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How Jewish comedy found religion, from Philip Roth to ‘Broad City’
(JTA) — In the 2020 comedy “Shiva Baby,” a 20-something young woman shows up at a house of Jewish mourners and gently offers her condolences. When she finds her mother in the kitchen, they chat about the funeral and the rugelach before the daughter asks, “Mom, who died?”
While “Shiva Baby” explores themes of sexuality and gender, the comedy almost never comes at the expense of Jewish tradition, which is treated seriously by its millennial writer and director Emma Seligman (born in 1995) even as the shiva-goers collide. It’s far cry from the acerbic way an author raised during the Depression like Philip Roth lampooned a Jewish wedding or a baby boomer like Jerry Seinfeld mocked a bris.
These generational differences are explored in Jenny Caplan’s new book, “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials.” A religion scholar, Caplan writes about the way North American Jewish comedy has evolved since World War II, with a focus on how humorists treat Judaism as a religion. Her subjects range from writers and filmmakers who came of age shortly after the war (who viewed Judaism as “a joke at best and an actual danger at worst”) to Generation X and millennials, whose Jewish comedy often recognizes “the power of community, the value of family tradition, and the way that religion can serve as a port in an emotional storm.”
“I see great value in zeroing in on the ways in which Jewish humorists have engaged Jewish practices and their own Jewishness,” Caplan writes. “It tells us something (or perhaps it tells us many somethings) about the relationship between Jews and humor that goes deeper than the mere coincidence that a certain humorist was born into a certain family.”
Caplan is the chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She has a master’s of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and earned a Ph.D. in religion from Syracuse University.
In a conversation last week, we spoke about the Jewishness of Jerry Seinfeld, efforts by young women comics to reclaim the “Jewish American Princess” label, and why she no longer shows Woody Allen movies in her classrooms.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity
[Note: For the purpose of her book and our conversation, this is how Caplan isolates the generations: the Silent Generation (b. 1925-45), the baby boom (1946-65), Generation X (1966-79) and millennials (1980–95).]
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Let me ask how you got into this topic.
Jenny Caplan: I grew up in a family where I was just sort of surrounded by this kind of material. My dad is a comedic actor and director who went to [Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s] Clown College. My degrees were more broadly in American religion, not Jewish studies, but I was really interested in the combination of American religion and popular culture. When I got to Syracuse and it came time to start thinking about my larger project and what I wanted to do, I proposed a dissertation on Jewish humor.
The key to your book is how Jewish humor reflects the Jewish identity and compulsions of four sequential generations. Let’s start with the Silent Generation, which is sandwiched between the generation whose men were old enough to fight in World War II and the baby boomers who were born just after the war.
The hallmark of the Silent Generation is that they were old enough to be aware of the war, but they were mostly too young to serve. Every time I told people what I was writing about, they would say Woody Allen or Philip Roth, two people of roughly the same generation.
In “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials,” Jenny Caplan explores how comics treated religion from the end of World War II to the 21st century. (Courtesy)
The Roth story you focus on is “Eli, the Fanatic” from 1959, about an assimilated Jewish suburb that is embarrassed and sort of freaks out when an Orthodox yeshiva, led by a Holocaust survivor, sets up in town.
Roth spent the first 20 to 30 years of his career dodging the claim of being a self-loathing Jew and bad for the Jews. But the actual social critique of “Eli, the Fanatic” is so sharp. It is about how American Jewish comfort comes at the expense of displaced persons from World War II and at the expense of those for whom Judaism is a real thriving, living religious practice.
That’s an example you offer when you write that the Silent Generation “may have found organized religion to be a dangerous force, but they nevertheless wanted to protect and preserve the Jewish people.” I think that would surprise people in regards to Roth, and maybe to some degree Woody Allen.
Yeah, it surprised me. They really did, I think, share that postwar Jewish sense of insecurity about ongoing Jewish continuity, and that there’s still an existential threat to the ongoing existence of Jews.
I hear that and I think of Woody Allen’s characters, atheists who are often on the lookout for antisemitism. But you don’t focus on Allen as the intellectual nebbish of the movies. You look at his satire of Jewish texts, like his very funny “Hassidic Tales, With a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar” from 1970, which appeared in The New Yorker. It’s a parody of Martin Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim” and sentimental depictions of the shtetl, perhaps like “Fiddler on the Roof.” A reader might think he’s just mocking the tradition, but you think there’s something else going on.
He’s not mocking the tradition as much as he’s mocking a sort of consumerist approach to the tradition. There was this sort of very superficial attachment to Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim.” Allen’s satire is not a critique of the traditions of Judaism, it’s a critique of the way that people latch onto things like the Kabbalah and these new English translations of Hasidic stories without any real depth of thought or intellect. Intellectual hypocrisy seems to be a common theme in his movies and in his writing. It’s really a critique of organized religion, and it’s a critique of institutions, and it’s a critique of the power of institutions. But it’s not a critique of the concept of religion.
The idea of making fun of the wise men and their gullible followers reminds me of the folk tales of Chelm, which feature rabbis and other Jewish leaders who use Jewish logic to come to illogical conclusions.
