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Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022
(JTA) — All year long, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports about the deaths of Jewish newsmakers in our community. To close out the year, we wanted to turn our attention to people who may not have been such household names but whose stories deserve to be remembered.
Here, with the help of readers who shared the names of people they are remembering, we recall 18 Jews who shaped their local communities and made a difference in the lives of those close to them. They include rabbis whose impact extended for decades, teachers who inspired generations of students and activists who were working to build a better world. May their memories be a blessing.
Harriet Bograd
A champion of emerging Jewish communities in far-flung places.
Harriet Bograd, center, her husband Ken Klein, left, and daughter Margie on a visit to the Sefwi Wiawso Jewish community in Ghana in an undated photo. (Courtesy Kulanu, Inc)
Harriet Bograd, who as president of the nonprofit Kulanu supported emerging Jewish communities in Africa, Asia and other places far beyond the usual centers of Jewish life, died on Sept. 17 in a Manhattan hospital. She was 79. A Yale-educated lawyer and a stalwart at the West End Synagogue, she was inspired by a visit in 2004 to a remote village in Ghana, where about two dozen families considered themselves Jewish. In the years to come, she and Kulanu would provide support to emerging Jewish communities in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala, the Philippines and more. She once said of her work at Kulanu, “after the Holocaust and the decimation of Jewish communities in Arab lands, the idea [is] that we’re establishing Jewish communities that have their own richness and variety.”
Henry Berg-Brousseau
Transgender activist from Kentucky
Henry Berg-Brousseau (Courtesy Human Rights Campaign)
Henry Berg-Brousseau grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied history, political science and Jewish studies at George Washington University, where he was a founding member of an LGBTQ+ fraternity. He had recently gotten a major promotion at the Human Rights Campaign when he died by suicide in his Arlington, Virginia, home, on Dec. 16 at age 24. “Henry spent his life working to extend grace, compassion and understanding to everyone but especially to the vulnerable and marginalized. This grace, compassion and understanding was not always returned to him,” his mother, the Kentucky state legislator Karen Berg, wrote in a statement that criticized lawmakers who advance anti-LGBTQ views. She added, “He was doing work that was important to him to make the world a more accepting place. At 24 years old. he had finally found a community but that could not undo the brokenness that he already felt.”
Rabbi Simcha Krauss
Orthodox advocate for women’s rights
Rabbi Simcha Krauss speaks at a dinner hosted by Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi in his honor on Feb. 5, 2014. (Courtesy Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi)
Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a leading figure of Modern Orthodox Judaism who was a forceful advocate for women’s rights within Orthodoxy, died Jan. 20 at 85. Krauss’s efforts, which included creating a rabbinical court to support “agunot” — women whose husbands refused to divorce them — frequently earned him scorn from traditionalists within Orthodoxy. But many others saw him as a “gentle giant” who wielded his years of study and experience to fight for women’s rights in Jewish law. Krauss was born in Romania and came to the United States in 1948. Coming from a long line of rabbis, Krauss studied at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, and later studied with the Modern Orthodox luminary Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Krauss led the Young Israel of Hillcrest for 25 years. During his years in Queens, Krauss taught Talmud at Yeshiva University and began to get more involved in issues related to the role of women in Orthodoxy. He moved to Israel in 2005, and in 2014 came back to New York to found the International Beit Din, or religious court, to work on agunot cases. “Some say it is a modern revolution,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “I say that’s the way you should do it.”
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni
A survivor and scholar who teased out the many voices of the Talmud
Survivor and Talmud scholar Rabbi David Weiss Halivni was associated with Columbia University for 35 years. (Chaim Meyersdorf/Wikimedia Commons)
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, the Talmud scholar and Columbia University professor, died June 29 at age 94. A Holocaust survivor and refugee raised in Sighet, Romania, he earned his doctorate and taught for many years at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, until leaving the institution in 1983 over its decision to ordain women rabbis. He later became dean of the rabbinical school of the Union for Traditional Judaism, a movement created by rabbis and scholars who similarly broke with the Conservative movement. In works like his multi-volume opus “Mekorot u’Mesorot,” or “Sources and Traditions,” he galvanized the world of Talmud study by treating Jewish text as a living, mutable conversation across generations, as opposed to a static document. Halivni’s approach to learning was the “corollary to loving the text so much that you just had to understand it to its fullest, whatever tools would enable you to do so,” wrote Rabbi Ethan Tucker in an appreciation.
