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These Jewish artists are searching for home — at America’s only Catholic historically Black university
(JTA) — The class does not begin with a lecture. Instead, Neta Elkayam stands at the front of the room and sings. Usually in the Moroccan Arabic of her ancestors, rather than her native Hebrew.
The students — most of them Black, most of them American, many of them encountering Jewish culture for the first time — do not ask what the lyrics mean. They listen. They feel something, and it’s the feeling that eventually leads to learning.
“Seeing me perform live reveals a common ground, the desire we all share to understand our origins, a search for the lost voices of our ancestors,” Elkayam said in an interview. “The fact that I am singing not in English but in an African language resonates with the students and helps propel them on their own quest.”
The scene has become familiar at Xavier University of Louisiana, the nation’s only Catholic historically Black university, where Elkayam and her partner in life and art, Amit Hai Cohen, have spent the past two years as visiting artists and instructors. Their course, an immersive, multidisciplinary exploration of music, memory, diaspora and interfaith exchange, grew out of an initiative to increase understanding between the Black and Jewish communities. It is now one of the most sought-after electives on campus, recommended by students by word of mouth.
It is an unlikely setting for two Israeli artists whose work has been shaped by Morocco, Jerusalem, Marseille and Paris, and whose creative lives have long resisted fixed categories. Yet Xavier has become a place where their music, pedagogy and personal histories suddenly make sense together.
It is also the place where they now face a crossroads.
After two years of teaching, performing and building cultural bridges in New Orleans, the private funding that brought them to Xavier has ended. The university wants them to stay. But whether they can remains uncertain, a predicament reflecting a wider strain on the institution itself.
Xavier University is facing significant financial uncertainty, underscored by recent layoffs even as it received a major gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott that offered partial relief. At the same time, moves by the Trump administration to cut or reshape federal higher-education programs have disrupted key funding streams the university relies on, adding to the instability.
For Elkayam and Cohen, who have spent their careers moving along what they call the “Jerusalem-Morocco axis,” the question is no longer how to live between places, but whether that in-between can become a home.
Long before New Orleans entered the picture, Elkayam and Cohen were already artists of transit and connection.
Elkayam, 45, rose to prominence in Israel, Europe and Morocco for her reinterpretations of North African Jewish music, not as preservation, but as reinvention. Born in Netivot, on Israel’s geographic and social periphery, she grew up acutely aware of the ruptures many Mizrahi Jews feel: the distance from ancestral languages, sounds and stories. Her work has become a way to address that loss, offering a path back to connection beyond nostalgia.
Drawing on Andalusian, Amazigh (Berber) and Jewish liturgical traditions, she folds in elements of jazz, rock and contemporary performance art. Her sensibility is evident in projects like “Hilula,” a multidisciplinary opera blending drag, Torah study and live music, and “Arénas,” a collaboration built around archival recordings of women from Morocco’s Atlas Mountains who passed through a transit camp in Marseille on their way to Israel.
Cohen, 43, has worked in music, cinema and visual installation, often in collaboration with artists from Morocco. He recently explored memory and ritual across Judaism, Christianity and Islam through a ceiling installation for the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem weaving together the elements from all three faiths.
Together, the couple built ambitious, research-driven projects that blurred the line between scholarship and performance. Their collaborators included towering figures of North African Jewish music — among them the Algerian pianist Maurice El Médioni — as well as Moroccan Muslim artists and Gnawa masters.
“We’re not interested in freezing the past,” Cohen said. “We’re interested in what happens when you improvise inside it.”
That ethos drew the attention of scholars such as Chris Silver, a professor at McGill University who studies North African music and Jewish-Muslim history. Silver describes their approach as not merely performing an inherited repertoire, but actively shaping how the past is understood and carried forward.
“As a scholar focused on the relationship of music to history, I marvel at what sometimes feels like their historiographical approach, in which their music builds on a well-known and lesser-known past, is in dialogue with the contemporary, and is future-oriented, contributing to and shaping the sounds of the possible and what may yet be,” Silver said.
For Flo Low, the founder of Bamah, the nonprofit that brought the couple to Xavier University two years ago, the future Silver describes crystallized in a single moment.
Low, an American Jew who has lived in Israel, first saw Elkayam perform in Jerusalem in 2018, at an outdoor concert beneath the walls of the Old City. She expected virtuosity. What she did not expect, she said, was what happened next.
