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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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The dark message behind Tucker Carlson’s attempt to drum up drama in Israel
Tucker Carlson’s visit to Israel lasted only a few hours — not long enough to experience the country, but sufficient to stage a performance.
Carlson claimed he had experienced “bizarre” treatment at Ben Gurion Airport, a description that Israeli and U.S. officials dismissed. What actually happened: He underwent routine security questioning on his way to interview United States Ambassador Mike Huckabee.
In Israel, Carlson’s outrage was widely received with a mixture of indifference and eye-rolling. But Israelis with their ears to the ground understood that his attempt to stir the pot means they have a problem brewing in American public opinion — and a more immediate problem with public relations.
Because Carlson’s airport drama was never about Israeli airport procedures. It was about American politics, an arena in which Carlson has built a lucrative post-Fox career selling a particular worldview: one suspicious of alliances, contemptuous toward interventionism, and invested in the conspiratorial belief that shadowy forces distort American sovereignty.
Israel, in this rhetorical universe, functions as a convenient prop in a broader narrative of elite manipulation and national victimhood.
Carlson and Huckabee, the man he traveled across the world to interview, now personify two increasingly incompatible strains of MAGA politics. Huckabee represents something recognizable to mainstream conservatives: he’s traditionalist, evangelical, instinctively pro-Israel and broadly aligned with America’s historical posture as a global power.
Carlson speaks, instead, to a newer faction defined by nationalist retrenchment, hostility to foreign entanglements, and an often startling indifference to liberal democratic norms. He has been scathingly critical of U.S. support for Israel in its war with Hamas and has backed far-right conspiracy theories about whites being “replaced” by people of color. And when he attacks evangelicals like Huckabee for supporting Israel too much, there is extra value in the antisemitic dog whistle for the white supremacists with whom he is popular.
Call it deep MAGA: a coalition that regards alliances as burdens, admires strongmen — including and especially Vladimir Putin — and deeply disdains anyone who cares about democratic values and their promotion around the world. This large and growing constituency within American conservatism is eager for narratives that recast foreign policy debates as struggles against manipulation rather than disagreements over strategy. And Israel fits neatly into that story.
Carlson’s brief airport encounter was therefore not a journalistic episode, but content generation. The grievance was the product.
Nothing about the incident requires serious factual dispute to achieve its purpose. Its value lies in symbolism, not accuracy. Whether Carlson genuinely subscribes to every element of this worldview is, at this point, almost irrelevant. His extraordinary success after leaving Fox News suggests he understands his audience perfectly. He is not drifting toward obscurity by embracing this kind of stunt; he is responding to market demand.
In doing so, he is illustrating a story about a Republican Party negotiating an identity crisis.
President Donald Trump, widely seen in Israel as a huge friend, is not a reliable ally. If the wing behind Carlson becomes clearly stronger than that behind Huckabee, there’s no telling whether he would hew to their demands. His loyalties are famously contingent, and he has shown little hesitation in entertaining figures once considered radioactive within mainstream Republican politics.
In a movement defined by power, primacy will belong not to the most coherent worldview but to the most electorally useful one.
For Israel, the implications are uncomfortable. The country has long relied on the assumption that American support is both durable and bipartisan. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu badly upset that applecart by so clearly aligning himself with the Republican Party at large, and Trump specifically.
In growing sections of the progressive left, Israel is framed as a colonial antagonist, and Israel’s support on the Democratic side of the public is in free-fall. On parts of the populist right, it is cast as an entangling liability or worse. The political center sustaining the relationship is shrinking.
Carlson did not invent this shift. But he is capitalizing on it. Netanyahu’s outrageous behavior — including his alignment with the fascist underbelly of Israeli politics and ennabling of the ultra-Orthodox establishment — is causing a rift with U.S. Jews, and giving pundits like Carlson tailwind.
If a media entrepreneur of Carlson’s sophistication believes there is a vast audience for rhetoric that treats Israel as suspect, burdensome, or undeserving of American backing, Israeli policymakers would be unwise to dismiss the signal.
