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What is the state of American Zionism today, and how did we get here?
As long as Jews have been Jews, from God’s call to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12, our identity has been measured by way of geographical and spiritual proximity to the land. A first principle which – and I can’t help myself – New York’s Mayor-elect elides and ignores when he calls himself an anti-Zionist but not an antisemite.
From Joseph being sold down to Egypt in this week’s Torah reading, through our wilderness wanderings, the first commonwealth, our laments by the rivers of Babylon, the second commonwealth and subsequent exile – whether exile be due to the hands of our oppressors, or, for the theologically minded, mipnei hata·einu, due to our own sins – our eyes and hearts have turned to Zion.
In good times and bad, as Jewish communities flourished in Bavel, in Spain, or anywhere else, by way of halakhic literature, poetry, or breaking glasses at weddings, we are ever reminded im eshkakhekh, If I forget thee. The foundation of Jewish existence has always been a connection to the land – when we were in the land, and when we were not.
– The emergence of Zionism –
As the limitations of the Enlightenment and Emancipation became evident in the second half of the nineteenth century, what was a distant hope for return took on new urgency with individuals like Leon Pinsker (Auto Emancipation, 1882), Theodor Herzl (The Jewish State, 1896), and Max Nordau (Jewry of Muscle, 1903). It was time for Jews to become the subject of their own sentence rather than the object of someone else’s.
As I always remind the rabbinical students I teach, Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Judaism are but three of a handful of responses to the challenge of modernity, the question of how to be a Jew in the modern world. The most famous and perhaps most successful response to the Jewish question, as Herzl best understood, is Zionism, a vision by which a Jew could be fully Jewish and a full citizen of the world, the Jewish people a nation like other nations.
No matter the passion of Zionism’s founding idealogues and the courageous first waves of aliyah, the vast majority of Jews did not heed the Zionist rallying cry, but instead emigrated to American shores or, as in the case of my grandparents, to the United Kingdom. The story of American Jewry is largely (but not entirely) the tale of two million Jews (out of 20 million immigrants) who arrived in America around the turn of the twentieth century in search of a better life for themselves and their descendants – seeking to balance the hyphen of American-Jewish identities.
It was not then, nor is it now, a straightforward proposition to hold multiple hyphenated identities – never mind loyalties. I think of Theodore Roosevelt’s infamous 1916 address entitled “America for Americans,” where he proclaimed: “I stand for straight Americanism unconditioned and unqualified, and I stand against every form of hyphenated Americanism.” Roosevelt decried what he dubbed the “moral treason” of anyone acting or speaking as a German-American, Irish-American, English-American, or any other hyphenated identity.
It was this context – the challenge of hyphenated identities – that was the backdrop for Justice Brandeis’s 1915 insistence that Zionism was consistent with American patriotism, in a landmark Zionist speech that was delivered to a group of Reform rabbis who feared that supporting the Yishuv (the early settlements in then Palestine) would be perceived as somehow incompatible with the aspiration of being accepted as an American. For American Jews, the task was a tricky one. A not-yet-established American Jewish community fearing the charge of dual loyalty figuring out what to do with the not yet established Yishuv.
– American Zionism takes root –
No discussion of American Zionism can occur without mention of Henrietta Szold. More than Brandeis, more than Stephen Wise or Abba Hillel Silver, it is Szold, the founder of Hadassah, to whom all American Zionists owe a debt of gratitude beyond repayment. Szold delivered her first lecture on Zionism in 1896 – prior to Herzl’s publication of Der Judenstaat.
As the daughter of Russian immigrants, Zionism held a central place for Szold and her conception of Judaism, a belief that Judaism could only be in “full flower” when normal human life was built around Jewish principles – Hebrew language, Hebrew literature, and beyond. Perhaps more importantly, it would be the organization that Szold established – Hadassah – that would forever change the face of American Judaism and American Zionism.
Hadassah grew from the shattered shards of Szold’s broken heart, founded by Szold with six other women in the vestry room of New York’s Temple Emanuel. Because while Brandeis was off telling people that patriotism and Zionism were compatible one with another, Szold and her Hadassah compatriots were showing people how it could be done.
In Francine Klagsbrun’s words: “Unlike male Zionists, with their often grandiose political and nation-building objectives, these women could identify with the down-to-earth goals and skills . . . that Hadassah emphasized.”
The cause of medical care in Palestine (Hadassah’s first hospital was dedicated some 100 years ago), the cultural work, the philanthropy, eventually youth aliyah – Hadassah provided a vehicle by which American Jews could do the pragmatic work of Zionism without living in Zion itself.
As Klagsbrun points out, the effects of Hadassah were not solely to elevate the lives of those in the Yishuv. Their work provided an organizing principle, a civil religion, that enhanced the lives of American Jews.
As Szold wrote privately in her diary: “We [American Jews] need Zionism as much as those Jews do who need a physical home.”
Not just women’s organizations, but every American Jewish organization aimed at the building up and uplifting of Jewish life in the Yishuv and subsequently Israel owes a debt of gratitude to Szold. The critical point, to which we will return soon enough, is that the work of Hadassah, as much as it was in service to Jews in Palestine, was also in service to American Jewry. A faith, a civic faith, by which American Jews, in doing good work on behalf of Jews in Palestine, could bring spiritual renewal to themselves.
