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Extraordinary lives: 18 notable New York Jews who died in 2022
(New York Jewish Week) — Recalling the lives of what obituary writer Marilyn Johnson has called the “important dead” is one of the honors and pleasures of reading — and writing — daily journalism. Jewish tradition teaches that every life is of infinite value, but many people make their marks in ways that inspire readers to pause and ponder on the sheer variety of human endeavor.
In the case of the New York Jewish Week, we’ve been honored to remember those who died in 2022 and whose lives represent the diversity of Jewish experience and what it means to be a New Yorker. Below, we recall 18 Jewish New Yorkers whose contributions to religion, the arts, communal life, popular entertainment, public affairs or just their loving families were either the subject of an obituary that we had written, or who came to our attention thanks to their friends and relatives. May their memories be for a blessing.
David Henoch
Recent high school graduate who died doing what he loved.
Henoch and his parents, sisters, brothers-in-law and niece the day of his graduation from SAR High School in the Bronx, June 13, 2022. (Courtesy Henoch family)
The tight-knit Modern Orthodox community in the Bronx, where David Henoch grew up and attended the SAR Jewish day schools, remembered him as a curious, sensitive and empathetic leader among his peers, with a deep sense of humor and excitement for many different areas of life. Friends and family described “Divi” as an avid adventurer whose favorite activities — many of which he loved to do with his father Avi — included snowboarding, sailing and basketball. He was a certified scuba diver who died at 18 July 10 in a diving accident in Florida, a month after his graduation from SAR High School. He was buried in Israel, where he had planned to spend a year studying before going to college. “Divi always challenged me to improve. He was open to anyone and everyone’s ways no matter how mild or extreme,” a friend, neighbor and classmate recalled, adding, “He was as fearless as it gets and never once was he afraid to be himself.”
Michael Lang
A promoter behind the 1969 Woodstock festival.
Woodstock Music Festival co-producer Michael Lang attends a celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock at the at Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC in New York CIty, Aug. 13, 2009. (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
Michael Lang, the Jewish co-creator of 1969’s legendary Woodstock Music and Art Fair, died on Jan. 8 in Manhattan. He was 77. A concert promoter who was just 24 at the time, he was one of several Jewish collaborators who made the generation-defining festival, billed as “Three Days of Peace and Music,” happen. Other key players included music executive and promoter Artie Kornfeld — another Brooklyn-born Jew — and businessman Joel Rosenman, a Jewish native of Long Island. Lang was born in 1944 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Lang credited his Jewish parents, who were small-business owners, with teaching him the skills he needed to pull off an event of such scale. His father, he said, “gave me a strategy for getting out of tough situations: take charge and keep moving. Step back just enough to think clearly, and trust your instincts.”
Edward Schoenfeld
A Brooklyn-born maven of Chinese cuisine.
Ed Schoenfeld speaks at a Food Network event in New York City, Oct. 18, 2014. (Michael N. Todaro/Getty Images for NYCWFF)
Like a lot of Jews growing up in Brooklyn, Edward Schoenfeld learned to love Chinese food. He made it a career, opening a series of famed restaurants that introduced New Yorkers to the wide variety of Chinese cuisine. In 1973, he got his first restaurant job as assistant to restaurateur David Keh when he opened Uncle Tai’s, one of the first Hunan restaurants in New York. He went on to a career developing and running restaurants over some four decades. Among his well-regarded Chinese restaurants were Auntie Yuan and Pig Heaven, both on the Upper East Side, as well as Red Farm, a farm-to-table restaurant in Greenwich Village, which opened in 2010. “My personal joke is that I learned to speak Yiddish in the Chinese restaurant from my customers,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2013. Schoenfeld died Jan. 14 at 72.
Lori Zabar
A lawyer and activist devoted to landmarks — including her family’s gourmet food emporium.
Lori Zabar, left, with Kate Wood and David Sprouls at the book launch of “Interior Landmarks: Treasures of New York,” at The Four Seasons, Oct. 8, 2015. Zabar was the first director of the NYC Historic Properties Fund at the New York Landmarks Conservancy. (New York School of Interior Design)
Lori Zabar, a lawyer, author, antiques dealer and historic preservationist whose grandparents founded Zabar’s, the Upper West Side gourmet food emporium, died Feb. 3 the age of 67. The cause of death was cancer. The first director of the NYC Historic Properties Fund at the New York Landmarks Conservancy, she died shortly before the publication of “Zabar’s: A Family Story, with Recipes” in May. In an excerpt from her book published in the New York Jewish Week, she wrote about the perfectionism of her grandfather Louis when he opened the first reiteration of what became the famed “appy” store and a landmark in its own right: “For this new venture, Louis would sample deli meats and fish from various purveyors before he would commit to doing business with those suppliers. To taste fish, Louis would tour dozens of local smokehouses, large and small, mostly in Brooklyn and Queens. He was notorious among the wholesalers for rejecting more than he accepted. His retail mantra was simple: the highest quality at the lowest price.”
Sheldon Silver
A powerful politician undone by a corruption scandal.
Then-Speaker of the New York State Assembly Sheldon Silver walks in front of the State Capitol in Albany, New York, March 12, 2008. (Daniel Barry/Getty Images)
Sheldon Silver, who for two decades wielded enormous power as the speaker of the New York State Assembly before being brought down by a corruption scandal, died Jan. 24 at 77 at Otisville Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where he had been serving a 6 1/2-year sentence on federal corruption charges. An Orthodox Jew and Democrat who represented New York’s Lower East Side, Silver was one of the most influential political leaders in the state, using the power of his office to guide legislation and stall opposition even when, for 12 years, Republican George Pataki was governor and Republicans held a majority in the state Senate. Silver’s arrest and conviction sent shock waves through New York’s Jewish establishment. “Shelly Silver was one of the strongest forces for progressive issues in the New York State Legislature,” Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, a Jewish Democrat from Manhattan, told the New York Times. “It’s a tragedy that those achievements have been overshadowed by his criminal record.”
Pinchas Stolper
A leader of the Orthodox Union and its powerhouse youth movement.
Rabbi Pinchas Stolper delivers a Passover message to NCSY alumni on April 10, 2014. (YouTube)
Rabbi Pinchas Stolper, a pioneer in making Orthodox Judaism accessible to young people, died on May 25 at 90. Stolper helped turn the National Council of Synagogue Youth into a national powerhouse. He served as the first full-time national director of NCSY and as the longest-serving executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, and wrote a series of books making the holidays and Shabbat more accessible to younger readers. He retired from the leadership of the Orthodox Union in 2000, the same year that a rabbi under his supervision. Baruch Lanner, was accused of years of sexual and physical abuse. In the first report about the scandal, he told the New York Jewish Week that he had heard several complaints from young women about improper behavior by Lanner, but lacking specific allegations, let the youth leader off with a warning.
