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Thirty years after the Rebbe’s death, Chabad has become the most visible movement in American Jewish life. In fact, this form of Hasidism might now be considered its own denomination. by Sarah Breger and Sue Fishkoff
Moment’s editor-in-chief reflects on what she learned after zigzagging around Israel in a rental car and asking Israelis across a wide spectrum to articulate their visions for the country’s future. by Nadine Epstein
Interviews with a Palestinian grassroots activist, a West Bank-dwelling lawyer, an October 7 survivor, a leader of an anti-government protest movement and many more. Read the complete project at momentmag.com/ israel-vision-project by Nadine Epstein
The Jewish summer resort in the Poconos served as a boot camp for Broadway and launched some of the biggest names in mid-century American entertainment, from Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca to Carol Burnett and Danny Kaye. by Gloria Levitas
A physics professor is approached by a stranger in São Paulo and is pulled into a metaphysical mystery. by Ralph Levinson
4 From the Editor-in-Chief
Searching for our Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky by Nadine Epstein
8 The Conversation
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Can evangelicals ban contraception? by Sarah Posner
Trump’s scary deportation plan by Marc Fisher
The privilege of Jewish anti-Zionists by Gershom Gorenberg
‘Everyone hates us’ is not a strategy by Marshall Breger
My husband’s Jewish journey by Letty Cottin Pogrebin
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20 Ask the Rabbis
How do we balance civility with disapproval for others’ politics?
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Camille Pissarro and the birth of Impressionism by Diane M. Bolz
66 Talk of the Table Hot diggity dog! by Molly Foster
68 Literary Moment
To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People review by Robert Siegel
The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters review by Gloria Levitas
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Book essay: Is motherhood bigger than reality? by Amy E. Schwartz
78 Poem
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79 Caption Contest Cartoon by Ben Schwartz 80 Spice Box
0n a recent trip to Israel, I entered the gleaming new Ben-Gurion Archives in the Negev Desert, wondering what its namesake— the great David Ben-Gurion— would think about the predicament Israel finds itself in today. After a tour through the public exhibit, I followed Flora Pazerker, the archivist at the facility, down to a lower-level chamber and watched as she tenderly removed one of Ben-Gurion’s 1934 journals from a box. Opening it to a page densely covered with his neat Hebrew script, she pointed to a line and translated: “I said hello without reaching out my hand.”
The country’s future founding prime minister, a meticulous journal keeper, had carefully recorded everything he did each day, including that he hadn’t wanted to shake the hand of his political rival, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a man he abhorred.
In the 1920s and 1930s, these two strong-willed, charismatic Zionist leaders clashed over their different visions of how a Jewish state should be established and what it should look like. A fiery orator, a journalist and a soldier, Jabotinsky was the progenitor of Revisionist Zionism, which promoted the establishment, by force if necessary, of a majority Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River, including all of what is now the nation of Jordan. He founded the Revisionist Party in 1925 to compete against Ben-Gurion’s Labor Zionists in the World Zionist Congress, which determined the leader-
ship and strategy of Jewish settlement in Palestine. In a controversial 1929 speech, Jabotinsky declared that rapprochement between the Jews and the Arabs was impossible: Their interests were too contradictory, their cultures too different, although he did not call for expelling Arabs, who he thought should be given full rights in a Jewish-majority state.
Ben-Gurion was the less captivating speaker but the superior political tactician, writes Hillel Halkin in his book Jabotinsky: A Life. He and his Labor Zionists, no stranger to using force themselves, would eventually establish a more compact Jewish state west of the Jordan River. Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion also fought over strategies for dealing with the British, who controlled Palestine and set Jewish immigration quotas, and they had diametrically opposed economic visions: Jabotinsky preferred a state founded on the principles of individualism while Ben-Gurion was deeply invested in socialism.
Their enmity had serious consequences. “In the 1930s, the disagreements between Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky were tearing apart the Yishuv, the pre-
BY NADINE EPSTEIN
state Jewish government, spilling over into chaos and violence,” said archivist Pazerker, the sabra daughter of Bnei Menashe parents born in India. By mid-1934 the conflict had reached a boiling point: In the hope of bridging the gaps between the two movements, a parley was arranged in London, and as Ben-Gurion’s October 10 diary entry makes clear, it didn’t begin well. Jabotinsky offered his hand; Ben-Gurion couldn’t bring himself to take it.
What followed was pivotal, according to Pazerker. The men met 16 times over the next month and were able to resolve some of their disputes. Their respective followers would rebuff what would become known as the London Agreements, but nevertheless their relationship had changed. “Ben-Gurion wrote a letter to Jabotinsky and told him that he now saw him as his friend, had respect for him and was reaching his hand out to him, and Jabotinsky responded in the same way,” she explained. “I think that it’s something amazing that they could put aside their differences and their hatred and see each other as human beings and as friends.” The easing of this rivalry helped avert
outright civil war at the time, although relations between the two men and their factions remained troubled for years.
Pazerker, who lives in the southern Israeli city of Dimona, finds this coming together for the sake of the Yishuv inspirational. “It’s very difficult for me on a personal level to see the next step for Israel today,” she told me. “It’s still too chaotic.” What she can see is that Israeli society is deeply fractured, and perhaps even on the verge of civil war. “I’m secular, and before October 7, I used to talk a lot about the Haredim [ultra-Orthodox] but in a very collective way,” she said. “After October 7, I saw how many of them contributed to the effort to support people and the soldiers, and that some joined the army.” She has come to realize that generalizations reinforce prejudices and prevent giving credit where credit is due. “I’m trying to change the way I talk. If each one of us will change their way of talking about the others and about ourselves, it could change the way we think.”
Her vision for Israel today is for people to be able to talk to each other with respect and “really listen,” she said. “We can have different ideologies and different perspectives, but we need to remember that in front of us there’s another person, another human being.”
Jabotinsky died in 1940, and Ben-Gurion’s vision for Israel triumphed, at least for the nation’s first three decades. One can’t draw straight lines from the disagreements between these two men to Israel’s modern-day divides, but Jabotinsky’s views are still reflected in many of the central tenets of Israel’s Likud Party today. (Benzion Netanyahu, the current prime minister’s father, was Jabotinsky’s private secretary, and later the keeper of the Jabotinsky flame, but that’s another story.) Pazerker doesn’t think even Jabotinsky would agree with all that Israel’s right wing stands for now, but the main point, she says, is that these two rivals agreed more than they disagreed.
Polarized times, such as 1930s Israel and today, demand leaders who can inspire antagonistic factions to unite by working together themselves. Which brings me to one of the young Israelis
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with whom I’ve spoken recently. Nadav Salzberger, 29, was an organizer of the anti-judicial reform protests and is now a leader of the movement to release the hostages and topple the Netanyahu government. “I think many young people really feel over the past year and a half that Israel is at a crossroads,” he said. “We need to decide whether Israel’s going to be a liberal democracy—a Jewish democracy, where we have a strong independent judicial system, where we strive to solve the conflict with the Palestinians, where human rights are safeguarded—or whether Israel is going in a direction of a Jewish state that is not democratic and that is run by the Messianic, the Orthodox and the settlers who want to drag us into endless war and isolation.”
Salzberger identifies as part of the Zionist left in Israel and wants to see a Jewish state that is based on the principles of humanist Zionism and social democracy. “Israel has to strive for equality in terms of human rights, but also economic opportunity,” he told me. He wants peace but thinks it won’t happen until Hamas’s leadership is destroyed or banished from Gaza, and education and corruption in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority are addressed. He wants a revitalized Palestine Authority and clear borders that Israel can defend. A twostate solution is absolutely necessary, he said, but he can’t imagine it will come about in the foreseeable future. “Any serious attempt to promote a peace process that would theoretically involve evacuating settlements is more than Israeli society can handle right now.”
I asked Salzberger if he knew a young Israeli I could speak to with different views from his, and he introduced me to his friend Evyatar Lipkin, with whom he studied political science and history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The two men come from very different backgrounds: Salzberger is from Zichron Yaakov, a quaint village overlooking the Mediterranean about 20 miles south of Haifa, and Lipkin grew up in Ofra, a well-established West Bank settlement about 20 miles north of Jerusalem. One is secular, one is religious, although not
ultra-Orthodox. One is a social democrat, the other politically conservative. “I don’t agree with Nadav on basically anything,” Lipkin informed me when we began to talk.
Lipkin thinks Donald Trump, if elected, would give Israel more space to pursue the war against Hamas and would promote a strong Middle Eastern coalition against Iran, Russia and China. He supports reforming Israel’s Supreme Court, although not in the way that it was approached by the current government, which he says was “like a bull in a china shop.” He describes himself as a strong-minded libertarian who wants to minimize the presence of the government in civilian life. He wakes up in cold sweats at night thinking about the reces-
Polarized times, such as 1930s Israel and today, demand leaders who can inspire antagonistic factions to unite by working together themselves.
sion of “biblical proportions” he expects after the war because of the amount of money the government is throwing at soldiers, victims and refugees.
When we spoke, Lipkin was in his eighth month of serving in a military reserve unit, which had delayed his starting a new job as an assistant to a Likud member of the Knesset. While he respects “religious study, Torah learning and yeshiva education,” he told me that he’s lost patience with the ultra-Orthodox’s lack of participation in the Israeli social contract. “I do believe there is a metaphysical value to prayers, but God commands us to protect ourselves with weapons and to fight, not just to sit and study.”
Both Lipkin and Salzberger are considering entering politics. “If I was running the country and had to talk with the opposition,” Lipkin told me enthusiastically, “I’d love the opposition to be Nadav, because he’s such a great guy.” It’s not just the two of them, he said; he knows many young people who are excited to work together to come up with solutions for Israel’s problems. “We may be on completely different sides ideologically, but we can speak with each other and work with each other,” he said. “I’m extremely optimistic about that.”
After talking with Lipkin and Salzberger, I could see that it’s not true that they don’t agree on anything. True, they do have competing economic visions, they don’t see eye to eye on judicial reform and they prefer different candidates for the American presidency come November. But neither is an extremist and both want a democratic Jewish state to survive. Salzberger wants a secular government and Lipkin, as a libertarian, has no problem with ending the Orthodox rabbinate’s control over marriage and domestic issues. Lipkin would like the ultra-Orthodox to be drafted into the IDF; Salzberger thinks it wiser that they perform public service in education, agriculture or the like so that their presence won’t suppress women’s leadership in the military. Both men believe Benjamin Netanyhau should cede power so that new leaders can emerge. And while Lipkin believes that Judea and Samaria belong to the Jews, both he and Salzberger agree that in the long run, a two-state solution is the only way to protect Israel’s democracy and Jewish identity.
Neither Salzberger nor Lipkin has formally entered the political fray, and I don’t mean to equate either young man with complex historical figures. But for now I find hope in the fact that the two of them, like Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion in the 1930s, have more in common than separates them, and are willing to come together to build an Israel for the future.
Turn to page 48 to read interviews with both Evyatar Lipkin and Nadav Salzberger or go to momentmag.com/israel-vision-project
The United States Air Force Memorial outside Washington, DC, was the setting for a ceremony on May 21 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift and to honor the men and women of the Allied effort to bring desperately needed food, fuel, and supplies to the beleaguered people of Berlin, giving them hope at a time of despair. The German Ambassador to the United States, Andreas Michaelis, and the U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force, International Affairs, Kelli L. Seybolt, were on hand to mark the occasion.
One little known fact about the Berlin Airlift is that it transported not only cargo but also refugees, in one of the first such air rescues in history. On their return flights from Berlin, American planes carried vulnerable people and children, as well as over 5,700 Jewish Holocaust survivors and refugees who were living in displaced person camps in Berlin, to safety in the West. They were flown to Frankfurt and transferred to refugee camps in southwestern Germany. Many were able to continue their journeys from there to Israel and other countries (see Moment Magazine, Spring 2024 edition).
We commemorate all the pilots and soldiers who lost their lives in this daring operation to save so many people, to keep Berlin a beacon of freedom for people in the East, and to enable many Holocaust survivors to start a new life in freedom.
Coinciding with the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, the airlift marked a turning point that has shaped the bonds between our two countries until today. Since then, German-American partnership has flourished and our close friendship has continued to grow. The spirit of the Berlin Airlift teaches us a historic lesson: Together we can also overcome new challenges in the future.
DOIKAYT IS NOT A CONCEPT ROOTED IN JEWISH TRADITION BUT A MODERN INVENTION DELIBERATELY CREATED TO UNDERMINE THE TRADITIONAL JEWISH VALUES OF NATIONHOOD AND CONNECTION TO THE LAND OF ISRAEL.
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Bardi’s Jewish Word column, “Doikayt: The Jewish Left Is Here” (Jewish Word, Spring 2024) explored how young, progressive Jews in the United States were adopting a diaspora awareness that includes criticism of Israeli policy and an embrace of the Bundist movement of the early-mid 20th century—which had championed the concept of “hereness” (doikayt) in opposition to Zionism.
The topic, introduced in a short video shared on Moment’s multiple social media platforms, proved popular and provocative. Some commenters on YouTube and TikTok condemned not just the concept of hereness but the Bundist project as a whole. “Actually, I was born in Lithuania,” said @noragutberg, referring to the birthplace of the Bund. “And I know what happened to my entire family—my mother was the only survivor…So, no thank you.”
“Whereas the Bundist movement was a well-respected political movement in early 20th-century Europe,” wrote @saulchapnick1566, “the Bundists were murdered by the Nazis. They had no chance in the world. Zionism is the answer.”
@McFluff33 put it in even stronger terms: “By practicing doikayt, one actively cuts themselves off from the Jewish people. Doikayt is not a concept rooted in Jewish tradition but rather a modern
Bravo, Moment! Thank you for immersing us in an Arab-American community and its many points of view in “Letter From Dearborn: Scenes From the Heart of Arab America” by Jacob Forman (Spring 2024). The teamwork of intrepid Forman and friendly Zach Touqan elicited forthright answers from leaders and ordinary citizens, showcasing both
invention deliberately created to undermine the traditional Jewish values of nationhood and connection to the Land of Israel.”
Others supported doikayt. “The Bundist perspective makes a lot more sense,” @noisy99 shared. “I am a mixed Indonesian-Australian-German dude, and I have lived all my life in Indonesia. Indonesia will always be home to me while Austria and Germany are mere reminders of my ancestors; I wouldn’t call them home.”
Another commenter using the social handle @lulalela542 wrote: “As a Jew, I support this…Our people are stronger together and around the world, not concentrated in a genocidal, segregationist state.”
YouTube commenter @DeborahMiller-cg1ur struck a novel note in invoking doikayt to defend the Jewish state: “The concept of ‘hereness’ gives hope for being at home with peace and contentment wherever you are. It is difficult if a person is a refugee for years seeking a place to settle. The Jews found a homeland in Israel following World War II after wandering for thousands of years. The Bundists would apply this word to the present defense of Israel. The universal concept applies to all peoples’ right to be where they feel at home. It implies staying power and focusing on the present.”
unity and diversity in their interviewees’ thinking, from opinions on the two-state solution to American leadership on a variety of issues. More than one talked about the long history of coexistence between Jews and Arabs as “brothers.” So many insights. I was struck by a tone of serious respect from all parties, even as they expressed strong feelings. Characteristically, Moment has brought fresh air to this subject. Forman and Touqan’s
partnership, in itself, serves as a fair model of “agreeing to disagree.”
Ellen Stukenberg Columbus, OH
“Letter From Dearborn” showed that, for the most part, Arab Americans are just like all the myriad other ethnic groups that make up the United States. There is a strong sense of group identity, but at the same time there is a movement to integrate into the general American culture. In America, every immigrant group adds something of its own to the culture. Inevitably, this means the bonds that keep the Arab-American community together will gradually loosen over time. It is already happening to the next generation in Dearborn, Michigan, where, as the story notes, many of the next generation do not speak Arabic at home.
Jay Stonehill Chicago, IL
OZ-SALZBERGER’S
I’ve been looking to Fania Oz-Salzberger’s writing lately in order to keep believing in peace, even if it’s not realistically possible in my lifetime. I marvel how she can speak so well of too many Pharaohs (“At Israeli Seders, Pick Your Pharaoh,” Spring 2024) and the darkness that everyone feels, even those of us in the diaspora. Oz-Salzberger writes so beautifully with simple common sense, in a voice that is recognizably Israeli but touches universal hopes, ambitions and terrible fears. Deborah Salazar via momentmag.com
In the previous issue, we asked if UNRWA should be shut down. We asked Moment’s followers on X (formerly known as Twitter) to weigh in. The majority answered yes.
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Israeliuniversitylaunchinguniquementalhealthtraumacenterspurredby distinctivenatureofOct.7attack
ByElanaSztokman
Howdoyoudealwiththetraumaofthe deadliestdayJewshaveexperiencedsincethe Holocaust?
ThiswasthequestionIsraelitraumaexperts facedinthewakeofOct.7,2023,whenover 1,200Israeliswerekilledandsome250taken captiveinHamas’sattackonIsrael.
Themassiveattackbyterroristsimmediatelywasfollowedbyadditionaltraumas:The displacementoftensofthousandsofIsraelisfromtheirhomesintheconflictzones.The subsequentwar,whichhaslefthundredsmoresoldiersdeadandthousandswounded. Emotionalscarringonanationalscale.
AttheHebrewUniversityofJerusalem,someofIsrael’sforemosttraumaexpertssetto worktodesignnewclinicalapproachesandtraintherapiststodealwiththesetraumas.
“Theseexperiencesarebeyondanythingwehaveseen,”saidProfessorAsherBen-Arieh, deanoftheuniversity’sPaulBaerwaldSchoolofSocialWorkandSocialWelfareand CEOoftheHaruvInstitutefortheStudyofChildMaltreatment,notingthatsome childrenweretakenhostageandwitnessedtheirparents’murderorkidnapping.“The toolswehaveuseduntilnowarenotsufficient.Weneednewsolutionsandnewideasfor howtotreatthesetraumas.”
Ben-Ariehestimatesthat25%to50%ofthosewhoexperiencedtraumawerelikelyto developproblemssuchaspost-traumaticstressdisorder(PTSD),depression,anxiety, complexgrief,ordifficultiesinmarital,social,oroccupationaladjustments.
Tomeetthesenewneeds,HebrewUniversity’sIsraelCenterforAddictionandMental Healthsetabouttolaunchthe InstituteforTraumaticStressandRecovery tocreatea multidisciplinary,academic-clinicalhubtoaddresstrauma-relatedresearch,training, prevention,treatment,andresiliencepromotion.
TheInstituteforTraumaticStressandRecoveryaimstogivetherapistsandtrauma survivorsevidence-basedpracticesandtechnologies,accessibleviaIsrael’spublichealth system,toenhancethehealingandrecoveryofIsraelisgrapplingwiththeenormityof
thesetraumas.Theinstitutewillconductresearch,traintherapistsinnewevidence-based practices,andprovidepatient-centered,comprehensive,coordinatedcare.
“Thisproactiveapproachwillnotonlyenhancethecapacityfortimelyandeffective traumaintervention,butalsocontributetoamoreinformedandresilientcommunityasa whole,”saidHebrewUniversitypsychologyprofessorJonathanHuppert,whoisinvolved intheproject.
“Traumamanifestsinmanywaysandcanbedifferentfordifferentpeople,”Huppertsaid. “NoteveryonehasPTSD.Somehavestress,grief,anddifficultycopingwiththeeffects ofbeingrelocated.SinceOct.7peoplearemorestressedingeneral.Theymay experiencemorenegativethinking,troublesleeping,morephysicalachesandpains, muscletension.Thingsmaysetthemoffmoreeasily.”
Thenewinstitute,whichwillofferararecombinationofresearchwithclinicalpractice, training,andadvocacy,hasraised25%ofitsbudgetsofarandisactivelyseekingsupport fortheremainder.
“Weneedenoughmoneytohaveastablecentertothinkoutofthebox,”Ben-Ariehsaid. “Andweneediturgently.We’renotevenposttrauma.Wearenotpastthis.It’sstill happening.”
AftertheshockoftheinitialHamasattack,Ben-AriehandhiscolleagueOfritShapira Berman,aHebrewUniversityprofessorwhospecializesintreatingadultsurvivorsof complexchildhoodtrauma,joinedanOctober7NationalTaskForcetocareforchildren whowereabducted.
WorkingwithIsrael’sMinistryofSocialServicesandothergovernmentalbodies,thetask forcetrainedthesecurityserviceswhofirstgreetedtheabductedchildrenupontheir releaseinlateNovember2023toensurethechildrenwouldnotberetraumatizedinthe processoftheirrelease.Theyalsoworkedwiththeirparents.
“Thereisadeepissueofbetrayalinchildhoodtrauma,”saidBen-Arieh.“Inthesecases, theseeventsoftenhappenedinplacesthattheirparentssaidwerethesafestintheworld. Parentscouldnotsavetheirchildren.Ortheyhadtochoose.Wehavenewformsof traumathatwedon’tunderstand.”
Headded,“Weneedtochangethefield.”
OPINION SARAH POSNER
A handful of cases could allow evangelicals to define contraception.
decade-old Supreme Court case looms over this fall’s pivotal presidential election, in which reproductive rights may well take center stage. In 2014’s Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the court held that religious business owners could decide, based solely on their own religious beliefs and contrary to established medical evidence, that certain contraceptive methods cause abortions. And based on that religious belief alone, they could opt out of covering the cost of contraceptives in their employee health care plans, overriding a federal requirement under the Affordable Care Act.
Hobby Lobby was a landmark case for the Christian right. It granted conservative evangelicals long-sought “religious freedom” rights or, viewed another way, troubling special privileges. It was also an early warning sign that Republicans have more cataclysmic plans afoot for elevating the “religious freedom” of a small faction. Trump’s base wants Trump because he’s their messianic hero, but also because he enables a small bloc of religious zealots to use the government to impose their biblical worldview on everyone else.
The scale and scope of their aspirations are now coming into focus. In his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, conservative movement hero Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court should next take aim at Griswold v. Connecticut. Thomas’s call to overrule this 1965 case that struck down state laws criminalizing the sale of contraceptives to married couples shocked many Americans. But this has long been a commonplace view on the American right. Conservative legal scholars and Christian right activists have claimed that the privacy right the Griswold court recognized is not in the Constitution. The truth is that privacy rights conflict with theocracy.
Republican lawmakers and Christian right advocates are not sitting on their hands while waiting for Thomas’s wish to be fulfilled. Democratic lawmakers, spurred by Thomas’s concurrence, have sought to enshrine the right to birth control in the law. But in more than a dozen states, Republican legislators have blocked these efforts, citing the very bit of disinformation the high court endorsed in Hobby Lobby: that certain Christians believe, contra the entire medical establishment, that IUDs and emergency contraception cause abortions. Trump allies drafting the blueprint for his next presidency have proposed making that lie official government policy, so any employer could opt out of providing contraception coverage. They have proposed that the government should promote ovulation-tracking methods of birth control, which are far less effective than the methods now covered. On an even grander scale, Trump allies are hoping to revitalize the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-obscenity law rendered dormant by Roe, and use it to criminalize the sale through the mail of abortion pills, contraceptives and more.
A small glimmer of hope emerges from a legal effort, whose plaintiffs include many Jews, to turn Hobby Lobby on its head. Earlier this year, an Indiana appellate court unanimously held that the state’s abortion ban, enacted after Dobbs, violated the religious freedom of plaintiffs including the group Jewish Hoosiers for Choice. The law’s challengers brought their case under the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a state replica of the federal statute at issue in Hobby Lobby. Their argument: If RFRA can be used to protect the religious rights of people who oppose abortion, why can’t it be used to protect the religious rights of those who support it?
Because Jewish law teaches that a fetus is not an independent person with rights, a ban granting protection to a fetus from
“ THE TRUTH IS THAT PRIVACY RIGHTS CONFLICT WITH THEOCRACY.
the moment of conception or fertilization presents a clear violation of the freedom of a Jewish person to choose an abortion. Indiana state lawyers tried to argue that getting an abortion is not a “mandatory ritual” like keeping kosher or observing Shabbat. But the appellate judges eviscerated that argument in short order. Procuring a health insurance plan for your employees is not a mandatory religious ritual either, they pointed out, but it was “core” to the Hobby Lobby holding.
Similar lawsuits have faced opposition from red state lawyers. Kentucky state attorneys recently prevailed on their motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by three Jewish women against that state’s abortion ban. “Jews do not consider life to begin at conception; this religious belief is forced on them by the government,” the women’s lawyers have argued to the court. “Kentucky’s laws are Christian in origin and design and impugn the faith of Jewish Kentuckians.”
All of these cases are far from final resolution. A favorable result in any of them could protect some people’s abortion rights and access to contraception as well. Meanwhile, though, their long-overlooked arguments should motivate everyone to recognize the Republican “religious freedom” crusade for what it really is: a war on freedom, religious and otherwise.
Sarah Posner is the author of Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind.
The Trump-Miller deportation plan should scare Jews—but does it?
The image wins lusty cheers at Donald Trump’s rallies—uniformed U.S. officers rounding up illegal immigrants and shipping them back where they came from. It’s a vision meant to rattle liberal sensibilities, smash norms and fulfill Trump followers’ quest for a mythic America made great again.
For many American Jews, it’s an image that summons nightmares from a past turned suddenly not so distant, a violation of Jewish values and law. Yet to many Jews, from the policy’s Jewish creator, Stephen Miller, to many Jewish Trump supporters, the plan to deport millions of people seems both necessary and moral.
In an interview on Charlie Kirk’s conservative talk show, Miller, Trump’s longtime speechwriter and the architect of the deportation proposal, bluntly promised the biggest forced movement of people in American history. “This is going to happen,” he said. “If President Trump is back in the Oval Office in January, this is going to commence immediately, and it will be joyous, and it will be wonderful, and it will be everything you want it to be.”
The planned numbers are unclear—15 million, 20 million. The methods are vague, but lurid—Trump, who rails against immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” says he’ll deploy the National Guard, or maybe the military, or maybe local police forces. The money, legal authority and logistical arrangements that would be needed to pull off mass deportations go largely unexplained either by Trump or in Project 2025, the plan developed for a second Trump term by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
These developments have a dimension beyond the political for many Jews who feel a religious, historical and moral imperative to take the side of those who have escaped from terror. A map of the world’s Jewish population is largely a map of the places to which Jews fled when
they were expelled, deported, hunted or otherwise removed from countries they’d called home for centuries. Exodus is as central to our experience as Genesis.
“If there were a master narrative of the Jewish people, it would be ‘We were slaves in Egypt,’” says Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Reform movement’s social justice arm, the Religious Action Center. “The fundamental Jewish experience most of us share is the sacred reenactment of our journey, an experience in which we are commanded to see ourselves as the stranger.” Because of this, the Trump-Miller deportation plan “flies in the face of our tradition and history,” Pesner says. But the commandment to identify with the stranger is a difficult one, he adds: “It’s so easy to vilify the other.”
Although the immigration debate often plays out as Republicans against Democrats, viewing the outsider as an invading, destructive force is not a partisan position, he says. Three consecutive presidents—Obama, Trump and Biden—have sought at various times to toughen restrictions and close the U.S.-Mexican border.
But this should be an easier question for Jews, Pesner argues: “It’s not just that it’s clear in rabbinic and Talmudic texts. It’s in their kishkes. When has deportation ever been something good for the Jews?”
That doesn’t make it unanimous. There are numerous Jews who argue that mass deportation can be both politically and morally right. “Assuring the safety of the Americans who are here legally overrides any issue of tikkun olam,” says Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America and an immigrant from Germany whose parents, he says, waited three years for a visa to come legally to the United States. Klein cites polls showing that large majorities of Middle Easterners harbor antisemitic attitudes and says Muslims “coming to America should be vetted. This is pure-
ly political. No one has an obligation to bring in people who hate them. Maybe we should even increase immigration, but only vetted people.”
