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Honoring Rabbi Arthur Waskow – activist, pioneer and prophet
At the 2014 Climate March in New York City, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who passed away Monday at the venerable age of 92, rode atop a makeshift Noah’s Ark. The float was constructed by Auburn Seminary and a coalition of faith organizations to highlight the deep connections between religious values and environmentalism. I was honored to be on that ark alongside him, and, looking out on the throngs of marchers, I snapped a photo and showed it to him. “The Rebbe and his legacy,” I said.
“What legacy?!” Reb Arthur responded, then a spry 80 years of age. “I’m still right here!”
This was Rabbi Arthur Waskow: prophetic, wise, cranky, witty, insightful, and decades ahead of his time. Like his contemporaries who have also recently left us — Rabbi Michael Lerner, for example — Reb Arthur (as his students called him) transformed how Jews understand themselves and their religion’s relationship to political engagement.
To an inner circle of Jewish social justice activists and Jewish Renewalniks, Rabbi Waskow was indeed one of our rebbes. Together with his wife Phyllis Berman, he co-created a form of Jewish spirituality and consciousness that wove together progressive, even radical, political engagement with ritual and liturgical innovation. Paraphrasing what was once said about the Velvet Underground, there weren’t a lot of people in this inner circle, but all of them went on to become spiritual leaders and activists too.
But Reb Arthur’s legacy extends far beyond his fans to hundreds of thousands of Jews who don’t even know they’ve been influenced by him.
In 1969, Waskow created the “Freedom Seder,” a new version of the Passover Haggadah that, in his words, “connected the Jewish exodus from Egypt with the struggle for Civil Rights in America and Social Justice around the world.” This may seem banal today, but in 1969, it was unheard-of. While there were plenty of radicals, hippies and artists who were Jewish (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, the list goes on and on), few embraced Judaism as such, as a religious and communal tradition with something worthwhile to teach. Meanwhile, while we’ve all seen that photo of Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in fact large segments of the Jewish community were antagonistic to antiwar activism, civil rights activism, and the array of left-wing political causes that animated that period known as the Sixties.
Rabbi Waskow brought these threads together. Well before doing so became a buzzword, Waskow made Judaism newly relevant to a generation of young American Jews. He created new rituals on old foundations, and breathed new life into old words. Just consider his book titles: The Bush is Burning! Radical Judaism faces the pharaohs of the modern superstate; Godwrestling; or one of his newest, Handbook for Heretics and Prophets: A New Torah for a New World. (Those are only three of twelve, I hasten to add.)
This work continued for decades, through the Shalom Center, which Waskow founded, and later in ALEPH: The Alliance for Jewish Renewal, which, for a while anyway, brought together Waskow’s political radicalism with the emergent spirituality of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and others.
Truthfully, though, there was always a tension — often productive, sometimes less so — between these two directions. (Waskow may have coined the phrase ‘Jewish Renewal’ in a 1979, but there are different versions of that story.) Reb Arthur had little interest in meditation and mysticism; his was, in the words of another book title, a down-to-earth Judaism. He loved Jewish ritual, wrote a book about Jewish holidays, and, with Berman, proposed to transform Jewish languages of prayer and of God. Yet he had little patience when contemplative practice turned too inward, or turned away from the problems of justice toward mystical or theological speculation.
Conversely, Waskow’s radicalism often chafed against the sensibilities of many Jews. He was a left-wing activist long before he was a Jewish spiritual leader, and was outspoken from beginning to end. The Freedom Seder cited not only Gandhi and King, but Nat Turner and Eldridge Cleaver; it was published in the leftist Ramparts magazine; it was first hosted by the left-wing Jews for Urban Justice. His was not a polite liberalism.
