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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
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EU sanctions Israeli settlers after Hungary, under new leadership, clears path
(JTA) — The European Union decided to sanction Israeli settlers over violence against Palestinians in the West Bank on Monday, moving forward a measure that had been blocked for months.
The EU’s 27 foreign ministers agreed on the sanctions at a meeting in Brussels after Hungary’s new government gave its approval.
The measure had been blocked by a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Viktor Orban, who was Hungary’s president for 16 years before being unseated in April.
The backing from Peter Magyar, who was sworn in as Orban’s replacement on Saturday, is seen as portending a new era in which the consensus-oriented European Union adopts a more united tone against Israeli policies.
Magyar has pledged to restore ties with the EU after Orban’s far-right politics isolated Hungary. He also said he would pursue a “pragmatic relationship” with Israel and vowed to recommit Hungary to the International Criminal Court, which Orban withdrew from after the court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over alleged war crimes.
“It was high time we move from deadlock to delivery. Extremisms and violence carry consequences,” Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, said on X.
Kallas said ministers also agreed to impose “new sanctions on leading Hamas figures,” who were not specified.
Kallas did not name the Israelis that will now be sanctioned or specify whether they will be organizations, individuals, or both. Several groups play crucial roles in promoting, developing, financing and defending Israeli settlements, while multiple individuals have previously faced sanctions by individual governments over their alleged involvement in violence against Palestinians.
Settler violence in the West Bank surged after the Gaza war began in October 2023 and further intensified since the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran broke out in February. In March, thousands of Diaspora Jewish leaders called on Israeli President Isaac Herzog to take action to stop the violence.
Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar said Israel “firmly rejects” the EU’s decision and accused the bloc of imposing sanctions on Israeli citizens and groups “because of their political views and without any basis.”
“Equally outrageous is the unacceptable comparison the European Union has chosen to make between Israeli citizens and Hamas terrorists. This is a completely distorted moral equivalence,” Saar said on X. He added that Jewish people have a “moral and historical right” to “settle in the heart of our homeland.”
Peace Now, which advocates for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said the EU had sent “a grave warning sign” and “a call to the Israeli public to wake up to the reality we have created through decades of occupation.”
“The rampant violence of settlers in the West Bank, encouraged and supported by the government, is leading Israel into a moral abyss and casting an indelible stain on the state of Israel,” the group said in a statement.
Broader measures against Israel remain stalled by a lack of support. Spain, Ireland and Slovenia have pushed for the EU to suspend its trade agreement with Israel and sanction its far-right cabinet ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. France and Sweden have called for tariffs on imported products from settlements in the West Bank. Other member states, such as Germany and Italy, have refused to support those measures.
Under the Biden administration, the United States sanctioned multiple settler leaders, settler groups and West Bank outposts in 2024. Trump canceled the sanctions a day after reentering office in January 2025.
In March, Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the administration had expressed concerns about settler violence to the Israeli government and anticipated that the government would take action.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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A British spy, a notorious murderer, the Indiana Jones of the insect world, and a very Jewish history
Jews are often thought of as urban, bookish folks who don’t venture out into the wild. But there have been plenty of Jews who break that mold — Abraham Cahan, founder of the Forward, was himself a birder. In To Life: Jews Exploring Nature, author Joel Greenberg, with Judith Winston, a research associate at the Smithsonian Marine Station in Florida, tells the life stories of a group of Jewish researchers, naturalists and environmentalists. I spoke with Greenberg, a research associate of the Field Museum and the Chicago Academy of Sciences Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, book author and avid birder who lives in Westmont, IL, about the accomplished and often adventurous lives of the scientists he profiled. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Countering the common perception of Jews as indoor cats, you found a group of Jews who spent their careers hunting spiders, skinning mammal specimens and handling snakes. Is the cliché inaccurate?
I cite Fran Lebowitz, who says that the outdoors is what you pass through when you go from your apartment to a cab. For a variety of reasons, Jews are kind of urban people. But when you have a literature that goes back 4000 years, you can find anything in it. You find people loving nature and people hating it.
