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6 months after her father was killed at Bondi Beach, Sheina Gutnick has become a leading antisemitism advocate in Australia
(JTA) — MELBOURNE — Six months ago, Sheina Gutnick was a 31-year-old mother of three at the end of her maternity leave. She had degrees in social science and psychology, and several years of experience worked at a Jewish school. She was an average mother looking to get back into a 9-to-5 routine after her baby started daycare.
Then, on the first night of Hanukkah, everything in her life changed.
Gutnick was at a Hanukkah party in Melbourne, Australia, with her husband and three children when she crossed paths with a friend from Sydney. He looked ghostly white and told her there had been a shooting at a Hanukkah party in Bondi. Her parents, who were visiting Sydney from their home in Melbourne, had been planning to attend.
“I immediately called my dad, but he didn’t answer. Then I called my mum and she answered and I could hear shooting, and she was screaming and told me they are shooting people on the beach and that my dad is running after the terrorists,” said Gutnick.
Her father, Reuven Morrison, would be one of 15 people murdered on Bondi Beach that night. Before he was killed, Morrison was filmed throwing a brick at the terrorists, charging toward them with whatever he could find, trying to shield his community with his body. The footage of his bravery against the terrorists would be seen around the world within hours. After diverting the terrorist’s attention from others, Morrison bled out on the beach after being shot 11 times. He was 62.
“At 7:13 p.m. I found out that my dad is no longer alive, and my first reaction was to tell my husband to get me on a plane to Sydney,” she said. “As I was standing at the doorframe to leave the house before I went to the airport, I turned to my husband and said, ‘This is the day our lives have changed.’”
Gutnick boarded the last flight from Melbourne to Sydney that night. She couldn’t stop crying, and a flight attendant asked what was wrong. “I told her that my dad had just been killed in Bondi,” she recalled. “She didn’t really know what to say, but told me, if you need vodka let us know, we’ll sort you out.”
Six months after the attack, the deadliest antisemitic incident in Australia and one of the bloodiest anywhere in recent history, Australia is still reeling. A royal commission is unearthing searing allegations of antisemitism and accounts of Jewish fear, and has started rolling out recommendations designed to shore up public safety and cohesion.
Gutnick, meanwhile, has vaulted into public view not just at home but abroad. This week, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt posted a picture of himself with Gutnick on social media.
“I was honored to meet with Sheina Gutnick, daughter of Bondi hero Reuven Morrison z”l,” Greenblatt wrote. “Since Sheina’s father and 14 others were murdered by terrorists on Bondi Beach during Hanukkah, Sheina has tirelessly and relentlessly demanded that Australia take action against antisemitism. She is an inspiration.”
After throwing herself into speaking about her father, her experience and the challenges facing Australian Jews, Gutnick has now joined an international coterie of advocates transformed by their proximity to historic antisemitic violence.
“I get people saying to me, ‘Aren’t you exhausted?’” she said. “But the truth is, I get energy from it. I’m not a person that can sit when something has happened to me.”
The path that made Gutnick who she is was forged first in the former USSR, which Reuven Morrison left at 14 for Australia. Like many Soviet Jewish emigres, he knew little about Judaism when he arrived and for a time did not have much connection to Jewish practice in his new country, either.
But he became more religiously observant later in life, affiliating with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement that emphasizes outreach to Jews of all levels of observance. He became heavily involved in building Chabad of Bondi, a synagogue and community center in Sydney’s iconic beachfront neighborhood, helping to fight several legal battles while getting the building permits approved.
More than a decade ago, he moved to Melbourne. But the Sydney Jewish community, and especially Chabad of Bondi, remained close to his heart and he visited regularly. Its Chanukah by the Sea celebration, he decided, was one he would not miss.
Gutnick arrived in Sydney at 10 p.m., just a few hours after two men opened fire on the celebration, killing 15. Her father’s body still lay on Bondi beach, covered by a sheet, unable to be released for burial until all evidence had been collected from the scene of the massacre by Australian homicide detectives. She made her way to her uncle and aunt’s home, where her traumatized mother was waiting.
That night, nobody slept — and stories began trickling in.