One remarkable example: In 1969, Waskow delivered a Yom Kippur sermon at Washington’s Tifereth Israel synagogue demanding that congregants confess and atone for “paying soldiers to burn Vietnamese babies alive… supporting a system of grocery stores that starve some children into apathy and death… paying and applauding policemen who gas, shoot and beat Black people…” and many other sins. The response was just what you’d expect: in the words of one account, “a burst of indignation” from attendees who said he should focus more on issues that affect Jews. Ours is not the first time in which the Jewish Establishment has disowned and demonized Jewish Leftists.
And while Waskow may have mellowed somewhat with age, he didn’t mellow that much. In later years, he was excoriated for his criticisms of Israel’s actions in Lebanon and in the Occupied Territories; his peace work with Christian and Muslim leaders; and his opposition to the ADL and defense of the so-called ‘Ground Zero Mosque.’ Waskow was not always shaking his fist at the sky; after all, yet another of his books is called Seasons of our Joy. But he lived his life as a prophet, and prophets are rarely popular in their times — just ask Jeremiah.
Still, Waskow’s legacy — now I can use the term — runs deep and wide. He helped create Jewish environmentalism; if your synagogue is reducing its carbon footprint, in part it has Reb Arthur to thank (though he would be the first to say that such steps are pointless without collective political action). He and Berman transformed Jewish liturgy in ways that rippled out well beyond progressive communities. And broadly speaking, Reb Arthur pioneered the entire notion that social activism and Jewish spirituality — not only Jewish identity and moral teaching, but also Jewish ritual and text and myth — enrich one another.
These teachings are still prophetic today. So, as Reb Arthur would surely insist, I will give him the last words, taken from the Dayenu liturgy in the original 1969 Freedom Seder:
The struggles for freedom that remain will be more dark and difficult than any we have met so far. For we must struggle for a freedom that enfolds stern justice, stern bravery, and stern love. Blessed art thou, O Lord our God! who hast confronted us with the necessity of choice and of creating our own book of thy Law. How many and how hard are the choices and the tasks the Almighty has set before us!
For if we were to end a single genocide but not to stop the other wars that kill men and women as we sit here, it would not be sufficient;
If we were to end those bloody wars but not disarm the nations of the weapons that could destroy all mankind, it would not be sufficient;
If we were to disarm the nations but not to end the brutality with which the police attack black people in some countries, brown people in others; Moslems in some countries, Hindus in other; Baptists in some countries, atheists in others; Communists in some countries, conservatives in others, it would not be sufficient;
If we were to end outright police brutality but not prevent some people from wallowing in luxury while others starved, it would not be sufficient;
If we were to make sure that no one starved but were not to free the daring poets from their jails, it would not be sufficient;
If we were to free the poets from their jails but to train the minds of people so that they could not understand the poets, it would not be sufficient;
If we educated all men and women to understand the free creative poets but forbade them to explore their own inner ecstasies, it would not be sufficient;
If we allowed men and women to explore their inner ecstasies but would not allow them to love one another and share in the human fraternity, it would not be sufficient.
How much then are we in duty bound to struggle, work, share, give, think, plan, feel, organize, sit-in, speak out, hope, and be on behalf of Mankind!
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Pro-Israel Democrats battle to take on vulnerable Republican Rep. Mike Lawler
(New York Jewish Week) — Voters in New York’s Hudson Valley on Tuesday are choosing a Democrat to challenge the staunchly pro-Israel Republican Rep. Mike Lawler in a heavily Jewish swing district.
Two candidates have emerged as frontrunners in the Democratic primary in New York’s 17th Congressional District, a suburb of New York City that includes about 30,000 Orthodox Jews.
Cait Conley, a military veteran and former national security adviser, leads by double digits in polls this month and prediction markets over Beth Davidson, a member of the Rockland County Legislature who has highlighted her Jewish identity. A poll from Tavern Research last week found that 28% of voters were still undecided as the election approached.
Both are appealing to residents anxious about the cost of living, housing, healthcare and foreign conflicts. The winner will also aim to claw back moderate voters who supported Lawler, one of the most vocally pro-Israel members of Congress and a representative who has forged close ties with Orthodox Jewish voters.
