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On one foot: Five essential things to know about Abraham Joshua Heschel on his 50th yahrzeit
(JTA) — Last week marked the 50th yahrzeit — or Hebrew anniversary — of the death of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), the theologian, scholar, philosopher, Holocaust survivor and modern-day prophet who was long associated with the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary but whose embrace of “radical amazement” wasn’t contained by any movement or denomination. Monday is also Martin Luther King Jr. Day: The rabbi and the minister have often been linked thanks to Heschel’s civil rights activism and iconic photographs of them in the front lines of the march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery on March 21, 1965. (See below for events tied to the legacies of both men.)
I confess that Heschel’s lavish, epigrammatic prose and devotion to the living reality of God didn’t speak to a buttoned-down skeptic like me. I might quote his book “The Sabbath,” a lovely articulation of how Shabbat forms an island in time, but I’m more comfortable discussing Heschel’s political views, like his opposition to the Vietnam War, than his ideas on God and humankind.
I suspect others are similarly intimidated by Heschel, and could use a gentle onramp. For help I turned to Rabbi Shai Held, author of “Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence” (2015) and the president and dean at Hadar, the nondenominational yeshiva. I challenged Held to name five works, articles, films or other media that would help people appreciate who Heschel was and why he remains celebrated.
“I fell in love with Heschel as as a teenager, because I felt he both articulated intuitions about the world that I had but didn’t remotely have language for, and he also was the first person I had heard articulate a vision of what Judaism thought that the good life could look like,” Held told me. “As a day school grad I felt I knew a lot of stuff about Judaism, but if you asked me ‘what is Judaism about and what is it for,’ I would have had no idea what to say. And Heschel gave me that narrative. It was a story that spoke to my mind and my heart at the same time. It was like asking me to become something in the world and that was incredibly moving to me.”
Here are five great ways to access Heschel, with comments by Rabbi Held. I plan to make this an ongoing series of introductions to Jewish thinkers, writers and artists who are making news or are particularly relevant to the current Jewish conversation. If there is someone you’d like to see discussed, drop me a line at asc@jewishweek.org.
(For Rabbi Held’s own introduction to Heschel, see his video, “Why Amazement Matters.”)
“The Sabbath,” (1951)
(In this slim volume, Heschel describes the Sabbath as a “palace in time,” and an opportunity for spiritual communion with the potential to help shape how its observers live the other six days of the week.)
“The number of people I have met in my travels, who tell me about how that book opened them up to spirituality, is staggering. Two things about that book are very moving. One is, at a time when American Judaism was about integration and success, Heschel launched this dramatic insistence that Judaism was about the life of the spirit. I think it landed like a bomb for a lot of American Jews. It was totally revolutionary to them. One of the ways that the book has resonated and continues to resonate is that Heschel is rebelling against a culture of technology, and wants to place a stake in the ground for the value of appreciation and gratitude. One of my favorite sentences in all of Heschel is that ‘Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.’ That line is from ‘God in Search of Man,’ but I think ‘The Sabbath’ is about Shabbat as a practice of appreciation.
“I also think that people had internalized the Christian, anti-Jewish idea that Christianity was about inwardness and spirituality and Judaism wasn’t. Heschel responds: We gave the world the gift of Sabbath which is about living in the presence of God.”
“God in Search of Man,” part 1 (1955)
(Held calls Heschel’s companion volume to his earlier work “Man Is Not Alone” a “beautiful evocation of what wonder and gratitude look like.”)
“This is Heschel as a phenomenologist: What is it like to have a sense that our lives are not something that we earned and that part of the religious life is to repay this extraordinary gift? He needs to write in a poetic mode, in part, because he’s trying to evoke in his readers a sense of gratitude, a sense of indebtedness, a sense of obligation. What I tried to do in my book is to [delete] sort of argue that amidst all that poetry, there’s an argument: Wonder is what opens the door to obligation. Wonder is about reawakening a sense that all of us, just by the nature of being human, have an intuition that we’re obligated to something and someone.”
“The Prophets,” 1962
(Heschel provides compact profiles of seven biblical prophets and attempts to understand the phenomenon of prophecy in general. Held recommends starting with the chapter titled, “The Theology of Pathos.”)
“Heschel makes the most eloquent case I think any Jew has ever made since the prophets for a God who cares, a God who is stirred to the core of God’s being by human suffering and especially human suffering that stems from oppression. It’s Heschel’s attempt to reclaim the God of the Bible from what he saw as the ravages of abstract philosophy that reduces God to an idea. God is not an idea. God is someone who cares about us. God has a name. There’s this amazing speech he gives to Jewish educators somewhere where he says, ‘I was invited to a conference to talk about my idea of God and I responded to them and said, ‘I don’t have an idea of God, I have God’ — Hakadosh baruch hu [the Holy one, blessed be God] who makes a claim on my life.”