“When I got there, we began hearing that my dad threw a brick at the terrorists. A lot of people started messaging me that he saved their lives based on actions that he took that night,” Gutnick recalled. “My mum had been on the beach and saw him running, and she saw when he went down, and she saw no one was helping and he ran to step in, but she hadn’t seen what he had actually done.”
An Australian homicide detective arrived at 1:30 a.m. to formally advise Gutnick and her mother Leah that Reuven had been murdered, and to explain the process for releasing his body back to the family for burial. It was slightly complicated, the detective told them, because this was Australia’s first major terrorist attack. The protocol was still being clarified.
“At this point, pure adrenaline and pure rage was running through my body, that this had actually happened. The fact that it was Bondi and it was my dad,” Gutnick recalled.
Gutnick returned to the apartment her parents owned in Sydney, situated right behind the Chabad of Bondi building, to collect a few things her mother needed. Outside, members of the Sydney Jewish community stood on the footpath alongside news crews and photographers. People on the street were crying.
Inside, Gutnick found her parents’ dog Simba who had come to Sydney with them, hungry and bewildered that he had been left alone since the night before. According to Jewish law, a Hanukkah menorah must be lit by each person in the place where they are spending the night. Reuven Morrison had set his up before leaving for the beach. On the table, it sat exactly where he had placed it, ready, unlit.
All the while, Gutnick’s phone kept ringing, with journalists asking her for comment. She felt, she recalls, like she was floating outside her own body.
“My mum was completely broken. Her world was torn apart; she has been with my dad for 42 years,” she recalled. “Every semblance of normal life was gone, she’s all of a sudden alone, she’s impacted in this way that is not humanely possible to comprehend.”
With dozens of media requests already flooding her phone, Gutnick ignored all of them — until she spotted one that was framed very differently.
The message came through Facebook from a producer at CBS News in the United States on Monday night, more than a day after the massacre, and it changed her life.
“I still hadn’t spoken to any media. They prefaced their message and said that they needed to help tell the world about my dad’s bravery, that they had seen the footage of him throwing a brick at the terrorists and they wanted to publicise it, so everyone knew about him and what he had done,” Gutnick recalled.
She felt compelled to respond: “It hit me so crushingly hard there is no one else to tell my dad’s story but me, so if I don’t do this, no one will hear about him and his bravery.
She messaged back, saying they could come to interview her the next morning. But CBS suggested they come right over immediately, in the middle of the night, so her interview could be aired on American prime time news. At 1 a.m., a full media crew arrived and Gutnick sat in front of lights that made her room feel like it was the middle of the day.
In the hours that followed, she wrote a personal reflection about what she believed her father’s death represented: a direct result of an Australian government that had been weak on antisemitism. After she circulated it, a prominent local Jewish figure whom she did not then know, the former treasurer of Australia, Josh Frydenberg, shared it on X, and it was republished widely. More media requests started flooding in and Gutnick started speaking about her dad.
“I realized how much I have on me to carry on my father’s legacy,” she said.
In between the interviews, she and her husband were on the phone to the Australian coroner and the chevra kadisha, the Jewish burial society, demanding that Australian authorities release her father’s body. A family friend, not knowing when the body would be released, flew his private plane from Melbourne to Sydney, ready to accompany Morrison home the moment his body was released. When that finally happened, a special flyover was arranged with the air controllers in Sydney so that the private plane with Morrison’s body could circle over Bondi Beach, in a final farewell to the place where Morrison had met his wife 42 years earlier.
Nobody who knew Sheina Gutnick Dec. 14 would have predicted what she’s done since. She says wouldn’t have predicted it either.
When Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese initially declined to call a royal commission into the Bondi attack and the broader rise of antisemitism in Australia, Gutnick, alongside other victim families, went to the front page of all of Australia’s major newspapers and called on him to reconsider. After weeks of lobbying, the prime minister relented.
When the royal commission convened, Gutnick was the first witness called to testify.
She described hearing “Free Palestine” shouted on the streets of Melbourne, chants that she said “not political expression but is explicit, targeted hatred and is designed to intimidate.” She recalled fearing the treatment her child would receive while undergoing surgery at a hospital where nurses had been fired after posting a viral video saying they would not treat Israeli patients. And she recounted being called a “f—ing terrorist” by a man she said had pointed at her Star of David necklace.
