אלכּסנדר פֿרענקעל, דער ראָש פֿונעם ייִדישן קהילה-צענטער אין סאַנקט-פּעטערבורג, האָט זיך לאַנגע יאָרן אָפּגעגעבן מיטן פֿאָרשן שלום-עליכמס לעבן און שאַפֿונג. זײַנע אַרטיקלען האָבן זיך באַװיזן אין פֿאַרשײדענע רוסישע פּעריאָדישע פּובליקאַציעס און איצט, סוף-כּל-סוף, זײַנען זײ צונױפֿגעבראַכט געװאָרן אין אַ זאַמלבוך, „דער אומבאַקאַנטער שלום-עליכם׃ נײַע איבערזעצונגען, פֿאָרשונגען און פּובליקאַציעס‟, װאָס איז אַרױס װי אַ בײַלאַגע צו דעם זשורנאַל „דאָס פֿאָלק פֿונעם בוך אין דער װעלט פֿון ביכער‟.

די הױפּטטעמע פֿון פֿרענקעלס פֿאָרשערישן אינטערעס איז שלום-עליכם און די רוסישע קולטור. דער דאָזיקער ענין האָט צװײ אַספּעקטן׃ שלום-עליכמס באַציִונגען מיט דער רוסישער קולטור און דער רוסישער אָפּרוף אויף שלום-עליכמס שאַפֿונג. בײדע אַספּעקטן װערן אינעם בוך פּרטימדיק באַהאַנדלט.

אין סאָװעטן-פֿאַרבאַנד איז שלום-עליכם אָנערקענט געװאָרן װי דער הויפּט־קלאַסיקער פֿון דער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור. צוליב דעם האָט ער זוכה געװען אַ װאָגיקע זעקס-בענדיקע אױסגאַבע פֿון זײַנע געזאַמלטע װערק אין דער רוסישער איבערזעצונג, װאָס איז אַרױס אין דרײַ פֿאַרשײדענע אױפֿלאַגעס מיטן סך-הכּלדיקן טיראַזש פֿון כּמעט אַ האַלב-מיליאָן עקזעמפּלאַרן. בײַ די רוסיש-רעדנדיקע לײענער, ייִדן און ניט-ייִדן, האָט די דאָזיקע אױסגאַבע געדינט װי אַ פֿענצטער אין דער װעלט פֿון ייִדישקײט.

פֿרענקעלס פֿאָרשונגען אַנטפּלעקן דעם קאָמפּליצירטן פּראָצעס פֿון אױספֿורעמען שלום-עליכמס סאָװעטישן „קאַנאָן‟ אױף ייִדיש און אױף רוסיש. געװיס זײַנען ניט אַלע פֿון שלום-עליכמס װערק געװען פּאָליטיש כּשר אינעם סאָװעטן-פֿאַרבאַנד. קודם-כּל גײט עס װעגן זײַנע ציוניסטישע סימפּאַטיעס. אַזױ למשל האָט מען באַזײַטיקט אַפֿילו דעם נאָמען פֿון טעאָדאָר הערצל פֿון זײַנע איבערגעזעצטע דערצײלונגען.

אָבער פֿרענקעל דערװײַזט, אַז װײַט ניט אַלע השערות װעגן דער סאָװעטישער צענזור זײַנען געװען באַרעכטיקט. אַ צאָל פֿאָרשער האָבן געהאַלטן, אַז דער ראָמאַן „די בלוטיקע שפּאַס‟ איז געװען פֿאַרװערט אין סאָװעטן-פֿאַרבאַנד, װײַל מען האָט אים געהאַלטן פֿאַר אַ „נאַציאָנאַליסטישן‟. װײַזט אױס, אַז „די בלוטיקע שפּאַס‟ איז טאַקע אַרױס אױף רוסיש אין 1929 און איז געװען גאַנץ פּאָפּולער. דאָס איז געװען די צײַט, דערקלערט פֿרענקעל, װען די סאָװעטישע פּראָפּאַגאַנדע האָט געפֿירט אַ קאַמף קעגן אַנטיסעמיטיזם, און די פּובליקאַציע פֿון שלום-עליכמס ראָמאַן איז געװען צײַטיק.

אין די 1930ער יאָרן, װען די סאָװעטישע ייִדישע ליטעראַטור-פֿאָרשער האָבן זיך גענומען פֿאַר אױספֿורעמען דעם קאַנאָן פֿון שלום-עליכם װי אַ פֿאָלקשרײַבער, האָט „די בלוטיקע שפּאַס‟ מער ניט געטױגט, ניט פּאָליטיש און ניט קינסטלעריש. דװקא די עסטעטישע אָפּשאַצונג האָט דערבײַ געשפּילט די װיכטיקסטע ראָלע. ייִדישע קריטיקער, שמואל ניגער און בעל-מחשבֿות בתוכם, זײַנען געװען אײַנשטימיק, אַז „די בלוטיקע שפּאַס‟ געהערט ניט צו שלום-עליכמס מײַסטערװערק. דערפֿאַר טאַקע האָט מען דעם ראָמאַן ניט אַרײַנגענומען אין דער סאָװעטישער אױסגאַבע פֿון שלום-עליכמס װערק אױף ייִדיש, װאָס איז געװאָרן דער יסוד פֿאַר דער שפּעטערדיקער רוסישער אױסגאַבע.

ניט געקוקט אױף דעם איז „די בלוטיקע שפּאַס‟ און פֿאַרשײדענע אַדאַפּטאַציעס אירע אָבער פֿאַרבליבן אינעם רעפּערטואַר פֿון סאָװעטישע ייִדישע טעאַטערס ביז אין די 1940ער יאָרן. שפּעטער, װען מען האָט פּלאַנירט די רוסישע אױסגאַבע פֿון שלום-עליכם, האָט מען געטראַכט װעגן פּובליקירן „די בלוטיקע שפּאַס‟, אָבער דער דאָזיקער פּלאַן איז ניט מקוים געװאָרן. ערשט אין 1989-1988 איז דער ראָמאַן פֿאַרעפֿנטלעכט געװאָרן אינעם מאָסקװער זשורנאַל „סאָװעטיש הײמלאַנד‟ און אַרױס אױך אױף רוסיש אין דער רוסישער בײַלאַגע צו דעם זשורנאַל.

די געשיכטע פֿון „רוסישן‟ שלום-עליכם הײבט זיך אָן אײנצײַטיק מיט דער געשיכטע פֿון זײַן ליטעראַרישער טעטיקײט אױף ייִדיש. דער יונגער מחבר האָט געמאַכט עטלעכע פּרוּװן צו שרײַבן אױף רוסיש, אָבער זײ זײַנען אים ניט געלונגען. אַזױ װי אַנדערע רוסיש-ייִדישע שרײַבער איז ער ניט געװען בכּוח צו געפֿינען אַ פּאַסיקן אידיאָמאַטישן סטיל פֿאַרן איבערגעבן די לעבעדיקע רײד פֿון ייִדישע פּערסאָנאַזשן אױף רוסיש.

אָבער איבערזעצונגען זײַנען געװען אַן אַנדער זאַך. שלום-עליכם האָט געהײסן זײַן רוסישן איבערזעצער יולי פּינוס׃ „הקיצור — איר דאַרפֿט געדענקען, אַז איר זעצט מיך איבער פֿאַר די רוסן, פֿאַר ניט-ייִדן‟. ער האָט באַשטאַנען, דער איבערזעצער זאָל אױסמײַדן ייִדישע װערטער, װאָס קלינגען פֿרעמד פֿאַרן רוסישן אױער׃ תּפֿילין, מזוזה, מינחה וכּדומה. צװישן הײַנטיקע איבערזעצער פֿון ייִדיש איז אַזאַ מין צוגאַנג מער ניט פּאָפּולער. הײַנט סטאַרעט מען זיך, פֿאַרקערט, איבערצולאָזן ייִדישע װערטער און באַגריפֿן כּדי צו מאַכן דעם טעקסט װאָס מער ייִדישלעך.

פֿרענקעלס בוך איז כּולל אַן אינטערעסאַנטן רוסישן טעקסט פֿון שלום-עליכם, װאָס געפֿינט זיך אין שאול גינזבורגס אַרכיװ אין ירושלים. דאָס איז אַ שטיקל זכרונות װעגן דעם צוזאַמענפֿאָר פֿון דער ערשטער לעגאַלער רוסישער אָרגאַניזאַציע פֿאַר שטיצן דעם ייִדישן ייִשובֿ אין ארץ-ישׂראל. דאָס איז געשען אין 1890 אין אָדעס, װוּ שלום-עליכם האָט דעמאָלט געוווינט נאָך דעם, װי ער האָט פֿאַרלױרן זײַן פֿאַרמעגן איבער פֿינאַנציעלע ספּעקולאַציעס אױף דער קיִעװער בערזע. שלום-עליכם דערמאָנט זיך װאַרעם אָן זײַן יונגן חבֿר, דעם פּעטערבורגער יוריסט װאַסילי (זאבֿ-װאָלף) בערמאַן, װאָס איז געװען צװישן די דעלעגאַטן פֿונעם צוזאַמענפֿאָר.

מיט זײַן כאַראַקטעריסטישן הומאָר באַשרײַבט שלום-עליכם אַ טשיקאַװע מעשׂה. אינעם אײנציקן פֿרײַען טאָג האָבן זײ, ער און בערמאַן, באַשלאָסן צו מאַכן „אָפֿיציעלע װיזיטן‟ בײַ די ייִדישע גדולים פֿון אָדעס. זײ האָבן קודם-כּל באַזוכט דעם „זײדן‟ שלום-יעקבֿ אַבראַמאָװיטש, דערנאָך דעם ד״ר לעאָן פּינסקער, משה-לײב ליליענבלום, אחד-העם און אַנדערע. „עס איז שױן געװען נאָענט צו דער װעטשערע-צײַט, װען מיר האָבן זיך פּלוצעם דערמאָנט אָן הרבֿ ר‘ שמואל מאָהילעװער. ‚אַך, דער רבי‘, האָט זיך געכאַפּט בערמאַן. ‚מיר האָבן נאָך אַ האַלבע-שעה, לאָמיר זיך אַ פֿאָר טאָן צו זײַן הײליקײט, און צו מאַכן דאָס בקיצור, לאָמיר נעמען אַ דראָזשקע.‘‟

װען ר‘ מאָהילעװער האָט זײ דערזען דורכן פֿענצטער, איז ער געװאָרן אױפֿגערעגט. „עפּעס עקסטרע האָט זיך געטראָפֿן?‟ „גאָרניט עקסטרע‟, האָבן זײ געענטפֿערט, „מיר האָבן פּשוט געװאָלט אָפּגעבן כּבֿוד דעם רבֿ. דער רבֿ האָט געשמײכלט׃ „באמת האָב איך ניט דערװאַרט אַזאַ כּבֿוד פֿון אײַער צד. צוליב מיר האָט איר אַפֿילו מחלל-שבת געװען און זײַט צוגעפֿאָרן מיט אַ דראָזשקע…‟ בײדע געסט זײַנען רױט געװאָרן פֿון בושה, און שלום-עליכם האָט אױפֿריכטיק געזאָגט׃ „צו זאָגן דעם אמת, רבי, האָבן מיר אין גאַנצן פֿאַרגעסן, אַז הײַנט איז שבת‟. „גוט װאָס איר האָט ניט פֿאַרגעסן, אַז איר זײַט ייִדן‟ — האָט דער רובֿ גוטמוטיק געענטפֿערט מיט דעם זעלביקן שמײכל. „אַ שאָד נאָר, װאָס צוליב שבת קען איך אײַך ניט מכּבד זײַן מיט אַ גלעזל טײ.‟

שלום-עליכם פֿאַרבלײַבט פּאָפּולער אין מאַסן-קולטור — דער עיקר צוליב נײַע אױפֿפֿירונגען פֿון „פֿידלער אױפֿן דאַך‟. דער יונגער דור ייִדישע פֿאָרשער האָט אָבער, דאַכט זיך, אַ קנאַפּן אינטערעס צו זײַן שאַפֿונג און לעבן. לאָמיר האָפֿן, אַז פֿרענקעלס בוך װעט אױפֿװעקן דעם דאָזיקן אינטערעס בײַ די הײַנטיקע ליבהאָבער פֿון ייִדיש, בפֿרט אױב עמעצער װעט נעמען אױף זיך די טירחה פֿון איבערזעצן זײַנע שטודיעס אױף ענגליש און מאַכן זײ צוטריטלעך פֿאַרן ברײטן עולם.

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TEL AVIV (JTA) — When Daniel Schleider and his wife, Lior, leave Israel next month, it will be for good — and with a heavy heart.

“I have no doubt I will have tears in my eyes the whole flight.” said Schleider, who was born in Mexico and lived in Israel for a time as a child before returning on his own at 18. Describing himself as “deeply Zionist,” he served in a combat unit in the Israeli army, married an Israeli woman and built a career in an Israeli company.

Yet as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power, assembled a coalition that includes far-right parties and started pushing changes that would erode hallmarks of Israeli democracy, Schleider found himself booking plane tickets and locating an apartment in Barcelona. Spain’s language and low cost of living made the city a good fit, he said, but the real attraction was living in a place where he wouldn’t constantly have to face down the ways that Israel is changing.

Israel’s strength over its 75 years, Schleider said, is “the economy we built by selling our brains.… And yet, in less than half a year, we’ve managed to destroy all that.”

Schleider has been joining the sweeping protests that have taken root across the country in response to the new right-wing government and its effort to strip the Israeli judiciary of much of its power and independence. But while he considered recommitting to his country and fighting the changes rather than fleeing over them, he also accepts the government’s argument that most Israelis voted for something he doesn’t believe in.