Between Pesner and Klein lie many American Jews who accept our special obligation to the world’s outsiders and wanderers yet are deeply concerned about crime, homelessness, the inability of local governments to care for an overwhelming tide of newcomers—and the abuse of the refugee system by people who come here not because of political oppression, but simply in search of a better life.
All along the political spectrum, though, the topic seems to make people viscerally uncomfortable. I called seven rabbis who work along the border to talk about this question, and every one either declined to speak to me or didn’t return my calls. “I can’t help you on this,” said a rabbi in Texas. “It’s just too controversial in my congregation.”
But part of the obligation Jews owe to ourselves and our fellow outsiders is to tackle such controversies. Just as it’s wrong to round up those who’ve fled to our country, it’s also wrong to pretend that their arrival hasn’t caused great strains. The solution is exactly the path America’s leaders have avoided: acting with empathy while setting rational limits.
Marc Fisher is a columnist at The Washington Post and coauthor of Trump Revealed, a biography of the former president.
It's easy to say a Jewish state is not needed from the safety of the United States.
Our home is wherever we are. There’s no nation-state that is our national homeland,” said a Jewish instructor at the University of Chicago who helped organize an anti-Zionist Seder held during this spring’s campus protests against Israel. So The Chicago Tribune reported.
“Zionism does not make you safe. Zionism makes the world more dangerous for Jews,” a member of Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) at the University of North Carolina told the Religion News Service.
JVP reportedly took a prominent role in organizing protests on college campuses this spring. “Zionism was a false and failed answer” to the antisemitism faced by “many of our ancestors” in Europe, says JVP’s own statement on its website rejecting Zionism.
To which I must respond: Check your privilege.
Given how that phrase is often used, I’ll clarify: I’m not referring to the skin color of people who made these statements. I’m speaking of the safety they enjoy as Jews in America while they attack Zionism. For nearly all, that safety is due to historical luck: Before they were born, their ancestors were able to come to the United States.
To explain, let’s take a look at the statement on JVP’s website, with its mix of historical facts, distortions and lacunae. Accurately, it says that some Jews tried to assimilate into European society; many emigrated to America; and some “turned to revolutionary socialism.” And some, it says disapprovingly, chose Zionism.
Two essential pieces are missing from this picture. First, of those who stayed in Europe for the sake of revolutionary socialism, a great many were murdered in the Holocaust—or, in smaller numbers, in Stalin’s purges. Many survivors or their descendants would emigrate to Israel.
Second, America shut its gates. The Johnson-Reed Act, enacted in 1924, set
quotas for immigrants from each country, with deliberately low quotas for eastern and southern Europe. As Jia Lynn Yang writes in her 2020 book One Mighty and Irresistible Tide, the laws’ architects saw people from those areas as racially inferior.
If you’re an American Jew, you are probably descended from people who got in before that—people who won a fateful historical lottery.
This was also a turning point for Zionism. From 1924 on, ever more Jews migrated to British-ruled Palestine. For some, it was pragmatic: Tel Aviv was an option; New York wasn’t. Some were more ideologically Zionist. But America’s decision validated the Zionist view that only a national home would provide Jews a lasting refuge. And British decisions to limit entry to Palestine in the 1930s made it clear that the “national home”—formerly a politically vague concept—had to be an independent state to be a true haven.
Trapped in Europe, millions of Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Jewish survivors made up part of the “last million”—author David Nasaw's term for the displaced persons (DPs) who couldn't return to their pre-war countries. In June 1948, Congress enacted a law to allow some DPs to come to the United States. Under the pretext of excluding Communists, the law was written to keep out most Jews. In 1950, a new law allowed in more Jewish DPs. By then, most survivors had found sanctuary in Israel. Only in 1965 did a new law significantly reopen America to immigration.
So again: If your parents or grandparents were survivors who got to the United States, you’re enjoying a benefit not of your making.
After Israel’s independence, Jewish immigration from the Middle East and North Africa climbed dramatically. That story is too complex to sum up here. But the anti-Zionist narrative that Israel
“ FOR NEARLY ALL, THAT SAFETY IS DUE TO HISTORICAL LUCK.
shattered idyllic coexistence in Muslim countries is a myth. “Jews were always second-class citizens under Moslem [sic] rule,” as the renowned anti-colonial thinker Albert Memmi wrote, in his explanation of why he, as a Jew, left Tunisia. Newly independent Arab states, like newly independent Eastern European states before them, were inhospitable to Jews. Some Mizrahi Jews found homes in the West, especially France. Many more, by choice or necessity, came to Israel. A smaller number reached America. If that’s your family, you too are holding a lottery ticket dealt by history.
I’m not suggesting that American Jews should feel guilt for being the heirs of what, so far, has been a safe haven. Guilt over historical good luck is silly. Nor do American Jews need to refrain from criticizing Israeli policies. Most Israelis are critical of the Israeli government these days; why shouldn’t American Jews be? If you believe that Israel should end the occupation of the West Bank and avoid the reoccupation of Gaza, from where I sit—in Jerusalem—it seems you have Israel’s best interests in mind.
On the other hand, claiming that Jews don’t need a state because you personally are doing fine outside that state is the ultimate in unthinking entitlement. It’s time to take a good hard look at your privilege, and learn some humility.
Gershom Gorenberg's most recent book is War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East.
‘Everyone hates us' is not a strategy to build on.
oes the world hate Jews? Is antisemitism the unchanging condition of Jewish life? There’s certainly a line of traditional Jewish thought that takes that view. We learn from Genesis that Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing Isaac gave Jacob instead of him and “said in his heart, ‘The days of mourning for my father are at hand, then I will slay my brother Jacob.’” The Mishnah-era rabbi Shimon bar Yochai took from this that “It is a well-known halacha (law) that Esau hates Jacob.” In modern times Rabbi Moshe Feinstein expanded this idea to say that “Esau’s hatred of Jacob never changes. Even in those [nations] that behave well [toward Jews], their hatred [of Jews] is actually strong.” In other words, it is in the nature of Esau—that is, all gentiles—to hate Jews.
This view is not fringe. Medieval Judaism referred to Christianity as “Edom”— the nation descended from Esau. Later, the renowned 20th-century Orthodox theologian and rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik argued in an iconic 1964 essay, “Confrontation,” that the deep theological structure of Christianity is antagonistic to Judaism; that is, Christianity by its nature views Judaism as an inferior religion and would not be Christianity if it did not treat Jews as inferior. He was writing before Vatican II revised many of Catholicism’s explicitly antisemitic doctrines, but his opposition to interfaith dialogue was absolute, not contingent on either history or sociology.
This approach—which we might call “essentialist”—continues to be influential, and not only in religious circles. It has been expressed by many after the Shoah and even more so after October 7. In a recent book, Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, now President Biden’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, suggested that when it comes to
hatred of Jews “medication may alleviate the symptoms, but the infection itself lies dormant and may reemerge at an opportune moment in a new incarnation, a different ‘outer shell.’” The novelist Dara Horn writes in a recent book of essays, “People love dead Jews. Living Jews, not so much,” and journeys through different cultures, times and places to make her case. It is as if antisemitism is built into the DNA of the universe.
Many Jews have reacted to the present explosion of antisemitism by embracing the idea that antisemitism is universal and eternal. As the Haggadah puts it, “In every generation they rise up to destroy us.” But this kind of essentialist argument, though in an odd way comforting (It’s not us, it’s them!), is dangerous.
As none should know better than Jews, painting one class of humanity, or its beliefs, with a single brush can lead to tragedy. When you say that all Christians by their very nature view Jews as inferior, you imply there can be no such thing as a truly good, non-bigoted Christian. Writ larger, the binary approach does not even reflect the realities of social life or of history, in which antisemitism fluctuates based on a variety of external causes. The economic turmoil of the 19th century, for instance, led to fear of socialism and to competing stereotypes—on the right, of Jews-as-revolutionaries; on the left, of Jews-as-plutocrats. But as subsequent history makes evident, neither anti-plutocrat socialists nor anti-socialist Tories are ineluctably antisemitic. All have evolved non-antisemitic varieties over time.
Likewise, while Jews were deemed dhimmis in Islam, the meaning of that term changed with different sects and different eras. Bernard Lewis, the neoconservative Islamic scholar, argued that while Jews were sometimes persecuted in Islam, we cannot say antisemitism is essential to Islam—there are too many
competing texts and historical counterexamples, from Iraq to al-Andalus, to support the facile views about Islam that many contemporary Jews hold.
And what about the preoccupation of the day—anti-Zionism? While I can’t guess at the thought processes of Western intellectuals or progressive politicians, I’m convinced that for most of the Global South it is the settler-colonialist paradigm, not essentialist antisemitism, that shapes hatred of Israel. I lectured at a provincial college in the Philippines some years ago on the state of international relations. To a person, all the students and faculty declared themselves anti-Zionists and peppered me with questions about Israel and Palestine. Were they antisemites? I very much doubt it. They told me they did not hate any Jews, and probably none of them had ever met one before me. Their views on settler colonialism and Israel came not from anti-Judaism but from theories about world politics that spoke to their lived experience and to which Jews and even Israel were merely incidental. I suspect that many of those protesting in anti-Israel encampments at universities draw from this well also.
Marginalized groups in society often come to be seen as the “other” and to be blamed for societies’ ills. It is far too simple, however, for Jews to see themselves as “eternal victims” (à la Hannah Arendt), for it suggests that there is something about the Jews that evokes hatred over time, culture and place. If antisemitism is built into the structure of the universe, there is not much anyone can do about it. We would do far better to study what social pathologies cause persons to fall into this way of thinking and what strategies can dampen their effect.
Marshall Breger is a professor of law at Catholic University.
Bert and I met on June 9, 1963, fell madly in love, talked incessantly, got engaged in October and married two months later, astonished by our commonalities and delighted by our differences. After meeting dozens of each other’s fiercely opinionated, short-statured, mostly immigrant Ashkenazi relatives, we agreed that our families were, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable. By our wedding day, I knew my husband’s worldview and background as thoroughly and intimately as he knew mine. I knew where our tastes in books, magazines and music overlapped and where they were at least compatible. I knew he loved skiing, jogging, basketball and tennis; he knew I had no athletic ability whatsoever. The only thing that gave me pause was that he had never had a bar mitzvah. To me, this was inconceivable.
Bert dubbed ours a mixed marriage: I was a believer, he wasn’t. I lit Shabbat candles and trusted prayer and kinehoras to ward off the evil eye and pull me through the narrow places. Bert was a logical pragmatist, a Harvard Law School graduate, a problem solver with scant trust in miracles. Raised as a “red diaper baby” by atheist Communists, he grew up in a New Deal town with utopian aspirations and a tiny shul that he never set foot in. I grew up in a kosher home in Jamaica, Queens, with fervently Zionist parents who “made Shabbat,” hosted seders and regularly attended services. And I was one of the first girls in Conservative Judaism to become a bat mitzvah.
Bert was sent to Workmen’s Circle camp to be tutored in political solidarity and Yiddish/socialist culture. My upwardly mobile parents forbade me to learn the mamaloshen, the language of “the old country.” Both Bert and I attended public schools; however, I spent three afternoons a week in Hebrew
school, while he couldn’t tell the Kiddush from the Kaddish.
On our Caribbean honeymoon, which coincided with Hanukkah, he was nonplussed when, clad in a filmy negligee, I reached into my suitcase and brought out a tiny traveling menorah and a box of birthday candles. “I’ve married a religious fanatic,” he chuckled, but he stood at my side when I said the blessings and sang Ma’oz Tzur.
A few months later, Bert had a serious cancer scare, which, thankfully, proved benign. Later, he confessed that he had pledged to the God he didn’t believe in that if he survived, he would attend shul at least once a year. I’d been estranged from synagogue life ever since my moth-
er died in 1955 and I, at 15, was not permitted to “count” in the shiva minyan because I was a girl. Still, I always went to shul on the High Holy Days. Because of his promise, he accompanied me to Kol Nidre services for the rest of his life.
Just as he accommodated my feelings and needs with his characteristic warmth and generosity, he lived his Jewish values through his rock-solid commitment to peace, justice and social action. But since I practiced a recognizable form of Judaism, when it came to religion in the family we agreed that I would be the “decider.” Determined to shield our three kids from patriarchal Judaism and the sexism in our tradition, I decided not to send them to Hebrew school or have them
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bat or bar mitzvahed. My home-based Judaism would be education enough. Like my mother, I made beautiful Shabbat meals, and like my father, I recited the brachot and explained the meaning of each holiday. We celebrated eight nights of Hanukkah and attended two family seders every Passover. Everyone loved Bert’s Paul Robeson-inspired rendition of “Let My People Go.”
Though occasionally bemused by my habits—I drape a schmatta over my head like an old bubbe when I kindle Sabbath candles—Bert went along for the ride. He enjoyed the candlelight, the challah or matzah, the family songfests, even the vintage Manischewitz. He didn’t put on a kippah, but at some point, he began to recite the blessings with me.
During our first trip to Israel nearly 50 years ago, we went to the Western Wall. I peeled off to the women’s section to place my folded prayer in a crack, thinking Bert would just hang out
at the back of the plaza. When we met up, he told me a couple of Haredim had asked in Yiddish whether he was Jewish. When he nodded, they grabbed his arms and muscled him toward the Wall. Up close to the ancient stones, he’d been overwhelmed by the power of the place and felt he had to say something in Hebrew. So he said the Kiddush. I laughed. He added, “I bet they went home and told their wives, ‘You’ll never believe it. There was a wino at the Wall.’”
When we studied together, Bert became fascinated by the wisdom of the ancient sages and the parallels between American law and halacha. He loved burrowing into a text. Around 1990, we cofounded a once-a-month Torah study group for our friends, which has morphed many times but is still going strong. In recent years, Bert would prepare for the Day of Atonement by dipping into books, including, sometimes, our daughter Abigail’s My Jewish Year.
But his journey into Judaism was never about faith; it was about morality, legacy, history and human behavior.
He died on March 25, his bed encircled by Abigail, her twin sister Robin, our son David and our six grandchildren playing and singing the union songs he loved. During his last weeks, among other mind-blowing statements, he told me how much he loved being Jewish.
“I know you don’t accept the idea of an afterlife,” I ventured, half in jest. “But in case you find yourself up there looking down, how will you let me know you’re watching us?” He closed his eyes and smiled. Then this nonbeliever, who had allowed me to surround him with my kind of Judaism and all the religious symbols that came with it, said, “Whenever you see a Magen David, it’s me.”
Letty Cottin Pogrebin is the author of 12 books, most recently Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy. NAME
“
It’s painful to see what’s happening to this country.
Age: 26
Party: Republican
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Occupation: President and founder, Sky High PR
Jewish Denomination: Hasidic 2020 Vote: Donald Trump
Current 2024 Choice: Donald Trump
Who do you think would make a better president, Biden or Trump? Trump, absolutely. Not just because of Biden’s age but because Trump had a proven four years, a great presidency in spite of COVID. He did a lot of good things, showed great leadership in foreign and domestic policies, especially in business. In the debate, Trump did an excellent job. He was prepared; he was relaxed.
After watching the debate, I thought Biden should be replaced immediately for the sake of the country. I was very surprised, because I watched the State of the Union and he was very good. He was on target, on his game. But somehow when it came to the debate, he looked very bad, tired, like he didn’t even belong there. He didn’t look presidential at all.
I’m voting for Trump because it’s painful to see what’s happening in this country. In New York City, there are nearly half a million undocumented migrants, and immigration is a real issue. It affects everyone. I do think we’re a nation of immigrants, but you have to have checks and balances.
Crime is a big issue. I know it’s easy to blame the White House, when there are a lot of other people to blame, but it’s a real problem. I don’t take the subway anymore, because what’s happening in the trains is frightening. I’m going to have to pay a big toll going into Manhattan soon, because I’m afraid to take the
train. And the governor and the mayor aren’t doing much to address that. I haven’t been a crime victim in New York myself specifically—maybe some people screaming Free Palestine at me a few times, trying to say Israel’s bad, but nothing more than that.
Do you think Trump’s felony convictions will change the trajectory of the race? There was no real case there. It pisses me off tremendously. I’m very shaken about what’s happening in the 2024 cycle. People get carried away, especially the media. We’re not talking about issues that affect the people. It’s always another Trump conviction, another Trump trial, Trump at another courthouse. That’s not what the country should be looking at. We should look at how our bank accounts are doing, how is our safety in our cities, how is inflation? Can you pay your taxes this year? That’s much more important. It used to be that the media talked about issues of substance, what matters to the working class. Besides talking all day the way they do on CNN about whether Donald Trump’s conviction is legal, let’s start talking about issues that matter to people, like immigration.
In terms of the other Trump cases, there is due process, and whatever happens happens. I’m not an attorney. I’m not going to weigh in on the legal questions, but I can tell you what bothers me as a voter in New York City.
What do you think of Biden’s handling of Israel and Gaza? Would Trump do a better job? Biden has no strategy for how to handle the situation. He flip-flops every day. One day he says go into Rafah, another day he says stay
out of Rafah. I think his stance on Israel over the past couple of months has changed dramatically. I’m utterly worried about what’s happening to Israel, the strongest ally of the United States in the region. The president should focus more on the future of Gaza, and let Israel end the war quickly.
Also, the United States should work more aggressively to get the hostages back home. The United States has a lot of political leverage in the Middle East, especially with countries like Jordan and Qatar. They definitely could leverage more pressure on them to get the hostages home, because every day is like a year for them.
I think Trump’s foreign policy was much, much better. Countries didn’t want to do anything aggressive to their neighbors, because they knew that Trump doesn’t play games. Trump has much better negotiating skills than Biden.
What’s the political atmosphere in your community? Are there undecided voters? The community that I live in, in Brooklyn, voted for Donald Trump, I would say 80 percent in 2020. And now I think it’s going to be at that same percentage, more or less. They see safety as a major issue. And the economy is something that our community thinks about a lot. They feel that Trump had a much stronger economy than Biden. Inflation affects a lot of families, especially a lot of large families. It’s much tougher these days than it was. I don’t see anyone changing their mind and voting for Biden.
What sources do you read or watch to get your news? Ami magazine, CNN, Fox News.
Who do you think would make a better president—Biden or Trump?
“
There’s literally nothing that will make me vote for Trump.
Age: 41
Party: Democratic
Location: Warwick Township, Bucks County, PA
Occupation: Project manager for health insurance company
Jewish Denomination: Reform
2020 Vote: Joe Biden
Current 2024 Choice: Joe Biden
Who do you think would make a better president, Biden or Trump? Biden. I did watch the debate; Trump lied nonstop and Biden stumbled the whole time. It was painful to watch. But I still say what I said before the debate: You are not voting for a president, you’re voting for an administration. Biden’s cabinet is staffed with competent and educated leaders. Trump’s would be staffed with MAGA loyalists and extreme Christian nationalists who want to destroy our democracy. There’s literally nothing that will make me vote for Trump.
I know things aren’t perfect, but I think Trump would be completely disastrous. Thank God, Trump is not president right now, because things would be way worse—in America and Israel.
Do you think Trump’s felony convictions will change the trajectory of the race? I don’t think they will change anything, because people who didn’t support Trump won’t support him now. And for those who are true loyalists, the convictions don’t seem to matter. They believe that the trials are witch hunts. So I don’t think that anybody who’s really loyal to Trump is not going to vote for him because of that.
It is a sad time. I wasn’t planning on ever voting for Trump anyway. I mean, I’m happy he’s been convicted. I hon-
estly thought he’d never ever face any consequences for anything he’s done. But for me, personally, it doesn’t change anything. I don’t have many friends who are hard-right Trump supporters.
What do you think of Biden’s handling of Israel and Gaza? Would Trump do a better job? I think Biden is in a very, very difficult situation. To be honest, I think he’s done a really good job—considering what he’s dealing with. I think he’s been level-headed, and his cabinet has been pretty good. At one point, when he threatened to withhold aid to Israel, people got really upset about that. I understand some of the strategy here. But I also realize that we, the common people, don’t understand everything that’s going on in a war situation. So we have to trust that a Democratic president who has a good relationship with Israel is doing the right thing. Also, I think it would definitely be worse for Gaza if Trump were the president.
What’s the political atmosphere in your community? Are there undecided voters? During the primaries here in Pennsylvania, the results were eye-opening, especially in the suburban counties around Philadelphia, some of them very blue-collar. In Pennsylvania, we have closed primaries—only Republicans can vote in the Republican primary and only Democrats in the Democratic one. In the Republican primary in Bucks County, I saw almost 20 percent of the Republican vote went to Nikki Haley. In [adjacent] Montgomery County, it was even higher. So that tells me that a lot of Republicans are done with Trump. Anecdotally, I have a lot of friends who
worked the polls on Election Day. And when the people at the Democratic table offered sample ballots, some voters responded: “No, I’m voting Republican, for Nikki Haley. But you’ll have my vote in November.”
I am seeing some pushback on Biden specifically from Jewish voters. Several people I know have mentioned that they can’t vote for Biden because they disagree with how he’s handled Gaza and Israel. And so there are definitely a few who are sitting around, waiting to see what happens in the next couple of months. But I’m only hearing that from Jewish voters. I’m not really hearing that from any other voters. I’ve heard people who I’m pretty close to say things like, “I can’t vote for either one,” because of Gaza, or because of Ukraine. We have a lot of Russian-Jewish immigrants here. Those issues are kind of difficult for them right now. But they’re basically saying: “I don’t want to vote for Biden, but I’m definitely not voting for Trump.” So they might just stay home on Election Day.
What sources do you read or watch to get your news? The Philadelphia Inquirer, Bucks County Courier-Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic
Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. This has been adapted from Moment’s Jewish Political Voices Project. For more voices go to momentmag.com/jpvp-2024 or scan the QR code for regular updates.
As civil discourse in politics continues to deteriorate, we thought it would be interesting to revisit this Ask the Rabbis edition from 2017. Some names and affiliations have been updated.
We should learn from our sages. Even though they disagreed vehemently on issues of law and politics more than 2,000 years ago, they would leave the House of Study following each debate holding each other’s hands. And even though some of their disagreements involved the laws around marriage and divorce, they gladly allowed their sons and daughters to marry one another anyway (Talmud Bav’li, Yevamot 13b). “When a scholar issues an [unacceptable] opinion, we do not compel him to retract, nor do we reject him...nor do we accuse him of being prideful” (Talmud Bav’li, Chulin 6b-7a). We can also learn from God, with whom we have been in disagreement on and off ever since the
first circumcision. In the words of God as filtered through the Talmud: “Even if the Israelites worship idols but there is peace between them, I won’t judge them” (Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 38:6). In the Tanach we read how the tribe of Joseph “went up to Beth-El, and God was with them” (Judges 1:22). Said the 3rd-century Rabbi Yudan: “Even though they went up to Beth-El for the purpose of worshiping idols, God was still with them” (Midrash Pesikta D’Rav Kahana).
Rabbi Gershon Winkler
Walking Stick Foundation Golden, CO
There’s a familiar saying: “Don’t talk about race, religion or politics”—espe-
cially with family members who have opposing views. But that guidance is rarely followed, particularly at holidays, when tensions can run high. In normal years, many families unofficially agree to leave their politics at home and discuss benign subjects.
In the fall of 2016, when I led pre- and post-election discussions in my congregation, more than a few members voiced apprehension at seeing family members on Thanksgiving. Even if not a word was spoken, how could they even sit at the same table as those relatives? Some said they simply wouldn’t go home; as good Jews, they would volunteer instead at a local church or soup kitchen.
But how long can you postpone seeing family? One person, who scrapped Thanksgiving, just couldn’t put off the annual trip to Florida in December to see her aging grandmother who, horrors, had voted for the other candidate! My member decided that honoring one’s parents and grandparents was the higher value, so she gritted her teeth, practiced calming breathing and made the pilgrimage. The dread was worse than the reality; her relatives brandished no swords, had no need to gloat and were just glad she came. As was she, but what anxiety!
Rabbi Peter H. Schweitzer z”l
The City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism
New York, NY
Hillel and Shammai were models for civil disagreement—but only when they debated questions like how to light the menorah, not charged political issues. Some of Shammai’s disciples actually used physical violence against Hillel’s followers because of differing views on Roman oppression.
Shammai’s followers often supported the active resistance of the Zealots, whereas Hillel’s followers sought compromise and reconciliation with Rome.
Most of us vehemently oppose violent protest, yet believe that being civil (i.e. courteous and polite) is sometimes not enough. In Manhattan, 19 rabbis were arrested for civil disobedience while protesting President Trump’s travel ban. Were they civil? Actually, yes: civil to the police but disobedient while struggling for a just cause.
Within our synagogues, we expect civil discourse between members whose political positions differ. We teach the mitzvot of not harboring hate in our hearts, avoiding gossip and finding respectful ways to criticize. Yet political passions can be strong and mitzvot are sometimes ignored. We learn civility from Hillel and Shammai, but we also acknowledge that, in situations when life is at stake, the mitzvah of pursuing justice takes precedence over polite and courteous discussions.
Rabbi David Zaslow Havurah Shir Hadash Ashland, OR
These are not ordinary times. From my perspective, they call us to resist and persist. Basic religious values of compassion, respect and truth have been brazenly breached, and few of us can leave our deep concern, even alarm, at the synagogue door. Religious communities can play an important role in bolstering faith, organizing for our values and affirming teachings of basic human decency.
What place does that leave for civility?
A large one. We must demonstrate that people who disagree can listen to and learn from each other. We must model the rebuilding of community ties and caring for all, not just for those within our circle. This does not mean we should normalize the situation or silence ourselves. The Torah teaches that we should “reprove our neighbor.” It also teaches, however, that we must love our neighbor and treat others the way we want to be treated.
In these times when the basic social fabric is deliberately frayed and undone for nefarious purposes, we must assert that the social fabric matters. Incivility will only unravel social bonds and divert our energy from the real issues. It risks hurting or alienating people with whom we may yet find common ground. “The day is short; the task is great…” as Rabbi Tarfon would say. There is no time for incivility.
Rabbi Caryn Broitman
Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center Vineyard Haven, MA
The Talmud chronicles many debates. A renowned story recounts that “For three years there was a dispute between the School of Hillel and the School of Shammai, each one claiming that ‘The law is in agreement with our views.’ Then a bat kol, a voice from heaven, announced, Eilu v’eilu divrei Elohim Chayim, ‘These and those are the words of the Living God.’”
This phrase, Eilu v’eilu divrei Elohim Chayim, became the foundation upon which Jews hold themselves responsible for respectful dialogue and debate. The equal weight given to the words “these and those” suggests that each opinion can be valid because they are both made “in the name of heaven.”
What does this posture require of us? It demands respectful listening. We have to acknowledge the sincerity of each other’s opinions, the intelligence by which each comes to those opinions. We may not agree; we may never agree. Regardless, we must recognize and revere the humanity of those with whom we engage in dialogue.
Rabbi Dr. Laura Novak Winer Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion Fresno, CA
There is no tension between being civil and expressing disapproval. Especially when we disagree with someone or disapprove of their politics, we need to be
polite, respectful and attentive. We can follow rule five of Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Covey suggests we practice empathetic listening to genuinely understand the other person. In doing so, we encourage the other person to reciprocate and bring an open mind to the conversation.
Sadly, at present, civil and balanced political debate does not exist. Instead, both sides of the political spectrum seem to have their own media outlets where they vent their incredibly polarized and uncontested political views, often with the aim of discrediting the opinions of their ideological opponents. The two sides talk at each other rather than to each other, and suspicion and hate fester. It is good to be passionate about our politics. However, if we converse only with like-minded people, we will never be challenged to reexamine our ideas. For truth to be upheld, it is fundamental that human beings not live in intellectual isolation.
Rabbi Amy S. Wallk Temple Beth El Springfield, MA
The essence of covenantal behavior is that we treat others, even opponents, respectfully. Even if we are convinced that they are totally wrong, we treat them as partners in building a better world (in covenant) or a better society (in democracy). From give and take— even between sharply conflicting political approaches—the best possible result should emerge.