Miriam Winiarz
A Staten Island widow who was devoted to outreach.
Miriam Winiarz and her husband Rabbi Mendy Winiarz were known for their outreach to Jews on Staten Island. (Courtesy)
Miriam Winiarz lived through the unthinkable: In 2015, her husband Dovid Winiarz died in a Maryland car crash, leaving the Staten Island mother alone to raise their 10 children. And yet, after losing her husband, she remained a pillar in the borough’s Jewish community, Mendy Mirocznik, president of the Council of Jewish Organizations of Staten Island, told silive.com. She continued the kiruv, or outreach work that she and her husband had conducted before his death, bringing other Jews closer to their tradition through social media and through his rabbinate. “This was somebody who, when they got wind of the situation, somebody had a problem, they would interrupt their own lives and make you a priority,” said Mirocznik. Miriam Winiarz died in early December at the age of 56 after what was described as a brief illness. Her funeral at Young Israel of Staten Island in Willowbrook drew more than a thousand people. A fund has been set up to support her children, the youngest of whom is 14.
Philip Pearlstein
Modern realist painter and champion of Jewish art.
Modern realist painter Philip Pearlstein photographed in his New York studio in 1971. (Jack Mitchell/Getty Images)
Philip Pearlstein, an artist whose painting of nudes revived realistic painting after decades of dominance by abstraction, died in Manhattan on Dec. 17 at age 98. Born in Pittsburgh, he moved to Manhattan in 1949 as a sort of chaperone to a young Andy Warhol. He became an instructor at the Pratt Institute, and taught at Brooklyn College from 1963 until his retirement in 1988. Pearlstein served on the board of the Covenant Foundation in the early 2000s, and , according to Judith Ginsberg, former executive director of the foundation, opened the board to funding Jewish art in a bigger way and promoting the artists Debbie Friedman, Liz Lerman and Liz Swados.
Barbara Roaman
A grandma with a keen fashion sense and commitment to social justice
Barbara Roaman and her granddaughter, Sandy Fox. (Courtesy)
Barbara “Bobby” Roaman, who died on Nov. 6 at 91, was born in Manhattan and lived on the Upper West Side as a child. After attending Syracuse University and Columbia University, where she majored in Spanish, she moved to Long Island with her husband, Richard. In a eulogy shared with the New York Jewish Week, her granddaughter, Sandy Fox — an editor at In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies — remembered both her sense of fashion and her work in the civil rights movement on Long Island:
“Our conversations as a child instilled in me much more than a love of clothing. She taught me values of social justice and tzedakah, or what she would have called charitable giving, and because she wasn’t at all religious, those were the pillars of her Judaism. She and my grandfather were born in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They were upwardly mobile and privileged. In their class status and whiteness, they had blind spots when it came to race. Nevertheless, their commitments to social justice and civil rights were inspiring to me as a child and teen. They were involved in attempts to desegregate Long Island in the 1950s and 1960s. In more recent years, grandma had become involved in a local group called ERASE Racism, and donated to many non-profits that I also care about: Planned Parenthood, Democratic campaigns of all kinds, American Jewish World Service, and so on. It would have been so easy for them to become Republicans, as many Jews in their generation did. But they didn’t…. My mom died when I was 18, and from then on we tried to bridge that cavernous loss that affected us so differently but both so profoundly. She could not replace my mother and I could not replace her daughter, but we came pretty damn close. I sensed that she poured into me everything she wished she had poured into my mother.”
René Slotkin
A survivor of Mengele’s sadistic experiments on twins.
Ita Guttmann and her twins, René and Irene (then Renate), were photographed for Nazi propaganda while they were imprisoned at Theresienstadt. (Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via Irene Guttmann Slotkin Hizme)
René Slotkin, who with his twin sister Renate (Irene) was subjected to Josef Mengele’s infamous medical experiments on twins, died July 10 at age 84. Born in Teplice-Sanov, a city in northern Bohemia, he and his sister were sent, at 4, with their mother, to Theresienstadt. After a year, the three were shipped to Auschwitz. Then they were split up, the children becoming part of the infamous medical experiments conducted by Mengele, the sadistic “Angel of Death.” Orphaned, Slotkin and his sister survived a death march and arrived in New York in 1950. He was married at a young age and, after serving as a sergeant in the U.S. National Guard, worked for a box manufacturing company as a cost estimator. In 2019, he joined the Speakers Bureau at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, sharing his testimony with students. “I am here because of good people, good people everywhere,” he told the museum in an interview.
Sarah Schlesinger
A force in musical theater education.
At NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts , Sarah Schlesinger was the recipient of the David Payne Carter Award and the University Distinguished Teacher Award. (tisch.nyu.edu)
Sarah Schlesinger was an award-winning lyricist and librettist whose works, with composer Mike Reid, included “The Ballad of Little Jo,” “The Last Day,” “Casanova Returns,” “Prairie Songs,” “A Wind in the Willows Christmas” and “In This House.” But her most lasting legacy may well be the composers and lyricists she mentored as an arts professor and dean at the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She joined the program in 1989, served as associate chair of the department from 1995 to 1997, and was named chair in 1998. “Under her leadership, the program produced a huge, international alumni network of artists who are at the forefront of every facet of musical theatre activity: as creators, teachers, scholars and business leaders,” the program said in a statement. “Her insight, razor-sharp mind and her ability to get things done and to identify and encourage faculty, students and alums was frankly staggering in its longevity and reach. Sarah was a force that could make things happen.” Schlesinger died Dec. 14 following an illness.
Menahem Schmelzer
The ‘go-to’ librarian at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Menahem Schmelzer tended perhaps the greatest collection of Judaica in the Western Hemisphere. (Courtesy Jewish Theological Seminary)
In 1966, after a fire gutted the library at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, Menahem Schmelzer led what the flagship Conservative seminary said in a statement was “the extraordinary effort to reopen it, restore it to health, and ultimately open a new Library building in 1983.” When he stepped down as its longtime librarian in 1987, he had watched over the resuscitation of perhaps the greatest collection of Judaica in the Western Hemisphere. Schmelzer, who spent four decades at JTS, also served as provost and held the title of Albert B. and Bernice Cohen Professor Emeritus of Medieval Hebrew Literature and Jewish Bibliography. A Holocaust survivor who was born in Hungary, Schmelzer was also a scholar in his own right, specializing in medieval Hebrew literature and the Jewish liturgical poetry known as piyyut. David Kraemer, the Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian at JTS, remembered his colleague as “the ‘go-to’ person on questions of Jewish bibliography for researchers around the world.” He died on Dec. 10 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.
