Uncategorized
As 1000+ rabbis sign anti-Mamdani letter, others decry mounting ‘red lines’ in Jewish communities
(JTA) — Two days after Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove delivered a sermon urging congregants to vote against Zohran Mamdani, rabbis across the country were asked to sign a letter quoting him.
By the time it was published Wednesday, 650 rabbis and cantors had done so, adding their names calling out the “political normalization” of anti-Zionism among figures like Mamdani, the New York City mayoral frontrunner.
By Friday, the letter had more than 1,000 signatories, making it one of the most-signed rabbinic letters in U.S. history.
But Cosgrove, the senior rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue on the Upper East Side, was not one of them.
“As a policy, I do not sign group letters,” he said in an interview.
“My fear of such letters is they can flatten subjects and reduce complex issues to ‘Who’s on a letter and who’s not on a letter?’” he added. “There are other platforms that rabbis can give expression to their leadership.”
As the letter has ricocheted across the country and escaped from rabbis’ inboxes to their congregants’ social media feeds, it has ignited a wave of scrutiny, plaudits and recriminations. Some people have voiced relief or disappointment in seeing their rabbi’s name on the list — or on not seeing it.
“Jewish communities are circulating spreadsheets of who signed and who didn’t,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein in an essay describing what she said was “a painful public reckoning” taking place both publicly and privately.
“I am not sleeping. These red lines are so dangerous,” responded Rabbi Lauren Grabelle Hermann, of Manhattan’s Society for the Advancement of Judaism, in one of dozens of comments representing a wide range of views. Hermann devoted her Yom Kippur sermon earlier this month to calling on her community to “become an antidote to the polarization and fragmentation in our broader Jewish community and society.”
Now, facing renewed pressure from their congregants over the letter, some New York City rabbis are articulating alternative strategies for responding to a political moment that many Jews are experiencing as fraught and high-stakes.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl wrote to all members of Central Synagogue, the Manhattan Reform congregation where she is senior rabbi, to explain why they would not find her among the letter’s signatories.
“As a Central clergy team, we have spoken from the pulpit in multiple past sermons and will continue to take a clear, unambiguous position on antisemitism, on anti-Zionist rhetoric, and on sharing our deep support for Israel,” she wrote.
But, citing the importance of “separation of church and state,” Buchdahl wrote that “it is up to each of us to vote our conscience.”
“There are political organizations, including Jewish ones, where electoral politics is the core mission. Get involved,” she wrote. “Central Synagogue, however, is a Jewish spiritual home and we want to keep it that way. It remains our conviction that political endorsements of candidates are not in the best interest of our congregation, community, or country.”
Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of the Conservative synagogue Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side sent out a letter of his own to congregants. He said he would not be voting for Mamdani but did not believe it was his role to tell them how to vote. And he raised concerns about what he said was the “shearing off of liberal from conservative liberal communities,” saying that Jews of all political outlooks should be able to pray and act together.
“The Torah commands lo titgodedu, traditionally interpreted to mean, don’t fragment yourselves into factions,” Kalmanofsky wrote. “I fear this happening to Jews. Frankly, I fear it more than I fear an anti-Zionist mayor.”
Rabbi Adam Mintz, who leads the recently rebranded Modern Orthodox congregation Shtiebel @ JCC, said he’d signed a smaller letter from Manhattan Orthodox rabbis urging the importance of voting. But Mintz felt this letter was outside his role.
“I’m a rabbi. I don’t want to take a political stand,” he said. “I understand that some people feel strongly and they want to take a political stand. I think that’s OK, but that’s not my role.”
Rabbi Michelle Dardashti of Kane Street Synagogue, an egalitarian Conservative synagogue in Brooklyn, did not sign the letter, either. She instead took a different approach to addressing her congregants in the lead-up to the election, hosting about 80 of them Tuesday night for an evening of dialogue.
Members representing a spectrum of views took turns sharing questions and concerns ahead of the election. Dardashti said congregants, despite conflicting views, were “deeply engaged and passionate, and spoke beautifully and respectfully.”
“I understand my rabbinic role to be one that creates space for people to learn from each other’s different experiences, and therefore perspectives,” she said.
Some Jewish leaders and groups outright opposed the letter and its message, rather than considering it an ill-advised strategy. Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish organization that endorsed Mamdani, released a statement excoriating the letter and its signatories for distracting from what it said was the real issue: Donald Trump.