It was only one of countless stops to share her story. In the last six months, Gutnick has taken dozens of flights to meet with parliaments and groups to speak about her father and about Australian antisemitism. She has written in major national and international newspapers about her father and spoke at the Sydney reception for Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
She and her mother received condolence letters from across Australia and beyond. The one from King Charles, she said, was especially comforting. “He has an excellent team around him clearly, because it was such a beautiful, personalized letter, the one we received,” she said.
Her advocacy has been noticed at some of the highest levels within Australia’s Jewish community. “Sheina Gutnick never sought the public spotlight. She was thrust into it by the horrific murder of her father, and has responded with remarkable courage, dignity and moral clarity,” Jeremy Leibler, the president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, told JTA. “Her advocacy has resonated because it is authentic.”
Alex Ryvchin, the co-chair of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the peak body for Australian Jews, knew Reuven Morrison for years before he was killed. “He was an outstanding human being and now Australia knows him as a hero who gave his life to save others,” he told JTA. “Sheina honours his memory and legacy and I’m proud to stand with her in the fight against antisemitism.”
Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, the rabbi of Chabad of Bondi, whose son in law Rabbi Eli Schlanger and many close friends and congregants were murdered Bondi Beach also has deep appreciation for Gutnick’s advocacy.
She “emerged as one of the most compelling and eloquent new voices in Australia’s fight against antisemitism, transforming personal tragedy into sustained public advocacy,” he said.
After booking dozens of engagements independently, Gutnick was offered a role as the first public affairs officer of the recently established Australian branch of the Combat Antisemitism Movement, an international advocacy organization.
The group’s supporters argue that CAM is responding to a genuine rise in antisemitism and see it as trying to address problems that existing Jewish groups have failed to solve. They also argue that the group’s efforts to push back against anti-Israel sentiment are justified because anti-Zionism is often used as a vehicle for anti-Jewish prejudice.
CAM has indeed attracted criticism from other Jewish groups and civil liberties advocates who argue that it takes an overly broad approach to antisemitism and too often conflates anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
In Australia, the organization has also faced scrutiny over its political alliances, including relationships with some conservative and right-wing groups, as well as criticism that it imports American culture-war politics into debates about antisemitism.
Gutnick is aware of some of this criticism but isn’t really bothered by it. “Every organization has its controversial moments, so this stuff — it doesn’t really concern me,” she said. “The work CAM is doing now is so relevant in our lives in a post Oct.-7 world and a post-Bondi world,” she said.
In fact, she is grateful for the many connections they have helped her with both in Australia and around the world as well as their extensive research into antisemitism. “They gave me the ability to tell my dad’s story in many public spaces,” she said. “I continuously say, as Jews, we need to know the facts and figures on the ground about antisemitism, and what resolutions and legislation we need to have in place, and as an international org, CAM has the ability to help me do this.”
The royal commission has presented its first recommendations, designed to improve the processes that left the Bondi Hanukkah celebration with inadequate police protection despite the known threats. Soon, it is expected to say more — with a backlash to follow from those who believe that antisemitism is getting outsized attention and who say that efforts to address it will likely inappropriately constraint anti-Israel protest.
Gutnick doesn’t know exactly what the future will hold for her, but she knows that she will never return to where she stood six months ago — a spot that, in retrospect, feels like it may have been on the sidelines of the fight for Jewish security.
“As Jews, we are being faced with so much darkness,” she said. “I have gone through the worst thing — my father was killed for antisemitism — so I have become stronger, wanting to spread the message that no matter what happens, as the Jewish people we are one people, part of one faith, and although it’s terrible, this is something we have faced before.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Let my people grow: Jewish online cannabis retailer braces for new federal law to take effect
For the past several years, Jewish cannabis company Tokin’ Jew has offered a little something to take the edge off just about every Jewish occasion.
High Holidays have you feeling stressed? Try “High, Honey,” the company’s THC-infused honey stick. Passover Seder dragging on a little too long? An edible called “4 Cups,” the first officially certified kosher-for-Passover THC gummy, will help get you through it.
Now the company that brought the world cannabis-infused chocolate Hanukkah gelt and THC-laced hamantaschen is facing a decidedly less festive future. In a couple months, the products responsible for the majority of its business will no longer be legal due to a change in federal law.