“Neta started singing in Moroccan Arabic,” Low recalled, “and thousands of people in the audience were singing along with her. Her music is allowing so many people in the Jewish world to reconnect with their Jewish roots through their music.”
For Low, who had been working to build cultural exchange programs between Israeli artists and American institutions, the scene was revelatory.
“I knew at that moment that I wanted to bring Neta and her partner Amit to the United States,” Low said. “If they could inspire me and thousands of others in a single performance, I could only imagine what they might do with a full semester, or even a full academic year, with students.”
Still, it would take several years, and an unexpected chain of events in New Orleans, before the partnership materialized.
The road to Xavier began with Kanye West, the musician who now goes by Ye.
In late 2022, as antisemitic rhetoric surged into mainstream discourse — fueled in part by Ye’s public outbursts — students at Xavier were finding themselves caught in a confusing digital and social crossfire.
“My freshman honors students were hearing a lot of people in their lives say that ‘Kanye has a point,’ and they wanted to know, as students at a historically Black university, ‘What is our response?’” recalled Shearon Roberts, a professor and associate dean at Xavier. “They realized: we don’t actually know Jewish people. Many students had never met a Jew at all.”
Roberts saw an opportunity for a different kind of education. “How about we start there?” she told them.
A small group of Xavier students launched an initiative that set out to address antisemitism and anti-Black racism together, rather than as separate problems.
They partnered with local Jewish organizations and faculty mentors, built relationships with students at nearby Tulane University, known for its high concentrations of Jewish students, and began hosting dialogues that emphasized shared histories of exclusion and violence — alongside the tensions and misunderstandings between the two communities. The students designed workshops, social media campaigns and campus events focused on media literacy and the warning signs of radicalization.
“We wanted to tackle that problem in our community,” Aarinii Parms-Green, one of the Xavier students, who graduated last month. “We saw it rising with Kanye West, Whoopi Goldberg, Kyrie Irving and other figures saying things like, ‘Black people are the real Jews’ or ‘Jews people control the media.’”
Parms-Green said the students were inspired by the history of Jewish-Black solidarity, from the civil rights movement to the Jewish academics fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s who found refuge at HBCUs.
Their project eventually won a national Department of Homeland Security award for innovative anti-extremism programming. (The federal program behind the award was shut down by the Trump administration earlier this year.)
The win led to a trip to Israel for the students and when they returned they wanted to sustain the connection, especially to Israel’s racially and ethnically diverse culture.
“The project started as a way to give back, to bring Black and Jewish students together and counter hate, and it just took off,” Parms-Green said.
After the attacks of Oct. 7, the work felt only more urgent.
“Instead of rushing to blame, people on campus asked questions,” Parms-Green said. “They wanted context. We didn’t see protests — there was more curiosity than anything.”
While it’s true that Xavier has not been a central hotspot of campus unrest around the war in Gaza, the atmosphere has not been entirely tranquil either. In June 2024, administrators canceled a commencement address by United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield after students organized a petition and raised objections over her role in U.S. policy backing Israel in the Gaza war.
Still, just as the Xavier students were looking for ways to engage with Israelis, Elkayam and Cohen were searching for a way to stay abroad, wary of returning to a country in turmoil.
They had landed in Morocco two days before Oct. 7, planning on little more than a week of concerts and screenings. The documentary they were showing, directed by a local Muslim filmmaker and titled “In Your Eyes I See My Country,” follows the two as they travel through Morocco, searching for traces of the Jewish world their families left behind, a world that once numbered about a quarter million people and has dwindled to only a few thousand.
On Oct. 6, they gathered to celebrate at Hachkar’s home with a mostly Muslim circle of friends where they recited the Jewish blessing over wine that marks the start of the Sabbath, and sang, and shared stories late into the night. The next morning, they woke to the news.
With two young children and a single suitcase, they faced a choice.
“We quickly understood the insanity that was coming to Israel and decided to stay,” Cohen said.
Their outlook proved to be a premonition of how many Israelis would come to feel over the next two years, as more than 69,000 residents left Israel in 2025 alone, contributing to sustained negative migration and one of the largest modern spikes in emigration from the country.
For Elkayam and Cohen, the decision was about preserving relationships and the ability to think, mourn and speak honestly, especially given how unpopular their left-wing views have become in Israel after Oct. 7.
“It might sound weird but we felt safer in a sense in Morocco, to be among our friends and accepted with our complexities, where we can talk about different narratives at once.” Cohen said. “In Israel, inside the family, you can’t always speak freely. I don’t want to fight with my dad about politics. I am not going to let it happen.”