Steven Salen
Holocaust survivor who dressed presidents
Steve Salen in an undated photo in his Manhattan atelier. (Family)
Born Zoltan Salomon in Czechoslovakia in 1919, Steven Salen first learned tailoring at a trade school run there by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Then the Nazis arrived and they deported Salen. He never saw his parents or seven of his 11 siblings again. But he stuck with his trade, establishing himself after arriving in New York City as a tailor to the elite, making garments for the likes of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Martin Scorsese (and keeping mementoes of their business at his Bayside home). Salen was an old-school, word-of-mouth tailor who started working at FL Dunn on Fifth Avenue in New York, and eventually had his own full-floor atelier on Madison Avenue and 53rd Street, at the heart of the city’s high-fashion district. In 2011, when Salen already topped 90, a New York style blog profiled his shop, noting that it was one of fewer than 30 bespoke tailors in a city that had once been home to more than 300. Salen would work until 95 before retiring; he died Nov. 23 at 103.
Maximilian Lerner
A World War II “Ritchie Boy” who went undercover behind German lines.
Maximilian Lerner served as a translator and interrogated prisoners on behalf of U.S. intelligence during World War II. (Via Museum of Jewish Heritage)
Maximilian Lerner, an Austrian Jewish immigrant, served as a translator and interrogated prisoners on behalf of U.S. intelligence during World War II as a member of the “Ritchie Boys,” a special unit trained in espionage and frontline interrogation. He died Sept. 10 at his home in Manhattan at age 98. Lerner left Austria with his family two months after Germany’s March 1938 annexation of his homeland and, after layovers in Paris and Nice, came to the U.S., via Lisbon, in 1941. After volunteering for the draft, he became one of the 2,000 to 3,000 European-born Jews who learned to interrogate prisoners of war and civilians, interpret and translate for foreign officials, and read codes. “I wore civilian clothes”— posing as German behind enemy lines – “a number of times,” he told the New York Jewish Week in 2004. “This was my war. I would do whatever it took.” After the war, her worked for a horticultural products business and later started his own business in the same field. He also earned a master’s degree in business education from Teachers College at Columbia University in 1952, and wrote two spy novels and an autobiography. In recent years Lerner volunteered at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan, talking to groups about his experiences.
Chave Hecht
A camp director devoted to Jewish outreach.
Rebbetzin Chave Hecht and Rabbi J. J. Hecht receive a dollar and a blessing from the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, before a trip to South Africa in 1989. (Hecht Family/JEM van Chabad.org)
Rebbetzin Chave Hecht, the founder of Camp Emunah Bnos Yaakov Yehudah — an overnight camp for observant Jewish girls — and a host of other educational initiatives originating in the Chabad-Lubavitch community, died Feb. 8 at the age of 95. Born in the East New York section of Brooklyn and educated at public schools, she, along with her husband, the late Rabbi J.J. Hecht, also directed a Jewish summer day camp on Coney Island for public school children, pioneering Chabad’s outreach to non-observant Jewish families. Rebbetzin Hecht ran the day-to-day operations of Camp Emunah for decades, when her husband was back in Brooklyn running his synagogue. “She slept in her office,” her son, Rabbi Sholem Ber Hecht, a Chabad emissary in Queens, told Chabad.org. “She had no secretary; if you called the camp at 7 a.m. or 10 p.m., she answered the phone.”
Frederick Terna
Survivor, Brooklyn artist and “someone to watch” late into his 90s.
Artist Fred Terna, a Holocaust survivor, continued painting well into his late 90s. (Courtesy of Terna)
Holocaust survivor and painter Frederick Terna, who remained active at his Brooklyn studio into his late 90s, died on Dec. 8 at 99. Born in Vienna and raised in Prague, he was imprisoned in four Nazi concentration camps, including Terezin, where he began to make art. Terna moved to New York in 1952; his work was collected by a variety of museums and institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Albertina Collection in Vienna and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Earlier this year he was named to the New York Jewish Week’s “36 to Watch” list of notable Jewish New Yorkers.
Saida Somekh
Immigrant, entrepreneur and loving grandmother.
Saida Somekh demonstrates her cooking skills for her family. (via Instagram)
Saida Somekh, who owned Dora Hosiery, a go-to lingerie shop in Midtown Manhattan for decades, died Nov. 5. She was 94. Her granddaughter, Erin Dana Lichy, a real estate agent and a new cast member on “The Real Housewives of New York,” remembered her in an Instagram post:
“She came from a different world, married very young and was expected to raise a family as a stay-at-home mom with little choice in her major life decisions. Well, that didn’t work for her, so she forged her own path. As a young immigrant with little practice in English, she became a female homeowner, businesswoman and successful entrepreneur…. As a grandmother, she was simply always there, like one’s backbone. She was a pillar of strength. Her presence made me feel safe and warm. She loved purely, deeply and didn’t pass judgment. She was patient. If I ever needed to fix a garment or didn’t have something to wear, she’d sew me something from scratch, however long it took. She was warm to my friends and anyone close to me. She would send us home with bags of food and cook with me for hours if I wanted to learn new a new dish. All I had to do was ask. My kids adored her and she them. They brought her so much joy and watching how prideful she was of them was heartwarming. She had pictures of us all around her house just so she could look at ‘her babies’ every morning when she woke up.”
Freddie Roman
Catskills comedian and keeper of the flame.
Freddie Roman, left and fellow comedian Shecky Greene attend “The Friars Club Salute to Freddie Roman and Stewie Stone” at New Tork’s Pierre Hotel, April 21, 2014. (John Lamparski/WireImage)
Comedian Freddie Roman, who died Nov. at 85, was never a crossover star in the mold of Alan King, Jackie Mason or Joan Rivers — three other Jewish comics with roots in the Catskills. And yet in a capstone to a long and steady career he resurrected the spirit of the Borscht Belt with the 1991 show “Catskills on Broadway” and, as the long-serving dean of the Friars Club, he injected new life into the fading Manhattan showbiz venue by inviting younger comics to join. Born Fred Kirschenbaum in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in Jamaica, Queens, Roman started emceeing at age 15 at the the Crystal Spring Hotel in the Catskills, which was owned by his uncle and grandfather. He soon was performing at hotels and resorts in the region for the largely Jewish crowd. “Catskills on Broadway,” starring him and fellow tummlers Dick Capri, Marilyn Michaels and Mal Z. Lawrence, was a bona fide hit, running for 453 performances. “I’m like the Fidel Castro of comedians,” he once said of his tenure at the Friar’s Club. “I’m president for life.”