“I have a lot of internal conflict,” he said about the protests. “Who am I to fight against what the majority has accepted?”

Schleider is far from alone in seeking to leave Israel this year. While Israelis have always moved abroad for various reasons, including business opportunities or to gain experience in particular fields, the pace of planned departures appears to be picking up. No longer considered a form of social betrayal, emigration — known in Hebrew as yerida, meaning descent — is on the table for a wide swath of Israelis right now.

Many of the people weighing emigration were already thinking about it but were catalyzed by the new government, according to accounts from dozens of people in various stages of emigration and of organizations that seek to aid them.

“I’ve already been on the fence for a few years — not in terms of leaving Israel but in terms of relocating for something new,” said Schleider.

“But in the past year, with all the craziness and everything, I realized where the country was going. And after the recent elections, my wife — who had been unconvinced — was the one who took the step and said now she understood where the public is going and what life is going to be like in the country. You could call it the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said.

“And then when the whole issue of the [judicial] revolution started, we just decided not to wait and to do it immediately.”

Ocean Relocation, which assists people with both immigration to and emigration from Israel, has received more than 100 inquiries a day from people looking to leave since Justice Minister Yariv Levin first presented his proposal for judicial reform back in January. That’s four times the rate of inquiries the organization received last year, according to senior manager Shay Obazanek.

“Never in history has there been this level of demand,” Obazanek said, citing the company’s 80 years’ experience as the “barometer” of movement in and out the country.

Shlomit Drenger, who leads Ocean Relocation’s business development, said those looking to leave come from all walks of life. They include families pushed to leave by the political situation; those investing in real estate abroad as a future shelter, if needed; and Israelis who can work remotely and are worried about the country’s upheaval. Economics are also a concern: With foreign investors issuing dire warnings about Israel’s economy if the judicial reforms go through, companies wary to invest in the country and the shekel already weakening, it could grow more expensive to leave in the future.

The most common destination for the new departures, Drenger said, is Europe, representing representing 70% of moves, compared to 40% in the recent past. Europe’s draws include its convenient time zones, quality-of-life indices, and chiefly, the relative ease in recent years of obtaining foreign passports in countries such as Portugal, Poland and even Morocco. Many Israelis have roots in those countries and are or have been entitled to citizenship today because their family members were forced to leave under duress during the Holocaust or the Spanish Inquisition.

On the other hand, Drenger said, emigration to the United States, where the vast majority of the 1 million Israeli citizens abroad live, has declined significantly. The United States is known for its tough immigration laws and high cost of living in areas with large Israeli and Jewish communities, and even people who have no rights to a foreign passport have an easier time obtaining residency rights in Europe than the United States.

Some Israelis aren’t picking anywhere in particular before leaving. Ofer Stern, 40, quit his job as a tech developer, left Israel and is now traveling around the world before deciding where to settle.

“We’re living in a democracy and that democracy is dependent on demography and I can’t fight it,” he said, alluding to the fact that Orthodox Jews, who tend to be right wing, are the fastest-growing segment of the Israeli population. “The country that I love and that I’ve always loved will not be here in 10 years. Instead, it will be a country that is suited to other people, but not for me.”

While others have already started their emigration process, American-born Marni Mandell, a mother of two living in Tel Aviv, is still on the fence. Her greatest fear is that judicial reforms could open the door to significant changes in civil rights protections — and in so doing break her contract with the country she chose.

“If this so-called ‘reform’ is enacted, which is really tantamount to a coup, it’s hard to imagine that I want my children to grow up to fight in an army whose particularism outweighs the basic human rights that are so fundamental to my values,” Mandell said.

Most people who look into emigrating for political reasons do not end up doing so. In the weeks leading up to the United States’ 2020 presidential election, inquiries to law firms specializing in helping Americans move abroad saw a sharp uptick in inquiries — many of them from Jews fearful about a second Trump administration after then-President Donald Trump declined to unequivocally condemn white supremacists. When President Joe Biden was elected, they largely called off the alarm.

The Trump scenario is not analogous with the Israeli one for several reasons, starting with the fact that the Israelis are responding to an elected government’s policy decisions, not just the prospect of an election result. What’s more, U.S. law contains safeguards designed to prevent any single party or leader from gaining absolute power. Israel has fewer of those safeguards, and many of those appear threatened if the government’s proposals go through.

Casandra Larenas had long courted the idea of moving overseas. “As a childfree person, Israel doesn’t have much to offer and is a really expensive country. I’ve traveled around so I know the quality of life I can reach abroad,” she said. But she said she had always batted away the idea: “I’m still Jewish and my family are still here.”

That all changed with the judicial overhaul, she said. While not against the idea of a reform per se, Laranes is firmly opposed to the way it is being carried out,  saying it totally disregards the millions of people on the other side. Chilean-born, Laranes grew up under Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.

“I still remember [it] and I don’t want something like that again,” said Larenas, who has purchased a plane ticket for later this spring and plans to take up residency abroad — though she said she would maintain her citizenship and hoped to return one day.

The departure of liberal and moderate Israelis could have implications on Israel’s political future. Israel does not permit its citizens to vote absentee, meaning that anyone who leaves the country must incur costly, potentially frequent travel to participate in elections — or cede political input altogether.

Benjamin-Michael Aronov, who grew up with Russian parents in the United States, said he was taken aback by how frequently Israelis express shock that he moved to Israel in the first place. “The No. 1 question I get from Israelis is, ‘Why would you move here from the U.S.? We’re all trying to get out of here. There’s no future here.’”

He said he had come to realize that they were right.

“I thought the warnings were something that would truly impact our children or grandchildren but that our lifetime would be spent in an Israeli high-tech, secular golden era. But I’m realizing the longevity of Tel Aviv’s bubble of beaches and parties and crazy-smart, secular people changing the world with technology is maybe even more a fantasy now than when Herzl dreamt it,” Aronov said. “I found my perfect home, a Jewish home, sadly being undone by Jews.”

Not everyone choosing to jump ship is ideologically aligned with the protest movement. Amir Cohen, who asked to use a pseudonym because he has not informed his employers of his plans yet, is a computer science lecturer at Ariel University in the West Bank who voted in the last election for the Otzma Yehudit party chaired by far-right provocateur Itamar Ben-Gvir. Cohen was willing to put aside his ideological differences with the hared Orthodox parties if it meant achieving political stability — but was soon disillusioned.

“None of it is working. And now we’re on our way to civil war, it’s that simple. I figured, ‘I don’t need this nonsense, there are plenty of places in the world for me to go,’” he said.

Cohen stuck with the country after one of his brothers was killed in the 2014 Gaza War. Now, he said, his other brothers have recently followed his lead and applied for Hungarian passports in an effort to find a way to move abroad permanently.

“I’m not alone,” he said. “Most of my friends and family feel the same way.”

Others still, like Omer Mizrahi, view themselves as apolitical. A contractor from Jerusalem, Mizrahi, 27, headed to San Diego, California, a month ago as a result of the reform. Mizrahi, who eschewed casting a vote in the last election, expressed a less common impetus for leaving: actual fear for his life. Mizrahi described sitting in traffic jams in Jerusalem and realizing that if a terror attack were to unfold — “and let’s be honest, there are at least one or two every week” — he wouldn’t be able to escape in time because he was caught in a gridlock. “Our politicians can’t do anything about it because they’re too embroiled in a war of egos.”

Now 7,500 miles away, Mizrahi says he feels like he’s finally living life. “I sit in traffic now and I’m happy as a clam. Everything’s calm.”

Back in Israel, Schleider is making his final preparations for leaving, advertising his Tesla for sale on Facebook this week. He remains hopeful that the massive anti-government protests will make a difference. In the meantime, though, his one-way ticket is scheduled for April 14.

“I dream of coming back, but I don’t know that it will ever happen,” he said. “We made a decision that was self-serving, but that doesn’t mean we’re any less Zionist.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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Eighty years ago this month, some of the biggest-name Hollywood and Broadway actors staged a pair of sold-out pageants at Madison Square Garden to pressure the United States and its allies to halt the Nazi genocide against European Jews.

The March 9, 1943, New York City performance of “We Will Never Die” would be repeated in several cities, including Washington, D.C., where First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, 200 members of Congress, and seven Supreme Court justices attended. Roosevelt called it “one of the most impressive and moving pageants” she had ever seen.

It featured movie star Paul Muni, famous for his role in the 1932 film Scarface; actor Edward G. Robinson, known for his depictions of 1930s gangsters; and Jacob Ben Ami, a founder of the Jewish Art Theater in New York.

Backing them was a cast of hundreds, including 20 rabbis rescued from European ghettos, most wearing black gowns and white prayer shawls, and actors portraying Jewish soldiers fighting for the American military. The backdrop was an enormous display of the Ten Commandments, each tablet 40 feet high. The orchestra played Kurt Weill’s original score as well as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

“Forty thousand persons listened and watched in emotional silence in Madison Square Garden last night to two performances of ‘We Will Never Die,’ a dramatic mass memorial to the 2,000,000 Jews killed in Europe,” The New York Times reported after the New York shows. “The memorial was staged to stir the Allied nations to stop the slaughter of a people by the Germans.”

There were two shows that night — one at 8:30 and another at 11 — while an overflow listened outside to a broadcast.

But though the pageant, tied to a newspaper ad campaign, filled venues and caught the wider public’s attention, it ultimately failed — in that the Nazis would kill 4 million more Jews. The question as to why the U.S. and its allies waited so long to intervene still stands.

In 1943, some Americans knew about the Holocaust, but many didn’t — or didn’t believe it was actually happening. Others sympathized with the Nazis. Four years before the staging of “We Will Never Die,” 20,000 people attended a 1939 German American Bund rally — also at Madison Square Garden.

It featured a giant portrait of George Washington flanked by two large swastikas. Audience members at the Garden held up posters that said, “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian America,” and denounced President Franklin D. Roosevelt as “Rosenfeld.” The Bund had openly supported Adolph Hitler and the rise of fascism in the years leading up to World War II.

Kaddish for 2 million

“We Will Never Die” took form when Ben Hecht, one of Hollywood’s greatest screenwriters, teamed up with militant Zionist Peter Bergson, whose Committee for a Jewish Army was campaigning for a Jewish army to fight under the Allies.

In late 1942, American newspapers had reported that the Nazis had already killed 2 million European Jews, but as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum noted in an online article, only 48% of Americans in a January 1943 poll believed it. Hecht, who was Jewish, wrote a magazine exposé in The American Mercury called “The Extermination of the Jews,” which was later excerpted in Reader’s Digest as “Remember Us.”

He then decided to write the pageant to raise awareness of the plight of Europe’s Jews, and collaborated with Bergson, who had already planned a Madison Square Garden rally that was to be called “Action — Not Pity.” Instead, Bergson agreed to stage “We Will Never Die,” according to the Holocaust Museum article.

In a 2019 New York Times book review, writer Mark Horowitz described Hecht as someone who hated politics, viewing all politicians as corrupt.

“But unexpectedly, in middle age, Hecht dropped everything to become a propagandist and political organizer, in a nationwide campaign to pressure the Roosevelt administration to rescue the endangered Jews of Europe,” Horowitz wrote. “His dramatic transformation surprised his friends and colleagues, and may reveal more about the man than any of his Hollywood successes.

The pageant’s program cover featured a muscular soldier with a Star of David on his helmet, hoisting a rifle in one hand, while he cradles suffering Jews, including one who is clutching a Torah, in the other. Under the title of the performance read the words, “A Mass Memorial Dedicated to the Two Million Jewish Dead of Europe.”

“There are four million Jews surviving in Europe,” Muni tells the audience. “The Germans have promised to deliver to the world, by the end of the year, a Christmas package of 4 million dead Jews. And this is not a Jewish problem. It is a problem that belongs to humanity, and it is a challenge to the soul of man.” Muni, who had been born to a family of Polish Jewish actors, and Robinson, who grew up in a Yiddish-speaking family in Romania, narrated the pageant.

In one scene, actor Jacob Ben Ami stood between the tablets and read a prayer:

“Almighty God, father of the poor and weak, strength of the righteous and hope of all who dream of goodness and justice, we are here to say our prayers for the two million who have been killed in Europe because they bear the name of your first children — the Jews. We are not here to weep for them. We are here to honor them and to proclaim the victory of their dying. For, in our Testament are written the words of Habakkuk, prophet of Israel, ‘They shall never die.’ … They were unarmed, but not we.”

The final scene depicts actors negotiating a peace conference to end the war, as a narrator makes a hauntingly prescient prediction: “There will be no Jews left in Europe for representation when peace comes. The four million left to kill are being killed, according to plan … No voice is heard to cry halt to the slaughter, no government speaks to bid the murder of human millions end. But we here tonight have a voice. Let us raise it.” The pageant ended with participants singing the Jewish prayer for the dead, the kaddish.

A concerted campaign

The show was part of a concerted pressure campaign by Bergson and Hecht, who “produced an avalanche of newspaper advertisements charging the [Roosevelt] administration with ignoring the plight of Europe’s Jews,” as the recent Ken Burns documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, noted.

The day after the show, the Committee for a Jewish Army ran an ad in The New York Times headlined, “The People Have Spoken,” and urged: “Save the 4,000,000 remaining Jews of Europe by Action — Not Pity.” The ad, signed by Colorado Democratic Sen. Edwin C. Johnson, the chairman of the Committee for a Jewish Army, urged three steps:

• An intergovernmental commission of military experts to come up with a policy to “stop the wholesale slaughter of European Jewry.”
• The creation of a Jewish Army to “raid deep into Germany.”
• The transfer of Jews from “Hitler-dominated countries to Palestine or any temporary refuge.”