After three months, living in friends’ homes and watching events unfold from a painful distance, Bamah brought the couple to Xavier University.
At Xavier, Elkayam and Cohen were not treated like visiting artists passing through. They were, as Roberts, their host and champion on campus, put it, “part of the university’s extended family.”
“They are a model for what it looks like to have members of the Jewish diaspora — Israeli citizens, artists, educators — serve, teach and mentor at a historically Black university,” she said. “And they’ve always led with their artistry first. When you connect with people through art, through beauty, everything opens up in a different way.”
Roberts continued, “If I brought someone who was like a Jewish studies expert or political or sociology expert, and they’re lecturing to these students about complex issues connected to Jewish identity, African American identity, Jewish or African diasporic identities, it might get lost in translation. But when Neta and Amit say, ‘All right, grab an instrument. Let’s sing, let’s improvise,’ they’re all speaking one language, even though they don’t speak the same language.”
The warm embrace the couple has found at Xavier, including from Muslim faculty, comes at a moment when many Israeli academics report feeling the opposite: isolated, targeted, and professionally vulnerable on American campuses amid the Gaza war.
For Roberts, it’s no surprise that a historically Black university would be different. HBCUs, she says, know how to practice inclusion because they were founded as an answer to racial exclusion. “By nature, we welcome before we turn away,” she said.
At the same time, Elkayam and Cohen’s particular outlook and style have helped them avoid the kinds of conflicts and tensions Israelis have faced at other universities. By their own account and that of supporters like Roberts, their work is deeply political, but because they communicate through their art, it is harder to flatten them into a caricature or cast them as political adversaries.
Their success at navigating an era prone to strife isn’t confined to Xavier or New Orleans.
In August, Elkayam and Cohen traveled to Flint, Michigan, where they appeared on stage with their New Orleans band alongside musicians from the National Arab Orchestra, in a concert co-presented by Bamah and the Flint Jewish Federation.
Titled “Songs of Our Mothers,” the program represented a rare collaboration in a moment when Israeli artists often face boycotts. The evening unfolded quietly, without protest and without political interference.
At Xavier, each semester culminates in a public showcase of student work, where projects ranging from short films to musical performances and research presentations are shared with classmates, faculty and community members.
“One student told me he would have never been able to voice how I feel on an artistic level with the class,” Parms-Green said. “He left that class feeling more confident, his ability to kind of just put himself out there.”
For all their travel, Elkayam and Cohen have begun to lay down something like roots in New Orleans. They built a band with local musicians, adapting their repertoire of Moroccan Jewish songs to the rhythms of the city, letting brass and jazz sensibilities seep into the arrangements. They were struck by how New Orleans’ second-line parades echoed Morocco’s street rituals, where music spills into public space and celebration becomes something the whole neighborhood moves through together.
“It’s like when I went to Morocco for the first time and was totally shocked,” Elkayam said. “You see music inside people’s homes, art inside people’s homes. Suddenly all the hierarchies in your head collapse — what’s ‘folklore,’ what’s ‘high art,’ what’s ‘low.’ We came back from Morocco as different people, it blew our minds. And it’s the same here, discovering America — the non-stereotypical America, the one they don’t market to you.”
Last year, they brought to New Orleans one of the figures who helped unlock their Moroccan heritage: Reuven Abergel, a founder of Israel’s Black Panthers.
The movement, started by Mizrahi Jews in the 1970s, intentionally borrowed its name and tactics from the American Black Panther Party to protest the systemic discrimination and domination of Israeli society by Ashkenazi elites. A longtime mentor and friend to Elkayam and Cogen, Abergel met with the students at Xavier, creating a bridge between two distinct histories of marginalization and resistance. Cohen filmed the visit for an ongoing documentary about Abergel’s life, capturing the moment where the “Jerusalem-Morocco axis” met the American South.
Cohen also helped create a digital exhibition marking 100 years of The Louisiana Weekly, the city’s historic Black newspaper, helping research its archives and design the site. The work pulled him into the civic memory of the place, into conversations about race, migration and culture that felt familiar and new at once.
At home, the process has been quieter and more complicated. In our conversation, Elkayam described feeling like an immigrant for the first time, even as her children, almost without noticing, were becoming New Orleanians. They now speak mostly English to their parents. They know the songs, the parades, the small neighborhood rituals. “They’re really from here,” she said. “They grew up inside the parades. For them, this is how you celebrate.”