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Mahmoud Khalil wants to reassure you
Mahmoud Khalil knows what you’ve heard about him. That he is an antisemite. That he supports Hamas.
That he fostered “a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States,” as Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in a letter seeking to deport Khalil on national security grounds.
It’s not just that these claims offend Khalil — though they do.
Or that they jeopardize his ability to continue living in New York City with his wife and baby son — though they do that, too.
“This is what we should aspire for: to get a place where there’s no more conflict, no more killing in that place and it’s open to anyone who wants to call it their home.”
On what a ‘free Palestine’ should look like
The major reason that Khalil put on a baseball hat and sunglasses and traveled from Brooklyn to a conference room in Manhattan last week to meet with the Forward is that he believes misplaced Jewish fear remains a major obstacle to achieving what he and other protesters consider to be the liberation of Palestine.
Speaking extensively about Hamas, Oct. 7 and his preferred political solution to the conflict, Khalil sought to reassure American Jews that the protest movement he participated in and helped lead at Columbia University recognizes “absolutely a Jewish connection” to Israel and does not seek to drive Jews out of the region.
“The Jewish people are part of the land and they should remain that way,” Khalil told me. “I want to liberate everyone.”
Face of a movement
When federal agents arrested Khalil in the lobby of his Columbia student housing last March, he was transformed overnight into an emblem of the campus demonstrations against Israel. Even many of those who objected to his detention accepted the Trump administration’s premise that he was an antisemitic extremist.
“I abhor many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said at the time, before suggesting that his arrest might violate the First Amendment.
But despite occasionally speaking to the media on behalf of protesters, and negotiating between students and the administration, Khalil was not the movement’s face until he was arrested — and it was unclear what exact opinions and policies Schumer and his other critics were actually referring to.
Khalil, who is now 31, did not have any public social media accounts before his arrest. Unlike others at Columbia, he had not posted a video of himself saying “Zionists don’t have a right to live,” or held a sign labeling pro-Israel counterprotesters as “Al-Qasam’s next targets” or been caught on camera yelling at anyone to “go back to Europe.”
The protest movement at Columbia was fractious and, while Khalil managed to retain the respect of most encampment participants, on key issues — including whether a student who had insisted he had the right to kill Zionists should apologize, whether protesters should occupy Hamilton Hall, and whether to embrace the slogan “globalize the intifada” — he aligned himself with those calling for the more conciliatory approach.
His media tour following a court order releasing him from immigration detention in rural Louisiana last June largely confirmed this. There were flashes of anger, especially when he spoke about missing the birth of his son Deen last April, and resolve. “Even if they would kill me, I would still speak up for Palestine,” he told reporters immediately after his release.
But in repeated interviews, Khalil condemned antisemitism and violence against Israeli civilians, and spoke with passion about the important role of Jewish students he had demonstrated alongside.
All this made Khalil, who graduated from Columbia with a master’s degree in public administration shortly before his arrest, a poor poster child for the protest movement’s excesses.
And yet nobody has wanted to confront this reality because it requires acknowledging that the movement had both moderates and extremists. Khalil’s opponents rejected the premise that there were any moderates in the movement, while his supporters rejected the premise that there were any extremists.
A balancing act
Khalil, like the movement he came to represent, is adamant that Zionism is racist. He opposes any two-state solution that seeks to preserve a Jewish majority in Israel.
“Rejecting the self-determination of the Jewish people on the Palestinian land in itself is not antisemitism,” Khalil said during our interview. “You are denying other people’s rights in the land.”
Khalil goes beyond accusing Israel of genocide and has said that its goal is to kill all the Palestinians in Gaza — a claim Israeli officials have strenuously denied, insisting that civilian casualties are the inevitable result of dense urban warfare. In our interview, he questioned whether militants sought to kill, rather than kidnap, Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. He is sympathetic to support for Hamas among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. And like most of the Palestinian liberation movement, he views liberal Zionist groups that support Israel while seeking to push its government to the left as an obstacle.
He is reluctant to criticize the movement’s excesses, and ready with explanations for even the tactics and rhetoric he finds unproductive. Khalil argues that Israel is to blame for anti-Zionism sometimes slipping into antisemitism because its government has intentionally held itself out as representative of Jews and Judaism while carrying out what more than 40% of Americans — and the vast majority of Democrats — considered to be a genocide in Gaza.
Khalil keeps a magnet on his fridge with a map of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza overlaid with the pattern of a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian scarf, that reads: “I will stay a traveler until I go back to my home country, Palestine.”
There is nothing moderate about any of this for Jews who believe that anti-Zionism is always an expression of antisemitism.
“I have a nuanced view of the Zionist project that goes beyond ‘Zionism is bad.’”
On what he learned from engaging with liberal Zionism
But Khalil’s views are ubiquitous among those who have protested against Israel over the past two years — and are coming into the mainstream as Americans turn against Israel at a rapid pace. Its support has cratered to a paltry 13% among Democrats, and an endorsement from the AIPAC has become a liability for liberal politicians at a time when the former leader of a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter just became mayor of New York City while other Democrats who share his views on Israel are winning Democratic primaries, and liberal members of Congress are rejecting funding even for Israel’s defensive missile systems.
Pro-Israel groups have been able to convince Republicans to enforce prohibitions on anti-Zionism by force — epitomized by the White House’s unprecedented attempt to deport Khalil — but the conservative vanguard is turning on this approach, with some blaming Jews for the war in Iran and referring to politicians who prioritize countering antisemitism as “J-pilled.”
If anti-Zionism is here to stay, Khalil advocates a remarkably pragmatic direction for the movement. He is critical of Hamas — including its embrace of political Islam and violations of international law — and his vision for a free Palestine includes safety and security for its Jewish residents. He is attuned to concerns over antisemitism, rejects an oppositional stance toward Jews who disagree with his beliefs and cares about bringing more of them into his tent.
“For a lot of people, all Zionists are bad,” Khalil said. “To me, no — it’s not like that.”