Davidson and Conley have both said they support the United States alliance with Israel while opposing actions by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. During a candidate forum in April, they distanced themselves from Democratic efforts in the Senate to block certain military sales to Israel.
Polling far behind Conley and Davidson is Effie Phillips-Staley, a progressive who says Israel is an apartheid state that has committed genocide in Gaza.
Conley and Davidson say they are marrying pro-Israel views with a liberal agenda, including fighting President Donald Trump. Davidson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she wants to create a political home for “Jews that have felt lost in the Democratic party.” She previously served on the board of her White Plains synagogue, Beth Am Shalom, and has touted Jewish values as driving her public service, including tikkun olam, or repairing the world, and welcoming the stranger.
Conley has presented her military experience as an advantage. A former national security adviser in the Biden administration, she has said that she supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and views Israel as a critical national security ally.
The winner will face off with Lawler, who has become so closely identified with the district’s Jewish community that he was recently attacked in comments by Sen. Rand Paul’s son, William Paul, who accused the lawmaker of being one of “you people,” although Lawler is not Jewish.
Often working with Democrats, Lawler has proposed a spate of legislation aimed at supporting Israel since he entered Congress in 2023. He co-sponsored the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Department of Education to codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, a move championed by major Jewish groups and criticized by progressives for classifying some forms of Israel criticism as antisemitic. The bill passed in the House in 2024 but stalled in the Senate amid free speech concerns and was reintroduced in the House last year.
Lawler also introduced in 2024 the bipartisan Stand with Israel Act, which seeks to halt funding for United Nations agencies that “expel, downgrade, suspend, or otherwise restrict the participation of the State of Israel.” His bipartisan 2025 Bunker Buster Act seeks to equip Israel with massive bombs to target Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
This year, Lawler has partnered with Democrats on two new measures that he says will combat antisemitism. The Jewish American Security Act introduced this month proposes expanding federal security support for Jewish institutions, and a House resolution from April condemns leftist streamer Hasan Piker and far-right podcaster Candace Owens for “antisemitic hate-filled rhetoric and content.”
Phillips-Staley represents the rising progressive wing of the Democratic party that is sharply critical of Israel, differentiating herself from Lawler as well as Conley and Davidson. Phillips-Staley has said that her views solidified after she traveled to Israel and the West Bank in February. She was criticized by some Democratic officials for doing an interview with Piker.
She told JTA in March that many Jewish residents supported her belief that Israel has committed genocide and the United States should sever military aid.
“I get the most encouragement, from lots of people, but a lot of encouragement from Jews who really challenged me, especially in the beginning, to be brave and say it like it is,” said Philips-Staley.
Republicans are suspected of jumping into the late stage of the race by funding a shadowy new group called Progressive Champions PAC, which mirrors GOP efforts to influence other Democratic primaries nationwide. Davidson publicly disavowed the PAC, which has spent $1.5 million on ads attacking Conley for her contract work for an AI company that works with the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Cook Political Report.
The primary winner will quickly rocket to national prominence in the general election, as Lawler’s seat is considered one of the most likely to flip in November. Democrats outnumber Republicans in the district, which former presidential candidate Kamala Harris won by less than one percentage point in 2024.
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Primary battle between rabbi and Jewish lawyer is a referendum on Mamdani and buffer zones
(New York Jewish Week) — A primary race on New York’s Upper West Side for a state legislative battle pits a rabbi against a Jewish lawyer in a referendum on where Jews stand on Mayor Zohran Mamdani and on the right to protest outside houses of worship.
Stephanie Ruskay would be the first female rabbi elected to state office in U.S. history. Her opponent is the Mamdani-endorsed Eli Northrup, a public defender and the grandson of a Jewish civil rights lawyer who worked on Supreme Court cases to combat antisemitism and racial segregation in the 1950s.