And it’s not just Tokin’ Jew. The new restrictions, set to take effect in December, threaten to upend a multibillion dollar e-commerce industry that has flourished for nearly a decade.
For co-founders Ben Kraim and Will Cohen, who have spent years building a business around the unlikely intersection of Judaism and cannabis, the change threatens to undo much of their lives’ work.
“It’s not easy being a Jewish weed brand, Kraim told the Forward. “Our brand is incredibly niche, so the prospect of losing access to the customer base we worked hard to build up is especially upsetting.”
What began as a humble meme account has grown into a thriving online operation, selling everything from novelty Judaica gifts and smoking accessories to kosher-certified edibles with clever names like “Apple of My Chai” and “Guava Nagila.”
The company has also cultivated a devoted community, bringing together observant and secular Jews, along with cannabis enthusiasts of all backgrounds, through a shared appreciation for Jewish humor and high-quality kush.
Now, Tokin’ Jew Flower, the division of their company, which Kraim said accounts for approximately 60 to 70 percent of sales, faces an uncertain future.
The legal foundations for Tokin’ Jew dates back to the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized products containing no more than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC by dry weight. That provision created an opening for companies to manufacture and ship hemp and hemp-derived products, including THC gummies, across certain state lines without needing to abide by the state-by-state licensing systems governing recreational marijuana use.
A booming industry followed. But Kraim acknowledges that the relatively lax federal regulations created opportunities for “bad actors” to sell questionable products.
“I think everybody in this industry knew things were a little too good to be true,” he said.
What he and many others expected, however, was tighter rules, not the effective elimination of their business model.
“We all thought eventually the federal government was going to create more regulation in this space,” he said, adding that he would have welcomed stronger oversight.
“We like to joke that it’s our Jewish guilt that keeps us from selling a subquality product. But we absolutely support stricter regulation – something that would have been entirely feasible.”
Instead, another provision tucked into the federal spending bill signed by President Trump in November 2025 dramatically narrowed the definition of legal hemp. Under the new rules, finished products containing more than 0.4 milligrams per container of total THC and similarly intoxicating cannabinoids will no longer qualify as federally legal hemp.
The restrictions were originally scheduled to go into effect November 2026, but Congress granted a brief extension that pushed the deadline back to December 11.
According to Kraim, it is not only companies like theirs that will be affected. Growers, manufacturers, packaging businesses and warehouses may have to shut down altogether.
“These are people’s entire livelihoods that they now have to just set ablaze,” Kraim said.
“At least we have this brand that can take many shapes and can live on in so many other ways,” he said. “But if you’re a hemp farmer, you are in big trouble.”
The news comes just as Tokin’ Jew has been experiencing explosive growth. According to Kraim, the company now has approximately 250,000 followers across social media platforms, with its Instagram content reaching between 18 million and 22 million people monthly. Orders have roughly tripled over the past year.
But the founders’ relationship with their customers goes beyond sales.
From the beginning, Kraim, who was raised modern Orthodox, and Cohen, who was raised in a Reform community, viewed their company as a way to connect Jews to their identity through humor, particularly those who may feel alienated from more traditional expressions of Judaism.
That same sense of community was on full display when they announced the impending restrictions.
“We were flooded with comments and DMs and emails,” Kraim said, describing messages of sympathy, appreciation and personal testimonials about the company’s products.
What struck him most were the offers of assistance.
“We got tons of messages from people willing to offer a hand,” he said. “‘How can I help? My uncle owns a dispensary. Let’s protest.’ People just coming in hot, trying to help in any way that they can, which is just so beautiful and so Jewish.”
Others began stocking up, taking advantage of the products’ long shelf lives. The company is even considering producing its popular kosher-for-Passover gummies early so customers can buy them before the ban takes effect.
For customers who rely on the products for more than recreation, but relief, Kraim worries about what will happen when home delivery is no longer an option.
He described phoning one of their biggest customers only to discover an elderly Jewish woman on the other end of the line. She told the team how much she relied on their products and how convenient home delivery was, particularly because multiple ailments and limited mobility made it difficult for her to get to a dispensary.