Did your subjects’ Judaism play a role in drawing them to study the natural world?
There are threads that are well recognized in the Jewish world, though they certainly aren’t unique to it, that had an influence — like education being important, and supporting your children. But I picked people who manifested their Jewishness in different ways. Joan Ehrenfeld, an ecologist and environmentalist, was very Orthodox, and Judaism was very much part of the foundation of what she did. Whereas Philip Hershkovitz, a neotropical mammalogist at the Field Museum, kept it to himself to the point that his kids were shocked to learn that they were Jewish.
Andrew Spielman, who studied insect vectors of infectious disease, was known for arguing with people over individual words when they were writing papers. Longtime assistants said he approached these things almost like a Talmudic scholar.
Some of the people you profile have Hollywood-worthy life stories, starting with Aaron Aaronsohn. Can you tell a little bit about him?
He’s the person whose story goes back the farthest in time. His family left Europe to escape the pogroms, and settled in Palestine. He became totally intrigued by insects and plants, and became a real authority. On a trip to Germany, he met some world-famous botanists. They were interested in an ancient form of wheat called wild emmer, a single specimen of which had been found close to what is now the Syrian–Israeli border. They encouraged Aaronsohn to look for the plant because it might hold qualities that would increase the resilience and nutrition of modern wheat strains. He searched — and found it in a vineyard near the Golan Heights. It made him world-famous.
Just before the start of World War I, in which the Ottoman Empire sided with Germany, there was an infestation of desert locusts — billions of them. The Ottoman army commander said, ‘Who can help me with this?’ Everyone said, ‘Aaronsohn.’ So they brought in Aaronsohn. He and the team he assembled were allowed to go everywhere — to transportation hubs, to military bases. They became a spy ring, feeding the British the most detailed and accurate intelligence that was available.
Britain’s principal military goal was to take Jerusalem. The general there had failed twice. Then they brought in Field Marshal Edmund Allenby. He developed a rapport with Aaronson, followed his suggestions, and took Jerusalem in one try. What Aaronsohn did on behalf of the British was a major factor in Arthur Balfour issuing the British declaration in support of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. So it had an incredible impact on the world.
Another remarkable story, in a very different way, is that of Nathan Leopold. He and his friend Richard Loeb murdered a 14-year-old boy in 1924; but he was also a highly respected birder. Talk a little about your decision to include him.
I’ve long had an interest in him. Leopold is beyond understanding. He and Loeb committed a horrific crime. But he was one of the youngest people ever to be published in The Auk (now Ornithology), the country’s premier ornithological journal, when he was just under 14 years old. And he did important work on Kirtland’s warblers, a bird which back then was very poorly known. He was the first to correlate the rarity of the warbler with parasitism by brown-headed cowbirds. That knowledge might well have been a factor in saving the bird from extinction.
While he was in prison, he agreed to be injected with malaria, which during World War II was a big problem for US troops in Asia. When he was paroled to Puerto Rico, he got a master’s degree in public health and wrote Checklist of Birds of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
He did this terrible thing — but he also had incredibly broad interests and accomplishments.
You write about how antisemitism nearly derailed the career of Libbie Henrietta Hyman when she was at the University of Chicago.
She loved plants and wanted to do botany, so she entered UChicago’s botany program. But she was in a class that was being taught by a graduate student who was an ardent eugenicist who hated Jews, among other groups. He forced her out.
But she found a home in zoology, staying at the University of Chicago from undergraduate to doctorate and staying 15 years as a research assistant to her advisor. She authored two lab textbooks that sold enough copies for her to reach financial independence. She left Chicago and moved to New York, where she worked on her greatest accomplishment — a six-volume compendium called The Invertebrates. She worked out of an office at the American Museum of Natural History, and illustrated the volumes herself. They received world acclaim.
Several of these folks sound like Indiana Jones-level adventurers, spending months in jungles collecting specimens — like Andrew Spielman, a public health entomologist who studied insects that transmit human disease.
