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How a book by a ‘Zen Rabbi’ became a High Holidays classic
(JTA) — Every few years I put out a call asking what people will be reading in preparation for the High Holidays, and usually one book tops the list: “This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation,” by the late Rabbi Alan Lew.
Published 20 years ago this month, “This Is Real” is an attempt by Lew, a Conservative rabbi trained in Buddhist practice, to get perhaps jaded readers to see the period that includes Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot as a time for deep spiritual introspection — or, as he writes, a time to “move from self-hatred to self-forgiveness, from anger to healing, from hard-heartedness to brokenheartedness.”
If that sounds like the gospel of “self-care,” you’re not far off. Lew, who died in 2009 at age 65, came of age during the self-actualization movement, a serious attempt by psychologists to get people to live up to values that transcend their desire for wealth and status. By the time cosmetics companies, crystal sellers and lifestyle influencers took hold of the concept, it was derided as selfishness disguised as a spiritual journey.
But Lew’s book grounds concepts of “self-discovery, spiritual discipline, self-forgiveness and spiritual evolution” in normative Judaism. “This Is Real” never strays far from a traditional Judaism that saw the period of prayer, reflection and repentance surrounding the holidays as a time for a moral wake-up call.
That hybrid of the traditional and the much-maligned “New Age” continues to appeal to readers. Jewish educator Joshua Ladon, writing in the 2020 anthology “The New Jewish Canon,” calls the book “the handbook for American Jewish High Holiday survival,” comparing its influence to Rabbi Harold Kushner’s mega-bestseller “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” Synagogues host book groups to discuss the book in the run-up to the holidays; the book’s publisher, Little, Brown and Company, issued a paperback version only in 2018, suggesting its hardcover sales had remained strong for 15 years.
Ilana Sandberg, a rabbinical student at JTS, recommended Lew’s book last month in a video for the seminary.
She first read the book in the fall of 2020 as she was preparing to lead High Holiday services at Brandeis Hillel for the first time as the rabbinic intern, and considers the late author her “spiritual hevruta,” or study partner, in the lead-up to the holidays. The book, Sandberg says, is about “accepting this idea that we are ever-changing beings and there really is a possibility for change, for renewal as we go through the cycle of the year.”
Lew was spiritual leader at San Francisco’s Congregation Beth Sholom from 1991 to 2005. Raised in Brooklyn and New York’s Westchester County, he was underwhelmed by the suburban Judaism of the 1950s and ’60s and, like many Jewish seekers of his era, turned to Zen Buddhism — at one point considering becoming a lay priest.
“It was in a Buddhist monastery, meditating, that I realized who I really am. I am a Jew,” he wrote in “One God Clapping: The Spiritual Path of a Zen Rabbi,” a memoir he co-wrote in 2001 with his wife, Sherril Jaffe. “A Jew can use the practice of meditation to illuminate his or her Jewish soul.”
Rabbi Alan Lew appears on the cover of “One God Clapping: The Spiritual Path of a Zen Rabbi,” a memoir he co-wrote in 2001 with his wife, Sherril Jaffe.
A poet and sometime bus driver, Lew was 38 when he enrolled at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the training ground for Conservative rabbis. In 2000, he founded Makor Or, a Jewish meditation center housed at his synagogue.
In “This Is Real,” he writes about the meditative aspects of High Holiday prayer. “When we sit in meditation with other people, breathing the same air, hearing the same sounds, thinking thoughts in the same rhythms and patterns, we experience our connection to each other in a very immediate way,” he writes.
But Lew’s version of the High Holidays is hardly passive or even gentle: Preparing for the holidays, as he suggests in the title, is hard and daunting work. The dreamlike opening sequence describes the “journey” of the High Holiday period as “fraught with meaning and dread.”
Ladon wrote that Lew’s book represents “the possibility of American Judaism, full of vitality and transcending boundaries.” Perhaps because of, or even in spite of this, it was mostly non-Orthodox Jews who replied to my recent social media post asking about their attachment to “This Is Real.”