Rumor has it that this question originally reflected chatter in Washington, DC synagogues over whether to confront Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump (who attended synagogue regularly) out of outrage at the policies of Ivanka’s father, President Donald Trump. Such behavior would violate the Torah’s instruction that “parents should not be executed [punished] for the [sin of] children; nor shall children be executed
If we converse only with like-minded people, we will never be challenged to reexamine our ideas.
for the [sin of] parents” (Deuteronomy 24:16). If anything, this particular couple should have been treated extra respectfully because they were playing a moderating role in the administration.
History makes the idea of retaliation against families even more obnoxious. Totalitarian systems often demand that people prove loyalty to the “higher cause” by turning on their families. Under Stalin, a child named Pavel Alexandrovitch reported to the KGB that his father had mocked the great leader. The father was sent to Siberia (he never returned) and the child was declared a Hero of the Soviet Union and celebrated in textbooks. Thus, “saving the world” was turned into justification for cruelty and inhumanity.
The methods of tikkun olam must uphold human relationships. Judaism teaches that it is legitimate to show special concern for one’s family, because that is the humane start to improving the whole world.
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg
J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life/Hadar Riverdale, NY
The question is partly practical. If the purpose is not just to let off steam by yelling at people, if it is to relate to them, perhaps change minds, then incivility simply doesn’t work. There is a mitzvah to rebuke someone who is doing something categorically, legally, halachically wrong. The phrase is Hocheach tocheach et amitecha, you shall surely rebuke, and the verb takes a direct object. But there is a marvelous Hasidic story about two brothers, both rebbes, who, when there was someone to rebuke in their town— say, someone who hadn’t shown up in
shul—would start a conversation within his earshot about the value of coming to shul. The point being, when you rebuke a person directly, the chances of his heeding what you’re saying are about the same as the chances of Donald Trump becoming head of the Democratic National Committee.
Sometimes you’re not interested in affecting someone’s behavior, or you need to speak truth to power in strong terms. The Talmud says that the Torah scholar who isn’t as tough as iron isn’t a proper Torah scholar, because sometimes we need to describe things in a tough way. But we should always examine our motives.
Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein Cross-Currents Los Angeles, CA /Jerusalem
I believe that we should avoid labeling people because of their political affiliation, and therefore welcome everyone into our communal space. That being said, an individual has the right not to attend services if he or she feels offended by the opinions of another congregant. Special care has to be taken that those who represent the community, particularly the cantor, will be respected and accepted by all. There is also great risk in filtering out those who disagree with us: the risk of creating a monoculture devoid of diversity, where one is never exposed to the ideology and humanity of the other side.
With all that, I think there are cases where congregants or religious leadership should speak up and prevent some people from attending all or some services and activities—say, a person engaged in an ongoing violation of the rights of others and who shows no signs
of regret or remorse. A husband who refuses to give his wife a get, an unrepentant Bernie Madoff, or an elected official who harms others should not be welcomed in our midst until justice is done (Isaiah 1:15-17).
Rabbi Haim Ovadia
Torah VeAhava Potomac, MD
Judaism contains two notions, chilukei deyot (argument/dispute) and pirud halevavot (literally separation of the hearts, or conflict/animus). The prior is encouraged, the latter disdained. In the Talmud’s two great schools of thought, Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, Shammai is generally considered the more stringent: In the famous story of an aspiring proselyte who asked to be taught the entire Torah while standing on one foot, Shammai dispensed with him, while Hillel taught, “What you hate, do not do unto your neighbor—the rest is commentary.”
The Lubavitcher Rebbe, of blessed memory, teaches that Shammai stressed the present, Hillel the potential. In Shammai’s view, the proselyte was simply not ready. Hillel may have figured that if the proselyte would embrace this core principle, he could learn more about what being a Jew really is. Unlike Shammai, Hillel also always mentioned his opponent’s view, clearly saying that though he was right, he recognized the opposing opinion. He thus avoided the easy descent into conflict/animus.
We are a society of many ideas. We sometimes differ strongly, and lately that has become painful to watch nationally. But even when we do not see eye to eye, we must strive to see heart to heart. We have the right to disagree with others, including public officials whose views differ from our own, but it comes with a responsibility to keep the discourse civil and respectful, even if passionate. Otherwise, we lessen all of us.
Rabbi Levi Shemtov Executive Vice President, American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad) Washington, DC
Beastie Boy Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz seemed to be getting it. On September 9, 2023, when a street corner on the Lower East Side of Manhattan was renamed Beastie Boys Square in honor of the famous rap trio, The New York Jewish Week described Horovitz as appearing “to get a little bit verklempt” as he addressed a throng of adoring fans packed into the intersection of Rivington and Ludlow streets, where the sign was unveiled.
Earlier that week, in the pages of the Suncoast Post, entertainer and photojournalist Sheri Nadelman recounted the “fabulous flamingo encounter” she’d had in the Florida Keys on Labor Day. “The sight of these majestic, art deco-looking creatures almost took my breath away and in true Streisand fashion, I felt myself getting verklempt.”
Of course, anyone who regularly watched Saturday Night Live in the 1990s knows “verklempt” isn’t Barbra Streisand’s linguistic baby but rather that of a woman named Linda Richman, who is quite possibly Babs’s number one fan and who regularly gets verklempt—i.e., emotionally choked up—when talking about the singer. And even that isn’t quite right. Because the Linda Richman we’ve seen get verklempt is a character Mike Myers played on SNL ’s “Coffee Talk,” the recurring sketch in which he impersonated his then-mother-in-law Linda Richman in a heavy New York accent peppered with Yiddish words, some real, some not.
“My friend, the regular host Paul Baldwin, asked me to fill in this week,” Myers’ Richman announced in her first “Coffee Talk” hosting gig, which aired on October 12, 1991. In subsequent shows she would explain that Baldwin had “developed shpilkis in his genechtagazoink,” and assure viewers that he was “in Boca Raton, recovering nicely, thank you very much.” Here you have a real
Yiddish word, shpilkis , which literally means “needles” and conveys agitation, and a made-up Yiddish word, genechtagazoink (pronounced “ga-neck-ta-ga-zoink”), suggesting a private body part no one’s ever heard of. But the most popular word of the sketch was “verklempt.” (Spoiler alert: It isn’t technically Yiddish, even though Myers did get the Yiddish meaning right—sometimes.)
At least once or twice on every episode of “Coffee Talk” (“Where we talk about coffee, New York, dogs, daughters—ya know, no big whoop”), something would move or grieve host Linda Richman, and she would announce that she was feeling verklempt. “Talk amongst yourselves,” she’d instruct her audience, at which point Myers, in a dark and copious bouffant wig that he repeatedly primped, a purple bedazzled sweater,
chunky gold jewelry, black leather pants and eye makeup behind large tinted glasses, would bring long, fake red nails to his chest, pucker his mouth and close his eyes tightly in a pained expression. His Linda would often provide a topic to occupy viewers while the wave of emotion passed: “Palmolive—it’s neither palm nor olive. Discuss.” And a beat later she’d declare, “There. I feel better,” (pronounced “beddah”) and continue with the show.
Verklempt is related to the Yiddish infinitive verb farklemn, says writer and popular Yiddishist Michael Wex. “That would mean to press or hold something, like you’re squeezing it in a vise grip.” And so farklemt means to be clamped. “If you’re between a rock and a hard place, you can also be sort of farklemt ,” says Wex, whose first language was Yiddish.
And although he doesn’t recall hearing farklemt used in an emotional sense growing up, if he heard it at all, he says the Yiddish word can mean that something is a little upsetting and weighs on your heart.
“But on SNL Mike Myers seemed to use it for anything emotionally moving, positive or negative,” notes Wex, clarifying that in regular Yiddish, it would usually only be used for the latter. “If Barbra Streisand turns up out of the blue, there are other ways of describing how you feel; farklemt would not be one of them.”
(What Yiddish word would you use? I ask Wex. “I don’t know. I don’t know if anybody’s ever really that happy in Yiddish,” he deadpans.)
And so “verklempt,” spelled the way Myers (or the SNL cue-card writer) heard it and used in a positive emotional sense, isn’t Yiddish. It’s a loanword— defined simply as a word borrowed from one language and used in another.
“Verklempt is a Yiddish loanword just like ‘ballet’ is a French loanword, and ‘burrito’ is a Spanish loanword,” says Sarah Bunin Benor, professor of contemporary Jewish studies and director of the Jewish Language Project at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. “And they’re all also English words.”
It’s not uncommon, Benor notes, for the sound, spelling or meaning of a loanword to change when it becomes part of another language. On “Coffee Talk,” Richman certainly got grievously verklempt when discussing some slight leveled at Streisand (like when she didn’t get nominated for Best Director for The Prince of Tides .) And Richman also got verklempt thinking about how amazing her idol was. So, was she farklemt in the first case and verklempt in the second?
No, says Wex, her usage is all about the loanword.
And yet, it’s still not clear how farklemt came to be borrowed. Benor checked two definitive sources, Sol Steinmetz’s Yiddish and English and Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish , and neither had an entry for farklemt (let alone verklempt). However, those reference books predate the SNL sketch. Two later sources, The
JPS Dictionary of Jewish Words, by Joyce Eisenberg and Ellen Scolnic (2001) and another by Sol Steinmetz, Dictionary of Jewish Usage (2005), do contain an entry for farklemt. If Yiddishists give Myers and Richman credit for making verklempt a thing, were they also responsible for those dictionary updates?
Learning about the real Linda Richman’s life, detailed in a book she wrote in 2001 titled I’d Rather Laugh: How to Be Happy Even When Life Has Other Plans for You, one can imagine Richman was often sadly verklempt. Her father was fatally hit by a truck when she was eight, but her mother simply said he’d gone away and she didn’t learn the truth until she was in high school. She married young, to a lawyer with a bad gambling
“IF STREISAND TURNS UP OUT OF THE BLUE, THERE ARE OTHER WAYS OF DESCRIBING HOW YOU FEEL; FARKLEMT WOULD NOT BE ONE OF THEM.”
problem, and suffered from agoraphobia starting when her kids were very young, not leaving her apartment for 11 years. In 1990 her son was killed in a car accident. Richman did garner a measure of fame via SNL (she got to meet Streisand) and today is a certified grief counselor and public speaker.
She also helped give the world a great word. Today, people often use verklempt in the sense of being awestruck or positively moved and feeling the need to share—in the “you’re-gonna-make-mecry-and-I-love-you-for-it” kind of way. But not always, exactly.
woman in Rome texted her fellow Jewish friends (American, French, Italian, Israeli) living nearby. “I have been so comforted to know that I am not alone in my grief and angst and political confusion,” she wrote, suggesting they come together “to drink, laugh and support each other.” Their moniker, which appears in the private group text below a photo of “Coffee Talk” Linda Richman in all her overcome glory? Donne Verklempte
Meanwhile, in March of 2023, the New York City Jewish arts collective Havurah launched a quarterly print-only magazine called Verklempt!, dedicated to showcasing Jewish art and literature. They’ve published two editions so far, along with a special poetry pamphlet on the Jewish experience since October 7.
“People I know from Brooklyn who grew up speaking Yiddish were surprised that I named it Verklempt! because to them it meant sad,” says Editor-in-Chief Yoni Gutenmacher. “My grandma, who knows some Yiddish, just scratched her head.” However, he saw it as an opportunity to follow the Ezra Pound imperative to “make it new.”
Noting that he was “aware of the whole Barbra Streisand thing,” Gutenmacher also felt like verklempt was often used performatively, “like you’re signaling that you are Jewish or like talking about Jewishness in some way.” He says he didn’t necessarily want to change the meaning of the word but viewed it as an interesting canvas and even finds emotional resonance in it as a sound. “Verklempt evokes a silly/serious mood, like somehow it’s both. And that’s what our magazine is— serious, reflective and contemplative and also joyful and comedic.”
So, whether you’re getting verklempt or not, it’s fair to say the word—borrowed from Yiddish and launched into the cultural stratosphere by a Canadian comedian and his Jewish mother-inlaw—keeps evolving. What else is there to say, except: That’s all the time we have for “Jewish Word,” where we talk about words, culture, etymologies and emotions. No big whoop.
Last fall, after the Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza, a BY JENNIFER
BARDI
BY DIANE M. BOLZ
Alot is going on in France this summer. Normandy marked the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion in June. Paris is hosting the summer Olympics and is also celebrating the 150th anniversary of the exhibition that gave birth to Impressionism. In honor of that artistic milestone, the Musée d’Orsay mounted an ambitious exhibition, “Paris 1874—Inventing impressionism,” which was on display through July 14. But fear not, you’ll soon have an opportunity to see the exhibition on this side of the pond.
The show was organized along with Washington, DC’s National Gallery of Art and will be on view there from September 8, 2024, to January 19, 2025. Titled “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment,” the exhibit will showcase some 130 paintings and will juxtapose works that appeared in that first Impressionist exhibit in 1874 with paintings displayed at the official Salon—the influential annual art exhibition of Paris’s Acadèmie des Beaux-Arts—that same year. The show also explores the featured artists’ responses to a city rebounding from the trauma of the Franco-Prussian war and political and social turmoil.
The first Impressionist exhibition opened in Paris on April 15, 1874, at 35 boulevard des Capucines, the studio of photographer Felix Nadar. The show, which marked a pivotal moment in the development of modernist painting, featured the work of a group of 30 artists, among them Claude Monet, PierreAuguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro. The exhibition
was organized by the Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs, a cooperative founded for the express purpose of pursuing artistic expression unimpeded by the official art establishment. The show was historic in that, unlike the Salon—with its Academyapproved mythological, religious and historical paintings—there was no jury. Participants alone decided which of their works they wanted to display. What united these artists, in addition to their dissatisfaction with the constraints of the Salon, was a desire to record the contemporary world around them by capturing the elusive effects of light and color. Shunning traditional composition and modeling techniques, they focused
instead on texture, tone and color.
The reaction to the exhibition was, to say the least, mixed. More than 50 articles, some expressing outrage, others praise, were penned about the event. Louis Leroy, one of the exhibition’s harsher critics, coined the term “impressionists” in response to Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise, which was featured in the show. The name, originally intended as derisive, stuck.
The oldest member of the group was Danish-French artist Camille Pissarro. By all accounts wise and kind-hearted, he was like a father to many of the artists. In the early 1870s he had discussed the idea of creating an alternative to the Salon with his friends Monet and Renoir, and helped in 1873 to found the Société Anonyme. Referred to as the “father of Impressionism” by many of his colleagues, he played a key role in encouraging and holding the group together. Art historian and Impressionist scholar John Rewald called him the “dean of the Impressionist painters” and Renoir referred to his work as “revolutionary.” As for Pissarro himself, author Anka Muhlstein quotes one of his letters in her 2023 biography, Camille Pissarro, the Audacity of Impressionism: “I have a rustic, melancholy temperament,” he wrote. “I look coarse and wild...too serious to appeal to the masses and too distant from exotic tradition to be understood by dilettantes. I am too surprising, I break away too often from accepted behavior.”
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was born in 1830 on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, then under Danish rule, now part of the U.S. Virgin Islands. His mother, Rachel Pomié
Manzana, was a Sephardic Jew born in St. Thomas. His father, Frédérick Abraham Gabriel Pissarro, was a French citizen of Portuguese Jewish heritage. Descendants of Jews who had fled Spain during the Inquisition had first arrived on St. Thomas from Denmark in the mid-17th century. Over the following centuries, a Jewish community thrived in the capital city of Charlotte Amalie. A congregation was founded there in 1796 and a synagogue was built in 1803, then rebuilt in 1833. Now a U.S. National Historic landmark, it is the second oldest synagogue in the Western hemisphere. Frederick Pissarro had come to St. Thomas to settle the estate of his recently deceased uncle. He soon fell in love with his uncle’s widow, who was not only his aunt but also still nursing her
youngest child. Marriage, according to Jewish law, was thus forbidden. The local synagogue would not marry them, and when they arranged a Jewish ceremony on their own, it would not recognize the marriage. It took eight years and the intervention of the Danish king for the synagogue to relent. The couple had four sons; Camille was the third. When Camille was 12, his father sent him to boarding school in France. He studied at the Savary Academy near Paris, where he acquired a strong foundation in drawing and painting. Upon returning to St. Thomas at age 17, he went to work in the family hardware business, but he always made time to draw. At 21, he was inspired by Fritz Melbye, a Danish artist living in St. Thomas, to turn to painting as a profession.
In 1855, Pissarro moved back to Paris, where he worked as an assistant to painter Anton Melbye, Fritz Melbye’s brother, and studied paintings by other artists whose style he admired— Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet and French landscape and portrait artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He also took classes at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Suisse, but ultimately sought instruction from Corot, with whom he shared a love of painting everyday rural scenes. It was Corot who inspired Pissarro to paint out of doors, en plein air. Striving for an authentic representation of light and atmosphere and intent on preserving his first impression of a scene, Pissarro liked to complete his paintings out of doors, often in one sitting. He preferred
to work on all the elements of a scene simultaneously and to keep reworking the painting until he felt it was right.
According to Muhlstein, Pissarro “felt that painting should be neither literary or historical, nor political or social, but only the expression of a feeling.” He displayed five of his works in the 1874 show—all of them loosely brushed landscapes that captured the specific light and impression of the moment.
Pissarro’s parents relocated to Paris around 1860, and it was then that he met and fell in love with his mother’s kitchen maid, Julie Vellay. When Pissarro told his parents they intended to marry, both Rachel and Frédérick objected—not only was Julie from a working-class background, she was a Catholic. Pissarro’s mother, in fact, never entirely accepted the union or Julie. Nonetheless, the couple moved in together and Julie soon gave birth to the first of their eight children (only six survived to adulthood—all became artists). Despite the lack of approval and numerous difficulties—financial worries, antisemitism, family deaths and the destruction of many of Pissarro’s paintings by soldiers occupying his home during the Franco-Prussian war—their marriage endured.
According to Anka Muhlstein’s 2023 biography, the question of religion appears frequently in the numerous letters Pissarro left. “During a period of despondency,” writes Muhlstein, “this resolute atheist admits that his origins have left their mark on him: ‘To date,’ he wrote, ‘no Jew in this country has produced art, or rather heartfelt, disinterested art, I think that this could be one of the reasons I’m having no luck.’” He also confessed in letters to sometimes feeling like an outsider in France. “Being not only Jewish but also foreign,” Muhlstein writes, “necessitated a degree of caution that did not come naturally to him.”
Although Pissarro was backed throughout his career by the Parisian art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, he was constantly struggling to achieve financial and critical success. It was only after
his death that his work started selling for substantial prices. His dedication to painting directly from nature and depicting the specific effects of light and weather on his subjects made him a central figure and driving force in the Impressionist movement. He was, in fact, the only one of the 30 original artists to participate in all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions. His work had
a profound influence on many artists, from Monet and Sisley to Cézanne, who billed himself as “a pupil” of Pissarro and lauded him as the “first Impressionist.” Mulstein relates that Matisse once asked Pissarro what an Impressionist was. “An Impressionist is the artist who paints a different picture every time,” Pissarro replied, “a painter who never produces the same picture twice.”
Thirty years after the Rebbe’s death, is Chabad the most influential Jewish denomination today?
By Sarah Breger & Sue Fishkoff
hen the seventh and final rebbe of the Chabad movement, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, died at age 92 in 1994 without an heir, many prognosticators declared the movement would collapse or at least fade from view. By the time of Schneerson’s death, many in Chabad had come to believe he was the Messiah, an idea that has continued to linger after his death and has, at times, threatened to tear apart the movement.
But 30 years later, Chabad is thriving. When the Rebbe died there were around 1,200 shluchim, Chabad emissary couples doing kiruv (outreach) work around the world. In 2000 there were around 3,500 shluchim; now that number is about 5,000, according to chabad.org, with 2,000 posted in the United States. Every week, an average of two new Chabad couples go on what’s known as shlichus, adding to their number in a steady rhythm.
In many countries around the world Chabad has cemented itself as the only Jewish game in town. Even more interesting is its success in the United States, where Jews have a robust set of options to choose from. Two out of five American Jewish adults have engaged with Chabad in some way, according to the Pew Research Center’s study “Jewish Americans in 2020.”
While the depth of engagement varies, Chabad has created an expansive infrastructure that includes its own preschools, youth movements and Birthright trips to Israel. Its adult education operation, the Jewish Learning Institute, offers courses at more than 600 locations around the world. It has an educational website, chabad.org, that draws some 50 million unique visitors yearly. “There’s no question Chabad has moved from the periphery to being a central player and even an alternative to denominational Judaism,” says Adam Ferziger, professor of Jewish history and contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University and author of Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism.
One could even argue that Chabad has become a powerful mainstream de-
nomination—albeit one where the majority of the congregants do not share, or even aspire to share, the beliefs and practices of the clergy.
Hasidism has been a disruptor in the Jewish world since it was founded by Rabbi Yisroel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov, in the second half of the 18th century in what is now Poland, Ukraine and Belarus. Appealing to the masses of largely unlettered Jews in that region, it taught that God could be approached through love and prayer, not just book learning.
When the Baal Shem Tov’s successor, Rabbi Dov Ber, died in 1772, his closest followers branched off and created their own movements, each headed by a rebbe who maintained a mystical connection to his followers, the Hasidim. One of those was Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founding rebbe of Chabad, which was also called Lubavitch after the Russian town where it developed. (Chabad is an acronym for chochmah, binah, da’at, or wisdom, understanding and knowledge, the first three sefirot, or emanations, of the kabbalistic tree of life.)
A century and a half later, the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1880-1950), moved Lubavitch headquarters to Brooklyn in 1940, enabling it to become one of the few Hasidic courts to survive the Holocaust. From the start, Hasidim had sought to spread their form of Judaism among fellow Jews in Eastern Europe. In the United States, however, many Hasidic sects turned inward; Lubavitch was alone in continuing the practice of outreach and expanding it to focus on nonobservant Jews. Yosef Yitzchak, who had established an underground network of Jewish schools in Russia during Stalinist times, founded Jewish schools and educational programs in the United States.
When Yosef Yitzhak died, his son-inlaw Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson became the seventh rebbe, and he made outreach to affiliated and unaffil-
iated Jews his top priority. “Post-Holocaust, many Jews—understandably— felt they would be better off keeping a low profile, but the Rebbe, through his mitzvah campaigns, put Judaism out on public display,” says Baila Olidort, editor-in-chief of Lubavitch International Magazine. An example of this was Chabad’s campaign of public menorah lightings during Hanukkah, launched in 1974. Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, believes this campaign was a key part of the movement’s success. “It literally brought them into the public square,” he says, noting that Chabad fought—and won—key Supreme Court cases in the 1980s for the right to locate their menorahs on public land.
Interestingly, many of the early cases opposing public menorahs were brought by Jews unhappy with Chabad’s “in your face” brand of Judaism. Today, Jews of all stripes turn out for their public lightings. “Chabad took over Hanukkah,” says Sarna. “They transformed what had previously been more private, and people got to know them.”
Chabad took the same style of outreach worldwide. Schneerson sent his first shaliach (emissary) couple from Brooklyn to Morocco in 1950, a year before he was officially named the new rebbe. It was the beginning of the international Jewish outreach campaign for which Chabad is now known.
In the early decades, shluchim grew up in tight-knit Lubavitch communities, notably in Brooklyn, Montreal and Israel. As young married couples, they would leave their home communities and set up shop outside the Hasidic world in farflung locations across the globe, opening their homes for worship and classes (until they could afford to buy a building). They raised their children in these communities and devoted their lives to Chabad outreach efforts.
The movement flourished under Schneerson, a charismatic figure whose personal magnetism and teachings drew notable figures such as Elie Wiesel, Bob Dylan and Herman Wouk into Chabad’s orbit. When he died in 1994, it caused a
Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi Founder of Chabad 1745-1812
Rabbi Dovber Schneuri (son of Shneur Zalman) 1773-1827
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (grandson of Shneur Zalman; son-in-law of Rabbi Dovber) 1789-1866
Rabbi Shmuel Schneersohn (son of Menachem Mendel) 1834-1882
Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneersohn (son of Shmuel) 1860-1920
Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneershon (son of Rabbi Sholom Dovber) 1880-1950
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (direct paternal line from Menachem Mendel; sonin-law of Yosef Yitzchak) 1902-1994
cataclysm in the movement. By that time, many, if not most, Lubavitchers believed he was leading the world to the promised Messianic Age; some believed he himself was the Messiah. In the years following his death, the internal struggle intensified between those who became known as the Messianists (who were sure he was the Messiah) and the non-Messianists (including those who weren’t sure or weren’t public about it). The official position of the Chabad leadership has always been non-Messianist, and those in charge at Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, the umbrella organization for the shluchim network as well as Chabad’s educational departments, have been successful in restraining Messianism among the shluchim. Messianist factions do still exist, as seen by the ongoing proliferation of posters declaring that the Rebbe is the Messiah plastered around New York City and Israel. More recently an even more extreme faction came to public attention when they were discovered illegally digging under 770 Eastern Parkway in
Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the movement’s global headquarters. The Messianic Chabad group from Israel were attempting to expand the crowded synagogue sanctuary in accordance with their understanding of the Rebbe’s wishes.
American Jews don’t necessarily view Chabad as a Hasidic sect, but as an outreach movement. Yet, there are an estimated 90,000 to 95,000 followers of the Rebbe who mostly live in strictly Lubavitch communities in places such as Crown Heights, NY, Pittsburgh, PA, and Detroit, MI. They are not engaged in outreach and instead work in business, high-tech, retail and other professions.
As Chabad has grown, the boundaries between the shluchim and Lubavitch communities have become more porous, according to Yossi Deren, the rabbi at the Chabad of Greenwich, CT. Like American Jews in general, who for decades have been leaving the urban Northeast, young Lubavitchers are abandoning the crowded conditions of Crown Heights and other large communities for places such as Atlanta and Cleveland. They tend to settle first near the existing Chabad centers, creating new Lubavitch communities in what were strictly outreach areas.
Lubavitchers are also moving to rural areas. For example, the town of Kingston, PA (population 13,349), has two or three Chabad shuls—not outreach
centers—solely for the newly arrived Lubavitchers. “You don’t see the silos you saw 25, 30 years ago,” Deren says. “It’s no longer, ‘I’ve grown up on shlichus,’ or ‘I’ve grown up in a Lubavitch community.’ It’s all mixed up.”
These days many American Jews first encounter Chabad in college. There are currently around 200 Chabad houses on U.S. campuses, and while each one is different, they usually offer Shabbat dinners and Jewish learning programs, attempting to be a social hub for students in search of a community. While not all Jewish students choose to go to a Chabad house, most are at least familiar with it.
This wasn’t always the case. When Rabbi Aaron and Rivkah Slonim arrived at SUNY Binghamton 40 years ago to set up a Chabad house, they were not welcomed. There were fewer than ten Chabad houses on American campuses at the time, and most Jews were not familiar with this Hasidic movement that had appeared in their midst. “People looked at us as if we were there to brainwash their kids, like we were parasites that had come to prey on the institutions that were already here,” says Rivkah Slonim.
Three students showed up for the Slonims’ first Friday night dinner in 1984. By the end of that year, the number had grown to 45. Today, it’s about 450. Hundreds more attend a wide range of programming, classes and social activities, online and in person—Aaron Slonim estimates that half of the university’s 4,000 Jewish students come through their doors every year.
Most of these students are not observant. “If you go to a Chabad house you see plenty of people the Chabad rabbi would not allow to marry their children,” says Jonathan Sarna. “But they’re all welcome.” For the Rebbe, getting Jews, any Jews, to do more mitzvot was a way to hasten the arrival of the Messiah. “Part of the Messianic ideology is that when there are more mitzvot than averot [sins], then the Messiah will come,” says Queens
College sociologist Samuel Heilman, who has written extensively on Chabad.