“We were tearing up by the end of the call,” Kraim recalled.
Gabrielle G, a Tokin’ Jew customer since 2024, who declined to give her last name, called the news “truly devastating for the Jewish stoner community.”
“Their Advent calendars were a highlight of my Jewish holidays,” she told the Forward. “I hope they find a solution because TJ feels like family.”
Regardless, TokinJew.com will continue selling accessories, apparel, home goods and Judaica, with plans to expand its offerings.
They’re also planning a gradual move into licensed dispensaries, beginning in New York and eventually New Jersey. But that involves developing separate production, distribution and regulatory requirements for each state, a daunting prospect for a company that spent years developing its national online operation.
“But us Jews are the masters of the pivot,” he pointed out. “We historically have troubles thrown our way, and we always have to figure out our next step.”
For a company whose product line is largely inspired by the Jewish calendar, the date of the new bill feels particularly poignant: The new restrictions are scheduled to take effect on December 11, the evening Jews around the world light the eighth and final Hanukkah candle, commemorating the miracle of a single day’s supply of oil burning for eight.
“We have our plan A, B and C,” Kraim said. “One of which is praying for a Hanukkah miracle.”
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Trump antisemitism official to visit Michigan synagogue weeks before midterms, backed by ZOA
(JTA) — DETROIT – The Trump administration’s antisemitism czar will speak to a Michigan synagogue on Wednesday for a Justice Department event that also doubles as a fundraiser for the state’s chapter of the Zionist Organization of America.
Leo Terrell, who chairs the administration’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, is attending on behalf of the department. The Justice Department touted the event on its website with a link to a ZOA registration page that solicits donations to become an event co-sponsor.
Federal ethics regulations restrict fundraising by government employees and prohibit the use of government property for unauthorized purposes, though they allow authorized official fundraising and certain official speeches at fundraising events.
Terrell is visiting Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, a Detroit suburb; the synagogue is also listed as a co-sponsor. Other co-sponsors include a local Jewish high school, Mothers Against College Antisemitism and pro-Israel advocacy groups.
It comes weeks before the midterm elections, in which rhetoric on Israel and Jewish safety from the state’s Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has put local Jews on edge.
The Justice Department is billing the event as the first stop on Terrell’s “American Tour Against Hate,” adding, “All faiths and backgrounds welcome.” Terrell will be in conversation with Mort Klein, national head of ZOA, a usual stalwart Trump supporter who has broken with the president at times on Iran policy.
On its registration page for the event, ZOA Michigan notes that it “brings the Department of Justice directly into dialogue with Michigan’s Jewish community.”
ZOA Michigan also alluded to current tensions between the state’s Jewish community and El-Sayed.
“Antisemitism is reaching across Michigan — in schools, in public spaces, and among political candidates,” the event page reads. “Confronting it requires our community to stand together.”
The ZOA is a hawkish pro-Israel organization that backs the West Bank settlement movement and Israeli right wing government policies. In the U.S., it has also endorsed some of Trump’s restrictive immigration policies.
Federal tax law prohibits tax-exempt houses of worship from supporting or opposing political candidates, but Trump has sought to loosen the restrictions.
Rabbi Aaron Starr, of Shaarey Zedek, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Conservative congregation’s co-sponsoring of the event should not imply that it was endorsing one candidate over another.
“We are looking forward to working with anybody and everybody who wants to combat hate, whether that hate is antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, racism or any other form of hate,” Starr said. He added that the congregation would soon welcome Jewish Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin for a veteran’s Shabbat.
Starr said the synagogue became a sponsor because it had been approached by ZOA to serve as an event host. “We’re mostly just serving as a venue for the event,” he said, adding that he personally would not be there.
Terrell did not return a JTA request for comment on the event. But he has promoted it extensively on social media and had hinted at the talk, and the ZOA partnership, in a previous email he sent to JTA reporters.
“We hope to see everyone there making it clear hate has no place in America a.k.a the greatest country on Earth,” he wrote at the time. He also thanked ZOA Michigan “for their tireless work on bringing our powerful message into reality.”
ZOA Michigan’s executive director, Kobi Erez, told JTA the event was nonpartisan, but added that he was aware of voters planning to switch parties — an allusion to Democrats who are considering voting for Rogers.