American Zionism was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a given. Reform, Orthodox, and my own denomination, Conservative Judaism all had non-Zionist devotees. While there are books written on the subject, my favorite story comes from my alma mater, the Jewish Theological Seminary, in 1945.
Then chancellor Louis Finkelstein understood JTS and, for that matter, Judaism as whole to have a universal mission: to be, in his words, “a civilizing influence on the modern world.” Which also meant that his views on Zionism were lukewarm at best. Despite his love for the Jewish people Finkelstein could never quite square the circle of a Jewish nation-state.
Having come of age during the Great War, Finkelstein bristled against nationalisms of all kinds. As the head of the leading Jewish educational institution of America, his bets were on Jewish life in the diaspora, not Palestine; as a human rights advocate, he would only support a Jewish state that conferred equal status to Christians and Muslims; not to mention that Finkelstein’s fundraising base was dependent on Arthur Hayes Sulzberger and Lewis Strauss – two anti-Zionist JTS board members.
Thus, despite the Zionism of most American Jews, the rabbinical leadership of the Conservative movement, and the student body of the Seminary itself, Finkelstein stayed firm in his non-Zionism. So adamant was Finkelstein’s position, that at the 1945 pre-state JTS graduation, the students’ request to sing Hatikvah at commencement was turned down. In an act of defiance, the students arranged with the carilloneur at Union Theological Seminary across the street to play the melody so it could be heard during their processional.
A younger generation of students protesting the older generation for being too soft on Zionism. History, it would seem, has a wicked sense of humor.
– Zionism in the diaspora –
Oscar Wilde once said something to the effect of “there are two tragedies in the world – one is not getting what you want and the other is getting it.” The establishment of the state of Israel – l’havdil – marked an unprecedented opportunity and challenge for American Jewry as we finally “got” that which we had sought over the millennia.
When Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion established the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, it was both a culmination of and a break with thousands of years of Jewish history. For those who lived in Israel, of course, but also for those who did not. Israel was no longer an abstraction. How would diaspora Jews orient themselves to the living, breathing Jewish state as they opted not to live there?
Prior to statehood, the term “Israel” referred to the entire people of Israel, wherever they might dwell. Following May 14, 1948, as Ben-Gurion made clear in a famous exchange with Simon Rawidowicz, Israel became a specific geographic and statist designation – no longer the name for the global people of Israel.
How does a Jew living in Moscow, Milan, or Milwaukee support the Jewish state while remaining a proud citizen of their own country of residence and citizenship?
Up until 1948, Zionism, loosely defined, stood for supporting efforts to establish the Jewish state in the land of Israel. In 1961, when Rabbi Joachim Prinz proclaimed to the AJC, “Zionism is dead – long live the Jewish people,” he did so because he believed that with the establishment of Israel, Zionism had fulfilled its purpose and what was needed was “a new and dynamic movement to preserve Jewish peoplehood and create an independent and positive link between American Jewry and Israel.” The landscape had changed.
“What is the new definition of Zionism for the person who has chosen to opt out of settling in the land?”
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
What is the new definition of Zionism for the person who has chosen to opt out of settling in the land? To what degree may, or must, a diaspora Jew engage with, support, defend, or critique the actions of the Jewish state, a state that, no different from any other state, makes both good and bad choices? Is Israel the Jewish state, or the state of the Jews – all Jews, wherever they may be? What does all this mean in practice?
From Israel’s founding, this debate over American Jewry’s relationship to Israel has taken many guises. In 1950, for instance, Ben-Gurion and Jacob Blaustein, the then president of the American Jewish Committee, agreed that Ben-Gurion would both tone down his calls for diaspora emigration and refrain from intervening in American Jewish life. In exchange, Blaustein (speaking on behalf of American Jewry) stated that while American Jewry could offer advice, cooperation, and help, it would not attempt to speak for Israel. The importance of the Ben-Gurion–Blaustein agreement is not so much its durability, but, with the hindsight of the last 75 years, that it is a benchmark more honored in the breach than in its observance.
The 1950s would see the building of a Zionist consensus for American Jewry. With the establishment of the State of Israel, any lingering non-Zionism had become a moot point. By 1952, Finkelstein was awarding an honorary doctorate to Ben-Gurion. The establishment of the Conference of Presidents, the registering of AIPAC as a lobbying organization, and for American Orthodox, the gushpanka (stamp of approval) of Soloveitchik’s Kol Dodi Dofek in the midst of the Suez Crisis – all signaled the Zionist transformation of American Orthodoxy.
In the wake of the Shoah, Israel’s founding had profound implications for the self-perception of diaspora Jews. At its most basic level, Israel provided refuge for world Jewry should they need it. Never again would Jews, as was the case in the Shoah, be denied safe harbor from their oppressors. But Israel was more than that. In diaspora hearts and minds, it was a source of pride: a new and more assertive identity that served as a counterpoint to the vulnerability of the Shoah and the thousands of years of pogrom-filled exile that preceded it. While opting out of living in Israel, diaspora Jews derived vicarious confidence as the first stages of Israel’s existence unfolded. Whether we were safer because Israel existed or not was beside the point; we felt safer because we lived in a time of a Jewish state.
– Israel became a secular religion –
American Jewry’s engagement with Israel became a constituent building block of American Jewish identity, a civil religion to complement our religious religion.