The couple are also seeing transformation in themselves. The war, the distance, the months in Morocco and now New Orleans have left them feeling untethered from the national identities they had once inhabited. They miss Jerusalem and the community that formed around them there. They also recognize the relief in being in a place where they are not required to perform loyalty, and where it is possible to hold grief and criticism in the same breath.
“We don’t feel Israeli in the rooted sense of the word,” Cohen said. “What matters to us now is not the place, it’s the people.”
They have begun to think of themselves as Jews in the diaspora — not as a temporary condition but as a way of moving through the world.
What happens next is unclear. They are currently in the United States on J-1 visiting scholar visas sponsored by Xavier University, but the university cannot offer enough funding to hire them as full-time instructors. Without outside support to replace the now-expired Bamah grant, they risk losing their visas and their right to stay in the country.
For now, they keep teaching, composing and building relationships, unsure how long New Orleans will remain home.
“I really feel like a Jewish migrant right now, in the most basic sense of the word,” Cohen said.
Elkayam offered a caveat. She has come to see their time abroad as a fragile privilege — a brief chance to heal while others, especially Mizrahim without the means to leave, remain stuck.
Grateful yet uneasy, she misses the heavy responsibility she once carried in Jerusalem: showing up for her community, helping hold its history, telling stories that might otherwise disappear. From New Orleans, she allows herself to rest, even as she knows the future is uncertain.
“Maybe, God willing, we’ll be able to continue here,” she said, “because yeah, I don’t always miss that role.”
The post These Jewish artists are searching for home — at America’s only Catholic historically Black university appeared first on The Forward.
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She helped rescue the Torahs from their burning synagogue. A year later, Pasadena’s mishkan is thriving.
PASADENA — A year after fire reduced the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center to ash, Cantor Ruth Berman Harris stands in the rain on the empty lot where it once stood. Beneath her boots, the ground is slick; above her, the San Gabriel Mountains fade into fog — the inverse of the dry, wind-driven night when flames tore through this block.
As smoke filled the building, and ash began falling in the parking lot one year ago, Berman searched for her husband through the darkness, calling out to make sure the Torahs were being carried out. Joined by the synagogue’s president and custodian, they worked quickly, loading the 13 scrolls into two cars as the fire, a beast consuming Los Angeles, roared closer. By night’s end, the building was destroyed, the flames claiming it all.
Over the past year, the synagogue has been doing the work of recovery in plain sight and in borrowed space. It has not seen a collapse in membership; as many families have joined since the fire as in the year before it. The calendar has remained full. In 2025, the shul celebrated 25 bar and bat mitzvahs — one nearly every other week — even as services moved to a church chapel across town. And as the community continues to grieve what was lost, leaders are already imagining a rebuilt synagogue designed to better reflect how the congregation lives and gathers now.
For Berman, 55, that rhythm felt familiar.
She grew up in Buenos Aires and lived through two acts of mass violence that targeted the Jewish community there — the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center, which killed 85 people, including friends of hers. In those moments, she was the one making sandwiches for rescue workers, helping others absorb shock.
The Eaton Fire that razed Pasadena was different.
“What surprised me,” she said, “was how loving and caring and strong and vibrant a community can be in the midst of tragedy. There was no doubt that we were going to be OK.”
Over the past year, she has watched people return to Jewish life who had once drifted away from it — not out of fear, but out of need.
“It surprised me how relevant a Jewish community can be in times of crisis,” she said. “I knew it from books. I had never experienced it.”
Some losses, she knows, cannot be replaced. On her office walls hung artwork painted by her mother. On her desk, a constant presence was a prayer book she had studied from since cantorial school, filled with notes, highlights, and the handwriting of her teachers.
“I can buy another siddur,” she said. “But I can’t replicate their writing.”
She speaks plainly about the trauma. Nightmares. Compartmentalization. What she calls a lockbox she has learned to keep sealed so she can continue doing her job. Only recently, she said, has she begun to feel steady enough to open it — helped by the arrival of a permanent rabbi, and by the knowledge that the community is no longer just surviving.
A temporary sanctuary
Shabbat arrives inside a side chapel at the First United Methodist Church, where the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center has been gathering since the fire.
During Sukkot, the church opened its courtyard for a sukkah. Shul congregants found themselves explaining the holiday — its temporary walls, its invitation to dwell with uncertainty — to church members who stopped to ask questions. What might once have been an accommodation became, instead, a point of exchange: Jewish ritual practiced openly, and neighbors eager to understand it.
