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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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The post Extraordinary lives: 18 notable New York Jews who died in 2022 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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American music producer Justin Goldner at work on a Yiddish album
How many Yiddish rock stars do you know?
Maybe more than you think.
If you watched the Grammy Awards back in 2018, you might have seen one of them, Justin Goldner, accompany Ben Platt as he sang “Somewhere” from the Broadway musical West Side Story.
A multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, bass, mandolin, ukulele, and lute, Goldner has worked with an all-star array of artists as a session musician and producer, including Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Ricky Martin and Macy Gray. Goldner also appeared on Broadway and in Madison Square Garden, performed with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and recorded music for Disney’s live-action Snow White.
Goldner is no stranger to the spotlight, but for his latest project, he stepped away from the roaring arenas of pop stardom to inhabit a more intimate space: a dive into Yiddish culture. His work in progress, Songs of Longing and Belonging (Vi shturem a benken in Yiddish), sets Yiddish poetry to music, creating tracks that sound refreshingly contemporary even as they plumb the Yiddish literary archives for inspiration.
By the end of the project — which is being supported by a fellowship from the Jewish Writers Institute — the songs will comprise an entire album. Goldner estimates the full album will appear next spring. For now, he has been releasing them one at a time on YouTube under his Yiddish moniker, Reb Tsudek.
Like many younger people interested in Yiddish today, Goldner didn’t grow up with the language. Although Judaism was part of his upbringing in suburban Philadelphia, it was not a central part of his identity. “I grew up in what I would imagine is a pretty typical Reform family,” Goldner said when I spoke with him. “I had a bar mitzvah. I went to Jewish summer camp. But in retrospect, my memory of my Jewish upbringing was a little bit like: ‘Here’s Judaism. Don’t get too close to it.’”
If he had anything resembling religious commitment, it was to music, specifically the guitar, an instrument he took up at 13. “Relatively quickly it became an all consuming pursuit,” he recalled. “In high school, I barely did anything else. I was a very obsessive listener and wanted to devour as much music as possible.” After graduating high school, he earned a degree in music from NYU.
Goldner said he began to think differently about his Jewish heritage when he saw how his friends related to their own cultural backgrounds. “The thing that sort of primed the pump for me was getting into Greek and Spanish and Arabic and other languages and cultures,” he said. “I just found that so engaging. I was really inspired by my friends and colleagues who come from these backgrounds and carry their culture and their heritage with them, but they’re not living in the past.”
That epiphany, combined with the experience of getting to know a great-aunt with dementia who increasingly reverted to her native Yiddish, led Goldner to purchase a copy of College Yiddish, the classic textbook by Uriel Weinreich. For many years, Yiddish was a linguistic passion that he nurtured privately. Now it has become central to the evolution of his musical career.
The Yiddish title of Goldner’s project — Vi shturem a benken — comes from “Dos lid fun a meydl” (The Song of a Girl), a poem by Anna Margolin, a 20th-century Yiddish poet who immigrated to the United States from Lithuania in 1906. Previously unfamiliar with her work, Goldner was drawn to the “intensity” of Margolin’s lyric, which he translated for me as “it rocks me like a storm, this yearning.”
“I feel like she, as a writer, leaps off the page,” Goldner told me. “The intensity of wanting to do something or be something and not even knowing what, but just feeling like you can’t hold yourself back.”
Featuring vocalists Temma Schaechter and Ben Abraham, Goldner’s version of “The Song of a Girl” reveals another facet of Songs of Longing and Belonging: its blending of heritage languages and diasporic experiences. Besides Yiddish and English, “The Song of a Girl” also includes lyrics in Indonesian, one of the languages spoken by Abraham’s parents.
Future songs will take a similar approach. For example, “Meyerkepl” ( Seashell), based on a poem by the Yiddish writer Yehoash, will include words by Cuban poet José Marti. “I’ve been fascinated by Cuban music for a very long time,” Goldner said. “My wife’s family is Cuban. I was struck by how this sense of exile, of diaspora, of being far away from something or someone that we construe as home, manifested with these two very different authors in very similar imagery.”