Johnson challenged: “It will be sinful if we do not agree upon a policy of action to save the millions who still survive and carry it forward without further delay with all our energies and might.”

“Action — Not Pity” was a message used in other Committee for a Jewish Army ads, and allies used it as a rallying cry as well. In a 2020 House speech, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi quoted remarks that her father, Rep. Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., D-Md., made on March 2, 1943, one week before the New York performance of “We Will Never Die.”

“Action, not pity, can save millions now — extinction or hope for the remnants of European Jewry?” D’Alesandro said. “It is for us to give the answer … We will spare no effort and have no rest until the American public will be fully informed of the facts and aroused to its responsibilities.”

The night before D’Alesandro’s speech, Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the American Jewish Committee, led a mass demonstration of Jews and Christians at Madison Square Garden, demanding action to save Europe’s Jews. An overflow of 10,000 people on 49th Street listened to that rally on loudspeakers.

On April 12, “We Will Never Die” filled Constitution Hall in Washington, putting the barbarity of the Holocaust in front of an audience that Hecht and Bergson were targeting, including some of FDR’s Cabinet members. Two days later, Eleanor Roosevelt praised the performance in her syndicated column.

“No one who heard each group come forward and give the story of what had happened to it at the hands of a ruthless German military, will ever forget those haunting words: ‘Remember us,’” she wrote. “All the way through, I thought how important it is in this country that we do not for a moment allow intolerance and cruelty to creep into our dealings with any of our own people, or with any people who have taken refuge among us.”

The pageant also played in several other cities, including Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. Overall, an estimated 100,000 Americans saw it.

Of course, it did not stop the Holocaust. But as The Washington Post observed in a 1993 retrospective story, “‘We Will Never Die’ did have an impact, however. In January 1944, mounting congressional and public pressure led Roosevelt to establish the War Refugee Board and thereby officially recognize the uniqueness of the Jewish Question as distinct from the general refugee problem.”

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It can be hard to find kosher-for-Passover foods. My local grocery stores usually  have matzo — but it’s never kosher for Passover. Yes, even in Brooklyn! I know, I know, I am shocked by it every year.

But now, Trader Joe’s, the grocery store beloved for its fun snack products and aloha shirts, is launching its own matzo brand. And thankfully, Daddy TJ’s did their research, and the product, which is made in Israel, is going to be certified kosher for Passover, meaning anyone who lives near a Trader Joe’s will have access to kosher-for-Passover goods.

This isn’t the first time Trader Joe’s has sold matzo; they previously carried Holyland matzo, which was also kosher-for-Passover. But this is the first time they’ve sold matzo under their own brand. (Thankfully, we were spared any cutesy-yet-questionable branding like Trader José’s, though the chain did once sell bagels branded as Trader Josef’s.)

Trader Joe’s often partners with third-party manufacturers — sometimes with big, recognizable names — to make products sold under their own brand, often at a cheaper price. The company refuses to share information about who is making their products, though some online sleuths have used FDA recall information, ingredient comparisons and taste tests to trace back some of the manufacturers. 

A recall on Naked Juice’s products resulted in the TJ’s juices also vanishing from shelves, for example, and ingredient comparisons and taste tests between Stacy’s-brand pita chips and Trader Joe’s imply the two are the same. 

Has Trader Joe’s now partnered with Holyland to create its matzo? Both are imported from Israel, after all. A representative for Trader Joe’s declined to provide further information, but said that “Trader Joe’s Passover Matzos are made for us by one of the largest and oldest matzo-making bakeries in Israel. Made with a simple recipe of flour and water, they’re light, crisp, and, of course, certified kosher for Passover. They are available in our stores nationwide for a limited time.” They are not, however, in stores yet, and no information yet about when they’ll arrive, even though Passover is right around the corner.

What really matters is that there’s finally a place where you can find kosher-for-Passover matzo — if you’re lucky enough to live near a store. (Trader Joe’s tends to only open stores in locations with a high average household income and population, and there are only a few locations scattered throughout the middle of the country. When I used the company’s store locator to try to find a location in Missoula, Montana — a university town — the closest location was in Spokane, Washington, a three-hour drive away.)

Trader Joe’s has been importing kosher products from Israel and beyond for years. So we’ve come up with some fun toppings and Passover treats made from ingredients you can find at Trader Joe’s.

A disclaimer: Trader Joe’s has plenty of kosher products, but doesn’t offer many products that are certified kosher-for-Passover — beyond the matzo, of course. Obviously, I could’ve kept this to things that don’t need certification, like fresh produce, but where’s the fun in that? I’ve done my best to avoid chametz, but use your discretion.

A tangy twist on the matzo pizza

Have you ever had a salad pizza? It’s a wonderful invention, pairing the richness of pizza with the refreshing crunch and acidity of fresh salad on top. So fire up your toaster oven and make a matzo pizza, however you like it, and pile on some bagged arugula or romaine, drizzle on some olive oil, and top it with some of Trader Joe’s feta imported from Israel.

Garlic matzo

The Trader Joe’s Garlic Spread — a riff on the Lebanese condiment toum made from garlic emulsified with lemon juice and salt — is, in my humble opinion, one of the most delicious things known to man. If you’re having some bread withdrawal on Passover, maybe spread some matzo with butter and the toum, and do your best to imagine it’s garlic bread.

A matzo mille-feuille

Trader Joe’s is one of the most reliable options for frozen mango. It seems like a perfect, if untraditional, filling for a mille-feuille, a form of pastry that involves layers  of puff-pastry, usually with fruit and cream piped in between.

You could improvise a little riff on the forbidden patisserie by stacking matzo pieces with pastry cream and some sweet mango chunks — defrosted — or even throw in some mascarpone for richness. Maybe crumble some of these freeze-dried berries in to flavor the cream. Trader Joe’s even offers a “sweet cannoli cream” dip that you could sub in for the pastry cream, but the reviews are meh. 

Matzo ice cream sandwich

Trader Joe’s has plenty of fun ice cream flavors, and this horchata edition caught my eye. Like the matzo, it’s a limited edition. Admittedly, matzo is no real stand-in for a cookie, but try dipping two pieces in chocolate to jazz them up, scoop some horchata ice cream in between and put it in the freezer to set. Drink with coffee or even actual horchata. (If horchata isn’t your thing, try this ube ice cream, which is a vibrant purple and has the slight nutty flavor of the namesake yam.)

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 דעם 9טן מאַרץ 2023, אַ טאָג נאָך דעם ווי די גרויסע ייִדישע אַקטריסע לאה שלאַנגער איז אַוועק פֿון דער וועלט, האָט מענדי כּהנא, דער דירעקטאָר פֿון דער ייִדישער אָרגאַניזאַציע „יונג ייִדיש“ אין תּל־אָבֿיבֿ, אַרויפֿגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ אויף פֿייסבוק פֿון אַ טרעפֿונג מיט איר אינעם לאָקאַל פֿון „יונג ייִדיש“ עטלעכע חדשים פֿאַר איר פּטירה.

די אַקטריסע, וואָס איז געשטאָרבן צו 91 יאָר, זינגט דאָס טראַגישע ליד, „אַ ייִדיש קינד“ פֿון חנה חייטין ווײַנשטיין, וועגן אַ מאַמע וואָס באַשליסט צו ראַטעווען איר קינד פֿון די נאַציס דורכן באַהאַלטן עס מיט קריסטלעכע שכנים. דערין גיט די מאַמע דעם ייִנגל קלאָרע אינסטרוקציעס ווי זיך אויפֿצופֿירן מיט זײַן נײַער משפּחה:

מיט די קינדער שפּיל זיך פֿײַן,
שטיל, געהאָרכזאַם, זאָלסטו זײַן
קיין ייִדיש וואָרט, קיין ייִדיש ליד,
ווײַל דו ביסט מער ניט קיין ייִד.

בשעת שלאַנגער זינגט דאָס ליד קען מען זען ווי זי דער עולם פֿילט מיט מיט דער אומגליקלעכער מאַמען.

דעם ווידעאָ האָט געמאַכט געערט וואַן קעסטערען, ווי אַ טייל פֿון זײַן פּראָיעקט צו שאַפֿן אַ דאָקומענטאַר־פֿילם וועגן דער באַליבטער אַקטריסע.

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A U.S. senator is urging the country’s law enforcement agencies to be more forthcoming with hate crime data, a week after the FBI reported incidents skyrocketed in 2021.

New York’s Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, along with several members of the House, asked the Justice Department to look into local police departments withholding hate crime data to the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System.

The group of representatives was bipartisan and included Democrats Don Beyer, Dan Goldman, Ritchie Torres, Nydia Velázquez and Republican Nicole Malliotakis. Gillibrand released the letter Monday at a press conference at John Jay College in Manhattan.

“Keeping up-to-date data for these incidents is imperative for law enforcement agencies to be able to do the work needed to combat hate crimes,” Gillibrand said in a statement. “While we commend the steps local law enforcement and the Department of Justice have taken in responding to such incidents, reporting, collecting and maintaining the most accurate data available is crucial in evaluating and responding to hate-related crimes as well as keeping our neighborhoods safe from such reprehensible attacks. Hate has no place in New York and it takes everyone, working together, to defeat it.”

An initial FBI report, released in December, actually indicated a decrease in hate crimes in 2021, a contradiction of other, similar reports, such as the Anti-Defamation League’s annual hate crime audit. But while the FBI said part of the discrepancy was due to the lack of locally sourced data, the issue was also related to a transition to a new reporting system.

Last week, the FBI released updated data indicating that hate crimes reached the highest number in decades in 2021, even though the information was incomplete due to numerous police departments declining to share their data with the NIBRS.

With the data that was available, the FBI reported more than 10,800 total hate crimes, 1,590 of which were based on religion. Jews were the most victimized religious group, with 817 criminal offenses, up from 683 in 2020.

The group with Gillibrand included academics and representatives of minority advocacy groups, including Jewish Federations of North America senior vice president for public affairs Elana Broitman.

“We cannot allow antisemitism, a pernicious hatred based on conspiracy theory and fearmongering, to metastasize, threatening not only the Jewish community but the fabric of our democracy,” said Broitman.

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(JTA) — When Judy Blume’s young adult novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” appeared in 1970, intermarried families were a small segment of the American Jewish population. Perhaps 17% of Jews were married to someone who wasn’t Jewish; today, 42% of married Jews have a spouse who is not Jewish, and in the past decade, 61% of Jews married non-Jewish partners. 

Through the 1960s, middle-grade and young adult fiction rarely acknowledged the existence of these families, reflecting and reinforcing their outsider status. Today it is routine for authors to address the reality of inter-religious and culturally mixed families, portraying them with insight and compassion. (See “Not Your All-American Girl” by Wendy Wan-Long Shang and Madelyn Rosenberg, “Becoming Brianna” by Terri Libenson and “The Whole Story of Half a Girl” by Veera Hiranandani.)

This change was made possible partly by Blume’s story of sixth-grader Margaret Simon and her one-sided conversations with God. 

Blume’s status as a pioneer in young adult literature is usually associated with her honest approach to the emotional, physical and sexual milestones of growing up, with her works still attracting readers and still finding an honored place on lists of banned books. That legacy is being celebrated in April with a new documentary, Amazon Prime Video’s “Judy Blume Forever,” and a theatrical release by Lionsgate of a feature film version of “Are You There God?”

Yet her treatment of contested identity in intermarried families is as revolutionary as her openness about bras, menstruation and sexual feelings. Actors Lena Dunham and Molly Ringwald, comedian Samantha Bee and many authors, including Raina Telgemeier, Tayari Jones and Gary Shteyngart, have cited Blume’s influence on both their lives and their work. Book lists for intermarried families frequently list the novel as a resource.

Margaret Simon is 11 years old at the start of “Are You There God?” Her Jewish dad and Christian mom have pointedly ignored the possibility that their daughter might have questions about her identity. Along with other issues of teen angst, she feels compelled to decide if she is Jewish, Christian or neither. Without any guidance, the last alternative leaves her in a frightening void. As she pointedly asks God, in her ongoing series of questions for Him, “I can’t go on being nothing forever, can I?”

Margaret’s parents, Barbara Hutchins and Herb Simon, fell in love and defied their respective parents by marrying out of their faiths. They assure Margaret that she has no religion, but can choose one when she is older, oblivious to the fact that this solution seems more of a burden than a promise of future freedom. Their avoidance of any serious engagement with either religion or culture renders any possible choice unlikely. 

Blume situates Margaret’s search within the specific landscape of post-World War II America. When the Simons decide to leave their Upper West Side home in New York City and move to suburban New Jersey, their decision suggests a coded reference to their religious status. Long Island is “too social,” an implied euphemism for “too Jewish.” Living there might have made it harder for their relatively unusual situation to be discreetly ignored. On the other hand, the more affluent Westchester and Connecticut are “too expensive” and “too inconvenient.” Farbrook, New Jersey has enough Jews for it to feel right for Herb, but not so many as to make their mixed family stand out. 

Margaret also suspects that her parents’ are determined to put distance between the Simons and Sylvia, her paternal grandmother, who lives in New York City. This gregarious woman shows up at their new home unannounced and toting deli foods, making it clear that Margaret’s one unambiguous connection to Judaism is not going to disappear. While Barbara’s parents utterly rejected her when she married a Jew, Sylvia has pragmatically decided to accept what she cannot change. In the postwar era, more Jews began to abandon or minimize religious practice, while still maintaining ethnically distinct customs. Like holiday observance or synagogue attendance, ethnic Jewish culture is also absent from the Simon home. Sylvia’s Jewish food, her frequent trips to Florida, even her combination of sarcasm and smothering warmth, provide Margaret with markers of the tradition her parents have eschewed. 

