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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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Germany’s far-right victory in eastern state election portends ‘disaster’ for centrists
(JTA) — The far-right Alternative for Germany’s victory in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, its second in the region in as many weeks, underscores the growing popularity of the anti-immigration, nationalist party at the expense of the country’s political center.
The center-right Christian Democratic Union, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party, had its worst result in any state or federal election with just 4.9% of the vote, falling short of the 5% minimum needed to enter the legislature. It’s the first time in history the party was shut out of a state parliament.
Merz himself admitted the result was a “disaster” for the CDU, saying he would remain chancellor and press on with his economic reform agenda.
The AfD won 38.2%, according to preliminary results in the sparsely populated state on the Baltic Sea, home to some 1.6 million people. The AfD’s result on Sunday more than doubled its 16.7% share in the state’s last election in 2021.
The party’s rise in the east signals it is breaching the consensus of Germany’s liberal, multicultural order and meticulously built barriers against the far right since the Nazi era. Two weeks ago, the AfD crushed its opponents in Saxony-Anhalt, sending shockwaves through Europe.
At the same time, the socialist Left Party swept to victory on Sunday in Berlin, challenging centrist coalitions from the other side of the political spectrum. Such coalitions have long dominated the country but are now fighting to keep alienated voters amid economic stagnation and global instability.
In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the AfD was followed closely by the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) with 35.5% of the vote. The SPD outperformed opinion polls under the leadership of state premier Manuela Schwesig, who cast herself as a bulwark against the AfD while promising to strengthen the economy, education and social services. The Left Party trailed with 6.5% and the Greens with 5.7%.
Despite winning the largest share of votes, the AfD could struggle to form a government without an outright majority in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Other large parties have refused to work with the AfD, which advocates for deporting refugees, opposing multiculturalism, protecting “German identity,” abolishing current public broadcasting and ending sanctions on Russia. The SPD could form a left-leaning coalition with the Left Party and the Greens.
In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD also fell short of a majority with almost 44% of the vote, but has a greater chance of forming a government. The party is currently negotiating to govern with the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), a populist party with left-wing and right-wing positions that won 5.3% of the vote.
Leif-Erik Holm, the AfD’s candidate for state premier in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, said on election night that his party had a “mandate to govern.” He later acknowledged to the public broadcaster NDR that the AfD is ultimately unlikely to be part of a governing coalition, but said he expected the other parties to be “open to dialogue.”
Alice Weidel, the AfD’s national co-chair, celebrated the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania result in an interview with the broadcaster ZDF.
“We are the strongest force and have reached the mainstream of the population, and we are the new people’s party in Germany,” said Weidel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Germany’s far-right victory in eastern state election portends ‘disaster’ for centrists appeared first on The Forward.
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Coexistence is the only way and one state is a fantasy
For some time now, right-wing Zionists and left-wing Anti-Zionists have been mirror images of one another, both insisting on a one-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. To be sure, the visions are different: one is of a Jewish-dominated ethnostate with a permanently subjugated non-Jewish minority, the latter either a utopian democratic fantasy or a violent, forced reversal of 1948.
As different as they are in some respects, though, both visions are delusions.
Clearly, many on the left still want to reverse 1948, to remove the “settler-colonialist Zionist entity” from the land and return control of it to its indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. (Never mind that the boundaries of Palestine and their demarcations of identity are, themselves, relics of colonialism.) Setting aside the virtues of these goals, it would be entirely unprecedented for a state to self-destruct in this way.
The model, of course, is apartheid-era South Africa. But whatever similarities Israel does or does not have to that state, there are critical differences as well. Most importantly, apartheid ended because of a combination of factors: international pressure (the original Boycott / Divestment / Sanctions campaign); the moral leadership of figures like Nelson Mandela; but also the fact that, by the late 1980s, nearly half the white South African population was itself opposed to apartheid, and elected a leader, F.W. de Klerk, who pledged to end it and did.
There is no analogue in present-day Israel. The upcoming Israeli elections are about many things, but the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state is not one of them. Nor is the maximalism, ferocity, and one-sidedness of the left likely to somehow persuade Israeli Jews that erasing the Jewish state would be a good idea. Quite the contrary.