The Slonims’ mission is not, as Rivkah Slonim puts it, “to put black hats on people…We’re not here trying to make Hasidim. We never were,” she says. “Our mission is to connect Jews to Hashem and each other. A few may become Hasidim. But a larger number connect with the Rebbe’s teachings, the Rebbe’s ideas.”
Numerous studies have shown that most of those attending Chabad events and sending their kids to Chabad schools are not Orthodox. That is true even
While the number of Reform, Conservative and non-Chabad Orthodox synagogues has declined over the past 20 years, the number of Chabad synagogues has tripled.
among the most active Chabad participants. (Of the 16 percent of American Jews who told Pew they “often” or “sometimes” take part in Chabad activities, 76 percent do not identify as Orthodox.)
“Ninety percent of our clientele are not observant, that hasn’t changed,” says Maryashie Deren, who runs the Chabad of Greenwich with her husband Yossi. “But the difference is, when we meet someone, they are familiar with Chabad. And they really want it for their families.” Indeed, Chabad preschools are booming. “These parents feel comfortable walking into a Chabad house,” says Holly Cohen.
“After their time on campus, it feels organic.” Cohen is the founding director of Tamim Academy schools, a group of Chabad-affiliated day schools founded in 2020. Although not officially under the umbrella of Chabad’s educational arm Merkos, Tamim Academy schools work only with Chabad centers, says Cohen, who explains she was inspired by a video of the Rebbe urging Jews to send their children to Jewish schools. Today there are 12 Tamim Academy schools around the country, with another four planned for this fall. Each of them operates in a Chabad center that already has a preschool, providing a ready-made audience and infrastructure.
These schools are part of a cradle-to-marriage pipeline Chabad has been actively building: an educational effort that begins with preschool, then day school along with youth clubs, then Chabad on campus and Birthright. The alumni of these programs grow up and have their own kids, and want them to have the same positive experiences they had.
Chabad centers and schools require money, and Chabad is famous for its fundraising prowess. New Chabad centers do not receive funding from headquarters. In the early days, new centers would receive funding for only one year. While there is a fund available to shluchim who work with specific populations, notably children and teens, the typical Chabad center raises the bulk of its funding from local supporters. Donors are cultivated through intimate events, dinners, even weekly challah deliveries.
Shluchim just starting out can also appeal to a number of wealthy supporters around the world. Some are Lubavitchers themselves, living in Lubavitch communities, who have made money and use it to support the shluchim. “There are probably such people in all established Lubavitch communities—many, many more than 30 years ago,” says Schneur Zalman Newfield, a professor of sociology and Jewish studies at Hunter College who grew up Chabad in Crown Heights. There are also mega-donors from outside the Chabad world. One of the
largest is philanthropist George Rohr, who, in addition to the massive funding he gives to shluchim around the world, offers a three-year grant for shluchim setting up new Chabad centers.
The COVID pandemic was a big growth period for Chabad. Chabad’s digital presence, already strong, stood it in good stead as the country took to Zoom instead of in-person programs. Chabad.org logged 54 million unique visitors in 2020, according to its own records. When the country shut down in March 2020, synagogues, JCCs and other Jewish institutions were hit hard, forced to lay off staff and curtail programs. However, many Chabads across
the country reacted by launching capital campaigns, attempting to raise $100 million for the purchase of buildings in the first 19 months of the pandemic. Not all came to fruition, but the impulse to grow bigger was in line with what the Rebbe taught: Do more. Always do more.
tween 2001 and 2020, the number of Chabad synagogues grew from 346 to 1,036, says demographer Ira Sheskin, a University of Miami geography professor who has headed more than 50 major studies of Jewish communities.
Sheskin charted Chabad’s explosive growth in “United States Jewish Population, 2022,” a report coauthored with Jewish Studies Professor Arnold Dashefsky from the University of Connecticut. He has also done his own analysis of the Pew data, reporting that during those same years, the number of non-Chabad Orthodox synagogues decreased from 1,156 to 775, a decline of 33 percent; Conservative synagogues have gone from 865 to 558, a decline of 35 percent; Reform synagogues dropped from 976 to 816. (For comparison with smaller denominations, there are around 100 Reconstructionist synagogues and 43 Renewal synagogues in the United States.)
Chabad’s biggest expansion has been in the South, particularly Florida, and on the West Coast. An astonishing 43 percent of synagogues in California, Oregon and Washington State are now Chabad. Observers say this growth stems from a number of factors but note that its decentralized structure, in which Chabad shuls and outposts multiply as families expand, is a key contributor.
The growth, in fact, has been phenomenal. While the number of Reform, Conservative and non-Chabad Orthodox synagogues has declined over the past 20 years, the number of Chabad synagogues in this country has tripled. In fact, be-
Chabad outreach is often a family affair. Rabbi Yossi and Maryashie Deren from Greenwich, CT, both grew up on shlichus and come from a long line of shluchim. Yossi’s parents, Yisrael and Vivi Deren, direct nearby Chabad of Fairfield County, which covers most of the state. Yossi’s grandparents were shluchim in Nashville, TN, and his great-grandparents were shluchim in Pittsburgh, sent there by the sixth Rebbe in the 1940s. With their own children now entering the same field, the Derens boast five generations of shluchim. They illustrate another growing trend in Chabad over the past 30 years: More and more children of shluchim become shluchim themselves.
Many join their parents in the same communities where they grew up, filling positions created by new programs and expanding operations. Yossi and
Maryashie’s son Levi started out two years ago as their director of social action and now runs two Chabad operations nearby. At the beginning of this year, their daughter Chaya moved with her husband Baruch to Old Greenwich, where they are set to open a new Chabad center.
New centers must always be approved by their “head of state,” generally the first Chabad rabbi in any given region, as well as Merkos in Brooklyn. As time has passed, these heads of state have grown old; some have died. They have been replaced by committees of Chabad rabbis rather than by individuals, continuing the movement’s march away from personal control to more self-sustaining bureaucratic structures. Sociologist Newfield calls it “Chabad, Inc.” Rabbi David Eliezrie, a shaliach in Orange County, CA, who sits on several of the movement’s national boards, calls it evolution. He explains that committees now run Chabad operations in Chicago, for example, and a similar structure is being set up for the state of Florida. There are also unsanctioned shaliach outposts, referred to in Chabad slang as “mushrooms,” but they are more likely to be found in India than in North America.
Shluchim today receive much more practical help from headquarters than they did 30 years ago. Rivkah Slonim notes there are now professional development courses where shluchim are taught how to fundraise, keep books and manage staff. Nothing like that existed when she and her husband started out— they had to learn on the job.
Chabad’s relationships with Reform and Conservative clergy have also improved over the years. “In most places it’s a fairly positive relationship,” says Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, the umbrella group for Reform synagogues in North America. Jacobs recalls that when he was a pulpit rabbi, more than 15 years ago, his local Chabad rabbi asked to bring a Jewish holiday program to his synagogue. “I said, sure, if I can teach in your Chabad center,” Jacobs recalls. His offer was refused.
Today, as more Jews become active
with Chabad while also maintaining their membership in other synagogues, rabbis on both sides are better at finding ways to work together. Jacobs tells of a woman whose mother died and had requested her funeral be led by both her Chabad rabbi and her Reform rabbi. As a compromise the Reform rabbi led the service, and the Chabad rabbi said a few words. “He didn’t take over in that ‘Haredi’ way,” Jacobs says, meaning that
the Chabad rabbi did not steamroll over the female non-Orthodox rabbi. Individual Chabad rabbis have also found workarounds to participate in weddings where one or both individuals tying the knot do not meet the Orthodox standard of being considered halachically Jewish.
Jacobs notes that he still gets calls from colleagues who report tensions, mostly stemming from what they perceive as a lack of respect. In smaller communi-
ties there are sometimes disagreements over shluchim actively recruiting Reform congregants or Chabad presenting itself to the media as the “real Jews” in the community. In addition, “they offer a gateway to Judaism that’s cheaper,” says Heilman, including free services. “They often will undermine the community and community institutions.”
When the Rebbe was actively supervising the creation of new Chabad centers, he was adamant about not situating them close to other Orthodox synagogues, to avoid competition. (It was fine to locate them close to Reform and Conservative synagogues, the thinking being that most of those members were not observant.) Today, because there are so many new Chabad centers being set up all the time, not only are they close to Orthodox shuls, in urban areas they can be within walking distance of each other.
And as Chabad has grown and become more visible, it has taken on more issues of national Jewish concern, such as security and school vouchers. Its increased political power and success in reaching out to American political leaders has also enhanced its position in the organized Jewish world. “Jewish organizations, including the Federation and other major Jewish organizations, have taken notice of the fact that they are a powerful bloc,” says Newfield. “They are meeting with governors and senators, U.S. presidents and other global politicians. The Jewish organizations
are very keen on being connected to rabbis who have that kind of access, and so they’ve invited them to their organizations and actively embrace them, notwithstanding whatever distinct theological beliefs they maintain.”
“Chabad used to be in open war with the Federation,” says Sarna. “Now there’s a sense that ‘We’ll get a lot farther if we play nice.’” Eliezrie, the shaliach in Orange County, for example, sits on his local Federation board in greater Southern California, as well as on the Governors Board of the Jewish Agency for Israel. “That absolutely would not have happened 30 years ago,” Eliezrie says. Chabad’s connections to the politically powerful are not accidental. Although there is no official playbook for new shluchim, it was always understood that when a new couple arrives in town, they should reach out to the local media and elected officials to build good relationships. Shluchim call reporters in advance of Jewish holidays to offer interviews. They invite the mayor to (symbolically) light the public Hanukkah menorah.
This has also occurred on the national level, with Chabad’s Washington rabbi and executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch Levi Shemtov and his wife Nechama regularly hosting dignitaries from around the world as well as influential DC policymakers. Chabad is a regular presence at White House Jewish events, hosts the national menorah lighting and kashers the White House kitchen when needed.
can Jewish University and the author of numerous books on making synagogues more welcoming. “They say, ‘We come and ask you to support this because it is of value.’” “Dues optional” is now a growing trend among non-Chabad synagogues. Orthodox Jews, including groups such as Aish HaTorah, have also mimicked Chabad when it comes to outreach and inspiring nonreligious Jews to become more observant. “Many parts of Jewish life are being ‘Chabadized,’” says Sarna. “People copy success.”
own customs and interpretations of certain Jewish laws. Plus, positions Chabad takes do not necessarily line up easily on a spectrum of progressive to stringent observance. “Within Orthodoxy, they’re much more flexible than other Hasidic movements. And in many ways, even more than Yeshiva University,” says Bar Ilan’s Ferziger, referring to the flagship Modern Orthodox school and seminary in New York City. “You can call them the more open-minded Haredim.”
Given the movement’s untrammeled success, many denominations now draw from Chabad’s playbook. Chabad pioneered the concept of not charging dues for worship services, even at the High Holidays, instead appealing to wealthy local donors to support the operation on behalf of the entire community. “If you ask them, who are your members, they say we don’t have members,” says Ron Wolfson, education professor at Ameri-
Much of Chabad’s popularity is due to its willingness to be loudly and publicly Jewish, says Wolfson. This unabashed embrace “resonates because of what’s going on today—do we run or do we stay and be proud in the face of antisemitism and anti-Zionism?” he says. “They were the first to do this work.”
But where does Chabad fall on the topological map of American Jewish religion? It’s complicated. Chabad is often listed as a category distinct from Orthodox Judaism in community surveys and studies. It has a distinct theology, its
The role of women is a good example. As in other Orthodox groups, women don’t count in a minyan or lead prayer services, but they do take on strong leadership roles in building community. “The model established by the Rebbe was that men and women—as married couples—would serve as Chabad shluchim. He felt that women were indispensable to the project and he expected them to be full partners with the men in executing his vision,” says Lubavitch International’s Olidort. Ferziger adds that for Chabad, “it’s about who’s going to be the best and the most effective.”
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By Nadine Epstein
The moment felt decades away from the happy clamor of the 75th anniversary, which had, in hindsight, been a delusion. In the corridor on the way to passport control, I peeked down through the glass into the vast hall of Terminal 3 and, seeing the usual hubbub, felt reassured. Throughout my six-day stay, during which I zigzagged around Israel in a rental car, that sense of physical normalcy persisted: No missiles flew anywhere near me, and I never glimpsed an Iron Dome interception, although while near the Erez Crossing into Gaza, I heard what may have been an explosion. Elsewhere, the bougainvillea bloomed brightly as Israelis went about their lives, including uniformed soldiers who were most at risk of losing them. Protests continued to draw many and snarl traffic: At a Jerusalem junction a group of ultra-Orthodox waved placards calling for the end of the internet, which they fear will allow outside thinking to corrupt their way of life, and in big-city plazas and on highway overpasses throughout the country, angry, mostly secular demonstrators rallied for the return of the hostages and against the policies of the Israeli government.
One usually reliable homegrown technology, however, wasn’t working. As if reflecting the loss of a metaphysical North Star, neither Waze nor Google Maps was functioning well. In many parts of the country, GPS identified our location as Beirut and mapped the trip from there, a recurring reminder that Hezbollah fighters were not far away, and the Israeli military was scrambling GPS to make it harder for their guided missiles to find their targets. This left Moment Israel Editor Eetta Prince-Gibson and me without navigation as we drove from Jerusalem to
the West Bank settlement of Ofra, from the Arab-Jewish cities of Akko and Haifa on the coast to Beer Sheva and Sde Boker in the Negev, from the Nova Music Festival site (now a moving memorial to those massacred there, as is the heap of burned-out and bullet-riddled cars a few miles away) to Tel Aviv/Yafo, Zichron Yaakov and Kfar Saba.
I had come to ask Israelis of all kinds to articulate their vision of Israel’s future, because, from afar, it was difficult to imagine what they were thinking in a time of tragedy and existential threat. By the end of the trip, I had talked with nearly 70 people, and themes gradually
As if reflecting the loss of a metaphysical North Star, neither Israel’s Waze nor Google Maps was functioning well.
began to emerge. The first and most obvious was bottomless despair. A very high-ranking retired government leader whom I visited lamented privately that everything they had worked for was lost. A successful professional who had made aliyah decades ago questioned whether they would have done so now. A parent who had spent their life building peace was struggling in the face of sending their children to war. A settler was losing hope for a normal life. A former diplomat had seen Israel through many ups and downs but never a “down” like this one. Yahya Sinwar’s brilliant plan had struck right into the souls of all of these Jewish Israelis and exploited their vul-
nerabilities, regardless of background, age, political or religious leanings.
Mostly I sensed fear, and a kind of vertigo. People were dizzy from not knowing what might come next or even what should. Many people I spoke with believed the war was justified, but no one knew how it might end or what a plan for Gaza might look like. “The sheer level of open-endedness makes me the most nervous,” a usually composed and cerebral historian admitted. No one I spoke with, not even longtime supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu, had confidence that the Israeli government and military knew what they were doing. “Every morning, I wake up and pray that there is a plan,” a young reservist told me.
One night, at an event held under the stars at a winery in the Negev, I sat next to Rinat Galily, a survivor of Kibbutz Nirim. Her quiet pain reverberated as she recounted her experience to me. Rinat and her husband had survived only because their neighbors, who were killed, owned a golf cart. The cart had distracted the terrorists, who had taken off in it and, as a result, missed their house. Galily is a marriage and family therapist, and after October 7, she helped other Kibbutz Nirim survivors find therapists, then sought help herself. “Some of my clients and some of the therapists I was mentoring were slaughtered with their families,” she told me. In the beforetimes, she had led workshops in Gaza, and in 2022 she had traveled to the Polish border to train Ukrainian psychologists to work with internally displaced Ukrainians traumatized by Russian brutality. She was stunned that she, her family and kibbutz-mates were now displaced and wrestling with similar trauma. Galily is troubled that government funds for therapy are drying up, because she has no idea when, or if, the pain will recede.
When I asked people to look forward, they often slipped into rewind mode to recount what and who was to blame. The blame list is long and varied. Hamas. Iran. The current Israeli government.
Bibi. Jews who have betrayed the Jewish vision. The United States. Biden. Internal divisions. Fragmented society. The ultra-Orthodox not serving in the army and not contributing to the economy. The settlements. The settlers. The Palestinian Authority. Mediocre political elites. Colonialism. The Ashkenazi-Mizrahi divide. Not enough Judaism. Too much Judaism. Segregated schools (ultra-Orthodox, Arab, secular, religious) that prevent integration. Too much capitalism. Not enough capitalism. A weak state. An all-too-powerful state. Social media and the awful discourse emboldened by it. Jihadists. Arrogance. Naivete. Evil.
Yet in almost the next breath, everyone recognized the overarching need for internal unity. Many confided that the silver lining of October 7 was that it had brought Israelis together. Again and again, I heard that with the government paralyzed after the attack, Israelis of all backgrounds had stepped up to root out the terrorists and to aid the survivors. At least three secular Israelis told me this had led them to make a conscious decision to be less judgmental of the nation’s religious Jews. The majority of people I spoke with told me that coming together as a nation is Israel’s first, and most daunting, task.
Although I’d love to be wrong, it quickly became clear to me that while people genuinely long for unity, the fences that divide them are so high that only a few people can see over them. When I spoke with Naomi Ragen, a novelist and Moment columnist whose views largely lean right, she told me that the brutality of Hamas had resolved the issues that had been tearing the Jewish people apart: Well-meaning people on the left “now saw the great error of their ways in trying to make peace with jihadists” and had come to share the views of the right, she said. Ragen, who is Modern Orthodox, has only contempt for the concept of “land for peace,” which in her opinion misses the real reasons for the conflict, which are cultural and religious. In contrast, several people I met on the left were equally certain
that all Israelis now clearly understood there was no choice but to embark on a path to establish a separate Palestinian state. Israelis on both the left and right had inched toward the political center, but among the more partisan, there was no missing the different lessons drawn from the same events.
Yehuda Glick, an American-born Orthodox rabbi I spoke with in Jerusalem, is frustrated that the sense of unity was short-lived. “I was hoping that what we went through would cause people to be a little more aware of the diverse society we’re living in, but unfortunately, we see the same arguments that existed before, just with different pawns on the table,” said the rabbi, a former Likud member of the Knesset who leads the push for Jews to pray on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. “People refer to themselves as Messiahs and the other side as Satan, and vice versa. Everybody’s sure that they know exactly what’s right and the only problem is the other side.”
There were subjects almost everyone I spoke with did agree on. Despite calls from the far right for Israel to “go it alone,” including from some members of the current coalition government, most people believe that external intervention is a must. Eyes are on the United States, Europe and the Sunni Arab world. Israelis on both the left and right see the Abraham Accords as a lifeline; they have set the stage for a new Middle East, the one where the economic engine of the “start-up nation” aligns with Sunni nations against Iran, and where people live good lives (fueled by cutting-edge technological advances, including those that make life in dry climes sustainable), generate wealth, and transcend the region’s troubled history. Saudi Arabia is viewed as holding the keys to peace in the region, since it controls a high proportion of the wealth in the Arab world and, as guardian of the two holiest places in Islam, can confer legitimacy.
In fact, many of my interviewees spoke of Saudi Arabia as if it were Israel’s knight in shining armor. Those who don’t believe peace with Palestinians is possible hope the Saudis will help clean
Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and one of the leaders of Standing Together, a movement of both Jewish and Palestinian Israelis, was recently elected to Haifa’s city council. She thinks it’s time to “move toward the place where we build a state for everyone, one that gives liberty and freedom and safety and refuge to both nationalities that are here.” But it’s much more than that, she explains. “We are just so consumed with surviving and fighting for a right to not die that we don’t dare to dream about lives that are prosperous and joyful. We live in one of the most beautiful spots on earth,” she says. “I want to be happy. I want to be safe, economically and personally. And I want everyone around me to prosper in a country that has a state and a government that exists to serve its people and their safety.”
“I want us to have an understanding that both peoples have to prosper in order for all of us to prosper.”
When people say safety, she notes, it’s gotten reduced to national security. “Right now, the vast majority of Jewish Israelis believe we have to control five million people and be wary of 20 percent of our own citizens to be safe,” she says. “I want us to be past that. I see that not just as a Palestinian. I see that as an Israeli citizen. I want us to be past the trauma that was inflicted on October 7, not just, but mainly, on Jewish Israelis, and past the unfathomable suffering of the people on the other side,” she says. “I want us to have an understanding that both peoples have to prosper in order for all of us to prosper.”
Standing Together doesn’t provide models for a two-state solution or a confederation, says Abed. Its job as a grassroots movement is to help Israelis begin to imagine the idea of safety and security and a prosperous future. “Now we have political leadership in Israel that is not
willing to even talk about these things and is actually systematically preventing them from entering the political imagination of Israelis,” she says. “If you look at the West Bank, we have the same problem on the Palestinian side. Palestinian political leadership has systematically destroyed any options: Over the past 20 years alternative leaders have either been incarcerated, exiled or killed.” This stifling of threats to the status quo, she says, may be “the most effective collaboration between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.”
Abed says she and other Standing Together leaders have studied and learned from previous Israeli peace movements and are mobilizing people under the group’s signature purple tent, a color chosen because it isn’t associated with either the Israeli right or left, and is also the international color of the feminist movement. “We bring people together in person again and again and again,” she says. “It’s not just a one-time thing or a series of meetings to bridge the gaps or narratives. That’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to build a new community and create a new culture of solidarity with new terminology.” The group builds local movements by advocating for a livable wage, climate justice and other issues.
The story of Israel is a dual one: “We’re literally the only society that has Palestinians and Israelis who live together,” she says. Abed’s personal story reflects this duality, as well as that of three generations of Israel’s Arabs. She grew up in the western Galilee Arab village of Mi’ilya. Her grandmother was illiterate, her parents educated civil servants. Abed, who is fluent in Arabic, Hebrew and English, was able to attend college in the United States. It wasn’t until she returned to Israel and joined Standing Together that she began to take ownership not only of her own narrative as a woman and as a Palestinian but as a member of
Interviews by Nadine Epstein. To read more interviews from Moment’s Israel Vision Project go to momentmag.com/israelvision-project
Israeli society. “I think that’s one of the most important things we can do as Palestinians, because we don’t feel like we have ownership.” In Abed’s assessment, her generation of Israel’s Palestinians is unique: “I’m not saying this lightly—we are the only ones who can actually imagine a new collective and the only ones who can be the leaders for peace.”
Over the past year, she and Alon-Lee Green, Standing Together’s Jewish Israeli codirector, traveled widely throughout the United States, where she found herself in disagreement with protesters who rejected any vision of Palestinian-Israeli cooperation and anything short of the outright elimination of Israel. She says their black-and-white thinking erases her point of view. “It’s not radical to condemn the status quo,” she says. “The most radical thing you can do is actually try to build an alliance and change the status quo.”
“Obviously,” she adds, “we could argue for why Israel is a settler colonial project, but how would those arguments convince anyone who is not already convinced?” More Palestinians in Israel now use this language of colonialism and, as a result, are isolating themselves further from Israeli society. “There’s a lot of work to do in Palestinian society as well as in Israeli society,” she says.
up the mess in Gaza and ensure Israel’s long-term future without the creation of a Palestinian state. Those who want a cease-fire now, or not too far in the future, hope the Saudis will help stabilize Gaza in the short term, then stand at Israel’s side as the process of Palestinian statehood unfolds. I heard completely different versions of what Saudi Arabia wants, depending on where people stood politically. Some argued a Palestinian state or at least a path toward it was a requirement for the Saudis, while others said the Saudis couldn’t give a fig about a Palestinian state or about the Palestinians themselves. One person told me that Saudi Arabia would lose respect for Israel if it folded to pressure to end the war before Hamas was vanquished. There was much M.B.S. (Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman) mind reading, and a propensity to project political views onto Saudi Arabia’s white sands.
The geopolitical shift brought about by the Abraham Accords is very real. I experienced it firsthand. Since October 7, many airlines have suspended service in and out of Israel, and in April, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that one of the biggest carriers, Turkish Airlines, would stop flying into Ben-Gurion. So there weren’t many flights to choose from when United Airlines canceled my return flight to Washington. I reticketed via Dubai on Dubai Airlines, which is owned by The Emirates Group, which in turn is owned by the Dubai government. I could do this because The Emirates Group has not pulled out of Israel despite the Israel-Hamas war and the international backlash against Israel. The plane was filled to capacity with Israelis, some in religious garb, who, when we arrived, blended into the multitudes at the Dubai International Airport.
It’s far easier for Israelis to pin their hopes on geopolitical realignment in the Middle East than on their own government. Criticism of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister came from more directions than I had expected. I didn’t penetrate far into the insular ul-
tra-Orthodox world or into cities in Israel’s periphery where many of the 25 to 32 percent of Israelis who still support Bibi are said to reside, but I did talk to a range of people on the right. Naomi Ragen, for one, said Bibi had lost her vote since October 7 had occurred on his watch. Ran Baratz, founding editor of the Hebrew-language conservative news site Mida and a former director of communications for Netanyahu, said he was proud of the prime minister’s many accomplishments but questioned whether he had the Churchillian qualities required to lead the nation through a war. Even the Israelis I spoke with who lived in West Bank settlements thought
Many of my interviewees
spoke of Saudi Arabia as if it were Israel’s knight in shining armor.
Netanyahu’s brand of politics had become too toxic. One settler said she would still support Netanyahu, at least for now—not because she trusts him (she doesn’t) but because for the time being she thinks his personal goals are aligned with those of the country, and that makes her feel safe.
Not that it matters. Except for wishful thinkers on the left, no one really thinks there will be an election until after the war, whenever that is. The ultra-Orthodox parties (which represent 13 percent of the population and have the highest voter turnout) have no other real allies and are unlikely to abandon Netanyahu, who remains their best
hope of keeping their young men out of the army. And when the time comes, no one thinks Netanyahu will go quietly; realists expect many grueling election cycles before any new leaders emerge. Wherever I went, I heard disdain for Israel’s political parties and fear for its political system. I also listened to divergent interpretations of what democracy is and should be. Critics of the government’s recent efforts to curtail the powers of Israel’s Supreme Court believe that the country’s democracy is heading down a slippery slope where minority rights will be curtailed and the party in control of the Knesset will govern unchecked. Supporters of the overhaul blame decades of judicial activism by the Court for undermining Israel’s democracy by wresting power from both the legislative and executive branches.
With politics frozen for the foreseeable future, and ultra-Orthodox and religious Zionist parties holding the reins of power, many of those I interviewed, from left to center right, are putting their faith in an ecosystem of social movements, NGOs and civic initiatives. Organized through social media, listservs, WhatsApp and the like, they may fade away once the political system becomes less stagnant, but for now, they are a national obsession. As the leader of one explained, movements “are the one thing that can provide the public with different options and different political ideas they can choose from.” Best known is the massive anti-judicial reform protest that mobilized the left—and some of the center—before October 7. This movement was made up of groups such as Brothers in Arms (reservists and former military), Black Flags (led by physicist Shikma Bressler and her siblings) and the Kaplan groups, named for the Tel Aviv street where demonstrations in that city are held.
Post-October 7, the anti-judicial reform movement metamorphosed to call for the release of the hostages, and new groups emerged to lead it. The largest is the Hostage and Missing Families Forum, which holds demonstrations every Saturday night outside the Tel Aviv
A kibbutznik, a leader of NGOs promoting equality and a Jewish-Arab shared society, and the author of Sharing the Promised Land: In Pursuit of Equality Between Jewish and Arab Citizens in Israel, Shuli Dichter has a clear vision for Israel’s future. “The major element of life between the river and the sea must be the notion of belonging both by the Palestinians and by the Jews to this homeland on an equal basis,” he says. “We both belong here. It’s the sense of possessiveness that would change in my vision. We would jointly take care of this land and take care of these two peoples. When I say a country from the river to the sea, it’s totally dependent on mutual recognition and equality.” Dichter recognizes that his vision is shared by few others. “The vast majority of Jews in Israel do not wish to see this,” he says, “so those who do must practice it as much as possible in daily life until it becomes the political vision of the rest.” This will require volunteering together to build partnerships everywhere—from shared schools and educational communities to initiatives for healthcare centers. “It’s important to do anything possible to
bring Palestinians and Jews together on an equal basis with shared ownership,” he says. “It is critical to sit together, create language for such partnerships and, most important, to remain partners. This is what I see for the next two decades,” he says. “I believe it will be enough.”