“These Jewish leaders are doing Trump and the MAGA movement’s work for them: dividing our pro-democracy movement at a time when we need to be united to beat back fascism,” the statement read.
Josh Whinston, a rabbi in Ann Arbor, Michigan, expressed skepticism on social media about the letter’s origin and intentions, and noted that he did not sign it.
“This was not a call for moral clarity; it was a political move aimed at influencing a local race in New York City,” he wrote.
Upon first reading it, Whinston wrote that he “agreed with parts of what it said,” and that he “considered signing.” But, hoping to learn more about the Jewish Majority, the group behind the letter, Whinston wrote, “The site offered no substance. There was no mission, no vision, no leadership, no staff.”
The Jewish Majority’s goal, as stated on its website, is to counterbalance left-wing “fringe groups” like Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, which they say “weaponize the Jewish identity of some of their members to call for policy recommendations that are rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community.”
The executive director of the Jewish Majority, Jonathan Schulman, is a former longtime AIPAC staffer. In an interview, Schulman said he wrote the letter’s first draft before it underwent rounds of edits from about 40 rabbis of different denominations.
The inspiration came when “Rabbi Cosgrove’s sermon started making the rounds,” he said, adding, “By Sunday morning, rabbis were reaching out to me saying, ‘This is the kind of sentiment we’re feeling all over the country.’”
Unlike Cosgrove’s sermon, which included an endorsement of Andrew Cuomo, the letter does not mention either of Mamdani’s opponents. It does, however, say that political figures like “Zohran Mamdani refuse to condemn violent slogans, deny Israel’s legitimacy, and accuse the Jewish state of genocide,” and calls on Americans to “stand up for candidates who reject antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric, and who affirm Israel’s right to exist in peace and security.”
Schulman recalled being told, “‘There’s the issue of Zohran Mamdani and calls to globalize the intifada and all this, but there’s anti-Zionist candidates running for mayor in Somerville, Massachusetts, in Minneapolis, Seattle — this is becoming normalized, this is becoming mainstream.’”
Rabbi Mark Miller of Temple Beth El in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, is one of the rabbis who helped edit the letter. He said part of his goal was to help clarify its nature as being national rather than local.
“This was not an attempt for the rest of us to get involved in New York politics,” Miller said. “It’s highlighting it, but the issue is that everywhere we are, this is a concern.”
Signatories on the letter include rabbis from across the United States, and even outside the country.
Rabbi Brigitte Rosenberg, the senior rabbi of a Reform congregation in St. Louis, signed the letter, and said the message about anti-Zionism resonated with her on a national level.
“Mamdani was the big race that was talked about in this, but it’s come up in other races, right?” Rosenberg said, pointing to the comeback bid of “Squad” member Cori Bush to represent St. Louis in Congress.
Rabbi Jeremy Barras from Miami said a number of his congregants have residences in New York, and “they’re just terrified.”
“But I would’ve signed it if it was the same issue in any city in America,” Barras said. “It just happens to be true that we’re a little more sensitive because so many of our families have connections in New York.”
Both Barras and Rosenberg said they couldn’t remember an open letter signed by this many rabbis. There have in fact been examples of open letters being signed by 1,000-plus rabbis, including an appeal to open Palestine to Jews in 1945; a 2017 letter calling on Trump to support refugees and a letter from earlier this year demanding Israel stop “using starvation as a weapon of war.”
Yehuda Kurtzer, co-president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, affirmed that open letters like the one distributed by the Jewish Majority are nothing new, and said there is “definitely a tension that emerges” for those expected to sign. Endorsements from the pulpit, on the other hand, are “new terrain,” he said, noting the Trump administration’s decision to stop enforcement of an IRS rule barring political endorsements from religious institutions.
“We felt pretty strongly that rabbis should not generally do this, and there’s a whole variety of reasons,” Kurtzer said. “It’s a plausible scenario that politicians will start doing quid pro quos with religious leaders around their needs. Once you do it once there’s an expectation that you’ll do it all the time.”
Some of the rabbis who signed say they weren’t making a partisan political statement. Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side and the leader of a Zionist organization within the Reform movement, acknowledged “worries” about alienating some congregants. But, like others who’ve come out against Mamdani, Hirsch said it was non-partisan to speak out against someone whose rhetoric could compromise Jewish safety.
“There’s always the risk that people will understand you in a partisan way, especially since we’re living in such a hyper-partisan atmosphere now,” Hirsch said. “But it’s a risk that we have to take because the stakes are so high.”
Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El made a similar point. “I’m not going to tell people who they ought to vote for. But I do think it’s important for me to let them know what I think they ought to be thinking about when they vote,” he said, pointing to issues like “the well-being of the State of Israel and the safety of the Jewish community.”
For Cosgrove, whose synagogue is located 20 blocks from Davidson’s, the division that’s arisen since his sermon is something to grieve.
“It deeply saddens me that, in a moment where the Jewish community should be thinking about the external threats that our community faces, that we should be spending an iota of energy on that which exacerbates any fault lines,” Cosgrove said.
The post As 1000+ rabbis sign anti-Mamdani letter, others decry mounting ‘red lines’ in Jewish communities appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Waiting on line on Christmas is a time-honored New York tradition — was it ever thus?
At 6 a.m., the morning before Christmas, Charles Licata was waiting outside the door of Russ & Daughters, two hours before the century-old Manhattan appetizing store opened. Each Christmas Eve for the past 42 years, Licata, jones this time by a family member and a friend, has made the hour-long drive from central New Jersey. “I like to be first in line,” he told me.
Licata, who manufactures granite countertops, told me he was hosting 40 for a traditional Italian feast of seven fishes on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas Day, his family had plans to devour another seven fishes and then some. “We got sable, lox, caviar, the spreads, pickled herring, tuna fish salad, hot and cold smoked salmon,” he started to list, before adding, “we got everything.”
Nikki Russ Federman, the fourth-generation owner of Russ & Daughters, instantly greeted Licata who she recognized from years past. By 9 a.m., she was hustling off to the shop’s Brooklyn bakery because they were already running out of bagels.
The Christmas Eve crowds rival Erev Yom Kippur and they grow throughout the day.
“Christmas is a Jewish holiday,” Russ Federman quipped.
For Licata, the line itself, with its banter and camaraderie is part of the ritual, except queuing at Russ & Daughters isn’t traditional. Lower East Side Jews didn’t wait in line; they jostled at deli counters and mobbed pushcarts.
“When I arrived on the scene in 1978 to take over the business,” third-generation owner Mark Russ Federman recounted in his 2013 book Russ & Daughters, “I discovered that there had never been a real attempt to implement a method to maintain crowd control and customer flow.”
First, the lox slicers behind the counter would pick out their regulars from the crowd, and then call “Who’s next?” To which, according to Mark Russ Federman, several elderly women would yell in their Yiddish-inflected English, “My next.” Mayhem would ensue.
“Grandpa Russ, my parents, and my uncles and aunts,” wrote Mark Russ Federman, “felt that having customers take a number from a machine and wait their turn was insulting, impersonal, and too ‘uptown.’”
It was during the Yom Kippur rush of 1978 that Russ Federman established a numbered ticketing system, turning the huddled mass of customers into an orderly line — something he saw as both more efficient for business and fairer for the customers. Since then, the appetizing store’s line has only grown, as have lines throughout the city.
Weathering the wait for Russ & Daughters seems more legit than camping out for the latest TikTok trend. Since the pandemic, lines in New York have become ubiquitous — for oversized pastries, for stunt croissants, for hype pizza. This past spring, a Saturday Night Live skit joked that a New Yorker’s favorite pastime is to “wait in a big dumb line.”
Waiting on line for West Village brunch often feels performative, but for Licata at Russ & Daughters, it isn’t about clout, it’s about continuity. It was a Jewish friend who first brought bagels and lox over for Christmas breakfast at Licata’s home decades ago. “I’m just carrying the tradition forward,” he said.
Down the block, most every year, Jeremy Kahn and his family make a pilgrimage from Washington, D.C. to Katz’s Deli. This past week, he was shocked to find that, even at the off-time of 4 p.m., the line still stretched to the corner. He speculated that there were more tourists. “I thought we’d be able to just walk right in,” he said.
After the 30 minute-plus wait at Katz’s, customers hungry for pastrami take a ticket at the door; they must sort into new lines to wait their turn with a cutter at the counter. And before leaving, customers must again wait their turn at the cashier’s line.
For Kahn, the wait is worth it. “This is where my grandfather would come to eat,” he said, and now he was taking his two young children and his father. “It means something that there is a line to get in. People are willing to wait in the cold.”
Katz’s with its shared cafeteria tables is known for its hustle and bustle, but things feel orderly compared to how it once was. In 1966, the iconic cheap eats guide, Underground Gourmet, deemed Katz’s “the largest, nosiest, busiest, and sloppiest delicatessen in Manhattan.” The guide’s authors, the illustrators and graphic designers Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder, described ordering as a “struggle” that involved having to “muscle your way up to the endless serving counter and try to make yourself heard.”