The chapel feels like a sanctuary in its own right. There are no crosses on the walls. The space is rectangular and airy, with wood arches vaulting toward the ceiling like the hull of an inverted ship. Gold-rimmed stained-glass windows run the length of the room on both sides. One of them, inexplicably, bears a purple menorah.
Only small details reveal the building’s Christian life: a New Century Hymnal tucked into the back of each pew, a Bible containing both the Old and New Testaments, a small tithing envelope resting beside it.
About 100 people fill the pews on Saturday morning. At the front of the chapel, Berman and Rabbi Joshua Ratner lead services alongside a bat mitzvah girl, while a guitarist and mandolin player keep the room humming.
The portable ark behind them has an unlikely backstory. It was crafted decades ago by a Los Angeles pediatrician (and father of Forward reporter Louis Keene) who had built it for his own shul which, at the time, was temporarily meeting at a Baptist church.
In recent years, the ark sat unused in the doctor’s garage. After the January 2025 wildfires, the family donated it to Pasadena — carried in and out of the church chapel each week, suddenly suited to a congregation without a permanent home.
For a year now, the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center has lived this way. “It’s a mishkan,” Ratner said. “A traveling tabernacle.”
As the service continues, Ratner delivers the sermon. He began the job in August, months after the fire, at a moment when the synagogue no longer had a building to offer him — only a congregation in flux.
Ratner, 50, spent his early career as a lawyer before pivoting to the pulpit. He applied for the Pasadena job before the fire, drawn by what he had heard about the community. When the building was destroyed, he thought the search would be called off.
“I assumed that would be the end of it,” he said.
Instead, synagogue leaders doubled down. They wanted a rabbi not after recovery, but in the middle of it.
When Ratner visited Pasadena after the fire, he was struck by what he found. Hundreds of people filled Friday night and Shabbat morning services — not out of obligation, but solidarity.
The community, Ratner sensed, was grieving, but not frozen. “There’s no doubt or existential fear,” he said. “While we’re still mourning what we lost, we’re already morphing into the future.”
Since his arrival, the momentum has held. “Every week almost feels new,” Ratner said. “Like a simcha.”
A family without a home
For some of the shul families, the losses were not only communal.
In neighboring Altadena, Heather Sandoval Feng and her husband, Oscar, stand on the front steps of what used to be their home. The fire left behind a pile of rubble and a concrete staircase leading nowhere.
Three weeks after the fire destroyed their house, their daughter Hannah became a bat mitzvah.
Like the congregation itself, the family was displaced. They moved in with Heather’s parents nearby. Life became provisional — borrowed bedrooms, borrowed routines, borrowed time. And yet Hannah’s bat mitzvah went ahead as planned, held in the church chapel where the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center now gathers each Shabbat.
“There was something strangely comforting about that,” Heather said. “The synagogue had lost its home. We had lost ours. We were going through it together.”
Oscar described the year as one long exercise in adjustment — learning how to live without the assumption of permanence. “We’ve had to be a little nomadic,” he said, looking over as their son, Noah, 10, played in the dirt where his bedroom once stood.
The bat mitzvah ceremony became a life lesson — not just about Torah, but about continuity without certainty. “It turned into a teachable moment,” Oscar said.
What sustained them, both parents said, was the congregation’s steadiness. Tutors kept showing up. Shabbat kept coming. People checked in — not performatively, but persistently. The synagogue did not treat their family as a separate tragedy. It folded them into its own.
“There was never a question of whether things would still happen,” Heather said. “The answer was always: Of course they will.”
Holding steady and looking ahead
In the months after the fire, synagogue leaders worried about what displacement might do to membership. Instead of a drop-off, the numbers told a different story. Since the fire, the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center has welcomed 49 new families — roughly the same number it added the year before. A handful of families have moved away, some because of the fire itself, but overall membership has remained remarkably consistent, hovering around 430 families.
An added bonus: Some relatives who flew in from out of town for bar and bat mitzvahs found themselves so moved by the congregation that they later joined it themselves.
What surprised Melissa Levy, the synagogue’s executive director, was not just the endurance, but the momentum behind it. Families kept calling. Local Jews who were not members wanted to now join the congregation.
“It’s amazing,” she said, “but it’s also a testament to how strong this community already was.”
That strength has been built over more than a century.