“I’m really moved by the way that Lew takes the traditional images of the Holidays — the wake-up call of the shofar, the books of life, death and the undecided, the opening of the gates — and retells them in a way that they speak directly to my personal existential discomfort,” wrote Jonah Mendelsohn, an actor and writer who has been reading the book with fellow members of SAJ, a Reconstructionist synagogue in Manhattan. “The book has me facing my own insecurity and self-judgment in a way that isn’t always comfortable, but pushes me to change.”
Karen Paul, a fundraising consultant and former executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Tikkun Olam Women’s Foundation, said a friend gave her a copy of the book the year her husband died from glioblastoma.
“Lew’s comforting and relatable stories were precisely the roadmap I needed to begin to reshape my future,” she told me. “My favorite parable in the book is the day that the rabbi had to be on one side of the park for a [funeral] and the other side of the park for a birth. This is the dialectic of life, which, if we listen for it, applies to all that we do.”
Rabbi Rachel Barenblatt of the Reform Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires in North Adams, Massachusetts, recommends the book for “folks who might not self-identify as seekers, but who are interested in approaching the holidays in a deeper or more informed way.”
“When I first read it, it changed how I experience this two-month window of time, and I love opening that up for those whom I serve,” she wrote me. “How can we harness this season to fuel our inner work so that we can emerge ready to grow and become and try again?”
But she, like others, notes that “This Is Real” isn’t without his flaws. She suggests that Lew “had some blind spots, notably around gender.” (Last year, Jewish blogger Shari Salzhauer Berkowitz criticized his “heterosexual, male” handling of the sexual dynamics in Ki Tetze, the Torah portion that includes instructions for soldiers taking women captives as “wives.”)
The book also has admiring references to Rudy Giuliani — the New York City mayor turned RICO defendant — and Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach — the songwriter who faced posthumous allegations of sexual misconduct — that read differently than they did 20 years ago.
Barenblatt suggests pairing his book with a “contemporary and feminist text” such as Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s recent book “On Repentance and Repair.”
Lew’s style — he glides between poetry and memoir, allegory and darshanut, or Torah commentary — isn’t for everyone. Many prefer Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon’s anthology “Days of Awe,” first published in English in 1948, a collection of mostly primary texts related to the High Holidays. Philip Goodman’s various anthologies for the Jewish Publication Society take a similar approach. The 1999 essay collection, “Beginning Anew: A Woman’s Companion to the High Holy Days” by Gail Twersky Reimer and Judith A. Kates is a corrective to books that ignore the central place of women in the liturgy.
Many of these books seem intended for readers who are looking for inspiration in synagogue when their attention begins to flag. Lew invites you to read his book as a coherent narrative of a nearly three-month process from destruction (Tisha B’Av) to joy (Sukkot).
But for some readers, it is also a book to be dipped into and sipped from.
“I have never finished this book,” Pittsburgh Rabbi Mark Asher Goodman admitted last month in a column recommending books for the High Holidays. “I read four or five pages. I stop and ponder over the meaning of existence and God and human growth and obligation and fallibility. Lew is poetic and instructive and guru-esque but also deeply personal; you feel you know him. The book’s title is perfect, and yet the book really will prepare you for the High Holidays, even if you, like me, never actually finish reading it. One might argue that this book, if properly read, is never finished.”
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New Research Links South Africa’s Genocide Case Against Israel to Growing Ties With Iran
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in Chatsworth, South Africa, May 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Rogan Ward
Newly released research links South Africa’s expanding ties with Iran to its contentious genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), raising questions about the motives behind Pretoria’s legal battle.
Last month, the Middle East Africa Research Institute (MEARI) unveiled a report exploring the South African government’s relationship with Iran and the ways in which this partnership has shaped the country’s foreign policy.