Still, when Sylvia repeatedly asks Margaret if her (nonexistent) boyfriends are Jewish, the young girl is baffled. Given her own lack of consciousness of herself as Jewish, why would Margaret care?

In the larger world of Farbrook, Margaret’s new friends seem to have more secure identities, conveniently defined by membership either in the “Y” (Young Men’s Christian Association) or the Jewish Community Center. Perfunctory attendance at Hebrew school until after one’s bar mitzvah is the furthest extent of her peers’ Jewishness. Margaret explains that her parents are “nothing” and that, prior to their marriage, they were Jewish and Christian, as if those identities could be cast off like an article of clothing. When Mr. Benedict, her enthusiastic young teacher, distributes a questionnaire, Margaret completes the prompt “I hate” with “religious holidays.” He attempts to draw her out about this troubling answer, and she scornfully observes that her teacher acted as if “he had uncovered some deep, dark mystery.” 

On one level, he has. Her mother’s blandly universal definition of God as a “nice idea,” who “belongs to everybody,” is clearly a denial of the fractures in her family members’ lives. 

Blume also captures the essence of mid-century non-Orthodox Judaism as comfortably accessible, yet also somewhat empty. On a visit to Grandma Sylvia’s elegant temple, the atmosphere is quietly decorous, the sanctuary filled with well-appointed congregants and beautifully arranged flowers. Sylvia’s rabbi greets Margaret with an enthusiastic “Good Yom Tov,” which he translates as “Happy New Year,” although it is actually a generic holiday greeting. 

When Margaret later visits Presbyterian and Methodist churches, she notes the remarkable similarity among all three experiences.

The novel’s one incident of specific religious practice involves Margaret’s brief, unfinished confession in a classmate’s Catholic church. Having participated in bullying, Margaret tries to assuage her guilt through a ritual alien to both her father’s Judaism and her mother’s Protestant Christianity. She even momentarily confuses the priest with the silent God of her conversations. Nothing could be further from her parents’ rejection of religion, or from Grandma Sylvia’s loving assurance to Margaret that “I knew you were a Jewish girl at heart.”

When Margaret’s Christian grandparents decide to resume contact, the suppressed anger in the Simon home finally erupts. Herb is furious, and accuses his in-laws of only wanting to meet Margaret “to make sure she doesn’t have horns!” — a caustic reference to a persistent antisemitic myth. Blume had subtly foreshadowed this disruption of the status quo in a parallel event at school. When a Jewish student, backed by his parents, refuses to sing Christmas carols, the implicit agreement of the town’s Jews to quietly conform is broken. A Christian girl, in what seems an act of retaliation, then refuses to sing Hanukkah songs. These acts of resistance reinforce Margaret’s marginal status. Her intermarried family represents neither conformity with postwar norms nor an assertion of Jewish pride.

Blume appears to tip the scales in her portrayal of Mary and Paul Hutchins, Margaret’s maternal grandparents. Entirely unlikeable, simultaneously pushy and cold, they insist that the granddaughter they had never acknowledged is Christian. After their failed visit, Grandma Sylvia returns, along with her sweet and obviously Jewish new boyfriend, Mr. Binamin (“rhymes with cinnamon”). Readers rooting for the triumph of Margaret’s Jewish roots may breathe a sigh of relief here, but hope for a satisfying ending is illusory. Margaret’s search for a stable sense of self is still unfinished, and will not be satisfied by choosing membership in either the Y or the JCC. 

For young readers, the novel’s discussion of religious identity proved as life-changing as its honest portrayal of puberty and menstruation. “I related to that kind of conflict of religion,” the comedian Chelsea Handler, who grew up in a mixed Jewish-Mormon home, told Blume in 2020. “At that time, I just found out my mom was Mormon, on top of thinking she was Jewish, and your books were such a reprieve for me and such a joy.”

More than 50 years ago, Judy Blume tackled a difficult subject, about both changing demographics and the search for authenticity in American Jewish life. Margaret’s conclusion that “twelve is very late to learn” about the essence of who you are still poses a challenge, while her persistent search for a meaningful identity offers a degree of optimism.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post How Judy Blume’s ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’ broke taboos around interfaith marriage appeared first on The Forward.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz in a recent interview said Republicans shouldn’t worry that attacking Jewish billionaire George Soros, in relation to the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into former President Donald Trump, is antisemitic.  

In a series of social media posts over the weekend, Trump said he expects to be arrested and charged for violating a campaign finance law in relation to a payment to Stormy Daniels, a former adult film actress. Trump has been accused of having an affair with her in 2006 and then buying her silence before his first presidential campaign. He denies the allegation and has accused the chief prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, of carrying out a coordinated effort backed by Soros to undermine him. Soros had supported Braff in his 2021 race for district attorney.

“Please, everybody, feel free to tell the truth about George Soros,” Dershowitz said Sunday on Newsmax TV, a pro-Trump conservative cable network.  “Don’t worry about false charges that it is antisemitic.” 

Soros, a Hungarian-born Democratic megadonor and Holocaust survivor, has long been the subject of antisemitic attacks from the far right. Casting a Jew as a puppet master who manipulates politics for evil purposes is a common antisemitic trope. Soros was the top political donor in the midterm elections last year, investing more than $170 million to help Democratic candidates, including $40 million in district attorney races nationwide. 

In recent months, Trump, the frontrunner in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, has assailed Soros in fundraising emails, accusing him of aiming to “single-handedly buy” President Joe Biden’s reelection.

An anti-Soros campaign

Ahead of a potential indictment, Republicans, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have all united behind a plan to attack Bragg as a “Soros-funded” DA. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, tweeted on Sunday: “No other person has undermined our democracy more than George Soros. Why is [he] still allowed to maintain his citizenship?”

Dershowitz said Americans shouldn’t “be fearful on the charge of antisemitism” when going after Soros “on the merits.”

“I’m a proud, deeply committed Jewish Zionist and I think that what Soros is doing — distorting civil liberties, distorting human rights — is outrageous, and I want to be the first to attack George Soros,” he said. “I’m not attacking him because he’s Jewish. I’m attacking him because what he’s doing is wrong.”

The outspoken Jewish attorney served as legal counsel for Trump during the former president’s 2020 trial following his first impeachment. He claimed, but without evidence, in an interview with Breitbart that former President Barack Obama “personally asked the FBI to investigate somebody on behalf of George Soros.” 

Dershowitz also repeated a debunked far-right conspiracy theory that Soros was a Nazi collaborator. “He’s not much of a Jew, first of all,” Dershowitz told the Newsmax hosts. “I mean, as you know, he worked and collaborated with Nazis in his native country when he was a young kid.”

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“It’s a deeply funny and brutal satire,” director Rachel Chavkin said.  A satire, she said, about how the actions of “well-meaning white people” who desire to do good can actually “eclipse an earnest reckoning with the history.”

Chavkin is talking about The Thanksgiving Play, in which four well-meaning, liberal white theater folks try to create a politically appropriate Thanksgiving saga for school performances. The history she is referring to is that of the genocidal horrors inflicted on Native Americans by the European settlers and their descendants, and what that history has meant for Native Americans today.

The author is Larissa FastHorse, a MacArthur genius grant winner — and the first known Native American female playwright to have a play on Broadway. Chavkin, 42, is the Tony-winning director of Hadestown and a Tony nominee for Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.

So what’s an East Coast Jew doing directing a play written by a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation of South Dakota? 

“I’ve known Larissa for a long time,” Chavkin told me on the phone after a long day of rehearsal. “Probably a decade that we’ve been really close. And I’ve just deeply admired her as a colleague. And when she asked me if I would direct it, I of course said let me just read it to make sure I can serve it. And it took my breath away.”

The play is, in addition to being funny, “ultimately deeply painful,” Chavkin said. “It was the painful part that made me really want to be a part of it, because I think that ultimately there’s so much catharsis through the absurdity of this piece. And ultimately also a desperation that I really recognize, and I suspect a lot of audiences, particularly a lot of white audiences, are going to recognize as well.” 

Still, she said, “when Larissa asked me, I said, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to see a director of color?’”

FastHorse told her she wanted her, and her expertise. 

Chavkin said that the fiction of the play will alternate with the reality of America — “every other scene is a sequence based very, very directly on research that Larissa did of real Thanksgiving Day pageants happening across the country. Still. Today. While I was in preproduction for this show, several friends sent me pictures of their nieces and nephews involved in Thanksgiving Day pageants. So we’re going to have children in the production.”

The play was presented off-Broadway in 2018 at Playwrights Horizons with a different cast and director. Chavkin said that that production was “very funny” and “really brought out the situational comedy,” and that her production would be “significantly different” in its emphasis. 

The play, Chavkin said, “is going to lean very heavily ultimately into the desperation that is at the heart of this comedy, driving these characters. And the larger implications of the kind of snake eating its own tail” situation created by “white people trying to put on an ‘ethical’ Thanksgiving Day pageant without genuinely reckoning with the history.” She will also, she said, “lean into the incredible cruelties and microaggressions that come up in the space of this play.”

“So I think there’s going to be some heavier undertones,” she added.

“We’re playing very, very little in the show as a ‘joke,’” said Chavkin. “And I think that’s why we’re beginning to tap into both a deeper demented layer of the comedy and a much weightier underbelly. A much more gnarly underbelly.”

There are moments, she said, “where the characters are trying to figure out what the right thing is to do. And what is divine about the comedy in this play is that they work themselves in these insane circles and come up often with extensions of logic that, if you trace the logic to its final conclusions, are so desperate and absurd and deranged.”

“We are trying to meet those leaps of logic with as much earnestness and commitment to trying to get it right as possible, trying to meet these characters where they are and assume that they are genuinely trying to do the right thing. That to me is the thing that hopefully will make the audience actually identify with these characters versus write them off as, oh, they’re so silly, oh, they’re nothing like me. Because all the time in the rehearsal process I’m like, ‘Yep, I’ve done that.’ We’ll be laughing about something that the characters do, and I’m thinking, my theater company did exactly that.”

Chavkin has had a busy winter. She co-directed, with Liliana Padilla and Steph Paul, Padilla’s How to Defend Yourself. The play, about college students in a self-defense class, is at New York Theater Workshop through April 2. Next year she will direct Gatsby, a new musical version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, premiering at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before a hoped-for Broadway run.

Chavkin grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland. She has told the Forward in the past that she considers herself “culturally Jewish,” which “includes the value of argument and dialectic”; her parents, civil rights lawyers, inculcated a belief that theater was “a higher form,” an “agent of social change.”

How does that belief apply to The Thanksgiving Play?

There’s a “social service that theater does,” she said. “I think there’s a release where laughter is medicine.”

And there’s something else.

“You can say this is my Jewishness or say not, but it certainly relates to my upbringing from my folks. I’m so fucking deeply honored to be directing the play by the first known Native woman playwright on Broadway. That’s incredible. I would have said yes just for that.”

The Thanksgiving Play begins performances Mar. 25 at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater.

The post For a Native American playwright’s Broadway debut, this superstar Jewish director got the call appeared first on The Forward.

Former President Donald Trump faces indictment in New York for his role in an alleged hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels. Many are now wondering what Trump’s arrest, which he says he expects to happen Tuesday, would mean for his 2024 presidential bid. Can Trump run if he’s indicted — or even if he’s in jail?

The answer is yes. Another, very different, candidate did exactly that. 

Socialist politician and trade unionist Eugene V. Debs, the preferred candidate of the Forverts and namesake of our radio signal, WEVD, ran for president in 1920 from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.

On election day, almost 1 million voters cast their ballot for Prisoner 9653. (Noted conspiracy theorist and antisemite Lyndon LaRouche also ran from behind bars in 1992, but had considerably less popular support at just under 23,000 votes.)

Debs was convicted for incitement at an antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio. Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the mob on Jan. 6, and there most of the comparisons, between a labor leader and a billionaire known for anti-union policies, end.

On Nov. 2, 1920, the front page of the Forverts, citing erroneous numbers, proclaimed that Debs received 2 million votes.

It remains to be seen if Trump, who could become the first ex-president to face indictment, will actually be convicted and serve time. But even if he does, he wouldn’t be the first presidential hopeful to campaign from a jail cell.

The post Donald Trump faces indictment — he, like Eugene Debs, can still run for president appeared first on The Forward.

On a winding medieval street in the small Dutch city of Deventer, a quote is stenciled across a white stucco wall. “Boven die straat staat toch de héle hemel,” it says. “Above this street stands the whole sky.”

The words are taken from the diary of Etty Hillesum, scribbled before she perished at Auschwitz in 1943. “Even if one narrow street remains for us through which we may go,” she wrote, “the whole sky is above that street.”

Deventer, located 40 miles from the German border, might be the most obscure port in the old Hanseatic trading league, despite its immaculate Golden Age architecture and ancient ramparts. Locally, it’s better known for its dense honey cake, sold at a bakery in the town square, and for the turreted Great Synagogue that served hundreds of Jewish families before the war. For the 15 years they lived here, these included the Hillesums. Esther, or “Etty,” went to the Jewish school located behind that white stucco wall, now called the Etty Hillesum Center.