The pulpit of my synagogue, like so many others, is adorned with an Israeli flag, and the prayer for the State of Israel is central to our liturgy. Curriculum teaching the history of Zionism and modern Israel is integrated into congregational schools, Jewish day schools, and Jewish camping. In times of both comfort and crisis, American Jews raised vast sums of money for Israel. Summers in Israel, gap semesters, and gap years became normative expressions of Jewish life.
Politically, American Jews were expected to support elected representatives who prioritized the defense of Israel, important acts unto themselves but also a rallying cry to unify American Jewry in all its political and religious diversity. As the slogan goes, “Wherever we stand, we stand with Israel.” Two of the most impactful achievements of American Jewry over the past half-century are AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Birthright Israel, offering a free ten-day trip to Israel to all Jewish young adults, ages eighteen through twenty-six. Both efforts centered on Israel engagement.
In ways Henrietta Szold could not imagine, Israel came to serve as the bonding agent to keep American Jewry together. It focused our energies. We were proud of our Israeli cousins and wanted to help them, and the fact that we could provide Israel with philanthropic and political support served their needs and ours. Israel missions, Israel education, Israel advocacy — in good times and bad — became a secular religion for American Jews, sometimes supplanting Judaism itself. It is easier, after all, to write a check than it is to keep our children home on Friday night to light Shabbat candles. It is easier to call someone a self-hating Jew than to worry about your children or grandchildren’s non-observance.
Uninspired by the prayerbook, unfamiliar with the Talmud, American Jews became adept at new Jewish topics of conversation: how our elected leaders vote on legislation regarding Israel’s security or the terms by which the United States should or shouldn’t enter into a deal with Iran. The dividing lines between us no longer fell along the various levels at which we observed the Sabbath or dietary laws, or our beliefs as to whether the Torah is or isn’t of divine origin. Our views on Israel took the place of these. The decisions being made in a sovereign Jewish state in which we do not live, vote, pay taxes, or serve in the military became the basis of a new Israel-based religion.
And in many respects, engagement with Israel became more than a religion; it became an orthodoxy. Again, it makes perfect sense that the imperfect policies of Israel (or any state) might be worthy of objection – by Israelis, Israel’s Jewish supporters, or anyone – but sense has very little to do with it. For an American Jew to suggest that this or that policy of the Israeli government was not in the long-term best interest of Israel came to be understood by the American Jewish establishment as a form of betrayal.
As the late Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg once observed, “The lack of support for Israel [is] the only offense for which Jews can be ‘excommunicated.’” Israel, the thinking goes, does not lack for external enemies. Because we have opted out of the opportunity to live in Israel, American Jews must forgo our right to critique Israel because any such criticism will become fodder for Israel’s real enemies.
“American Jews feel that the Israel they love so much does not love them back or even care that we exist.”
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
To make matters even more complicated for American Jews, while our Jewish identity obligates us to engage with Israel, for most of us it is a religious identity that is not recognized by Israel itself, where all matters of personal status (birth, marriage, conversion, burial) fall under the authority of the Chief Rabbinate.
The irony, of course, is that so much of my energy as an American rabbi is devoted to supporting and defending a Jewish state which neither supports, defends, nor recognizes Judaism as I teach and preach it.
A state of affairs whose effect is to make American Jews feel that the Israel they love so much does not love them back or even care that we exist.
I recall the shock and dismay my daughter shared upon returning from her Israel gap year, discovering that her Israeli pre-army mechina peers, on whose condition so much of her Jewish education had been directed, expended zero psychic energy on the well-being of diaspora Jewry.
And then, we have the nerve to send that kid to a college campus expecting her to defend the policies of a government that does not reflect her values or recognize her Judaism as Judaism. I myself may be constitutionally incapable of walking away from Israel, but others have and will continue do so – before October 7th and all the more since. There is a limit to the self-flagellating exercise of supporting a state that neither recognizes you nor represents your values. For the coming generation of American Jewry, the loyalties of yesteryear will no longer suffice.
– The Palestinian-Israeli conflict & Oct. 7 –
And of all the points of difference between the “civil religion” of American Jewry and the reality of Israel, none loom as large as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For the post-Shoah generation of American Jewish leadership, Israel’s claim to the land and need for a sovereign state were obvious, a simple matter of survival.
In the first decades of Israel’s existence, persistent Arab hostilities sidelined any concerns American Jewry might have harbored about the democratic rights of the indigenous Palestinian population. The facts didn’t help.
Arabs had long rejected any Jewish claim to the land, and mainstream American Jewry paid little attention to Palestinian aspirations to nationhood, focusing instead on the pressing needs of the Jewish people. Expressions of concern for the Palestinians and the conditions they lived in were beyond the bounds of Jewish communal discussions.
But the past fifty-plus years of Israeli settlement expansion have radically changed the facts on the ground and American Jewry’s perception of Israel as a Jewish and a democratic nation. Whether American Jews know about, or care to understand, the events leading up to the Six-Day War, through which Israel gained control of the territories known as the West Bank, matters little.
What matters is that Israel continues to occupy the territories. Whatever justifications (theological, historical, security, or otherwise) have been and continue to be marshaled in support of Israel’s ongoing presence there, in the eyes of American Jewry, the West Bank settlements and the illiberal policies they represent pose a threat to Israel’s founding promise – its commitment to democracy.
