Dear Rabbi Cosgrove,

Thank you for your letter this week. Although you envision my electoral defeat two years from now, I recognize that it comes from a place of genuine concern, for me and for our shared future.

While your letter imagines my political fate, I think it’s really the future of the Jewish community that’s at stake. I know you care about the safety and thriving of Jews in New York City and beyond — so do I. We just have different ideas about how best to achieve it.

Two thousand years ago, Hillel prescribed us a challenge, in two questions: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am for myself only, what am I?”

You believe that I am falling short on the first of Hillel’s questions. In our tradition of tokhecha, of accountability, I’ll sit with your criticism and take it seriously. I fight fiercely to keep our people safe, here in New York City, across the United States, and in Israel. I urged Mayor Zohran Mamdani to keep Jessica Tisch as NYPD Commissioner; to discourage the use of phrases like “globalize the intifada”; and to increase funding to combat antisemitism and other forms of hate. I’m pleased he’s done those things, and I’ll keep pushing for more.

I believe in the vision of a Jewish and democratic Israel, as imagined in its Declaration of Independence. I just don’t believe there can be democracy with occupation, or that Israel’s present actions in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are consistent with that vision. On Election Night, I spoke about Israelis who provide protective presence in the West Bank, putting their lives on the line to help protect Palestinian neighbors from settler terrorism, as heroes whose courage I hope to emulate. And I pleaded with people not to use “Zionist” as a slur.

But even if I were an anti-Zionist, I would still be deeply within Jewish tradition and values.

My son is named after Marek Edelman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and a Bundist (Jewish democratic socialist) who was not a Zionist. Albert Einstein and Judah Magnes, a leading American rabbi who moved to Israel in 1922, both worried presciently about the dangers of sovereignty in a “Jewish state” and preferred to imagine a bi-national one. Many Jews are rediscovering those traditions, and concluding that they fit better with the Jewish values they learned in Hebrew school.

Your efforts to define them, and me, outside the Jewish community, are dangerously short-sighted. Jews are not made safer by proscribing a particular vision of Israel as the price of full belonging, or by insisting on unconditional support for Israel while it commits human rights violations against Palestinians.

Like the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, Israeli-American historian and eminent Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, and the Lemkin Institute — the legacy of the Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor who developed the term — I believe with great sadness that Israel’s destruction of Gaza meets the definition of genocide. But whether one uses the term or not, surely we can agree that the scale of Palestinian death and suffering should trouble every Jew. Our obligation is not to ignore it, or explain it away, but to reckon with it — and to change it.

You recently urged candidates for office seeking the Jewish community’s support to march in the Israel Day Parade. But if representing Jewish New Yorkers requires marching alongside Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, perhaps we should ask whether we’ve confused loyalty with moral leadership.

I believe that we need more attention to Hillel’s second question. Our tradition asks us never to become indifferent to the suffering of children. I cannot reconcile Israel’s killing of thousands of Palestinian children with the Judaism that shaped me — most deeply, with the idea that every one of them was created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, just like my kids.

The future you imagine presumes that the greatest danger facing Jewish life is that Jews will leave Zionism. But it seems to me the real danger is that young Jews will conclude there is no room for them inside Jewish institutions unless they silence their conscience. A community cannot thrive if the choices it offers the next generation are hypocrisy or excommunication.

At the end of your letter, you welcome me “back,” presumably to a position of always defending Israel against its critics, insisting that Zionism is an essential part of every Jewish identity and refusing to be in political coalition with people who disagree.

I’d like to invite you forward, to a belief in shared safety, where we don’t compromise on anyone’s humanity.

Or, at least, I’d like to invite us together to attempt a more productive conversation, to continue a debate that Jews have been having for at least 2,600 years. You recently called for Jews “to avoid the reductive and destructive tactic of labeling people with whom we disagree either as self-hating Jews or colonialist aggressors.” Let’s model that together.

Our differing points of view represent a longstanding debate amongst our people about the best way to achieve safety and flourishing, for ourselves and our neighbors. There’s room to keep that debate going — through conversation and dialogue, not through exclusion and shaming.

The door is open, rabbi. Welcome forward.

The post My hopes for the rabbi who envisions my defeat — and for a better Jewish future appeared first on The Forward.

Unveiled in the suburbs of Boston more than two decades ago, the Jewish ritual bathhouse known as Mayyim Hayyim offers an intimate space for people of all genders to mark life’s transitions. The facility’s pair of pools beckoned thousands from miles around, effectively reinventing the ancient Jewish practice of mikveh immersion for the modern era.

Then one of the tubs sprung a leak that took more than an ordinary plumber to fix. Now, more than four years later, the mikveh itself has had a rebirth, with the reopening of the immersion pool on the building’s left side, restoring a source of strength in suburban Boston that has become a pillar of American Jewish life.