I ended up here by chance last summer, and in stumbling past the center discovered the diarist some consider to be “the grown-up Anne Frank.” As if I’d found a new word you learn, then suddenly start spotting everywhere, I began noticing Etty’s name all over Holland. In September, the author Judith Koelemeijer released her lauded biography on Etty’s interrupted life. And in October, the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam launched Etty & Leonie, a showcase of Etty’s diaries and letters alongside those of her frenemy Leonie Snatager, who survived the war in hiding and spent her later life in the U.S.

Etty began writing in earnest after leaving school and settling in Amsterdam. Yet Deventer, where she began her intellectual life, is worth a visit. The Hillesums lived in an elegant house at 9 Geert Grootestraat, a lane of herringbone brick near the star-shaped moat that circles the town. As deputy headmaster of Etty’s school, her father taught classical languages; her mother, a Russian émigré, educated the children in her culture and language. A monument to the family, shaped like a shard of broken glass, was unveiled recently on the IJssel River footpath.

On every second Sunday, the Etty Hillesum Center leads a group walk around Deventer’s erstwhile Jewish quarter, past homes that once belonged to Cohens and Gosschalks, and brass “stumbling stones” set into the pavement outside the homes of deportees. Inside the center are sepia keepsakes from Etty’s era — including a haunting school photo of 22 smiling children, their mandatory yellow stars sewn to their fine clothing. Rotating exhibitions promote tolerance and responsibility, as set out by Etty in her diaries: “One must accept one’s circumstances, good and bad, but that does not prevent one from devoting one’s life to improving the bad.”

In the mid-1930s, Etty moved to Amsterdam to study law in the same monumental buildings that now house luxury hotels. She earned money translating Dostoyevsky, and keeping house for a 62-year-old widower named Hans Wegerif in the relative luxury of the Museumplein. She fell in with anti-fascists, devoured writers like Rilke, and dabbled in Buddhism. After she and Wegerif became lovers — they lived what she called “an almost married life” — she developed the sort of brooding angst familiar to women her age, whatever era.

To nurture her “inner life,” she began a course of therapy with psychologist Julius Spier, a disciple of Jung and master “chirologist,” or palm-reader. Spier recommended therapeutic diary-keeping (and a rather dubious wrestling ritual) to his young female clients, but gave special attention to Etty. She penned her first diary entry in early 1941, a year before Anne Frank began hers. It began modestly: “I dare not open up and freely give vent to my feelings, and yet it shall have to be if I wish ultimately to make something of my life,” she wrote. “I am quite refined and, I daresay, expert enough to be counted among the good lovers, but love is only a game that eludes what is really important and something deep inside me remains locked up.”

Before long she added Spier — “the accoucheur of her soul” — to her roster of lovers and opened up on the page. “I don’t think I am cut out for one man,” she wrote. “Nor could I ever be faithful to one man. Not because of other men, but because I myself am made up of so many people … Is that sordid? Is it decadent? To me it feels perfectly all right.”

Etty Hillesum is far from unknown – her diaries have been translated into 30 languages. But something about her maturity, her secularity, her sexuality, her lack of preoccupation with the horrors of war, has kept her from the level of posthumous fame Anne Frank has enjoyed.

“Anne impressed so many people because she was so young and already such a good writer,” said Ariane Zwiers, curator of Etty & Leonie at Amsterdam’s Jewish Museum. “Etty was not a young girl – also a good writer, but she had a philosophical way of writing.”

Religion was less of a concern of Etty’s than, say, Rilke, Zwiers aded. And it’s no surprise that while Frank’s diaries were printed in 1947, the woman who wrote “I have broken my body like bread and shared it out among men” wasn’t published until 1981.

But Zwiers also reckoned that the world wasn’t ready for an introspective female-driven autobiography.

“She lived on Museumplein, near the German consulate, with demonstrations happening, Nazis walking around,” said Zwiers. “That must have made an impression on her.

“What I find special is that in spite of these facts she can write about friendships, beautiful flowers, and many other things, as if the war isn’t everything.”

Zwiers’ exhibition places the diaries of Etty and Leonie side by side, along with correspondence unearthed by Leonie’s son after her death in 2013, and seen here for the first time. In their letters, the women argue over Spier, discuss their philosophical differences and gradually drift. They both volunteered for the Jewish Council, but Etty promptly left for a job supporting deportees at Westerbork transit camp, north of Deventer. She chose solidarity, to “share her people’s fate.”

It was, as they say, the beginning of the end. Spier died from cancer in September 1942. Leonie, to Etty’s dismay, went into hiding.

“Leonie had no guilt about it,” said Zwiers. “She was glad not to have followed Etty. After the war, she said it was the right thing to do. Etty had many possibilities to go into hiding but didn’t want to.”

Etty was under no illusions about what lay ahead, yet remained sanguine. Aside from turning her, unwittingly, into an author, written therapy clearly helped her emotional state. “The misery here is quite terrible,” she wrote of Westerbork, “and yet, late at night when the day has slunk away into the depths behind me, I often walk with a spring in my step along the barbed wire. And then time and again, it soars straight from my heart — the feeling that life is glorious and magnificent, and that one day we shall be building a whole new world.”

She remained positive until the end. In summer 1943, the Hillesums were summoned to Westerbork and Etty was forced onto their train to Auschwitz. Before boarding, she passed her notebooks to a friend, who set off the chain of events leading to their publication. Etty died on Nov. 30, just shy of 30. On a final postcard, found by a farmer and dropped in the mail, she wrote, “We left the camp singing.”

Etty and Leonie runs through April 23 at the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam.

The post The ‘grown-up Anne Frank’ remains little known — and there’s a reason for that appeared first on The Forward.

הײַיאָר װײַזט מען אין דײַטשלאַנד צום ערשטן מאָל אַ קונסט־אויסשטעלונג מיט װערק פֿון דער גרויסער מעקסיקאַנער ייִדישער קינסטלערין פֿון 20סטן יאָרהונדערט, אָלגאַ קאָסטאַ. הגם די מאָלערין איז געבוירן געוואָרן אין דער דײַטשישער שטאָט לײַפּציג, האָט זי געשאַפֿן איר קונסט נאָר אין מעקסיקע, אין משך פֿון גאַנצע 50 יאָר שעפֿערישקײט. אַן אָפּקלײַב פֿון אירע געמעלן קען מען איצט זען אינעם לײַפּציגער מוזײ פֿון די שײנע קונסטן.

די אויסשטעלונג, „אָלגאַ קאָסטאַ: דיאַלאָגן מיט דער מעקסיקאַנער מאָדערנער קונסט“, האָט זיך געעפֿנט דעצעמבער 2022. דער לײַפּציגער מוזײ האָט זי אײַנגעאָרדנט בשותּפֿות מיטן מלוכישן אינסטיטוט פֿאַר קונסט פֿונעם מעקסיקאַנער שטאַט גואַנאַכואַטאָ. אין גואַנאַכואַטאָ, וווּ קאָסטאַ האָט געוווינט לאַנגע יאָרן, געפֿינט זיך הײַנט אַ קונסטמוזײ אױף איר און איר מאַנס נאָמען.

אָלגאַ קאָסטאַקאָװסקי איז געבױרן געװאָרן אין 1913, אינעם זעלבן יאָר װען די טאַטע־מאַמע, אַנאַ פֿאַבריקאַנט און יאַנקל קאָסטאַקאָװסקי, האָבן געהאַט פֿאַרלאָזט די הײמשטאָט אָדעס און זיך באַזעצט אין דײַטשלאַנד. אָלגאַ האָט זיך געהאָדעװעט אין בערלין ביז 1925, װען דער טאַטע, אַ פֿידלער, אַ קאָמפּאָזיטאָר און אַ סאָציאַליסט, האָט אַריבערגעפֿירט די משפּחה קײן מעקסיקע, צוליב רדיפֿות קעגן אים.

דאָס, װאָס די יונגע קינסטלערין האָט געביטן איר נאָמען אױף קאָסטאַ, שפּיגלט אָפּ איר שעפֿערישן גאַנג. אין אײנעם מיטן „־קאָװסקי“ האָט זי אָנגעװוירן דעם סימן פֿון מיזרח־אײראָפּעיִשן ייִחוס און פֿון ייִדישן אָפּשטאַם. נאָר װאָס? זי איז אָנגעקומען צו די ברעגן פֿון מעקסיקע, און „קאָסטאַ“ מײנט אױף שפּאַניש טאַקע „ברעג ים“. בעת איר ייִנגערע שװעסטער ליאַ (לאה) איז געװאָרן אַ פּאָעטעסע, האָט זי זיך גענומען צו מאָלערײַ.

די װאַנטגעמעלן פֿונעם קינסטלער דיעגאָ ריװעראַ האָבן געמאַכט אַ גרױסן רושם אױף דער יונגער אָלגאַ. װי אַ קונסט־סטודענטין האָט זי זיך אױך עטלעכע חדשים געלערנט בײַ נאָך אַ גדול־הדור פֿון דער מעקסיקאַנער מאָדערנער קונסט — קאַרלאָס מערידאַ.

 בעת די סטודענטישע יאָרן אין דער שטאָט מעקסיקע האָט זי זיך אױך באַקענט מיט איר שפּעטערדיקן מאַן, דעם מאָלער כאָסע טשאַװעז מאָראַדאָ. אין דער דאָזיקער סבֿיבֿה האָט זי זיך אָנגעזאַפּט מיט אײַנדרוקן פֿונעם מעקסיקאַנער נאַציאָנאַלן שטײגער װאָס האָט זיך ערשט גענומען פֿונאַנדערבליִען. אײַנגעטונקען אין דער מאָדערנער קונסט פֿונעם נײַעם הײמלאַנד, איז אָלגאַ קאָסטאַקאָװסקי אין גיכן מגולגל געװאָרן אין אָלגאַ קאָסטאַ.

יענער „נאַציאָנאַלער שטײגער“ האָט זיך אױסגעפּיקט באַלד נאָך דער מעקסיקאַנער רעװאָלוציע. אין 1920 האָט זיך סוף־כּל־סוף פֿאַרענדיקט דער בירגערקריג, װאָס האָט זיך געהאַט געצױגן אַ גאַנצן יאָרצענדליק. דערנאָך האָט די סאָציאַליסטיש־געשטימטע מעקסיקאַנער רעגירונג אַרײַנגעלײגט גרױסע אָנשטרענגונגען אױסצופֿורעמען אַ נײַע נאַציאָנאַלע אידענטיטעט, װי אַ יסוד פֿאַר אַ נײַער געזעלשאַפֿט. דערבײַ האָט די קונסט געשפּילט אַ װיכטיקע ראָלע און די מלוכה האָט שטאַרק געשטיצט מאָלער און אַנדערע קינסטלער.

נאַציאָנאַלישקײט האָט זיך אױסגעדריקט אױף פֿאַרשײדענע אופֿנים. מע האָט, למשל, געמאָלן שטיללעבנס מיט טיפּיש מעקסיקאַנער פֿרוכטן אַזעלכע װי אַרבוזן, מאַראַנצן, קאָקאָסניס און פּיטאַהאַיאַס (אױך באַקאַנט װי „דראַקאָן־פֿרוכט“).

אָלגאַ קאָסטאַ האָט ניט נאָר ליב געהאַט צו מאָלן פֿרוכטן, נאָר אױך דעם פּײזאַזש — אַ מאָל מיט די פֿײַנסטע שטריכן, איבערצוגעבן אַלע פּיטשעווקעס, אַ מאָל כּמעט אַבסטראַקט — אָבער תּמיד מיט כּישופֿדיק אינטענסיװע קאָלירן.

אױך פֿאָלקישע טעמעס האָבן פֿאַרנומען אַ װיכטיק אָרט בײַ קאָסטאַן — װי, למשל, פֿאָלקסטענץ אָדער אַזאַ יום־טובֿ װי דער טױטן־טאָג, צי טראַדיציאָנעלע פֿאָלקס־טראַכטן װי, אַ שטײגער, טעהואַנאַ, אַ װײַבערשער מלבוש בײַ די זאַפּאָטעקעס — אַן אַלט צענטראַל־אַמעריקאַנער פֿאָלק װאָס לעבט אין דרום־מעקסיקע.

בדרך־כּלל האָבן מאָלער זיך אַ קערעװע געטאָן דװקא צו דער דאָרפֿישער באַפֿעלקערונג און צו די אַרבעטנדיקע מאַסן.

אַחוץ אַזאַ מין ראָמאַנטישן נאַציאָנאַליזם איז בשעתּו אין מעקסיקע אױך אױפֿגעקומען דער סוררעאַליזם. בעת דער צװײטער װעלט־מלחמה האָבן סוררעאַליסטישע קינסטלער, פּליטים פֿון אײראָפּע, געפֿונען אַ מיקלט אין מעקסיקע און געהאַט אַ השפּעה אױף זײערע מעקסיקאַנער קאָלעגן.

נאָך אַ װיכטיקע טעמע אין דער מעקסיקאַנער מאָדערנער קונסט בכלל און בײַ קאָסטאַ בפֿרט איז געװען — די פֿרױ. קאָסטאַ האָט געמאָלן סצענעס מיט מעקסיקאַנער אוראײַנװױנערינס, פּאָרטרעטן פֿון מײדעלעך און אױך אַקטבילדער ניט לױט די אײַנגעשטעלטע נאָרמעס פֿון שײנקײט.

אין אײנעם פֿון קאָסטאַס סאַמע באַרימטע װערק קומען זיך צונױף פֿאַרשײדענע עלעמענטן פֿון איר קונסט: אינעם געמעל „די פֿאַרקױפֿערין פֿון אױפּס“ זײַנען דאָ סײַ כּל־מיני פּירות װאָס װאַקסן אין מעקסיקע און סײַ דער פּאָרטרעט פֿון אַ פֿרױ אַ מעקסיקאַנערין. אַזאַ מין אופֿן צו װײַזן דאָס טאָג־טעגלעכע לעבן פֿון פֿאָלק הײסט אין דער מעקסיקאַנער קונסט „קאָסטומבריסמאָ“ (שטײגעריזם).