A prolific novelist, Naomi Ragen is Modern Orthodox. In 2002, she and her family were attending a seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya, Israel, when a Hamas terrorist detonated a bomb that killed 30 people and injured 140. She found October 7 and its aftermath to be very clarifying. “A lot of disputes that were tearing the Jewish people apart have now been resolved in the most brutal way possible,” she says. “Because the whole idea of land for peace, the whole idea of being able to live in neighborly friendliness with jihadi groups has been clarified. So all the good people who loved Israel but thought they needed to make peace with the Palestinians are beginning to understand that this is not a dispute about land. It’s cultural, it’s religious and it has very deep roots.”
Ragen believes that Israel has to finish this war and destroy Hamas. “There’s no future for Israel and there’s no future for anybody in this area if you do not defeat Hamas and other radical jihadi groups,” she says. “If you look at the history of Islam, whenever there have been periods when radicals took over, it was terrible for everyone the whole world over. Israel just happens to be on the front lines.”
She is grateful for the Abraham Accords and for the openness toward Israel among Sunni Muslims in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, and for the changes that have occurred within these societies that were unimaginable years ago. “All of a sudden we have more in common with them than with other radical Arab states,” she says. “We’re really on the same side now. We have a common set of interests that we can build on. And those interests
are to protect ourselves from fanatics. We want to raise our children in the atmosphere of peace. We want our economies to flourish, and I think that’s possible.”
Ragen considers Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to be a lost cause because they have been indoctrinated by fanatics. “We have to get rid of Hamas,” she says. “The Palestinian Authority is just as bad. I don’t see any difference between them and Hamas except for the fact they would perhaps not openly say they want jihad. But they do. People don’t talk about it, but Israel has been at war with the West Bank this whole time. This has to change. We need to replace Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, but I don’t know how you can replace them with anybody until you change the educational system. So we have to get rid of the people who are in the educational system who are radical jihadists, and who are poisoning the minds of the next generation.”
Palestinians, she says, need to be taught the truth about the history of the Jewish people in Israel. “They just don’t know that we have 3,000 years of history here.” She feels that the people who support them in the universities in the United States are likewise ignorant. “The children who are walking through New York City high schools threatening Jewish teachers, they don’t know either. There’s
Museum of Art (in what is now popularly referred to as Hostage Square) and coordinates international efforts to free the hostages. Another group meets earlier on Saturday outside Tel Aviv’s Habima Theater to demonstrate on behalf of the hostages, but more broadly against the government. And lest you think only the left and center are out on the streets, the right-leaning Tikvah Forum also organizes protests on behalf of families of hostages that support Netanyahu’s policies.
With left and center parties largely sidelined since 2009, various initiatives have filled the vacuum in that part of the political spectrum. One is Blue White Future, which was founded that year to grow support for a two-state solution, and later threw its weight behind the judicial reform protests. Its cofounder, Orni Petruschka, is a fighter pilot turned engineer who made his fortune as a high-tech entrepreneur in the alternative energy field. In order to preserve Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, he told me, “it’s necessary to have two states, so that Israel is Jewish, with holidays that stem from the roots of the Jewish people that are celebrated, but not with a rabbinate that has control over anyone.” Religion, Petruschka said, “should be a matter of choice.” He envisions a demilitarized Palestinian state in conjunction with Israel being accepted within the region.
I met Sally Abed, a young Palestinian Israeli, at a café in downtown Haifa. She’s one of the leaders of Standing Together, a small movement founded in 2015 of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis who want to change how the country’s citizens talk and think about peace. “Very few people are actually willing or able to imagine that kind of future right now,” she told me. “It’s our job as a grassroots movement to create the political imagination so that more people will see it, to make the idea of safety and security and a prosperous future accessible. Then we can work on the details.” Abed, who was born in the western Galilee Arab village of Mi’ilya, won a seat on the Haifa City Council last year.
The details could start with two states, a confederation or one state, but in the long run, Standing Together’s vision is not for a Jewish state but for Israel’s nationalities living side by side in freedom and safety. “We are just so consumed with surviving and fighting for a right to not die that we don’t dare to dream about lives that are prosperous and joyful,” she said. “We live in one of the most beautiful spots on earth. I want to be happy. I want to be safe economically and socially. I want to be safe personally on the streets. And I want everyone
No one completely ruled out a Palestinian state in the future, but no one thought it was closer than many years, even generations, away.
around me to prosper in a country that has a state and a government that serves us, that exists to serve its people and their safety in the deepest sense. When we say safety, it’s gotten reduced to national security. Right now, the vast majority of Jewish Israelis believe we have to control five million people and be wary of 20 percent of our own citizens to be safe. I want us to be past that. I see that not just as a Palestinian. I see that as an Israeli citizen.”
In Yafo, I talked with Meron Rapoport, one of the founders of A Land for All, a group on the left that advocates for a confederation of two states, one Jewish, one Palestinian. “You can call it a con-
federation, or you can call it a union that allows for the things that are shared to be shared, and the things that should be run separately to be separate,” he said. “It sounds a little bit abstract, but take the example of the European Union, or the resolution of other conflicts since World War II such as the one in Northern Ireland. It’s not all roses, but it works. People don’t forget the past so fast, but sharing power is the best guarantee for peace, stability and eventual reconciliation.”
I visited the West Bank settlement of Ofra. It’s less than 20 miles from Jerusalem via a road that intentionally bypasses Palestinian communities, but they are long miles through barren hills spotted with olive groves and, always, a security apparatus that is both visible and invisible. There I met Netzach Brodt, an international tax lawyer, and his family. He told me about an initiative that inspires him called The Fourth Quarter. Founded by historian Yoav Heller in 2022, its mission is to build a broad alliance of Israelis, focus on forward-thinking solutions rather than victories, and foster a politics of humility. “There’s a feeling that we have reached a critical time in the history of Israel and the situation is fragile,” Brodt said. Twice in the history of the Jewish people, following the reigns of King Solomon and the Hasmonean Queen Shlomtzion, Jewish kingdoms collapsed as they entered the fourth quarter of the first century of their existence, falling into civil wars after having lost touch with their foundational values. Brodt said people from all the “name tags” of Israel—including the ultra-Orthodox and the secular, Jews and Arabs—have joined The Fourth Quarter; they believe that 70 percent of the population agrees on 70 percent of the issues and that these areas of broad agreement should be “laid out as the fundamental infrastructure for the next generation to be successful.” Brodt has been serving in the reserves since October 7 and told me he wished Israeli society could be modeled on the integrated and supportive culture of reserve units.
Not all his neighbors in Ofra, a
been no education. When people are asked on TikTok if they’ve heard of the Holocaust, they ask, ‘Is it a place? Is it in California?’ We assume a lot of things because we’re from a different generation, but it’s shocking how little people know.”
She thinks outlawing TikTok would be a good thing. “It’s an indoctrination tool, which has been used by the worst possible kind of people to indoctrinate other people in terrible things. Maybe we should just get rid of the internet. I don’t think you can do that, but I do think the next step is to defeat Hamas in such a way that they can never come back. How do we do that? Well, that’s a good question. If we had more support from the United States and its president was supportive of our goals, perhaps we would be able to do this in a more final manner. At this point, probably what’s going to happen is that we’re going to get tired of fighting and we’ll give in and say, OK, let’s make some kind of treaty,” says Ragen. “That will be the worst thing that could happen, because it means another war, another year.”
Until October 7, Ragen says, she was a very strong supporter of Netanyahu. “But Bibi lost me,” she says, “because of what happened on his watch. It was his concept that allowing Hamas to take over Gaza would be better than having a Palestinian state. Only the extreme right wing were against that, and they turned out to be right.”
An American-born Israeli Orthodox rabbi, Yehuda Glick leads the campaign for expanding Jewish access to Jerusalem’s volatile Temple Mount, which he envisions as the world center of peace. “It’s where the kingdom of one God is supposed to be announced,” he says. Glick served in the Knesset for the Likud Party from 2016 to 2019.
“When I zoom in on the situation right now I see that Israeli society is very much divided,” he says. “People refer to themselves as Messiahs and the other
side as Satan, and vice versa. Everybody’s sure that they know exactly what’s right and the only problem is the other side. I was hoping that October 7 would cause people to be a little more aware of the diverse society we’re living in. But unfortunately, we see the same arguments that existed before with different pawns on the table. A year ago, it was judicial reform that was dividing us, before that it was corruption. Now it has become the hostages and drafting the religious into the army. There’s always an excuse and it’s always dividing us.”
Until October 7, Glick says, Israel was on a very promising path. “We developed peace with many Arab countries, such as the Emirates and Oman, and there was serious talk about peace with Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.” Now, he says, “all the cards have been spilled on the ground again and we’re at the point where even our friend the United States is hesitating about its friendship with Israel, and our peace treaty with Egypt is at stake.”
“Back 76 years ago, there were two nations here. Neither had a country and the United Nations offered both of them a country. We built a country with a flourishing society, culture, technology, medicine, economy and agriculture—we turned seawater into drinking water, and anything we touched flourished. Un-
fortunately, our next-door neighbors, the Palestinians, have been spending 76 years blaming Israel and spreading propaganda all over the world and investing a lot of money in terror and hate and incitement. I don’t understand why they’re not investing in their society. When we pulled out of Gaza in 2005, we left the houses there. All they had to do was turn on the water. The world gave them $10 billion. They could’ve had a flourishing economy. They told us it was going to become Singapore. I’ve been to Singapore and Gaza doesn’t resemble Singapore. I’m very frustrated, but I will continue my efforts to live in peace with my brothers in Israel—the citizens of Israel, Jews and non-Jews, religious and nonreligious—and I will continue my efforts to live in peace with our neighbors.”
Israel, says Glick, must continue to move forward. “We have to make sure that no one will have the ability to be able to do something like October 7 ever again,” he says. “And we should do everything we can to defeat this cruelty in the world and show people that it’s not just against Israel, it’s against the whole Western liberal society. So the next step is to win the war. Everyone in Israel has an opinion about exactly how to do it. I don’t. I just know that we have to put every effort we can to bring back our hostages and to defeat the enemy, an enemy with octopus arms.”
Glick is hopeful that Israel is up to the challenge. “Our history shows that as a Jewish nation our survival was never easy,” he says. “But eventually, in spite of the very difficult history we went through, we always managed to stand up on our feet.”
Born in Canada and raised in Israel, Netzach Brodt is an international tax lawyer for a large accounting firm and is currently serving in the reserves. He and his family live in the settlement of Ofra, located about 20 miles north of Jerusalem in the West Bank. They moved there, he said,
long-established and relatively close-in settlement, hold such conciliatory views. One analyst told me that the settlements and their councils, which lead the expansion into the West Bank, themselves are social movements. These movements include extremist, violent settler groups such as the Hilltop Youth and follow the increasingly popular ideology of Meir Kahane, who believed that Palestinians are “raping the Holy Land” and must be expelled. The movements on the far right don’t waste any time giving lip service to consensus and democracy; their mission is to hold onto land they believe belongs to the Jewish people and to safeguard Jewish identity as they see it. These views are echoed to varying degrees by more mainstream right-wing advocacy and watchdog NGOs, which have become as numerous as human rights groups on the left.
Throughout my journey, I listened to wildly different thoughts about the Israeli-Palestinian future. I didn’t personally meet anyone who explicitly called for one state only—either for Palestinians or for Jews—though obviously there are such people. And no one completely ruled out a Palestinian state in the future, but conversely, no one thought it was closer than many years, even generations, away, given the radicalization of the West Bank and Gaza.
Ran Baratz, Netanyahu’s former director of communications, shared what has become the official position of the Likud Party: First, a Palestinian state won’t happen until “the Palestinians reach the point that they want to have their own state living side by side in peace with Israel.” Second, a Palestinian state is not relevant to the Israeli-Sunni alliance needed to contain Iran.
There was one last thing pretty much everyone was betting on: Israel’s unique ability to continue to generate growth far beyond its size. This is itself a form of Zionism, explained Isaac Bentwich, whom I met in the hip Tel Aviv quarters of his company Quris, an artificial intelligence innovator that seeks to transform the drug development process. Once “we manage to collectively pass through
these dire straits,” said Bentwich, “the business synergies between us and the surrounding countries will change the world.” I heard talk that academic boycotts and frightened investors could inflict damage, and already were doing so to some extent, but there was optimism that Israel would power through. Dan Blumberg, the head of the Israeli Space Program, predicted that in five years Israel would be generating more technology than ever, including more agile, streamlined and affordable satellites. The challenge, he told me, is an internal one: The ultra-Orthodox need to learn math and English. “Torah learning has never stopped people from working, from going into industry and from going to new places of work,” he said, noting that religious scholars such as Rashi often held jobs.
One morning in the Negev, the desert region that Israel’s founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion hoped would supercharge Israel’s growth, I had breakfast with Daniel Chamovitz, the president of Ben-Gurion University and a plant scientist. We met in a crowded hotel restaurant in Sde Boker, just yards from the modest kibbutz home to which Ben-Gurion and his wife retired in 1970. Given the university’s location in the south, a high proportion of its students were killed or taken hostage on October 7, and Chamovitz shared that he had made 37 shiva calls since then. Overall, he said, the country’s millennials and Gen Z are bearing the brunt of the war with Hamas in terms of numbers captured, injured and killed. “After what happened on October 7, the younger generation, ages 18 to 35, who we thought were superficial and criticized as the TikTok generation, have proven themselves to be the strongest generation ever in the history of Israel,” he told me. “And that’s saying a lot. They’re fighting the hardest war, they’re dealing with greater losses than ever before, and they’ve had to leave jobs where they were making very good money. What brings me hope is that this generation now has to take on the mantle of leadership. My generation,
the generation that came of age after 1973, has failed.”
Not surprisingly, young Israelis I spoke with wholeheartedly agree, whether they are left, right or somewhere in between. Some said that they are finding ways to peek over the walls that separate Israelis and, although they have as many policy disagreements as their elders, are more willing, and even excited, to work together. One 29-yearold who described himself as a secular “center-left Zionist” has been extending his hand to Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews in his age group. “A lot of other young Israelis want peace, but we’re in the minority; most young Israelis are more right-wing and right-leaning and more conservative and religious,” said Nadav Salzberger, a leader of Change Generation. That group has developed a detailed plan for a revamped government, including expanding the Knesset and creating a separate high court to review Israel’s Basic Laws. But its main purpose is to connect young people— using texts, social media and video talks that employ humor and outrage—from across the political and religious spectrum. The goal, said Salzberger, is to make them realize that the current government doesn’t have a realistic vision for Israel and to move them a step to the left. “Some [ultra-Orthodox] came into our tents during the protests,” he told me, “and although we didn’t see eye to eye, there was a lot of exchange going on.” Salzberger is convinced that there are young ultra-Orthodox who are searching for ways to be part of the larger society, or who are at least curious. “They are going through processes that are hidden from our eyes,” he said. As his grandfather, the writer Amos Oz, once told him, “Unlike books, people can change…people can surprise those around them and even themselves.”
Despite the despair, wishful thinking and the occasional delusion, I came away from Israel hopeful. Without Waze (one of the great technologies invented in Israel), I managed to find my way around. I’m betting that Israelis will find their way too. M
because it was an affordable place conveniently located between Jerusalem, where he was working at the time, and Ariel, where his wife attended university.
Brodt is deeply concerned about growing civil strife in Israeli society. “There’s a feeling that we have reached a critical time in the history of Israel and that the situation is fragile,” he says. Twice in the story of the Jewish people, following the reigns of King Solomon and the Hasmonean Queen Shlomtzion, Jewish kingdoms collapsed as they entered the fourth quarter of the first century of their existence, falling into civil wars after having lost touch with their foundational values. Brodt has joined an initiative called The Fourth Quarter, which is working to prevent such a civil war: Its goals are to build a broad alliance of Israelis, focus on forward-thinking solutions rather than victories, and foster a politics of humility.
With greater appreciation for one another, Brodt says, Israelis will know how to overcome the challenges facing them. He’s still inspired by the way people brought supplies and sandwiches from their homes after October 7. “People just came,” he says. “We saw that the differences between different parts of Israel are very small. I’m talking about people. We just need to be able to break through to the politicians. We need to be able
to break through these boundaries that we’re always building around ourselves.” The current government, he says, is benefiting from the fragmentation of Israeli society. “This doesn’t mean that we all have the same political views,” he says. “People can still have their views and beliefs and so on, but the bottom line for all of us is, “What are we? What are we doing together as a society?”
Brodt finds the IDF reserve units to be good examples of brotherhood. “Reserve units are unique because people come together from different backgrounds, from different daily routines and different ideologies,” he says. “Yet they stand up for each other, and that’s something we all need to do.”
Esther Brodt is an architect who lives with her husband, Netzach, and their children in the West Bank settlement of Ofra. She grew up in and around Ofra and attended the girls’ school there. Her sister also lives in Ofra, and her parents are ten minutes away by car in another settlement. “It’s pretty close, but you can’t walk there like you can in the city—
if you want to stay alive,” she says.
Brodt’s message to the Palestinians is: “We don’t want to have to give this back. Give us back the hostages and leave us alone. I don’t need more than what I have. Just give me some quiet.”
“I feel lost,” she says. “I don’t know what the next steps are. I don’t know if changing the government is a good idea or a bad idea. I feel like I cannot trust Bibi, but right now I think he and Israel have the same interests, so I feel safe for the moment.” She doesn’t trust the political left: “It seems that the left or the radical left are not working in the interest of the State of Israel,” which she wants to see retain its Jewish identity. “They would like Israel to be like any other state in the world.”
A marriage and family therapist who survived the October 7 attack on Kibbutz Nirim and is now displaced from her home, Galily previously trained Ukrainian psychologists to work with internal refugees who had experienced Russian brutality. “I used to think that we could make peace with Gaza,” she
says. “I ran workshops with women from Gaza. We educated young kids and I developed a workshop for their parents about how to communicate better with them. I didn’t see it coming. Some of my patients were slaughtered with their kids. One of the therapists I was mentoring was slaughtered with her family. I could never have imagined that something like this would happen.”
“I would like Israel to come back to its original values of humanity, of caring for each other. I’d like a stable and honest government,” she says. “I’d like to have a government that will reach an arrangement with our neighbors in order to have peace so that everyone can live their own lives with their own people. Europe had two major wars in the 20th century, and nowadays, you can simply drive between France and Germany. I used to be more optimistic. I’m not so much now. I hope my dream will come true in my lifetime.”
“We have so much to heal, and it won’t happen in the next few years,” says Galily. “That’s why I think the best thing is to bring an international force into Gaza to govern, because we’re too wounded to do it. It has to be strong enough to make sure that the Gaza Strip will be good for the people who live there, who are also traumatized. It needs to put everything in order and to fight Islamic extremism so Gazans will be able to live in peace and live their lives and not be threatened by Hamas and other extremists. Then maybe we can live together. But there must be a political solution, not only a military solution. It can’t be that we wipe out everyone. It’s not humane to do it. We have to get rid of Hamas because they’re evil, the kind of evil I learned about when I learned about the Holocaust.”
Salzberger was a leader of the judicial reform protests and now helps lead demonstrations to free the October 7 hostages and topple the Netanyahu gov-
ernment. He’s also a leader of Change Generation, a social movement focused on connecting young Israelis from across the political and religious spectrums, with the goal of making them realize that the current government doesn’t have a realistic vision for Israel and moving them a step to the left. “I think many young people really feel over the past year and a half that Israel is at a crossroads,” he said. “We need to decide whether Israel’s going to be a liberal democracy—a Jewish democracy, where we have a strong independent judicial system, where we strive to solve the conflict with the Palestinians, where human rights are safeguarded—or whether Israel is going in a direction of a Jewish state that is not democratic and that is run by the Messianic, the Orthodox and the settlers who want to drag us into endless war and isolation.”
Salzberger describes himself as a center-left Zionist and a social Democrat: “I believe that Israel, in order to survive, has to be a welfare state, a social democracy that strives for equality in terms of human rights but also economic opportunity.” He is inspired by what he calls the “awakening of a liberal camp that was in deep slumber and felt hopeless and defeated over the last decade. The historic protest movement born from the judicial overhaul attempt is something that, in my opinion, will reshape Israel in years to come.”
Israel needs a constitution as soon as possible, Salzberger says. “There are so many big issues that the founding fathers of Israel left for future generations, such as the exemption of ultra-Orthodox Jews from the army. ‘We don’t have to resolve this now,’ they said, ‘it’s for future generations to solve.’ Well, we are a future generation, and things now have to be decided.” He would like to see a constitution that safeguards both human rights and social rights, and believes there should be some sort of reform of the judicial branch—but not for the same reasons as conservatives. “The judicial branch and the Supreme Court are not defending the weakest people,” he says. “They defend the elites. There
aren’t laws that require them to safeguard our social rights in Israel.”
After October 7, one of the first things Change Generation did was to meet with professors, academics and thinktank analysts to produce a plan for Israel. “We call it ‘Israel 2030,’ both because we set 2030 for the plan to be fulfilled and because 2030 is a play on the ages 20 to 30.” The plan has 10 clauses, most of them focused on socioeconomic problems. “The first one states that we need a bill of rights, including the right to education, to healthcare, to housing. I view October 7 not only as a military failure, an intelligence failure and a political failure but also as a socioeconomic failure. The institutions of the state were totally unprepared, and the citizens had to step in and save the day,” he says, adding that this was a result of decades of dwindling budgets for social services.
Salzberger wants to see an overhaul of the election system in Israel and thinks the Knesset should be expanded to more than 120 representatives to bring in younger people and “new blood”—and also should include representatives who are elected in regional or semi-regional elections to improve accountability. “There isn’t even a word in Hebrew for accountability,” he says. “Having no direct way for voters to punish or reward
elected representatives leads to a very corrupt system and concentrates power in the hands of the largest party.”
Israel, he says, needs more checks and balances on power, which could ease tensions between the government and the Supreme Court, as well as a law that limits a prime minister to two terms. He also thinks it could be helpful to spread power by creating a constitutional assembly, outside the purview of the Knesset and the Supreme Court, that has the authority to review the Basic Laws (which currently act as a quasi-constitution) and create a constitution.
Unlike many of his peers, Salzberger does not think the ultra-Orthodox should be drafted into the military. He’d prefer to see them perform mandatory public service in education, agriculture, social work or another field. “I don’t think serving in the army would be good for the ultra-Orthodox, who are trying to preserve the nature and character of their community,” he says, nor does he think it would be good for the army. “If a third of the soldiers are ultra-Orthodox Jews, there’ll be fewer women in positions of power within the military.”
Salzberger supports the establishment of a full Palestinian state but doesn’t think it will be possible for years due to the radicalization of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. He thinks it is essential for Israel to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia and create an alliance of moderate states in the Middle East against Iran and Hamas. “I think that’s something that can be reached with an Israeli government that says it does not want to control Gaza’s civilians and does not want the West Bank.” Israel, he says, “must deal with its own fanatics.” An Israeli professor, Salzberger says, has coined the term “sectocracy” to describe Israel at this juncture. “It means that you have different groups such as the settlers and the ultra-Orthodox, each of them only worrying about their own interests and trying to take a big piece of a shrinking budget but not thinking of Israel as a whole.”
It’s not easy to be a center-left Zionist at this point in time, says Salzberger. “Left-leaning Zionist Israelis are essen-
tially fighting three wars right now—the war against Hamas, the war against our awful government and the war for the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state worldwide,” he says. “Never in any previous conflict has whether Israel should exist been discussed. And now it is. This is one of the worst consequences of the war and we will see the effects of this for years to come. This has highlighted for me that Israel is the only home for the Jews as a nation, the only place in the world Jews can have self-determination, not without being persecuted because, as you can see, we got massacred for being Jewish, but it’s the only place we have,” he says. “I have a lot of friends who are talking about leaving the country out of despair. I tell them that things can get better, that the nation has survived the worst, that sometimes out of the deepest crisis things can take a turn for the better.”
Evyatar Lipkin, who grew up in the West Bank settlement of Ofra, is a recent graduate of the master’s program in political science and history at Hebrew University. He wants to go into politics but has yet to start a position as an adviser to a Likud Knesset member because he is serving in the military reserves.
“A lot of people say that democracy in Israel has never been more in danger,” says Lipkin. “I don’t believe that democracy in Israel has ever been that strong. We still live in a very militaristic society and we still have a lot of emergency guidelines that are always active and that are understandable considering the current situation.” Lipkin believes that reforming Israel’s Supreme Court would strengthen the country’s democracy by making the court “more balanced and more clear and open to criticism,” although he did not support the Netanyahu government’s recent judicial reform effort, which he describes as “like a bull in a china shop.”
And although Lipkin voted for Netanyahu many times and thinks he’s “the best politician Israel has ever seen,” he feels it’s time for a new leader. “Bibi symbolizes a time period of Israeli politics that is very toxic and very unhealthy,” he says. “The problem with Bibi is that he thinks he knows what is best for Israel. I feel like he did a lot to heat up the temperature of political dialogue in Israel.” Lipkin says Netanyahu is “an extremely savvy political operator. But it always smells authoritarian when there is someone in control for way too long. We don’t have term limits, which is something that is going to have to change.”
Lipkin hopes Netanyahu will leave politics in good health without destroying any more of his legacy, but he doubts that will happen. Instead he sees “a war for the throne and the Court” looming and has nightmares about the many election cycles he expects after the war. He wants the Knesset threshold [the percentage of votes a party needs to receive to make it into parliament] to be lowered “because there are many parties on the sidelines who are just begging to get inside. It will create a lot of chaos, but it will help us to form more coalitions.”
As a libertarian, Lipkin wants to cut spending (he also has nightmares about a recession of “biblical proportions” af-
ter the war) and minimize the presence of the government in civilian life. He also supports the separation of church and state: “It’s not the business of the religious institutions to lead the country. Their job is to be religious leaders for the communities, for people who look to them for guidance.” He has lost patience with specific sections of the population “who rarely contribute to the common good.” In other words, he wants the ultra-Orthodox to serve in the army. As a religious Jew, he has a lot of respect for religious study; however, he says, “I don’t have respect for people who, excuse my language, sit on their ass while other people are putting their lives on the line for them. I do believe there is a metaphysical value to prayers, but God commands us to protect ourselves with weapons and to fight, not just to sit and study.”
Lipkin says he’s extremely optimistic about the future. “There is no one in Israel right now who won’t say to every single one of the current Knesset club of 120 that they need to go home,” he says. Noting that the political class in Israel has long been stagnant, he adds, “There are so many young people who are waiting on the sidelines for their turn…we are excited to work together.” He’s personally looking forward to shaping policy “by sitting down and logically talking with people who have different ideas to reach a common-good conclusion.“
Lipkin believes geopolitics are central to Israel’s future and wants to see the United States sponsor a strong Middle Eastern coalition against Iran, Russia and China. As a religious Jew, he believes Judea and Samaria belong to the Jewish people and that they shouldn’t have to share it. Nor is he convinced that most Palestinians in the West Bank want a separate state given the level of corruption that exists there. “I have so much sympathy for them,“ he says. “The irony of living in too-dense areas in so-called settlements is that half of the buildings are being built by Palestinians. Most of the construction work in Israel, in general, is being done by Palestinians.” Both of his parents speak Arabic, having
worked in intelligence. “They like to sit with the construction workers and talk with them. The amount of suffering Palestinians go through because of the corruption in their government is really heartbreaking. You can’t get anything if you don’t have friends in high places, and there is no chance of social mobility. It’s amazing how many Palestinians are trying to move to Egypt, or the States or Europe.”