“For the coming generation of American Jewry, the loyalties of yesteryear will no longer suffice.”
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
For a progressive American Jew, the thinking goes that if the project of Israel is to provide a homeland and security to a historically vulnerable Jewish minority, then how can the state not respond to the needs of the vulnerable minority in its midst?
Leaving aside the role of historical revisionism and progressive identity politics, the unresolved status of the Palestinians – lacking as they are in freedom of movement and access, self-determination, and other accoutrements of sovereignty – forms a wedge issue between an increasingly liberal-leaning American Jewry and an increasingly right-leaning Israeli Jewry.
The mainstreaming of Jewish fundamentalism in Israeli society and government further compounds the problem. The fact that the same government that fails to recognize American Jewry also fails to recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination only serves to increase American Jews’ sense of estrangement.
And now, into the mix, October 7th and the war. Over 1,200 killed, brutally and viciously, and 251 taken hostage. A trauma beyond words, a trauma that continues to this day. Israel surrounded by Iran’s self-proclaimed ring of fire – Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and beyond. The threats are real and existential, well beyond a debate about this border or that border or who is to blame for the latest cycle of hostilities.
Ours is a time of threat, for the 47% of world Jewry who live in Israel and – with the porous and pernicious blurring of line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism – for American Jews.
Traumatic and threatening as October 7th was – and remains two years later – I would reflect that it is a trauma that has been experienced differently by American Jews. Full throated as my defense is of Israel, unflinching as my advocacy on its behalf, I know, for reasons that I have just named, not every Jew holds as I do.
For a young person today, Israel is the Goliath to the Palestinian David.
Israel’s decades-long expansionist settlement policy is perceived to have precluded the emergence of a Palestinian state, and the only Prime Minister that anyone really knows is one who either is a part of or is beholden to extremist parties whose views are antithetical to pretty much every value that liberal American Jews have championed these past decades. One’s perception is one’s reality, and you can’t blame a person for when they were born.
Painful as October 7th was for Israel, real as the marginalization felt by way of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, for many American Jews October 7th was a marginalization twice over. First the horrific attacks of October 7th and the hatreds subsequent to it. And second, a marginalization from the organized Jewish community itself in whose presence a muzzling – implicit and explicit – occurred. An entire generation disenfranchised by the prior one.
You may not like the fact that 30% of New York Jews voted for Zohran Mamdani, but you shouldn’t be surprised by it. For a liberal Zionist disillusioned by the Israeli government, Mamdani’s anti-Zionism is a difference of degree, not of kind. He understood the fissures of our community better than we did. The question we face now is what we will do about it.
“For a young person today, Israel is the Goliath to the Palestinian David.”
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
A good starting point would be for the American Zionist community to engage in heshbon ha-nefesh, self-audit, as to how – by making unconditional support for the Israeli government a litmus test for Jewish identity – we ourselves have inflicted harm on the Jewish future.
Lest we forget, in 2023 prior to October 7th, the pro-democracy movement against judicial reform brought millions of Israelis into the streets to protest the Israeli government out of love for country.
For the first time in my memory, Israelis called on American Jews to engage in the process of advocating that Israel remain a state both Jewish and democratic. No different than my criticisms of this or that US administration come from a place of my patriotism, so too my critique of Israel.
The argument that it is somehow treasonous to criticize this or that Israeli policy simply no longer holds – as long as that criticism comes from a place of love, loyalty and investment in the well-being of the State of Israel.
And the heshbon ha-nefesh, goes both ways and on both sides.
For such a time such as this, when Israel is surrounded by enemies, Jewish critics of Israel need to be judicious in how they voice their dissent. It is one thing to attend a pro-democracy rally in a sea of Israeli flags that begins and ends with the singing of Hatikvah. It is another thing to stand in an encampment next to someone calling for global intifada.
October 7th did many things to us as American Jews, one of which is that it exposed a fault line that we have long avoided addressing. I would readily turn back the clock and forgo any wisdom wrought from these past two years. But if one outcome is that we can be more intentional about how we voice support and dissent, how we speak to each other, and how we seek to mend the rifts within our people – that is something I would readily welcome.
For such a time as this: A new chapter of American Zionism infused with an appreciation of our internal pluralism, whereby we avoid the reductive and destructive tactic of labeling people with whom we disagree either as self-hating Jews or colonialist oppressors. A big tent American Zionism, wide enough to house a diversity of views, as does Israel, on how best to secure a Jewish and democratic state of Israel. An American Zionism that recognizes that the Upper East Side is not the Middle East and must therefore be infused with a sense of humility.
No statement, to channel Emil Fackenheim, should be made about Israel’s war with Hamas that would not be credible in the presence of an IDF soldier who has risked life and limb fighting a merciless enemy, defending his own life and that of his fellow soldiers in the pursuit of liberating his captive kin.
An American Zionism that is capacious enough to hold multiple views at once: the just cause of securing Israel’s defense and standing, and an empathy-filled response to the horrific sufferings of Gaza. The knowledge that if every hostage’s life is of infinite worth, so too is the life of every Palestinian child. The understanding that while we champion the IDF, that support does not come with a moral blank check, and that support need not extend to every policy of the Israeli government before, during, or since October 7th. Against those who stand outside our tent, we must hold the line. And for all who seek to dwell within our tent, we must expand it. We need to do both; in short, we need to walk and chew gum at the same time.