Founded in 1921 as Temple B’nai Israel, the congregation moved onto its current property in 1941, a campus of Mission Revival–style buildings arranged in a U-shape — a midcentury synagogue just beyond the urban sprawl of Los Angeles that had expanded over decades to include classrooms, playgrounds, and a social hall. At one point, it even had a swimming pool. During World War II, the synagogue hosted USO-style dances for servicemen stationed nearby.
Members have included NASA engineers, Caltech professors, and those who built their dreams among the stars. “I used to joke that growing up in Pasadena, our shul had doctors, lawyers and rocket scientists,” said Rabbi Alex Weisz, whose family has been members for generations.
As Jewish demographics shifted, the congregation absorbed others — merging with Shomrei Emunah and later Shaarei Torah — eventually becoming the singular Conservative synagogue serving the western San Gabriel Valley.
That history now informs the future, and what rises in its place will not be a replica of what was lost. The new building will be more intentional: fewer walls, more flexibility, and spaces designed around how congregants actually spend time together now.
Plans call for open gathering areas where parents can linger when their children are in classes — places to work, talk, or simply stay — rather than treating the synagogue as a drop-off point. There will be more glass and fewer corridors, designed to draw the San Gabriel Mountains into view. Outdoor areas are meant not just for overflow, but for prayer and meditation — quiet spaces that look outward, toward the hills that rise behind Pasadena.
“We were fitting a circle into a square,” Levy said. The new building is being imagined as a place where different generations can overlap rather than pass through on separate schedules.
The goal is not grandeur, but usability. A synagogue that can hold worship and study, celebration and stillness — and that reflects a community that has learned, over the past year, how to gather without relying on walls at all.
The scale of what lies ahead is substantial. Rebuilding is expected to cost tens of millions of dollars. Insurance will cover roughly half of that amount — money that was paid out quickly and is already in an account collecting interest — but the rest will need to be raised by the congregation itself. The cost is immense, especially for middle-class Pasadena, but leaders describe it as something to be faced, not feared.
They hope to open the new building by the High Holidays of 2028 — not as a return to what was lost, but as an expression of what the community has become. For now, those plans exist alongside grief. But Jewish life continues — weekly, seasonally, insistently.
Asked what it feels like to stand at the site of the fire a year later, Cantor Berman pauses.
“I don’t really have words for it,” she said.
Rain dots the cracked pavement beneath her feet, darkening the outline of the lot where the synagogue once stood.
After the fire — after the Torahs had been rescued and the building reduced to rubble — she returned to the site and took one small thing that was still standing. Not a ritual object. Not a book. It was the sign from her parking space — Reserved for the Cantor — something ordinary that had marked the rhythm of returning to the same place, day after day.
There were other losses, she said. Some she remembers clearly. Others she does not.
“The things I don’t remember having,” she said, “will haunt me forever.”
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I grew up in Venezuela. Will Maduro’s ouster bring my Jewish community the security we need?
For Venezuelan Jews — inside the country and across the diaspora — the United States’ shocking removal of President Nicolás Maduro from power marks an inflection point in a long and painful chapter marked by vulnerability, fear and exile.
Venezuela was once home to one of Latin America’s most vibrant Jewish communities. I know this because I was raised there. A generation of Jews, including my own grandparents, found refuge from the Holocaust in Venezuela, at a time when many other countries closed their doors.
Venezuela’s relationship with the Jewish people was not only about providing a refuge for Jews following the Holocaust. It was also diplomatic. In November 1947, Venezuela voted in favor of United Nations resolution 181, which supported the creation of independent Jewish and Arab states in Palestine, leading to the creation of the State of Israel. For the Venezuelan Jewish community, this vote has long stood as a point of pride, and an affirmation of belonging.
For decades, Venezuela and Israel had a natural, mutually beneficial diplomatic relationship. For example, in 1961 the two signed a technical agricultural agreement as part of Venezuela’s push to modernize rural development.
High level visits between government officials between the two countries were common. I vividly remember shaking then-foreign minister Shimon Peres’s hand when he visited the Jewish Day School in Caracas in 1995 as part of a state visit. As a high school student, it was exciting to see firsthand how an Israeli statesman carved time out of his agenda to come see my distant country’s Jewish community. And, looking back, that visit underscored how normal and secure Jewish life once felt in Venezuela, in stark contrast to the fear and isolation that would follow years later.
All this began to change after Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999.