In taking up Yiddish as a medium of musical expression, Goldner joins a growing group of artists recording contemporary music in the language, including Daniel Kahn, whose Yiddish versions of classics by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits are ingenuous feats of translation; Isabel Frey, whose 2020 debut album Millennial Bundist repurposes Yiddish labor and protest anthems; and the Bashevis Singers, a Melbourne-based folk band who, like Goldner, frequently turn to Yiddish poetry as a source of musical inspiration.
Meanwhile, independent record labels like Borscht Beat are producing Yiddish music that runs the gamut from traditional to experimental.
This thriving world of Yiddish popular music reflects a larger cultural and linguistic renaissance in which Goldner is a passionate participant. He has attended the Yidish Vokh, an annual week-long retreat for Yiddish speakers in upstate New York, takes online Yiddish classes, and has even developed a Yiddish keyboard app, YidShrift, that aims to bring familiar features like autocorrect and autocomplete to modern Yiddish communication.
Beyond the Yiddish lyrics he sets to music, Goldner has incorporated his affinity for the language into Songs of Longing by including Yiddish interviews with some of his collaborators, emphasizing the currency of Yiddish as a medium of colloquial expression.
While Songs of Longing and Belonging is firmly rooted in Goldner’s engagement with Yiddish language and lyrics, he also believes that the texts he is drawing on speak to shared human experiences.
“I think that there is a longing for connection that is universal and that manifests itself through the concepts and stories of who we are,” he said. That longing often pushes people to ask themselves probing questions of identity like “Who are my people?” or “where is my home?”
“I don’t think that there are ever simple answers,” he said.
The post American music producer Justin Goldner at work on a Yiddish album appeared first on The Forward.
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Katie Zacharia’s brief White House stint included a rebuke from the Auschwitz Memorial
Katie Zacharia’s five-day stint as White House Press Secretary ended almost as soon as it began. But before she was fired on Friday, she managed to draw a rebuke from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
The museum’s reprimand came in response to a claim Zacharia posted to X in November 2025, asserting that the abortion pill is “connected to the manufacturer of the deadly gas Zyklon B, used in the World War II concentration camps.”
The supposed connection? A company descended from the conglomerate involved in producing Zyklon B later owned the company that developed the abortion pill, Zacharia intimated in her post.
The official Auschwitz Memorial X account rebuked Zacharia on Monday, calling the argument “a misleading chain of guilt by association.”
Mifepristone, commonly known as the abortion pill, was first synthesized in 1980 — more than three decades after World War II’s end — by Georges Teutsch, a chemist at the French pharmaceutical company Roussel-Uclaf, based on an idea developed by Jewish endocrinologist Étienne-Émile Baulieu.
The tenuous connection to the poison gas used in concentration camps goes something like this: Zyklon B was distributed by a company called Degesch, which was partly owned by the German conglomerate I.G. Farben. After World War II, I.G. Farben was broken up into successor companies, including Hoechst AG, which in 1997 acquired a majority stake in the French company that developed mifepristone.
“A corporate relationship between companies separated by decades is presented as if it proved continuity of products, purposes, or chemical composition,” the Auschwitz Memorial wrote on X. “That is not historical analysis, but the selective combination of unrelated facts to produce a predetermined conclusion.”
Zacharia offered another version of the claim in a June 2025 podcast episode of We the People with Gates Garcia, saying that “the abortion pill has the same chemicals that they used in the exterminant (sic) camps in Nazi Germany.”
Suffice it to say, mifepristone, a steroidal progesterone blocker, is not the same as cyanide. Zacharia, the Auschwitz Memorial wrote, “confuses corporate history with chemical composition.”