Standing on line was foreign enough to Jewish immigrants that the Forverts mostly referred to queues, not by the Yiddish word “rey” (meaning row), but with the English “line,” spelled out in Hebrew letters. In 1930, the Forverts reported that boxing fans were waiting on long lines in the cold and rain to watch a Jackie Kid Berg lightweight championship bout at Madison Square Garden, but Jews at the time mostly seemed to be lining up at Depression-era soup kitchens and unemployment lines in the U.S. or, worse, for handouts at refugee centers in Europe.
It’s not just Jews who were late to line up; lines are actually a fairly modern phenomenon. Often cited as containing the first description of a queue in English is Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 book The French Revolution, which described Parisians lining up at bakers’ shops during a famine. By World War II, queuing had become commonplace in rationing-era Britain.
Lines were then associated with shortages and bureaucracy; now they represent wealth and leisure. There are still long waits at the DMV and over-burdened food pantries, but today, many lines are fueled by social media. A long line at a bakery signals that their $8.50 pistachio rose croissant is popular; joining the line gives you online bragging rights, not joining risks FOMO.
My friend Miriam Berger, a 91-year-old Manhattanite, says she has no memory of these types of lines in the 20th century. “I have no patience to stand on a line for anything,” she told me, “probably because such behavior didn’t exist in my growing-up environment.”
We still manage to do much without lines. We squeeze into rush hour subway cars, flag down bartenders at crowded pubs, and hail cabs. At times, it feels cut-throat, but there’s an unspoken etiquette — someone waves you into a lane, a stranger holds the door.
Lines promise efficiency and equity, but the first-come-first-serve system easily breaks down. There are cutters, professional line waiters, and ways to pay your way to the front of the line with priority passes and VIP options for most anything.
And very often, there are ways to avoid lines altogether. At the end of his book, Mark Russ Federman writes that when his daughter Nikki and his nephew Josh entered the business in 2001, they started online ordering. “This wasn’t the way the Russ family did business,” he initially thought before he accepted the idea. “If you wanted to buy our fish, you came to the store. If you wanted to place an order over the phone, we had to recognize your voice or know your family.”
Now, Russ & Daughters ships nationwide, and with delivery apps, lox and herring can be ferried almost instantly to your door on an electric moped.
That’s too uptown for my tastes. I’d rather take a number.
The post Waiting on line on Christmas is a time-honored New York tradition — was it ever thus? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The data is in: For many in the Northeast, Christmas isn’t Christmas without Chinese food
It’s not just a myth that Jews head to Chinese restaurants on Christmas. It’s science!
Sort of. A new report from the financial services company Coventry Direct claims to have quantified the trend. The report analyzed search data for “Chinese food near me” during the week of Christmas from 2020 to 2024, and found that the Northeast dominated the results.
The top five states included Delaware, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and New Hampshire, while New York, which is home to the largest Jewish population in the country, came in seventh place. Under the assumption that Jews are overrepresented in the Northeast, the study confirms that Coventry Direct is not peer-reviewed.
The study also analyzed Google search trends over the past year to find the top-searched Chinese food dish in each state. While Szechuan chicken was the most popular dish, taking first place in eight states, New York’s most searched item was Buddha’s Delight, a — IYKYK — vegetarian stew.
The Jewish Christmas tradition was famously referenced during Elena Kagan’s United States Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2010 when she was asked where she was on Christmas day:
“You know, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant,” replied Kagan.
In recent years around Christmas, social media has also been flooded with images of a sign where the seemingly fictional “Chinese Restaurant Association” of America thanks its Jewish diners for their patronage.
“The Chinese Restaurant Association of the United States would like to extend our thanks to the Jewish people,” the sign reads. “We do not completely understand your dietary customs … but we are proud and grateful that your GOD insist you eat our food on Christmas.”
Two men enjoy Chinese cuisine prepared by Chinese chefs within the guidelines of kosher food preparation at a restaurant. (Getty Images)
But the now-ubiquitous tradition of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas traces back to the early 20th century, when Jewish immigrants began carving out distinctly American rituals of their own. If for no other reasons, Chinese restaurants were more likely to be open on Christmas.