Carlson’s Ben Gurion theatrics were undeniably entertaining. What they reveal about the trajectory of American politics — and Israel’s place within it — is rather less amusing.
The post The dark message behind Tucker Carlson’s attempt to drum up drama in Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Rediscovering the ‘Dybbuk’ composer Henokh Kon
When the 1936 Polish Yiddish feature Al Khet (I Have Sinned) screened at the New York Jewish Film Festival last month after a decades-long restoration process, seeing the film was cause for celebration.
Hearing the soundtrack was my greatest joy. It was scored by one of my favorite Yiddish composers, Henokh Kon, who created the music for the 1937 film classic The Dybbuk. In his heyday between the world wars, Kon was already renowned as a prolific creator of catchy songs and sophisticated multi-genre instrumental repertoire, even years before his first film commissions.
My ears perk up for Kon’s distinctive, eclectic sound textures (as well as ingenious folk-stylized song repertoire) — from the iconic dance sequences of The Dybbuk, to angst-driven passages in the Bundist quasi-documentary Mir Kumen On (called Children Must Laugh in English), to darkly ironic background cues for the low-budget Freylekhe Kabtsonim (Jolly Paupers).
I heard a signature sonic palette: Brightly dissonant chords, off-kilter rhythmic patterns on moody drums, frantic flurries of plucked violins, haunting exotic double-reed instrumental leads (played by the oboe’s English horn cousin, or by bassoon) alternating with more klezmer-standard clarinet, flute or fiddle.
Kon soundtracks often juxtapose traditional Jewish modal scales with more angular chromatic passages. An opening scene in Al Khet features a lovely subdued range of his orchestration punctuated by a triangle chiming downbeats as though to clarify the air during a montage of shtetl vistas. Later in the film, Kon crafts a vibrant, sultry tune for Ruth Turkow (the real-life daughter of actor-directors Zygmund Turkow and Ida Kaminska) to sing from her parlor keyboard: “Zing zhe mir a lidele” (“Sing me a little song”) with a tango lilt.
I admire Kon the alchemist, infusing Hasidic melodies with both modernist expressionism and baroque techniques, as well as Kon the entertainer, gifted at popular singable hits. (He also set “Yosl Ber” — a humorous song about a Jewish soldier — and even led a jazz band for a secular New Year’s Eve Jewish ball.)
Kon was equally in demand for dramatic and satirical stage projects in an ever-shifting constellation of visionary writers, artists, production teams and performers that propelled Yiddish cultural movements of the 1920’s and ’30s.
Like many artists involved in interwar Jewish Poland’s kleynkunst (cabaret-style entertainment) and experimental performance scenes, Kon had himself grown up “between two worlds” (which, by the way, was the original title of the Dybbuk author An-sky’s groundbreaking play). Born in 1890 into a religious household in the Polish industrial city of Lodz, Kon was sent at age 12 to live with his grandfather, a rabbi in Kutno, since his family hoped the boy would become a yeshiva scholar.
Instead, intrigued by listening to klezmer musicians and badkhns (wedding entertainers), Kon followed a more creative path, and was sent as a teenager to Berlin to study at a royal music academy for several years. But homesickness for his Jewish roots led him back to Poland.
Arriving in Warsaw in 1912, he found creative encouragement and connections through the literary salons hosted by the classic Yiddish writer Y.L. Peretz and the Yiddish playwright and actress Tea Arciszewska. Peretz insisted that Kon compose settings for his poetry, and later Kon scored the premiere of Peretz’s groundbreaking expressionist stage play A Night in the Old Market.
In the cultural upheaval and ferment following WWI, Kon garnered various commissions from the Vilna Troupe, but more regularly partnered with the charismatic writer and impresario Moishe Broderzon for a series of collectivist performance projects, often with a leftist political edge.
All these productions used titles referring to radically reimagined Jewish culture. Their popular 1922 puppet parody company “Khad Gadye” — a Passover reference — was followed in 1924 by their ambitious yet low-budget, biblically-based modernist opera Bas-Sheve (Bathsheba, King David’s lover and future wife). When a lead singer fell ill, Kon sang his bass part from behind the piano.