His daughter called him “Indiana Papa.” Once he was in Jamaica monitoring water-filled pots for mosquitoes, and he encountered this big guy who said, ‘You know what they call me? “Big Blade.’” He showed him his machete. Spielman had to flee. Another time he was in Ethiopia and he and a colleague went out at night looking for hippopotamuses, and they were surrounded by Ethiopian armed forces who thought they were spies. It got really heated, but fortunately, things calmed down.
Hershkovitz went on his last field trip to Brazil when he was 82 years old. I’m blown away by this. Another time he took his wife and their oldest daughter to Colombia for 18 months. They stayed in cities and he was out there in the hinterlands collecting specimens. His wife would write to him. She was totally supportive of him, but she wrote, “My dream is to move back to Chicago, go to the A&P, and have a good doctor and dentist.”
There were even dangers back home. At the Field Museum, herpetologist Hymen Marx witnessed an awful incident with a venomous snake.
Marlin Perkins at the Lincoln Park Zoo had received a bunch of snakes. He thought one of them was a boomslang, a venomous tree snake, but it didn’t quite match the pictures. So he had somebody drive the snake over to the Field so that Marx, herpetologist Karl Schmidt and the herpetology curator could look at it. They all handled it — but it bit Schmidt in the thumb. He died within two days. He refused medical assistance because he didn’t want to alter the symptoms. He kept a diary of the details; he wanted it to be scientific.
Witnessing that affected Marx greatly. It used to be that you could have live snakes at the Field; Marx used to walk around with a python around his neck and torso. But after that there could be no live snakes.
You yourself are a Jewish naturalist and birder. Is being Jewish connected to your passion for the natural world?
My family was pretty secular; I went to Hebrew school for one year. But when I was at the University of Arizona, a group of us birders went to this remote area in southern Mexico. We actually contributed to scientific knowledge: We obtained the first known chicks of the horned guan, and we discovered that the azure-rumped tanager, which was thought to be rare, in fact just had a very narrow elevational range.
It was Passover, and a friend in Tucson gave us a piece of matzo and some of the other elements. It wasn’t a full-fledged seder, but we did this little seder in a place where I’m sure there’s never been one before or since. It’s a part of me.
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Three simple rules for navigating a new season of protest against Israel
Spring. The season of graduations and protests.
A tenured professor and faculty chair at my alma mater, the University of Michigan, recently used the commencement stage to denounce Israel’s war in Gaza — remarks that drew applause from some as others experienced them as alienating and unwelcome. At New York’s Park East Synagogue, a group of masked, hate- spewing demonstrators waving Hezbollah flags while protesting the “Great Israeli Real Estate Event.”
If the settings of these incidents differ, one underlying question they raise remains the same: What are the ethics of protest? At what point does dissent deepen democratic life and moral accountability, and when does it begin to fray the trust, dignity and shared sense of belonging upon which a society depends?
While these tensions may be hard to resolve, I’d like to put forward three guiding principles for how best to engage on the subject of free expression in such a hot-zone climate.
Protest is essential
Protest is foundational to what it means to be both a Jew and an American.
Look to Abraham standing before God at Sodom and Gomorrah; Moses standing before Pharaoh; the prophets calling kings and nations to conscience; and Esther risking all for her people. All of their examples show that to be a Jew is to take note of the gap between the world as it is and as it ought to be, and then to summon the moral courage, communal will, and spiritual audacity to help close that gap.
Jews understand that to protest is a religious act. That’s why rabbis so often quote Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous reflection after marching alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma in 1965: “I felt my legs were praying.”
And as the United States turns 250 years old, it’s worth remembering that our country began with a protest movement. Since then, many of our country’s finest moments have emerged from moral protest — including the labor movement, the fight for women’s suffrage, and the Civil Rights Movement.
As Jews and as Americans, we are heirs to two traditions of protest.
So is self-interrogation
Where we draw the lines around acceptable protest says as much about us as it does about the protest itself.
A prime example of this: During my 25-plus years as a rabbi, no congregant has ever told me that the pulpit is no place for politics — so long as they agree with my politics.
