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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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UK Jewish groups express concern as the likely next PM criticizes Israel over Gaza
(JTA) — Andy Burnham, who is on track to become Britain’s next prime minister following Keir Starmer’s resignation last month, apologized for his party’s handling of the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas mass killings in Israel, saying that it should have done more to push for a ceasefire and called for exerting greater pressure on the Jewish state today.
His comments prompted a joint response from the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council, which said they had contacted his team to express “significant concerns” about his remarks.
Burnham made his comments in a video statement on Thursday in response to questions from the public. Burnham is likely to become the next prime minister after gaining the overwhelming support of sitting Labour members of Parliament. To date no one has challenged him for the party’s leadership ahead of a July 17 deadline.
“I know many people feel that at the start of Israel’s military action in Gaza, my party didn’t get it right, and I am sorry about that,” he said. He added that he supported further sanctions on Israelis involved in the violence in Gaza, measures to ban trade with Israeli settlements and restrictions on arms licenses to Israel, saying there was “increasing evidence that war crimes appear to have been committed.”
He also condemned increased antisemitism in Britain, and said that tackling antisemitism did not contradict holding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to account.
His comments came as lawmakers across the political spectrum have pushed for increased condemnation of Israel and sanctions on the country.
“The unbearable suffering in Gaza is a scar on our collective conscience,” Burnham said. “The killing of innocent Palestinians, including children,” was “completely unacceptable,” he added, declaring that Britain had to do more to “put pressure on the Israeli government.”
He described the country as “too slow to call for a ceasefire” and that “we must now do more to strengthen our approach” as “Israel continues to violate the ceasefire agreement killing innocent Palestinians.”
In their response, the Board and JLC said they shared “concern for the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip” but stated that the conflict “cannot be understood without reference to the role of Hamas not only in launching the conflict but in perpetuating the war through the holding of hostages, war-fighting entirely from within the civilian population, and [their] ongoing refusal to cede power and disarm, in line with the 20 point peace plan.”
They added that the conflict also could not be understood without reference to Hamas’ regional backers and allies, including Iran and Hezbollah. Burnham addressed none of this in his comments.
Burnham did, however, reiterate his condemnation of Hamas, describing the Oct. 7 attacks as “monstrous,” stressing that he denounced them “as strongly today as I did in the immediate aftermath.”
He said that he also condemned “the increase in appalling antisemitic attacks here in the U.K. and those who seek to divide our communities by targeting Jewish people.”
“I felt first-hand the anxiety in our Jewish community and the very real threat they face,” the former mayor of Greater Manchester said, referring to the Yom Kippur 2025 attack on the city’s Heaton Park synagogue in which two people were killed.
The Board and JLC welcomed Burnham’s “zero tolerance approach to antisemitism” and affirmed his assertion that “there is no contradiction between fighting antisemitism and disagreeing with actions of the Israeli government.”
However, they said, “Antisemitism cannot be confronted without addressing all its drivers,” arguing that in Britain that includes “Islamist, far left and far right extremists who go beyond criticism of the Israeli government to a place of hatred directed at Jews and Israelis.”
Their joint statement pointed out that Burnham knew “first hand the links between hatred of Israel, antisemitic extremism and deadly violence against British Jews,” adding that, “in a country in which antisemitism has become more normalized, more extreme and more violent, we call on our leaders to show the utmost care in their rhetoric in relation to the conflict.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post UK Jewish groups express concern as the likely next PM criticizes Israel over Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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NY congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier doubles down on attending Oct. 8 pro-Palestinian rally
(JTA) — Democratic congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier defended her presence at a pro-Palestinian rally the day after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel during a wide-ranging interview Friday with progressive Jewish author Peter Beinart.
“I think the targeting of civilians is wrong in any context, including on Oct. 7,” Avila Chevalier said when asked by the editor-at-large of the leftist Jewish Currents about slogans legitimizing “resistance” that appeared at the rally. Avila Chevalier previously defended her attendance at the rally to City & State in June.
“I think what matters is international law, and what international law condemns and protects,” she said. “And it condemns the targeting of civilians, and it also protects the right to resist.”
Beinart, who is an outspoken critic of Israel and a journalism professor at the City University of New York, pushed back, saying that he “didn’t see any discussion of international law in that rally on the signs or the slogans of the kind that you are offering now … Were you uncomfortable by that?”
Avila Chevalier responded that, at any protest, there will always be “folks who are voicing opinions that you might not agree with.”
“I knew even as early as Oct. 8, right, where this cycle was headed, and I knew the things that I did have power over,” Avila Chevalier said. “The thing that we have power over is the fact that our tax dollars are going towards an apartheid state that has a pattern of engaging in this type of retribution against civilians.”
Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist who helped organize pro-Palestinian encampments at Columbia University, ousted incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat last month in the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th Congressional District, which covers parts of Upper Manhattan and the Bronx.
“Today we make it clear. The politics of the past ends today,” Avila Chevalier told attendees at an election night watch party, where the crowd erupted into cheers of “Free Palestine.”
She joined two other progressive and Israel-critical candidates backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in winning upset primary victories, cementing the anti-Israel mayor’s influence in the city’s politics and likely extending the left’s gains in Congress since the wins came in deeply Democratic districts.
Beinart’s interview offered an extensive look into the Israel-related positions that became flashpoints during Avila Chevalier’s campaign, including her attendance at the Oct. 8 rally, which was condemned at the time by Mamdani and fellow congressional candidate Brad Lander, and past criticism of former President Joe Biden’s policy toward Israel and Gaza in a since-deleted X account.
Many of the attendees on Friday’s Zoom call appeared unimpressed by the candidate’s responses.
“She is well intentioned, but also clearly is not familiar with the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Hillel Schenker, a veteran American-Israeli peace activist.
Other attendees defended Avila Chevalier.
“I am surprised and disturbed by many of the comments made here that are just dismissing her comments and her approach to expressing her belief in human rights and a world without hierarchies of peoples,” wrote an attendee with the screen name Benjy Ben Baruch.
To kick off the interview, Avilia Chevalier described her internship in the West Bank as a 20-year-old Columbia University student, saying that at the time she observed “systems and how they were impacting Palestinian people and Jewish folks, and how people were being treated based off of those state structures.”
Beinart then asked Avila Chevalier why she believed Israel had become so “central for progressive politics.”
“I think there is a war machine that is insatiable,” Avila Chevalier replied. “An American war machine, the Israeli war machine, that we fund with our tax dollars as Americans, and instead what we could be funding is our communities.”
When asked by Beinart what she wanted to see as the future of the region, Avila Chevalier voiced her support for a one-state solution, which she described as “one governing body, one state that sees everyone as equal before the law, regardless of race, religion, identity, ethnicity.”
“We have seen over the course of history that attempts at two states have failed, and even so, I think in this question of like, well, do we partition to begin with, that inherently is divisive,” Avila Chevalier said.
Avila Chevalier also stopped short of saying that “Zionism is racism” when asked if she agreed with the statement by Beinart.
“Zionism is an ideology that creates this type of hierarchy that I’m talking about, and I just don’t believe that we should be striving for a world where there is a hierarchy among people,” Avila Chevalier replied.
Towards the end of the conversation, Beinart referenced scrutiny Avila Chevalier had drawn for her 2022 statements in which she condemned Dominican nationalism and said it was the reason she didn’t put the flag in her social media bio.
“What do you see as the fundamental differences between Zionism as a form of Jewish nationalism, the Dominican nationalism that you have had some concerns about, and Palestinian nationalism,” Beinart asked Avila Chevalier, whose parents are Dominican immigrants.
In response, Avila Chevalier referenced racist attacks she had endured for those comments in the lead-up to the election.
“While it’s not the majority of Dominicans, I would never say that, I think there is a faction that supports this ideology that I have just always found incredibly violent, and the type of rhetoric that I was subjected to, I think, is reflective of the very thing I was criticizing, and I see a lot of that in Zionism as well,” Avila Chevalier responded.
The candidate added that, in contrast to Zionism and Dominican nationalism, Haitian and Palestinian discussions of “liberation” were rooted in “a more universalist understanding of human rights before the law.”
“When I was there in Palestine, you know, some of the most dehumanizing language I’ve ever heard, right, was coming from Israeli soldiers towards children,” Avila Chevalier said, adding that she saw the movements “in very different lights.”
When asked whether she worried that “Hamas’s version of Palestinian nationalism may have exclusionary elements as well,” Avila Chevalier replied: “That’s why I worry about nationalism point blank.”
“Nationalism itself always gives me pause, but I think it’s important to also consider the context in which we’re talking about, like what group is engaging in this conversation, right, and the power dynamics at play there,” Avila Chevalier continued.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post NY congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier doubles down on attending Oct. 8 pro-Palestinian rally appeared first on The Forward.
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Many young Jews support a binational state. That doesn’t mean they’re anti-Zionist.
(JTA) — There are three kinds of young Jews the headlines keep confusing: the anti-Zionist, the non-Zionist and the young Jew who loves being Jewish, shows up, feels bound to other Jews, and cannot tell you what happened in 1967. The last is by far the most common kind I meet as the executive director of Hillel at Brandeis University.
