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Sicily’s Jews have their first rabbi in 500 years. Italy’s Jewish establishment won’t accept them.
CATANIA, Italy (JTA) — Rabbi Gilberto Ventura believes his synagogue has the most beautiful view in the world. Located in the tower of a century-old castle on the slopes of Mt. Etna in the eastern Sicilian city of Catania, the synagogue is wedged between a snow-capped volcano and the sun-kissed Mediterranean sea.
The 49-year-old Brazil-born rabbi also thinks his congregation is one of the most unique in the world. It’s made up mainly of Bnei Anusim — descendants of Jews forced to hide their religious practice and convert to Catholicism after the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. Before that infamous decree, Sicily was home to tens of thousands of Jews.
The synagogue, which was first inaugurated last fall, is the result of decades of grassroots efforts by those descendants in Catania to find each other and forge a sense of community that had been lacking for centuries.
Hiring a full-time rabbi was the last piece of the puzzle, and Ventura, who has a long history of working with communities of Bnei Anusim in Brazil, was a natural candidate. He arrived in Catania in January.
“I really believe that the future Judaism in the world, especially in some places like Italy and, of course, Brazil, is connected to the Bnei Anusim, and the need to embrace the Bnei Anusim,” Ventura said.
But in an ongoing point of frustration, the formal organization representing Italian Jewry, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), does not recognize them as Jews.
“In the case of Catania, this strange Jewish community hasn’t passed all the steps the law requires,” said Giulio Di Segni, the vice president of UCEI.
He was referring to the fact that the community did not seek UCEI’s permission before establishing themselves under the name “Jewish community of Catania.” Per Italian law, UCEI has a monopoly on acknowledging and establishing Jewish communal life in Italy — including authority over who can use the term “Jewish community of” in formal ways.
“UCEI can’t accept this because it is too easy,” he added. “We are not against their synagogue or their way of prayer, but they cannot use the name ‘Jewish community of Catania.’”
The rooftop of the Castello Leucatia, where the community meets, has a large menorah and a view of the Mediterranean. (David I. Klein)
Catania’s Jewish community members told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a variety of stories about their Jewish backgrounds. Some came from families that always outwardly identified as Jewish. Others identified the source of family traditions practiced by parents and grandparents who — as descendants of Jews who faced persecution for practicing Judaism — still felt the need to hide aspects of their Jewishness from the public eye.
In the midst of questions about their ancestry, the majority of the Jewish community members have undergone Orthodox conversions. But that hasn’t led to their acceptance.
Benito Triolo, president of the Catania Jewish community, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he first came to Judaism at the age of 40, thanks to the insight of a Jewish friend in Palermo, Sicily’s capital and most populous city. Working together, they established a Charter of Sicilian Jewry, which aimed to identify and highlight the Jewish heritage of neighborhoods across the island.
While working on that project, Triolo came closer to his own Jewish heritage, and after years of study, he completed an Orthodox conversion through a rabbi in Miami 25 years ago.
Another community member, who was born Alessandro Scuderi but today goes by the name of Yoram Nathan, first felt drawn to Judaism as a child watching news of the Six-Day War in 1967. At first, he was laughed at by other members of his family — except his grandmother, who happened to have a tradition of lighting eight candles in early winter and baking flat unleavened bread around Easter time.
Decades of study later, Scuderi also completed a formal conversion to Judaism before an Orthodox rabbinic court, or beit din.
Others had more straightforward backgrounds.
“I was born in a Jewish family,” said David Scibilia, the community’s secretary. “Frankly speaking, we were not hiding or deep in the shadows in this part of the country.”
Scibilia said that his father explained to him that he was a Jew as early as the age of four. Within their own home, they observed holidays and kept Shabbat — no easy task since Italian schools at the time of his childhood in the 1970s had class on Saturdays. He did not eat meat until he was an adult and was able to acquire kosher meat.
He said that his family had maintained their Jewish identity since the days of the Inquisition and married amongst a small group of other similar families.
“I was a Jew, but not part of any community,” Scibilia said. “Just my family was my community.”
An aerial view of the city of Catania shows the Mt. Etna volcano in the background, Jan. 28, 28, 2022. (Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images)
Scibilia explained that once he had a child of his own, he realized he did not want her to have the same lonely Jewish experience. But when he reached out to UCEI, he said he found the proverbial door to organized Jewish life shut. Earning membership in Jewish community organizations across Western Europe involves a strict vetting process, and many groups require applicants to prove their mothers’ Jewishness according to varying standards.