Moris Albahari
A remnant of a Ladino-speaking past
Moris Albahari, shown in a documentary about his story called “Saved by Language,” was a pillar of Sarajevo’s Jewish community. (Courtesy of Brian Kirschen)
Moris Albahari was 11 when the Ustaša, Bosnia’s Nazi collaborator force, came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac, the country’s equivalent of Auschwitz. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and David was able to help his son escape from the train. Because Moris knew Ladino, the Jewish language that is mixture of medieval Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages, he was able to speak with the Italian soldier who saved him. Ladino would save him several more times before the end of the war, but afterwards, with most of Sarajevo’s Jews dead or forever dispersed, he spoke the language largely at home. At one point the director of Sarajevo’s airport, Albahari was a leader within Bosnia’s Jewish community. “It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevok,” said Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino in Israel. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members.”
Rachel Brodie
A “master Jewish educator” whose influence was vast
Rachel Brodie (Courtesy of J. The Jewish News of Northern California)
Rachel Brodie was unassuming and humble yet through her work as an educator had a vast influence on the Jewish community in the Bay Area of California, where she lived, and beyond. Brodie was the co-founder Jewish Milestones, an educational resource for Jewish lifecycle ceremonies that launched in 2004 as The Ritualist. She also served as “chief Jewish officer” at the Jewish community Center of San Francisco, a position created just for her, from 2011 to 2016. “To be in Rachel’s presence was to be illuminated by her wit, her laughter, and her fierce and tender heart,” wrote the founders of the Jewish Studio Project in Berkeley, where she had been a senior educator. “To learn with her was to be stimulated, delighted, and transformed.” Brodie, 55, died on April 11 after falling at her home in Berkeley.
Rabbi Steven Sager
“Leader, mentor, poet” in North Carolina and beyond
Rabbi Steven Sager at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, in 2017. (Courtesy Anna Carson DeWitt)
When Rabbi Steven Sager died May 15 at 71 after an extended battle with pancreatic cancer, he was mourned not only by his family and his congregants at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, from which he retired in 2011 after 32 years, but by a rabbinic and Hebrew poetry community spanning the globe. “Steve was a beautiful and deep human being,” the Israeli poet Rivka Miriam wrote. “I generally do not believe in translation, especially translation of poetry. It seems to me that every language has an inner secret that cannot be transposed into another vessel. Yet, when Steve translated my poems I had a different feeling — I felt he entered an inner layer, one that lies beneath any language, a layer carrying a hidden code.”
Nate Geller
Devoted to building stronger Jewish communities
Nate Geller, at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey. A colleague’s daughter made the “Nate” sign, which he took home and hung on his mantel. (Courtesy)
Nate Geller died on Jan. 24 at age 63, after a struggle with leukemia that he faced with characteristic humility, faith and optimism. His death was a blow to his colleagues at 70 Faces Media (JTA’s parent company); to his synagogue community in Teaneck, New Jersey; and to the Jewish communal world to which he had dedicated his life since graduating from the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University in 1983. In the hours after his death, chat rooms and email boxes filled up with loving tributes to Nate, remarkable for their consistency: Friends and colleagues remarked on his gentleness, his passion for Jewish learning, his commitment to Israel, his willingness not just to hear but to listen when a colleague kvelled or kvetched. Most of all, they remembered his devotion to his family: his wife Lyn Light Geller, herself a gentle and passionate force among “Jewish professionals,” his grown children Aliza, Ariana and Koby, Koby’s wife Talia, and their kids, Annaelle and Judah. Said one colleague and fellow congregant, “There is an enormous Nate-shaped void in the world now.”
Hedi Fried
A voice for Holocaust remembrance in Sweden
Holocaust survivor Hedi Fried stands between Sweden’s culture minister and handball player Linnea Claeson during a counterprotest against a neo-Nazi demonstration in Stockholm, Aug. 25, 2018. (Pontus Lundahl/AFP via Getty Images)
Born in 1924 in Sighet, in what was then Hungary and is now Romania, Hedi Fried survived Auschwitz and settled in Sweden, where she became a psychologist and advocate for Holocaust survivors. She created Cafe 84, a salon for survivors in Stockholm, and spoke widely about her experiences during the Holocaust, gathering some of the most common exchanges in “Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust,” published in English in 2019. “Your solidarity was boundless and no question too difficult to answer. You were brave, generous, dedicated and extremely wise,” Christina Gamstorp, the director of Stockholm’s Jewish museum, wrote in a remembrance. “Now your voice has fallen silent but not your message. It lives on in everyone who met you, in your texts, books, films and your belief that man is still good — and that it is possible to build a society free from antisemitism and racism, which threaten our entire existence.” Fried, who had three children, died in November at 98.