ניט נאָר װי אַ טעמע און אַן אָביעקט האָט זיך די פֿרױ באַװיזן אין דער מאָדערנער מעקסיקאַנער מאָלערײַ, נאָר אױך װי אַ זעלבשטענדיקע שעפֿערין. ס׳זײַנען געװען עטלעכע פֿרױען קינסטלערינס בײַם סאַמע אױבנאָן פֿון דער מאָדערנער קונסט אין מעקסיקע, אַרײַנגערעכנט ניט װײניק אַרײַנגעפֿאָרענע פֿון אַנדערע לענדער — װי קאָסטאַ גופֿא.

צװישן יענע קינסטלערינס זײַנען געװען אַ צאָל פֿון ייִדישן אָפּשטאַם, װי למשל די פֿאָטאָגראַפֿין און גראַפֿיקערין מאַריאַנאַ יאָמפּאָלסקי און די װאַנט־מאָלערין פֿאַני ראַבעל. יאַמפּאָלסקי איז געװען דער ערשטער װײַבלעכער מיטגליד אינעם „װאַרשטאַט פֿון פֿאָלקס־גראַפֿיק“. ראבעל (ראַבינאָװיטש), אַ געבױרענע אין לובלין, איז אויך געװען אַ מיטגליד אינעם װאַרשטאַט. איר ערשטע אױסשטעלונג האָט ראַבעל געהאַט בײַ נאָך אַ לינקער ייִדישער אָרגאַניזאַציע אין מעקסיקע־שטאָט — בײַ דער פּראָ‏‏־סאָװעטישער פֿאָלקס־ליגע.

אין דער לײַפּציגער אױסשטעלונג האָט מען געװידמעט אַ גאַנצן זאַל אָט דעם „װאַרשטאַט פֿון פֿאָלקס־גראַפֿיק“. די דאָזיקע גרופּע קינסטלערס האָט אַ מאָל באַזוכט מיזרח־דײַטשלאַנד און געװיזן זײערע גראַפֿיקן טאַקע אין לײַפּציג. אױף אַזאַ אופֿן האָט זיך אײַנגעגעבן דער קוראַטאָרין, ד״ר זאַבינע האָפֿמאַן, אױפֿצוּװײַזן עפּעס אַ שײַכות פֿון לײַפּציג צו דער מעקסיקאַנער מאָדערנער קונסט. טאָמער אונטערציִען אַ סך־הכּל, האָבן אָבער מעקסיקאַנער קינסטלער ניט ספּעציעל משפּיע געװען אױף דער דײַטשישער קונסט, אַפֿילו ניט אין סאָציאַליסטישן מיזרח־דײַטשלאַנד — בפֿרט אַז מע פֿאַרגלײַכט עס מיט די פֿאַראײניקטע שטאַטן װוּ די פּראָגרעסיװע קינסטלער זײַנען שטאַרק מושפּע געװאָרן פֿון די מעקסיקאַנער מוראַליסטן.

דער קוראַטאָרין איז באמת געלונגען צו שאַפֿן אַ מין דיאַלאָג — דער עיקר צװישן קאָסטאַ און אַנדערע מעקסיקאַנער מאָלער, װעמעס װערק מע קען זען אין דער אױסשטעלונג. דורכן צונױפֿפּאָרן קאָסטאַס װערק מיט די געמעלן פֿון אירע מיטצײַטלער שװימען אַרױס קלאָרע טענדענצן און אינטערעסאַנטע קאָנטראַסטן. װאָס שײך אַלגעמײנע נטיות, איז קלאָר — אַחוץ דעם װאָס איז שױן געזאָגט געװאָרן פֿריִער — אַז די מעקסיקאַנער מאָדערנע קונסט איז פֿיגוראַטיװע קונסט און אָפֿט מאָל לינק געשטימט. דאָס הײסט, די קונסט האָט אַ געזעלשאַפֿטלעכע אױפֿגאַבע און איז באַטראַכט געוואָרן ווי אַ מין פֿאָלקס־קונסט. ס׳דאַכט זיך אַז אין דעם פּרט פֿירט די אױסשטעלונג אױך אַ דיאַלאָג מיט אונדזער הײַנטיקער צײַט װען פֿראַגעס פֿון אידענטיט און, אין אַ קלענערער מאָס, פֿון סאָציאַלן יושר שטײען װידער אױפֿן סדר־היום.

The post Olga Costa, the Jewish girl who became a great Mexican artist appeared first on The Forward.

Yiddish music fans have begun celebrating a long-awaited accomplishment: the digital launch of the The Yosl and Chana Mlotek Yiddish Song Collection at the Workers Circle, based on the widely popular out-of-print songbook series, Pearls of Yiddish Song.

An online event marking this accomplishment is to take place on Monday, March 20, 2023 at 7 pm ET, hosted by the Workers Circle.

For those of us who still keep our dog-eared hard copies of those songbooks stashed away on our bookshelves, ready to be pulled down anytime we have like-minded company over, this is welcome news indeed. The new bi-lingual website provides a free, searchable database for Yiddish music and contains the lyrics, translations, sheet music, audio and video performances to over 400 Yiddish songs.

The site also includes content curated from YouTube, Spotify, and TikTok videos showcasing newer generations of artists around the globe performing songs that the Mloteks had collected.

The songbooks were authored by the renowned Yiddishist husband-and-wife team, Yosl and Chana Mlotek z”l. Yosl served many years as the education director of the Workers Circle and later, the managing editor of the Forverts newspaper. Chana was a respected musicologist of Yiddish song whose vast knowledge on the subject attracted queries from musicians and singers around the world and no doubt helped spur the klezmer revival.

For decades, the Mloteks co-authored the Forverts column, Perl fun der yidisher literatur (Pearls of Yiddish Literature) which included letters from readers asking for the lyrics of a Yiddish song they’d heard years back in Eastern Europe or in the Yiddish theater in New York City. Chana would provide the lyrics or if she didn’t know them, would research it and publish the results in a subsequent issue.

Just like in their songbooks, each song on the website is accompanied by its author and composer (unless the author is unknown, as is true in most folk songs) and fascinating historical context.

In order to register for the event, click here.

The post Celebrating the digital launch of an iconic Yiddish song collection appeared first on The Forward.

This article is part of our morning briefing. Click here to get it delivered to your inbox each weekday. A true story of Nazi escape, Superman and Marilyn Monroe   The American Way, a new book from authors Bonner Siegler and Helene Stapinski, is a true story that has all the makings of a Hollywood movie: The publisher of DC Comics uses his influence to rescue a Jewish family on the eve of the Holocaust. Along the way, there are cameos from Marilyn Monroe, Joe Dimaggio and even a young real estate developer named Donald Trump.   I recently caught up with the authors for a video chat about this fascinating, untold chapter in history which has been called the rare “feel-good Holocaust story.”   Pulp fiction: Harry Donenfeld, a fast-talking and shrewd businessman, made his fortune peddling racy magazines and was eventually charged with obscenity. 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She said her zayde felt like the lone survivor of Krypton and, once he gained a modicum of success in America, did whatever he could to save other Jews from Nazi Germany.    Watch my conversation with the authors… Spread the word! Invite someone to sign up for this newsletter.👇 Share with a friend ➤ ALSO IN THE FORWARD Fashion photos published in the Forward were often accompanied by sewing instructions. (Archive) There’s 11 days left in Women’s History Month. Throughout the early part of the 20th century, the Forward reached out to women in a variety of ways, whether it was to inform them of their political rights, coach them on proper manners or organize cooking contests with cash prizes. Our predecessors even provided readers with sewing patterns for the stylish clothing modeled on its fashion pages. The editor of the Yiddish Forward, Rukhl Schaechter, takes a dive through the archives. 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Speaking of education, it was a pair of Sunday School teachers in New Jersey who inspired Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist, to give his fortune away to charity. “They set my moral compass,” Newmark told our editor-in-chief, Jodi Rudoren, for her latest column. At the World Baseball Classic last week, Team Israel’s locker-room talk turned to the protests currently roiling the country. Members of which religion are most liked in America? Which Jewish comedian just won the Mark Twain prize? Test your knowledge of the latest Jewish headlines with our news quiz. WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY Noa Tishby, left, and Asaf Zamir are under fire for their comments criticizing Israel’s government. (Getty) 🛫  Israel’s envoy in New York, Asaf Zamir, was summoned back to Jerusalem Sunday after he said at a gala that he was “deeply concerned in the direction the country is going right now.” Israel’s Foreign Ministry is also reportedly considering cutting ties with Noa Tishby, the actress who serves as Israel’s envoy to fight antisemitism, over her criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul plan in a recent OpEd and on Friday night’s episode of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. (JTA, Times of Israel)   🇺🇸  President Joe Biden told Netanyahu in a 45-minute phone conversation on Sunday that upholding democratic principles, including “genuine checks and balances” is a cornerstone of the U.S.-Israel relationship. (Haaretz, Washington Post)   🇵🇸  A former U.S. Marine who lives in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank was shot and seriously wounded Sunday as he drove through the Palestinian village of Huwara. The attack came nearly a month after bands of Israeli settlers responded to the killing of two brothers with a violent rampage through Huwara that many have described as a pogrom. (JTA, Haaretz)   🇮🇱  Meanwhile, leaders of Netanyahu’s coalition say they plan on pushing their judicial reform plan through before Passover, and Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right minister of finance, said at a memorial service that there’s “no such thing as Palestinians,” and that his grandparents were the “real Palestinians.”   🏳️‍🌈  A Chicago-based yeshiva is publishing the first-ever collection of Jewish legal opinions written by and for trans Jews. The “Torah thrives when people are bringing their life experiences to the text and asking their questions of the text,” said Rabbi Becky Silverstein, co-director of the Trans Halakha Project. “That’s how Judaism and Torah has stayed alive through so much of Jewish history.” (JTA)   🇬🇷  During a somber march to the Thessaloniki train station on Sunday, about 1,000 people marked the 80th anniversary of the first deportations of Greek Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some 46,000 Jews left the station in 1943; only 1,950 returned. (AFP, AP)   Mazel tov ➤  To our intern, Sarah Nachimson, who received the Chandler Award for excellence in student reporting from the Religion News Association. Read her Forward articles here.   Shiva call ➤  Mel Zuckerman, founder of the Canyon Ranch spa resorts, died at 94. A public celebration of his life is scheduled for April 17 at the University of Arizona, where the college of public health is named after Zuckerman and his wife, Enid. What else we’re reading ➤  For Zionist LGBTQ group, Israel’s right-wing government has created an urgent crisis … Across the United States, a push to observe Muslim holidays in school calendars … Trader Joe’s is launching its own brand of matzo. ON THE CALENDAR On this day in history: In the year 131, Halley’s Comet was recorded at its nearest point to the sun for the sixth time. Many centuries later, in 1835, Hayyim Zelig Slonimski of Bialystok, a mathematician and astronomer, published Kokhava de-shavita, a Hebrew book about the comet. Slonimski’s efforts in the sciences earned him a visit with the king of Prussia in 1858. In honor of National Proposal Day, we’re remembering this one that took place in a Yiddish library. VIDEO OF THE DAY Liraz Russo, the Israeli pop sensation known as Static, released his new single this month. The video has already racked up more than 1.6 million views.    —  Thanks to PJ Grisar, Tani Levitt, Rukhl Schaechter and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com.

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on the phone on Sunday with U.S. President Joe Biden about his government’s attempt to overhaul Israel’s judiciary.

In the call Biden “underscored his belief that democratic values have always been, and must remain, a hallmark of the U.S.-Israel relationship,” the White House said, adding that “democratic societies are strengthened by genuine checks and balances, and that fundamental changes should be pursued with the broadest possible base of popular support.”

The president also “offered support for efforts underway to forge a compromise on proposed judicial reforms consistent with those core principles,” the White House said.

Referring to Sunday’s multilateral talks with a Palestinian delegation at a summit in Egypt, the U.S. president “reinforced the need for all sides to take urgent, collaborative steps to enhance security coordination, condemn all acts of terrorism, and maintain the viability of a two-state solution,” during his call with Netanyahu, according to the White House.

A U.S. official said the leaders spoke for nearly 45 minutes.

According to reports in Israeli media, the conversation also focused on the Iranian threat and widening the circle of peace between Israel and other Arab states. “Netanyahu told Biden that Israel is and will remain a vibrant and strong democracy,” the Prime Minister’s Office reported and added that Netanyahu thanked Biden for his steadfast commitment to Israel’s security.

Netanyahu updated Biden on the shooting attack in the Palestinian village of Hawara, in the West Bank on Sunday in which an American citizen was seriously wounded. Netanyahu told Biden that “Israel will continue to defend itself and act against terrorist and their backers,” the Prime Minister’s Office said.

This is their third call since Netanyahu’s Likud party emerged victorious in November’s election, and the first since Netanyahu’s far-right government’s plans to gut Israel’s judiciary attracted widespread criticism and concern.

The call comes amid growing international pressure – including from Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides and the foremost leaders of the U.S. Jewish community – to heed President Isaac Herzog’s compromise plan.

Netanyahu and his allies, meanwhile, have been growing increasingly disconcerted about the lack of invitation to Washington, with all parties aware that Israeli prime ministers have usually been welcomed at the White House by this point in their respective tenures.