Which means that the only way to return to 1947 would be by force: an international military campaign against a nuclear power that has no intention of removing itself from the map and whose population believes it has nowhere else in the world to go. Needless to say, this scenario is as implausible as it is evil.
Of course, BDS advocates would claim that economic sanctions, the suspension of foreign aid, and international opprobrium would be enough to cause the Jewish state to voluntarily evolve into a non-Jewish, binational democracy. But the vast majority of Israel’s seven million Jewish citizens are resolutely opposed to such a change, and without military force, externally-mandated ‘regime change’ rarely happens: just look at Iran, North Korea, and occupied Tibet.
And what about the Palestinians? Does anyone truly believe that seven million Palestinians, most of whom understand themselves to be occupied, displaced, subjugated, and repressed by the state of Israel, are interested in joining hands with the same Israelis who have oppressed them for seven decades to create a new state free from ethno-nationalist trappings? Of course not. They want a state of their own, which they deserve. They, like Israelis, want to be in charge of their own destinies, to promote their own cultures, to build a society that reflects who they are and who they aspire to be.
Now, ‘two states’ may take many shapes: geographical contiguous entities, or a confederation of two governmental authorities, or others. But in some form, Palestinians and Israelis must be in charge of themselves.
This may not be an ideal arrangement, but it is the only pragmatic one. In principle, I am sympathetic to the arguments that any kind of ‘special’ nationalism, including ethno-nationalisms like Zionism, will inevitably lead to the extremism we now see in much of Israel, Europe, and the United States. In the Israeli world, such arguments were made by Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Adin Steinsaltz decades ago, and were recently discussed in a fascinating online back-and-forth between Shaul Magid and Irwin Kula. Perhaps, in retrospect, a ‘thick’ patriotism like Zionism was a mistake and Israel should only have aspired to be, as many of its initial founders wanted, a state like any other. Maybe, as soon as Zionism became religiously significant (to Israelis and non-Israelis alike), the stakes became too high.
But as the Talmudic rabbis said, avar zmano batel korbanо — basically, the horse has left the barn. Israel as a Jewish state is a reality and the overwhelming majority of Israelis want it to continue. It is not South Africa, and the dream of one democratic state from the river to the sea is a pipe dream with no tether to the actual realities of the 14 million people who live there.
And then there’s the fantasy on the Right, which is even darker.
The Right, too, wants one state from the river to the sea, only this state is an ethno-nationalist, non-democratic Greater Israel built on repression and minority rule. And (as Abdul El-Sayed aptly noted) unlike the Left, it has been building that reality on the ground for three decades now, most recently in its sociocide of Gaza and its policy of hachraah (compulsion) in the West Bank, which a recent BTzelem report describes as an “elimination project.” As B’Tzelem leader Yuli Novak put it in a recent New York Times op-ed, these policies are creating “a new phase of the political project to make Israeli Jewish control permanent while dismantling the conditions for Palestinian collective life.”
Here, too, it is hard to adjudicate between implausibility and immorality, but I’ll focus on the former. Already, Israel has lost the support of around a quarter of Americans, and a clear majority of American Jews disapprove of Israeli policies even as they do believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state. Do the likes of Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich really believe that the world will simply stand by and watch Israel ethnically cleanse the West Bank without, at the very least, disastrous economic and political consequences?
Israel is a small state that, for now at least, depends on American foreign aid and the (limited) support of the world community. Even if it were militarily and morally possible to institute formal apartheid in Greater Israel, it is simply unrealistic to believe that the world will simply allow Israel to do so. Nor do half of Israeli Jews want such a dreadful, dystopian, and endlessly violent future.
These fantasies on Left and Right are not idle delusions. They are impeding the real work that is necessary to move, however slowly, toward sustainable coexistence.
First, Israelis will hopefully soon elect a new government that will rein in the extreme nationalists and take a more realistic, ethical, and constructive stance toward the Palestinians. There is not an Israeli-Jewish majority that is ready for an independent Palestinian state tomorrow. But there is, it seems, a majority that wants the ethnic cleansing, ultra-nationalism, and settler-extremist vigilantism to end, and that, at least, is a step toward coexistence — a step toward normalization.