From Khan Eshieh to Columbia
A good place to start Khalil’s political journey is at 16, when he boarded a bus from Khan Eshieh, the Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Damascus where he was born, bound for the foothills of the Golan Heights.
The Syrian military normally restricted access to the border, but on May 15, 2011 — Nakba Day, marking the anniversary of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion during the establishment of the new state of Israel — soldiers allowed thousands of protesters to stream into the demilitarized zone and toward Israeli territory.
Khalil had been raised on stories of his grandparents’ expulsion from a village near Tiberias to Khan Eshieh, which Yasser Arafat nicknamed the “Camp of Return,” because of its distance just 20 miles from Israeli territory. And the Arab Spring had awoken something in him.
He marched toward the border. Khalil says it was peaceful. The Israeli military says demonstrators tried to breach the border fence and threw rocks. Gunfire broke out. An Israeli soldier shot Khalil in the leg, he said, and four protesters were killed.
The incident adds credibility to Khalil’s insistence more than a decade later that he would die for Palestine. “This is a tradition of the Palestinian resistance,” Khalil said. “Longing for home.”
But the march was not a neat morality play.
The Palestinian factions inside the Syrian refugee camps — Hamas, Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — had tried to stop the march from taking place because they were afraid that Bashar al-Assad’s government was using it as a distraction from mounting protests against his authoritarian rule.
A few weeks later, a similar march took place with even deadlier results. Israeli soldiers killed 22 demonstrators, sparking a Palestinian uprising in the Syrian camps that targeted their own leadership for playing into Assad’s hands and ultimately spurred a crackdown that forced Khalil to flee to Lebanon.
It was there, around the time he graduated from the American University in Beirut, that Khalil began to wonder whether he had been indoctrinated into his political beliefs about Israel.
“Growing up I was baffled by why this was happening to us — like, it’s clear this is our home, we did not do anything wrong — why were we exiled from our home?” he said.
And so Khalil began spending time in pro-Israel chatrooms on Clubhouse, a short-lived audio-only social media platform, and scrolling through Zionist discussion boards on Reddit.
“I started going into these conversations and just understanding why Israelis felt so strongly about Israel — the same way we feel so strongly about Palestine,” he said. “One of the points that caught my attention was the miscommunication and misunderstanding about what we are, and who we are, and who they are.”
Khalil suggested this lack of knowledge fueled a fear of Palestinians and the movement he participated in.
“People think that we want to drive all Jews to the sea,” he said. “We don’t believe that.”
Conflicting messages
It wasn’t always clear to outsiders what the campus protests following Oct. 7, including those at Columbia, were actually about.
The first set of demands from Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace chapters at Columbia were relatively narrow: That Columbia’s senior administrators apologize for official statements about Oct. 7 that did not mention Palestinians, “divest from companies profiting from Israeli apartheid” and end the school’s partnership with Tel Aviv University.
But these calls received far less attention than the statement the two groups released days after the Hamas attack lauding it as an “unprecedented historic moment for the Palestinians of Gaza” and a “counter-offensive against their settler-colonial oppressor.”
The protests often ran along these two tracks: The formal demands directed at university leadership, and the rhetoric and posturing that accompanied those demands.
Some of the students recognized that the inflammatory slogans and tactics could work against the movement. Especially after the first tent encampment started in April, fissures began to develop. Some participants — including Khalil, who emerged as a mediator between demonstrators and the administration — called for a more measured approach, while others wanted to aggressively escalate. “One of the reasons I was chosen to negotiate on behalf of these students is because I’m more pragmatic,” Khalil told Hasan Piker during a July livestream. “I can meet you in the middle.”
“There were maybe some bad actors who believed only in the theory of resistance — and believed themselves to be part of it — while Palestinians were like, ‘No, it doesn’t work this way.””
On divisions within the protest movement at Columbia
These divisions were often invisible on the outside. Everyone at the encampments was facing pressure from university administrators, who repeatedly called police to sweep the areas and arrest students, and from outside organizations that sought to identify and blacklist them as antisemites.
Even when students thought some of their peers had gone too far, the impulse was to circle the wagons rather than be seen as giving ammunition to enemies of the protest movement.
For instance, Khalil maintained that the slogan “globalize the intifada” was unproductive. “I don’t use it just because — to me, my goal at Columbia is to get it to divest,” he told Piker. But even now, he is careful to explain that it’s not intended to invoke violence and that he would never discourage others from using it.
“Even if the students used a normal word like globalize the ‘uprising’ they would receive the same sort of backlash,” Khalil said in our interview. “The point is not about their slogan, the point is about silencing them.”
But cracks began to show the following school year. A few days after the first anniversary of Oct. 7, a group of Palestinian students broke away from Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the coalition that had organized the encampments. “We refuse to have our liberation dictated for us,” the anonymous organizers wrote in the Columbia Spectator. “We refuse to allow anyone to speak over us.”
The article also included a veiled swipe at the increasingly cavalier attitude some participants in the movement had been taking toward violence against Israeli civilians. It said the new group supported armed resistance against Israel under two specific provisions of international law but that “equally and firmly, we wholeheartedly disavow any violence outside of this context.”
Maryam Alwan, a Palestinian-American undergraduate at Columbia who had been a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine, unleashed on CUAD in an interview last month with The Blue and White, a student magazine on campus.
“They started making these crazy-ass posts,” Alwan said, referring to their Instagram account. She referred to Khymani James, the student who had said the school should be “grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists” as an “opp,” slang for enemy.
Alwan said that she and the other Palestinian students at the encampment had opposed the occupation of Hamilton Hall, in which demonstrators smashed glass door panes and two janitors said they were assaulted before police swept the building and arrested 44 people, but that they’d been ignored before being asked to defend the occupation to reporters.
The leadership of CUAD became increasingly centralized and extreme in part because students that Columbia had suspended pending expulsion — already, in many cases, those willing to take the most radical actions — now had more time for activism as other members became turned off by the organization’s direction and went back to their studies. “Anyone who could’ve talked them down was gone,” said Alwan, who described herself as being close friends with Khalil.
Khalil’s role in CUAD has been hotly contested as part of his legal case. The government accused him of failing to disclose membership in CUAD on his green card application, but the group had no formal members and Khalil’s lawyers have argued that he served as a negotiator on behalf of student protesters rather than as a representative of the coalition itself.