The hotly contested Democratic primary is for the State Assembly’s District 69, which covers much of the Upper West Side and all of Morningside Heights, including the Columbia University campus roiled in 2024 by pro-Palestinian protests over Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Endorsements tell a story of two New York establishments vying over prime legislative real estate: Mamdani’s Israel-critical progressives facing off against the city’s storied Jewish liberals.
Along with Mamdani’s blessing, Northrup has won prized endorsements from left-wing icons who ran now legendary insurgent campaigns: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose energetic presidential primary run in 2016 helped doom Hillary Clinton’s presidential run; and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose ouster of top Democrat Joseph Crowley in a 2018 primary paved the way for the youthful congressional “Squad.” Mamdani has roiled this election season with endorsements of democratic socialists challenging incumbent congressional Democrats.
Ruskay has been endorsed by leading Jews in New York politics, such as City Council Speaker Julie Menin, City Comptroller Mark Levine, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal and former Borough President Ruth Messinger. She also has the backing of ActJew, a nonprofit focused on combating antisemitism, and the New York Solidarity Network, a pro-Israel group.
Ruskay and Northrup, who both identify as progressives, are battling in a neighborhood where nearly one-third of households are Jewish. The Assembly seat opened in the fall when current Assembly member Micah Lasher, who is also Jewish, decided to run for Congress.
The district overwhelmingly supported Mamdani in the 2025 mayoral race, when his sharp criticism of Israel broke with the city’s Democratic establishment and fomented ongoing tensions with segments of the Jewish community.
Northrup is a full-throated supporter of the mayor who volunteered for his campaign. Ruskay has voiced more tepid views on Mamdani, acknowledging that many Jewish New Yorkers disagreed with his views about Israel.
“When we agree, I’ll be very excited to work together, and when we don’t agree or when I know that I represent people who have a very different perspective from what’s happening, then my job is to bring that into the room,” Ruskay told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in December.
Ruskay joined New York’s annual Israel Day Parade in May, which Mamdani skipped. She said on X that she was “proud” to attend the gathering, which she described as a reminder of “the deep bonds between New York’s Jewish community and Israel, and of the strength, resilience, and vibrancy of Jewish life.”
Northrup has resisted the long tradition among Jewish Democrats of identifying as a Zionist. “I don’t know that it’s serving us to be categorizing people as Zionist or anti-Zionist,” he told JTA last month. “I certainly don’t see myself in those terms.”
Both candidates have cited their faith and Jewish values as driving their politics. They agree on building more affordable housing, filling the district’s many vacant storefronts, supporting unions and enforcing labor laws. Both have also voiced their commitment to fighting President Donald Trump and his crackdown on immigration.
One of their rare areas of disagreement is the fight over “buffer zones” to insulate synagogues from protests, a flashpoint in New York politics. The city and state both recently passed legislation that restricts demonstrations outside houses of worship. Some Jewish leaders and lawmakers championed the measures in the aftermath of a string of pro-Palestinian rallies outside synagogues, which were hosting events that promoted migration to Israel and real estate sales in Israel and the West Bank.
Ruskay supports the buffer zones. She has argued they are necessary to protect Jews from intimidation, saying during a candidate forum in May, “In the world as we wish it was, I don’t think that you should have [to] have a buffer zone. But in the world that we actually live in right now, I think that we do need one.”
Northrup, meanwhile, said in the forum that outlawing protest within a certain distance of an institution “wouldn’t pass constitutional muster,” citing Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. He told JTA that buffer zones were more symbolic than effective in addressing rising antisemitism, and that he instead supported multifaith education and building alliances across communities.
Various civil rights groups and Jewish progressives, such as Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, have said that buffer zone laws infringe on free speech and assembly. JFREJ has endorsed Northrup.
Northrup’s skepticism of the laws aligns with Mamdani’s views. The mayor resisted signing the City Council’s buffer zone bill pertaining to houses of worship, though it became law with a veto-proof majority, and he vetoed a separate bill implementing buffer zones around schools.