Two visionary variety-show format “revue” theater collaborations by Broderzon and Kon came next. The first collaboration was the mid/late 1920’s variety theater collective Azazel (Scapegoat), famously rhyming with shlimazel which you hear in Broderzon and Kon’s “Azazel Shimmy” — a song that all of Jewish Warsaw used to hum. The Yiddish actress and playwright “Totshe” Arciszewska, whom Kon knew before WWI, was another key player in this group.
Broderzon next established the theater collective Ararat, the acronym for the Artistic Revolutionary Revue Theater, but also referring to Mt. Ararat, the place where Noah’s ark landed after the flood, signifying a fresh start.
Through the legendary 1930’s Ararat kleynkunst ensemble, Kon became well-acquainted with several cultural figures he would also soon write for in celluloid format. Dzigan and Schumacher, the comedy duo, first known to Polish-Yiddish audiences through live shows with Ararat, played supporting roles in the film Al Khet, adding humor to the screen melodrama.
The following year the pair starred in Freyklekhe Kabtsonim, scripted by Broderzon, the same guy who had discovered them.
Most significantly for Kon himself, the dancer Judyta [Judith] Berg joined Ararat. Kon encouraged her choreographic innovations, accompanying her solo dance concerts and using his established celebrity to draw elite Warsaw audiences for her in 1934. By the time the prestigious cinematic version of The Dybbuk was cast, Berg was not only recruited as choreographer, she also performed in white skull mask and tallis for the toytn-tants (Dance of Death) accompanied by Kon’s evocative music, the indelible Dybbuk scene for which she and Kon are best known. Kon and Berg became a romantic couple as well, though it’s not clear whether they ever married.
Like Kon, Berg had grown up influenced by Hasidic culture around her and then studied in Germany. At various Jewish celebrations, her grandmother led women’s dancing and told Judith about older traditional dance forms like the toytn-tants, while her brother would hold open the door so she could watch the men’s group dancing.
Later Berg went to Dresden, Germany, for intensive classes with modern dance pioneer Mary Wigman. (During the rise of Hitler, Judith and other Jewish dance students left Wigman’s school and Germany altogether.) In the late 1930’s, she and Kon escaped the Nazis separately, but Berg’s niece Yvette Metral told me she recalled seeing Kon once in 1948-49 when he came to visit her aunt at the dance school Berg established for Jewish survivor children in Wroclaw.
Kon’s legacy is being rediscovered in numerous recent cultural explorations. “Bas-Sheve,” the opera he wrote with Broderzon, was performed in 2019 at Yiddish Summer Weimar, based on a rediscovered partial piano score, with major arranging and re-imagining by klezmer performer Josh Horowitz and added libretto portions devised by the writer and Yiddish translator Michael Wex. This piece will soon be performed again by the UCLA Symphony.
Also in recent years, much research and revival effort has focused on two works that Kon composed for the avant garde leftist theater troupe Yung teater, both based on landmark American trials which galvanized political movements. One composition, called “Boston,” is about Sacco & Vanzetti, and the other, “Mississippi,” is about the Scottsboro Boys. Small wonder that a quote from the leftist anthem “Internationale” found its way into Kon’s score for Mir Kumen On (the Bundist film already under threat by Polish censors).
Last December brought us the diasporic Yiddish puppet show The Trial of Modicut, directed by Yael Horowitz, who gave a conference presentation on Kon, Broderzon and their Azazel Shimmy in 2025. Splendid music for the Modicut show was performed by the duo of Raffi Boden (cello/music director) and Ira Temple (accordion), which at one point featured a gorgeous adaptation of one of Kon’s most recognizable orchestrated Dybbuk motifs, graced by a fluffy puppet sheep.
While my musician friends who took part in the puppet show seemed unaware of the composer’s name, the spirit of his creation lives on in their fusion of conservatory training, deep klezmer chops, respect for cultural ancestors and antic humor aimed at serving the creative proletariat.