Either way, he is more forgiving than Alwan and emphasized that many of the students involved were teenagers who suddenly found themselves at the center of an international news story. But he has also said the occupation of Hamilton Hall was not the right move and that he was barred from entering the building while it was occupied.
“There were maybe some bad actors who believed only in the theory of resistance — and believed themselves to be part of it — while Palestinians were like, ‘No, it doesn’t work this way,’” Khalil said. “A lot of them had only read the literature of the Palestinian struggle, rather than living within it.”
The Hamas question
Khalil made headlines for declining to condemn Hamas during interviews following his release, arguing that the question represented “selective outrage” and was unfairly directed toward Palestinian activists.
He has also said that, while he is opposed to any violence against civilians, he cannot dictate what Palestinians who experience Israeli human rights abuses should do. “To them, it’s not about supporting Hamas, it’s about resisting the occupation, resisting the status quo, resisting the injustices, resisting the killing,” he said during our interview. “All of that pushed people toward any resistance to Israel: ‘Whether it’s Hamas or anyone else, we want to resist Israel.’”
But in his most detailed public comments about Hamas itself, Khalil told me that the organization is “not up to the Palestinian aspiration for liberation.”
“Hamas came to power as a result of Israel’s concerted effort to delegitimize the PLO,” Khalil said, referring to the Palestinian Liberation Organization controlled by Fatah, which continues to rule Palestinian areas in the West Bank. “The Netanyahu government was allowing funding for Hamas because they see it as a way to maintain the division within the Palestinian political sphere.”
(Netanyahu’s working relationship with Hamas has been widely reported.)
Khalil, who is Muslim, added that his personal faith and politics did not align with Hamas. “I come from a family that doesn’t believe in political Islam,” he said. “You have to separate between these two.”
More broadly, Khalil argued that most of the grassroots support for Hamas that does exist among Palestinians came about because Israel had eliminated the organizations that could pose a serious threat to its power while failing to deliver on the promise of the Oslo Accords.
“When you have the PLO, who signed the Oslo agreement — agreeing to 22% of the land, yet you see Israel continuing its settlements, blocking any attempts for the realization of Palestinian statehood — that pushed people to think, ‘This is not working,” Khalil said. “So you’re left with Hamas.”
Khalil cautioned that the support some participants in the student movement expressed for Oct. 7 and occasionally for Hamas itself — embracing the inverted red triangle symbol used in Hamas propaganda videos, for example — did not mean they believed in the organization’s ideology.
“There should be a distinction between supporting legitimate armed resistance and supporting Hamas.”
On allegations that pro-Palestinian activists support Hamas
“A big part of this movement is LGBTQ, and of course they don’t support Hamas,” he said. “That’s why you see a lot of PFLP affection in this country just because it’s the left-iest organization carrying out armed resistance.”
(The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is a Marxist organization that has faded in relevance since the 1990s but operates a militia that participated in the Oct. 7 attacks alongside Hamas.)
“There should be a distinction between supporting legitimate armed resistance and supporting Hamas,” Khalil said.
The question of what armed resistance is “legitimate” is one that has divided pro-Palestinian activists.
Some of the most radical voices argue that Jewish civilians in Israel are acceptable targets because they can be called to serve in the Israeli military, or because as settlers on ostensibly stolen land they do not deserve any expectation of safety. Others simply state that Palestinians have a right to resist “by any means necessary.”
Khalil, like the Palestinian student breakaway group at Columbia, is adamant that targeting civilians is unacceptable. “I grew up in a community that valued human rights and valued principles beyond religion, beyond race,” he said. “I would never, in any context, justify the killing of a civilian for any reason.”
Those who support the right of Palestinian armed resistance, but oppose violence against civilians, generally point to provisions of international law that say national liberation movements may use force against countries that deny them independence while remaining subject to the laws of war. “In short: Right to resist, including armed resistance: Yes. Right to indiscriminately kill or target civilians: No. It’s as simple as that,” Ihsan Adel, the founder of Law for Palestine, wrote in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
Many pro-Palestinian activists see the events of Oct. 7 very differently than most American Jews do. Where pro-Israel groups condemned the attacks as an unprovoked act of brutality, most pro-Palestinian organizations portrayed them as a reaction to the tight Israeli control of travel and trade into Gaza since it withdrew from the territory in 2005 and its killing of more than 4,000 Palestinians during four major military operations over that time period. Many student demonstrators also expressed skepticism about the extent to which the violence targeted Israeli civilians.
“Hamas, yes, targeted civilians to take them hostage, which is another crime — that doesn’t absolve them of anything like, ‘I want to kidnap them rather than kill them.’ That’s the same, as it turned out later.”
On whether Hamas intended to kill Israeli civilians on Oct. 7
Khalil said there should be an independent and transparent international investigation into Oct. 7, something the Israeli government has generally sought to prevent.
“I wouldn’t say Hamas were saints or angels and did not commit any crimes,” Khalil said. “The fact that civilians were caught up in such violence and the killing means that there were crimes committed, and Hamas has a responsibility for that.”
He demurred when I pressed him on whether he believed the Israeli civilians killed had merely been “caught up” in a hostage-taking operation that also targeted military installations near the Gaza border. “I have no idea, to be honest,” he said.
Khalil referred to the Hannibal Directive, in which the Israeli military can be authorized to kill its own citizens to prevent them from being taken hostage. Haaretz has reported that the protocol was used in several instances on Oct. 7.
“Hamas, yes, targeted civilians to take them hostage, which is another crime — that doesn’t absolve them of anything like, ‘I want to kidnap them rather than kill them.’ That’s the same, as it turned out later,” he added.
But while it’s true that Israel has interfered with inquiries into Oct. 7, Khalil’s insistence that it is impossible to know whether Hamas targeted civilians overlooks that several independent investigations have found that it did.
Amnesty International concluded that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups “were part of a systematic and widespread assault against the civilian population,” while Human Rights Watch determined that Hamas and its allies “bear responsibility for the worst abuses” committed during the attack.
“I wouldn’t rule out that Hamas targeted civilians, but I wouldn’t confirm it either,” Khalil said. “That’s my position on this.”
Seeking a ‘utopia’
The recent and dramatic shift in American attitudes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict make it hard to imagine that the U.S. government will be able to maintain its longstanding policy of ironclad support for Israel in the years ahead.
Influential Republicans like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene have described Israel as a major burden for the U.S. and suggested that the Trump administration should wash its hands of the conflict, withdrawing military and diplomatic support rather than conditioning it on a solution.