For such a time as this. A new chapter of American Zionism that boldly asserts support for Israel as a constituent building block of contemporary Jewish identity but does not see Zionism as synonymous with Jewish identity. For far too many Jews, support for Israel became a vicarious faith, a civil religion masking the inadequacies of our actual religion. The only way Israel will learn from, listen to, or care about American Jews is if we show ourselves to be living energetic Jewish lives. In 1915 Brandeis said, “to be good Americans, we must be better Jews.” In 2025 I would say, “to be good Zionists, we must be better Jews.” A robust American Jewish identity can weather policy differences with this or that Israeli government; a paper-thin Jewish identity cannot.
For such a time as this. An American Zionism that refuses to let the ideological, institutional, and philanthropic extremes define the field of play and terms of debate. We who live between the forty-yard lines, who are capable of holding multiple views at once, who stand by our convictions and know we need to expand our tent – we have a unique role to play in American Zionism today. We can defend Israel, support religious pluralism and encourage efforts to achieve Arab-Jewish coexistence and dialogue. Because the stakes are so high, the sane center must speak with passion and with volume. We must be the change we seek to see in this world. We must protect each other from the ideologues on the extremes, rallying men, women, money, and discipline for a cause that is just.
If Zionism has a catchphrase or watchword, it is Herzl’s immortal line from Altneuland: “If you will it, it is no dream.” The English translation, however, misses the point – what Herzl first wrote in German, and what Sokolow then translated into Hebrew. Im tirtzu, if you – plural, all of you – will it, eyn zo Aggadah, then it is no dream.
The future dream of American Zionism depends not on my vision, or yours; not on the right or left, religious or secular. It is a dream that depends on all of us, together. An American Zionism for such a time as this – bold enough to embrace the voices, complexities, paradoxes, and even contradictions of our age. A Zionism of love and engagement: with Israel, with our tradition, and – perhaps above all – with one another, as we carry the dream forward together.
The post What is the state of American Zionism today, and how did we get here? appeared first on The Forward.
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The photos may be black and white, but the klezmer world is drenched with color
In Lloyd Wolf’s evocative photography exhibit, “A Joyful Noise,” you can almost hear the Klezmer music — plaintive and celebratory, earthy and devout, and always with a profound, but not easily definable, outpouring of Yiddishkeit.
Now showing at the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum at New York’s Hebrew Union College, the 45 images feature solo, dual and group portraits of Klezmer musicians performing from the mid 90’s through 2024.
They may be at a wedding, in concert, or practicing alone in a bucolic setting. In one humorous picture, six Klezmer musicians emerge from a row of porta-potties, instruments in hand. Most of the pictures, arranged chronologically, are in black and white.
“The trick in photographing music, which is invisible, is that it has to be translated into a visible form,” said the Dayton, Ohio-born Wolf during a phone conversation from his home in Arlington, Virginia. “You have to pick up on the energy. It’s like jamming, only it’s silent. I’m often up on the stage with the musicians, right up in their faces. Because they know me they’re not posing. I can photograph bad musicians but the picture is much better if the musicians are great. It just raises the level of what you do.”
Wolf, who grew up hearing classical music, show tunes, folk, and Gilbert & Sullivan, has always loved music and musicians and he has photographed many, including Brian Wilson, Wynton Marsalis and The Grateful Dead.
The genesis of the exhibit was Wolf’s stunning book, A Joyful Noise! Klezmer in Motion.
“I’ve worked with Lloyd on several prior exhibits, mostly issue-oriented ones, and knew his work to be very good as well as interesting,” said Nancy Mantel, the exhibit’s curator. “Anything happy at this time seems like a win. And it’s about music and memories — also good.”
“It was the perfect moment to present our exhibition to celebrate nearly four decades of a vital musical genre that has immeasurably enriched Jewish life,” added Jeanie Rosensaft, the museum’s director. “Klezmer has contributed greatly to the growing appreciation for Yiddish language and culture among younger generations.”
A way to engage with the world
Klezmer music emerged from the world of Ashkenazi Jews in pre-Holocaust Eastern and Central Europe. It has roots in both Hasidic rituals and the Jewish (and Romanian, Hungarian and Romani) folk music of the time. In the post- World War II years, Klezmer music largely disappeared, in part because it was a painful reminder of what had been lost. In the 80s and 90s, when ethnicity became cool, it enjoyed a renaissance that continues today.
According to Wolf, there are any number of reasons why young people are attracted to Klezmer, including the fact that it provides a way to celebrate and identify that feels authentic and fun.
“Most of their roots are in the Yiddish world of their immigrant ancestors from Eastern Europe,” he said. “Some of it perhaps has to do with political and cultural gaps that have grown between Diaspora Jews and what they see and feel going on regarding the policies and actions of the current Israeli government.”
Wolf’s favorite picture, and coincidentally mine as well, presents Klezmer musician Michael Winograd sporting a jaunty little hat and playing his clarinet on an otherwise empty Coney Island boardwalk against a backdrop of immobilized rides, the iconic roller coaster and parachute drop. All by itself, the setting brings to mind an old ethnic, Jewish New York fixed in time.
