As prisons go, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia was unusually luxurious. For one, it had flush toilets — beating out even the White House in making the upgrade, museum exhibit developer Beth Tinker told me on a recent tour.

But if plumbing reflected the penitentiary’s commitment to prisoners’ physical well-being, its biggest innovation was more spiritual. Eastern State housed the first synagogue inside a U.S. prison, complete with a Torah ark and ner tamid, or eternal light. That restored sanctuary — a short walk from gangster Al Capone’s former cell — is now newly open to the public in a museum exhibit, Freedom through Faith: Judaism at Eastern State and Beyond.

“It’s a place really of humanity, when you’re not getting a lot of humanity in this space,” Tinker said.

The synagogue, founded in 1922, hosted holiday celebrations and weekly Shabbat services. Outside volunteers brought in kosher meats. A circus performer visited and provided entertainment. After a prisoner gave birth to a baby boy, they brought in a mohel and held a bris.

Compare that level of institutional support with modern-day prisons, where there are often multifaith chapels, but a separate, dedicated space for a synagogue is rare, according to Rabbi Joseph Kolakowski, the first full-time Jewish chaplain in the history of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

The exhibit comes on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling that makes it more difficult for prisoners to obtain a remedy when their religious rights are violated. Last month, the Court ruled that a Rastafarian man, Damon Landor, could not sue prison guards for monetary damages after they forcibly shaved off his dreadlocks, which he kept as part of his faith. When he entered the prison, Landor carried with him a copy of a 2017 court decision that required the Louisiana Department of Corrections to honor Rastafarian religious practices — which a guard threw in the trash, according to court records.

But while Landor couldn’t sue the guard, the Supreme Court did agree that Landor’s rights had been violated. His case led the Louisiana Department of Corrections to update its prisoner grooming policy to prevent similar violations.

Eastern State, meanwhile, was accommodating Jewish religious practice decades before those legal protections existed, Tinker said.

“That’s part of what makes this synagogue and this Jewish congregation so amazing, is because they didn’t have to do it, legally,” Tinker said. “It was able to not just sort of secretly start up, but thrive.”

The synagogue’s history

Eastern State didn’t exactly start as a model of restorative justice. Opened in 1829, the state-funded prison pioneered solitary confinement in the U.S., with the idea that solitude would force prisoners to reflect on their sins and find redemption.

That philosophy shaped the prison’s design. A wagon-wheel shaped, panopticon-esque layout allowed for centralized surveillance of prisoners. Skylights in each cell represented the “Eye of God,” suggesting to prisoners that they were always being watched. Cells were attached to small outdoor exercise yards, enclosed by high walls to discourage communication between prisoners. Guards placed hoods over prisoners’ heads whenever they left their cells to prevent them from seeing each other.

But overcrowding made isolation difficult to enforce, so Eastern State abandoned solitary confinement in 1913. That same year, Jewish prisoners gathered to pray for the first time together in the prison’s emergency hospital.

The idea for a more official synagogue came from the top: Alfred Fleisher, the Jewish president of the prison’s board of trustees, advocated for the construction of a sanctuary, partly over concerns that Jewish prisoners would be pressured to convert to Christianity, according to Tinker.

In 1922, prisoners and outside volunteers built the ornate sanctuary. Lights in the shape of menorahs surrounded the ark, and a gold Star of David was affixed to the ceiling next to a skylight.

“It was a chance for the Jewish congregants to have a space that really resonated with their religion, and was a little fancier than the rest of the prison,” Tinker said. “It has sort of the gravitas that you might really find in a synagogue.”

Most of the congregants were serving time for petty crimes, Tinker said, and their stays at Eastern State lasted no more than a few years. For instance, Sydney Bleecher, a prisoner and congregant at Eastern State, was serving time after pleading guilty to stealing 542 suits and overcoats from a store. But for many congregants, the synagogue’s impact lasted beyond the lengths of their prison sentences.

“It is not easy to find words that can say what we feel about you,” Bleecher wrote in a 1948 letter to Joseph Paull, one of the synagogue’s most devoted volunteers. “You have done so much for us that we are far and away indebted to you. Maybe we can repay in part by becoming decent citizens and, like you and your wife, reach out a hand to those who need help.”

The synagogue was also unusually integrated with the outside community. Fleisher attended every service at the synagogue until his death in 1928. Sabato Morais, the spiritual leader at Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, simultaneously served as a chaplain at Eastern State.

All that support occurred despite the prison’s small Jewish population, which never rose above 80 in a prison that held roughly 1,800 people in the 1930s.

Yet according to Tinker, the synagogue never faced much pushback from people of other faiths.

