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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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Colorado voters weigh candidate for Congress who declined to call Boulder firebombing antisemitic
A democratic socialist once fired from a law job for pro-Palestinian comments is hoping to unseat a longtime member of Congress in Colorado’s primary election Tuesday, following primary victories for allies in New York.
Attorney Melat Kiros is a viable contender, according to polls, which show her about even with Rep. Diana DeGette in the race for Colorado’s 1st congressional district, which DeGette has held since 1997. One other candidate, University of Colorado Regent Wandy James, is polling a distant third for the seat, which includes almost all of the city and county of Denver.
Kiros, who was born the year DeGette took office, has used Israel policy as a wedge throughout the campaign — calling for an arms embargo against Israel, including funding for defensive weapons like the Iron Dome.
Last week, Kiros drew criticism for declining to call a firebombing attack at a vigil for Israeli hostages in Boulder last year antisemitic.
But some Jews are supporting her, saying that Kiros’ harsh criticism of Israel is necessary and warranted. DeGette has outfundraised Kiros at a 3-to-1 ratio, while Kiros has picked up endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders, Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement.
Kiros’ candidacy in the deep-blue district, where DeGette won three-quarters of the vote in 2024, will test the momentum of recent congressional primary victories by Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidates Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York. Avila Chevalier personally campaigned for Kiros on Monday on X.
The race also comes during a tenuous month for Jews in the state. Students in Boulder issued a statement June 3 praising the Boulder attack as an act of “resistance.” Denver Jewish Day School, the largest Jewish school in the state, sent kids home early from summer camp June 11 after receiving threats. And last week the ADL filed a civil rights complaint alleging severe antisemitic harassment in Boulder schools.
Colorado voters will also go to the polls Tuesday to choose their nominees to succeed Gov. Jared Polis. Leading the Democratic candidates in polls is Attorney General Phil Weiser, who is the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors. (His top opponent, Sen. Michael Bennet, has a Jewish mother but does not identify as Jewish.)
Here’s 4 things to know about the congressional race ahead of the election.
1. Kiros entered politics after a pro-Palestinian blog post got her fired.
Kiros, whose family immigrated to the U.S. from Ethiopia when she was a baby, was working as an associate for law firm Sidley Austin in November 2023 when it signed onto a letter to law schools instructing them to take an “unequivocal stance” against antisemitism and Islamophobia, including protests that call for the elimination of Israel, which the letter called antisemitic.
In a Medium post responding to the letter, Kiros wrote that she agreed with the stance against antisemitism and that “there is no justification for the attacks on Israel on Oct. 7.” But she added that she did not believe that calling for the elimination of Israel qualified as antisemitism, partly because that perspective foreclosed on the possibility of a one-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians enjoyed equal rights.
“By chilling future lawyers’ employment prospects for criticism of the Israeli government’s actions and its legitimacy,” Kiros wrote, “you are complicit in Israel’s weaponization of anti-Semitism.”
The post received some traction online, and Sidley asked Kiros to take it down. She refused, reportedly leading to her firing. She then worked as communications director for 2024 congressional candidate John Padora, who placed third in that year’s Democratic primary in Colorado’s fourth congressional district.
2. She repeatedly declined to call the Boulder attack antisemitic
Kiros was grilled on her stances about Israel in a June 22 interview with a Denver news channel.
She said weapons that defend Israeli citizens against attacks from Iran and Hezbollah “give Israel the cover to continue the genocide that’s taking place in Palestine and now the ethnic cleansing that’s taking place in Lebanon.” (Genocide scholars have debated whether the war in Gaza rises to the level of genocide.)
Some of Kiros’ comments on Israel appeared to take a more centrist position than some of her far-left allies. Though she has campaigned with controversial streamer Hasan Piker, she said she disagreed with his statement that Hamas is a lesser evil than Israel.
And asked whether Israel “had it coming” on Oct. 7, Kiros said “no, not at all — it’s about understanding the conditions in which violence and war happens.” She said Israel had resisted change despite decades of international frustration with its policies; her job as a politician, she said, was to change those conditions.
But the remark that drew the most attention was her response to a question about the Boulder attack, which took place at an event calling for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas. The attacker, Mohammed Soliman, was heard saying “Free Palestine” as he threw molotov cocktails and used an improvised flamethrower to burn his victims.
Soliman left behind writings in which he declared that “Zionism is our enemies until Jerusalem is liberated and they are expelled from our land,” and further described Israel as a “cancer entity,” according to law enforcement.
He injured 13 people in the ambush, including an 82-year-old woman who later died of her wounds.