Under Chávez, relations with Israel steadily deteriorated, shaped by Chávez’s ideological commitment to global left-wing movements that, as a legacy of the Cold War, aligned themselves with Arab states and framed opposition to Israel as a core political stance. Diplomatic relations between the two nations were formally severed during the 2009 Israel-Hamas confrontation known as Operation Cast Lead.
That wasn’t just a major foreign policy shift; it also marked the onset of a political climate in which Venezuelan Jews felt increasingly exposed. That vulnerability reached a terrifying peak that same year, when armed assailants desecrated the Tiferet Israel synagogue in Caracas, ransacking sacred spaces; destroying religious objects; and scrawling threats and antisemitic slogans on the walls.
It was not an isolated act of vandalism. It was a message of hostility and intimidation, received as such by a community that already felt abandoned by the state.
In 2010, Chavez amped up his anti-Israel rhetoric in reaction to that year’s confrontation between the IDF and the Gaza Freedom Flotilla by declaring “maldito sea el Estado de Israel” — “cursed be the State of Israel” — on national television. When Maduro rose to power in 2013, following Chavez’ death, he did not reverse this trajectory. He accelerated it.
Under his rule, anti-Zionism repeatedly crossed into open antisemitism — both in language and in effect. Not long ago, while talking about Israel’s war in Gaza, Maduro claimed he had “real Jewish blood … unlike Israeli Jews” whom he described as “foreigners from Poland,” reviving classic tropes about authenticity, belonging and conspiracy that have long been used to delegitimize Jews and Israel.
After the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, Maduro’s regime openly embraced the “genocide” narrative against Israel. His government even compared Israel to Nazi Germany. The consequences of these statements touched Jews across Venezuela. Synagogues and Jewish institutions were often vandalized and defaced with hateful slogans. The targets were not Israeli diplomats — there were none — but Venezuelan Jews.
That distinction matters. Being Jewish has become more difficult in advanced democracies like the U.S. since the Oct. 7 attack. So imagine what it felt like in a country governed by an authoritarian regime that is openly anti-Zionist and routinely fails to distinguish between Jews and Israelis. The family and friends I still have in Venezuela navigate daily life with quiet caution, finding ways to remain Jewish while staying unnoticed, weighing every decision about when to gather, when to speak, and when silence feels safer.
But most of the Jewish community opted to be part of a wave of more than 8 million Venezuelan migrants — about 20% of the country’s population — who decided to seek a new life in other countries.
Will that wave of departures ebb now that Maduro has been forcibly removed from power by the U.S.? The honest answer is: we don’t know. Two decades of institutionalized hostility have left deep scars. And the early signs about the next era are discouraging. In her first televised addresses, new interim president Delcy Rodriguez — Maduro’s former second-in-command — blamed “Zionist” influences for the U.S. military operation. Old reflexes die hard.
And yet, Venezuelans, including Venezuelan Jews, are cautiously optimistic. Not celebratory. Not naïve. But hopeful that this may finally be the beginning of the end of a cruel dictatorship that devastated an entire nation — economically, socially and morally. If free and fair elections follow — still a significant “if”—Venezuela may have a chance to return to democracy, and with it, to its historical commitment to pluralism and coexistence.
That could also bring an opportunity to rethink Venezuela’s relationship with Israel — not only morally, but also strategically.
Israel could be a natural ally in Venezuela’s reconstruction. It is a global leader in water management, agriculture, health technology, cybersecurity, and energy innovation — precisely the areas in which Venezuela faces acute shortages after years of collapse.The building blocks are already there: Even amid today’s diplomatic wreckage, trade still exists at a small scale — evidence that the bridge can be rebuilt when politics allows it.
In fact, opposition leader (and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner) María Corina Machado has already stated that a democratic Venezuela would reopen its embassy in Israel — in Jerusalem, in fact. That is a clear signal that, in the eyes of at least some influential leaders, antisemitism has no place in the country’s future.
For Venezuelan Jews, this moment is not about geopolitics. It is about whether the country they once called home can again be a place where being Jewish is not a liability.
Hope, for now, is cautious. But after so many years of fear, even cautious hope is something new.
The post I grew up in Venezuela. Will Maduro’s ouster bring my Jewish community the security we need? appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish New Yorkers say concerns about Mamdani are real, new poll shows. Most other voters say they’re overblown.
A majority of New York City voters believe that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s harsh criticism of Israel is a legitimate policy disagreement and that elected officials should challenge U.S. support for Israel, even if it upsets some voters, a new poll found. Views differ sharply among Jewish New Yorkers.