“When they started it, it’s also World War I, World War II, and all that antisemitism that’s happening,” Tinker said. “It could have easily gone another direction.”

Jewish life behind bars

Most prisons today hold Jewish services in multi-faith chapels rather than separate Jewish sanctuaries — a practical arrangement that allows facilities to accommodate prisoners of many faiths in a shared space.

After Eastern State closed in 1971, its successor, Graterford Prison, also featured a dedicated synagogue. But after Graterford closed in 2018, its replacement, SCI Phoenix, opened with a multifaith chapel instead.

Today, Kolakowski, chaplaincy program director at the State Correctional Institute at Waymart, Pa., conducts services in a multifaith chapel or, when it’s occupied, a classroom shared with Jehovah’s Witnesses.

There, he leads regular services and holiday celebrations, including Passover seders and Hanukkah candle-lightings. During Sukkot, he hosts services in a makeshift sukkah.

“It’s meaningful to every inmate that practices a religious tradition,” Kolakowski said. “I remember one inmate in particular — he expressed how much he appreciated having the opportunity to have the lulav.”

But accommodating religious practice inside a prison often requires balancing spiritual needs with security concerns. When Kolakowski advocated for a Sikh prisoner to be able to wear a turban, for example, prison officials had to consider that the traditional head covering could be used to hide contraband, he said. Kolakowski ultimately got the item approved by suggesting a small turban with less fabric.

Modern-day prisons are legally required to accommodate prisoners’ religious practices unless they can demonstrate a compelling reason not to, such as a risk to staff or other prisoners’ safety. How those accommodations are carried out, however, can vary from prison to prison.

In 2023, for example, Jewish inmate Riley Benjamin sued the D.C. Department of Corrections after officials required him to produce outside proof of his Judaism before providing him with kosher meals. The jail later agreed to change its policy.

“Today, it’s really prison by prison, warden by warden, how they are defining religious freedom,” Tinker said. “One thing those laws really do is they sort of let the prison decide and the staff decide what it means to a certain extent.”

Still, there have been some successors to the Eastern State synagogue — including at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, where Rabbi Irving Koslowe convinced the prison administration to let him convert a basement storage room into an exclusively Jewish place of worship in 1959.

Koslowe died in 2000. But his great grandson, Benjamin Koslowe, visited the prison years later and wrote about the experience for Yeshiva University’s student newspaper.

In an interview with the Forward, Koslowe recalled one of his great-grandfather’s favorite jokes: “They’re the only synagogue that hopes that they don’t have a quorum.”

The post The first synagogue inside a U.S. prison reopens — no conviction required appeared first on The Forward.

I was strolling through a gleaming new mall complex in Beijing beside a couple walking their robot dog when I stumbled upon the bagel tree. Its branches, though bare of leaves, bore giant bagel sculptures, hanging from its boughs on translucent string. In front was a sign proclaiming, “Beigel Tree by New York Bagelous Museum.”

Beigel Tree by New York Bagelous Museum, it turned out, was a new offshoot of the viral New York Bagelous Museum, a growing bagel chain with five shops across three Chinese cities.

The New York Bagelous Museum would seem, at least in name, to be a nod to New York Jewish culture. These days, China isn’t so hot on either of those things. The Chinese government sees America as a country in decline and often points towards visible poverty in major American cities, like New York, as a sign of this. While China used to be nearly free of Jew-hatred, there has seen a rise of antisemitic posts and rhetoric on Chinese social media platforms. The government tightly controls what is posted on these platforms, but there has seemingly not been censorship of antisemitic posts.

In this environment, the proliferation of New York Bagelous Museums was surprising. I’d been living in China for nearly a year pursuing a Masters in Global Affairs, and I couldn’t help but wonder what this new development in Beijing-New York relations was all about. I went to see for myself.

Inside, the shop was decorated less like a New York bagel shop and more like a New England bed and breakfast. Instead of sturdy linoleum, it has hardwood floors. Customers sat on benches with green velvet pillows, noshing on bagels and sipping coffee. The shop’s exposed brick walls are hung with oil paintings, photos of New York City, and one tapestry depicting a famous 1963 photo of John and Jackie Kennedy’s family at Hyannisport. I found myself thinking, wouldn’t a portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg be more appropriate?

Well, yes, but the shop isn’t exactly meant to be a faithful duplicate of a New York bagel shop. The likely inspiration for the store comes not from New York but from Seoul. In 2021, Seoul experienced its own bagel craze when a store called London Bagel Museum opened up, drawing two-hour-plus lines.

The Bagel Museum is, in no way, a museum. Besides the bagel part, the rest of the name is arbitrary. According to a Korea Times article, the store’s name simply “combines the founder’s favorite words.”