Scibilia’s experience was echoed by Jews outside of the community in Catania and across Italy’s south who talked to JTA — a feeling of neglect or rejection by UCEI for those who fall outside of the norms of Italian Judaism.
UCEI currently recognizes 19 Jewish communities across northern Italy and just one in the south, in Naples, which has jurisdiction over the rest of the southern half of the peninsula and the island of Sicily. The organization recognizes around 28,000 Jews in total across the country.
Scibilia noted that despite his Jewish upbringing, he has multiple certificates of conversion from Orthodox rabbis. The first came from a beit din of American rabbis from who traveled to Syracuse, Sicily, to assess Scibilia and others like him in Sicily. His second comes from the conversion court of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, which is known for its exacting Orthodox standards.
Both were rejected by Italy’s own Orthodox rabbinate, and he was forced to stand before another rabbinic court in Italy.
“I have at this moment — don’t start to laugh — three documents that prove that I am a Jew, two Ketubah [marriage contracts] for my wedding, and so on, again and again and again,” Scibilia said.
Others’ experiences in the region have been even more fraught, he said.
“The problem in Italy, that if you try to study with any rabbi here, you can study for 20 years, maybe you can die even before you reach the end of the tunnel,” he said. “From my point of view, they are playing with the spirituality of these people.”
In a statement last year, UCEI called the the Catanians “a phantom ‘Jewish community’” and accused them of “misleading the local institutions and deluding believers and sympathizers into adhering to traditional religious rites, never actually recognized or authorized by the Italian rabbinical authority.”
“Between UCEI and the Italian republic is an agreement signed in ‘87,” Di Segni said. “This law means everything about Jewish communities in Italy is through the Union Jewish community in Italy (UCEI).”
Noemi Di Segni, shown in Rome in 2017, is president of the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy. (Stefano Montesi/Corbis via Getty Images)
Triolo said he isn’t too concerned about UCEI’s recognition.
“Ours is a process of refounding old communities that existed as early as 200 and up to 1492,” Triolo said. “Our recognition is already in our history. At that time the UCEI did not exist. We were there and we simply returned!”
No one knows when Jews first arrived in Sicily, but the Talmud tells a story that claims Rabbi Akiva, a well-known early rabbinic sage, visited the island in the early second century and told of a small Jewish community in Syracuse. Some historians believe the Roman writer Caecilius Calactinus — who was born in a town near Messina in the first century B.C.E — to have been of Jewish origin.
All agree that over the course of history, Sicily’s Jews watched as the island was traded between Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Normans and half a dozen other empires. The narrative has also long been that Jewish life there ended five centuries ago, under Spanish rule.
The Spanish empire’s Jews suffered the same fate as Jews from the Iberian peninsula, who would become known to the world as Sephardim when they were expelled in 1492.
The descendents of Spain — and Sicily — spread throughout the world, establishing communities in North Africa, throughout the Ottoman empire, in the Netherlands and ultimately the British Isles and North America, as it was believed that Judaism faded away in their homelands.
Catania’s Jews disagree, arguing that many Jews practiced their religion over the centuries, in secret.
Triolo and others in the community formally inaugurated their synagogue in October. It was furnished with Torah scrolls donated by the Ohev Sholom synagogue in Washington, D.C.
The synagogue is situated in the tower of the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. The building was granted to the community by the city’s municipality.
“So they had the people, they had a synagogue, but they needed somebody to teach,” Ventura said.
The community meets in the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. (David I. Klein)
Ventura, who is Orthodox, may be the island’s first permanent working rabbi in over 500 years, but it’s not his first time working with Bnei Anusim.
Back in his native Brazil, Ventura was the leader of the Synagogue Without Borders, an organization through which he served 15 communities in Brazil’s north that were made up of descendants of Jews who came with the first Portuguese colonists to South America and who ultimately had to hide their identity as the Inquisition spread to the New World.
His work there put him in conflict with Brazil’s Jewish establishment, too. But Ventura is unfazed.
In Brazil, he founded synagogues and summer camps and built mikvahs and yeshivas across the country’s north. Since 2015, he has facilitated the conversion of hundreds of Bnei Anusim, bringing them back into the fold of mainstream Orthodox Judaism.
