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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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Lively Yiddish Forward columnist Miriam Hoffman has died
The Yiddish writer, Forverts columnist, playwright and Yiddish lecturer Miriam Hoffman passed away July 29 in Coral Springs, Florida. She was 90 years old.
Hoffman was a talented storyteller, as seen in the 2017 Forverts video about her, one of ten episodes in its documentary series, Yiddish Writers Monologues. In the 55-minute clip, she describes in dramatic detail her family’s journey from Siberia to a forced labor camp to a displaced persons camp and finally, to New York. The video is in Yiddish with English subtitles.
In a book, also published in 2017, A Breed Apart: A Miraculous Escape from Russia, she tells her life story again, this time in English.
For many years, Hoffman penned a lively column for the Forverts, where she commented, often with biting humor, on certain character types in Jewish society she disapproved of — like American-born Jews snubbing their noses at fellow Jews who had recently arrived from Europe, something she experienced first-hand.
She also wrote about the blatant sexism she encountered in the 1960s and ’70s among the leadership of Yiddish organizations like the Workmen’s Circle and the Congress for Jewish Culture.
But other essays had a serious, softer voice, like the one she told about her decision as a young teen to suddenly cut off her curly locks in order to look more “American” — and how her mother reacted to her daughter’s “rebellion.”
She also hosted a popular Yiddish radio program on the Forward station WEVD.
Hoffman loved the Yiddish theater and began writing plays herself. She and fellow playwright Rena Borow wrote the book for the musical, Songs of Paradise, based on the biblical poetry of Yiddish troubadour Itzik Manger. The show ran at NYC’s Public Theater and the Shakespeare Festival in 1989, drawing a rave review from The New York Times. Her plays were also staged in Montreal and in several European countries.
For 23 years, Hoffman was a popular Yiddish lecturer at Columbia University. In 2011, she published a Yiddish textbook, Key to Yiddish, that included not only lessons in grammar, but also passages on Eastern European Jewish history, customs, songs and holiday content.
I was personally most impressed with her dogged determination to preserve Yiddish as a spoken language with younger generations. In the 1960s, while teaching at the Sholem Aleichem Shul 21, an afternoon Yiddish school in the Bronx, she and three fellow Yiddish cultural activists — educator Gella Schweid Fishman, pianist-composer Malka Gottlieb and artist Tsirl Waletzky — published a series of Yiddish children’s books through a publishing house they created themselves, called Oyfgang (Sunrise).
As Hoffman and Schweid Fishman told me years later, the mood in the Yiddish world then was so pessimistic, and the attitude towards women so dismissive, that none of the Yiddish cultural organizations — including the Workers Circle and the Congress for Jewish Culture — showed any interest in publishing the books.
But Hoffman and her colleagues didn’t give up. An example of this concerned a musical Purim play they wrote and published in 1968, “Purim iz a shpil aza” (“Purim is a time to play”). On the book cover it gives the male name Gavriel Tolyes as the author. But this was a pseudonym; the real author was Hoffman.
“We understood that no one would take our book seriously if they found out that four women published it,” Hoffman told me. “So we took my mother’s name Tolye, and came up with the name Gavriel Tolyes.”
Years later, Hoffman translated the Purim play into English where it was performed and made into a video. This time, the author’s name was her own.
Hoffman was born Miriam Shmulevitsh in Tobolsk, Siberia in 1936. In 1950, her family immigrated to the United States where she studied Yiddish pedagogy at the Jewish Teachers Seminary until 1957. Years later, she finished her bachelor’s at the University of Miami and received a master’s from Columbia University in 1983.
During the 1970s she and her husband Mendl and two young sons, Avrom (Avi) and Binyomin, lived in Israel for several years where she hosted the first Yiddish television program in the Jewish state, together with the popular comedian Shimon Dzigan.
Hoffman often said that one of her main goals in life was to help instill Jewish pride among Jews of all ages in order to stem the tide of assimilation. In 2015 she, along with her son — the renowned Yiddish actor, director and producer, Avi Hoffman — launched the Yiddishkayt Initiative, an organization dedicated to bringing Jews back to their roots through lectures and performances that portray Jewish values and cultural traditions. For Hoffman, this was exactly what she had been waiting for.