Rabbi Sy Dresner
The “most arrested rabbi in America”
Rabbi Martin Freedman, right, and Rabbi Israel Dresner,center, are taken to the Tallahassee city building where they were charged with unlawful assembly after they and 10 other “Freedom Riders” were arrested attempting to eat at the Tallahassee airport in June 1961. (Getty Photos)
Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner, who demonstrated with Martin Luther King Jr. and was sometimes called the “most arrested rabbi in America,” died Jan. 13. He was 92. A Freedom Rider in the 1960s, Dresner built a career as a social justice-oriented Reform rabbi who was active in the fight against the Vietnam War and was a vocal opponent of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dresner was born on the Lower East Side in 1929 to an Orthodox family and grew up in Brooklyn, where his father ran a delicatessen. He attended yeshivas as a child but went on to become a Reform rabbi after serving in the Korean War and working on a kibbutz in Israel. “We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria,” he said after an arrest in 1964 outside a segregated motel in St. Augustine, Florida. “We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.”
Eli Evans
‘Poet laureate of Southern Jews’
Eli Evans, seen here in a picture from a trip to Israel in the 1970s, was “equally at home in New York.” (Courtesy Josh Evans)
Born in 1936 in Durham, North Carolina, where his father would become the first Jewish mayor and his mother the founder of Hadassah’s first chapter in the South, Eli Evans remained tied to his native home despite spending his adult life in New York City, where he was a prominent grant-maker whose giving fueled the creation of “Sesame Street” in both the United States and Israel. He wrote several memoirs about Southern Jews and also included the South in his philanthropy, which he pursued at multiple foundations according to an activist philosophy that helped launch the Children’s Defense Fund, seeded the South with Black lawyers who became local civil rights leaders and built ties between Israeli and Egyptian scientists after their countries made peace in 1979. “Eli was a Southern gentleman who interacted with the Jewish establishment and strengthened American Jewish life, without losing his Southern Jewish soul,” said Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history Jonathan Sarna. “It was a privilege to have known him.” Evans died July 26 in Manhattan of complications of COVID-19, after a period of declining health.
Sheryl Grossman
A lifelong advocate for people with disabilities
Sheryl Grossman was a Jewish disability activist. (Screenshot from 2021 JDAIM Interview Series at Towson University)
Sheryl Grossman stood small, at just 4’3″ and 48 pounds, but in the world of Jewish disability advocacy she loomed large, as both the founder of a Facebook group for people living with Bloom’s Syndrome and as a board member of Yad Hachazakah, the Jewish Disability Empowerment Center. She died March 28 at age 46, the result of a Bloom’s Syndrome-linked cancer. “I don’t think anyone will ever know just how much work Sheryl did during the pandemic to help Jewish communities support their most vulnerable neighbors who were in the hospital or isolated at home with COVID,” said Shoshana Finkel, a law student who met Grossman when she was an intern at the American Association of People with Disabilities. “She didn’t feel the need to share her accomplishments; that was never what the work was about for her.”
Dara Goldman
A professor of Spanish and Jewish studies in her prime
Dara Goldman was a professor of Spanish and Jewish studies at the University of Illinois. (Courtesy U of I)
Dara Goldman was preparing for graduation at the University of Illinois, where she was a professor of Spanish and chair of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, and for the American Jewish Historical Society conference, when she died May 13 of a heart attack. She was 51. A graduate of Columbia and Emory universities, Goldman produced scholarship so diverse that she was affiliated with eight units within the University of Illinois; most recently, she was researching Jewish cultural production in Cuba, where she brought resources for the Jewish community during her research trips, and co-edited a volume on 21st-century Jewish writing. “With her characteristic wit, she would often joke that she was a Jewish woman who took a wrong turn at diaspora,” said a remembrance published by the university. “But jokes aside, she could be at the same time a Jewish woman from New Jersey and an adopted daughter of Puerto Rico and Cuba, two cultures that she knew intimately and loved very deeply. … The echoes of her inimitable, hearty laughter will resonate within our halls for a long time.”
Yaakov Shalev
A beloved family man whose story was Israel’s
Yaakov Shalev, seated third from right, helped organize Iraqi Jews’ exodus to Israel. (Courtesy Asaf Shalev)
“When I arrived for a visit with family in Israel in my early twenties, my septum piercing outraged nearly everyone at our Shabbat morning gathering. Even my younger cousins badgered me to remove it. It took my elderly grandfather, Yaakov Shalev, to quiet everyone down and declare that I am his same beloved grandson, with or without the piercing.