After the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, anti-abortion activists have increasingly set their sights on banning the abortion pill nationwide. Prescribing, dispensing, or mailing mifepristone is currently banned in 13 states. In May, the Supreme Court blocked a lower court ruling that would have effectively ended mail delivery and telemedicine prescribing of mifepristone nationwide, including in states where abortion is legal.
Zacharia has framed her opposition to abortion as deeply personal. Zacharia said that, when she met her biological mother at 18, she learned she was “approximately 20, 30 minutes away from being aborted.” A Christian counselor, Zacharia said, convinced her mother to place her for adoption instead.
On the podcast, Zacharia also spoke about her work on the board of the White Rose Resistance, an anti-abortion advocacy group named for the Nazi resistance movement of the same name.
Groups including the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and the Anti-Defamation League have condemned comparisons between abortion and the Holocaust, arguing that they trivialize the Holocaust and exploit its victims’ memory for political ends.
Zacharia has also made Nazi comparisons in other contexts: According to CNN, in September 2022, she reposted a Truth Social post comparing then-President Joe Biden and anti-fascist protesters to Nazis. It included the hashtags #Antifa, #PedoHitler and #WrongSideOfHistory.
The White House Press Office did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment Friday morning, before Zacharia’s firing had been announced.
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After my dad died, I discovered a lost history of Iranian Jews in the US
I was a freshman in college when my dad died. An Iranian Jew who came to the United States four years before the Islamic Revolution to study at the University of Missouri, he went both by Farzad and by his Hebrew name, David. Eventually, he became a traveling jeweler — or, as he put it, a “merchant,” a word evoking an image of independence, shrewdness and valor on the Silk Road. After each business trip, he’d return home with stories of how nice people were in Raleigh, how cold it was in Minneapolis, and how beautiful the Florida Keys were.
Growing up in an Iranian Jewish community in Great Neck, a suburb on the North Shore of Long Island, I had spent my life mostly surrounded by people just like me, and rarely ever boarded a plane. The contrast between my dad’s cosmopolitanism and my provincialism mirrored another contrast, between his capability and my incapability. These differences made me distrust and worship him.
I knew my dad was getting older. The pace of his hair growth had slowed down, making his insistence on monthly haircuts a regular source of ridicule. But he was only 62; he wasn’t supposed to die. In 2019, he had a fatal heart attack on a flight to Key West — while he was in the air.
It seemed fitting that he — a cosmopolitan who had always seemed separate from the rest of my more provincial family — would die several hundred miles away from where we all lived. In the wake of his death, my desire to better understand his life led me to discover a forgotten chapter of Iranian Jewish history.
My community’s identity, like all identities, reflects a series of choices we’ve made about which parts of our experiences we wish to keep, and which we wish to throw away in the name of self-preservation. But despite our better efforts, the things we try to discard tend to remain with us, sometimes without us even knowing it.
Roots in Mashhad
My Iranian Jewish community traces its roots back to Mashhad, a city in northeastern Iran. In 1839, a mob of Muslim Mashadis raided the Jewish ghetto and killed more than 30 people. They seized and married Jewish women, selling others into slavery. Some Jews converted to Islam to escape death; others fled the country.
My ancestors appeared to convert to Islam. But community lore goes that when no one was watching, they wore tiny tefillin, prayed in basements and kept kosher as best they could. On Saturdays, Jewish shopkeepers kept their stores open so as not to be seen keeping Shabbat — but jacked up prices so high no one would buy anything. Jewish parents arranged their children’s engagements at young ages, so that if a non-Jew came requesting their daughter’s hand in marriage, they could honestly say she was taken.
Decades later, under a new government, my ancestors slowly began practicing Judaism openly again. In the mid-20th century, my grandparents and other Mashadi Jews left the city and moved to Iran’s capital, Tehran. But they remained insular. In Tehran’s much larger Jewish community, Mashadis separated themselves, praying in Mashadi synagogues and marrying fellow Mashadis.
They did the same in the U.S., where they first settled in Queens, then later helped form the ethnic enclave where I grew up.