Miriam Hoffman is survived by her two sons, Avi and Benjamin, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
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Are you there Hashem? It’s me, Clara
“I can complain no more of what brutal tongue-abuse I suffered today. I have exhausted all manners of expression for my grievances.”
I wish I could tell you I don’t recognize those words. I wish I could say they were written by a beleaguered 19th-century governess, or a soldier in the Continental Army afflicted with gangrene. Unfortunately, they were written by me. The day was May 20, 2016. I was 12 years old and full of spite.
I am not sure what, exactly, provoked me that day (since I had exhausted all manners of expression for my grievances), but judging from other angry rants found in this deceptively cute, panda-covered journal, it probably had something to do with: A) My obsession with school, B) My enemies, let’s call them Kyle and Reese, C) My parents’ attempts to discipline me, and D) My conviction that the whole world was conspiring against me. These were heavy burdens for a sixth-grader to bear. Fortunately, the school year was almost over. Reform Jewish summer camp was just around the bend, and I was praying for change. Literally.
“God, if you can hear me, please let me have an amazing camp-experience,” I wrote a few weeks before the session started. “It’s my only escape.” Also, while I had His ear, could He make sure I got a really good part (preferably Belle) in the summer musical, Beauty and the Beast? The previous year, in Aladdin, I’d been relegated to some sadsack ensemble role that clearly did not make use of my incalculable dramatic potential. Please, Hashem!!
But God had His work cut out for Him.
During my first summer, I had established a reputation for myself as a puritanical hardass thanks to my clashes with the popular girls of Bunk 15. Let’s call them Samantha, Madison and Lindsey. Lindsey slept in the bunk bed next to mine, and every night she would amuse the other girls by pretending that she was singing Taylor Swift hits in her sleep. This enraged me. I hung up towels around my bed so I could silent-scream in private. Soon, the trio began to whisper that I was “gossiping” about them. I don’t think the counselors bought that story, though, since successful gossiping requires you to spread lies to many people, and I knew around three. I spent seven weeks in non-stop kvetch mode, writing pathos-ridden letters home, crying a lot, and making petty demands on God in a prior journal that I am scared to open. It got so bad that the camp director had to call up my parents on vacation.
Yet when the long-awaited last day came and my parents loaded up the car with all my musty-smelling camp stuff to take me home, something inexplicable happened: On my first night back in my own bed, I cried that I missed camp. Maybe I had been wrong all along! Send me back!
I don’t know how I got sucked back into another year. Maybe I’d been hoodwinked by ritual — the s’mores, the songs, the tie-dyed shirts, the crying around the lake as we promised to come back — or the fantasy that next year, I would finally be accepted. In any case, nostalgia had caused me to keep secrets from myself. “When does the memory keep secrets?” the Italian writer Alda Merini asks cryptically in her 1989 book Delirio amoroso, or Amorous Delirium, a collection of poems inspired by her experiences with love-induced madness. “When it forgets.”
I had forgotten, and now I was going to pay the price.
On my first day back, I arrived to find that all my complaining to the camp director had backfired: I’d earned an exile worthy of Napoleon, except instead of Elba, I was going to Bunk 20, where I knew nobody. I had no foes, and also no friends.
According to 12-year-old me, I spent the next seven weeks fighting back an unstoppable tide of hostilities. In reality, I probably spent just as much time swimming, kayaking, trying to play volleyball, hanging out with my new friends Lana, Hannah and Sabrina, painting clay pots, and pretending I wasn’t spending Shabbat services writing installments of a bleak tale called “Gertrude’s Life,” about a long-suffering Victorian girl with a mangled left leg. But 12-year-old me was fluent exclusively in “kvetch.” A couple of times a week, a cadre of rabbis with guitars tried to counteract my natural crankiness by teaching us key principles of Reform Jewish wisdom: Shalom (keeping calm), Tikkun Olam (repairing the world), and Hineini (present awareness). Unfortunately for the rabbis, I was too far gone. I had braces on my teeth and eczema on my skin, an intimidating combination of blood and steel.