Two years later, in 2023, New York Bagelous Museum opened its first location in Shanghai. Like many Chinese companies, it was welcomed into this world with copycat allegations. The two shops are nearly identical, even including the font on the marquee, the interior design and the artwork on the packaging. The main difference is that one features a Union Jack while the other features the Statue of Liberty.

The mission statement on the shop’s page on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media application, says that the founders started the company because they wanted “to create a unique American museum-style bagel shop” and for their customers “to enjoy and feel the atmosphere from the American 50s and 60s.”

Though the menu did feature a lox and cream cheese bagel, the rest of the options were unrecognizable to this New Yorker. The signs were written in both English and Chinese. Some bagels were pre-made sandwiches. One featured sweet red bean paste and a slab of butter. Another was stuffed with cream cheese and topped with sticky syrup and rose petals. The sandwiches were artfully put together, unlike the slapdash constructions you find in New York. Other bagels had fillings rolled into the dough, like the Mexican pepper bagel, stuffed with asiago and salami. My friends and I got these, as well as a blueberry sandwich and chocolate bagel, to try.

Notwithstanding the unorthodox flavors, upon taking a bite, I realized that these were bagels in name only. While they did have some of the chewiness of a bagel, they didn’t have the density or the hard exterior. This is likely because, in making the bagels, New York Bagelous Museum doesn’t boil them, something I learned while watching bakers make them through a window into the kitchen. Besides the shape, there wasn’t much separating the bagels from a bread roll.

At the New York Bagelous Museum, I found few traces of New York, bagels, or museums. But the average Chinese customer probably wouldn’t realize the difference between this shop and the real deal, just like the average American eating Chinese takeout wouldn’t realize the gulf between the Chinese food in America and that in China.

It doesn’t seem like those who visit New York Bagelous museums are all that attracted by New York, much less New York Jewish culture. Instead, judging by the myriad posts from Chinese social media about the shop, it’s merely because the shop is viral. Many reviews mention the bagels, but a lot mention another fact: the shop, with its approximated Americana and absurdly stuffed sandwiches, is a great place in which to take photos.

The post Bagels are hanging from the trees in Beijing. Is China bagelmaxxing? appeared first on The Forward.

Jews have found themselves at the center of politics over the past few years — not a place we want to be, at least not like this.

Anton Jäger, a historian at Oxford University, has argued that since the Covid-19 pandemic spurred more government intervention into the lives of ordinary citizens, many Western countries have become “engulfed in a kind of permanent Dreyfus Affair.”

His point was that a contemporary obsession with politics has consumed society in the same way that the conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus on manufactured treason charges sucked up the oxygen in France at the end of the 19th century.

Jäger doesn’t mention the fact that Dreyfus was Jewish. But just as his Jewishness animated the scandal in the Third French Republic, Jews — real and imagined — have also found themselves at the center of today’s toxic political climate.

As many Americans became unmoored from reality during the pandemic, they alternately blamed Jews for creating the virus and described themselves as being victimized like Jews during the Holocaust for refusing to get vaccinated or comply with other public health guidance.

Jews have also found themselves at the center of debates over immigration, with suggestions on the right that George Soros is fueling mass migration intended to displace white Americans even as some on the left think of Jews as too white to be included in the minority coalitions fighting white supremacy.

Joe Biden made countering antisemitism a keystone of his presidency, while simultaneously providing Israel with a blank check after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack that allowed the country to wreak absolute devastation on Gaza — a military assault drove many Americans toward strident forms of anti-Zionism that teeter into antisemitism.

Donald Trump accelerated the logic of Biden’s fight against campus antisemitism — which held that the intense discomfort some Jewish college students felt over speech targeting Israel was a violation of their civil rights — to decimate elite universities that had long been targets of the conservative movement.

Meanwhile, right-wing media stars like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have won massive audiences while inveighing against Jews who they claim are supposedly controlling American politics, and even establishment institutions like the Heritage Foundation have struggled to keep what were once fringe antisemitic views from coming into the mainstream.

The overt kind of antisemitism peddled by the right is far less severe on the left — but the emergence of strident opposition to Israel as perhaps the core litmus test for inclusion in progressive spaces has hit many Jews hard in politics. At workplaces, schools and in social settings, people often fail to make space for any sense of Jewish attachment to Israel even when those Jews share deep outrage over the country’s actions or structure of government. AIPAC has ascended into the pantheon of liberal enemies alongside longstanding and much vaguer villains like “corporations” and “billionaires.”