As a child, I learned that being Mashadi made me different from all the other Iranian Jews in Great Neck, whom we called Tehrani even though many of their families came from other cities. So, when I learned that my parents were actually born in Tehran, I was scandalized. If my parents came from Tehran, didn’t that make us Tehrani?
“Why are we Mashadi?” I asked my dad one night, a year before he died: Why was I defined by this city, and not the other Iranian cities where my ancestors lived? Why weren’t we just Iranian?
Unable to explain, my dad laughed off the question. But I know now why Mashadis are Mashadi. It’s because pretending to be Muslim while secretly continuing to practice Judaism was a defining experience, one that taught my ancestors ugly ways to survive.
“To omr-e mani,” my dad would tell me in Farsi, in lieu of a simple “I love you.” Translation: “You are my life.” He always had a flair for hyperbole. And though he didn’t intend it this way, my teenage brain twisted his words to mean: “It will kill me if you aren’t a good Mashadi girl.”
Going to Missouri
When I was little, my mom told me a version of the Mashadi immigration story that matched her own experience: It began in Tehran and ended in Forest Hills, Queens. But when my dad died, I became more invested in piecing together the parts of his life that my mom’s story didn’t capture.
I got his yearbook and attendance records from the University of Missouri; obtained his immigration records from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; pored over more than 100 old newspapers, magazines and other archival documents; read academic articles and history books; and spoke to about a dozen people who I thought might have relevant intel, including extended family members, scholars and people who attended or worked at my dad’s college.
Arriving in 1974, my dad was one of tens of thousands of Iranians who came to the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s for college. In Iran, as in other major oil-exporting countries, economic development had led to increasing demand for skilled workers — but there weren’t enough colleges to meet this demand. So the Iranian government gave scholarships to students studying abroad.
Determined to develop allies during the Cold War, the U.S. government doled out scholarships, too. The idea was that students in Iran’s expanding middle class could study engineering in the U.S., then bring that expertise back to their home country, which needed it.
Many of these college students, seeking a lower cost of living, wound up in the Midwest. Plus, in the logic of a tight-knit ethnic community, where one person goes, others follow.
My dad followed a small group of Mashadi men to the University of Missouri in Columbia. His older brother, Behzad, had gone there for graduate school and still lived nearby. In Tehran, both he and my dad had attended an elite boys’ prep school called Alborz, named for the mountain range that stretches along the coast of the Caspian Sea. Historically run by American Christian missionaries, Alborz was considered the best high school in Iran, and American colleges knew it. Plus, if my dad’s kitchen-table bragging is to be believed, he was among Alborz’s top students in math.
Protest and persecution
By the time my dad arrived in Missouri, the tensions that would give way to the Islamic Revolution in 1979 had already emerged. Many Iranians protested the country’s then-leader, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, over restrictions he placed on democratic institutions, torture against political opponents under his leadership, and his significant expansion of the military.
The Iranian community in the U.S. — then disproportionately composed of college students — leaned into the opportunity this country gave them to express themselves politically. Articles from the Columbia Missourian, once my dad’s local paper, show that at one point in the mid-’70s, anti-Shah protests took place at least once a month at local colleges.
The protesters were embracing an American freedom: The Iranian secret police couldn’t get them, at least not while they were in the U.S. But American authorities had issues of their own.
In October 1975, police maced then arrested protesters at an anti-Shah rally at Lincoln University in Missouri. The protesters were denied food and prevented from calling lawyers because, a spokesperson for the Iranian Students Association said, “they were foreigners and had no rights.” The mayor sent the student-protesters’ names and photos to the Shah, even though students said that could get them executed or imprisoned for life.
At the University of Missouri, letters to the editor in the student newspaper, as well as classified ads, called for Iranian students to go back to where they came from. Graffiti on bathroom walls spread a similar message. Some people simply told their Iranian classmates face-to-face to return to the very place whose government they were protesting.