You probably won’t be shocked to learn that I didn’t get Belle. Instead I got cast as something more fitting, the wicked crone who turns the Prince into the Beast to begin with. It seemed unfair to me that such an important catalyst didn’t have any lines, just menacing gestures. Later in the summer, our bunk went on a camping trip where I broke a glow-stick on myself and my sleeping mat, and I became convinced that I was going to die. I briefly developed “enamorous feelings” for a young fellow before concluding that “he was really into cursing and being a general idiot.” On the bus back from some field trip, a kid named J.T. said he wanted to kiss me, which was repugnant and secretly flattering.
And of course, I somehow still managed to scrap with my tormenters from the year before. On a visit to Bunk 18, the lair of my enemies and also a few friends, Madison told the counselors that she felt “uncomfortable” changing out of her swimsuit in front of me. For my part, I felt uncomfortable that she was framing me as a pervert.
Looking back on this journal, I may have had myself to blame for the isolation I spent so much time complaining about. How would anyone make friends with a 12-year-old nudnik who wrote things like “I had to go to the compost bin thrice during breakfast” and “I started off the morning by crying the equivalent of Taghaza, the city made of salt”? Even Job would not have had the patience.
One way or another, by summer’s end, I was ready to leave camp forever. Or so I claimed. “At the moment, our bunk is creating a plaque to commemorate the summer. Everyone’s laughing, sharing inside jokes I’ll never be a part of,” I wrote. “To be honest, I’m rather sick of this camp thing and going home in two days is perfectly fine with me. Camp days are too frivolous. I need something with which to occupy the mind.”
But if I wanted “something with which to occupy the mind,” I was about to get it. Two days later, I was back home. Camp was no longer tormenting me with its frivolity, and I missed it. Memory had worked its hazy rearview magic on my mind once again. I thought about my friends, about singing the evening prayer and swaying back and forth, about the wooden float we’d burned in the middle of the pond like a Viking ship to commemorate the summer. I thought about ice cream sandwiches. “It’s been so fun, and now it seems like it had all been a dream,” I wrote.
A day or so later, missing camp had become a dream, too. I never went back.
It’s been ten years since I was twelve. That time of life is increasingly dream-like. When I reread the cursed document that is my camp journal, I feel the misery. I feel it churn in my stomach sure as suspicious falafel. Yet in photos taken at camp, I see myself smiling, entwined with other girls, my braces glinting in the sun. I cannot tell which person is real. Both girls — the one in the journal and the one in the pictures — seem unknowable.
I don’t know if I’ll ever figure out what I really thought. Memory is made of such blobby, malleable stuff that you can’t touch it without changing it, reshaping it in some way. And since memories make up our “sense of self,” whatever that is, this must mean that we are constantly morphing, too.
The last thing I wrote about camp at the summer’s end was that it seemed like another life, “as if it had all happened to someone else.”
Maybe it did.
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Cornell condemns student’s viral antisemitic remarks, but won’t bar him from campus
(JTA) — Cornell University is condemning viral antisemitic remarks made by an undergraduate student who appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” earlier this week, but the school’s president says no further action is planned against the student.
During his appearance, the student, Austin Franco, defended his statement in June that he did not want to work with Jews, saying that he did not like most of the Jews he had met. The remark was made in a private message that the company that received it publicized.
“As a university built on the solid foundations of our nation’s democratic freedoms, Cornell has an obligation to fiercely defend freedom of speech — even when we find that speech abhorrent,” Cornell’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, said in a statement issued late Wednesday, shortly after the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reached out to the school for comment on Franco.
“The student’s public comments invoked hateful generalizations and uninformed tropes with a long, ugly history of harm,” Kotlikoff said, adding that “antisemitism generally” is “detestable, ignorant, and fully at odds with the values of the Cornell community.”
Kotlikoff, who is Jewish, did not mention Franco by name in his statement, citing federal privacy law, nor did he specify which of Franco’s comments about Jews the school found objectionable.
His comments once again place Cornell on the front line in tensions over antisemitism at colleges and universities. The school reached a $60 million settlement with the Trump administration last year to resolve antisemitism claims and regain $250 million in funding that had been frozen over campus unrest in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Cornell was one of the earliest schools to face antisemitism allegations after Oct. 7, 2023, when a professor spoke at a pro-Palestinian rally and said he had been “exhilarated” by the Hamas-led attack against southern Israel, in which more than 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.