“Religion and Race,” 1963
(On Jan. 14, 1963, Heschel gave the speech “Religion and Race” at a conference of the same name in Chicago, where he became close to King.)
“First of all, you see how Heschel’s theology and his activism are so entirely interwoven: The God who loves the downtrodden, the God who loves widows and orphans, is the God who requires us to stand up and fight for civil rights. It’s also extraordinarily beautiful, in that it combines really interesting biblical interpretation with [theological depth and profound] moral passion. Part of what Heschel and King meant to each other is that each one of them saw the other as a kind of living proof that God had not abandoned the downtrodden — and King was very important to Heschel in the context of the theology of of the Shoah: Martin Luther King embodies the reality that God has not abandoned the world. He really believed Martin Luther King was channeling God, nothing less than that.”
The NBC Interview (1972)
(Shortly before he died at age 65, Heschel recorded an interview with broadcaster Carl Stern. It aired on Dec. 10, 1972, on NBC-TV as an episode of “The Eternal Light,” the long-running religion and ethics show produced in conjunction with the Jewish Theological Seminary.)
“He makes this incredibly beautiful statement about telling kids to live their life as if it were a work of art. Which is just amazing — so beautiful and so simple. And there’s also this really interesting moment where Carl Stern asks him if he’s a prophet and he says, ‘You know, I cannot accept such a compliment. I am not a prophet. I am a child of prophets. But indeed the Talmud says all Israel are the children of prophets.’ I just love that combination of humility and elevatedness. That interview [offers a powerful glimpse of him as a human being, and not just a bunch of words on a page. You see a real person]. is also what makes him actually a human being and not just a bunch of words on a page. You see a real person.”
On Monday, Jan. 16 at 7 p.m. ET, Shai Held will join Arnold Eisen, chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day conversation reflecting on Heschel’s life, thought and legacy. (Register here for Zoom link.) That same night, at 8 p.m. ET, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah will commemorate Heschel’s 50th yahrzeit with a discussion with his daughter, Susannah Heschel, the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. (Register here.)
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The post On one foot: Five essential things to know about Abraham Joshua Heschel on his 50th yahrzeit appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Prominent Jewish figures call for sanctions on Israel: ‘The ceasefire must be the beginning, not the end.’
(JTA) — As the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas enters its second week, prominent Jews from around the world who have criticized Israel throughout the war have now signed onto a letter urging global leaders to ensure that the deal results in a “new era of peace and justice for all.”
The letter, which was addressed to António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, and world leaders, also demands that Israel be held to account for “grievous violations of international law.”
“It was international pressure that helped to secure this ceasefire, and it must be sustained to guarantee that it endures. The ceasefire must be the beginning, not the end,” the letter says. “The risk of reverting to a political reality of indifference to occupation and permanent conflict is too great. This same pressure must be continued to deliver a new era of peace and justice for all—Palestinians and Israelis alike.”
The letter, titled “Jews Demand Action,” was released Wednesday as Vice President J.D. Vance visits Israel, amid signs casting doubt on the durability of the ceasefire deal.
It was signed by a host of prominent Jewish celebrities and public figures, many of whom have been outspoken in their criticism of Israel since the beginning of its two-year war in Gaza.
They include Israeli conductor Ilan Volkov, Emmy Award-winning actors Ilana Glazer and Hannah Einbinder, Canadian trauma guru Gabor Maté, and Oscar winners Jonathan Glazer and Yuval Avraham, who co-directed the documentary “No Other Land.”
The initiating signatories included American author and editor-at-large of Jewish Currents Peter Beinart; former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg; former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy; Libby Lenkinski, the vice president for public engagement of the New Israel Fund; British activist Em Hilton, and former Belgian member of parliament Simone Susskind.
“We launched this initiative because the deeds of Israel’s government in Gaza have been an affront to collective Jewish consciousness worldwide,” Burg said in a statement. “Pressure from people mobilizing across the world, which led to leaders taking a stand, helped produce a ceasefire. Now international pressure must be sustained to end this cycle of violence and oppression once and for all.”
The letter also urges “businesses, labor unions, civil society” and the United Nations’ member states to take four steps: comply with decisions of the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court (which issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year), impose sanctions and arms embargoes on Israel, ensure humanitarian aid reaches Gaza and “refute false accusations of antisemitism.”