Eve Sicular is a cinema scholar, co-curator of the Yiddish New York Film Festival and a former curator of film & photo archives at YIVO Institute. She is also the drummer/bandleader for Metropolitan Klezmer & Isle of Klezbos whose latest album is “Yiddish Silver Screen.”
The post Rediscovering the ‘Dybbuk’ composer Henokh Kon appeared first on The Forward.
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She’s a Democratic Socialist who affirmed Israel’s right to exist. Can she be LA’s next mayor?
LOS ANGELES – City Councilmember Nithya Raman won the backing of two very different organizations the last time she ran for office. One of them was Democrats for Israel Los Angeles, a liberal Zionist group. The other was perhaps the most overtly anti-Israel collective in town — the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. Raman’s politics divided both groups, but the unconventional coalition helped lift her to re-election.
Two years later, Raman hopes to recapture that broad appeal in her bid to be the city’s next mayor. The 44-year-old DSA member, who represents parts of the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood and Silver Lake, surprised her colleagues and incumbent Mayor Karen Bass earlier this month with her late entry into the June 2 primary race. And while political observers on both coasts have noted her similarities to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose 50,000 campaign volunteers drew from a slew of progressive groups, Raman hopes her tenure on city council — and the Jewish allies she’s made along the way — can attest to the differences.
“Mamdani is clearly a very popular politician, and so to be compared to a popular politician who is very good at communication — it’s a good thing,” Raman told the Forward in a phone interview. “I will also say that I am my own person, and I have a record of service here — five years of service to the city and to my district that clearly lay out who I am, how I have governed, and my approach.”
Raman’s relationship with DSA is something of a rocky symbiosis. In 2020, she became the first member of the movement to win a seat on LA’s city council, with left-wing grassroots organizers helping turn out a record number of voters to defeat an incumbent. Raman has since broken with DSA on votes and in public comments, on both Israel-related issues — for one, she does not support the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement — and municipal ones. Yet even as three other DSA members have joined her on city council — and another, Rae Huang, runs for mayor — Raman remains the chapter’s biggest star as well as its strongest candidate in the race.
Her community outreach and her openness to engaging on Israel and antisemitism have endeared her to some Jewish voters in LA’s 4th council district, and she won re-election in 2024 despite a redistricting that largely subtracted the progressive base that put her in office. She touts her second victory as proof of her broadly effective governance. But some Jewish constituents remain ambivalent about or opposed to Raman due to politics they deem insufficiently pro-Israel or because of her affiliation with DSA.
Interviews with 10 local Jewish leaders, including five who live in her district or whose institutions predominantly serve her constituents, underscored both the inroads Raman made with Jewish communities during her tenure and the difficulty she may have winning over voters citywide. (The top two primary finishers advance to a November runoff if no candidate receives a majority of the vote.)
“I know if I had a need, she would take my phone call and would do her best to be of assistance,” said Rabbi Sarah Hronsky, who leads Temple Beth Hillel, a Reform synagogue located just outside her district in Valley Village. “I think she genuinely cares about humanity. I just don’t think it is very clear to the Jewish community where she stands on the topic of Israel, and where she stands in terms of the increase in antisemitism.”
Those positions are well documented, and in some cases Raman has volunteered them. And though they were a wedge issue inside DSA, they also offer a point of departure from Bass, an establishment Democrat whose handling of Jewish issues — especially on anti-Israel protests — has been called into question.
Building a track record — and Shabbat-friendly crosswalks — in Jewish areas
Even as Raman, a Harvard-educated urban planner, soared from obscurity into office in 2020 on a groundswell of progressive activism, she did not neatly map onto DSA politics.
The national organization calls for an end to U.S. aid to Israel in its national platform, and the 90% of the LA chapter — some 2,000 dues-paying members, according to one longtime organizer — voted in 2017 to endorse the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Raman, with DSA’s endorsement already in hand, took a softer tack that summer on a Democrats for Israel questionnaire. In a written response, she affirmed Israel’s “right to exist” and said she did not support BDS, though adding her view that such efforts are protected by the First Amendment.
“I personally am deeply upset by policy decisions in India, my own country of origin, and while I have not participated in a boycott, I understand the argument for withholding economic activity,” she wrote. (Raman moved to the U.S. when she was 6.)