“We are not planning to discuss particular candidates or tell anyone how to vote,” Erez said in an email.
“We do encourage people to examine candidates’ records and statements concerning the safety of the Jewish community and consider whether they will take antisemitism seriously,” he said. “We feel that Jewish safety is at stake now more than ever. We know people who, because of these concerns, plan to vote for a party they have never supported before, and we understand their position.”
Erez said that the point of the event was not fundraising. “We are accepting voluntary sponsorships and donations to help cover expenses and support our work, but the purpose of this evening is to confront antisemitism and connect the community with the Department of Justice,” he said.
Frankel Jewish Academy, a private Jewish high school in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield Township, is also listed as a co-sponsor of the Terrell event. Frankel leaders did not return a JTA request for comment.
Terrell, an attorney, former O.J. Simpson supporter and ex-Fox News contributor, is a senior counsel in the Justice Department’s civil rights division. In that role, he oversees antisemitism taskforces that include staffers from the departments of Justice, Education and Health and Human Services.
Terrell’s visit comes as Trump, and Republicans more broadly, see an opening for Michigan in the midterms, in part via the Jewish vote. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance will be campaigning in Michigan in the coming days. During Vance’s previous stop in Michigan, he went after El-Sayed for his reaction to the Temple Israel attack earlier this year.
Hundreds of local Jews have signed a petition pledging to vote for El-Sayed’s GOP opponent, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, over their fears of the Democrat’s “extremism” on Jews and Israel, including El-Sayed’s remarks earlier this year about the attack on Temple Israel in the state. He has since apologized for those comments.
A separate petition — spearheaded by Starr and other rabbis — outlines “non-negotiables” that some Jewish leaders have pushed El-Sayed and other candidates to agree to.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Latin Jews seek belonging and identity in a country where they feel excluded
(JTA) — Ziggy Valdez, a nonbinary Mexican Jew studying to become a rabbi, was born in Illinois and grew up moving around the country as the child of a Navy father, always attached to a Reform synagogue. Valdez, who uses they/them pronouns, has Mexican roots on both sides of the family and has been “physically brown since birth,” but latinidad and Chicano identity weren’t an active part of family life. Their father worked in the Navy, which according to Valdez’ was the biggest barrier between them and the Jewish world. They grew up with Ashkenazi traditions, even when it meant driving an hour from the base where they were stationed at the time to the synagogue.
Valdez went to 10 different schools between preschool and senior year of high school.In many, they often felt excluded. “The kids at school who were also from Mexican families were not Jewish, and at some points in my adolescence, told me I wasn’t actually Mexican because I was Jewish and not Catholic,” Valdez told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “At times, my identity as Mexican felt like a source of shame for my family, Valdez said.”
The family would occasionally spend Christmas Day in Bakersfield, California with Valdez’s abuelo, or grandfather, where he would “cook the best mole ever made, including fresh tortillas.” But other than that they did not participate in Mexican culture.
Valdez heard about Jewtina & Co. (pronounced Jewtina y Co.), a national community of Latin Jews. After moving to Los Angeles two years ago, they joined the educators’ cohort of Jewtina’s Puentes national leadership fellowship, which has alumni across six cohorts, according to Violeta Stolpen, Jewtina & Co.’s Director of Operations.
“We were given the time and space to sit with that miracle of an experience, to be in a room with each other talking about the loneliness of growing up a Latin Jew, and being grateful that, thanks to the Jewtina, we weren’t alone anymore,” Valdez told JTA.
Jewtina & Co. was founded during Latin Heritage month in 2019 by Analucía Lopezrevoredo, a Peruvian Jew who moved to California with her family when she was five years old. A sociologist by training, she grew up surrounded by vibrant Latin and Jewish communities and began calling herself a Jewtina early on.
The idea of Jewtina crystallized in 2018, when she applied for a fellowship focused on global Jewry. “It started with a question I had carried on since childhood: Where do people like me get to be whole?” she told JTA. It is a way for Jewish immigrants from Latin America in the U.S. to express their conflicting and overlapping Jewish and Latinos identities publicly. Its members are mixed-couple children of Latin American descent, Latin immigrants who converted to Judaism, Latin Americans who were adopted into an American family and many more shades of Jewish Latinhood.