I had little difficulty admiring the activist Greta Thunberg when she sailed across the Atlantic to raise awareness about climate change. I found it much more challenging to view her kindly when she joined a flotilla protesting Israel’s war in Gaza.
Similarly, the faculty speaker at Michigan’s commencement sounded pretty good when championing the university’s first Jewish faculty member and a curriculum more attentive to Black American history. It was only when he condemned Israel that many listeners, myself included, recoiled at his remarks.
None of us are the neutral arbiters of protest ethics we may imagine ourselves to be. Progressives who passionately defend buffer zones around abortion clinics but not around houses of worship should ask why one form of vulnerability warrants protection and another does not. Student activists who champion on-campus encampments protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza, but would never tolerate a white nationalist rally on campus, should ask where principle ends and preference begins. Conservatives who invoke the First Amendment to defend provocative speech they favor, yet denounce positions they dislike as treasonous or un-American, should examine where principle gives way to ideology. And activists who mobilize when civilians die in Gaza but remain deafeningly silent when tens of thousands of Iranians are murdered by their own regime must interrogate what moral framework governs that selective outrage.
Where we draw the lines — whom we applaud, what we excuse and what we denounce — reveals not only our principles, but also our loyalties, fears and tribal attachments. Moral seriousness requires the humility to examine ourselves before we protest — to check ourselves before we express ourselves.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
As Jews, we believe in buffer zones — not just the kind debated at City Hall. The rabbis believed in moral buffer zones, a principle they referred to as living “lifnim mishurat hadin” — “beyond the strict line of the law.”
Rabbinic tradition in part explains the semi-somber period between Passover and Shavuot, in which we currently find ourselves, using precisely this idea. When 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva’s students died in one day, the Talmud teaches, they perished because they followed the letter of the law but failed to go beyond it and treat one another with respect — “kavod zeh lazeh.” They failed to embody the deeper demand of leadership: to live not merely according to what one is allowed to do, but by what one ought to do.
What might that mean for us today?
The answer: just because you have the legal right to express yourself doesn’t mean you should.
The Michigan commencement speaker may have been within his rights to voice his objections to Israel. But his decision to do so in that setting reflected a breathtaking failure of leadership, reminding us there is no direct correlation between tenure and wisdom, expertise and judgment. Like a teacher who hijacks a classroom to air political grievances under the guise of education, the speaker demonstrated an astonishing lack of discernment by alienating a sizable portion of the very students and families he was there to honor and congratulate.
Regarding the protests outside Park East Synagogue, the letter of the law may protect those who wave the flags of a terrorist organization, chant antisemitic slogans, or proclaim that the Jewish state itself should cease to exist. That such speech is protected does not mean it is right. It is, instead, intimidation masquerading as activism.
I was also deeply troubled by the response of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who prefaced his condemnation of the protests by first denouncing the event itself. The mayor should have simply said: no house of worship should be targeted or intimidated, full stop.
To imply that the nature of the event somehow mitigated the harassment outside was not only irresponsible, offering moral cover for behavior that crossed the line from protest into menace, but also a troubling form of moral equivocation that shifted responsibility onto those being targeted — if not outright victim blaming. A peaceful protest calling for Palestinian self-determination alongside Jewish self-determination? As a liberal Zionist, that sounds like my kind of protest! But in an age in which there is a direct line between anti-Israel rhetoric and antisemitic violence, our mayor must do more than merely follow the letter of the law. True leadership begins where the letter of the law ends.
The issue is not whether dissent is permitted, but whether we are not losing the capacity for kavod zeh lazeh.
As the secular prophet of our time, Bruce Springsteen, has been reminding audiences across the country on his current tour: “America, from the beginning, was born out of disagreement. It was built on argument, on disagreement. We can argue about what course we thought the country should take while recognizing our common humanity, our dignity and, yes, our unity.”
Whatever our differences, the challenge before us is whether we can disagree without severing the ties that bind us — as Americans, Jews and human beings.
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