The report — “Ties to Tehran: South Africa’s Democracy and Its Relationship With Iran: — argues that deepening ties with Tehran has led South Africa to compromise its democratic foundations and constitutional principles, aligning itself with a regime internationally condemned for terrorism, repression, and human rights abuses.
While Iran maintains support for South Africa’s coalition government in part due to a shared revolutionary, liberation ideology, Pretoria has frequently defended Tehran at the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by voting against sanctions or choosing to abstain, the report says.
In doing so, the study claims that the South African government has both undermined its democratic values and bolstered Iran’s regional ambitions by defending its nuclear program and downplaying its human rights abuses.
Adam Charnas, an analyst at the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), condemned the government’s long-standing ties with Iran and other regimes with questionable human rights records, calling them deeply troubling.
“This relationship was notably underscored when, shortly after Oct. 7, then-Minister of International Relations, Naledi Pandor, visited Iran for a two-week period to meet with [then-Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi],” Charnas told The Algemeiner.
“South Africa’s foreign policy appears to be more concerned with enhancing relations with rogue states,” he continued. “This narrow and party-led strategy jeopardizes its relationship with key trading partners rather than with addressing domestic challenges or advancing the welfare of its citizens.”
MEARI’s report also questions whether South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ, the UN’s top court, was genuinely rooted in constitutional principles — or driven by outside political pressure.
According to the study, South Africa’s open hostility toward Israel and its biased approach in filing the case — failing to acknowledge Hamas’s role in launching the war with its Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel — undermines the government’s credibility.
At the time of the ICJ filing, senior South African officials were holding high-level meetings in Tehran.
The study explains that shortly afterward, the ruling African National Congress (ANC), struggling with financial difficulties, unexpectedly paid off a multi-million-rand debt, fueling speculation about possible covert support from Iran.
“The evidence for such a claim is entirely circumstantial, but bears relating. In early December 2023, the ANC, South Africa’s ruling party, faced imminent liquidation. It allegedly owed R102 million to a service provider, which it could not pay,” the report says.
In prior years, the ANC has on several occasions been unable to pay staff salaries. But just days after the South African government filed its case against Israel at the ICJ, which MEARI drescribes as “an undertaking involving a phalanx of lawyers of international stature that could cost as much as R1.5 billion [about $84.35 million] in taxpayer money,” the ANC announced that it had reached an out-of-court settlement with its creditor to settle its debt and turned its finances around.
However, since the party’s finances were not available to the public, a fact-check by a leading South African newspaper could not find evidence to prove that the ANC had received funding from any particular source, Iran or otherwise.
Although the ANC claimed it complies with South African law requiring the of donor funding exceeding R100,000, the law is “weakly enforced,” MEARI notes.
“It could be pure coincidence that Hamas thanked South Africa for bringing a genocide case against Israel at the ICJ, and that this case aligns perfectly with the ‘mutual bilateral interests’ of South Africa and Iran,” the report says, with a not-so-subtle bit of sarcasm. “It could be pure coincidence that within days of taking this grave step, South Africa’s the ruling party, the ANC, managed to pull back from the brink of bankruptcy by settling a substantial debt out of court after having ignored multiple court orders and left staff unpaid.”
Since December 2023, South Africa has been pursuing its case accusing Israel of committing “state-led genocide” in its defensive war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
Both Iran and Hamas have publicly praised the South African government’s legal action.
For its part, Israeli leaders have condemned the case as an “obscene exploitation” of the Genocide Convention, noting that the Jewish state is targeting terrorists who use civilians as human shields in its military campaign.
Meanwhile, South Africa’s Jewish community has lambasted the case as “grandstanding” rather than actual concern for those killed in the Middle Eastern conflict.
Last year, the ICJ ruled there was “plausibility” to South Africa’s claims that Palestinians had a right to be protected from genocide.
However, the top UN court did not make a determination on the merits of South Africa’s allegations, nor did it call for Israel to halt its military campaign. Instead, the ICJ issued a more general directive that Israel must make sure it prevents acts of genocide.