“I am a teacher since I was 21 years old,” he said. “Now I am 49, along with my wife. It’s one of the things we love to do, and know how to do. To teach Jewish philosophy, to teach Torah, to teach Tanakh, to teach the story of the Jews in Brazil, and now we are starting to teach the story of the Jews in Italy, the story of the Inquisition etcetera.”
In Castello Leucatia, he leads Shabbat services with the energy of a gospel preacher, pausing between prayers to explain a verse, teach a new tune, welcome latecomers, or simply to allow the congregation to talk.
Catania community members are shown at a recent gathering. (David I. Klein)
“This is what’s most important,” he remarked during one such lull on a recent Friday night. “That they get to talk and be a community.”
Ventura had organized a Shabbat event for other Jews across Italy — from Naples to Turin — who shared his belief that the future of Judaism was in communities like the one in Catania.
“Our point of view of Judaism is that we have to be a part of society, we don’t have to insulate ourselves, we believe that Judaism has a lot to contribute to society,” Ventura said. “In Brazil, we have a lot of connections with people from the periphery, in the favela and other communities, immigrants, Indians, etcetera. So that is something we want to establish here, to teach the people a Judaism that brings good things to the wider society.”
Ventura isn’t the only one working with such communities in southern Italy. Across the Strait of Messina, Jewish life has also been on the rise in Calabria — the toe of Italy’s boot — thanks to an American-born rabbi named Barbara Aiello.
Aiello, though raised in Pittsburgh, is of Calabrian descent. She returned to the land of her ancestors in the early 2000s and began working with the Bnei Anusim there, ultimately establishing a synagogue called Ner Tamid del Sud, meaning “eternal light of the south.”
“Until now, nobody took care of Judaism in the south of Italy,” Scibilia said while looking out at the Mediterranean from the terrace of Castello Leucatia.
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Columbia University student workers union drops Israel divestment demand
The student workers’ union at Columbia University has withdrawn its demand that the university divest from Israel — a significant reversal for the group, which has played a leading role in the campus’s pro-Palestinian movement since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
Divestment had been one of the union’s signature demands, and a recurring point of contention throughout negotiations.
The union, Student Workers of Columbia–United Auto Workers, represents over 3,000 undergraduate and graduate student workers and had long campaigned for Columbia to cancel its dual degree program with Tel Aviv University, stop plans to open a new facility in Tel Aviv, and financially divest from Israel. The demand it withdrew this week would have mandated that the university divest from state actors or companies deemed by the International Criminal Court and the United Nations to be in violation of international law
But in a Monday general body meeting, union members voted to withdraw the divestment proposal.
Columbia became an epicenter for campus protests following the onset of the Israel-Hamas war, sparking a wave of encampments, building occupations and high-profile arrests. Its union’s leaders, in particular, had been heavily involved in pro-Palestinian activism. In 2024, the group passed a resolution supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and pledged to strike if necessary to force the university to “end its complicity in the genocide.”
Former PhD student Grant Miner was arrested for his role in the occupation of Hamilton Hall in 2024 and was subsequently expelled but still identifies himself as the union’s president.
Miner acknowledged the decision to withdraw the demand in an interview this week with the campus newspaper The Columbia Spectator, saying the give-and-take realities of collective bargaining had forced the union to adjust its demands.
“You start off a campaign with one thing, and then as you bargain, you have to face the realities of where you are,” he said.
Earlier this year, Columbia alleged the union did not bargain in good faith by “conditioning bargaining on the presence of an expelled student,” apparently referring to Miner. They also alleged the organization attempted to “bargain over matters that are not related to terms and conditions of students’ employment with the University; and filing grievances that similarly have nothing to do with terms and conditions of students’ employment.”
Indeed, the move appeared to reflect the realities of federal labor law. Under the National Labor Relations Act, employers and unions are required to bargain only over wages, hours and other terms and conditions of employment. Because university divestment is generally considered outside those mandatory subjects of bargaining, Columbia is not legally obligated to negotiate over it, though it could choose to do so voluntarily.
The union also softened on other contentious demands, dropping and significantly modifying its proposal to remove all police officers from campus and narrowing a surveillance-related demand.
In November, a university Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing rejected three proposals filed by activists calling on Columbia to divest, citing a lack of financial viability and consensus on campus.