Will the next Israeli government be as progressive as I, personally, would like? Almost certainly not. But will it be more progressive, or at least less regressive, than the current one? This is what I pray for. Contrary to what the Left and Right insist, there are many kinds of Zionism. Even if only for pragmatic reasons, I support the more progressive, just, and coexistence-oriented kind.
But American one-staters on both sides have obstructed it.
On the Right, hundreds of millions of American dollars have put thumbs on the Israeli-electoral scales for decades, while AIPAC and others have obstructed reasonable steps toward coexistence, such as conditioning military aid on Israeli compliance with international legal norms.
Meanwhile, on the Left, the insistence that all Zionism entails racism, colonialism, and genocide makes pragmatism more difficult, as any deviation from the anti-Zionist line renders progressive politicians treyf. And then, of course, is the rhetoric: blood libel, genocide, antisemitism, apartheid. Everyone on the other side is evil: musicians, politicians, artists, filmmakers, rabbis, and activists are all either Jew-haters or genociders, with no other options in between.
I think I speak for a majority of American people and American Jews when I implore everyone to tone it the f—k down.
If it isn’t clear by now, reasonable, non-hateful people profoundly disagree about how to understand what happened in Gaza, how it relates to what happened on Oct. 7, and how to negotiate living with people who strongly disagree with one another.
And I think a majority of American Jews are sick to death of the extremism. I’ve been canceled by both sides, personally, and I can testify to the exhaustion. I think we are sick of both sides’ ignorance, intolerance, and the inability to listen to multiple narratives.
We’re sick of the Left ignoring Israeli security and the Right only talking about Israeli security. We’re sick of the Left talking only about Palestinian safety and the Right never talking about Palestinian safety. We’re sick of the Right failing to acknowledge Palestinian dispossession and the Left failing to acknowledge the UN resolutions of 1947, the Holocaust, or the ancient Jewish ties to the land. We’re sick of the Right refusing to watch videos and films about Gaza, and the Left refusing to watch them about Oct. 7. (And no, we’re not trying to compare, equate, or measure the horror in one way or the other.)
Closer to home, we’re sick of the hypocrisy, hysteria, and weaponization of overheated rhetoric on all sides. We’re sick of how the Right refuses to call out (in the last month alone) concentration camp imagery, Islamophobia, and actual genocidal rhetoric on its side while harping on any insufficiently-apologetic apology by an accused antisemite. And we’re sick of how the Left refuses to call out voices who say that supporters of Israel are making themselves into targets of violence or that Bibi Netanyahu is an Emmanuel Goldstein-George Soros style puppetmaster of everything wrong with the world. Everyone in this rhetorical battle is living in glass houses and throwing stones at the other side.
Most of all, we’re sick of the incitement, the self-righteousness, the certainty, the maximalism, the rage-bait, the bullying, the demonization, the good guys/bad guys narratives, the harassment, the ‘de-normalization’ and the inability to tolerate disagreement. All, again, on the Left and the Right alike.
Most of us know that the Israeli government has behaved appallingly over the last few years. What happened in Gaza began as a defensive war but became a war of annihilation, with horrifying amounts of death and an aim, among some at least, to destroy Gazan society. But most of us also know that Israel is not a colonialist enterprise because Jews have no home country to which they can return, that Hamas is evil, that Jewish ties to the Land of Israel date back thousands of years, and that the Jewish state, for better or for worse, has been a reality for almost 80 years and is not going to self-destruct.
At the end of the day, whatever some left-wing activists or right-wing billionaires might like to happen in the Middle East, neither Israelis nor Palestinians are going anywhere. Eventually, in ten years or a hundred, these groups will have to live alongside each other, in one form or another. The clock cannot be turned back. Coexistence is the only way.
The post Coexistence is the only way and one state is a fantasy appeared first on The Forward.