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(JTA) — Since December, Israel’s top diplomat in New York has found himself in an odd-couple relationship with the government he represents. Now, that relationship looks like it may be on the rocks after he criticized his government’s signature legislation.

Asaf Zamir, Israel’s consul general in New York, was appointed to the position in 2021 by the short-lived centrist government that had unseated longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Zamir was a former deputy mayor of the liberal city of Tel Aviv, and had previously served briefly under Netanyahu as tourism minister — before resigning in protest.

But when Netanyahu returned to power at the end of last year, leading a coalition with far-right partners, Zamir stayed in his position in New York — long thought of as a coveted seat in Israel’s foreign service. He kept serving even as other senior diplomats — such as Israel’s ambassadors to France and Canada — resigned rather than represent Netanyahu again.

Now, Zamir has clashed with Netanyahu and is heading back to Jerusalem to explain himself. The order to fly home to clarify his remarks, given by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, came after Zamir implicitly criticized Netanyahu’s planned overhaul of the country’s judiciary, which would sap the Israeli Supreme Court of much of its power and independence.

“Right now, we’re in a very dramatic period,” he said in remarks to a gala dinner in New York City on Thursday night hosted by Anu, the Museum of the Jewish People, which is located in Tel Aviv. His statement was first reported by Barak Ravid, a reporter for Israel’s Walla News and the U.S. outlet Axios.

Zamir, who was appointed to a three-year term, said being a diplomat sometimes means defending policies one doesn’t agree with but continued, “That’s not the point in the last few weeks.”

“I’m deeply concerned in the direction the country is going in right now,” he said. “If we want to have a national home and we want it to be everyone’s home, it really must be democratic.”

Zamir was alluding to the fears of an expansive range of critics — including hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have taken to the streets in frequent protests — that the judicial overhaul would threaten Israeli democracy. The legislation, which is currently advancing through Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, would allow a bare majority of parliament to override court decisions and would give the governing coalition full control over Supreme Court appointments. Its defenders say it will allow the government to enact the wishes of Israel’s right-wing majority.

Zamir isn’t the first diplomat to fret over the legislation. Last week, Simon Seroussi, the spokesman of the Israeli embassy in Paris, warned in a leaked cable that “in recent weeks, we have identified a worrying trend of French journalists, editors, academics, and commentators who are known as pro-Israel speaking critically, even very critically, about Israel” due to the legislation as well as violence by Israeli settlers, according to the Times of Israel.

Seroussi’s cable came ahead of a visit by Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who said in a private speech in Paris on Sunday night that “There’s no such thing as the Palestinian people.” according to Israeli reports.

Israeli actor and producer Noa Tishby, who was appointed last year as an unpaid envoy for Israel, has also criticized the court legislation. The government is considering cutting ties with Tishby as a result, Israeli media reported on Sunday.

Zamir’s wife, actress Maya Wertheimer, delivered her own implicit criticism of the legislation on Sunday during an appearance at the kickoff gala of Tel Aviv Fashion Week. She walked in a show that featured Ivri Lider, an Israeli singer, who was wearing a blue dress bearing the seal of the state of Israel, along with a gold crown. Stenciled on his chest were the words “free in our land,” a quote from the Israeli national anthem.

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Lider wrote on Instagram that his outfit, designed by Aviad Arik Herman, was called “Dress of Democracy” and said the crown was made of gavels representing “the importance of the judicial system.” Wertheimer carried an oversized passport and plane ticket during her appearance in the show, which also featured Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai and the former head of the left-wing Meretz Party, Zehava Galon, wearing a dress emblazoned with the faces of Israeli women in politics.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Asaf Zamir, Israel’s top diplomat in NY, summoned to Jerusalem after implicitly criticizing judicial overhaul appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — An Israeli-American former U.S. Marine was seriously injured in a terror attack in the Palestinian West Bank village of Huwara.

David Stern, a resident of the Israeli West Bank settlement of Itamar, was driving through the village with his wife when a Palestinian gunman shot at their car. Stern was hit in his head and shoulder, and fired back at the attacker, according to Israeli reports. He was taken to a hospital and his condition has since stabilized. His wife has also been treated for traumatic shock.

The attack comes three weeks after two Israeli brothers, Hallel and Yagel Yaniv, were killed in a previous shooting attack while driving on the same road in Huwara. Following that attack, dozens of Israeli settlers rioted in Huwara, burning buildings and injuring residents. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the village to be wiped out, a statement that sparked international condemnation, and which Smotrich has since repeatedly walked back.

Following the attack on Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces locked down the area surrounding Huwara, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Sunday’s attack also comes three weeks after Elan Ganeles, another dual Israeli-American citizen, was killed in a shooting attack in the West Bank. Ganeles had traveled to Israel to attend a friend’s wedding. Since the beginning of the year, more than a dozen Israelis, mostly civilians, have been killed in Palestinian attacks. Dozens of Palestinians have been killed in Israeli military raids in the West Bank. The Palestinians who have been killed were largely militants, according to Israel, and some were civilians.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Former US marine seriously injured in West Bank shooting attack in Huwara appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Earlier this month the New York Times convened what it called a “focus group of Jewish Americans.” I was struck briefly by that phrase — Jewish Americans — in part because the Times, like the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, tends to prefer “American Jews.”

It’s seemingly a distinction without a difference, although I know others might disagree. There is an argument that “American Jew” smacks of disloyalty, describing a Jew who happens to be American. “Jewish American,” according to this thinking, flips the script: an American who happens to be Jewish. 

If pressed, I’d say I prefer “American Jew.” The noun “Jew” sounds, to my ear anyway, more direct and more assertive than the tentative adjective “Jewish.” It’s also consistent with the way JTA essentializes “Jew” in its coverage, as in British Jew, French Jew, LGBT Jew or Jew of color. 

I wouldn’t have given further thought to the subject if not for a webinar last week given by Arnold Eisen, the chancellor emeritus at the Jewish Theological Seminary. In “Jewish-American, American-Jew: The Complexities and Joys of Living a Hyphenated Identity,” Eisen discussed how a debate over language is really about how Jews navigate between competing identities.

“What does the ‘American’ signify to us?” he asked. “What does the ‘Jewish’ signify and what is the nature of the relationship between the two? Is it a synthesis? Is it a tension, or a contradiction, or is it a blurring of the boundaries such that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins?”

Questions like these, it turns out, have been asked since Jews and other immigrants first began flooding Ellis Island. Teddy Roosevelt complained in 1915 that “there is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans.” Woodrow Wilson liked to say that “any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the Republic.” The two presidents were frankly freaked out about what we now call multiculturalism, convinced that America couldn’t survive a wave of immigrants with dual loyalties.

The two presidents lost the argument, and for much of the 20th century “hyphenated American” was shorthand for successful acculturation. While immigration hardliners continue to question the loyalty of minorities who claim more than one identity, and Donald Trump played with the politics of loyalty in remarks about Mexicans, Muslims and Jews, ethnic pride is as American as, well, St. Patrick’s Day. “I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants,” former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said in announcing her run for the Republican presidential nomination this month.  

For Jews, however, the hyphen became what philosophy professor Berel Lang called “a weighty symbol of the divided life of Diaspora Jewry.” Jewishness isn’t a distant country with quaint customs, but a religion and a portable identity that lives uneasily alongside your nationality. In a 2005 essay, Lang argued that on either side of the hyphen were “vying traditions or allegiances,” with the Jew constantly confronted with a choice between the American side, or assimilation, and the Jewish side, or remaining distinct. 

Eisen calls this the “question of Jewish difference.” Eisen grew up in an observant Jewish family in Philadelphia, and understood from an early age that his family was different from their Vietnamese-, Italian-, Ukrainian- and African-American neighbors. On the other hand, they were all the same — that is, American — because they were all hyphenated. “Being parallel to all these other differences, gave me my place in the city and in the country,” he said.

In college he studied the Jewish heavy hitters who were less sanguine about the integration of American and Jewish identities. Eisen calls Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the renegade theologian at JTS, “the thinker who really made this question uppermost for American Jews.” Kaplan wrote in 1934 that Jewishness could only survive as a “subordinate civilization” in the United States, and that the “Jew in America will be first and foremost an American, and only secondarily a Jew.” 

Kaplan’s prescription was a maximum effort on the part of Jews to “save the otherness of Jewish life” – not just through synagogue, but through a Jewish “civilization” expressed in social relationships, leisure activities and a traditional moral and ethical code.

Of course, Kaplan also understood that there was another way to protect Jewish distinctiveness: move to Israel.

The political scientist Charles Liebman, in “The Ambivalent American Jew” (1973), argued that Jews in the United States were torn between surviving as a distinct ethnic group and integrating into the larger society.

According to Eisen, Liebman believed that “Jews who make ‘Jewish’ the adjective and ‘American’ the noun tend to fall on the integration side of the hyphen. And Jews who make ‘Jew’ the noun and ‘American’ the adjective tend to fall on the survival side of the hyphen.” 

Eisen, a professor of Jewish thought at JTS, noted that the challenge of the hyphen was felt by rabbis on opposite ends of the theological spectrum. He cited Eugene Borowitz, the influential Reform rabbi, who suggested in 1973 that Jews in the United States “are actually more Jewish on the inside than they pretend to be on the outside. In other words, we’re so worried about what Liebman called integration into America that we hide our distinctiveness.” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the leading Modern Orthodox thinker of his generation, despaired that the United States presented its Jews with an unresolvable conflict between the person of faith and the person of secular culture.

When I read the texts Eisen shared, I see 20th-century Jewish men who doubted Jews who could be fully at home in America and at home with themselves as Jews (let alone as Jews who weren’t straight or white — which would demand a few more hyphens). They couldn’t imagine a rich Jewishness that didn’t exist as a counterculture, the way Cynthia Ozick wondered what it would be like to “think as a Jew” in a non-Jewish language like English.

They couldn’t picture the hyphen as a plus sign, which pulled the words “Jewish” and “American” together. 

Recent trends support the skeptics. Look at Judaism’s Conservative movement, whose rabbis are trained at JTS, and which has long tried to reconcile Jewish literacy and observance with the American mainstream. It’s shrinking, losing market share and followers both to Reform – where the American side of the hyphen is ascendant — and to Orthodoxy, where Jewish otherness is booming in places like Brooklyn and Lakewood, New Jersey. And the Jewish “nones” — those opting out of religion, synagogue and active engagement in Jewish institutions and affairs — are among the fastest-growing segments of American Jewish life.

Eisen appears more optimistic about a hyphenated Jewish identity, although he insists that it takes work to cultivate the Jewish side. “I don’t think there’s anything at stake necessarily on which side of the hyphen you put the Jewish on,” he said. “But if you don’t go out of your way to put added weight on the Jewish in the natural course of events, as Kaplan said correctly 100 years ago, the American will win.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Which side are you on: Jewish American or American Jew?  appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — An American Jewish group that has provided aid to Jewish communities in crisis for more than a century has become the target of one of Israel’s newly empowered far-right ministers.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, who serves as national security minister, said on Wednesday that he was shutting down a program dedicated to reducing violence in Arab Israeli towns. His reason: The program is operated by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which he called a “leftist organization.”

“JDC is a nonpolitical organization and has been so since our founding in 1914,” Michael Geller, a spokesperson for JDC, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Ben-Gvir’s characterization baffled many across the Jewish communal world who know the JDC as a nonpartisan group with an extensive track record of providing humanitarian aid to Jews in distress.

To them, Ben-Gvir’s criticism of the group is the latest sign that the rupture of political norms in Israel extends beyond the judicial reforms advanced by the government, which have drawn unprecedented protests.

“To call the JDC a left-wing organization is a joke. It is not political in any way,” said Amnon Be’eri-Sulitzeanu, co-CEO of the Abraham Initiatives, a nonprofit that works toward an “equal and shared society” for Jewish and Arab Israelis.

Be’eri-Sulitzeanu, who is Jewish, said he anticipated changes by the right-wing government, which was inaugurated in December. But he was surprised by Ben-Gvir’s announcement.

“I could expect revisiting collaboration with organizations that are branded as civil rights or human rights or Israeli-Palestinian organizations,” he added. “But the JDC — it’s very strange.”

Founded in 1914 by the American Jewish banker Jacob Schiff to aid Jews living in Palestine, the “Joint” has distributed billions of dollars in assistance across 70 countries — including, over the last year, to 43,000 Ukrainian Jews amid the war there. It played a central role in aiding Holocaust survivors following World War II, as well as in the resettlement of Jews from the former Soviet Union.

Among its biggest sources of support are Jewish federations, the nonpartisan umbrella charities found in nearly every North American Jewish community.

“JDC is an apolitical organization that has worked with every government since the establishment of the State of Israel, providing critical services to the elderly, youth-at-risk, people with disabilities and other underserved populations across all sectors, including Haredim and Arab-Israelis,” the Jewish Federations of North America said in a statement. “JDC’s activities are a living and breathing example of the Jewish values of tikkun olam and tzedakah that guide Jewish Federations’ work every day,” Hebrew phrases that connote the Jewish imperative to repair the world, as well as charity.

In Israel, the group funds and operates efforts to help needy populations — including immigrants, the elderly, people with disabilities and people living in poverty. Those efforts often involve working with the government, which in 2007 gave the JDC Israel’s most prestigious prize for its work. This year, according to a spokesman, the group is spending $129 million on Israel initiatives.

The JDC’s government-funded programs include the anti-violence effort that Ben-Gvir is targeting. It was made possible last year due to a nearly $1 billion in funding to curb crime in Arab communities by the previous governing coalition, which was centrist. The allocation followed lobbying by Arab and civil society organizations, including the Abraham Initiatives, which is now monitoring how the money is being used and its impact.