Lopezrevoredo calls Jewtina part of a Jewish and Latin diaspora, which comes with its own identity challenges. Latino communities in the U.S. are heavily Catholic, so there is little space in these immigrant enclaves for members of other faiths. Latino Jews feel excluded from Mexican, Peruvian and other communities. But there is also discrimination of Jewtina members from Latin American Jewish communities. U.S.-based demographic categories, such as Latinos and Jews, can create exclusionary identities that do not fit neatly with complex migration paths.
“There is no single Latin Jewish experience” Loperevoredo said, “just as there is no single Jewish one. But one experience we hear again and again is the feeling of having to explain oneself.”
No national study has measured the size or demographic makeup of the Latin Jewish community in the U.S., according to Jewtina & Co.’s Director of Research and Evaluation David McCarty-Caplan, who holds a Ph.D. in social work. The closest estimate comes from “American Jewish Population Estimates 2020: Summary & Highlights,” a 2021 report by Brandeis University’s American Jewish Population Project. It found that about 6% of Jewish adults in the U.S. identify as Hispanic out of 7.6 million.
To make Latin Jews more visible and better understood, McCarty-Caplan is developing a national study of Latin Jewish community and identity in the U.S. The partners are Brandeis University’s Initiative on the Jews of the Americas and its Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, along with Universidad Hebraica in Mexico. He said it will be the first study of its kind.
McCarty-Caplan says he has felt deeply disconnected from his Latino origins and out of place in predominantly white Jewish spaces. He was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and adopted at 3 months old by a white American Jewish family. In 2019, he met founder Lopezrevoredo in a Jews of Color cohort of Bend the Arc’s Selah Leadership Fellowship. That’s where he learned about her work with Jewtina & Co.
“It felt like meeting her, and finding Jewtina was the first time I felt fully seen and valued as a Latino, a Jew, and an adoptee all at once,” he said.
Members of Jewtina & Co. are often a mixture of identities. Founding member and Director of Education Kimberly Dueñas’ mother is an Ashkenazi Jew born and raised in Los Angeles, with family roots in Ukraine and Poland. Her father was born and raised in El Salvador, in a rural farming community. Through his side, she has converso Sephardic Jewish — a convert to Christianity or a descendant thereof — and Indigenous Mesoamerican ancestry. He met Dueñas’ mother at a Passover seder in Orange County, California where Dueñas grew up.
“I know personally what it’s like to feel like I have to choose which identity to lead with,” said Dueñas who facilitates Puentes.
According to director of operations Stolpen, the organization ran 58 programs in 2025, 43 in person and 15 virtual, with 2367 participants. So far in 2026, it has held 47 programs and events with more than 1,200 participants, according to McCarty-Caplan.
The organization faces a harder climate than the one it was born into. When Jewtina & Co. emerged in 2019 and 2020, director of research McCarty-Caplan said there was a surge of support for groups working with multiracial Jewish communities. That support has since receded since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term. Since “the events in Israel-Palestine on Oct. 7th, significant attention and resources have moved away from supporting organizations like Jewtina,” he added, referring to the war launched in 2023 after Hamas raided communities inside Israel.
Oct. 7 also changed things for Jewtina & Co.’s members. “Many Latin Jews have encountered antisemitism in spaces where they once felt cultural or political kinship,” Lopezrevoredo said, “while also entering Jewish spaces where conversations about race, immigration, Latin America or the diversity of Jewish experience can feel constrained.”
Dueñas said one of the organization’s biggest challenges is responding in real time to what its community needs. “We are navigating fear around immigration, ICE raids and deportation within our Latino communities, while also experiencing the rise of antisemitism and the ripple effects of the war in Israel and Palestine within our Jewish communities,” she told JTA.
Jewtina & Co. has responded with spaces for processing, healing and spiritual support, along with mental health resources, rabbinic wisdom and Know Your Rights programming.
“A Jewish family can carry memories of Poland, Syria, Turkey, or Morocco, become deeply Argentine, Mexican, Brazilian, or Cuban over generations, and later become Latino in the United States.” Lopezrevoredo said ”None of those layers cancels the others.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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