“I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator,” Kiros said. “All I know is that he attacked innocent people because of what they might have believed. And I don’t even know what the people that were at that protest believed, too. In fact most of them were probably just there to ask that the people who were kidnapped on Oct. 7 be returned to their families.”
Asked to confirm that she thought the attack was not antisemitic, Kiros said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what his intentions were.”
In a statement to the Forward, DeGette said, “It’s never okay to rationalize antisemitism or excuse an act of terrorism. Those aren’t Denver values and we deserve better.”
The Kiros campaign did not respond to an inquiry.
3. DeGette, the incumbent, has a mixed record on Israel
DeGette, 68, has also pitched herself as a progressive. She was an early supporter of Medicare for All and includes abolishing ICE in her campaign positions. Her supporters highlight her efforts to secure abortion rights and her role in managing Trump’s first impeachment in 2019.
But unlike Kiros, DeGette has supported a two-state solution. DeGette voted for an April 2024 foreign aid package that included $5.2 billion to replenish Israeli air defenses.
“I believe Israel should have a nation, and I believe Palestine should have a nation, and I believe we need to move towards that solution,” DeGette told Colorado Public Radio. “I believe Israel has a right to defend itself.”
Her support for the war in Gaza flagged as it dragged on. In December 2025, DeGette voted against the National Defense Authorization Act that included provisions for funding additional weapons to Israel — and calling for a permanent ceasefire along with a surge in humanitarian aid.
But some constituents remained unsatisfied. DeGette’s heated exchange with one at a campaign event earlier this year went viral on social media. Someone asked “why she kept sending money for bombs,” and DeGette replied she was only funding defensive arms. When the constituent stormed off, saying DeGette didn’t care about Palestinians, the congresswoman followed her to correct her.
Finally, DeGette said, “If the only issue that you care about is this issue, then you should not vote for me.”
4. Some Jews in her district support Kiros. Others are worried.
Rabbi Rachel Kobrin, the spiritual leader of Congregation Rodef Shalom, wrote in the Denver Post last week that Kiros’ candidacy scared her as a liberal Jewish woman because it reflected a coarsened public discourse around Israel and ruled out a two-state solution.
“I do not believe Milat Kiros has shown the curiosity, humility, and empathy necessary to represent my community as a political leader,” Kobrin wrote.
One Jewish reader responded to Kobrin’s column by coming to her defense.
“We fought the state of South Africa as an apartheid state that was violently and legally separating and killing its black native citizens,” wrote Vivian Weinstein, a Denver resident critical of the war. “In the same way, Israel cannot continue to exist as an apartheid state according to its own law.”
The post Colorado voters weigh candidate for Congress who declined to call Boulder firebombing antisemitic appeared first on The Forward.
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How seriously should we take San Francisco’s anti-Zionist hecklers?
The videos of local activists in San Francisco accosting Scott Wiener, the state senator running to replace Nancy Pelosi in the U.S. House, are hard to watch.
“Say ‘Free Palestine’ for the camera, dog,” Jesus Coba, who runs a popular Instagram account, tells Wiener as he’s trying to watch the World Cup at a bar. “Say ‘Free Palestine’!”
Coba is holding the camera close to Wiener’s face as the politician stares at him in silence.
A few days later Wiener was surrounded and screamed at as he made his way through Dolores Park, where he had come to participate in a Shabbat service as part of the Trans March.
“F— you and your Zionist handlers,” one person shouted at Wiener, who is both Jewish and gay, and has championed legislation protecting trans rights. “F— you and your Israeli masters.”
What happened to Wiener can be seen as part of a national trend. Jack Schlossberg, a Jewish heir to the Kennedy dynasty, face-planted in his attempt to replace Rep. Jerry Nadler in the U.S. House. He ran a poor campaign, but it wasn’t helped by the fact that he tried to trade on his status as a Millennial social media influencer while refusing to embrace the TikTok generation’s skepticism of Israel.
“Can you say ‘F— Israel,’ Jack?” an erratic fellow influencer who goes by the name Crackhead Barney asked visibly stressed Schlossberg during a street interview.
“No way, dude, I’m Jewish,” Schlossberg responds.
And other Democrats have spoken about the extent to which a candidate’s willingness to accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza has become a litmus test in primary contests.
But, at the same time, the people hounding Wiener in public are part of a radical but fringe minority — one with deep roots in San Francisco — that has struggled to gain political power even as its members excel at generating viral clips.
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San Francisco is home to loud and often obnoxious activism fueled by the very real sense of alienation that comes when a region known for its radical politics is subjected to repeated rounds of displacement by the tech industry. I grew up in the city during the first dot-com boom, when the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project plastered the neighborhood with calls to vandalize luxury cars and sushi restaurants. The man behind the group was eventually arrested and police found instructions in his apartment for how to build acid bombs.