Arab citizens of Israel make up 84% of crime victims despite comprising just 20% of the population, according to government data released last year that showed a sharp rise in the proportion of Arab Israelis who had experienced violent crime.

Many in Arab communities have called for heightened law enforcement and have charged Israeli police with making inadequate efforts to keep their communities safe. This week, commenting on the shooting death of an Arab Israeli woman, Arab Israeli opposition lawmaker Ahmad Tibi accused Ben-Gvir of being “occupied with other matters,” such as clashes with the attorney general and police officials in Tel Aviv. “Maybe the time has come for senior officials to demonstrate responsibility when it comes to crime organizations and weapons running rampant,” Tibi said.

Other initiatives have aimed to tackle the violence in ways that go beyond policing. The program that Ben-Gvir said he is shutting down is one of them. Called Stop the Bleeding, it involves multiple government ministries as well as local community groups and education efforts and has operated in seven cities with large Arab populations, including a Bedouin town and Lod, a city with significant Arab organized crime networks that also has a large Jewish population.

Be’eri-Sulitzeanu said the program was already starting to bear fruit and had contributed to a slowdown in a multi-year rise in murders. Canceling the program, he said, reflects the current government’s general approach to tackling Israel’s problems.

“It’s not about collaboration. It’s not about hearing the concerns and pain and hopes and needs of the Arab community,” he said. “It’s about doing everything unilaterally, and really without a lot of care for the lives of those people. I think that’s what we are watching.”

A year ago, around the time when the previous government awarded the Stop the Bleeding contract to the JDC, Bezalel Smotrich, a key Ben-Gvir ally who was then an opposition lawmaker and now serves alongside Ben-Gvir as finance minister, proposed that Israel create a “command center” of “all of the relevant entities” that provide humanitarian assistance to Ukrainian Jewish refugees. Included on his list, alongside the Israeli Foreign Ministry and International Red Cross: the JDC.

The JDC is not the first mainstream group to be targeted by far-right members of Israel’s new right-wing government, whose signature effort aims to sap the power and independence of the country’s judiciary. That legislation has given rise to a sweeping protest movement and to grave warnings about Israel’s future from a broad range of public figures — including elder statesmen, foreign governments and religious leaders.

Avi Maoz, the leader of the anti-LGBTQ Noam Party who briefly held a leadership role in Israel’s Education Ministry, compiled a list of American and British groups that he believes are trying to impose their liberal values on Israeli schoolchildren. “We must protect our people and our state from the infiltration of the alien bodies that arrive from foreign countries, foreign bodies, foreign foundations,” Maoz once said. Maoz has since resigned from that role, saying that he did not think he was being sufficiently empowered to fulfill his goals by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

But Be’eri-Sulitzeanu said he remains concerned about civil-society programs, especially those falling under the purview of far-right ministers including Ben-Gvir or those funded by American Jews, whom the right perceives as universally liberal.

People who are paying attention to local governance in Israel expect further tensions around initiatives that do not match Ben-Gvir’s attitudes about harsh policing. Ben-Gvir wants officers to have the right to shoot Arabs who throw stones, has called for a crackdown on anti-government protesters and is increasingly clashing with police officials who believe his orders could jeopardize public safety. Multiple former police commissioners have called for his dismissal.

“Ben-Gvir has his own political agenda and he has his own ax to grind, and at the moment, I think he’s not keen on developing services of the Arab population, either in security or juvenile delinquency or education,” said Amos Avgar, who worked for the JDC in Israel, Russia and the United States for 30 years until 2010, including as chief programming officer.

Avgar emphasized that the JDC has always studiously avoided political activity. “If there’s one thing that the JDC is not, it is not political,” he said. “It always shied [away] from anything that had the smell of politics and never dealt with any project by political agenda.”

It’s unclear how quickly Ben-Gvir’s announcement, made during a government meeting and first reported by Israel’s public broadcaster, will ultimately translate into changes. Geller,  the JDC spokesman, said the organization had learned about the criticism only from the media, not from Ben-Gvir’s office. Later, amid an outcry, Ben-Gvir’s office said the funding decision had followed a review of contracts that revealed missing documentation from the JDC, a charge that the JDC denied.

Amnon-Sulitzeanu said he didn’t have high hopes for the program’s future.

“I think the first [characterization] is unfortunately going to be the correct one — that he is actually intending to stop it, which is very unfortunate because it is among the more serious programs that are willing to deal with this catastrophe,” he said. “And it shows again that the current minister is not so much interested in saving lives of Arab citizens.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Far-right Israeli minister finds enemy in JDC, the mainstream American Jewish aid group appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — In the midst of writing a 13-page analysis of a complex area of Jewish law, Rabbi Xava De Cordova found something she wasn’t expecting to see in the medieval-era sources: flexibility.

De Cordova is transgender and had long wondered whether she could feel a sense of belonging while studying reams of rabbinic writings on halacha, or Jewish law, which stretch back thousands of years and often prescribe different practices for men and women.

The laws of ritual purity, for example, prescribe specific behaviors for women on the assumption that they all menstruate. Trans women do not. De Cordova said that gap and others had her thinking, “I don’t really know if I can find a place for myself in this literature.”

But after digging into Jewish texts on the topic, De Cordova realized she’d sold the sages short: Medieval European rabbis were asking many of the same questions she was — and their answers reflected real-world complexity.

“I just found that the rabbis and the early halachic authorities’ understanding of niddah was so much more conceptual and vague and fluctuating than I ever realized before I started this particular work,” De Cordova said, using the Hebrew term for purity laws. Her conclusion: “Wow, there’s so much space for me within this literature.”

De Cordova’s realization is one of many that a dozen Jewish scholars and rabbis have had over the last year as they have scoured Jewish texts for guidance on how transgender Jews can adapt traditional rituals to their lived experience. Now, the group is preparing to release a batch of their essays, analyses of Jewish law called teshuvot, in hopes that they can inform the experiences of trans Jews who seek to live in accordance with traditional Jewish law.

The release of the essays comes at a time when lawmakers in dozens of states are targeting trans people and their rights, in some cases instigating fights that have heavily involved rabbis and their families.

In that climate, writing trans Jews into Jewish tradition “becomes an act of resistance because it’s about celebrating lives that are being demeaned and celebrating people who are being dehumanized in the public sphere,” said Rabbi Becky Silverstein, co-director of the Trans Halakha Project at Svara, the yeshiva founded in Chicago two decades ago to serve the queer community. The dozen rabbis and scholars are based at Svara and collectively form the Teshuva Writing Project.

Among the questions they have tackled: How could a trans man converting to Judaism have a bris, required for male converts? Is the removal of body tissue after gender-affirming surgery a ritual matter, given Jewish legal requirements for burying body parts? And is there a Jewish obligation, in certain cases, to undergo gender transition?

Just how widely their answers will be consumed and taken into account is a question. Most Jews who consciously adhere to halacha throughout their daily lives are Orthodox, and live in communities that either reject trans Jews or are reckoning with whether and how to accept them. Non-Orthodox Jewish denominations have made efforts to embrace trans Jews, but halacha is less often the starting point for most of their members. The Reform movement, the largest in the United States, expressly rejects halacha as binding.

Still, a growing number of Jews and Jewish communities strive to be inclusive while staying rooted in Jewish law and tradition. There are also a growing number of trans Jews who are connected to traditional communities, or who want to live in accordance with Jewish law.

“I think individual trans Jews who are not part of communities could use these teshuvot to guide their own decision-making,” said Silverstein, who was ordained at the pluralistic Hebrew College seminary. “We live in a time of religious autonomy in Jewish life, and where trans Jews actually are hungry for connection to tradition. And so they could use these teshuvot to help inform their own conversations.”

Organizations and initiatives such as the Jewish LGBTQ group Keshet; Torah Queeries, a collection of queer commentaries on the Bible; and TransTorah.org have created rituals, readings, blessings and customs for trans Jews, and Svara runs a Queer Talmud Camp as well as intensive Jewish study programs throughout the year. But until now, no collection of Jewish legal opinions has been published by and for trans people.

“Halacha has to be informed by the real lived experiences of the people about whom it is legislating,” said Laynie Soloman, who teaches at and helps lead Svara, in an approach that she said the group had adopted from the disability advocacy community. “That is a fundamental truth about halacha that we are holding as a collective and taking seriously in the way we are authoring these teshuvot.”

The teshuvot will be published later this month, and follow a long tradition of rabbis setting halachic precedent by answering questions from their followers. Those answers are traditionally based on an analysis of rabbinic texts throughout history. They can address questions ranging from whether smoking cigarettes is permissible to the particulars of making a kitchen kosher for Passover.

Some Jewish legal questions tackled by the group at Svara had not previously been answered, such as how to mark conversion for someone who is male but does not have a penis. In other cases, accepted Jewish law pertaining to gender can be painful for those who are nonbinary or trans, either because the answer is not clear or because the law does not match up with contemporary understandings that gender and sex are distinct.

“[Those are] areas where trans people are sort of most likely to either feel lost themselves or be interrogated by their community. … And so they’re sort of these urgent halachic needs,” said De Cordova, who was privately ordained by a rabbi from the Renewal Judaism movement. “And 99.9% of the literature about them so far has been written by cis people, about us.”

De Cordova concluded that trans women are obligated in niddah, the ritual purity laws. In her teshuva, she provides several approaches to emulate the complicated counting cycle that tallies the days a woman is considered ritually impure following menstruation. She suggests using a seven- and 11-day cycle originally proposed by Maimonides, the 12th-century scholar and philosopher. De Cordova also suggests that the imposition of a cycle not based in biology means ancient and medieval rabbis had some understanding of womanhood as a social construct.

“There’s many cases in which the rabbis sort of choose to orient niddah around their understanding of women, which I would call the social construction of womanhood by rabbis, rather than observable physical phenomenon or actual women’s experience,” she said.

For De Cordova, the experience of writing about niddah provided her with new insights about some of the oldest Jewish legal texts on the subject.

“They’re flexible enough and sort of responsive enough that I can really find a lot of freedom and space in working with them,” she said of the ancient sources. “And that was just a really sort of wonderful and freeing transition to go through.”

Last year, the Conservative Movement approved new language for calling up a nonbinary person to various Torah honors. The rabbis behind the opinion consulted with groups serving LGBTQ Jews and synagogues centered on them, but acknowledged that they were imperfect authors.

“When my coauthors and I published the teshuva, we wrote in it that we are all cisgender rabbis and that we hope that, increasingly, halachic work dealing with nonbinary and trans and queer Jewish life and identity and practice will… come from queer rabbis and scholars themselves,” said Guy Austrian, the rabbi of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center, a synagogue in upper Manhattan. “And I think the publication of the first batch of teshuvot from the Trans Halakha Project shows that that process is underway, and I think that that can only be a good thing for the Jewish world.”

Adding to the question-and-answer tradition of Jewish legal opinions means trans Jews will now have new texts to guide their religious practice, Silverstein said. Trans Jews, the writers of the opinions acknowledge, already have their own ways of performing Jewish ritual that accords with their lived experience. But they say that when it comes to Jewish law, informal custom without a sourced legal opinion is not enough.

“I want cis[gender] clergy to realize that there are resources written by and for trans people that they can turn to when they’re trying to help a member of their congregation,” De Cordova said.

The authors of the legal opinions applied to be part of the collective and come from a religiously pluralistic group, ranging in affiliation from Orthodox to Conservative to Jewish Renewal. They have varying expectations for how far-reaching the impact of the new legal opinions will be.

Mike Moskowitz, an Orthodox rabbi and the scholar-in-residence for trans and queer Jewish studies at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, which serves the LGBTQ community, said the teshuvot could provide a model for observant Jews who are also trans.

“I think it’s significant in modeling what an informed conversation can look like, which hasn’t really happened in Orthodox publications,” said Moskowitz, who was not part of the collective that composed the teshuvot on trans Jews’ practice. “I hope this models what can be done in other movements. What’s been tricky is that every movement has a different understanding of what halacha means.”

Even within Orthodoxy, conflicting opinions already exist, in a reflection of how halacha has always operated. For example, Talia Avrahami, a transgender Orthodox woman, follows the opinion of the late Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg, known as the Tzitz Eliezer, who ruled that a trans woman who undergoes gender affirmation surgery is a woman according to Jewish law. But Avrahami was told she could not sit in the women’s section of her synagogue, because the rabbi who the synagogue follows does not accept Waldenberg’s opinion. Months earlier, Avrahami had also been asked to leave her teaching job at an Orthodox day school after students and parents learned that she was transgender.

Avrahami declined to comment on the new teshuvot, citing restrictions set by her current employer.

Silverstein says some Conservative rabbis have expressed interest in using the opinions to guide practice in their own congregations. But he is less sure if they will be adopted in the Orthodox community, which is the target audience for most traditional literature on Jewish law.

“When it comes to the Orthodox community, I’m not sure I am bold enough to dream that these teshuvot specifically are going to be adopted,” Silverstein said. “I’m not even sure I know what that means. But it is my hope that they will permeate throughout the Jewish community, at least through the Modern Orthodox community.”

The scope of the opinions written by the collective extends beyond the trans community. The first batch of answers, for example, includes an opinion about how to increase physical accessibility to a mikvah, ritual baths used to fulfill some requirements of Jewish law.

“Judaism thrives and Torah thrives when people are bringing their life experiences to the text and asking their questions of the text,” Silverstein said. “That’s how new Torah is uncovered in the world. And that’s how Judaism and Torah has stayed alive through so much of Jewish history.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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