Columbia maintains its dual degree program with Tel Aviv University, and plans to open its Tel Aviv global center this summer, according to Nadav Eyal, a Columbia professor who spoke of the matter in an episode of the Call Me Back podcast this week.
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A Yiddish theater troupe condemned U.S. racism — then the Nazis came
In 1935, the experimental theater group Yung Teatr invited audiences in Warsaw to a new play that was virtually all in Yiddish but wasn’t about Europe or Jews. It was a modified retelling of the plight of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Tennessee in 1931. While the case was being retried in the United States for the second time, the three-act play Mississippi exposed Polish Jews to the injustice.
Penned by Yiddish writer Leib Malach, whose work as a journalist took him around the world including to Harlem, and directed by Michał Weichert, a trained lawyer with a love for avant-garde theater, Mississippi premiered in Warsaw in March 1935 at a time Yiddish culture in Poland was flourishing. Several troupes were staging translated works about American race relations, such as a Vilna Troupe production of Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, but scholars believe Mississippi was the first original Yiddish or Polish play on this issue to be performed in Poland.
Although it didn’t have the financial resources or popularity of traditional Yiddish productions, Mississippi had more than 100 performances in Warsaw and several in other Polish cities, where it was widely praised, as Jewish audiences identified with the mistreatment of the Scottsboro Boys. There is evidence of at least one production outside of Poland, all the way in Buenos Aires.
“Yiddish theater was much more given to a kind of transnational existence, probably more than any theater,” Alyssa Quint, a curator at YIVO and a co-editor of their translated Yiddish Voices series, said. “Because of all the communities, all the Jewish settlements that had been settled by that time were still really speaking Yiddish.”
Quint worked with scholars Ellen Perecman and Amelia Glaser to translate Mississippi into English for the first time and it has been published as a book with an introduction and notes from Quint.
Malach, who had been wanting to write a political play inspired by his time in America, made a few deviations from the real Scottsboro incident. In Mississippi, there are only seven Black defendants. Malach also invented characters to represent how the Black community and the boys’ family would react to the trial, although a mother of one of the accused is closely modeled after Ada Wright, the real-life mother of two of the Scottsboro boys who went on a European speaking tour about the case. White actors in blackface played the parts of the Black characters.
Acts Two and Three involve simultaneous actions on multiple small stages throughout the performance space, making Mississippi one the earliest examples of “immersive” or “environmental” theater.
“It’s experimental, but it was actually something that people flocked to as well,” Quint said. “That’s a very hard combination to strike even today, even under the best of circumstances.”
Because Poland’s censors had previously shuttered Weichert’s shows for being “politically provocative,” Yung Teatr left “Scottsboro” out of the title. Malach wrote that they chose Mississippi since it “is the name of a river along which reside communities of Black people, and it is also a state where ‘Scottsboro’ is a regular occurrence.”
Although few members of Yung Teatr had ever met a Black American, the play reads as a nuanced — if at times heavy-handed — investigation of the precarious position of Black people in American society.
The play also focuses a lot on class conflict, as Weichert thought it would make the story more accessible to Jewish audiences. While Weichert and Malach recognized the parallels between anti-Black discrimination in America and the antisemitism they experienced in Poland, Weichert wasn’t sure broader Jewish audiences would automatically sympathize with the Black characters. The communist-aligned Yung Teatr leaders also may have been hoping to inspire their Jewish audience to embrace class solidarity and at times, class seems to usurp race as the primary issue in the play.
One character, Shirley Silverstone, a Jewish labor activist who represents the real-life activists from the International Labor Defense that got involved in Scottsboro, argues that the case is really about “revealing the bloody intention of the ruling class to strangle us all.”
Mississippi offers a contrasting view in the form of Mickey, a Black Pullman train worker, who accosts Shirley for using the boys’ trial “for the benefit of your party” and playing “with the lives of the accused Negroes.”
“I think that you don’t really know where you necessarily stand or where the play stands,” Quint said.
The translation took several years. In 2020, as protests spread across the country in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Quint saw a connection between her work and the present, which she said can be a rare experience in the Yiddish world.
“Often you’re in your little corner and you have to have a more indirect relationship with the spirit of your time, or none at all even,” Quint said. “But it seemed like there was something very relevant about this play when I began translating it.”
“People were getting more and more engaged with deeper questions about the Black experience here in America.”