“It felt like we were cut off from a really important part of our space and our connectedness,” said Sarah Quiat, a mikveh guide at Mayyim Hayyim who has been guiding immersions for seven years. “Being able to give the immersee the option of the left pool in and of itself feels like a core part of how Mayyim Hayyim approaches mikveh. To be able to offer and facilitate the immersion that a person is looking for comes down even to the details of which pool is calling to you.”

Tucked into a butter-yellow, 19th-Century New-England-style home in Newton, Mass., Mayyim Hayyim, Hebrew for “living waters,” grew out of a vision developed by author Anita Diamant and collaborators affectionately known as the “Mikveh Mamas.”

The founders grounded Mayyim Hayyim in a desire to enrich ancient ritual with contemporary life and make it accessible to Jews of all identities and types of observance.

Since ancient times, traditional Judaism has called for married women to immerse themselves in a mikveh after their menstrual period or childbirth before resuming sexual relations with their husbands. In the 1970s, as the Jewish feminist movement began picking up speed, thought leaders including Diamant looked beyond the patriarchal origins of mikveh and sought to reimagine and reclaim it.

“We, as a Jewish community, had to do better,” Diamant said in an interview. “We needed a mikveh where everyone who entered felt welcomed and valued.”

Today, Mayyim Hayyim offers a wide range of non-traditional immersion ceremonies — including for gender transition milestones, survivors of domestic violence or abuse, or individuals recovering from long-term illness — in addition to more conventional ceremonies for occasions like b’nei mitzvahs, the High Holy Days, and conversions.

The pool’s restoration was made possible by a joint gift last year from Mikhveh Mama, Paula Brody, and her husband, Merrill Hassenfeld.

For their 20th wedding anniversary in 2004, the couple immersed in the waters on the house’s left-hand side.

But in February 2022, that pool sprung a leak, and the water level began declining at a rate of more than one inch per day. A leak of such magnitude rendered the pool not Kosher by halachic standards, forcing the organization to close the pool until further notice.

Contractors began work to diagnose the source of the leak. Then came another setback — the particularly frigid Boston winter of 2023. Burst pipes caused a major flood in the building. Now other repairs to the building had to be prioritized.

Brody and Hassenfeld had not been aware that the mikveh where they marked their 20 years of marriage was out of commission. Together, they donated the money to finance the restoration ahead of their 42nd anniversary on June 24.

Since then, members of an adult B’Mitzvah class from a local temple have sought the waters of the mikveh and, during Pride Month in June, Mayyim Hayyim and Keshet, an advocacy group for LGBTQ+ Jews, hosted an evening of affirming immersions for the queer community.

“It was always envisioned with the two pools,” Brody recalled. “When I realized that it had been dysfunctional, we really wanted to help.”

“It enables Mayyim Hayyim to be whole again,” she added.

Mia Peloquin traveled from Connecticut to immerse themself at Mayyim Hayyim last year to mark their conversion. In August, they will return with their friend who converted a year earlier. The pair will celebrate their conversion anniversaries together.

“I was actually surprised that the left pool was open,” Peloquin said. “We thought we would have to go in one after another, which would extend our trip in Massachusetts a bit longer, but finding out that the left pool was open was very exciting for us because we get to immerse at the same time.”

During the closure, the organization has been guiding immersions solely using the pool on the right side of the building. Even with one operational pool, more than 900 people visit Mayyim Hayyim for roughly 1,600 immersions annually, many hailing from the surrounding Boston area, while others plan international travel to experience the one-of-a-kind space.

In addition to increasing the organization’s capacity for immersions, having both pools back to full functionality allows for expanded partnerships with Jewish institutions.

Beginning in 2023, then-Brandeis student and Hillel Tfilah Coordinator Zac Gondelman saw the power of ritual immersion and identified a critical education gap on the subject among his peers.

“Reform Jews came into Brandeis feeling like there was a world of Jewish ritual and practice that they had never heard of or accessed or lived in,” he said. “And so, I thought there was no better way to bridge those things than to bring a whole bunch of college kids to the mikveh.”

Despite Mayyim Hayyim’s decreased capacity at the time, Gondelman helped organize an annual trip for Brandeis students each year ahead of the High Holidays. With the second pool now open, more students can participate.

Harvard Hillel recently organized a trip to the mikveh for graduating seniors to mark the completion of college.

Engaging with the community through the mikveh has long been central to Diamant’s founding vision for the space. In doing so, Mayyim Hayyim has helped the ritual expand and grow, and even interact with other ancient practices. In 2024, the North Shore Hevra, a Boston-based community of Jews seeking to revive Jewish death and burial rituals called tahara, began working with Mayyim Hayyim to offer mikveh immersions for its tahara leaders.