The ruling also called for the release of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas during the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 rampage.
“It could be that South Africa simply did not have the resources to respond in international courts to the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the war crimes committed by the latter in the pursuit of that war of aggression,” the MEARI report says. “It could be that it didn’t feel there was sufficient historical solidarity to oblige it to speak out about genocides of Uyghurs in China, or Rohingya in Myanmar, but Israel just went a step too far.”
Since the start of the war in Gaza, the South African government has been one of the fiercest critics of Israel’s military campaign, which seeks to free the hostages kidnapped by the terrorists and dismantle Hamas’s military and administrative control in Gaza.
Beyond its open hostility toward Israel, South Africa has actively supported Iran’s terrorist proxy by hosting two Hamas officials at a state-backed conference expressing solidarity with the Palestinians in December 2023.
In one instance, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa led the crowd at an election rally in a chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” — a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely interpreted as a genocidal call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
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German Media Investigation Reveals Gaza Photographer Staged Images of Despair, Prompting Agencies to Cut Ties
Palestinians carry aid supplies that entered Gaza through Israel, in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, July 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
Two leading German newspapers have released a joint investigation accusing Gaza-based photojournalists of staging images of hungry and despairing civilians, sparking fresh controversy over how the Israel-Hamas war is portrayed in international media coverage.
The report, published by BILD and Süddeutsche Zeitung, followed a recent controversy over a widely circulated image of a Gazan youth portrayed as starving — a photo later revealed to depict a boy with a genetic disorder, prompting outlets such as The New York Times to issue clarifications.
The German investigation focused on Palestinian photographer Anas Zayed Fteiha, a freelancer for the Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency, who allegedly staged images to dramatize civilian suffering and depict it as the result of Israeli actions.
Fteiha’s work has been published by major international outlets including CNN, Reuters, and the BBC, despite what the report described as openly biased photojournalism.
According to the German outlets, Fteiha has openly expressed anti-Israel views on social media, sharing inflammatory and antisemitic content.
The report further noted that, by working for a state-run Turkish news outlet whose government maintains longstanding ties to Hamas and a well-known hostile stance toward Israel, his work functions more as propaganda than as objective journalism.
On Tuesday, Israel’s Foreign Ministry praised the German investigation, saying it “reveals how Hamas uses ‘Pallywood,’ staged or selectively framed media, to manipulate global opinion.”
“With Hamas controlling nearly all media in Gaza, these photographers aren’t reporting, they’re producing propaganda,” the statement said.
“This investigation underscores how Pallywood has gone mainstream with staged images and ideological bias shaping international coverage, while the suffering of Israeli hostages and Hamas atrocities are pushed out of frame,” it continued.
Beware of fake news.
A joint investigation by @SZ and @BILD reveals how Hamas uses “Pallywood”, staged or selectively framed media, to manipulate global opinion.At the center is Anas Zayed Fteiha, a Palestinian photographer for Anadolu and an open Israel- and Jew-hater, whose… pic.twitter.com/MrBfvylwCi
— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) August 5, 2025
“Pallywood” is a term used to describe the alleged practice by Palestinians of staging fake injuries, deaths, or scenes of devastation to elicit international sympathy and fuel hostility toward Israel.
According to the investigation, Fteiha selectively shares images that reinforce an anti-Israel narrative. For example, one of his widely circulated photos depicts desperate Gazan women and children holding pots and pans outside a food distribution site.
However, other photos taken at the same scene — showing mostly adult men calmly waiting in line and receiving aid — were not distributed by Fteiha and have gone largely unnoticed.
Gerhard Paul, emeritus professor of history and a leading expert on visual propaganda, told Süddeutsche Zeitung that these types of images serve a specific function by shaping narratives and influencing public opinion.
“They are intended to overwrite the brutal images of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Many people don’t even remember these pictures,” Paul said. “Hamas is a master at staging images.”