“We shall not rest until this ceasefire carries forward into an end of occupation and apartheid,” the letter continued. “We write in the hope that this initiative further emboldens a moment of renewed Jewish commitment to act with conscience and compassion. We vow to work urgently to achieve equality, justice, and freedom for Palestinians and Israelis.”
The post Prominent Jewish figures call for sanctions on Israel: ‘The ceasefire must be the beginning, not the end.’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Prominent Jewish figures call for sanctions on Israel: ‘The ceasefire must be the beginning, not the end.’
As the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas enters its second week, prominent Jews from around the world who have criticized Israel throughout the war have now signed onto a letter urging global leaders to ensure that the deal results in a “new era of peace and justice for all.”
The letter, which was addressed to António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, and world leaders, also demands that Israel be held to account for “grievous violations of international law.”
“It was international pressure that helped to secure this ceasefire, and it must be sustained to guarantee that it endures. The ceasefire must be the beginning, not the end,” the letter says. “The risk of reverting to a political reality of indifference to occupation and permanent conflict is too great. This same pressure must be continued to deliver a new era of peace and justice for all—Palestinians and Israelis alike.”
The letter, titled “Jews Demand Action,” was released Wednesday as Vice President J.D. Vance visits Israel, amid signs casting doubt on the durability of the ceasefire deal.
It was signed by a host of prominent Jewish celebrities and public figures, many of whom have been outspoken in their criticism of Israel since the beginning of its two-year war in Gaza.
They include Israeli conductor Ilan Volkov, Emmy Award-winning actors Ilana Glazer and Hannah Einbinder, Canadian trauma guru Gabor Maté, and Oscar winners Jonathan Glazer and Yuval Avraham, who co-directed the documentary “No Other Land.”
The initiating signatories included American author and editor-at-large of Jewish Currents Peter Beinart; former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg; former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy; Libby Lenkinski, the vice president for public engagement of the New Israel Fund; British activist Em Hilton, and former Belgian member of parliament Simone Susskind.
“We launched this initiative because the deeds of Israel’s government in Gaza have been an affront to collective Jewish consciousness worldwide,” Burg said in a statement. “Pressure from people mobilizing across the world, which led to leaders taking a stand, helped produce a ceasefire. Now international pressure must be sustained to end this cycle of violence and oppression once and for all.”
The letter also urges “businesses, labor unions, civil society” and the United Nations’ member states to take four steps: comply with decisions of the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court (which issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year), impose sanctions and arms embargoes on Israel, ensure humanitarian aid reaches Gaza and “refute false accusations of antisemitism.”
“We shall not rest until this ceasefire carries forward into an end of occupation and apartheid,” the letter continued. “We write in the hope that this initiative further emboldens a moment of renewed Jewish commitment to act with conscience and compassion. We vow to work urgently to achieve equality, justice, and freedom for Palestinians and Israelis.”
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The post Prominent Jewish figures call for sanctions on Israel: ‘The ceasefire must be the beginning, not the end.’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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I was a villain on ‘Love is Blind.’ The antisemitic backlash brought me back to Judaism
Within hours of the debut of Love is Blind’s seventh season on Netflix in late 2024, “Leo the Art Dealer” became America’s newest reality TV villain.
That’s me.
TikToks mocking me gained millions of views; gossip columnists published pieces calling me arrogant, pretentious, obnoxious and a “walking red flag”; soon, Walmart was selling “Art Dealer” Halloween sets based on my style, and Netflix added the words “art dealer” to their official IG bio.
But I could deal with the hate. Until it turned antisemitic.
Most viewers knew I was Jewish from the Star of David chain around my neck. I didn’t anticipate how much negative attention that small piece of jewelry would attract. People weren’t just commenting on my behavior from the show. They were calling me a greedy Jew, indulging in antisemitic tropes, calling me the worst Jew ever, and much worse. My DM’s were filled with obscene and toxic messages that would make anyone nervous.
I felt the gamut of negative emotions – shock, hurt, anger and panic.
This experience is common among Jews in the public eye today. Sam Klein described the non-stop antisemitic comments he received after his appearance on Love in Blind UK season one. In 2022, internet personality Lizzy Savetsky dropped out of Real Housewives of New York, citing a “torrent of antisemitism” in response to the announcement that she would join the cast.
However, instead of making me cower or want to hide my Jewish identity, this experience actually pushed me to explore my roots more deeply. What started out as a traumatic experience became a catalyst for my return to my Jewish faith and community.