With Raman an outsider candidate for the council seat and not favored in the election, the responses attracted little attention outside of DSA. She eventually won in an unusually shaped jurisdiction that included Jewish and Israeli neighborhoods like Hancock Park and Sherman Oaks and young, progressive pockets like Koreatown and Silver Lake.
“I don’t think she’s afraid to diverge from the points of view of the DSA.”
Gregg SolkovitsPresident, Democrats for Israel Los Angeles
Once in office, Raman became a regular guest at Jewish community functions in and around her district. She joined Stephen Wise Temple for High Holiday services and the Silver Lake JCC for a Passover seder. Hronsky noted that Raman often stayed for the nearly two-hour duration of Valley-wide “Shabbat in the Park” gatherings, rather than the perfunctory photo-op-and-handshakes some might expect of a busy politician.
“When I ran, I actually didn’t know that this would be such a big part of my job,” Raman told the Forward. “But it’s been really good to be able to be a small part of the bigger Jewish community.”
Outside Chabad of Sherman Oaks, she helped push through the addition of a timed traffic signal that enabled Orthodox Jews to cross a busy thoroughfare on Shabbat — an improvement the synagogue’s rabbi, Mendel Lipskier, said he had sought for more than a decade.
The Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, in which around 1,200 people in Israel were killed and another 250 taken hostage into Gaza, thrust her connection to DSA into the spotlight.
That day, as Raman issued a statement “condemning the horrific violence by Hamas and praying for a peaceful end to this conflict,” the national DSA in its statement called the massacre a “direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime.” Raman, who had attended an Oct. 9 vigil at Stephen Wise, soon released a longer second statement in which she rejected DSA’s missive as “unacceptably devoid of empathy.”
Split constituencies
Her politics continued to defy easy categorization as the war in Gaza wore on. During a temporary ceasefire in November 2023, Raman adjourned a session of city council by memorializing the 11,000 Palestinians who had reportedly died to that point in Gaza. “My pain is unspeakable,” she said, closing the message by calling for “urgent action to stop these civilian casualties and bring the hostages home.”
The following June, she introduced a municipal resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and release of hostages. The resolution, which never reached a vote, was slammed by the local Jewish federation and other mainline Jewish groups as “fostering hostility toward the Jewish community.” (The federation declined to comment for this article.)
The ceasefire calls put her at odds with much of her Jewish constituency, which leans heavily pro-Israel. One Jewish leader said his synagogue, which serves many of her constituents, had had to keep Raman at arm’s length because not declaring Hamas entirely responsible for the devastation in Gaza meant Raman failed some congregants’ pro-Israel litmus test.
Yet as her term wound down, Raman found the support of DFI-LA, a Democratic Party club that considers local Jewish issues in addition to candidates’ stances on Israel. Gregg Solkovits, the organization’s president, said the combination of Raman’s public statements on Israel and her community engagement outweighed the ceasefire calls.
“She had reached out to the Jewish community and made clear indications that she was willing to be educated on our issues and to work with us,” Solkovits explained in an interview, “and she has continued to do that as she’s taken office.”
The vote of confidence had been controversial within the organization. “There were members of our executive board that are very bothered by anyone who comes out of DSA world,” he said. But Raman, Solkovits added, was not as ideologically rigid as other DSA politicians.
The independent streak cost her some fans in DSA, whose LA chapter endorsed Raman but also censured her for pursuing the pro-Israel club’s support. Though Council District 4 lost DSA-friendly Koreatown in the redistricting process, Raman won reelection with a majority of votes in the first round of voting.
“I don’t think she’s afraid to diverge from the points of view of the DSA,” Solkovits said. “In fact, I think she’s broadened her base. Which is one of the signs of a smart politician.”
Raman continued to tackle Jewish issues after her re-election. After a pair of Israeli diplomats in Washington, D.C., were assassinated in 2025, allegedly by a pro-Palestinian gunman, Raman issued a statement condemning the attack as a “horrific act of antisemitism.” And when vandals spray-painted antisemitic graffiti in her district, Raman and a staffer went to paint over it.