“There is an inherent energy in Coney Island and the architecture is coherent,” said Wolf. “It’s just fun to look at. As Duke Ellington said, ‘It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got a swing.’ I took that picture because Mike said he needed a cover shot. It was a freezing day, but he took his coat off. I said, ‘start playing.’ It was winter and there were no people out. That made for a much better picture than if we had done it in the summer with all the people.”
When I asked him when he chooses to shoot in black and white as opposed to color, he explained that, while there is usually no set plan ahead of time, he generally prefers black and white, “for its simplicity. It takes it out of a specific time. It’s more abstract, more classic. If I want a picture to be of a specific time and place, I’ll shoot in color.”
Wolf calls himself a documentary photographer and says his aesthetic influences include Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange and Weegee, whose work combines “meaningful artistry and committed documentary.”
Wolf is very much the social activist. His books depict such topics as the Vietnam Memorial, social diversity in Columbia Pike, and Jewish fathers and mothers.
He says his interest in Klezmer musicians and music was at once improbable and inevitable. But no one was more surprised than his mother, a Bronx-born daughter of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European immigrants who desired nothing more than to be a fully assimilated American woman devoid of any accent or rituals.
“She was shamed by her Christian neighbors into sending me to Hebrew School and I did have a Bar Mitzvah,” recalled Wolf. “But we were not observant.”
His father, a refugee from Nazi Germany was a proud German Jew, highly cultured, intellectual and accomplished. “A computer pioneer, he was the technical director for building the ARPANET, the system that evolved into the Internet,” Wolf said.
The Holocaust, indeed Jewish topics in general, were not discussed in Wolf’s home. A child of the 60s, Wolf came of age during anti-war protests, love-ins and Jimi Hendrix. He majored in political science at Goddard College, though he never had any real interest in pursuing that field as a carer, he said. “For me photography was the way to engage with the world.”
He earned his Masters in photography at Trinity College in Hartford where he started freelancing for local newspapers. One of his outlets was the B’nai B’rith Magazine, which marked a turning point in his life and career. An early assignment took him to Treblinka, Poland and Israel, where he met his father’s cousins who, like his father, were forced to flee their homes. But unlike his father they talked about the Holocaust.
“I learned from them, for the first time, what had happened,” he said. “When I came back home from Israel I started going to shul.”
A music beyond politics?
Wolf was first turned on to Klezmer music in 1992 when he was assigned to cover two of the new Klezmer revival groups: Kapelye and the Klezmatics.
“I met up with Kapelye at a rehearsal space in the Workman’s Circle building,” he wrote to me in an email. “I can’t recall any particular melody at this date but do remember being in awe of Adrienne Cooper’s deep, commanding, matronly voice and presence. The next night I was to meet a guy from the Klezmatics at the Bottom Line club, Frank London. Here was a Jew roughly of my generation, who fully expressed his passion and art in an explicitly ethnic context, and with great skill and brio. He and the other band members at the time delivered a masterfully exhilarating concert: Transcendent, beautiful, sweeping, a grand opening of the soul in sound.”
London played a central role at the exhibit’s festive opening night reception by leading a Klezmer concert, which was, London said, fueled by Wolf’s photography, but also by the other exhibit in the gallery — paintings that explored “Mothers, Prophets, Warriors: Women of the Bible.”
“Both Jewish, both joyous and we were part of the joyous noise,” London said. “Our music is celebratory. The musicians share a common language and repertory. Nobody had sheet music.”
Throughout the performance, which featured two clarinetists (including Winograd), Wolf was moving about and shooting away.
The audience seemed to be having a fine time. For much of the performance they silently emanated a collective satisfaction; midway through, an elderly woman moved to the back where, all by herself, she started dancing to the music.
Then, something else happened. A few women were up and dancing into the aisles. They held hands and moved around the chapel, swaying this way and that. Slowly others in the audience joined in — men and women, young and old, most able-bodied, some less so. Round and round they went.
“When people define Klezmer, they often talk about it as dance music,” said London. “Names of different tunes are often names of dances. Whenever we play this music in its unadulterated form it’s always to celebrate Yiddish Ashkenazi culture that is also universal. It is beyond politics.”
I don’t agree. For me, the wordless dancers exuded an unabashed, unapologetic and perhaps even defiant ethnic identification, joy and pride. It was a deeply moving and searing political statement.
After the concert, I went back to look at Wolf’s photographs. They worked wonderfully well all by themselves. Still, the music and dancing I had just witnessed shed a new, more complex light on the pictures. Either way, the images on the wall and those that I took from the recital lingered as I left the building and walked up Mercer Street back to the 8th Street subway station.
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On Columbus Day, remember Abraham Zacuto, the Jewish astronomer history forgot
(JTA) — Every October, Christopher Columbus returns not only as history but as controversy. The voyages associated with his name transformed the world, but their legacy is inseparable from conquest, coercion and the destruction that followed European expansion.
Yet the same Iberian age also produced a quieter and far less controversial revolution: advances in astronomy, mathematics, cartography, instruments and practical navigation that made sustained oceanic voyaging possible. Its protagonists included scholars, translators, mapmakers, instrument makers and pilots whose names are far less familiar than those of the captains who commanded the ships.