Gay Shame, an anonymous protest collective, carried on this style of activism with a promise to “instigate, irritate, and agitate” and graffiti insisting that “Queers Hate Techies,” while locals blockaded the private buses that ferried tech workers to their jobs south of the city.
When Google Glass — an early precursor to Meta Ray-Bans that embed a livestreaming camera in your glasses — became a symbol of gentrification, a woman was punched in the face for wearing the device into a local dive bar.
It’s not shocking that Jews have not always fared well among this set, for whom strident opposition to symbols of power reigns supreme. A disturbing precursor to the protests against Wiener came in 2018 when activists began weekly protests outside Manny’s, a cafe and “civic event space” in the Mission.
The business replaced a sushi restaurant, but it still somehow became the target of neighborhood activists who demanded a host of concessions from Manny Yekutiel, the cafe’s Jewish owner. Yekutiel agreed to many of the asks: bilingual signage and staff, affordable drip coffee and free event bookings for community groups.
But Yekutiel still found himself facing weekly protests, including by Gay Shame, accusing him of promoting a “pro-elite, pro-Zionist and pro-gentrification agenda.” Someone spray-painted a Star of David and “F— Zionism” on the exterior, and a window was smashed.
His sole crime was apparently a Facebook post from a few years before he opened the business asking for recommendations on “some good Zionist organizations in the Bay.”
The people who thought protesting Yekutiel was a good use of their Wednesday nights for several years are the same folks — sometimes literally — who are now harassing Wiener.
Coba, who was kicked out of the bar for yelling at Wiener, and whom Wiener said had previously accosted him at the airport and accused him of having a “tainted bloodline,” recently posted footage of someone chasing Yekutiel through a street fair.
Yekutiel is now running for the Board of Supervisors, which is San Francisco’s city council, and the man quizzing him was mad that Manny’s had once hosted pro-Israel activist Hen Mazzig. Coba claimed Mazzig was an Israeli commando, which I could find no evidence for, and Yekutiel said all he knew was that Mazzig had served in the Israeli military as most Israeli Jews are required to do.
“Well maybe having Israelis at the cafe isn’t a good idea,” the man, who does not identify himself, tells Yekutiel.
***
It could be difficult to summon much sympathy for tech workers whose commute was delayed by nudists trying to board their buses as a form of protest. But it’s much easier to see how corrosive the “Zionist” litmus tests being applied to Jews in San Francisco and elsewhere are.
As a longtime politician, Wiener’s record of support for Israel is deeper than Yekutiel’s. But not by much. He joined a solidarity trip to Israel in 2024, but had also called for a ceasefire in Gaza in November 2023, opposes U.S. military aid to Israel at least until a new government is in place, and — after an awkward delay — he joined the other candidates in the race for Pelosi’s seat in accusing Israel of genocide.
Wiener is a relative moderate in a city where progressives sometimes treat that as akin to being MAGA, and both Coba and the people yelling at Wiener during Pride make allusions to disagreement with his preferred housing policy. Mayor Daniel Lurie, another moderate, was chased out of the Trans March last year, though without as much vitriol.
But it seems clear that the obsession with Wiener supposedly supporting genocide is tied to the fact that he’s Jewish.
His opponent, Connie Chan, is backed by labor unions and has staked out a position to Wiener’s left on Israel, though she has faced no backlash for being endorsed by Pelosi, who embodies moderate San Francisco politics and has been a stalwart supporter of Israel.
At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that the people leading the charge against Wiener have failed time and again to move the political needle.
They didn’t stop gentrification or slow the mass arrival of tech workers to the city and luxury buses still ferry them to work. Google Glass flopped, but now every other influencer on TikTok is wearing Meta Ray-Bans to film content. Manny’s continues to thrive with support from prominent progressives in the city, and Yekutiel appears to be leading in his race to join the city council.
Wiener rose from the Board of Supervisors to the State Senate, and despite his extremely vocal detractors he remains the favorite to win in November. Local media has not framed Israel as a key issue.
(Schlossberg, for his part, ultimately lost to another pro-Israel Jewish candidate who was to his right on Gaza.)
When Joe Eskenazi, one of the most astute journalists covering local politics in the city, wrote about the Manny’s protests years ago he aptly described the demonstrators as “a diminutive group of attention-seekers.”
That certainly seemed to be the case at the time. Whether the rising tide of animosity toward Israel will afford these hecklers a veto over Jewish politicians ascending the political ladder is now an open question.