“Ultimately, my role is to make sure that my residents feel safe, to make sure that my residents know that issues related to violence or antisemitism are being taken seriously — that our response will be aggressive, proactive, preventative,” Raman said.
But not everyone finds her record as convincing as Solkovits does — or feels as heard as Temple Beth Hillel’s Hronsky. Lindsey Imber, who sits on the Sherman Oaks Neighborhood Council, said Raman dodged her question about pro-Palestinian encampments on college campuses and never returned to the neighborhood council meetings after that.
But Imber, who is Jewish, suggested that Raman’s approach to homelessness — which included her opposition to a rule that banned encampments less than 500 feet from schools — may be just as problematic to Jewish voters as any other issue.
“That was one of the things that really created a schism between the council member and the and the actual constituency of the district,” Imber said.
Others outside the district say Raman’s DSA connections are inherently disqualifying. Nate Miller, an LA-based public relations executive who specializes in Jewish affairs, said that while he was frustrated with Bass, he could not vote for a member of the movement.
“I understand those concerns, and I respect those concerns,” Raman said. “But I think that I have been able to really, really work to make sure that the Jewish community in my district knows that I am there for them in the ways that a council member would need to be. And that is exactly the way that I would show up for them if I were to be the mayor.”
Senior leaders of several synagogues in her district — including Stephen Wise, Valley Beth Shalom and Temple Israel of Hollywood — declined to speak on the record for this story. (Lipskier, of Chabad of Sherman Oaks, said he did not follow city politics and that his interactions with Raman were limited but that “whatever we asked for, she was nice, she was available. I don’t have nothing negative to say.”)
Crossing to victory
The incumbent Raman wants to supplant is fighting to retain her own Jewish backing. Bass, who attended public high school in heavily Jewish West Los Angeles, has long enjoyed a broad base of support that includes labor unions, the liberal donor class and a coalition of legacy progressive groups.
But her approval rating has plummeted since the January 2025 wildfires, which wiped out the Pacific Palisades, a wealthy and heavily Jewish enclave. Two candidates running to her right — Adam Miller and Spencer Pratt — may siphon off some votes in the primary.
Jewish leaders also said Bass failed to deliver on commitments she made after a 2024 protest outside a West Los Angeles synagogue descended into chaos. One of those commitments was to establish buffer zones outside synagogues where protesting would be legally prohibited.
Raman told the Forward she was not sure where she stood on the issue. “The idea of protesting outside a religious institution is troubling to me,” she said, “but I also have voted to uphold First Amendment rights to speak up and to protest in the past. I think that we can find a way to balance people’s needs for safety with that First Amendment right.”
Raman will want to reignite the grassroots support that propelled her candidacy in 2020. But her late entry into the mayor’s race isn’t helping.
Raman admitted she had entered the fray too late to seek most primary endorsements, a reality underlined by Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez — himself a DSA member — declining to switch allegiances from Bass after her announcement. And Solkovits said he was not sure whether DFI-LA would support Raman this time around. (Bass received its support in 2024, but the group sometimes supports multiple candidates in the same race.)
And her positions on Israel make up only part of the frustrations that may be lingering among her DSA peers.
Raman broke with DSA council members on Measure ULA, a so-called “mansion tax” that had been a major progressive legislation but which Raman said hamstrung multifamily housing construction. She also voted against a $2.6 billion convention center upgrade supported by Soto-Martinez and fellow DSA member Eunisses Hernandez, who represent union-heavy districts. (Raman said the city was already under huge financial pressure and could not afford it.)
If that makes it harder to rally the base that first put her in office — and replicate the massive wave of progressive turnout that got Mamdani elected in New York — Raman says she isn’t worried.
“My goals here are centered around Angelenos, their safety and their ability to thrive in a city that is deeply unaffordable and in a city that is struggling to deliver basic services,” she said. “That’s the message that I think will activate voters.”
The post She’s a Democratic Socialist who affirmed Israel’s right to exist. Can she be LA’s next mayor? appeared first on The Forward.