Linda Goodspeed, cofounder of North Shore Hevra, said a shared passion for breathing contemporary life into ancient practice helped forge a relationship between the two organizations. Now, tahara volunteers can receive a newly created immersion blessing before the High Holidays, one adapted ancient practice to prepare for another.

“They were really our mentors,” Goodspeed added.

That mentorship extends far beyond Boston. Through the Rising Tide Open Waters Mikveh Network, 39 facilities in the U.S. and an additional nine internationally draw on Mayyim Hayyim’s extensive training resources to prepare their guides to serve the local community and foster mikvehs around the world.

Rabbi Miriam Berger, founder of Wellspring, another pluralistic mikveh in the network located in London, England, considers Mayyim Hayyim to be “the mothership.”

“Judaism gifted us mikveh,” she said. “Mayyim Hayyim gifted it back to us.”

The post After 4 years and a stubborn leak, a landmark mikveh is finally whole again appeared first on The Forward.

On the eve of July 4, 1876, a New York broadside marked America’s centennial with something extraordinary: the first Hebrew poem to probe the essence of America. The poem, which appeared with an English translation, creates a fascinating encounter between a new nation brought forth upon a new land and an ancient nation without a land of its own.

It also reflects some of the most fundamental dilemmas troubling American Jewry “in those days, at this time.”

This now largely forgotten poem, “Minchat Yehudah” (Judah’s Offering), was written in Hebrew by Moses Aaron Schreiber and translated by Rabbi Dr. Frederick de Sola Mendes. Both served as clergy in a leading New York synagogue: Sha’arey Tefila, located at the time on West 44th St.

The poem is notable in Hebrew literature not only for its pioneering subject matter — the United States — but at least as remarkably for its tone. It radiates exuberance; its mood is festive and upbeat, and its joy and optimism are virtually unique in Diasporic Hebrew poetry. Nor is it common to find in that poetry the harmony and confidence of verses like:

Here they came
Christians and Jews
as friends and brothers
In her shadow they find peace,
In her bounty, joys increase.

And indeed, from the centennial and until quite recently, America and the Jews were a kind of match made in heaven, an encounter that generated an explosively successful historical rendezvous.

The poem’s title, “Judah’s Offering” is a quotation from Malachi 3:4, which refers to a new offering that is reminiscent of “the days of old.” Accordingly, in the poem it is made to refer to the singular gift that American Jews could give their adopted homeland on its anniversary: a new song in the language of the ancient Hebrew Bible. As the author writes in the eighth and final stanza:

Alas! but we,
Posterity
Of Judah’s host,
No land can boast!
Our tongue alone
Is all we own!
Accept from Hebrews
This ode in Hebrew,
Our heartfelt prayer,
“God bless thee, e’er!”

The Hebrew language, presented here as a “portable homeland,” was something that Jews could offer to the American national heritage. The Puritans had appropriated the Bible as an American asset, using it as a parable (an “ideal typology” in their terminology). They understood their migration to the new world as an exodus from the bondage of England — their Egypt — to America, their Promised Land. But if the founders had already made the biblical heritage their own, the language of the Bible was something else. It belonged exclusively to the Jews and could serve as the special “Offering” of biblical Judah’s offsprings.

Though only a minuscule number of American Jews at the time — before the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe — knew any Hebrew, the language, as scholar Alan Mintz has suggested, was understood as the root-source of Jewish national culture, one might say the cultural DNA of the Jewish people. Since the U.S. was a “composite nationality” (that’s Frederick Douglass) or “nation of nations” (that’s Walt Whitman), Hebrew as a symbol of the Jewish nation was a building block of America.

This symbolism is brought out strikingly in the graphic arrangement of the broadside. Its shape is reminiscent of the popular schematic display of the biblical tablets, with the Hebrew and English version placed on either of the joined tablets. From early on, the tablets served as a prominent symbol of American Judaism. Since the poem was about uniting the Jews with America and Hebrew with English, this merging was displayed visually, echoing the biblical heritage common to Christians and Jews.

But the harmony of the Hebrew and English as melded tablets is solely graphic and visual. A striking feature of the broadside is the gulf between the themes and messages of the Hebrew poem and its English rendering. The English translation, in many places, simply subverts the Hebrew original.

To understand why this was, it is first necessary to become better acquainted with the author and the translator. The author, Moses Aaron Schreiber (1841–1912), was a Kovno, Lithuania-born maskil (Hebrew Enlightener) who had studied to become a Hebrew teacher. Shaaray Tefila, the synagogue in which he served as “chazan” upon his arrival in the U.S, was founded in 1839 as a hub for the city’s Anglo-Jewish elite.