“Calm, open-minded, steadfast, Saba Yaakov, as we called him, passed away peacefully in February at age 92 in Holon, with his five children at his side. He spent his last few hours listening to the melodies of his youth in Baghdad, the music of giants such as Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, and Fairuz.
“Saba Yaakov helped organize the exodus of Iraqi Jewry to Israel in 1950 and then enlisted in the Israeli military as an airplane mechanic. He taught himself how to build houses and became a successful contractor in the 1960s. But he soon decided the stress was too much and opened a shop in south Tel Aviv where he fabricated canvases for Israeli artists and framed their paintings. He kept the shop running for more than 40 years, going to work every day until he was in his eighties.” — Asaf Elia-Shalev, JTA reporter
Trude Feldman
A journalist who specialized in Yom Kippur interviews
Trude Feldman interviews Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1978. (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)
The daughter of a rabbinical family, Trude Feldman launched her career covering the 1961 trial of Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she put her training as a Hebrew teacher to use by teaching the language to the Nazi’s lawyer. (She also taught Hebrew to famed converts Sammy Davis Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor, and to Paul Newman on the set of “Exodus.”) But it was in her coverage of American presidents that Feldman truly made her mark, becoming famous for scoring presidential exit interviews and Yom Kippur interviews, which she would pitch as an opportunity for redemption. That’s what got her the first interview with Bill Clinton after he copped in 1998 to yes, having sex with that woman. The mainstream media mocked her for her softballs — “Saturday Night Live” once did so in a sketch — but those close to her understood their value. “The joke, however, was on everyone else,” her nephew, Rabbi Daniel Feldman, wrote in a remembrance. “Paired with her signature persistence, her style more often elicited not puff but profundity, more sincerity than sugar. The unique access she earned — baffling to some, understood to the astute, acknowledged by all — yielded memorable results.”
Harlene Winnick Appelman
A revolutionary leader in Jewish education
Harlene Winnick Appelman in an undated photo provided by the Covenant Foundation.
Born in upstate New York, Harlene Appelman’s career in Jewish education took off in 1982 when she became the director of family life education at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. There, she pioneered interactive Jewish learning, bringing children out of dry frontal settings into a more tactile experience of Judaism. After joining the board of the Covenant Foundation, which funds and promotes Jewish education, in 1994, she became its director in 2005 and held that role until 2021, allowing her to influence a generation of Jewish educators. Many of them mourned her death at 75 on Aug. 18; the cause was cancer. “I am one of an entire congregation of Jewish educational leaders who Harlene mentored, supported, prodded and constructively critiqued, promoted, and made feel special,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, in an online remembrance. “I hope that in her memory, I will find ever new ways to help more Jewish rabbis and educators feel seen, heard, capable, and motivated.” This month, the Covenant Foundation initiated a new prize, in Jewish family education, in Appelman’s honor.
Tom Tugend
An indefatigable journalist
Tom Tugend in his Los Angeles home, Aug. 3, 2021. (Jacob Gurvis)
Tom Tugend was 13 when he and his family left their home in Berlin in 1939. He was 97 when he died Dec. 7 in Los Angeles, where he had lived for most of his life. In the intervening decades, he fought in the U.S. Army and the Israel Defense Forces; covered Jewish news for a wide array of publications, including JTA; and enjoyed 66 years of marriage during which he and his wife raised three daughters. “His authenticity came through to anyone who knew him,” said one of them, the journalist Alina Tugend. “He was a hero to many people.”
Judah Samet
A two-time survivor of antisemitic terror
Judah Samet stands next to his portrait, part of Luigi Toscano’s “Lest We Forget” project at the University of Pittsburgh in 2019. (Photo by Hector Corante, courtesy of Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh)
Judah Samet became a national face of Pittsburgh’s 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting because he survived: He had been running late that day, so was not inside the building when 11 of his fellow congregants were murdered. Months later, he was President Donald Trump’s guest to the State of the Union address. The experience was both very different Samet’s childhood in Hungary, where he was born in February 1938, and in some ways similar. As a young child, Samet was forced by the Nazis from his home and shipped with his family first to a labor camp in Austria and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After a stop in Israel, he moved to Pittsburgh in the 1950s, ultimately joining his father-in-law’s jewelry business there and remaining a committed community member until his death at 84 on Sept. 27.
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Possible Platner replacements and their divergent stands on Israel
(JTA) — Following the implosion of Graham Platner — a harsh critic of Israel who lobbed a parting shot about “genocide” in Gaza in his video Wednesday quitting the Maine Senate race — a number of possible replacements have emerged. And as their names have surfaced, interest and questions about their positions on issues of concern to the Jewish community also have arisen.