A classic 1993 study on the tradition, “New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern,” by Gaye Tuchman and Harry Levine, traced the Jewish affinity for Chinese food to a few factors: Chinese restaurants at the time “welcomed everyone,” offered flavors familiar to an Eastern European Jewish palate and were considered a “sophisticated” dining experience for new-ish, Jewish Americans stepping outside their comfort zones.
While Chinese restaurants do not typically offer kosher fare, Tuchman and Levine also argued that Chinese restaurants were viewed as “safe treyf” because Chinese cuisine rarely mixes milk and meat and ingredients like pork and shrimp are chopped into hard-to-identify pieces.
To celebrate the longstanding tradition, a comedy club in New York’s East Village is set to host “Kosher Chinese: The Comedy Show,” with patrons enjoying kosher dumplings and an “unapologetically alternative holiday spirit we all secretly love.” In San Francisco, the 33rd Annual Kung Pao Kosher Comedy show kicks off tonight, and runs through Friday, Dec. 26.
From Massachusetts to Ohio, Jewish delis have also planned their own Chinese-inspired menus to mark the tradition.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post The data is in: For many in the Northeast, Christmas isn’t Christmas without Chinese food appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
StopAntisemitism names Tucker Carlson ‘Antisemite of the Year’ as 2024 winner Candace Owens ramps up anti-Jewish rhetoric
(JTA) — The activist group StopAntisemitism has awarded the conservative personality Tucker Carlson its ignominious honor of “Antisemite of the Year,” citing his frequent invocation of classic antisemitic stereotypes.
The announcement comes as Carlson sits at the center of controversy on the American right about whether extremists should be welcomed in the Republican Party. It also marks the second year in a row that StopAntisemitism has selected a right-wing figure for its accolade, after years of awarding the mantle to mostly left-wing figures.
“Carlson mainstreams antisemitism by platforming and praising Holocaust revisionists and Nazi apologists, while hiding behind irony and plausible deniability,” the group said in a statement. “By legitimizing extremist voices and weaponizing conspiratorial imagery at massive scale, he has helped drag antisemitic ideas back into the mainstream.”
A watchdog presence with more than 300,000 followers on X, StopAntisemitism regularly mobilizes against activists and social media posts. The group has faced criticism for what some perceive as an inordinate focus on Muslim personalities, pro-Palestinian actions and non-prominent individuals. Its defenders deny that, pointing out that StopAntisemitism also regularly spotlights neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers on the right.
Its finalists for Antisemite of the Year included pro-Palestinian celebrities Ms. Rachel, Cynthia Nixon and Marcia Cross; mixed-martial-arts athlete and Holocaust denier Bryce Mitchell; two personalities associated with left-wing network The Young Turks; and social media personalities on both the far left (Guy Christensen) and far right (Stew Peters).
Carlson received the accolade on Sunday night, at the end of a weekend in which he was a keynote speaker at the convention of Turning Point USA, the young-conservatives group founded by Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated this fall. In its announcement, StopAntisemitism noted Carlson’s speech at Kirk’s memorial service, in which he described the murder of Jesus in a way that both his critics and fans interpreted as implying that Jews or Israelis had been behind Kirk’s assassination.
At the convention, the Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro continued his campaign against Carlson and Carlson declared himself to free of the anti-Jewish animus that he has long been criticized as propagating.
“Let me just affirm one final time. Not only am I not an antisemite — and I would say so if I was — I’m not an antisemite for a very specific reason,” Carlson said in his speech. “Not because it’s unpopular or my donors don’t like it. I don’t have any donors. I’m not an antisemite because anti-semitism is immoral in my religion. It is immoral to hate people for how they were born.”
It was the same explanation that Vice President JD Vance offered earlier this month when he said in an NBC News interview that he believed antisemitism is wrong.
In his own speech to Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, Vance again refrained from criticizing extremists in the Republican Party, saying that he opposes “purity tests” for inclusion in the conservative movement. He also said he believed that antisemitism in the United States was being fueled by “a real backlash” against U.S. aid to Israel..
As the convention was underway, last year’s “Antisemite of the Year,” the right-wing streamer Candace Owens, embarked on a four-hour broadcast eviscerating Shapiro; amplifying antisemitic theories, including that Jews controlled the slave trade; and promoting a classic work of antisemitism by August Rohling, a German Catholic who believed in the blood libel and argued that the Talmud is a secret guide used by Jews for nefarious purposes. Rohling died in 1931.
The post StopAntisemitism names Tucker Carlson ‘Antisemite of the Year’ as 2024 winner Candace Owens ramps up anti-Jewish rhetoric appeared first on The Forward.