Ruskay has received $25,000 from the American Centerpoint PAC, which was formed on June 11, according to City and State. The PAC’s sole contributor was Adeena Rosen, a key figure in the Solidarity PAC that boosted pro-Israel candidates in 2024 state races.
In a race lacking publicly available polls, fundraising is a significant indicator. The candidates were neck-and-neck in fundraising on Election Day, with Ruskay gathering $436,381 and Northrup raising $443,522, according to Transparency USA.
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DOJ investigates coffee shop that banned Rep. Goldman as his support for Israel threatens to topple his reelection bid
(New York Jewish Week) — The Justice Department is investigating a Brooklyn coffee shop that banned Rep. Dan Goldman over his support for Israel, as tensions over the Middle East fuel a rival’s surging bid to unseat him in Tuesday’s New York Democratic primary.
Poetica Coffee, a local chain, posted a photo of Goldman at its Williamsburg branch on Instagram with a caption saying that it did not serve “racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers or anyone in between.”
Poetica added that Goldman would have been turned away if the staff had immediately recognized him. The shop said it had refunded Goldman his money, which was “probably coming from AIPAC.”
Goldman’s support for Israel has been at the center of his opponent Brad Lander’s campaign, which is much more critical of Israel. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose own broadsides against Israel have roiled segments of the city’s large Jewish population, has endorsed Lander. Goldman and Lander are competing over New York’s 10th Congressional District, one of the most progressive and Jewish districts in the United States.
Poetica’s post prompted a swift backlash from Jewish leaders and an avalanche of negative reviews on Yelp, along with death threats shared by the coffee shop, before its Instagram account was deactivated.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who oversees the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, announced on Monday that her office had opened an investigation into the coffee shop’s “denial of service taunts.”
“Federal law prohibits public accommodations such as coffee shops from discriminating against patrons based on their race, religion, or national origin,” Dhillon said on X.
Dhillon has led investigations of universities that the Trump administration says have facilitated antisemitism by not preventing pro-Palestinian protests. Civil liberties groups say the probes impinge on campus speech freedoms.
Goldman has previously criticized the Justice Department’s use of power, accusing the Trump administration last year of “weaponizing” the department to prosecute the president’s political opposition.
Goldman was not enthusiastic about this Justice Department probe, either.
“I would rather they spend their time and resources investigating antisemitism against people who do not have a platform that I do, who are not elected officials, who do not — in some ways — ask for this,” he told CNN. “I mean, I don’t ask for the antisemitism, but I’m a public figure and I can accept the criticism.”
Before Poetica’s account was deleted, Goldman replied in a comment that a barista had allowed his 7-year-old daughter to use the bathroom even though they had not purchased anything. “I made sure to buy a coffee in return for her kindness,” he said. “I hope you at least make sure she gets the tip that she deserved.”
Lander defended Goldman in a statement. “There are plenty of ways to lobby elected officials and express outrage at the votes they’ve taken without turning coffee shops into places people don’t feel welcome,” he said. “I’m glad Poetica took down their post, and I thought Rep. Goldman’s reply was extremely gracious.”
Mamdani did not respond to a request for comment on the incident.
The race on Tuesday is likely to be one of the toughest of Goldman’s career, with the latest poll from Emerson College showing him trailing Lander by 34 percentage points.
Lander, the former city comptroller, is a progressive who has repeatedly criticized Israel and Goldman’s ties to AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby. Goldman has been endorsed by AIPAC, though he has not accepted direct AIPAC funding in his reelection campaign. Goldman has consistently voted for military aid packages to Israel, while Lander supports a blanket ban on military aid, including for Israel’s Iron Dome defense system.
The two Jewish Democrats agree on many other issues, such as fighting President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration. Before running for Congress, Goldman, as a lawyer, was the lead counsel in the 2019 successful U.S. House of Representatives impeachment of Trump. The Senate acquitted Trump.
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