Many Iranian Jewish students liked the Shah, because he believed in secular government and undertook westernizing reforms. But 2,500 years of living as a minority had taught them to keep quiet. “Normally, Jews would stay out of politics,” mom’s brother Bahram, who studied in the Midwest beginning in 1969, told me. “If you were pro-Shah, you had a lot of students against you. If you were against, you had the embassy that would come after you.”
Two people I interviewed — Bahram and one of my dad’s cousins — both said something I can envision my dad also saying: that being Jewish protected them from anti-Iranian hostility on campus.
My dad’s cousin Sohrab, who went to New York’s Queens College, said that when encountering potentially hostile people, he made sure to emphasize being Jewish. “We feel like somebody’s uncomfortable, we made sure we told them first, ‘I am Jewish. I ran away from Iran,’” Sohrab said.
“We are first Jewish, then Iranian.”
What my dad and I never talked about
When my dad was 22, and a senior at the University of Missouri, his native country erupted into violence.
More than 40 years after the revolution, I sat in my college dorm, reading back issues of the Columbia Missourian, imagining my dad as a young, longish-haired man following the news from afar.
December 1978: “2 million protesters hit Tehran.” February 1979: “10,000 dead in Iran’s crisis.” March: “Firing squads execute 13 in Iran.” As the revolution took place, so did frequent earthquakes, which also claimed thousands of lives.
The college students who’d risked it all in order to advocate against the Shah seemingly got their way when he fled Iran in January 1979. But they were blindsided by the zealotry of the man who took his place: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shi’ite Muslim cleric who established an Islamic theocracy. He offered a foil to Pahlavi’s friendliness with the West by preaching against the U.S., Israel and imperialism.
After the revolution, the new government tried to assure Iranian Jews that they’d be safe, yet some were executed on trumped-up charges of spying for Israel. My dad’s parents were quick enough to leave by air, landing in Queens. Those who waited too long to emigrate had to pay smugglers to help them over mountainous borders.
When the Mashadi community followed in the footsteps of its sons and immigrated en masse to the U.S., American-educated Mashadi men — now in their 20s and 30s — became informal secretaries, translators, immigration consultants, financial advisors, business consultants, and advocates for higher education, for their own families and for the wider community.
Despite what Sohrab said, de-emphasizing their Iranian origins didn’t always protect the new immigrants from bigotry. Mohsen Mobasher, an anthropologist at the University of Houston-Downtown, told me that because of anti-Iranian hostility that later grew rampant, “some Iranians developed deep feelings of anxiety, suspicion, insecurity and inferiority.”
Once, I asked my dad whether he ever experienced antisemitism or anti-Iranian hostility. He let out a hearty laugh, as though it was ridiculous for me to imagine that he had.
If the question was ridiculous, it was only because I asked it so casually; just as I might ask him to do my laundry or cut me a pineapple. It was as if I’d asked him to synthesize his whole experience of identity into some set of words that might satisfy me. My dad did not see fit to tell me, a girl he was charged with protecting, about times in his life when he may have felt small.
Singled out by the federal government
In November 1979, months after my dad graduated, a group of Iranian militant college students took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 66 Americans hostage. The hostage crisis gave way to unprecedented levels of anti-Iranian sentiment in the U.S., and the animus fell hardest on college students. Members of Congress introduced resolutions calling for all Iranian students to be deported. At Mizzou, one professor announced that he would no longer advise Iranian students.
On Nov. 10, President Jimmy Carter ordered immigration checks on all Iranian college students in the U.S., saying that anyone found to be violating the terms of their student visa would be deported. More than 200 Mizzou students were told to report to an immigration office in Kansas City. To some of these students, the visa checks felt wrong, and they refused to participate.
“I would feel like a criminal,” an Iranian student who did not report told the Missourian.
“This is discrimination — singling out one nationality and investigating them,” said another, who also refused to participate in the check.