Yet because Lipkin is against “displacement [expelling Palestinians from the West Bank],” he believes a two-state solution is the only way to solve the conflict. “But I can’t for the life of me see it happening,” he says, “just because of how radical the Palestinians are. The
“There is a value to prayers, but God commands us to protect ourselves with weapons and to fight, not just to sit and study.”
fact that every time you go out of your house, and you see a car coming up to you, you think to yourself, are there Palestinians inside? Am I going to be run over? Not only in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank. Even when you’re in Jerusalem, and you’re standing with a coffee in the train station, and you see someone who looks Palestinian coming up to you, you ask yourself, am I going to get stabbed?”
Lipkin says no one he knows questions the legitimacy of the war but that it’s been going on for far too long. “We should have gone in strong, hard and fast,” he says. “Israel had a lot of political capital in the beginning, we should have cashed it all in. There would have been a
lot more casualties, which is something that is very painful for me to say, a lot more soldiers would have died if we just went straight in.” Lipkin says Israelis feel like they are living in the movie Groundhog Day. “Every morning we wake up and see on TV an upcoming cease-fire agreement with Hamas for the return of the hostages. We’re just waiting for a response from Hamas. Then five days later we’ve said no to all the terms and we’re keeping the fighting going. And then the day after, discussions are being held in Egypt. And this keeps happening every single day.”
Lipkin has a lot of respect for what President Biden did at the beginning of the war. “He put the aircraft carriers outside. He stood strongly behind Israel.” But he believes that if Trump is reelected, he’ll give Israel a month to do whatever it needs. “He’ll say, ‘You can make the picture horrible but you need to finish it in a month.’ I believe Trump is extremely hard, and has the correct vision for the Middle East, which is that the political climate here does not depend on the Palestinian question. It depends on the Iranian question.”
Ran Baratz was director of communications for the prime minister’s office under Benjamin Netanyahu in 2016 and 2017, teaches military strategy for the IDF and is the founding editor of the Hebrew-language conservative news site Mida. Baratz says he now has a different vision for Israel than he had two years ago.
“I thought we had an all-encompassing kind of traditional identity being formed and that in the end, we would all converge—some would be more or less religious or more right or left—but we would have the mutual basis that we are all Jews with a good sense of tradition.” But then came the judicial reform and protests. He blames the government for its heavy-handedness and the left for
creating mass hysteria. “You’d have to go back to the 1930s before the State of Israel was formed to get to those levels of panic and animosity. In the 1930s, we were on the brink of a civil war between socialist Zionism and revisionist Zionism. It became so full of passion and hate. The levels of hostility and sectarianism that we now have give me pause.”
Baratz says that while the Orthodox have always built high walls around themselves, the protests made him realize that “part of the Israeli left is also stuck in its own world. They also have their own institutions and don’t see anyone other than themselves.” As the left keeps radicalizing, he says, the Orthodox become more defensive in response: “Their instinct is always to make the walls higher when they are attacked.”
Baratz believes it’s time for a new government. “We’re in a war, so the two main focuses are economics and security. And the current government is doing a terrible job in both,” he says. “I love Netanyahu. The last two years have demolished his record, but historically he had many achievements. The first term economically was incredible, later terms were very successful in terms of international relations, less for the economy. But it’s like when Neville Chamberlain resigned early in World War II and said, ‘I’m good for peace. I’m not good for war.’ I think there might be something to that. I think in peace Chamberlain was better than Churchill, but for war Churchill was better. Now Netanyahu likes to compare himself to Churchill, but Netanyahu is better in peace. And when we are in a crisis, we need something different. He’s been in power a very long time.”
There aren’t many good alternatives to Netanyahu, he says. “Most Israelis agree that the old generation, these 60plus politicians, are not doing a good job. We probably need to have younger leaders that start over.” Baratz sees a few younger leaders who are smart and qualified emerging in the Likud and from the Knesset. But he’s not optimistic that the middle-rank politicians will make good leaders, because they are focused on uni-
ty, and in politics division is necessary, he says. He thinks the protest movements on the left will produce some leaders but says “they are terrible and will make poor politicians.”
Baratz believes it is possible to forge peace without a Palestinian state because “the Saudi government doesn’t care about the Palestinians,” he says. “The Saudi population likes the Palestinians, and in the conflict, they take their side, but the Saudi leadership has only one interest, Iran, which for them is an existential threat. So if you ask me, the only one pushing the Palestinian question into this mix is the American administration.” This is unwise at this time, he says. It reflects President
“I’m saying something that’s unpopular in Israel, that the war in Gaza is less important than rebuilding the IDF.”
Biden’s “complete misunderstanding of the situation on the ground and in the Middle East.” The left in Israel, Baratz argues, has always maintained that peace in the region won’t occur until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is solved. This kind of diplomacy has failed, and he agrees with Netanyahu that there can be peace without the establishment of a Palestinian state. That will happen when the Palestinians are ready to make it happen, he says. “When they want peace, it will be that easy.”
Baratz sees a difference between “Arabs living in Israel” and Palestinians. “A talented Arab can also be a very good Hebrew author, a poet, scientist, whatever, just like Jews in the diaspora, who
worked in their national surroundings and did intellectual work in their national languages of German, French or English,” he says. “So it will be the same for Arab Israelis. They still have their own identity, but they’re basically part of Israeli culture.”
He is worried about looming geopolitical threats. “We have reached a point that the rest of the world is going to encounter in the coming decade or two, because of the rise of China and Russia and the Shiite part of the Arab world. They’re working together, growing, rising and militarizing at a very fast rate. I’m saying something that’s unpopular in Israel, that the war in Gaza is less important than rebuilding the IDF,” says Baratz. “I think that the likelihood of a regional war is growing every year. We need to rebuild for a kind of war that the IDF is not prepared for. They were under a false conception for two decades that conventional war in this world is over. Most Israelis agree with me that what we need now is not political unity for the sake of unity; what we need is real reform in the Israeli state. The machine is not working. We are reaching an existential period in history and we have got to get this machine going.”
The executive and legislative branches, Baratz says, are hampered by the Israeli Supreme Court, which turns any kind of change into a legal issue. The judicial function overpowers everything, he says, which is “almost insane from a democratic point of view.” The judicial reform “was about taking away that power” from the Court. He says the Court began to challenge the power of the other branches of government beginning in 1977, when the right first won an Israeli election, and that since 1995, the Court’s power has grown unchecked. “It’s corrosion in our democracy,” he says. “They never lose one iota of power that they assign to themselves, only the executive branch loses power. And so we are in a crisis.”
Thank you to Moment’s Israel Editor Eetta Prince-Gibson and to Yoram Black for their help with this project. M
The Jewish summer resort in the Poconos served as a boot camp for Broadway and launched some of the biggest names in mid-century American entertainment.
By Gloria Levitas
Tamiment is the Native American name for a region in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. But for me, and many other young people in the 1930s to the 1950s, it was first and foremost the name of a summer resort—burnished in memory by sunshine and Friday evening cocktail hours that brought men and women together for a first look that might lead to sex, or even better, marriage.
What I remember most vividly from the summer I spent there in 1950 were
the weekly shows—forged in the crucible of Tamiment’s Playhouse and created by famed producer-director Max Liebman and his exuberant, hard-working theater team. Without Tamiment and its desire to offer affordable and educational vacations to young, primarily Jewish New Yorkers, Liebman might not have gained the experience or developed the sensibility that led him, in 1951, to revolutionize TV and later to exert enormous influence over musical theater and film. Without Max Liebman, Tamiment might have remained just another sum-
mer resort. Instead, it served as a talent incubator for untold numbers of entertainers—along with writers, producers, directors, theater managers, set and costume creators—who would eventually become household names.
Tamiment’s story begins in 1921, when it was founded by New York City’s Rand School of Social Science as a tax-exempt summer school and camp to provide needed income for Rand. Established in 1906 by adherents of the Socialist Party of America to bring socialist ideas, culture and education to New York City’s young
workers, the Rand School enrolled just over 5,000 students in 1918-1919, but in part due to the Red Scare of 1917-1920, enrollment fell and its operating capital plunged to an all-time low.
Tamiment was a unique venture—a resort that would be used to educate workers (mostly young, single Jewish men and women) even as it offered them a brief respite from the city heat. The resort was the brainchild of Bertha Mailly, the executive secretary of the Rand School, who conceived of the project as a way to help support the school. She found the 2,100-acre property, in Pike County, PA, and raised the funds to purchase and develop what was initially called Camp Tamiment. Though a creation of the
Rand School, it was to be administered under a separate entity called the People’s Educational Camp Society. To justify its tax-exempt status, the camp added lectures, classical and contemporary music, and singers and dancers to the usual resort activities of swimming, tennis and calisthenics. In the early days there was opera and courses in classic Yiddish.
Tamiment was magic. Heavily wooded grounds hid guest sleeping cabins; the edges of its 90-acre lake were free of houses except for a few modest bungalows on the far shore, which provided accommodations for families connected with the school or the Socialist Party. Even larger structures such as the dining room, the Playhouse and administrative
The singing,
of
Brooks’s The Producers actually had their origin in a 1930s Tamiment production.
buildings were relatively unobtrusive. A clubhouse, designed for relaxation and quiet contemplation, was tucked into the side of a hill overlooking the only large open space on the grounds—a prize-winning golf course designed by prolific golf course architect Robert Trent Jones. Visible from the clubhouse, waterfalls ran down both sides of a wide stone stairway and splashed down to the golf course. The clubhouse’s interior colors—green, yellow and beige—echoed its sylvan setting. Much of this design and the resort’s many amenities were due to the innovative ideas of its shrewd and prescient general manager Ben Josephson, who was associated with the Rand School and worked at Tamiment from 1941 to 1968.
Despite some initial struggles, Tamiment soon attracted enough visitors to earn sufficient money to support both the resort and the Rand School. Guests, who generally arrived on Friday, paid by the week with all activities included. On Friday nights, everyone assembled for cocktails and a “meet and greet” on the terrace fronting the dining hall. Couples would often form, but singles would have many other opportunities to meet— around the large pool, in the dining hall,
or while engaging in tennis, horseback riding or other activities. The staff, many of whom were college students or young people who needed summer jobs, would also mingle with the guests, but unlike the Catskills hotels, which encouraged such behavior, Tamiment remained diffident about such couplings.
As only one of a dozen hotel resorts in the area (others included the International Ladies Garment Workers Union’s Unity House and the old Mount Airy Lodge), Tamiment attracted customers from New York City and environs, visitors from the neighborhood, and young women like me who sneaked into the resort to see their boyfriends. To keep intruders out, guards stationed at the gates at the bottom of the road leading to Tamiment refused entry to anyone without a resort pass. To get past the guards I would wait a few hundred feet away, beyond their view, and watch for cars full of young men headed for the resort. I’d thumb a ride, jump into the car, and onto some guy’s lap. The guards would stop the car, glance at us and snicker. Had we really tricked them? I never found out, but there were always a few other young women sleeping (or I might say, hiding) in the dancers’ quarters.
Things took an important and exciting turn in 1931 when Ben Josephson stole Max Liebman from another Poconos hotel. Liebman was a talented young man with a solid background in Yiddish theater, vaudeville, burlesque and comedy. He wrote sketches, songs and lyrics and shared Tamiment’s interest in raising the cultural level of the resort’s guests. At some point, he decided to create a new variety show every Saturday night. The shows, primarily skits accompanied by music and dance, were so successful that Tamiment built a new 1,200-seat state-of-the-art theater for him in 1941. Known as the Playhouse, it was equal and often superior to Broadway venues, and soon became a magnet for stage professionals eager for summer work.
Aptly described as “the boot camp for Broadway,” the Tamiment productions under Liebman demanded discipline, hard work and commitment. How else
could a relatively small group of people produce a completely original new show each week? The pressure was enormous. Those who couldn’t take it left quickly. Those who stayed learned to work together efficiently under the weekly deadline—invaluable training for the nascent TV industry.
Liebman loved music, and in 1938 he had employed a songwriter named Sylvia Fine to help write music and lyrics for his productions. Fine, in turn, introduced him to her future husband, Danny Kaye. Both Fine and Kaye had worked in the Catskills, but it would be Kaye’s starring role in Liebman’s 1939 Broadway production The Straw Hat Revue (yet another endeavor of the prolific director) that would put Kaye on the map. Other comedians who performed at Tamiment later came to dominate much of TV in the 1950s, including such icons as Imogene Coca, Sid Caesar, Carol Burnett and Irwin Corey.
Liebman’s impact on dance was equally impressive. He employed the dance team of Marge and Gower Champion, helped train dozens of dancers and persuaded
Jerome Robbins—whose dance routines in West Side Story would revolutionize the Broadway stage—to become a choreographer. Herbert Ross followed a similar trajectory. After spending time at Tamiment, he went on to delight Broadway audiences with his choreography in shows such as Finian’s Rainbow and to produce or direct some two dozen films.
Tamiment was startlingly different from Borscht Belt circuit hotels, whose stars, such as Jack Benny, Rodney Dangerfield, Phil Silvers, Fanny Brice and Zero Mostel, had already been prominently featured in films and on radio during the first half of the 20th century. Differences even extended to the resorts’ architecture. Catskills hotels asserted themselves on the landscape with large buildings and open spaces that seemed to shout, “Look at me!” They were famous for one-man shows starring comics known as tummlers, who wandered among the guests during the day, telling self-deprecating jokes about marital arguments in mixed English and Yiddish. Their variety shows were derivative, largely made up of material adapted from
can culture in which it was now embedded. It appealed to a younger, better-educated generation of men and women eager to assimilate to American culture even as they retained their Jewish identity. Comedy was always important, and the Playhouse emphasized parody, original dance routines and music and lyrics. Jewish humor was largely verbal and often antiauthoritarian. Serious politics were generally avoided, but by satirizing contemporary American life, the skits at Tamiment offered insights into popular culture even as they confirmed Jewish connections by making fun of antisemites such as Father Coughlin and taking aim at the rising power of the Nazis. The singing, dancing Nazis of Mel Brooks’s The Producers actually had their origin in a 1930s Tamiment production.
IBroadway productions. Though distinctly Jewish, this humor—once shorn of Yiddish but retaining its rhythms and cadence by some inexplicable alchemy— became enormously successful with a broader American audience.
Tamiment’s more sophisticated entertainment depended on teamwork and seemed organically connected both to its natural environment and to the Ameri-
n 1950 I was employed as the au pair to the family of Tamiment’s orchestra leader, Milt Greene. I had never heard of him, or of any of the artists who sang, danced, wrote and produced the weekly shows there, although I got to know them and many more in the following years. The shows were primarily skits—think Saturday Night Live—although short plays were also sometimes put on. My soon-to-be husband, Mike Levitas, operated the lights and helped build the sets for the weekly performances, and I occasionally watched the rehearsals. That year, the staff included writers Jerry Bock, Larry Holofcener and Harold Flender, and singers Jack Cassidy and Barbara Cook. Some of their names may be familiar, others less so, but their contributions to show business, both behind and on the stage, were invaluable. I met some of them at the clubhouse, where they went to relax. Jerry Bock, whose affability and gentle humor masked his ambition and intensity, became a close friend. His then collaborator was Holofcener, with whom he produced several successful Broadway musicals (Catch a Star and Mr. Wonderful are probably the best known), but Holofcener would soon quit the theater to become a highly successful sculptor.
Hard as they worked, members of the troupe were always ready for fun. Flender, the writer whose remarkable list of TV credits include I Spy and Car 54, Where Are You?, approached us one day as we prepared to take a walk around the clubhouse grounds. He asked to join us, then disappeared for half an hour, returning in knickers, knee socks and boots, a pith helmet on his head, and binoculars and a walking stick in his hands.
Another charmer, singer Jack Cassidy, was handsome and funny. Shortly after his Tamiment year, he became an important leading man in films and Broadway shows. I remember him fingering a piano and singing a self-written ditty, “It’s a Disappointment to be Irish.” Lucille Kallen and Mel Tolkin often came to the clubhouse to read. Both wrote words and music to most of that year’s sketches (with occasional alterations or additions by those bold enough to make them). Tolkin, a Russian-born Canadian, was a bit shy and we never got to know him very well. He and Kallen both wrote for TV’s Admiral Broadway Revue and Your Show of Shows. Tolkin went on to write 34 episodes of All in the Family, and for many other shows.
Barbara Cook had been singing since she was a child, but acting in a musical paralyzed her with fright. Tamiment gave her the confidence to overcome her fears, and she starred in at least one of Jerry Bock’s musicals—She Loves Me—and in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. I never met actors Sylvia Miles or Lee Grant, but the latter, a well-known director as well, remained in my mind because my husband Mike always referred to himself as “Lee Grant’s costar,” since he once played a minor role in Tennessee Williams’s play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton in 1949, when Grant was a featured player at Tamiment. Yes, Liebman also put on short contemporary plays during the week, placing even more pressure on his hard-working staff.
Playhouse stage manager Samuel “Biff” Liff became one of the most important figures in show business. He had major roles as an assistant producer, producer, stage manager and director for 50 Broadway shows and several TV produc- LOC
tions. Mike, who briefly replaced him as Tamiment’s stage manager when Biff left in midsummer for a new position, always regretted that we hadn’t followed his career: Even a small investment in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or Hello, Dolly!—not to mention any of his dozens of other ventures—would have made us rich. Not incidentally, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Hello, Dolly! both starred Carol Channing—another Tamiment alumna.
In 1951, Liebman left Tamiment. He was lured to TV by Pat Weaver, head of NBC, to produce a weekly variety show, originally the Admiral Broadway Revue which later morphed into Your Show of Shows—starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, who had performed at Tamiment in the 1940s. And for the next half century Liebman’s writers and performers,
notably Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner (as well as dozens of other theater personnel) dominated much of American TV, film and musical theater. Watch Saturday Night Live—which still retains the format and spirit of Your Show of Shows—for some idea of Liebman’s impact on the industry.
Even after Liebman was gone, the Playhouse continued to attract such talents as Woody Allen and Mary Rodgers, who wrote and tried out Once Upon a Mattress over the course of a couple of Tamiment summers. And if I remember correctly, Neil “Doc” Simon, who authored 30 plays and films (including The Apartment, The Odd Couple and Brighton Beach Memoirs), arrived in 1951. He was vocal in his gratitude to Tamiment. It was, he said, where he learned to write. Larry Gelbart, who wrote M*A*S*H and Tootsie,
and Joe Stein, who produced Fiddler on the Roof and Zorba, also worked at the resort before their successful careers.
We stayed connected to Max Liebman even after he left Tamiment. In 1951, Mike and I were included in some of Max’s New York soirees, which is where we first met Mel Brooks. One evening, sitting at the piano, Brooks began to riff spontaneously on shouted suggestions from a rowdy audience. Someone yelled “War and Peace” and he was off— on a hilariously literate monologue. The “2,000-year-old man” was born at one of those sessions.
In 1956, Tamiment, which hadn’t been a “school” since its first few years, lost its tax exemption, and its
profits predictably declined. Its connection to the People’s Educational Camp Society was severed in 1965 when it was sold to a Delaware corporation, which razed the Playhouse in 1976 to make room for conference rooms and indoor tennis. At some point the new owners tried to extend their season into winter with the construction of a small ski slope that ran from the golf course to the clubhouse. It got mixed reviews and was destroyed some years later.
In 1983 singer and entertainer Wayne Newton, known as Mr. Las Vegas, purchased the property to take advantage of a bill to legalize gambling slated to come before the state legislature. The bill never passed, and Newton sold the property in 1987 to investment banker Suong Hong, who struggled to keep it
open. Tastes by then had changed, and in 2005, Hong sold Tamiment to a developer who leveled the site to make way for houses and condominiums, which are rented and sold today by Eagle Resorts. The golf course remained until sometime after 2012, when it too was demolished to accommodate further housing sites.
Sometime in the early 1980s, Mike and I had returned to Tamiment for a brief visit. We had not followed its fortunes and were shocked and saddened by its appearance. The new owners had transformed the clubhouse, replacing wood with plastic and earth tones with gaudy upholstery, thus destroying its tranquil connection to the environment. Gone now was its calm and relaxed atmosphere. The Playhouse, too,
was gone. Where it once stood there was nothing but grass.
Today, Tamiment is only a memory— bittersweet and wonderful—for those who stayed, worked or performed there. At one time “a pillar of the Poconos tourist industry,” it played a large and original role in resort history, but its myriad contributions to American film, television and theater are what made it truly unique.*
*For a more exhaustive and fascinating study of this history, I refer readers to Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco’s Every Week, a Broadway Revue. Published in 1992, this volume is housed at New York University as part of the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. I could not have written this article without it. M
By Ralph Levinson
Ihad given a guest lecture on quantum physics at the University of São Paulo, when postgraduate students surrounded me and eagerly suggested I should have speculated more thoroughly on the nature of reality. I thought their earnest remarks pretentious, gave my excuses for an early night and retired to my bed.
A tapping aroused me from a deep sleep at half past two in the morning. My beloved friend, Roberto, stood on the other side of the door.
“You are tranquil?” he said.
“Just tired,” I replied.
He explained that a group of colleagues had gone for a meal—would I like to join them? I held up my watch, but he regarded me as if I was growing horns. Clearly there was a huge cultural difference between city life in London and São Paulo. I cannot bear to hurt Roberto so I asked him to wait, brushed my teeth and dressed. He ordered a cab. Roberto sat next to the driver, who joshed that, from his accent, Roberto must be a Carioca, and made jokes about the carefree residents of Rio, Roberto’s birthplace. It was a warm summer’s night and the streets still teemed with life. In the Japanese restaurant, a crowd drank and discussed politics. Lula had made his first bid for the presidency, and the anticipation of a transformed political landscape was manifest.
After a few rounds of sake, I was as voluble as everyone else. I returned to my hotel so inebriated, I found it impossible to sleep, took a shower and, when it was reasonable to do so, went down to breakfast. Roberto sat in a corner of the lounge, beside an ornate standing lamp, reading that day’s Folha de São Paulo. He inquired about my health. I told him I was glad I had accompanied him last night but was the worse for wear. Roberto folded his newspaper. I went over the conversations we had had over sushi and sashimi and asked if I had correctly interpreted them. He shook his head, his brow furrowed. I asked him how he had slept. He extolled the wonders of a long
It had struck us both at the same time: behind these great forces another hidden cause, slippery, mischievous, malign, was at work.
dreamless sleep, which was rare for him.
“Mas você estava comigo, Roberto.” But you were with me.
“Não,” he replied in a drawl. No.
“O restaurante. Taxi.”
He made a glottal sound—Tuk Tuk Tuk—which indicated that I was mistaken.
2.
Later, free from social and academic commitments, I explored Bom Retiro, the old immigrant quarter of São Paulo. I imagined Ottoman-style houses, narrow passages beside ancient souks, an antique reproof to the inanities of the contemporary world.
Bom Retiro is not like that. I visited a park, one of the few in São Paulo, which offered respite from the incessant hum of traffic; in the distance were fleets of skyscrapers: a glinting armada of concrete and steel. The art gallery and chic shops catered to a flagrant middle class. Murals of human and animal figures, contorted into rebellious poses, covered walls fringed with bougainvillea.
A Turkish café with orange and green awnings, and two potted olive trees, offered shade. I ordered cold mezes and opened the novel I had been reading. The only other customer was a young bespectacled man two tables away. His hair, a blond thatch, appeared to have an urgent need to take off, as if trying to escape from his head. He wore black, dressed more for winter than for summer, his hand movements were jerky. I waited for him to drop his coffee cup, but he held it—and himself—together. Finally, I met his gaze; he nodded and came over to my table. Before I could say “Bom dia,” he told me he had attended my lecture, although I had no memory of him being there. He was an electronic engineer and had studied for two years at CalTech. Producing a magazine from his briefcase, he flattened its pages and pointed to a short story he had written. He asked me if I would be kind enough to read it; he was about to collect some photographs and would be back within the hour.
Something about his manner urged me to be attentive; his deep uneasiness evoked a pathos that warmed me to him.
His story, under the author’s name of Gimmel Tzaddik, was published by an obscure university press.
It went back to a time when there was a large Jewish community in Bom Retiro, told of a Hasidic family walking to the small synagogue on a Friday evening to greet the oncoming Sabbath. Come my friend to meet the Sabbath, for it is a wellspring of blessing. On their journey they were met by a gang who taunted them—“Judeu, Judeu”—and threw garbage in their way.
At first the narrative depicted the family through the eyes of the gang leader. Everything about the Hasidim assaulted his sensibilities: their dress, their language, their exclusivity he perceived as a deliberate snub to him. Through the narrow echoing street, he watched the family make their way, as Hasidic families often do: the bearded father in front and alone, hands clasped behind his back, his absurd fur hat, white stockings and long gabardine coat; his wife in her preposterous blonde wig, a few paces behind, chatting with a friend, and the children following in order of seniority. Then he happened to catch the eye of one of the Hasidic daughters, about sixteen or seventeen years old, when his body turned ice cold, and his skin tingled. The quicksilver glance she threw him, her mouth with its intimation of censure and wickedness, touched something in the depths of his soul. The following week he was unable to think of anything or anyone but her.
To his own amazement he began to reflect on his need for violence. That moment, when their eyes met, unfolded from within him the possibilities of forgiveness and love. Struck by a qualiThe Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest was founded in 2000 to recognize authors of Jewish short fiction. The 2023 stories were judged by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Moment Magazine and the Karma Foundation are grateful to Newberger Goldstein and to all of the writers who took the time to submit their stories. Visit momentmag.com/fiction to learn how to submit a story to the contest.
ty that went beyond her exquisite slenderness, the unaffected delicacy of her movement, he vowed to defend the family from any insult, even if it meant losing the respect of his erstwhile gang friends. In the following weeks, he waited for the family at the foot of the hill leading to the synagogue, and wordlessly led them on a path to avoid their tormentors. His reward was a momentary pursing of the lips, as if mouthing her appreciation, from the young sphinx he had come to worship. During the week he searched for tutors to teach him Yiddish, but his uncouth, breathless manner made them suspicious of his intentions. He considered disguising himself as a Hasid but he knew his mission was hopeless. Basking in those moments on the Friday evenings when she was near, he could only gaze at the source of his mad desire.
At night, to mitigate his pain, he walked with the crowds in the Avenida Paulista, downed rough brandy and caipirinhas in cheap bars, ventured into the red lights of Baixo Augusta. All to no avail. He wrote poetry, but the prosaic words mocked his sentiments. He felt alone in the universe; the paving stones he trod seemed to resent the burden of his weight, and only she could have placated his loneliness. But she was forbidden to him. His terrible yearning drove him to a decision.
After the third week of escorting the family, he came towards her as she entered the portal of the synagogue and, in a Yiddish cobbled together from dubious sources, whispered out of earshot of her sibling escort “I will love you until the day I die.” He paused when she stopped, her back to him, but he knew she had heard. He added, “And beyond
even death. Unendlich.” Her response was a faint nod, one he might only have imagined, but it was sufficient to give him succour that night.
The next morning, restless again, he cried like a baby. Toward evening, he took the inter-city bus to the city of Salvador, in the state of Bahia. His part in the story ended there.
She had heard his words, felt them before he uttered them. When he failed to appear the next Friday, she knew he had decided it was a doomed love. From then on, every Friday afternoon when her family prepared for the Sabbath, baking challahs, polishing shoes, preparing the candlesticks, kashering the chickens, mopping the floor, she made her way to a piece of wasteland, a twenty-minute walk from her house, where there was a single jabuticaba tree. She rested her back against the tree’s flaking trunk, turned and plucked from the bark two fruits. She held one in the palm of each pale hand, gazing intently at their shiny purplish-black skins as if they were eyes staring back trying to tell her their secrets.
Savouring each one in turn
The treacherous juices could not slake her thirst
As she waited and waited Her beautiful eyes Delicate and gentle from weeping.