Before learning, grief
I had begun returning to Judaism during the COVID pandemic, well before my reality TV debut. I lost my mother and two grandparents early in the lockdown, and my father and stepfather received concurrent cancer diagnoses.
My inner world was completely falling apart.
That’s when, while scrolling YouTube one day with a close friend, I stumbled across the channel of Rabbi Shais Taub, a Chabad rabbi with a gift for taking complex Torah ideas and distilling them into easy-to-understand, bite-sized concepts. My Jewish knowledge at that point was pretty limited — we’re talking bagels and Seinfeld. But something about how Rabbi Shais broke down Jewish ideas and principles just grabbed me.
So I did what Jews have done for centuries when they needed guidance, in the mold of Pirkei Avot, which says “Make for yourself a teacher.” I reached out to the rabbi to ask some of my pressing questions: “Why does G-d allow tragedy in the world?” “How do I mourn for my deceased family?” and “How can I be a good Jew?”
Through his patient teaching, I slowly began to understand how Judaism could become a meaningful, active part of my life, and not just a cultural identity that I acknowledged once or twice a year.
Shidduch dating on steroids
In the early stages of my spiritual journey, I applied to be on Love is Blind. After a year of interviews, I was cast on the show, and filming began in October of 2023. For two weeks, I lived with 29 strangers in a surreal alternate universe, where I was surrounded by cameras and spent eight hours a day dating. It was like shidduch dating on steroids.
In the high-stakes environment of Love is Blind, I connected with a wonderful woman called Brittany. As part of the show’s editing process, however, the ways my Judaism played into our developing connection got cut. In reality, we had long conversations about how important it was to me to raise a Jewish family — even though I was still only beginning to figure out just what Judaism meant to me — and the process of conversion.
I proposed. Then, almost out of nowhere, the show’s producers decided our relationship wasn’t compelling enough to continue filming, and we were cut from the show. Shortly after, we discovered that while we seemed like a match during filming, in real life we realized we weren’t meant for each other, although today we remain great platonic friends.
The one-two punch of not being on the show and realizing Brittany and I weren’t meant for each other left me feeling completely lost and dejected.
Gaining fortitude — and needing it
I was spiraling, until Rabbi Shais invited me to visit the Ohel —the resting place of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, in Queens, New York. I’d never been to the gravesite of a holy person before, but I figured I had nothing to lose.
Walking into that place just a few months after wrapping up the filming was like stepping into an altered space of spirituality. All the chaos and noise seemed to fade away, and I felt a profound stillness and inner peace, unlike anything I’d ever experienced.
Jewish tradition teaches that a righteous person like the Rebbe can help us spiritually and bring us blessings even after they’ve passed. Standing there at his resting place, something just opened up in my heart. I found myself praying — really praying — for the first time in my life.
To my surprise, shortly after my Ohel visit, Love is Blind producers let me know that Brittany and I were being re-edited into the show. Several months later, when the season was finally released on Netflix, the sense of profound peace I had begun to cultivate that day proved newly necessary. Beyond the reality show gossip, and crude and inflammatory comments, I received a crash course in online antisemitism — including insults about my appearance and death threats against me and my family. Some social media users, in response to my appearance, issued called for Hitler and Hamas to finish the job.
It was everywhere — in my social media comment sections and DM’s, in my personal email and text messages, as well as my business contact form and voicemail. I disconnected my business phone because the messages wouldn’t stop. Internet trolls flooded my business with one-star ratings on Google, just to hurt my prospects.
However, rather than demoralizing me, the hate and negativity gave me a push to go deeper into my Jewish identity and start observing practices I’d never seriously considered before. I began taking a digital Shabbat, disconnecting from social media every week between sundown on Friday and Saturday night. I also started putting on tefillin daily, and at Rabbi Shais’ suggestion, studying Sha’ar HaBitachon, a classic text about developing trust in God.
For the first time in my life, I felt truly connected to and cared for by something greater than myself.
What’s next
In our chaotic times, when hate speech goes viral and authentic connection feels increasingly rare, our community and traditions can bring a needed sense of grounding.
While online antisemitism is real and impacts everyone differently, I make the conscious choice to not make it the center of my identity. For me, being a Jew is more than combating antisemitism. It’s about feeling a sense of Jewish pride, connection and empowerment. I’ve become much more involved with my local Chabad, and even attended the Chabad Young Professionals international retreat.
Ultimately, while I didn’t find my life partner in the Love is Blind pods, it was a crucial step on my journey to becoming a proud and active Jew. Through thick and thin, our people have always overcome adversity by doubling down on our Jewish pride and traditions, and always finding a reason to kvell rather than kvetch.
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