The post How seriously should we take San Francisco’s anti-Zionist hecklers? appeared first on The Forward.
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As the Bible and the news from the Strait of Hormuz tells us, our world is in dire straits
The most important traffic reports these days usually come from the Strait of Hormuz.
“Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz dropped significantly over the weekend, The New York Times reported, “as a four-day exchange of attacks between Iran and the United States left some shipowners deciding it was too risky to transit.”
What’s going on with the Strait of Hormuz affects gas prices, stock prices, Americans’ moods — and the world economy.
But what does “strait” mean, anyway?
The word has been with us for a long time, and intriguingly, it appears in many famous translations of the Torah. It also pops up in translations of the New Testament.
“Strait” comes from the Latin for “strict.” It first appeared in English in the 14th century, when, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it referred to clothing — “a garment, etc.: Tight-fitting, narrow.”
Over time, the meaning changed a bit, but it always had something to do with narrowness. From 1561 to 1725, it meant: “Of bonds, a knot: Tightly drawn.”
As the centuries passed, it attracted the attention of poets.
”It matters not how strait the gate,” wrote William Ernest Henley in his poem “Invictus.” “How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”
It turns out that Henley was kind of into the subject of what words meant.
“The poet, who was one of the leading slang lexicographers of his day, saw the gates of heaven as strait — tight, narrow, difficult to get through,” the late great language columnist William Safire observed in 1984, when he wrote a column on “strait” and “straits.”
Maybe Henley had the New Testament in mind, too.
Matthew 7:13 in The King James Bible advises: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.”
Today, according to Merriam-Webster, “strait” means “a comparatively narrow passageway connecting two large bodies of water — often used in plural but singular in construction.”
Henley, the poet, was using an archaic meaning — a narrow passage, without water.
In contemporary English, “strait” also has a secondary meaning — “a situation of perplexity or distress — often used in plural,” according to Merriam-Webster, but also according to anyone who has used the phrase “dire straits,” including, one would presume, the band Dire Straits.
Both physical and emotional space
“Strait” describes both a physical space — for example, a body of water — and an emotional space, like “dire straits.”
Perhaps that dual meaning is why the word “strait” appears in translations of the Torah. In the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation, the Hebrew word tzar, or “narrow,” is translated as “strait.”
Consider 1 Samuel, 13:6, in the JPS translation from 1917:
“When the men of Israel saw that they were in a strait — for the people were distressed — then the people did hide themselves in caves, and in thickets, and in rocks, and in holds, and in pits.”
Tzar has both a literal descriptive meaning and a figurative emotional meaning. Sure, as an adjective, it means narrow, such as in the famous song about the entire world being “a narrow bridge” — gesher tzar me’od.
But as ki tzar lo in Samuel 1 6:13 demonstrates, it can also refer to a tough circumstance, a strait. Similarly, perhaps, in contemporary Hebrew, someone might say, tzar li, or “I am saddened.”
These multiple meanings might lead a person to the hazardous question of whether one should say the “Strait of Hormuz” in the singular, or “Straits of Hormuz” in the plural.
That was what fascinated Safire in 1984. Today, his take feels like a postcard from another time — but it’s also soothing in this moment of, well, dire straits:
“My advice,”Safire wrote. “Go with the familiar; follow your ear. If you’re happy with the Straits of Gibraltar or Magellan, use the final s; if the place name is new to you, let the gazetteer crowd have its way.”
“Hormuz is unfamiliar to most Americans, and the Strait of Hormuz is therefore the name I would use, going along with Gary Hart and the stylebooks,” Safire continued. “But retain the singular sense: ‘The Straits of Gibraltar’ is a passage.’ ‘’The Strait of Hormuz’ is the next Quemoy and Matsu.”
I liked being distracted for a moment from Iran and Trump with the mention of “Gary Hart.”
That nostalgia reminded me that today’s Strait of Hormuz news cycle, about a traffic jam for the fuel and food we need to live, is about both a location and a feeling.
Sure, the waterway may be physically open, or, at least of this writing, effectively closed because of fear, but its status has other meanings too — like whether the Iranian regime actually won this war, and whether that narrow space is also a symbol of future peril.
And in those multiple meanings, strait echoes the Biblical tzar —narrow, yes, but also dangerous.
In Hebrew and in English, narrowness, perilousness and sadness frequently go together, indicating a world or a situation that must be navigated carefully. Perhaps a word like strait — a little bit singular, a little bit plural — captures it all.
The post As the Bible and the news from the Strait of Hormuz tells us, our world is in dire straits appeared first on The Forward.