When it came to translating the Yiddish word for the n-word, Perecman, Glaser, and Quint had to decide whether or not to include the original language.
“I felt strongly that since this was placed in the 30’s in the South, we needed to use the word,” Perecman said about the ultimate decision to have the slur in the play.
Both the transcultural and serious nature of Mississippi make it a standout piece of Yiddish theater history. Perecman said that many people have a narrow idea of what makes Yiddish theater, something she’s experienced firsthand running the New Worlds Theatre Project, which translates and stages early 20th century Yiddish plays.
“People would come and they’d say, ‘Oh my God, I thought Yiddish theater was all about singing and dancing,’” Perecman said.
There is music in Mississippi, but it’s jazz and gospel inspired numbers instead of Jewish folk tunes. The translators don’t know how much interaction the composer, Henkh (Henoch) Kon had with Black American music, but the lyrical structures, including a call-and-response gospel, show an intent to mimic what he imagined were traditional forms. YIVO plans to have music experts at a book launch event on Nov. 30 to analyze the lyrics and possibly put them to music.
In the post-Holocaust world, the play’s message about discrimination carries a sense of foreboding. Several of the actors and crew were murdered in the Holocaust. Weichert survived and made aliyah to Israel in 1958, where he died in 1967. Malach died in Paris in 1936 during an operation.
The Nazi invasion forced Yung Teatr to close in 1939 after only ten years of operating, but the troupe left a mark on Yiddish theater with their ambitious, unorthodox projects.
“There was just very, very little support for what they did,” Quint said. “They were just very devoted to what they did, and that’s what kept them going.”
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A mayor exposed New York City Jews to chaos. It wasn’t Mamdani.
The mayor ventured to a Brooklyn synagogue, hoping to assure an overflowing crowd of Jewish New Yorkers who blamed him for fostering an environment of antisemitism that he understood their fears and their place in a city they considered increasingly threatening to their safety.
Not Zohran Mamdani, who stands accused by segments of the Jewish world of turning New York City into a hunting ground for Jews with his invective against Israel. Not David Dinkins, who was mayor in 1993 when violence descended on the Jews of Crown Heights for days and a Jewish man was murdered.
It was 1968, and Mayor John Lindsay’s attempt at making peace was an utter disaster: He had to flee East Midwood Jewish Center into his limo, with a jeering mob behind him. The cause of the furor was Lindsay’s cooperation with an experiment in community control of public schools in a district called Ocean Hill–Brownsville. The neighborhood, once a hub of immigrant Jewish life, was now mostly Black, mostly poor, and eager to exercise self-determination and power as the civil rights movement crested.
As historian Richard Kahlenberg recounted to the Forward, the new district school superintendent sought to have an all-Black teacher workforce. Teachers were largely Jewish — and expendable. The district transferred 19 of them, prompting strikes by the teacher’s union that roiled the city.
The union had another weapon in its arsenal: the charge that the firings were acts of antisemitism.
For his 1973 movie Sleeper, Woody Allen premised the futuristic sci-fi comedy on a joke few today would understand: that the world as we had known it ended when “a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”
Back then, as president of the United Federation of Teachers, Shanker was one of the most newsmaking Jews in America. And he had a compelling story to sell to his members, the media and elected officials. He seized on a flamingly antisemitic anonymous letter placed in teachers’ mailboxes at a middle school and had it reprinted by the hundreds of thousands to show the world.
It read, in part: “It is Impossible For The Middle East Murderers of Colored People to Possibly Bring To This Important Task The Insight, The Concern, The Exposing Of The Truth That is a Must If The Years Of Brainwashing And Self-Hatred That Has Been Taught To Our Black Children By Those Bloodsucking Exploiters and Murderers Is To Be Over Come.”
Jewish alarm in the face of such provocation — not to mention dismissals without cause, something out of a Soviet Union purge — was certainly warranted. Conflicts between the community-control school board and teachers escalated inside school buildings, prompting Jewish teachers to file complaints that prompted grand jury indictments and to seek police protection.
District leaders’ attempt to steamroll the union, and escalating clashes with the largely white workforce, created an intolerant and intolerable climate. All the same, Shanker’s conversion of the complex facts of the situation into a hardened story of war on the Jews only added to the turmoil. Lindsay’s crucial mistake was to deliver his support for a bold experiment in establishing Black and Puerto Rican power without heed to the force of nature that was organized labor in its heyday — which was by extension organized Jewish power. By the time he faced the furious mob during the second of three strikes, it was too late.