But the latest incident involving Franco had little to do with the subsequent war in Gaza until Tuesday, when the student told Morgan on his YouTube show that he objected to Jews in part because of Israel, which he deemed “a genocidal country.”
The controversy over Franco, a rising junior at the Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York, began in June when he wrote in an internship application that he was “not interested in working for a jew.”
His name and remarks were publicized by the Jewish co-owners of Handshake, the tech company to which Franco had applied for an internship, though Franco has claimed he’d already turned down an offer. His comments prompted online backlash — including from Leo Terrell, the Trump administration’s antisemitism czar, who posted dozens of times about the 19-year-old.
Franco has garnered significant support from the far right, including through a crowdfunding campaign initiated by a YouTuber who had previously drawn criticism for saying he hoped to see “another Hitler.” Franco’s comments to Morgan included positive references to “America First,” the Trump-led nativist movement embraced by the far right.
Cornell had announced it was opening an investigation into Franco when his comments were first publicized. He remained in the headlines after he was secretly filmed by an apparent sting operation led by Accuracy in Media, a right-wing activist group that has targeted pro-Palestinian students and university heads the group deems antisemitic on other campuses. Franco told a hidden camera interviewer connected to the group last week that the university’s investigation had amounted to little and that he would be returning to Cornell.
Asked by Morgan Tuesday to explain his beliefs, Franco said that a Jewish friend of his at Virginia Tech University, where he was enrolled before transferring to Cornell, “said we should genocide all Palestinians.” He named other “bad experiences with Jews” he claimed to have experienced in college, focusing on Jewish campus figures he said had “made things up about me,” and said Jews had “made my life a living hell.”
As Morgan pushed Franco to admit he was antisemitic, the student insisted he was not.
“Not wanting to be around Jewish people does not mean you don’t like them,” he said, adding that one of his exes “was half-Jewish.” He returned to Israel later in the conversation, chargingthat it is a Jewish-led “genocidal country” that insists upon “killing Palestinians and reporters and dragging America into wars abroad.” He concluded, “No, I am not going to want to associate with those people.”
“This is a common sentiment that is held,” Franco said. “If you think this is just me, you are completely wrong.”
Morgan, for his part, concluded, “You kind of made yourself unemployable.”
Franco is facing more immediate consequences, he announced on X on Wednesday. “My parents are kicking me out,” he tweeted, drawing offers of support from a handful of prominent far-right personalities.
Like many other schools that faced unrest after Oct. 7, Cornell has taken steps aimed at countering campus antisemitism while attempting to balance academic freedom concerns, in part as a result of its settlement with the Trump administration. The university commissioned an antisemitism task force and has undertaken several initiatives, including new campus climate surveys and stricter Title VI enforcement. It has also enforced a range of disciplinary actions against pro-Palestinian students.
But when it comes to Franco, one Jewish faculty member at Cornell theorized, the administration’s hands were tied.
“You sort of have to live with it,” Menachem Rosensaft, a visiting professor at Cornell Law School and former general counsel for the World Jewish Congress, told JTA. “He is engaging in obnoxious thought that is not harming anyone else.”
Rosensaft has been at the center of other antisemitism-related controversies at Cornell, including in 2024, when he prompted Kotlikoff to criticize another Jewish professor’s planned class on Gaza — an action that the school’s faculty union said was a violation of academic freedom.
In the case of Franco, Rosensaft argued that Cornell shouldn’t “turn him into a First Amendment martyr.”
But Rosensaft added that there could be grounds for discipline if Franco returned to campus and made harmful comments about Jews in the classroom or in other public spaces.
In 2025, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, praised Kotlikoff for what he called “a comprehensive approach to countering antisemitism.” An ADL spokesperson did not return a JTA request for comment on Cornell’s latest statement about Franco.
Franco himself has launched a second crowdfunding campaign to support his housing costs.
“I have reiterated that my parents do not share my views, and it seems they no longer wish to provide me with a home to live in,” he wrote in the description. “I know the road ahead will be difficult, but this is the path I chose. I could have lived a more conventional life, as my parents did, and perhaps in a different time I would have. However, that is not the world we live in today, and because of that, I chose a different path than most.”
This story has been corrected to reflect that the original comments Austin Franco made about not wanting to work with Jews were made in a private message rather than publicly.
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