But on the left, the question is whether the U.S. should demand a two-state solution that would preserve a Jewish majority in Israel while creating a new Palestinian state in most of the West Bank and Gaza, or press for something more radical: a “free Palestine,” an aspiration that is often left undefined.
Khalil is firmly in the latter camp.
“It’s too late to tell people like, ‘Go back to Poland, go back to Russia’ or wherever.”
On Jewish concerns about the implications of anti-Zionism
He is adamant that preserving a Jewish majority in the 1948 borders of Israel is a nonstarter. “I don’t think this framework is realistic. We would still end up in the same vicious cycle of violence that we are in right now,” he said.
That rules out cooperation with organizations like J Street, the liberal Zionist advocacy group that has called for limits on American military aid to Israel and pushed for policies that would compel the Israeli government to grant Palestinian statehood.
“J Street takes everything from a lens of Israel’s security, or a lens of Jewish security, not from a lens of human rights for everyone,” Khalil said. “They want a two-state solution because that’s better for Israel, not because that’s better for the Palestinians.”
He added: “We should fight against this.”
Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s president, said in a statement that Khalil’s “characterization was incorrect” and that his organization is “grounded in a commitment to the equal rights, dignity, and security of both Israelis and Palestinians.”
This is more than a simple policy debate. One of the main reasons that some Jews found the campus protest movement to be antisemitic was because they felt that demonstrators were hinting, if not outright stating, that Jews needed to be purged “from the river to the sea.”
Khalil recognized that for many Jews the vehement opposition to the encampments was rooted in this fear, and emphasized that he rejects any solution based on “driving anyone out of the place that they were born in,” including Israeli Jews.
“It’s too late to tell people like, ‘Go back to Poland, go back to Russia’ or wherever,” he said.
He said that a “free Palestine” means a democratic country — or multiple countries — with equal rights for all citizens, and the right for Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to the land from which they fled or were expelled during Israel’s War of Independence.
“Anyone fearing persecution can live in that country without fear,” he said. “I know it might sound like a very ideal utopia, but this is what we should aspire for: to get a place where there’s no more conflict, no more killing in that place and it’s open to anyone who wants to call it their home or their Holy Land.”
Another concern among many Jews, including Jewish college students who did not participate in the demonstrations, was that protesters were quick to ostracize anyone who did not wholeheartedly support this vision of a liberated Palestine.
Khalil has described Zionism as “very, very racist,” and suggested a “Jewish and democratic” state is a logical fallacy because a democracy cannot elevate one group over its other citizens.
Yet he has also proven sympathetic to Jewish claims to the land and recommended My Promised Land, the liberal Zionist history of Israel by journalist Ari Shavit, during his appearance on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast. “A lot of Jewish people subscribe to the idea of Zionism because of the fear of persecution,” he told me. “I have a nuanced view of the Zionist project that goes beyond ‘Zionism is bad’ — no, there are different layers to that project that unfortunately aren’t being seen across the Arab world or among Palestinians.”
Khalil said that many of his Jewish friends began as Zionists but changed their views over time, something he believes will need to happen more in order to achieve the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and a system of equal rights across Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. “Palestinians don’t have the power to make this happen,” Khalil said during an event with journalist Peter Beinart in November. “It’s the Jewish community — whether inside or outside of Israel — that can influence that.”
And despite blaming the Israeli government for conflating itself with Jews, Khalil said his movement had an obligation to root out bigotry. “Some anti-Zionist actions may touch on antisemitism that we absolutely oppose and don’t want and need to be educated about,” Khalil said, adding that he believes the protest movement did a good job of keeping this at bay.
Khalil said that, for the same reason, he is wary of growing far-right wing opposition to Israel among figures like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens who mix a generalized hostility for Jews with dovish positions on American foreign policy.
“A lot of it is coming out of antisemitism, not out of support for Palestinian rights,” he said. “As someone who is taking a rights-based approach — a principled approach — I have to be careful that I don’t ally with people who are not genuine about their support.”
A mistake — or a message?
The tentative reaction to Khalil’s arrest by some leading Democrats and major Jewish organizations suggested a belief that some evidence was going to emerge that showed he was part of the most radical vanguard at Columbia.
That never happened.
“When the administration started with the smears, they did not provide any evidence or any quotes from me,” he said. “But people believed them because I’m Palestinian and I’m an Arab man named Mahmoud so that alone means you’re guilty.”
Canary Mission, which compiles blacklists of activists it considers to be antisemitic, only managed to find a quote in which he said that armed resistance was legitimate under international law.
Khalil’s case continues to work its way through the legal system and he could still be deported. But once it became clear that Khalil was prepared to condemn antisemitism and avoid inflammatory rhetoric, the image that the White House sought to paint of him seems to have fallen flat.
David Lederer, a pro-Israel student activist at Columbia, lamented in a video he shared on social media that the media “fell in love” with Khalil, while Nerdeen Kiswani, founder of Within Our Lifetime, who holds more strident views and was the recent target of a foiled alleged assasination plot, referred to him as the “perfect victim”: “A green card holder, top student, with no criminal record or radical affiliations.”
A poll of Jewish voters taken the month following Khalil’s arrest found that only 20% believed that arresting and deporting pro-Palestinian protesters would reduce antisemitism.
But there are other ways of understanding Khalil’s arrest.
One is that it was meant to send a message, as part of a larger Trump administration crackdown, that nobody who participated in the protests should feel safe.
After Khalil was arrested, immigration agents also detained Leqaa Kordia and Mohsen Mahdawi, two other international students who had participated in the Columbia protests, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University who had written an op-ed critical of Israel, and Badar Khan Suri, an Indian Georgetown researcher. The arrests were part of a sweeping crackdown that ultimately resulted in the State Department canceling more than 800 student visas, though not all were targeted for political reasons.
The government has struggled to keep those it arrested in detention and Kordia, Mahdawi, Öztürk and Khan Suri have since been released — Kordia just last week — though the Justice Department is still seeking to deport Kordia, Khalil and Mahdawi.
“It felt like we were being hunted,” Alwan, the Columbia undergraduate student leader, told The Blue and White. “Even as a U.S. citizen, I was scared because it felt like we had exited the realm of law and logic.”
Khalil thinks something else was at play.
He believes the government was incompetent and did not understand that some protesters were more radical — and easier to paint as threats to national security — than others, and may have erred in turning him into something of a poster child for the movement.
But he believes the pro-Israel groups that targeted him online, and encouraged the Department of Homeland Security to deport him, realized that it was the very nature of his moderate brand of anti-Zionism that made him a threat.