There is a significant range of views among the possible candidates on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee pro-Israel lobby, arms sales to Israel and whether there was a genocide in Gaza, based on their past and recent comments.
In statements to JTA, pro-Israel groups Democratic Majority for Israel and the Jewish Democratic Council of America both urged the party to nominate a candidate aligned with their values; Platner had drawn concern from a number of Jewish groups because of his covered-up Nazi tattoo and stance on Israel.
Some of Platner’s former volunteers have said they want his replacement to fit his mold as a progressive and Israel critic who is taking on establishment politics in the effort to unseat GOP Sen. Susan Collins. After Platner dropped out, the Maine Democratic Party announced on Wednesday that to fill the candidate vacancy it will hold a nominating convention made up of about 600 people selected by county-level Democratic committees. The timing of the convention is not yet clear; the deadline for naming a replacement is July 27.
“There is an unprecedented amount of energy and enthusiasm among Maine Democrats, driven in part by many of the dedicated volunteers and supporters who were inspired by Graham Platner’s campaign,” the party said in a statement. “We look forward to coming together and harnessing that energy around our new nominee as we work to defeat Susan Collins in November.”
Here are some of the replacements being mentioned and what they’ve said about Jewish-related issues, Israel and AIPAC. None of the possible nominees responded to JTA’s requests for comment.
Nirav Shah, epidemiologist and healthcare executive
Nirav Shah, who ran for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in June, finishing second in ranked-choice voting, told reporter David Weigel on Tuesday that he supports an arms embargo on Israel, and he accuses the country of having committing genocide. Shah also said that in keeping with his policy he would not accept funds or an endorsement from AIPAC.
Shah has touted himself as a political outsider like Platner and said Tuesday that he had “no establishment support, and no major political endorsements” when he was running for governor. He has called on possible Platner replacement to participate in a televised debate and “multiple” town halls across the state to make the nomination process transparent.
Troy Jackson, logger and union leader
Troy Jackson, who has backing from the left, had a close political alliance with Platner until calling for him to step aside on Monday and officially launching his campaign for the nomination on Wednesday.
A number of Platner’s supporters have called for the party to nominate Jackson, who finished third behind Shah in the gubernatorial primary. He’s said little publicly related to Israel, but in his run for governor, Jackson had the backing of a number of left-wing, strongly pro-Palestinian politicians, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Rep. Ro Khanna, as well as Maine’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter.
Sanders’ group Our Revolution and left-wing streamer Hasan Piker — a staunch Israel critic who’s drawn accusations of antisemitism — are both backing Jackson to be the new Senate nominee.
In 2024, at the Maine State Democratic Convention, Jackson, who served as convention chairman, reportedly attempted to quiet down a small group of protesters who called for a ceasefire in Gaza and called Maine Rep. Jared Golden a “war criminal” during a video celebrating the Jewish congressman.
“I believe in the ability of people to demonstrate and protest,” Jackson said amid the outburst. “There is a time for that.”
Shenna Bellows, Maine secretary of state
Before assuming her current role, a position that is filled by state lawmakers every two years, Shenna Bellows served as the executive director of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine.
In May, Bellows spoke at the Jewish-Asian Friendship Dinner, hosted by the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine. Bellows said she began working with the JCA during her time leading the Holocaust museum, and said she’d attended numerous events that discussed “many stories of Holocaust survivors and of genocide around the world, and how important it is that we stand up for all of each other, and for unity, and the love that we have for all of each other.”
Bellows also commended the JCA for its response to the surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence over the winter, which included mutual aid to support people who felt unsafe leaving their homes.
Bellows does not appear to have commented extensively on Israel, although she signed Maine Gov. Janet Mills’ 2023 proclamation recognizing the 75th anniversary of the founding of modern Israel that wished the country “a peaceful and prosperous future.”
Jordan Wood, ex-congressional staffer
A former staffer for former California Rep. Katie Porter, Jordan Wood spoke extensively about his views on Israel and AIPAC in an interview as a Senate candidate in Maine last fall. He was the first Democrat to enter the race for Collins’ Senate seat before being overshadowed by Platner and later suspending his campaign to run for the House.
Wood told Democratic commentator Kaivan Shroff that he would support Sanders’ resolution to restrict offensive weapons sales to Israel but backs the continuation of aid to the Jewish state with conditions.
Wood said he believes Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, but stopped short of accusing the country of genocide, pointing to a connection between that accusation and a rise in antisemitism.