He also explained that journalists and photographers in Gaza face significant risks and, because of their close proximity to Hamas terrorists, are unable to operate independently.
According to the German newspapers, part of the problem is that Israel restricts access to the Gaza Strip for independent journalists, allowing Hamas-controlled propaganda to dominate the coverage.
Shortly after the investigation was published, the German Press Agency and Agence France-Presse announced they would no longer work with Fteiha and would apply more rigorous scrutiny to photos from other photographers.
For its part, Reuters said Fteiha’s photos “meet the standards of accuracy, independence, and impartiality.”
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Florida State University Grad Student Charged With Battery After Harassment of Jewish Peer Caught on Video
Female student at Florida State University, believed to be graduate student Eden Deckerhoff, who allegedly assaulted male Jewish classmate at gym on campus. Photo: Screenshot/StopAntisemitism
Local law enforcement officials have charged a Florida State University (FSU) graduate student who allegedly assaulted a Jewish classmate at the Leach Student Recreation Center last Thursday with misdemeanor battery, according to a report by The Tallahassee Democrat.
“F—k Israel, Free Palestine. Put it [the video] on Barstool FSU. I really don’t give a f—k,” Eden Deckerhoff said before shoving the Jewish man, according to video taken by the victim. “You’re an ignorant son of a b—h.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Deckerhoff, a student at the FSU College of Social Work, allegedly accosted the victim after noticing his wearing apparel issued by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). FSU reportedly employs her mother, Rosalyn Deckerhoff, as a teaching professor in its College of Social Work.
After footage of the incident went viral on social media, the university promptly suspended Deckerhoff and issued a statement condemning antisemitism.
“While this process is underway, the student shown prominently in the video has been prohibited from returning to campus. Our commitment to swiftly and effectively responding to incidents of hate is unwavering. We appreciate the prompt report of this incident, which allowed us to address this instance of antisemitism without delay,” the university said.
It continued, “Florida State University strongly condemns antisemitism in all forms and follows Florida law, which protects Jewish students and employees from discrimination motivated by antisemitism, harassment, intimidation, and violence.”
According to the Democrat, Deckerhoff has denied assaulting the student, telling investigators, “No I did not show him at all; I never put my hands on him.” However, law enforcement described the incident in court documents as seen in the viral footage, acknowledging that Deckerhoff “appears to touch [the man’s] left shoulder.” Despite her denial, the Democrat added, she has offered to apologize.
The Jewish FSU student is not the first victim of violence or harassment motivated by anti-Zionism. In some cases, such incidents have been ftal.
In June, a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, while they exited an event at the Capital Jewish Museum hosted by the American Jewish Committee. The suspect charged for the double murder, 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez from Chicago, yelled “Free Palestine” while being arrested by police after the shooting, according to video of the incident. The FBI affidavit supporting the criminal charges against Rodriguez stated that he told law enforcement he “did it for Gaza.”
Less than two weeks later, a man firebombed a crowd of people who were participating in a demonstration to raise awareness of the Israeli hostages who remain imprisoned by Hamas in Gaza. A victim of the attack, Karen Diamond, 82, later died, having sustained severe, fatal injuries.
Another antisemitic incident motivated by anti-Zionism occurred in San Francisco, where an assailant identified by law enforcement as Juan Diaz-Rivas and others allegedly beat up a Jewish victim in the middle of the night. Diaz-Rivas and his friends approached the victim while shouting “F—k the Jews, Free Palestine,” according to local prosecutors.
“[O]ne of them punched the victim, who fell to the ground, hit his head and lost consciousness,” the San Francisco district attorney’s office said in a statement. “Allegedly, Mr. Diaz-Rivas and others in the group continued to punch and kick the victim while he was down. A worker at a nearby business heard the altercation and antisemitic language and attempted to intervene. While trying to help the victim, he was kicked and punched.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.