The anti-Zionists are certain they have thought it through, and conclude that the Jewish state should not exist. The non-Zionist wants to be Jewish without making the Israel they see in the news central to their Jewishness. The third stays bound to Israel and its people, and wants it safe, democratic and Jewish, even when its government disappoints them. That is because Israel has become part of what it means to be Jewish now, like Torah study or acts of kindness, something you can wrestle with or resent but not simply set down.
A recent poll found nearly half of American Jews under 35 agree that a single binational state of Jews and Palestinians is the best resolution of the conflict. The headlines around the poll imply that these young supporters are anti- or non-Zionist. But I suspect many of those who embraced the idea do not reject Zionism but are expressing something else altogether.
The survey asked which of three resolutions is best. The first, two states for two peoples, looks dead after the peace process has repeatedly failed to deliver that outcome for their entire lives. It’s certainly not an option according to the Israeli consensus, with only 15% of Israeli Jews currently supporting two states.
The second, in which Israel annexes the West Bank and Gaza and rules millions of Palestinians who cannot vote, seems to be the vision of Israel’s current government.
The third option, one democratic country, imagines equal rights for everyone. To a young American of decent instincts and thin knowledge of the region, schooled to see the conflict as a matter of racial equality, the last sounds like simple justice: one person, one vote. Choosing it is not the same as joining an anti-Zionist movement, even if barely 1% of Israeli Jews back it.
Why then would a young Jew, proudly Jewish and emotionally bound to other Jews, embrace such a plan?
It’s because this generation is already too loosely tied to the history and people of Israel to distinguish between a government and a country. The war in Gaza brought this into view. Young Jews today never knew Israel as the underdog of 1948 or 1967. And this generation has simply spent less time there than their peers did a few years ago.
There are many ways to visit Israel: a family trip, a high school or youth group trip, a college internship. For close to 15 years, at Hillels in Michigan, Chicago and now Waltham, Massachusetts, I have taken hundreds of students to Israel, dozens of non-Jewish students to Israel and the Palestinian territories, and worked with thousands more.
Birthright was meant to add to that mix. Yet for many it became the only trip, and even that has diminished: from 50,000 a year before COVID to 20,000 in 2024. Young adults, forming their views now, have visited the least. It is hard to feel bound to a people you’ve never met.
And yet there is another story, and not just a Jewish one. In 2025, Gallup found American pride had fallen to a record low, also along generational lines: Just 41% of Gen Z say they are extremely or very proud to be American, versus 75% of baby boomers and more still among their elders.
Young Americans are loosening their grip on inherited attachments across the board, and young Jews’ disaffection with Israel is one instance of that drift rather than a singular act of rejection. Politics is also dampening their pride: For Jews, the government of Netanyahu and Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir; for polarized Americans, whichever administration sits in Washington.
That parallel points toward the repair. If your attachment to a country rests only on its current government, it collapses the day you cannot stand that government. So defending this Israeli coalition is a losing errand, and the wrong one.
Another round of advocacy training will not do it either. You cannot argue someone into a bond. It makes better debaters, not deeper ties, and too often it binds students to defending a government rather than a people. It is not fair to ask them to defend war aims the government itself has never clearly named.
And bringing more young Jews to Israel, however important that is, is not enough. The real work is to build the connection on something sturdier than politics and more lasting than a week on a bus: Jewish texts and traditions, mentors who bring both intellectual rigor and spiritual depth, and a shared sense of kinship with the largest Jewish community in the world.
Israel is now home to nearly half of all Jews alive. A young Jew who feels bound to that people holds a connection that can survive a government they find objectionable. As we’ve seen in the hundreds of local celebrations of America’s 250th anniversary, our love of country, at its best, can rise above whoever happens to be president. Our connection to Israel can rest on the same kind of ground.
I used to think the job of drawing young Jews to Israel was mostly a matter of better education, more Hebrew and more history. I still believe in those. But literacy lasts only when it is part of a Jewish life that is felt and lived, and the deeper work is to grow roots no argument can pull up. That comes from vibrant Shabbat tables, from Torah studied slowly with someone who loves both the student and the book, from time in Israel, early and often.
Some warn that the Zionist majority among American Jews may evaporate within a generation. Perhaps it will. But note the gap between the 37% of American Jews who call themselves Zionist and the 88% who support Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state. Even if the label slips, the bond endures.
It is the everyday work of Hillel and Jewish educators on hundreds of campuses, here and around the world, to strengthen that bond. The students in this poll are not a cohort to be scolded, or a problem to be scoffed away. We are the ones who let their attachments to Israel grow thinner in their formative years, and the repair is ours to make.
Given how little we have given them, it is remarkable how many still feel bound at all.
Rabbi Seth Winberg is executive director of Hillel at Brandeis, the university’s senior Jewish chaplain and a doctoral candidate in American Jewish history. The views expressed in this piece are his own.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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