Among them, one figure deserves particular remembrance on Columbus Day: Abraham Zacuto, a Jewish astronomer born in Salamanca around 1452. Zacuto belonged to the same Iberian world as Columbus, but experienced its monarchies very differently. In 1492, Columbus sailed west under the patronage of Ferdinand and Isabella. That same year, the Catholic monarchs ordered the Jews of their realms to convert or leave. Zacuto left Castile and continued his work in Portugal. The celebrated maritime discoveries and the expulsion of Iberian Jewry were therefore not distinct historical worlds; they unfolded under the same rulers, at the same moment, within the same culture of ambition, knowledge and power.
Zacuto stands out within that larger scientific story. He was a rabbi, astronomer, mathematician and historian whose astronomical work helped give oceanic navigation a new degree of precision and practicality. His contribution belongs not at the margins of the Age of Exploration but within the scientific infrastructure that made long-distance navigation increasingly systematic.
Around 1478, Zacuto completed his great Hebrew astronomical work, “Ha-Hibbur ha-Gadol,” the “Great Composition.” Working within a long scientific conversation that included Greek, Islamic, Jewish and Christian astronomy, he refined and organized astronomical calculations in forms of exceptional practical value.
After the expulsion from Spain, Zacuto entered Portugal at precisely the moment when the kingdom was pushing maritime exploration farther into the Atlantic and down the African coast. Zacuto’s pupil, José Vizinho, a Jewish adviser to Portuguese King John II, was associated with the practical Latin and Castilian presentation of Zacuto’s astronomical material. In 1496, Zacuto’s Almanach Perpetuum was printed at Leiria in four known issues – three with Latin preliminary matter and one with Castilian.
The importance of those tables was intensely practical. They supplied precise, ready-to-use values for the changing position of the sun through the year. For a pilot on the high seas in daylight, far from recognizable coastlines, this meant that a noon observation of the sun could be combined with solar-declination data to determine latitude — the ship’s north-south position. The difficult astronomical calculations had already been embodied in the tables. What remained aboard ship was an operational procedure: Observe the sun, consult the appropriate value and calculate latitude. That combination of precision and usability greatly facilitated daytime position-finding at sea. Solar tables derived from Zacuto’s work entered early Portuguese navigational manuals and became part of the practical scientific culture of oceanic travel.
The clearest measure of Zacuto’s importance may be what happened next. The Almanach did not remain a local Portuguese publication. Its tables were reprinted repeatedly in Venice in 1498, 1502, 1525 and 1528. A work first printed in Leiria moved into one of Europe’s great publishing centers and continued to circulate for decades. That publishing history alone tells us something about the standing Zacuto’s astronomy acquired.
Its reach extended farther still. Zacuto’s astronomical material was translated and adapted into Arabic. One Arabic version was produced, likely in Istanbul, in 1505-06; another, associated with Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari in Morocco around 1624, survives in several manuscripts. The work of a Jewish astronomer writing in Hebrew in 15th-century Salamanca had crossed into Latin, Castilian and Arabic scientific cultures.
Zacuto’s name also became entwined with the memory of the great navigators. Accounts have long connected his tables with Columbus and Vasco da Gama, including the famous 1504 lunar eclipse in Jamaica. In this episode, Columbus intimidated Indigenous Jamaicans by predicting the disappearance of the moon, relying on Zacuto’s almanac, which he had on board. A manuscript connected with the Almanach also survives in Seville’s Biblioteca Colombina, the library created by Columbus’s son Hernando. Taken together, these associations reveal the stature Zacuto’s work acquired in the historical memory of the Age of Exploration.
Perhaps the most striking part of Zacuto’s story is what happened to the man himself. Portugal valued the kind of expertise he represented. Yet in December 1496, King Manuel I ordered Portugal’s Jews to leave unless they converted, and in 1497 the crown subjected the Jewish population to mass forced conversion. Zacuto left Portugal as well.
Exile did not end either his travels or his scholarship. From Portugal he moved through North Africa, including Tunis, before eventually reaching Jerusalem. There, late in life, he returned once more to the astronomical work that had made his name known across the Mediterranean, recalculating and updating his earlier tables for the Jewish calendar and the meridian of Jerusalem. The strongest recent reconstruction of his life places his death in Jerusalem in Tevet 5274, or late 1513 or very early 1514 — commonly given as 1514.
Zacuto’s story is therefore larger than a footnote to Columbus. It joins two strands of Sephardic history too often told apart: persecution and exile, and the transmission of knowledge, texts and technologies across borders.
Zacuto’s own tables and 15th-century procedures are now obsolete, but their underlying navigational logic endures. Modern celestial navigation still determines position by combining observations of the sun, moon, planets or stars with authoritative astronomical data. The U.S. Naval Academy requires all midshipmen to study navigation, and its current curriculum includes celestial navigation alongside electronic methods. The U.S. Naval Observatory still describes celestial navigation as a critical independent backup to GPS and other electronic systems. And the Nautical Almanac, first published in 1855, remains the standard U.S. Navy resource for marine celestial navigation. The instruments and calculations have changed, but the essential logic remains: Observe the heavens, consult reliable astronomical data and determine position.