“It was very malicious and very targeted,” Khalil said. “They did not want someone who can actually present a viable solution where everyone can live in peace.”
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Contributor to Drop Site News Says Israelis Should ‘Be Removed From Our Planet’
Abubaker Abed reporting from Gaza. Photo: Screenshot
Abubaker Abed, a self-described Palestinian journalist and contributor to the far-left news outlet Drop Site News, has come under intense scrutiny following the circulation of social media posts in which he called for the “wiping out” of Israel and said that Israelis “mustn’t feel safe.”
The remarks, which quickly spread across multiple online platforms, have prompted widespread condemnation and renewed skepticism over the credibility and coverage of Drop Site News, a controversial publication fiercely critical of Israel and US foreign policy in the Middle East.
“Wiping out Israel off the planet is not enough revenge. Israelis mustn’t feel safe anymore. Haunt them and go after them where they go. These terrorist parasites must be removed from our planet,” Abed posted on an Instagram story.
Drop Site co-founder Ryan Grim responded to the incident by clarifying that Abed’s comments do not reflect the editorial position or institutional stance of his publication. Grim, a far-left investigative reporter who has repeatedly accused Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza, did not condemn the statements by Abed.
“We also are never going to police the language of anyone who survived a genocide,” Grim posted on X.
Abed, a social media influencer from Gaza who evacuated to Ireland during the Israel-Hamas war, has previously suggested that attacks on Jewish institutions might be justified if they signal support for Israel.
Following the recent attack on the Temple Beth Israel Synagogue in Michigan, Abed resurfaced a photo from the synagogue featuring an Israel soldier. Abed wrote that the attempted mass casualty event was justified because the assailant defended himself.
“A person is not criminally responsible if they act reasonably to defend themselves against an imminent and unlawful use of force,” Abed wrote in a since-deleted post on X. “Israel murdered his relatives and is illegally bombing and invading his country.”
The FBI said last week that the attack on the largest Jewish temple in Michigan was an “act of terrorism” inspired by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group committed to Israel’s destruction.
Drop Site, a new media organization which debuted in July 2024, has found itself under immense criticism over its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the broader Middle East. The outlet has consistently characterized Israel as a “genocidal” aggressor stoking chaos and violence throughout the region.
Meanwhile, Drop Site depicts internationally recognized terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in a far more favorable light. Drop Site lead reporter Jeremy Scahill routinely refers to Hamas as “the resistance” and has given softball interviews to Hamas leaders.
Drop Site has also defended the Iranian regime from accusations of terrorism, asserting that Tehran’s goals “center on national sovereignty.” The site contends that Iran has “sought to project influence regionally through allied governments and forces (Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthi, Iraqi Militants, etc.) what’s often called the ‘Axis of Resistance.’”
Some observers have raised alarm bells over the outlet’s growing popularity among establishment mainstream liberals. Ben Rhodes, a former Obama administration official and co-host of the popular “Pod Save America” podcast, has praised the outlet on his social media profile and confirmed he is a subscriber.
Drop Site’s expanding influence does not seem to be confined to left-wing or liberal ideological circles. Right-wing media personality Mike Cernovich contended on X that young conservatives are increasingly reading Drop Site “for Israel news.” Joe Kent, the former director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, over the weekend reposted a Drop Site article pushing Iranian regime propaganda falsely claiming the US was actually trying to kill a downed American airman — just hours before he was dramatically rescued.
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Frankfurt cinema declines to participate in Jewish film festival, spurring backlash
(JTA) — A Frankfurt cinema’s decision not to participate in the local Jewish film festival is spurring allegations of antisemitism, even as its manager says the move was financial.
The Jewish Community of Frankfurt announced last week that the Astor Film Lounge did not wish to host movies during Jewish Film Days this year. The cinema, it said, had cited its workers’ reluctance to staff movies that are part of the biennial festival, as well as concerns about the security required to host Jewish events.
“The decision unequivocally signifies that Jewish life, Jewish people, and a Jewish media presence are no longer welcome at the Astor Film Lounge,” the community said in a statement.
“This line of reasoning is not only disappointing, but sends a devastating societal signal: If Jewish life and Jewish presence are suppressed out of fear of potential reactions, then this effectively amounts to a capitulation to antisemitic pressure,” the statement continued. “The fact that Jewish life can only take place under police protection is already shameful. That this necessity for police protection is now being used as a pretext to completely prevent Jewish events is a scandal.”
But the cinema’s managing director, Tom Flebbe, contested the Jewish Community of Frankfurt’s interpretation of events. In a statement cited in a leading local newspaper, he said the theater had withdrawn this year for economic reasons, as only 40 to 50 guests had come to screenings last year.
Flebbe said a lower-level manager had made unauthorized and inaccurate remarks about security concerns.
“Economic viability is a legitimate and necessary basis for business decisions — regardless of the thematic context of an event,” Flebbe said, adding that other joint projects with the Jewish community will continue as planned.
“The ASTOR Film Lounge MyZeil views Jewish life as a natural and welcome part of this society,” the statement concluded. “The decision against participating in the 2026 Jewish Film Days is not against Jewish people, Jewish culture, or Jewish presence. It is the result of a careful consideration of economic factors. We regret that our reasoning has been interpreted in this way and stand by our decision.”
During the 2024 festival, a half-dozen venues hosted screenings as part of Jewish Film Days. The Astor Film Lounge hosted one screening, of the film “March ’68,” a love story set during the Polish government’s antisemitic campaign following Israel’s Six-Day War.
Film festivals have emerged as a frontier for tensions over Israel and antisemitism. Germany’s largest film festival, the Berlinale, was roiled by tensions this year as its jury head fended off calls to criticize Israel. A major Toronto film festival, meanwhile, ruffled feathers last year by first canceling and then screening a documentary about the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. And a Jewish film festival was canceled in Malmo, Sweden, last year because too few cinemas would agree to show movies for it.
Flebbe’s explanation for why Astor Film Lounge would not participate in this year’s Jewish Film Days did not satisfy everyone who heard it. The Berlin-based German-Jewish Values Initiative, a non-partisan think tank, in an open letter called the economic justification a “mere pretext.”
“To the best of our knowledge, the Jewish Community of Frankfurt was prepared to guarantee a minimum revenue” for the film festival, the letter said. By apparently giving in to “threats and antisemitic pressure,” it added, the cinema has capitulated “to the very forces seeking to drive Jews out of the public sphere.”
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