Israel’s actions, and its apparent impunity to international concerns about its often abhorrent conduct, are an obvious and real explanation for this. But it doesn’t explain everything. Whatever one thinks about Zionism, the almost messianic notion that Palestinian liberation would unlock everything from world peace to Medicare for All is both unserious and, at its worst, part of an ignominious tradition of assigning Jews outsized control over the world.

***

This can make it feel like there is little room for persuasion in the fight against antisemitism. If someone believes that Israelis engineered Covid-19 in a lab to kill gentiles, what can you really say to sway them — and is it even worth it, if they’re just going to move on to a new conspiracy about George Soros or the Rothchilds? And if someone believes that all the allegations against Graham Platner were a plot by Israel and its supporters to sink his candidacy, it’s hard to believe they’re coming from a place of genuine concern about Palestinians.

It’s a feeling of hopelessness that has ironically animated both the argument that we should stop trying to counter antisemitism, promoted by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens in his State of World Jewry speech earlier this year at the 92nd St. Y, and the Jewish establishment’s turn toward embracing the use of force against perceived enemies of the Jews.

This force is literal in the case of Israel’s campaign in Gaza and more figurative — though sometimes still involving arrests and police violence — when it comes to cracking down on campus protests at home.

Both Stephens and the Anti-Defamation League, which he took target at in his remarks for supposedly spinning its wheels in a hopeless attempt to defeat antisemitism, seem to have adopted a belief that Jews are better off going it alone.

Stephens argued that we should shift the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been invested in countering antisemitism into day schools and other institutions that can cultivate a sense of Jewish belonging and peoplehood.

The ADL, along with much of the Jewish establishment and dozens of new Jewish defense organizations created over the past decade, have abandoned past efforts to combat antisemitism through coalitions with other minority groups in favor of a rhetorical and legal assault on those they contend criticize Israel in unacceptable ways. Their methods — including promoting rigid definitions of antisemitism that include anti-Zionism, sponsoring lawsuits against colleges and universities, and cheering on the Trump administration’s move to deport student activists — seem to accept that they aren’t going to win hearts and minds but can perhaps still bludgeon their enemies into submission.

***

But I don’t think Jews have the luxury of throwing up our hands in the face of rising antisemitism and deciding to either completely retreat, as Stephens has proposed, or strategically retreat while launching some rear-guard actions meant to keep the antisemites at bay for as long as possible.

First, there just aren’t enough of us. Jews may collectively have more wealth and resources at our disposal than any other community in the history of the Jewish diaspora, but there are still only a few million of us in the United States. Any fortress we try to build here would be cramped and vulnerable to being overrun by the 98% of the country that is not Jewish.

The community’s strength and power has come from our engagement in the political process and the fact that elected officials and civic leaders across the political spectrum take us seriously as citizens and constituents.

Smaller Jewish communities around the world, including those in Europe, have tried the fortress approach — often faced with little other choice as their numbers have shrunk and hostility has skyrocketed well beyond American levels — with dismal results. Following their lead voluntarily would be a tragic mistake.

Second, many Jews would be left outside the walls of any fortress. That’s because Stephens and his allies in the establishment seem determined to protect Jews not only from neo-Nazis, but also from anti-Zionists, who they often describe as posing the same threat as white supremacists. Where, then, would the roughly 50% of young Jews (and smaller shares of older groups) who oppose Israel’s existence as a Jewish state — preferring a binational one — find protection from those who wish them ill based on their identity?

An insular community that conditioned American Jewish identity on political support for Israel would also serve to legitimize antisemitic arguments that diaspora Jews should be held responsible for the country’s actions.

But the third, and most hopeful, reason to stay in the fight is it’s not a futile one. Antisemitism in the U.S. has receded dramatically since the 1960s, when university quotas and “gentiles only” disclaimers in employment ads were still common. The phenomenon of intermarriage, sometimes held up as an existential threat in its own right, is also a testament to the widespread acceptance of Jews in American society, and Jews remain welcome in the highest echelons of government, corporate and cultural life in this country.

That was not always true — but it became true in part as more Americans got to know Jews, and as Jews forged intentional alliances with other minorities to cultivate a more accepting climate in the country.

Antisemitism never disappeared, and I’m not suggesting that Jews can make it disappear any more than other minorities can make racism disappear or women can make sexism disappear. Prejudices ebb and flow according to factors beyond any of our control.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in five years on this beat it’s that we need Jews in the fight. The most effective path to fighting antisemitism is having Jews with credibility who are genuine participants in movements across the political spectrum and have allies who will listen to them when they raise concerns.

This isn’t a panacea. There’s no magic bullet to stop antisemitism and no singular approach that will work. Many people, and many communities, are hurting in this country right now. My appeal is simply that we accept that hurting alongside them — and working with them to lessen the pain — is our best shot at preserving Jewish safety.

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