“I’ve hesitated on it because I’m also seeing a real rise in antisemitism in the United States,” Wood said. “My husband is Jewish, and the acts of violence toward Jewish Americans is very much connected to the language that we use.”
Wood added that it would be “a huge deal for the United States Congress to designate what’s going on in Gaza as a genocide officially.”
“There could be consequences to that of US citizens that have served in the IDF,” he said. “Do they get prosecuted?”
Wood also said he would not take money from AIPAC, and added that there is a “huge amount of distrust” of the lobbying organization among Democratic voters.
“I believe the only way to truly prove to a voter that you are voting and prioritizing policies in their best interest, and for our country’s best interest, is to remove any perception of corruption or misdealing,” Wood said.
Dan Kleban, brewery owner
Dan Kleban, who announced on Wednesday that he is back in the race for Senate after having suspended his campaign in October and endorsing Gov. Janet Mills, who dropped out before the primary after trailing in the polls, has a very different approach from Platner to the U.S.-Israel relationship.
In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Kleban refrained from accusing Israel of committing genocide, instead calling the military campaign in Gaza an “absolute tragedy.” Kleban said he would condition arms sales to Israel.
When Kleban — a political novice and co-founder and co-owner of the Maine Beer Company — first launched his Senate campaign last fall, he told Politico that he did not support the recent resolution from Sanders to block certain arms sales to Israel.
“I believe Israel has a right to defend itself,” he said. “I don’t think that we solve the horrific humanitarian crisis in Gaza by disarming Israel and exposing them to harm.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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For generations of Jews, this cookbook defined the journey from immigration to assimilation
Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of the Settlement Cook Book
By Nora L. Rubel
Columbia University Press, 232 pages, $28
It was an inspiration for bestselling cookbook writer Mark Bittman, a trusted reference for James Beard, the first recipe book owned by New York Times food critic Mimi Sheraton, and the source of the recipes that famed Jewish cookbook writer Joan Nathan grew up with: The Settlement Cook Book, across 40 editions, sold over 2 million copies and defined Jewish American food.
In her book Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of the Settlement Cook Book, Nora L. Rubel traces the book from its birth as a 1901 fundraising pamphlet by Elizabeth “Lizzie” Black Kander, a kosher cooking-class instructor for Milwaukee immigrants, to its life as a hardcover distributed globally by Simon & Schuster into the 1990s.
For many Jewish Americans, the cookbook brings back memories of seder meals and their mother’s brisket. I didn’t grow up with a dog-eared copy of my grandma’s, but that didn’t mean I found the book any less interesting. Rubel, a University of Rochester professor of religion, discovered The Settlement Cook Book in graduate school. In it, she found not just a snapshot of the Jewish American kitchen throughout the 20th century, but also a continuous debate over what counts as American, conducted in the language of potato soup and noodle kugel.
Rubel credits Kander with pioneering “culinary pluralism” at a time when social reformers pushed immigrants to rid themselves of their garlicky and spiced ethnic cuisine in favor of a blander New England “diet of cornmeal mush and pea soup.“ Kander, a Reform Jew, aimed to help recently arrived Eastern European Jews integrate into American society. Unlike Christian reformers, Kander, an ethnic minority herself, envisioned an America where immigrant groups belonged.
The first edition contained kosher recipes for traditional Ashkenazi fare, but the Russian Jewish immigrant women in Kander’s class were also being prepared for domestic work in the Milwaukee homes of wealthier German Jews like Kander who did not keep kosher and had a taste for ethnic cuisine. Thus, the matzo ball recipe appears on the same page as the mulligatawny soup, and filled fish (gefilte fish) sits alongside scalloped oysters.
Rubel argues that, by not placing Jewish or other ethnic dishes in a separate section, the Settlement Cook Book is the among the first to define modern American cuisine through its immigrants. “Kander’s vision of American diversity,” she writes, “suggests that ethnic recipes are on equal footing with each other and traditional ‘American’ recipes, thus framing the United States as a multiethnic society.”
The ethnic mix and straightforward, simple recipes made Kander’s book the most successful of the era’s many charitable cookbooks. It funded the Abraham Lincoln House, which offered programming for impoverished Jews, as well as the Milwaukee Jewish Center, and helped establish Milwaukee’s first nursery school. By mid-century it had expanded from helping Jewish immigrants to funding programs for the broader public.
Kander was blunt that her philanthropy was rooted in what she called a “selfish motive.” The affluent German-Jewish community in Milwaukee feared the newly arrived Orthodox, unassimilated Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews might spark American antisemitism, which would threaten their own status. “To protect ourselves, our own reputation in the community,” Rubel quotes Kander, “we must work with tact, with heart and soul to better the home conditions of our people . . . and teach them habits of industry and cleanliness.”