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Ontario Jewish community saddened, but not shocked, by shootout outside synagogue
(JTA) — TORONTO – Doug Warren, 56, was attending Kol Nidre services at the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville, Ontario on the eve of Yom Kippur on Sunday. Prayers were just about to begin when he heard the gunshots.
“The rabbi had just started to call us into the sanctuary. We were stepping inside, and we heard this loud bang, and we all stopped,” Warren, a member of the congregation, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It sounded like someone was banging the window or the door.”
It was a 29-year-old former Canadian soldier exchanging gunfire with a police officer stationed outside the synagogue. The shooter, Sean Ward 29, of Quinte West, Ontario., died from his wounds on Tuesday. The officer, Const. Jeff Smith, a 13-year veteran of the force, remains in the hospital in critical condition.
Little is known of Ward, who served in the Canadian military from 2017 to 2022, and was never deployed.
“We knew this was going to happen,” Warren, a member of Sons of Jacob and a resident of Belleville. told JTA. “We’ve been saying as Jews that we’re very concerned with the rise of antisemitism. What did you think was going to happen? People weren’t taking it seriously.”
As the gunfire continued, congregants scrambled to find safety. “Some people suggested we should go to the basement, others said we should go out the back door,” he recalls. “At the same time, you’re just frozen because you don’t know what’s going on or what to do. Eventually the shots stopped.”
Warren said the congregation is extremely grateful to Smith, who was stationed outside the synagogue in an unmarked vehicle. “This guy’s a hero. I can tell you the gunman was coming for us inside, and he was trying to take out our armed protection first,” he said. “We’re praying for [Smith’s] recovery.”
Once police arrived at Sons of Jacob, they instructed everyone to wait inside until the area was clear. Congregants were then taken to the Belleville police station, where they were offered donuts and coffee, which Warren said they politely declined on account of fasting for Yom Kippur.
Richard Marceau, General Counsel and Senior Vice President of The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, echoed Warren’s concerns. “I wish I could say that I was surprised or shocked, but I was not,” says Marceau. “Unfortunately, in 2026 in Canada, we’ve come to expect this type of thing. It just tells us that the promise of Canada has been broken.”
The Belleville shooting came two days after the arrest of 19 year-old Alexander Parfitt after posting online threats to shoot up a synagogue in Southern Ontario.
Marceau said that Canadian politicians have not sufficiently addressed the threat of antisemitism. “There has been an all-level failure in the political sector and in law enforcement,” he said. “It is a failure to understand the threats that Jews are facing.”
According to Marceau, anti-Israel and anti-Zionist discourse have also contributed to rising antisemitism and endangered Canadian Jews. “Anti-Zionism is driving violence against Canadians, and the double standard against Israel is playing a role,” Marceau said. “Politicians need a clear plan, not just to talk about extremist ideologies, organizations and foreign state actors. There needs to be a meeting of all levels of government to ensure that the extremist networks are disrupted.”
Anti-Israel sentiment was a point of contention Sunday evening. Canadian Jewish politician and leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) Avi Lewis posted on X shortly after 8 p.m. that on Yom Kippur he was “reflecting on the fact that we have not done our part to stop an ongoing genocide being committed in our name.”
About an hour earlier, Ward opened fire outside Sons of Jacob. It was not clear whether Lewis knew the shooting had occurred when he had posted. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Canadian Member of Parliament Anthony Housefather responded to Lewis’ post, stating that “holding Canadian Jews and Jews across the world collectively responsible for events over which they have no control is despicable.”
Lewis said in an post the following day that the attack “is yet another reminder of the work that remains to create a Canada that is truly safe for people of all faiths, including Jewish people – to worship, to come together, to live without fear.” In a press conference he rejected claims that he was collectively blaming Jews for Israel’s actions.
Despite the events Warren witnessed on Sunday evening, he remains assured in the resilience of his local Jewish community. Unable to access their synagogue, Warren says the Sons of Jacob congregation gathered at a Best Western hotel on Monday evening for services.
“We want to keep going, but we know it’s not going to be easy. We might get emotional when we first get back inside the synagogue, and we’ll just have to work through that,” he says. “This will not stop us.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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