Stirred by its hopelessness, I had read the story a second time when I heard a cough next to me; my literary friend had returned carrying three parcels. “Your story will remain with me,” I told him.
But he was impatient to talk about other things. With a peremptory nod, he set the packages between us, folded the periodical, dropped it in his case, and resumed his seat. We ordered more coffee, the waiter serving us with a weary smile, and after we had each taken our first sip, he asked if he could tell me about a photograph that he had framed and was in one of the packages. He was already stripping off the brown paper and bubble-wrap cladding.
“In a way,” he said, “this photograph is another story.” He hesitated, peering at me. “Perhaps it is the same story.”
The black-and-white photograph, in its simple wooden frame, was about the size of his face as he set it upright before me. A posed group of people set in a rural village, a patch of grass before a large bare tree, a range of mountains receding into the background, from the deep blackness of those nearest to the group to a vague grey in the distance, nearly washed out by the light. On the left side stood two religious Jews, a man and woman, and a boy about three or four years old, held back by the woman, his mother. She wore an unwieldy sheitel and a modest dress with long sleeves. The man, tall and balding, wore a yarmulke; the fringes of his tzitzit showed beneath his shirt. Their smiles as broad as the mountains, both these individuals revelled in the playful struggle they were having with their son.
Had those three been on their own, the image would have been unremarkable except that the couple looked so blissful, particularly in their religious clothing, which to me always imparts severity to any expression. Standing by them, equally animated, were women and men, the
What contest judge Rebecca Newberger Goldstein has to say about this story:
“From the first paragraph a palpable atmosphere of mystery descends and is sustained until the end. The writer never allows the pieces of his story to come together; in fact, the writer subtly draws attention to the refusal to do so. This writer is not about to be pushed into any easy answers, knows exactly where to let the impenetrable silence fall so that an ultimate coherence is at once affirmed and denied. This is a writer who knows what they’re up to.”
women wearing small bowler hats typical of rural Bolivia. What had brought these people together, the local community with a Jewish couple so reminiscent of pre-war Eastern European ghettos?
Gimmel Tzaddik then told me the photograph was taken in the early 1950s. The religious man and woman were his grandfather and grandmother, and the little boy, his father. This was where they were living, in the rarefied air of the Altiplanos. In 1937 his grandfather, then a
young man, was apprenticed as a tailor in the Polish city of Lodz, but conscious of the migration of many of his friends, and the threats from Nazi Germany, he decided to try his—and his young bride’s —luck in New York. It was straightforward since it was just the two of them. The rest of the family, elderly parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, were to follow once they were settled. Friends from Lodz had made their home in the Bronx.
They boarded a boat bound for Hull where they caught a train to Liverpool before taking a transatlantic steamer. As happened so often at that time, and with their limited understanding of English, they only found out once at sea, and the Liver building receding into the distance, that their destination was not Ellis Island but Recife in Brazil. Still, they were young with a firm faith in the Almighty, and, after all, they had their Singer sewing machine.
As Gimmel Tzaddik recounted his family history, I looked again at the photograph, finding it difficult to reconcile this beaming couple with the penury and loneliness that they must have feared when they discovered the boat was not headed for New York. At the dockside in Recife they were met by a representative of La Sociedad de Proteccion a los Inmigrantes Israelitas. He arranged their transport to Bolivia, the only country in Latin America in the late 1930s that accepted immigrants from Eastern Europe. They found themselves in the back of an open truck, hurtling towards the border where, they were told, they would be issued with papers. Better, they supposed, than nothing. But where could a couple settle who spoke only Yiddish? Or make a living, with skills of tailoring adapted to the Orthodox Jewish community? Or learn Spanish from scratch? And in a country they had never heard of.
During the wearying bureaucracy at the Bolivian border, a young man approached the couple—Yankl and Chava—and gave them slices of bread and margarine, the first substantial food they had eaten since their arrival on dry land. Through laborious hand signals and drawings, he explained that he was a
government surveyor located in the central Altiplanos. Turning to the sewing machine, he said he knew a settlement that would be only too grateful for a man with Yankl’s tailoring skills.
After a long journey over stony tracks, weak from exhaustion, unsuitable clothes and the unfriendly climate, they arrived at a small settlement where only Aymara was spoken. They were received with a meal of steamed yucca and quirquina and given a room in a wooden hut, bordered by two small quinoa trees, at the edge of the settlement.
Around the hut there was only dry grey shrub; yet each morning, Chava and Yankl found outside their door a tub of water to wash, and a wooden bowl filled with yams. The villagers crowded around the Singer and brought their brightly coloured polleras and ponchos to repair, in exchange for food and accommodation. Chava and Yankl assimilated into the community, joining in the bickering, politics and celebrations that made up their lives. They met once a week with the villagers to teach them Yiddish. Chava and Yankl picked up Aymara so well —they were young after all—that they began to use that language to converse, but continued to reminisce, argue and hurl abuse at each other in Yiddish.
Chava gave birth to a little boy who became the only person on the planet, in the history of humanity, fluent only in Yiddish and Aymara. The child, whose name was Simcha in Yiddish—meaning joy—and Ekeko in the local dialect, signifying “abundance,” was rooted in the village until, at the age of eleven, he was sent to boarding school in La Paz, where he learned Spanish. In time, Simcha became a psychotherapist in São Paulo, where Gimmel Tzaddik was born. Chava and Yankl, now elderly, refused to leave their village; they were content to see out their days there.
When Gimmel Tzaddik finished his account, I became aware of happenings I had not noticed before. The subjects in the photograph met my gaze full on; time and distance vanished, and the villagers’ exuberance was directed towards me. So intensely was the photograph
communicating to me that I felt myself become part of the village: The call of a howler monkey as it slipped into Simcha’s hammock, the condor gliding through the thin air that made sounds so clear I was obliged to cover my ears with the shock.
Between two of the Aymara women in the group there was a gap. In that space, in the background by a cylindrical stone structure which could have been a well, was a woman crouching. Two years before, I had encountered Goya’s painting of The Family of the Infante Don Luis at the Villa Magnani. Entering the room, the Goya on its own on the far wall, I had a sensation of being shuttled through time. My partner, alarmed by my rapid breathing, had handed me a bottle of water and had urged me to sit down.
In that portrait of exiled aristocracy and their retinue, three of the fourteen figures notice something beyond the circumstances of the group. Two women on the far-left gaze at a point behind the artist who has included himself in the picture. They might be responding to an incident beyond the range of the canvas, like a young gallante appearing through the far doorway, or the cook carrying an appetizing sweetmeat. But the second figure from the right, a man wearing a white bandanna, greets me, the viewer. Noticing me, as if in surprise, he knows something I don’t; he is about to share his secret with me. A direct invitation for me alone.
And the photograph of the settlement struck me with that same personal immediacy. The crouching woman’s hat, at a jaunty angle, was like those worn by performers in 1920s music halls. Although the photograph was in black and white, her hat was turning scarlet, festooned with brightly colored roses. The way she squatted, apart from the group—indeed they were oblivious to her presence—in a long dress that looked tailored for city life rather than a rural village, put her in another time and place. Emanating from her was a mysterious laugh.
Three days before, the day after I had arrived in São Paulo, nervous and exhausted in the vast halls of Guarulhos
International Airport, Roberto took me to visit the astrophysics laboratory at the university, where scientists I knew by reputation had simulated a collision between Twin Supermassive Black Holes in the vicinity of our galaxy. Watching on the monitor the intense light emitted by the Black Hole combo, its gargantuan shifting shapes like contending colossi; the colors of sea residue—bladderwrack, emerald sea moss, glistening starfish; the innumerable worlds it swallowed like a cosmic alligator, I felt the death of God,
Noticing me, as if in surprise, he knows something I don’t. He is about to share his secret with me.
such was the vanquishing of any meaning of History, Love, Nature, as countless universes evanesced in time so short it was unquantifiable. A profound depression struck me, a tingling like cutlery in my stomach; that simulation would remain as a warning until the end of my life, and beyond, unendlich. Roberto and I, even as skeptical physicists aware of the playfulness of the cosmos, were united by the change this had wrought in us. It had struck us both at the same time: behind these great forces another hidden cause, slippery, mischievous, malign, was at work. We talked of this experience in
jocular terms, accepting the meaninglessness of our existence because there was no other way to make sense of it.
“Life,” Roberto had sighed. That woman’s laugh quashed my apprehension of the Great Cataclysm; in the photograph, the contents of the Black Hole materialized from her mouth in reverse. Together with countless points of light, they radiated outwards, reconstituting the world as I knew it. Although she was in a photograph, a deep bond sprang up between us. I turned my gaze back to the group but I could not distinguish her. She had disappeared like an alternative shape in a Gestalt image. From somewhere inside me a raucous heaving takes over, which leaves my interlocutor offended. He wraps up the photograph and whispers a hasty “ciao.” Still roaring with unstoppable hysteria— the solemn waiter eyeing me with disdain —I see Gimmel Tzaddik, his back to me, walk away with a lateral swaying motion, parcels under his right arm. The margins of his black coat shimmer as if he strides through a mirage. I can tell he moves away because the street and buildings and people around him come towards me, as if he is on an invisible treadmill in a film set that projects a moving street. But his length and breadth don’t recede with distance, he is the same size as when he stood by me in the café. A gold and green bird, the size of a large egret, settles on the olive bush beside my table, it squawks loudly in a curiously human tone. I turn towards the waiter to see how he reacts to the bird but he continues to watch me disapprovingly. When I turn back the bird is gone, no trace of its presence, even the olive bush is still, and Gimmel Tzaddik has disappeared too as if he had never existed. M
Ralph Levinson lives in London, England. He is a recently retired university academic with a science background, and has close academic connections with, and has worked in, Brazil and the Palestinian West Bank. He has published short stories, some of which have won or been short-listed for prestigious national prizes. He is at present completing a novel with a strong Jewish theme.
BY MOLLY FOSTER
s the hot dog a Jewish food? Frankly, it depends on how you slice it.
Sausages—ground and salted meat mixed with spices and preserved in a distinctly phallic shape—have been around for millennia. Homer sang of them in the Odyssey, and Emperor Nero’s cook Gaius was known to make them as well. By the 14th century, sausages had migrated to Central Europe, where regional varieties—such as the frankfurters of Frankfurt and the wieners of Vienna—took form.
In the 1800s, Austrian immigrants brought wieners with them to New York City’s Lower East Side, that veritable meat grinder (forget melting pot) of cultures and cuisines. Sausage peddlers on America’s city streets became known as “wienerwurst men” (“wurst” being German for sausage) and were considered something of a nuisance. “He is the
creature whose yells make night hideous, and whose wares make dreams that poison sleep,” began a Nashville newspaper’s 1886 characterization of the wienerwurst vendor. Hasia Diner, professor emerita of history at New York University, says that many merchants and storekeepers “were annoyed by the noise and the smells and the crowding on the street corners around all sorts of food vendors,” including the wienerwurst men.
It’s not clear how or why frankfurters and wienerwursts became hot dogs. The main technical difference is that the meat isn’t just ground, like in sausage, but emulsified. Regarding the name, the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (NHDSC) (which, yes, exists) suggests that frankfurter vendors called their long, thin offerings Dachshund sausages, referring to their resemblance to the German dog bred to chase badgers and other bur-
row-dwelling creatures. From Dachshund sausage, it could have been but a short hop to “dogs,” then hot dogs. (Of course, in what surely must be a bitterly ironic twist of fate for the proud Dachshund, their breed has now become known to many as wiener dogs.) An alternative theory is that hot dogs were assumed to be made from, among other things, dog meat.
It didn’t take long for Jewish immigrants—many of whom would have learned about German sausages from their neighbors on New York’s Lower East Side—to horn in on the hot dog scene. Charles Feltman, a German Jew, opened the first hot dog cart at Coney Island in the 1870s and eventually expanded to a full-service restaurant. Food writer June Hersh explains that Feltman, dubbed “Inventor of the Hot Dog” by the Coney Island History Project, funded an “empire” in Coney Island owing to his early years of
selling hot dogs from his pushcart.
But to the masses, Coney Island hot dogs will always be associated with a different Jewish immigrant. In 1912, a few years after Feltman’s death, his restaurant hired Nathan Handwerker, a Polish Jew, as a grill-and-bun worker. According to Hersh, Handwerker saved $300 working at Feltman’s, quit the restaurant and— along with his wife, Ida—began selling hot dogs from his own pushcart in Coney Island in 1916. His hot dogs (which were Ida’s family recipe) sold for half the price of Feltman’s. “With Nathan Handwerker, the hot dog becomes a thing,” notes Katharina Vester, professor of history and American Studies at American University. This would eventually prove fateful for countless rest stops across America.
While Handwerker’s business grew rapidly, many customers were concerned— rightly—that a hot dog that cost only five cents might be unhealthy. According to Hersh, Handwerker got around that by offering free hot dogs to the doctors and nurses who worked at Coney Island Hospital. “The perception became ‘Well, if these doctors and nurses in their white lab coats are at the stand, these must be really good for you.’” Another version of the story is that Handwerker simply hired people to dress up as medical professionals.
Handwerker also hit upon another marketing ploy—he promoted his hot dogs as “kosher-style,” meaning all-beef, but lacking the rabbinical kosher certification, or hechsher. Handwerker’s “kosher-style” dogs attracted some Jews who had kept kosher before coming to America, but more notably, non-Jews who assumed that kosher hot dogs were higher quality than non-kosher ones. (Hebrew National, founded in 1905, followed a similar path of capitalizing on customers’ desires for a product perceived as better quality. They adopted their famous slogan, “We answer to a higher authority,” in 1965, although how kosher their meat really is has been subject to controversy and lawsuits.) The term “kosher-style” has become mainstream in recent decades, but originated with Handwerker on the Coney Island boardwalk. Hot dogs also inspired anoth-
er of America’s most enduring marketing gimmicks—Oscar Meyer’s Wienermobile. The first Weinermobile was created in 1936, but college-age “hotdoggers” continue to roll around the country for “meat and greets” to promote their product. Fun fact: Former House Speaker Paul Ryan once drove a wienermobile while interning for Oscar Meyer in college.
Hot dogs have also become inextricably tied to America’s favorite pastime— baseball. One story goes that a German immigrant named Chris von der Ahe, owner of the St. Louis Browns, began selling hot dogs at the stadium in 1893, inspiring other owners to replicate his move. Another story has it that Harry M. Stevens, an English immigrant in Ohio, fell in love with baseball and quickly recognized the need for snacks at the games. After Stevens’ death, one eulogist called him “the man who gave fame to the hot dog.” Regardless, by 1939 hot dogs had become so American that President Roosevelt served them to England’s King George VI at an Independence Day celebration (according to The New York Times, George asked for seconds).
Today, around 19 million hot dogs a year are eaten at American baseball games alone, according to the NHDSC. Hot dogs and sausages account for $7.68 billion in sales and untold tons of emulsified meat. The skinny little meat stick has become an American cultural icon as
well, inspiring luminaries ranging from Roy Lichtenstein to contemporary New York artists Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw, whose 65-foot-long hydraulic hot dog spewed confetti all over Times Square every day at noon during its installation there in May and June.
And hot dogs continue to be the subject of controversy. Much ink (or mustard) has been spilled over the question of whether the term “hot dog” refers to a sausage in a bun, or just the sausage itself. There’s then the further question of whether, in a bun, the hot dog qualifies as a sandwich. (The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ruled that it does, with the caveat that it ultimately depends on the definition of sandwich.) Length also matters: To call a hot dog “foot-long” in New York, it legally has to be at least 8 inches. Also at issue is whether plantbased hot dogs qualify: After signing a marketing deal with Impossible Foods, which makes vegan meat alternatives, champion competitive eater Joey Chestnut was banned from Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest.
Finally, the question of which hot dog toppings—chili and cheese (definitely not kosher), classic condiments, or everything under the sun as they do in Chicago—are appropriate or not is far too contentious to delve into here. So in the end, the heated disputations about the humble hot dog may be the most Jewish thing about it.
BOOK REVIEW ROBERT SIEGEL
To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People
By Noah Feldman Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 416 pp.
Noah Feldman’s To Be A Jew Today is an ambitious undertaking accomplished with a deep appreciation of Jewish thought and scripture, a willingness to be provocative, and no small amount of wit. Feldman is a Harvard Law School professor, a multilingual polymath whose CV reads like a sketch for a comic-book action hero: Super Jew. Raised in an Orthodox household by Harvard faculty parents, he attended the Maimonides School, a Jewish day school billed as the beacon of Modern Orthodox education in New England, and went from there to its older, secular fellow beacon, Harvard, where he graduated summa cum laude. Throw in a Rhodes Scholarship, Yale Law School (where he was an editor of
the law review), a Supreme Court clerkship and you have a scholar who is conversant with the works of both Maimonides and James Madison, a Jewish public intellectual capable of leaping tall ideas in a single bound.
To Be A Jew Today is subtitled A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People. It is a book designed to explain us, I suppose to others, but primarily to ourselves. No easy task, that. It entails classifying Jews, not by the names of their movement affiliations but by the ideas and beliefs that undergird those affiliations or, alternatively, by their flight from both affiliation and belief, in the manner of godless “bagel-and-lox Jews.” Along the way we also meet, among others: “Traditionalist” Jews who study Torah all day in pursuit of spiritual elevation, and other Traditionalists who study all day just for the sake of studying; Zionists who see citizenship in a modern Israel displacing religion as the definition of Jewish identity, and other Zionists for whom Israel promises to be a base of operations for a Messiah King’s dominion; Reconstructionist Jews for whom worship and congregational life represent a Jewish civilization in which God is a function of their own choice to believe or not; and Reform and Conservative Jews who have found in their Judaism an expression of social justice and human rights that their forebears sought and found in America and that their European cousins saw stripped from them along with their culture, their property and their lives.
I cannot do justice to the breadth of Feldman’s guide. Suffice it to say that it is well worth the read, offering readers from many branches of the Jewish family tree a glimpse of other boughs and limbs and what their close and distant cousins in Jewishness make of life in the family. For Feldman, this is a work beyond the boundaries of his usual turf. His field is constitutional law. His scholarship has included medieval Islam’s reaction to Aristotelian thought. He helped write the first draft of Iraq’s post-Saddam constitution. His perspective is that of an observant Jew who recalls his Modern
Orthodox upbringing and education as intellectually and spiritually nurturing. His comfort with the Jewish life he was born into was challenged when he married a (non-Jewish) Korean-American woman, an act he has claimed (not in this book but in a New York Times Magazine article some years ago) led to his erasure from his beloved high school’s alumni pictures and documents. A former president of Yeshiva University commented in print at the time accusing him of wanting to have his cake and eat it too: marrying out (“violating a fundamental law”) and being spared the social consequences. From this encounter, one might expect Feldman’s survey of Jewishness to reveal a bitter side. To the contrary, he is remarkably generous. He writes of the warm family life of Haredim who choose communal living under rabbinical leadership. In his treatment of Reform Judaism, he observes Reform’s theological insistence on a covenant with God freely arrived at, not at risk of divine retribution, despite such a threat appearing in the Torah. These groups represent radically different interpretations of what it means to be a Jew, and Feldman’s stance is to explore and explain, not to excoriate.
Among his many observations and claims, the one that I find sticking with me most strongly is his diagnosis of the state of progressive (mostly Reform and Conservative) Jewish theology and the dilemma it faces in a time of challenge to Israel and to the fluid relationship of American Jewish identity and Israeli identity.
As Feldman sees it, progressive Jews have adopted two new pillars of contemporary theology since the second half of the last century: Israel and the Holocaust. “To Progressives,” he writes, “the word of God as passed to Moses and the elders and the rabbis"—that is, the chain of custody that justifies traditionalists' deference to Orthodox rabbinic leadership—"is in need of editing and renewal in the light of morality as we are given to realize and apprehend it over time.”
The progressives’ early indifference, if not opposition, to Zionism, he writes, gave way to devotion to the cause after
the wars of 1967 and 1973. The first war exhibited Jewish rebirth and recovery from the annihilation of European Jewry; the second revived fears of the potential annihilation of Jews in their Middle Eastern refuge. In the 1980s, Feldman writes, there emerged
a new distinctly Progressive American Jewish synthesis of the centrality of the Holocaust and the redemptive narrative of the creation of Israel…. At the level of theological narrative, it made some partial sense out of the deaths of the six million by depicting Israel as the redemptive solution to the problem of genocidal antisemitism.
As a measure of the centrality of this sequence of catastrophe and redemption to progressive Judaism, Feldman offers a thought experiment. What if a rabbi told her congregation that on some days she thought that we “should just get over the Holocaust and move on”? Or that on some days “I find I believe the State of Israel should not exist”? He assumes she would soon be out of a job, unlike rabbis who have admitted to “on some days” doubting that God exists or that the exodus from Egypt is historical fact. This narrative of Holocaust and Israel is more serious, not a modern-day Purim story with its plot of genocidal menace followed by a surprise happy ending but a pair of solemn attachments that elevate worldly experiences in our times to the stuff of theology. At the same time, the progressive insistence on tikkun olam, repairing the world, expands the righteous battle cry of “Never Again” from a nationalist slogan to a universal value.
I am sure that many progressives would resist what they might see as Feldman’s unfair reduction of their Judaism. Personally, I am intrigued by it. Since the rise of neo-Kahanism in Israel from the fringe to the Cabinet, I have wondered about the Israeli flag that stands beside the bimah in my synagogue. Reform Jews’ embrace of Israel once entailed admiration for the leaders who created the state and the virtues of its pioneers. Would a government led by an Itamar
Ben-Gvir, or a Bezalel Smotrich, lead to the mothballing of Israeli flags? And the new salience in Israel’s government of Jewish nationalists who oppose any Palestinian state with messianic zeal is not the only problem with adopting Israel’s survival as a theological pillar. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been an unconscionable violation of human rights. Israel’s need for Russian cooperation in Syria and its ties to Jewish communities in both Ukraine and Russia have led it to adopt a stance toward Russia's war in Ukraine that is more nuanced than many progressive Jews feel comfortable with.
I point this out to question, not the logic of Israel’s policy, but rather the theological reliability of a state that will necessarily have its own specific, sometimes narrow geopolitical and diplomat-
This Jewish public intellectual is capable of leaping tall ideas in a single bound.
ic interests. Feldman was still writing when the war in Gaza got underway. He does not speculate on what effect it may have on ties between progressive Jews and Israelis, but he does observe that Israel’s credibility as a democratic state mindful of social justice is a requisite for the state’s standing as an example of progressive tikkun olam.
In fact, I think we are beginning to see variants of Feldman’s thought experiments about progressive rabbis playing out in real life. Two students at the small but influential Reconstructionist movement’s rabbinical college dropped out and wrote about what they claimed was harassment for their pro-Israeli views. In fact, so many students from the college have been active in anti-Israel protests that the seminary's president felt obliged to say that the school has no litmus test on
Israel or Zionism, meaning that neither support nor criticism of Israel is required. We’ll see if the two who quit, or their activist classmates, find congregations.
And the Holocaust? The writer Dara Horn is neither a rabbi nor a theologian, but she has argued, in her book People Love Dead Jews and her reporting for The Atlantic, that a Jewish and non-Jewish preoccupation with universalizing the Holocaust in museums and school curricula has led people to equate Jewishness not just with victimhood but specifically with a form of victimhood that’s in the past, somewhere else, ignoring both contemporary antisemitism and the vitality of contemporary Judaism. The message of such universalizing, according to Horn, is that we are really all the same and should be treated as such. This, she believes, not only sells short the distinctive nature of Jewish civilization, community and worship; as we have seen in the anti-Israel protests of the past several months, it does not even guarantee Jews admission to the ranks of today’s self-styled victims. Horn is not saying “Let’s move on” from the Holocaust, but she has raised questions about spreading Holocaust education that were not discussed 20 or 30 years ago.
To Be a Jew Today is not a user’s manual. It describes how Jews today use the instructions for living contained in Hebrew scripture. The one constant that Feldman finds in the great variety of Jewish religious experience is the notion of Jews struggling with God. Jacob’s punishing night of wrestling with God (or, depending on the interpretation, with an angel) is a conversion experience—Jacob emerges renamed “Israel”—that establishes a people determined to embrace and wrestle with God for eternity. The struggle may entail observing dietary laws, studying Torah or fighting for social justice. It is, Feldman writes, “a covenant and a conflict and a concord all at the same time.” One thing is for sure: To be a Jew is a complicated matter.
Robert Siegel is Moment’s special literary correspondent.
BOOK REVIEW GLORIA LEVITAS
What are we to make of Barbara Walters? She was the first woman to break through the glass ceiling that governed TV news broadcasting, the first woman to cohost a network evening news program and a feminist icon—without ever taking part in the feminist movement. She was driven not by ideology, but by her mother Dena’s fearfulness and by her early experience of the financial insecurity created by her reckless father, Lou Walters. Both parents were children of immigrants who had fled antisemitism in Russia and Poland. A charming impresario, Lou made and lost several fortunes during and after her childhood. Barbara herself viewed her own
obsessive ambition primarily as a consequence of the love and resentment (in her autobiography, she called it love and hate) that she felt for her mentally challenged sister, Jackie, whom she felt obliged to support financially.
As dogged as Walters herself, author Susan Page has, in this fascinating, dense and lengthy volume, set Walters’s life in context with detailed descriptions of the world in which she maneuvered and the contradiction between her public and private personas. The rampant sexism of the TV news industry demanded incredible strength. She confronted and overcame the rage with which male colleagues reacted to her success, but had less success in her personal life, with four failed marriages (twice to the same man, real estate developer and TV producer Merv Adelson) and a devastatingly troubled relationship with her adopted daughter. After her retirement in 2014 and death in 2022, she seemed to have slipped from our collective memory.
Rulebreaker helps restore the visibility she deserves. Walters was intelligent, hardworking, good-looking and highly competitive. Her determination to support her family became an obsession when her father attempted suicide in 1958. She was 29 at that point and had taken a job in television with no particular goal in mind. The feminist revolution was in its infancy: In the late 1950s, women who worked in the TV news industry were invisible, employed behind the scenes as uncredited writers, secretaries or researchers. When they did appear on screen, they reported only on “female” issues such as homemaking and fashion. Hired with the expectation that most would leave to marry and have children, they were treated as highly disposable.
As Page tells it, Walters realized immediately that she could achieve financial security only if she could join the wellpaid men who broadcast the news. She was good at her work, bold and fearless, and she pushed for advancement, refusing to take no for an answer. Her employers recognized her ability to draw viewers and her talent as an interviewer. Soon she
gained the right to cohost nightly broadcasts and, shortly afterward, the right to deliver the news. As cohost of ABC’s Evening News, she fought publicly with her male colleagues, particularly Harry Reasoner, and persisted despite constant attempts to undermine her. Cohosts interrupted her, and cameramen had to be careful to avoid showing Reasoner when she was speaking because of his constant on-air scowls.
While Walters and ABC colleague Diane Sawyer were fierce competitors, especially when it came to landing high-profile interviews, the press reveled in their “catfights.” The competition among the men was just as fierce, but rarely mentioned by media watchers who condemned her publicly for the same behavior. No matter how successful she became or how many milestones she logged—the first woman to coanchor a morning show (Today on NBC); the first person to demand and get a million-dollar salary (from ABC in 1976) for coanchoring the evening news; the first woman to be taken seriously as an interviewer; the first woman who remained on TV as she aged—she was always afraid that it could all be taken away from her.