The quote is a reminder that despite the framing of Kander as a multiculturalist, at its heart, The Settlement Cook Book was an assimilationist project. As Rubel notes in her introduction, “liking foodways does not automatically translate into welcoming the people who make it.” A century ago, Americans ate chow mein while backing the Chinese Exclusion Act; many today happily order tacos and arepas, while supporting ICE raids targeting Mexican and Venezuelan immigrants. Still, the book captures a real push-and-pull into what counts as American– with the immigrants being Americanized, inevitably changing what it means to be American. .
Unsurprisingly, many Jewish immigrants didn’t appreciate Kander’s “selfish motive.” While young Jewish women were enthusiastic about the classes, their parents resented the patronizing German-Jewish teachers. Kander’s plan to train domestic workers backfired, the immigrant girls rejected being “neat little housekeepers,” preferring clerical and garment work. Rubel notes that the Jewish women avoided work at the time associated with African Americans. “In a country with a distinct color line,” she wrote, “Jews found their whiteness still in question, tenuous at best.”
In response, Kander pitched the cooking classes as preparation for marriage, as captured in the book’s original title: The Way to a Man’s Heart: The Settlement Cook Book. For decades, the book was a quintessential bridal gift, yet its crowdsourced nature allowed it to evolve with the times.
Wartime editions included canning instructions; the book went dry during Prohibition; and new gadgets and processed foods were introduced to keep up with the post-war kitchen. By the 1970s, however, the nonprofit organization that held the rights to The Settlement Cook Book resisted change, and became a guardian of tradition. The book stubbornly kept old fashioned housekeeping tips like how to remove stains with cod-liver oil and a section entitled “When There Is No Maid.” Only in the last edition, published in 1991, did an editor prevail to have pad Thai, curried lentil and refried beans appear alongside kugel and kreplach, altering the book’s content, but returning to Kander’s multicultural instincts.
Most keenly, Rubel examines the paradox of what makes The Settlement Cook Book so profoundly Jewish, given its massive popularity among gentiles and while it had many Jewish recipes, one would never know from its cover. Simon & Schuster, which took over the book in 1954, further chipped away at any hint of Jewishness in favor of mass appeal.
But as was the case with mid-century Jews assimilating into middle-class America, the cookbook’s Jewishness was not erased; it was merely coded, obvious to anyone looking for it. It’s precisely the cosmopolitan blending of recipes that makes The Settlement Cook Book a truer representation of how Jewish Americans actually ate than a Haddasah cookbook or the popular 1958 Jennie Grossinger’s The Art of Jewish Cooking. “Unlike kosher cookbooks that eschew treyf,” writes Rubel, “it is what this cookbook includes, rather than what it omits, that codes the text as Jewish.”
Ultimately, this coded nature led to the book’s greatest irony. As mid-century Jewish Americans moved to the suburbs, they yearned for the food and customs of the old neighborhood, if not the old country. Once a tool to Americanize Jews, The Settlement Cook Book became the definitive guide for American Jews who wanted to remember how to make matzo brei and gefilte fish. Rubel argues that the book itself became a marker of a Jewish home without explicitly announcing religion or ethnicity.
Though nostalgia kept The Settlement Cook Book alive in its final decades, and has kept it in the Jewish American consciousness, I have no memory of my family ever using it and have zero nostalgia for it. The recipes Rubel reproduces in her book might be of historical interest, but a 1910 chop suey recipe with canned mushrooms and chicken gizzards is decidedly dated today. And yet, reading this book, I felt incredibly seen.
That is because, as early as 1901, Lizzie Black Kander defined part of being Jewish in America as a cosmopolitan embrace of the world. The 1921 edition, for instance, includes a “Chinese Supper” menu as well as a list of Passover Seder recipes, “allowing Jews,” as Rubel puts it, “to have their gefilte fish and eat chop suey too.”
Yet 125 years since Lizzie Kander wrote her recipe pamphlet, it’s clear that, when it comes to building a truly multicultural and tolerant society, enjoying both gefilte fish and chop suey is the easy part.
The post For generations of Jews, this cookbook defined the journey from immigration to assimilation appeared first on The Forward.
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Israelis are experiencing a new kind of international boycott
Israelis are not facing formal sanctions from Western corporations. No international business coalition has announced a boycott. No major bank or airline has openly declared that Israeli customers are unwelcome.
Yet many Israelis are increasingly encountering something quieter and more difficult to define: a new norm of friction and the sense that when systems fail for Israelis, nobody feels much urgency to fix them.