Zacuto’s scientific reputation also survives in an unexpected place. In 1935, the International Astronomical Union formally adopted the name Zagut for a lunar crater honoring Abraham ben Shmuel Zacuto. Modern astronomy has, quite literally, written his name onto the Moon.
Columbus remains a household name because voyages leave dramatic images: ships, landfalls, encounters and conquest. The calculations, tables, instruments, translations and printed books that made such voyages possible are easier to forget. Remembering Zacuto widens the story: His tables brought greater precision and practicality to daytime navigation; his work crossed languages and continents; and his life traced the routes of Sephardic exile from Iberia to Jerusalem. The age of maritime discovery was also an age of scientific discovery, and some of the knowledge that carried Iberian ships across oceans was created by scholars whose communities those same monarchies expelled.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
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Recorded anti-Jewish hate crimes rise 10% in England and Wales
(JTA) — Hate crimes targeting Jewish people in England and Wales rose by 10% in the year ended in March, according to the latest data released by the British government.
Police-reported hate crime — including crime influenced by other factors such as race and sexual orientation — overall increased by 7% compared with the previous year, according to the Home Office data released last week.
British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband posted on X on Monday, “Antisemitism has no place in our society. This morning, I hosted a crucial discussion with the J7 Global Task Force to discuss how we can work together across countries to stamp out the scourge of antisemitism.”
Following the meeting, the Board of Deputies of British Jews issued a statement explaining that Miliband and the task force had discussed, among other things, “the sharp rise in global antisemitism” and the “continued demonisation of Israel.” Representatives from the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Argentina and Australia make up the task force.
“In the meeting, the J7 proposed a new international intergovernmental ministerial task force on antisemitism, comprising the countries represented in the J7 and taking on the key themes discussed. We were pleased that the Foreign Secretary agreed to host an inaugural meeting of J7 countries’ ministers to start this process,” the statement sent to JTA said.
The Community Security Trust, a charity that protects the Jewish community and monitors antisemitism, said on X that the new data show “that antisemitic hate crime remains at an unacceptably high level.”
“As seen previously, Jewish people continue to experience by far the highest police-recorded rate per head of religious hate crime of any faith group,” CST said. “This shows the disproportionate scale of anti-Jewish hatred and its impact on Jewish life in Britain.”
Religious hate crime rose by 13% overall in the 12 months to March 2026, the report said. The overall figure rose from 10,067 to 11,419 offenses.
The two groups most affected were Jews and Muslims, the Home Office said. Religiously motivated hate crimes against Muslims increased 15%, the report found, with spikes reported around public protests in September 2025 and the start of the U.S. war with Iran in February.
The number of recorded offenses affecting Jews rose from 2,874 to 3,162 offenses, spiking after the attack on Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester last year on Yom Kippur.
Two men, Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, were killed on Oct. 2, 2025, after Jihad Al-Shamie, who was wearing a fake suicide bomb belt, drove into the gates of Heaton Park synagogue and began attacking congregants with a knife. Cravitz died from stab wounds; Daulby was fatally struck by a police bullet during the response.
A spate of violent antisemitic incidents followed this year, including the torching of four ambulances belonging to Jewish volunteer service Hatzola on March 23 and the stabbing of two Jewish men in separate attacks in Golders Green on April 29.
The Home Office figures, which do not include data from London’s Metropolitan Police Service because of a change in how it records crime, showed the second-highest level of religious hate crime directed at the Jewish community since the Home Office began keeping records in 2018. It was surpassed only by the year ending March 2024.
“In the last year, there were 117 police recorded religious hate crimes targeted at Jewish people per 10,000 population, the highest rate for any religious group. The next highest rate was for religious hate crimes targeted at Muslims, with 13 per 10,000 population,” said the Home Office.
The report was published on Oct. 8, at a time of heightened sensitivity. Eleven people were arrested at pro-Palestinian marches in London a day earlier, despite calls by the Metropolitan Police to avoid demonstrating on the anniversary of Hamas’ deadly 2023 raids inside Israel.
Police reported 20 arrests at Saturday’s pro-Palestinian protest in London, where many demonstrators were wearing kaffiyehs, waving Palestinian flags and brandishing banners.
The level of hate directed at the Jewish community has remained at an “elevated level” since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict, the report stated.
The CST said, “There is an urgent need to reduce the amount of incitement connected to conflict overseas,” adding that “much more needs to be done across society to tackle this problem.”
Over the summer the government announced a major funding boost to support the Jewish community, promising £250 million ($335 million) over the next three years for increased policing and protection of Jewish communities.
More remains to be done, according to community organizations.
A spokesperson for the Board of Deputies of British Jews said the report’s publication “confirms the need for rigorous prosecution to ensure deterrence, and a whole of society approach to tackling hatred and extremism, and to stopping conflict in the Middle East being used to incite hatred against the Jewish community.”
The Campaign Against Antisemitism said the report was evidence that the British justice system was failing the Jewish community.
“Antisemites, emboldened by the Hamas terrorist atrocity three years ago, are not only not letting up in their hatred but are doubling down,” it said in a statement. “That’s because there is no real deterrent. So really these figures are most damning for the criminal justice system, which has utterly failed to defend British Jews.
“Even as conflict in the Middle East is easing off, antisemitism in the U.K. is rising, yet there have been essentially no changes in policing policy over the past three years and nobody has been held to account for this monumental failure,” the campaign said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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