The English translation was crafted by Sha’aray Tefila’s acting minister, Rabbi Dr. Frederick de Sola Mendes (1850–1927), a scion of illustrious Sephardic rabbinic dynasties. Mendes was born in the new world’s Jamaica but was raised and educated in elite higher-learning institutions in England and Germany. As Sha’aray Tefila’s religious leader he would gradually transform it from a traditionalist stronghold into a Reform congregation. These progressive shifts were likely what prompted Schreiber to leave Sha’aray Tefila for more traditionalist pulpits in New York and Baltimore.

The author and the translator were thus separated by a vast gulf in background, upbringing and ideology — making it hardly surprising that the Hebrew centennial hymn for American independence and its English translation diverged quite sharply.

A striking example appears in the elaborate ode’s 8th and final stanza. In it, Schreiber lauds President Ulysses S. Grant. In Mendes’ translation, Grant is nowhere to be found.

Here, it seems, we are seeing the influence of ideology, sociology and politics. The New York Jewish elite to which Mendes belonged tended to favor the Democrats, who were more conservative than Lincoln’s anti-slavery and more “progressive” Republican Party.

Many leaders of the Jewish community maintained extensive commercial ties with the South. Their Southern coreligionists were almost universally Democrats. In New York City wards where most Jews resided, Lincoln received only about a third of the vote in the fateful election of 1860. Similarly in Philadelphia, the focus of the centennial celebrations, most of the leaders of its veteran synagogue Mikveh Israel were, according to its prominent hazan Sabato Morais, “Copperheads.”

This is a chapter of history that American Jews tend to gloss over, for reasons that have become acutely understandable in recent times. They prefer to dwell instead on the prominent role Jews played in the mid-20th-century Civil Rights movement, after the Holocaust.

But there was a Jewish minority in the Civil War era North — likely made up of ordinary working-class Jews and the few Eastern European immigrants who had arrived by then — that gravitated toward Lincoln and the Republicans, fighting for the abolition of slavery. After all, Eastern European Jews had experienced prejudice and brutal persecution firsthand. Schreiber, a native of Lithuania, was seemingly among them; at the very least, his glowing view of President Grant aligns with this faction.

Grant was the commander Lincoln chose to decisively end the Civil War, deploying a strategy that historians describe as “hard war” — if not quite total war — directed at the economic and civilian heart of the South. During his presidency, the South was subjected to military rule. To those with economic ties or lingering sympathies for the South, Grant was hardly a figure to be celebrated. Moreover, Grant’s administration was mired in corruption and faced severe public criticism, even if Grant himself was not considered personally corrupt.

Even through a specifically Jewish lens, Grant evoked ambivalent feelings. As a general on the Western front, he had issued General Order No. 11, expelling Jews from the territories under his military command. It was perhaps the most flagrant state-sanctioned antisemitic measure in American history, though it was swiftly revoked by the scrupulous Lincoln. In later stages of the war, and especially during his presidency, Grant’s conduct toward Jews was not only irreproachable but arguably more supportive than that of any of his predecessors.

It is easy, therefore, to see how Grant and his administration could become a point of contention between literary collaborators like Schreiber and Mendes, even though the English translation strongly condemns slavery and praises Lincoln.

The focus of Schreiber’s Hebrew version was on Philadelphia, its Independence Hall, and the Liberty Bell hanging over it, on Leviticus with its call to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land,” inscribed on the bell, and on the Jubilee, when Liberty was to be proclaimed.

Mendes’ focus was different — not on Philadelphia, but on the neighboring Fairmount Park, home of the centennial exhibition representing 37 countries. Liberty’s arm and torch were on display there, and Moses Ezekiel’s statue representing freedom of religion was supposed to be displayed. When it comes to terminology, Mendes’ translation celebrated the more individual “freedom,” rather than the more public “liberty.”

Perhaps, however, this Centennial hymn was precisely the place for such profound discrepancies between Hebrew text and English translation. As noted, Minchat Yehuda — the offering brought by the Jews to America’s centennial — was the Hebrew language. In an English rendering, this offering inevitably dissipates and vanishes, as do liberty and Leviticus, Ulysses Grant and Patrick Henry, Liberty Hall and Liberty Bell, Philadelphia and the Jubilee.

The English language demanded a new and different offering — a forward-looking one, oriented to the new America of 1876 and to a new world’s fair. The Hebrew language pointed to 1776. It was an offering that reflected, in the words of Malachi, “the days of old, and former years,” before the Jews discovered modern America.

The post The gift Jews gave to America on its 100th birthday in 1876 appeared first on The Forward.