Consider a recent experience I had with the United Kingdom’s NatWest bank.
When NatWest stopped sending authentication texts to Israeli phone numbers in the spring, I assumed it was just a technical error. Banks malfunction. Security systems fail. But then the bank’s mobile app stopped properly recognizing my Israeli number — despite that number having functioned perfectly well beforehand. Customer service representatives offered contradictory explanations. The fallback solution was supposed to be a physical card reader for secure logins. I requested one repeatedly. Nothing arrived for months. Then, in early May, a representative informed me that NatWest apparently was not mailing card readers to Israel, either.
On a visit to London, I went to a branch, where they offered no explanations; they put me on the phone with customer service, where the agent repeated that they were no longer engaging in contact with Israeli phone numbers or addresses, due to “war tensions.” So I emailed every executive I could find to ask, directly, if the bank was boycotting Israel.
After lengthy exchanges, I was told that Israeli access was removed earlier in the year. The bank insisted the restrictions were not political and not specific to Israel, but rather part of broader fraud prevention measures. So I asked which other countries were affected. This, the bank refused to answer.
On its own, this could still be dismissed as another case of corporate opacity mixed with bureaucratic risk aversion. (Eventually, a physical card reader did make its way to me, still with no clear explanation for the delay.) But it was not the first strange interaction I had experienced.
In early 2024, I ordered a novel from Amazon. The book arrived at my home in Tel Aviv damaged and obviously used, despite being sold as new. Customer service initially handled the issue professionally, immediately agreeing to replace the order. Then I provided my address. There was silence.
“I see this address is not on the map,” the representative finally said. “I only see Palestine.” Then the line disconnected.
An alarming interaction, but the representative was expressing a personal political view, not enforcing corporate policy. What proved more revealing was Amazon’s institutional indifference afterward. Despite repeated inquiries to the company’s press office, I never received a clear decrial of the customer service representative’s actions. The issue simply disappeared into a bureaucratic void.
That sorry episode was felicitous in a way: It inspired my first op-ed for the Forward.
Then came British Airways.
After BA canceled flights between Tel Aviv and London in 2025 following a Houthi missile strike near Ben-Gurion Airport, my wife and I scrambled to reconstruct an itinerary at enormous personal expense. Wars disrupt aviation. That part was understandable.
What followed afterward was not. Months passed in a maze of contradictory responses, partial refunds, bureaucratic evasions and compensation offers so absurd that they bordered on parody. Only after I contacted the airline’s press office identifying myself as a journalist did the company suddenly rediscover the ability to communicate. Even then, the process remained exhausting and opaque. We were compensated perhaps a third the value of the ticket lost, with no apology whatsoever.
None of these incidents independently prove anti-Israel discrimination. Banks mistreat customers. Airlines fail passengers. Customer service departments malfunction. Yet together they illustrate a kind of new atmosphere for Israelis.
The most profound sign of that atmosphere has come in academia. As a new report by the Technion documents, what was once an academic boycott of Israel evolved from highly visible protests toward a more diffuse climate of exclusion.
Jewish students in Sweden reported hiding their identities in academic environments. British surveys found that roughly one in five students said they would not want to live with a Jewish roommate. Canadian campus activism increasingly moved from symbolic rhetoric toward operational demands for universities to sever ties with Israeli institutions and withdraw investments.
My friend Bar Harel experienced this personally at Portugal’s University of Coimbra. After complaining about antisemitic graffiti, pro-Hamas and Hezbollah imagery, and slogans such as “No Jews wanted” around campus, Harel became a target. He was threatened online, publicly vilified, physically assaulted near campus and told his family “should burn in a second Holocaust.”
University authorities largely deflected responsibility. Only after he fled Portugal at the advice of Israeli and American diplomats did the state ombudsman finally issue a report that said the university had adopted a “posture of fundamental passivity” in response to his harassment, failing to investigate despite clear evidence.
In business and academia alike, organizations don’t need to announce formal sanctions to change Israeli experience. They simply begin treating Israel operationally troublesome.
Does all this come from antisemitism — or is it a form of quiet protest against Israel’s brutality during the past years’ wars, or the indefensible situation in the West Bank? Does it relate to the current right-wing government — and if so, is it fixable should the moderate opposition return to power?
I do not have definitive answers, and there’s probably a mix of reasons. But it is clear that Israelis are losing the global narrative with astounding speed, and unless this is countered, more formal boycotts are on the way.
The post Israelis are experiencing a new kind of international boycott appeared first on The Forward.