By this time, my dad had moved to St. Louis, where he was working for the chemical manufacturer Olin Corporation. But he still had to report for the visa checks. He had a visa for students and recent graduates who were gaining practical training in their field of study. In December, he received a frantic letter from Carl Leistner, the international student program coordinator at Mizzou, telling him to report to Kansas City the following week.
“I regret this delayed notice,” Leistner wrote in the letter. “However, we simply overlooked our practical training students in the rush associated with the registration of our 258 currently enrolled students from Iran.”
My dad traveled more than 200 miles for his interview, but when he arrived, he was sent home. A federal judge had ruled the visa checks were unconstitutional. If that ruling was overturned, my father was told, he might have to come back for an interview later.
Back on the Mizzou campus, some 600 students held a protest where some students advocated “deporting all Iranians from the United States.” “Deport, deport,” the crowd chanted at one point.
By being away from campus, my dad managed to evade these sorts of protests, plus other horrors that befell his collegiate counterparts. Abe Manzour, an Iranian American Jew who was my dad’s classmate at the University of Missouri, was still earning his degree.
“Sometimes, we were scared to go outside,” Abe told me over Zoom in 2021. “I almost got beat up by some guys on the street because they knew I was Iranian.”
Scared to go outside? Almost got beat up? Despite everything I had already read about anti-Iranian hostility, I was still surprised. What Abe was describing seemed a world apart from tales my dad used to tell — stories of beer, women and football games, which would’ve taken place just months beforehand.
“My dad always talked about his time in college,” I said. “He made it sound like the best thing ever.”
“For me it was, too,” Abe said.
A conservative enclave
Growing up in Great Neck, I lived a life very different from my dad’s. Our suburb was full of Iranian Jews, and until I was 18, I rarely ever left it. He was worldly; I was provincial, and in my senior year of high school, as I applied for college, I could no longer contain my jealousy.
“Can I apply to UC Berkeley?” I asked him one Sunday afternoon during my senior year, while he was making “early-bird breakfast.” I knew he’d say no, but wanted to see him squirm.
“I don’t see! I don’t see!”
“Dad!”
“Bache nazaideem ke befresteemesh Ca-lee-forn-yaw!” — “We didn’t have a child so that we could ship her off to California!”
“I know two people who sent their son to college on a different continent!”
“That was over 10 years ago!” At 61, my dad enjoyed describing events of his youth as having taken place “over 10 years ago.”
I never applied to Berkeley; instead, I stayed close to home and went to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan. For better or worse, my life would be different from my dad’s, in ways that were tied up with the increasingly conservative nature of our community.
In Tehran, Mashadi Jews lived scattered around the city. In Great Neck, Mashadis are neighbors and attend a set of synagogues all within a mile of each other. And many Mashadi Jews in Great Neck have become more religious than their ancestors in Tehran were.
When most people think of assimilation, they envision people becoming more secular and better educated. But most Jewish people in Great Neck — Mashadi and otherwise — have assimilated into a different yet equally compelling idea of America, one that emphasizes religious freedom over other aspects of American culture.
In the Midwest, Mashadi men learned the valuable lesson that Abe Manzour expressed: that it’s possible to experience happiness and personal growth in the midst of a hostile environment. Years later, when they moved to Great Neck, their environment rendered that wisdom useless, like a vestigial organ at risk of evolutionary disappearance.
To the men who’d left Iran to study abroad, we, their children, must have at times seemed narrow-minded and irredeemably young. Especially when I think about my dad’s life, I sometimes resent that I wasn’t allowed to go to California and feel embarrassed to have attended a commuter school.
What made me want to study his life was a binary I imagined between him — worldly — and me — ignorant. But actually, I don’t really believe that a binary between cosmopolitanism and provincialism captures the nuances entailed in our father-daughter relationship. And I don’t believe that being poorly traveled is the same as being ignorant.
Regardless of where one lives or visits, there are many different ways to be ignorant, and many different ways to learn something new.
The post After my dad died, I discovered a lost history of Iranian Jews in the US appeared first on The Forward.