The Honan Strategy Group survey of 703 voters, conducted from December 4 to 12, found that 55% of non-Jewish respondents say Jewish concerns about feeling threatened by Mamdani’s statements on Israel are an overreaction fueled by politics. By contrast, among the smaller sample of 131 Jewish respondents, 53% say they have reason to feel that way, given Mamdani’s statements and associations.
The poll, first shared with the Forward, was conducted via text-to-web and analyzed separately for Jewish and non-Jewish respondents. The overall sample has a reported margin of error of plus or minus 3.7%, while the Jewish subsample has a margin of error of plus or minus 8.6%.
New York City is home to the largest Jewish community outside of Israel. Jewish voters make up an estimated 15% of the electorate. NYPD data shows that antisemitic acts made up 57% of all reported hate crimes citywide in 2025.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist whose strident criticism of Israel deepened rifts within New York City’s Jewish community during the election, spent the months after his surprising Democratic primary victory in direct outreach to clergy and prominent Jews to ease concerns about his record.
But his support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and his refusal to explicitly condemn the “globalize the intifada” slogan used at some pro-Palestinian protests, perceived by many as a call for violence against Jews, fueled backlash. The city’s Jewish voters were divided in the competitive mayoral election. Concern intensified after Mamdani’s mixed response to a demonstration outside Park East Synagogue that included anti-Israel and antisemitic slogans, in which he questioned the use of a sacred place for an event promoting migration to Israel.
Mamdani reignited deep suspicions about what kind of mayor he intends to be within hours of taking office, revoking two executive orders by former Mayor Eric Adams that many Jews felt supported them and Israel. Mamdani insisted that the move was not intentional or targeted at the Jewish community. He said he wanted to begin his administration with a “clean slate,” clearing away measures signed by Adams so he could enact his own agenda that he said would protect Jewish New Yorkers. But that explanation was met by skepticism. The New York Times reported that the revocations were planned well in advance and rolled out in a way that aimed to minimize backlash.
In a rare joint statement, a coalition of mainstream Jewish organizations said they were deeply concerned by Mamdani’s actions. It called for “clear and sustained leadership that demonstrates a serious commitment to confronting antisemitism” and one that ensures that the mayor’s office is not used to advance BDS.
The Honan Strategy Group found that 53% of non-Jewish voters and 47% of Jewish voters think Mamdani’s criticism of Israel reflects legitimate policy disagreements over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, 40% of Jewish voters believe it crosses a line and fuels antisemitism. Similarly, 51% of Jews view Mamdani’s rise as a troubling sign that antisemitism is being normalized, while 61% of non-Jewish voters see it as evidence of healthy debate and diversity. Fifty-four percent of Jewish voters say Mamdani’s positions deepen division and tension.
Pollster Bradley Honan described the positions on Mamdani and Israel as a “temperature gap” between communities in the Mamdani era. “This issue is turning into a defining political fault line in New York City,” he said. “Jewish voters are significantly more likely to say it’s making public antisemitism more acceptable and driving division.”
Mamdani has repeatedly defended his stance on Israel and the administration’s appointments of individuals who share his views. “We must distinguish between antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli government,” Mamdani said during a recent press conference, responding to an ADL report that scrutinized many of his transition team members. He also accepted the resignation of his newly-appointed director of appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, after her past antisemitic posts resurfaced.
Mamdani kept open the recently created mayor’s office to combat antisemitism that pursued the measure he revoked adopting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic. Mamdani also promised to divest from city investments in Israel and pledged to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he comes to New York in compliance with an International Criminal Court warrant.
The poll shows that Jews and non-Jews hold sharply different views on Mamdani’s foreign policy focus. Large majorities of Jewish voters — 71% and 69% respectively — say that speaking out against Israel’s military actions is likely to be viewed as antisemitic and that arresting Netanyahu would harm New York’s global standing. By contrast, 51% of non-Jewish voters say criticism of Israel reflects legitimate policy debate, 53% say it is appropriate for leaders to challenge U.S. support for Israel, and 40% say Mamdani has a moral obligation to uphold international human rights standards by ordering Netanyahu’s arrest.
In his inauguration speech, Mamdani reassured Jewish New Yorkers, “some who view this administration with distrust or disdain,” that he will protect them.
The post Jewish New Yorkers say concerns about Mamdani are real, new poll shows. Most other voters say they’re overblown. appeared first on The Forward.