When thinking about Mamdani and the frenzy of the moment over the fate of New York Jews under his mayoralty, my mind sometimes flashes to the Daily News photo capturing Lindsay’s truly awful moment — dashing out of a synagogue turned into a battleground, after Rabbi Harry Halpern tried in vain to keep decorum in the sanctuary.
East Midwood today is my congregation and community, a vantage point from which to look at the present landscape through the lens of history and see two kinds of power at play.
There is the kind of war that Shanker fought: where Jews, faced with a competing claim for power, resort to charges of antisemitism as a shortcut to establishing moral authority and political leverage. Ultimately, what Shanker was doing was protecting the jobs of union members and the civil service apparatus that organized their world. That was his job! But saying that would have been a much harder sell than “antisemitism” against the enormous public sympathies for Black power as a righteous cause.
Benjamin Netanhayu, in a newly released campaign video responding to Mamdani’s declaration that he is a war criminal, is playing the same game Shanker did. The video, based on a Fox News interview with the Israeli prime minister, is a smear job, seizing on the recent stabbing of a Jewish man on the Upper West Side to accuse Mamdani and his wife of being personally responsible for making New York City unsafe for Jews. But they serve to elevate Netanyhu’s standing as a defender of Israel.
I found Mamdani’s video indictment of Netanyahu alarming, too: prosecutorial, selective in the facts presented, and utterly unconstructive in providing leadership, even knowing his goal of eliminating Israel as a Jewish state. It only turns up the heat fueling what has become a panic in American politics over U.S. aid, doubling down on Israel as a pariah nation.
But he is, ultimately, a mayor — someone who admitted he has no power to follow through on his vow to arrest Netanyahu but very much does control how he runs his city. As much as anything, the Upper West Side stabbing reflects years of leaders’ failures to fix broken mental health services, on top of which his nothingburger move to create a new Department of Community Safety to respond to mental health crises is just another layer of sedimentary crud.
Meanwhile, the fear that Netanyahu and others are exploiting for their own political purposes clouds a clear view of the second kind of power, which Mamdani’s administration is actually exercising on the ground. We see it in how his police department has responded to conflict involving Jewish communities: not pitting one group against another, the world against Jews, but carefully balancing rights, safety and interests in potentially explosive situations. Lindsay could have learned something here.
Infinite credit goes to Mamdani’s appointee as NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a Zionist and a capable leader — and to Mamdani for letting her do her job.
I was witness to how Mamdani and Tisch’s NYPD responded to the extremely difficult challenge of synagogue protests, which erupted this spring outside land sales events that included properties on the occupied West Bank. And once again, the story came to East Midwood Jewish Center’s doorstep, thanks to a sale happening at Young Israel across the street.
The protests culminated in some upsetting moments. Marchers parading through a Jewish neighborhood’s streets carrying Palestinian flags and “Free Gaza” banners sent an unmistakable message of disdain and exclusion. And yes, some scary clashes you might have seen on social media, such as a protester shining a strobe light into a Jewish teen’s eyes, actually happened.
But what the world did not see was the discipline the NYPD brought to keeping the demonstrators at a distance from the synagogue — and to keeping taunts and chants from escalating into anything worse.
The rival camps and their flags met face to face in the middle of a major intersection in what could have been a Brooklyn rumble, but police did their best to steer the sides into separate zones. Some of the most aggressive insults came from Jewish teens blindsided by a hostile presence on their turf. One protester-counterprotester pair got locked into an extended debate about their opposing views on the fate of Israel and Palestinians. I gave them my card and said, only half jokingly, that they should consider doing a podcast.
None of this is to say that Mamdani’s words on the global stage are making Jews any safer. His fixation on uniquely attacking Netanyahu, when a mayor’s job description requires governing all New Yorkers, gives permission to those determined to antagonize Jewish supporters of Israel — as does his encouragement to protest the prime minister when he visits for the UN General Assembly in September, where clashes could break the containment that was possible in sleepy Brooklyn.
But a look back at John Lindsay’s catastrophic scramble to make peace is a reminder that it’s the decisions about how to deploy power within a mayor’s domain that ultimately determine Jewish safety.
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