Her public life seemed incredibly glamorous. She hobnobbed with senators and had affairs with two of them, John Warner of Virginia and Edward Brooks of Massachusetts (the latter was not just an illicit but an interracial affair). She numbered Nora Ephron, Gloria Steinem, Bette Midler and columnist Liz Smith among her close friends. Photos in the book show her with Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Elizabeth Taylor and dozens of other rich and famous people, including designers Yves Saint Laurent and Oscar de la Renta. Her more unsavory friends and acquaintances included arms dealers, members of the mafia and, most notoriously, lawyer Roy Cohn, to whom she remained fiercely loyal to the end of his life because he had once killed a tax action against her father. She had a long-standing acquaintance with Donald Trump and, memorably, interviewed him in 1990. Her
many interviews brought her renown, particularly one with Fidel Castro in 1977; she interviewed every sitting president, and first lady, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. (Even such triumphs often came with a cost to her reputation, as media critics accused her of using her femininity to get interviews.)
To add to her problems, Walters had a speech defect that affected her pronunciation of the letter “r.” This defect seems not to have bothered her in childhood or in her early career, but having it parodied by Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live embarrassed and upset her. Later, her sense of humor asserted itself and she embraced the caricature, even referring to herself as “Baba Wawa” on occasion. And for viewers—or at least for me—it was an asset, making her appear slightly vulnerable and all the more authentic.
Walters retired from The View in 2014 as the result of bad health, cognitive decline and a fall. She died in 2022 at the age of 93. Although her own internal demons may have driven her to pursue her career to its pinnacle, by doing so she paved the way for women such as Oprah Winfrey, Katie Couric, Connie Chung and even, despite their well-known rivalry, Diane Sawyer. The inscription on her tombstone, which she composed herself, reads, “No regrets—I had a great life.” She had achieved what she wanted: She supported her family, became rich and famous, enjoyed exciting work and had a number of dear friends who surrounded and tried to protect her to the end. To some, her affairs, failed marriages and fraught relationship with her daughter might suggest a less sunny verdict, but who are we to judge? Read this compelling book and decide for yourself.
Walters once remarked that women wanted to have it all, but that she thought this impossible. She settled for what she had and left a legacy for other women to follow. For that we owe her our thanks, and maybe a degree of compassion that she apparently rarely experienced during her glamorous and troubled life.
Gloria Levitas is a cultural anthropologist and the author of five books.
Chabad, continued from page 37
The place of the final rebbe is an open question in Chabad theology. “The Rebbe is still central to Lubavitch life and thought, as well as to the thinking and behavior of the shluchim,” says sociologist Newfield. “The idea that the Rebbe is memutza hamechaber, the intermediary that connects the follower to God, is a fundamental belief in Chabad Hasidism.”
Newfield was 11 when the Rebbe died. He recalls hearing Schneerson speak at 770 Eastern Parkway. “I remember seeing him, hearing his voice,” Newfield says. “Now you have a generation of young Lubavitchers who never met the Rebbe. A generation of young shluchim spending their life trying to help secular Jews connect to a person they’ve never met. That’s a tremendous challenge.”
Even if they never heard him live, it is likely they are familiar with his voice. Schneerson was a prolific writer and speaker for more than 50 years, addressing a wide range of Jewish and non-Jewish topics. Chabad’s educational and media arms have located, digitized, edited and captioned in English thousands of hours of the Rebbe’s talks; some 10,000 videos are available on chabad.org. And “people are still finding sichot,” transcriptions of the Rebbe’s Shabbat lectures that were written down afterward by Hasidim who had committed them to memory, says Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, executive director of chabad.org. “He might as well be an active presence. They’re continually seeing him and hearing him,” says Sarna.
Chabad might be its own denomination or something else altogether; it doesn’t really matter. Denomination—a word Jonathan Sarna eschews, arguing that it places a Protestant framework on Judaism—is not the lens through which Chabad views itself. “For Chabad, all Jews are Chabad,” says Joshua Shanes, professor of religious studies at the College of Charleston, who for a time identified as Chabad. In choosing to appeal to all Jews instead of just a subset, Chabad has become an undeniable force in American Judaism. Rabbi David Eliezrie explains, “We are mainstream Judaism today.” M
Sometime around July, the annual Torah reading cycle in synagogues reaches a portion called Balak that has a scene with a talking donkey. It’s never taught in Hebrew school, and it always struck me as the quintessential summer reading: The setting is familiar, but there’s a little extra room for the unexpected to happen.
Surveying possible summer reads, we’ve tried to select books with something of that same unexpectedness, whether the story they tell is imagined or real, whether it unfolds in the past, in the present or in a time that never existed. Some of these books and lives are enmeshed in Torah or Jewish observance; on others, Jewish experience lays only a feather-light touch. All offer a surprise or an adventure. Climb aboard!
By Noa Silver
She Writes Press, 312 pp
College graduate Elena Berg arrives in the Bay Area in 2011 as the very model of a modern seeker of enlightenment. She’s got a full set of ideals, a Teach for America job that will let her pursue them, and her mother’s copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet to connect her to the stories of radical activism she was raised on. Her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, taught geography to middle-schoolers and imbued her with his love of the profession;
her mother, after a wild youth that included the Weathermen, teaches history at a university. Elena’s path is clear.
At first everything seems within reach. Elena finds a roommate who, like her, wants to do something real, to get away from “all my i-banking and consultant friends back home.” (“I had those friends too, and so I laughed and nodded, and we linked arms as we watched the sun start to set over the Bay.”) She falls in love with Kyle, an urban farmer, at an Occupy march. But her dreams lose altitude, as dreams can. Her school somehow fails to assign her a classroom, and she struggles to get the magic of Emily Dickinson across to high schoolers while teaching in a corner of the cafeteria. Nostalgic for her grandparents, she tracks down a Passover Seder and brings her friends to it, but they miss the point and argue with her about Israel. Later, she leaves the teaching job to work at an educational startup, which shortly afterward “pivots” from educational products to develop a routine, if lucrative, scanner app. Whose ideals, if anyone’s, is Elena living? What is the way forward? It’s the question that governs many a classic novel: How do you find out who you really are? This very contemporary voyage of self-discovery is a satisfying take on an eternal story.
By Lisa Barr Harper, 368 pp
I’m not sure a novel about the sufferings of the Warsaw Ghetto should be this much fun, but Lisa Barr sure knows
how to put together a high-stakes revenge thriller. The revenge belongs to aged Hollywood idol Lena Browning, who was once Bina Blonski, a young Jewish actress in Warsaw whose phenomenal acting skills and Aryan looks served her in resistance, escape, self-reinvention—and more. At the novel’s opening, Lena is finally set to reveal her dark memories to an equally strongwilled young star, Sienna Hayes, who’s determined to play Lena in a blockbuster movie about her life. Sienna wants to write and direct the movie, star as Lena and win an Oscar. But Lena has bigger plans even than that.
Barr, the author of the bestselling Woman on Fire and other novels, sets up a masterful plot-within-a-plot, then throws escalating surprises like a series of fireworks. She salts the over-the-top plot twists with real historical detail; even the valiant and doomed historians of the Oyneg Shabbos group, who buried the archives of the Warsaw Ghetto in milk cans so that the truth would outlive them, make an appearance. (That story has been catnip to novelists, understandably so, since the resurfaced archives were catalogued and publicized in 2009; Lauren Grodstein’s We Must Not Think of Ourselves late last year was a more serious treatment of the material, though it still managed to add some suspense, not easy when we know the historical outcome.) Don’t read The Goddess of Warsaw for serious themes, though; read it for high drama, great movie effects and Nazi villains so evil and twisted that they are almost (dare I say it) funny.
By Reuven Fenton Central Avenue/Simon & Schuster, 288 pp
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A somewhat far-fetched PR blurb tried to sell this novel as a Jewish “Rumspringa,” the year Amish youths supposedly take off to sample all the wickedness of the outside world before settling into a lifetime of abstinence from it. Better to stick to English and just call it a romp. A first novel by a longtime New York Post reporter, who obviously knows his way around both the American heartland and Haredi Brooklyn, this kooky picaresque tale starts in a sweltering pinprick of a town in Georgia where twins David and Marty suddenly see a strange apparition: a Chabad menorah. It’s the first of many surprises. When
It’s the question that governs many a classic novel: How do you find out who you really are?
they get home, their mother, Ida Mae, is chatting with the new Chabad rabbi and confiding a secret: She never mentioned it to them, but she’s Jewish, so they are, too.
Placed under the rabbi’s tutelage, David takes the usual bar-mitzvah-and-out trajectory; but Marty, henceforth Mayer, goes all in, becoming a yeshiva bocher in deepest Williamsburg and, soon enough, a fully subsidized full-time Talmud student married to the Rav’s daughter. But when Ida Mae dies, leaving a letter with the catastrophic news that she just made the whole Jewish thing up, Mayer is thrown into limbo. He manages to get an appointment for conversion in a week—though who knows what
the Rav’s daughter will say about their questionable marriage—but meanwhile, what can the brothers do but hit the road? And can the cloistered Mayer and the aggressive David rebuild their relationship while traipsing through New Orleans, Instagram and other unsavory precincts of American life?
Does it work? Maybe, maybe not. But in the tradition of the great American road trip novel, complete with requisite stray dog, there’s definitely something here for everyone. Also, I really want Fenton to write a sequel about Mayer’s weird and terrifying wife.
By Leah Hager Cohen Bellevue Literary Press, 416 pp.
This strange and beautiful puzzle of a novel has two interlocking halves titled To (starting with the front cover) and Fro (commencing upside-down from the back). Together, they form a dreamy fable about telling, learning and knowing. The first half opens incomprehensibly: We are in a foggy, indistinct world. The narrator, who’s on a journey, has a bicycle, though otherwise the landscape is primitive—or maybe post-apocalyptic, it’s hard to tell. She’s searching for the Captain, who has left on horseback, saying only that he is going to a place called Away-From-Here.
Later, the narrator comes to a long, low house from which emanates a hum of discussion: a House of Study. The people in the house are learning from a large book with a block of text in the middle of every page. Discussions of its meaning are arranged around the sides in different typefaces. The fog lifts slightly: These people, whoever and whenever they are, are studying Talmud. But the mystery only deepens: To continue with the book, the reader must turn it (get it?) and read from the other cover, the side called Fro, which unfolds in a completely different world where a different child is on a different journey, or possibly the same one.
The epigraph for the “Fro” portion is
the famous line about the Talmud from Pirkei Avot, “Turn it and turn it, for all is therein.” The “To” epigraph reads, “There is no before and after in the Torah.” Whether or not reading this book is itself a form of Talmud study, you’ll never find a more haunting evocation of its essential nature, or of learning that echoes across the generations.
By Esther Goldenberg
100 Block by Row House, 384 pp.
In Genesis 35:8 there’s a stray reference, without context, to “Rebekah’s nurse, Deborah,” who “died and was buried near Beit El, beneath a tree, and that tree was called the Crying Tree.” Deborah otherwise goes unmentioned. It’s one of several apparent throwaway lines in the Torah that suggest the loss of once-familiar material, usually about female characters. (Another is the reference to Miriam’s miraculous well, which is mentioned only when she dies and it disappears, but which had apparently been following the Israelites in the desert.) Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent signally advanced the project of filling in such gaps with what amounts to feminist midrash, but there are abundant lacunae still to fill.
Esther Goldenberg’s contribution to this genre could have been cheesy— many are—but instead it’s unexpected and creative. She invents a lineage for Deborah, riffing off a line where Abraham and Sarah are described as going down to Egypt with their goods and servants and their nefesh, or spirit. Since nefesh can also mean a person, she spins this into a reference to an unmentioned sister of Lot and cousin of Abraham, named Hallel, who went down to Egypt with the family and was left there as a concubine to Pharaoh. Deborah, Hallel’s granddaughter, is raised in Egypt. Sent back to Lot’s family after the Pharaoh’s death, she serves her cousin Rebekah and accompanies her when Rebekah marries Isaac, thus joining the familiar dysfunctional family of the patriarchs.
As a prism through which to view this family and its travails, this con-
cept proves strikingly fertile. Deborah helps nurse Esau when Rebekah has her twins (of course—she’s overwhelmed) and nurtures a bond with Esau, which persists long after he is alienated from Jacob. Their connection plays a role in the brothers’ later reconciliation. When Jacob returns from 20 years with Laban, accompanied by a sprawling and equally dysfunctional family of his own, Deborah connects with young Joseph and persuades him to write down her life story on the eponymous “scrolls.” Is it convincing? Can more of these reimagined stories be sustained? This volume is marketed as Book 1 of a planned “Desert Songs Trilogy,” and I for one am up for it.
By Sara Glass
One Signal Publishers/Atria, 304 pp.
In an incongruous echo of California Dreaming (see above), figuring out who you really are and what to do about it is the theme of this lively and soul-baring memoir. It’s a highly readable contribution to the genre that’s come to be referred to as OTD, for “off the derech”— memoirs that tell of the journey from an ultra-Orthodox upbringing on the derech, or path, to a break from it and a life in the secular world.
Sara Glass’s memoir is notable for a few additions to this familiar plotline. First, though raised in the strict Gur Hasidic sect, from early adolescence she’s felt—and acted on—her sexual and emotional passion for female friends, though she is certain of its wrongness and desperate to turn from it and subsume herself in marriage. Sara (then known as Malka) has another drive that sets her apart: With a mother who struggles with mental health issues, and a sister sent away to Israel because of similar though unspecified instability, she is secretly determined to earn a PhD in psychology and plunge into research that can make her sister well.
Though the path is predictably thorny, involving two marriages, two children, a complicated custody battle, layers of secrets and betrayals and a struggle to own her true nature, the letters on the author’s bio—“By Dr. Sara Glass, Ph.D., LCSW”—tell of the triumphant outcome. Fittingly, Glass has ended up as, in her own description, a therapist treating “members of the queer community and individuals who have survived trauma to live bold, honest and proud lives.” It can’t have been easy to write, but the struggle for honesty pays off.
By Mimi Zieman Falcon, 244 pp.
Sometimes, finding your true nature means unlearning a lot of what you thought you knew about it. Mimi Zieman, a daughter of immigrants whose father survived the Holocaust, always saw herself as timid and cautious—until her third year of medical school, when she volunteered to be the sole medical support staff on an experimental four-person climb of Mount Everest. How did that happen? And how on earth was she to deal with the situation in which she’d landed herself, highly dangerous and demanding double measures of both courage and empathy?
In a thoughtful memoir that evidently marinated for many years—Zieman was 25 in 1988, when she climbed Everest, and has had a full career since then as a writer and ob/gyn—the author looks back on the moments of youthful clarity that propelled her to twin passions, a love of medicine and a love of the mountains. Ironically, an encounter not with an inspiring doctor but with a nasty one steered her to medicine, giving her the idea she could be a kinder, more approachable gynecologist than the one who frightened her at 13. Later, pure nerve sent her up the mountain, but it was the frightful conditions and near brushes with death that ultimately taught her to let go of her fears and “dance.” It
makes a great tale. Few people can claim to have attained personal growth in such extreme and colorful circumstances.
By David S. Tatel Little, Brown and Company, 352 pp.
What makes a Jewish memoir Jewish? Nothing in Judge David S. Tatel’s memoir directly addresses his religious identity—though I have vivid memories of his “officiating” at a moot court on a point of Talmudic law at my son’s Hebrew High School graduation ceremony. Rather, his story tells of his lifelong struggle to come to terms with a different aspect of his identity. From an early age he had retinitis pigmentosa, a progressive eye ailment that would render him completely blind by his mid-30s.
Few people can claim to have attained personal growth in such extreme and colorful circumstances.
As a successful civil rights lawyer and later a federal judge, Tatel writes, he strove to ignore and downplay anything that would tag him as a person with a disability, let alone as “the blind judge.” After retiring from 30 years on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, he sat down to write what he thought would be a memoir about the values that have shaped his life and his distinguished legal and judicial career. (The seat he occupied on the D.C. court was the one RBG had held before her elevation to the Supreme Court.) As he wrote, he found that his blindness was inextricably intertwined with the story. The book has garnered media atten-
tion for the bluntness with which it criticizes the current Supreme Court and its rulings. But it’s also worth reading for the sheer moral heft of Tatel’s career and the generosity with which he shares his journey of identity.
By Jessica Fein Behrman House, 280 pp.
It’s hard to tell the story of a child’s illness and death, let alone your own child’s, without drowning in sentiment. Despite all the superstructure of modern medicine, there’s no escaping the fact that these tragic stories happen. Grieving parents have shared them in unforgettable accounts (most recently journalist Sarah Wildman in her essays about her daughter Orli, who died of liver cancer in 2022). Jessica Fein tells hers with a gentle touch and a palpable love of her daughter that make the story gripping and wrenching in equal degrees. Adopted from overseas as a baby, Dalia radiated delight and cheer long before she could speak. But she never quite attained stability in walking—by kindergarten, she was stumbling like a toddler—and was diagnosed soon after with a rare degenerative mitochondrial disease to which she ultimately succumbed in her late teens.
I’d read about two-thirds of the way into this story, including a touching account of the author’s father’s death, before I realized that the father in question was Moment’s own cofounding editor, Leonard Fein. And indeed, the family’s Jewish values suffuse the story, which ends with Dalia’s valiant bat mitzvah, accomplished despite paralysis and a breathing tube that made speech impossible. “I’d need to decide whether the blessing or the curse defined me,” Fein writes in the painful aftermath of her daughter’s death, concluding that being mother to Dalia, a person of such joy and light, after all and despite everything was more blessing than curse.
Amy E. Schwartz is Moment’s opinion and book editor.
BOOK REVIEW AMY E.SCHWARTZ
henia, a Los Angeles-based aspiring actress who’s the protagonist of Katya Apekina’s Mother Doll, is having a rough pregnancy. Her husband Ben, unready for fatherhood, has left her; worse, her long-dead Russian Jewish great-grandmother, Irina, has contacted her from the Other Side through a medium and insists on long phone calls in which she shares the story, previously unknown in the family, of how she abandoned Zhenia’s beloved grandmother Vera at age 5 in an orphanage in revolutionary Russia. As the pregnancy progresses, so does the haunting; soon Irina has jumped the telephone wires to take up residence in Zhenia’s apartment, and Zhenia, having given birth, must juggle care of her newborn son with the aggressive ghost competing with him for attention and breast milk.
Zhenia has it easy compared with Hannah Bennett, the central character in Yael Goldstein-Love’s The Possibilities, the mother of an eight-month-old son named Jack who nearly died at birth in a difficult Cesarean. He came so close, in fact, that Hannah is tormented by flashes of a false memory in which a solemn nurse carried the still, blue baby away from her across the delivery room. Is she experiencing normal postpartum anxiety and ambivalence (and exasperating her husband Adam, “a goy from Ottawa” who likes things logical), or is there a parallel universe in which her baby died and that split off from hers, multiverse-style, in the moment of crisis? The question would be theoretical, but the alternative timeline seems somehow to be threatening Jack’s safety. It’s hard enough to parent a newborn in one universe; Hannah, it seems, must navigate millions.
Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell Vintage
What is it about motherhood, especially early motherhood, that has been propelling novelists lately toward the surreal and the supernatural? Is it the exhaustion, the intensity, the seemingly sky-high stakes of every moment’s choice? Or just a backlash from the apple-pie centuries, when the only acceptably shared feelings about bearing
I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood, Science and Art by Emily C. Bloom St. Martin’s Press, 352 pp.
and rearing children (from the mother’s point of view, anyway) were best expressed with hearts and flowers? Those centuries seem increasingly distant at a time when the political discourse, postDobbs, understandably stresses notions of pregnancy and motherhood as states so intense and costly to the mother that forcing a woman to undergo them
should be unthinkable. (Despite a recent spatter of conservative commentary suggesting that narratives like this suggest a feminist aversion to motherhood, I’d say these kinds of depictions, far from condemning the experience, are just giving it its due.)
Whatever the cause, you can take your pick of recent novels—particularly, though not exclusively, by writers who are also Jewish mothers—that portray motherhood not only as a raw and primal experience (leaky incisions, leaky breasts, sleeplessness, obsessive fear, obsessive love) but as one that is so intense and extreme that it breaks the bounds of realist fiction to encompass monsters, demons and other odd visitations. These aren’t genre thrillers or supermarket Gothics, either, but mainstream literary works by established novelists; they make claims to say something true about life, and they deliver. To do justice in serious fiction to the reality of having a baby under a year old, apparently, you need a touch of the impossible.
For Zhenia, in Mother Doll, the supernatural dimension flows from her relationship with her grandmother, Vera, who has helped raise her while barely remaining civil with her own daughter, Zhenia’s mother Marina. (When an interviewer with the online magazine Kveller asked Apekina about her “obsession” with “intergenerational matrilinear trauma,” the novelist responded, “That is my beat, for sure.”) Zhenia knows her husband hates the idea of having a child, but she can’t give up on the (unplanned) pregnancy. “You’re disappearing and this baby is appearing,” she tells the comatose Vera over the phone, “and the two feel connected to me.”
Vera dies soon after. Alas, it’s not she but the spectral great-grandmother, Irina, who makes her presence known when Zhenia goes into labor: “Zhenia felt like her body was becoming a portal and something deep inside was being pried apart. ‘Not just my cervix, but like, something in another dimension.’” And it’s Irina’s presence that has to be resolved, first by Zhenia taking in the full, catastrophic story of Irina’s mater-
nal failure and what happened between her and Vera, and then, more concretely, through a purely physical, hilariously motherhood-flavored form of exorcism.
Irina’s tormented self-questioning about whether she did the right thing for her child—so intense that it allows her to bridge the gap from the dead to the living—is echoed in the passionate emotions that power Hannah’s travels between worlds in Goldstein-Love’s The Possibilities. Is it good old Jewish-mother guilt, that notoriously powerful force, or something more purposeful? At first, Hannah is merely preoccupied with the false memory that Jack died at birth. Then, when he disappears from his crib,
What is it about motherhood, especially early motherhood, that has been propelling novelists lately toward the surreal and the supernatural?
those feelings merge with a conviction that it’s all her fault: “I was aware that it made no sense...there couldn’t possibly be any connection between my missing child and what my insurance reimbursement claims called adjustment disorder with postpartum onset and Adam called Jewish Mother Overdrive and I called the car-swerve feeling,” the sense that she could dip at any moment into a baleful alternate reality. “Fear was my mother tongue,” she muses, “but this level of fear right now, these past eight months, every second since the moment Jack was born…was something altogether different, something that broke open the rules of how the world worked.”
That kind of fear, which most parents will recognize without difficulty, becomes the force on which Hannah “rides the possibilities” from world to world, seeking a Jack who seems sometimes lost to her, sometimes close enough that her milk leaks. To find him, she has to sink deep into the intense physicality of motherhood, “breast milk, spit-up, soiled diapers; shrieks of displeasure that felt like the world ending, that I myself would end if I couldn’t soothe his fury and his pain; a little mouth sucking voraciously, skin against skin, wet and devouring, a confusing swirl of annihilation and contentment.” As with Zhenia, a big part of the answer turns out to be intergenerational, with Hannah’s own impaired and absent mother becoming her guide through the dimensions. Another piece of it is the surreal blending of identities that can make the mother/ baby dyad in real life so destabilizing to the sense of reality.
You don’t actually need to look to supernatural fiction for evidence of that feeling. A straightforward version turns up in a new nonfiction memoir by literary scholar Emily C. Bloom about learning to tend to her diabetic and hearing-impaired baby: “Motherhood… is itself an experience that troubles the distinction between self and other.”
The maternal-surrealism genre has been building for a while. I first noticed it in a non-Jewish context when my New Yorker feed served up a short story that first ran in 2018, Karen Russell’s “Orange World” (later anthologized in a volume of the same title). The haunted new mother in this case is Rae, who was told during pregnancy that she had a high statistical risk of a negative genetic outcome, panicked, and made a deal with a creature she believed to be the devil. The baby was born healthy, so Rae is stuck serving the devil, and serve him she does. Anything to protect her child.
Rae isn’t Jewish, probably, and as Jewish mothers go, these other mothers aren’t particularly Jewish, either—when asked whether she’ll circumcise her new son, Zhenia in Mother Doll responds, “No, people don’t do that anymore”—
but in one sense they embrace a view of motherhood that’s bound up in Jewish culture, the idea of the mother not as an angel in the house but as a sometimes terrifying bastion of strength and toughness. That stereotype may have been the butt of a generation of Jewish comedians, but these novels are in communication with it, albeit from the other side of the equation. Philip Roth’s nightmare Jewish mother isn’t someone you’d want to be, but you wouldn’t mind having her on your side if you got stuck between universes, or in an unfortunate contract requiring you to breastfeed the devil.
And community and female solidarity—admitting the unspeakable, facing
Part of the delight of these wacky stories is the way they plumb the near-unconscious memories of something that strained reality at the time.
it, drawing support from other beleaguered mothers—turns out to be the final element that saves these moms from the supernatural menaces with whom, or which, they’ve become entangled. When Hannah needs to “ride the possibilities” to the scariest emotional place of all, where she can connect with her lost mother, she asks her babies-and-newmoms group to sit with her and hold her hands—and they do, not even asking her to explain. The funniest moment in “Orange World” is when Rae finally admits to Yvette, an older, more experienced mom in her support group, that she’s not just having “trouble with night feedings,” as she said in the sharing circle;
actually, she’s sneaking out every night at 4 a.m. to crawl into a gutter and nurse a satanic rodent. She “watches Yvette’s face and awaits her reassignment, from weary stranger to dangerous lunatic,” but instead “a look of naked exasperation flashes across [Yvette’s] carefully madeup face and she responds, ‘That fucking thing. It’s been coming south of Powell?’”
It turns out that the junior-grade devil lies in wait for any member of the support group whose fear for her child has become sharp enough so that she’s willing to bargain. Having mutually fessed up, the moms band together for an exorcism—this one, in line with the suburban surrealist vibe, involves a minivan and a cat carrier.
I once asked a woman I think of as one of the ultimate Jewish mothers—a rabbi, no less, who raised five boys—what the early years had been like. “To be honest,” she replied, “I don’t really remember a thing about it.” Every mom I’ve quoted this to has laughed with recognition. Part of the delight of these wacky stories is the way they plumb the near-unconscious memories of something that strained reality at the time. It’s taken literature a while to catch up with the idea that “motherhood” is an experience undergone by terrified human beings in all their quirkiness, not a sentimental abstraction.
So mighty is the Jewish mother stereotype laid atop this abstraction that it’s a surprise to find what lurks beneath when it’s peeled away. In fact, the fears and truths here resonate well with the Jewish mother’s understanding of the world: The world is a scary place, a narrow bridge over profound insecurity and uncertainty, and having children in it is the scariest thing of all; moms are strong, and if necessary they can fight demons and monsters and the laws of physics; moms are on a hero quest that verges on the improbable. And when it all seems too much, and reality and parenting are too hard to bear, the best way to get through it is coming together with your community.
Amy E. Schwartz is Moment’s opinion and book review editor.
POEM DAVID BIESPIEL
Waking from a nightmare is a triumph of sorts—an escape from terror. Waking to a nightmare is terror itself. “Prisoner Z” conjures a dystopian world that exists today in countries we can name. Is this a dream narrative? A warning? Is it both? Image by image, the poem reminds us how suddenly our lives could change.
—Jody Bolz, Poetry Editor
I have come back to my own Life now—or now my life Has come back to me with ink On its finger. Above Avenue 7 Protesters are being shot. And the radio Stations have been off-air since They came under rocket and Arson attack after the coup. Now a trumpet, and blasts of Footsteps, though nothing visible Comes to save me and to Carry me down the staircase, Saying, But who are you, coming? Now Throwing yourself into a panic? Tonight the trains are slipping Past with their lights off. My name Is pulled under and doesn’t recognize Me anymore. My name, like An invisible sleep rolled up under A tree at the side of the building With darkness hammering for Hours. My name, arriving Tomorrow to cast a ballot, At night is punctuated by Gunfire and explosions. The Marginalized, the dazed, clap And sing, and the opposition Candidates boycott the public Square. I have seen this Piece of theater before But will not withdraw from The race, nor startle Awake to ask, Where am I?
David Biespiel is the author of twelve books, including the forthcoming volume, Beautiful Is the World: New and Selected Poems, 1996-2026.
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