Yes.
You write that the baby boomers are sort of a transition between the Silent Generation and a later generation: They were the teenagers of the counterculture, and warned about the dangers of empty religion, but also came to consider religion and tradition as valuable. But before you get there, you have a 1977 “Saturday Night Live” skit in which a bris is performed in the back seat of a luxury car, and the rabbi who performs it is portrayed as what you call an absolute sellout.
Exactly. You know: Institutional religion is empty and it’s hollow, it’s dangerous and it’s seductive.
Jerry Seinfeld, born in 1954, is seen as an icon of Jewish humor, but to me is an example of someone who never depicts religion as a positive thing. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
“Seinfeld” is more a show about New York than it is necessarily a show about anything Jewish. The New York of Seinfeld is very similar to the New York of Woody Allen, peopled almost entirely by white, middle-class, attractive folks. It’s a sort of Upper West Side myopia.
But there’s the bris episode, aired in 1993, and written by Larry Charles. Unless you are really interested in the medium, you may not know much about Larry Charles, because he stays behind the camera. But he also goes on to do things like direct Bill Maher’s anti-religion documentary “Religulous,” and there’s a real strong case for him as having very negative feelings about organized religion which feels like a holdover from the Silent Generation. And so in that episode you have Kramer as the Larry Charles stand-in, just opining about the barbaric nature of the circumcision and trying to save this poor baby from being mutilated.
The few references to actual Judaism in “Seinfeld” are squirmy. I am thinking of the 1995 episode in which a buffoon of a rabbi blurts out Elaine’s secrets on a TV show. That was written by Larry David, another boomer, whose follow-up series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” is similarly known for its irreverence toward Judaism. But you say David can also surprise you with a kind of empathy for religion.
For the most part, he’s classic, old school, anti-organized religion. There’s the Palestinian Chicken episode where the Jews are rabidly protesting the existence of a Palestinian-run chicken restaurant near a Jewish deli, and where his friend Funkhouser won’t play golf on Shabbos until Larry gets permission by bribing the rabbi with the Palestinian chicken. There, rabbis are ridiculous and can be bought and religion is hollow and this is all terrible.
But then there’s this bat mitzvah montage where for one moment in the entire run of this show, Larry seems happy and in a healthy relationship and fulfilled and enjoying life.
That’s where he falls in love with Loretta Black during a bat mitzvah and imagines a happy future with her.
It’s so startling: It is the most human we ever see Larry over the run of the show, and I believe that was the season finale for the 2007 season. It was much more in line with what we’ve been seeing from a lot of younger comedians at that point, which was religion as an anchor in a good way — not to pull you down but to keep you grounded.
So for Generation X, as you write, Judaism serves “real, emotional, or psychological purpose for the practitioners.”
I wouldn’t actually call it respect but religion is an idea that’s not just something to be mocked and relegated to the dustbin. I’m not saying that Generation X is necessarily more religious, but they see real power and value in tradition and in certain kinds of family experiences. So, a huge amount of the humor can still come at the expense of your Jewish mother or your Jewish grandmother, but the family can also be the thing that is keeping you grounded, and frequently through some sort of religious ritual.
Who exemplifies that?
My favorite example is the 2009 Jonathan Tropper novel, “This Is Where I Leave You.” I’m so disappointed that the film adaptation of that sucked a lot of the Jewish identity out of the story, so let’s stick with the novel. In that book, where a family gathers for their father’s shiva, the characters are horrible people in a dysfunctional family writ large. They lie to each other. They backstab each other. But in scene where the protagonist Judd describes standing up on the bimah [in synagogue] to say Kaddish [the Mourner’s Prayer] after the death of his father, and the way he talks about this emotional catharsis that comes from saying the words and hearing the congregation say the words — it’s a startling moment of clarity in a book where these characters are otherwise just truly reprehensible.
Adam Sandler was born in 1966, the first year of Generation X, and his “Chanukah Song” seems like such a touchstone for his generation and the ones that follow. It’s not about religious Judaism, but in listing Jewish celebrities, it’s a statement of ethnic pride that Roth or Woody Allen couldn’t imagine.
It’s the reclamation of Jewish identity as something great and cool and fun and hip and wonderful and absolutely not to be ashamed of.
From left, Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson and Seth Green in an episode of “Broad City” parodying Birthright Israel. (Screenshot from Comedy Central)
Which brings us to “Broad City,” which aired between 2014 and 2019. It’s about two 20-something Jewish women in New York who, in the case of Ilana Glazer’s character, anyway, are almost giddy about being Jewish and embrace it just as they embrace their sexuality: as just liberating. Ilana even upends the Jewish mother cliche by loving her mother to death.
That’s the episode with Ilana at her grandmother’s shiva, which also has the B plot where Ilana and her mother are shopping for underground illegal handbags. They spend most of the episode snarking at each other and fighting with each other and her mother’s a nag and Ilana is a bumbling idiot. But at the moment that the cops show up, and try to nab them for having all of these illegal knockoff handbags, the two of them are a team. They are an absolute unit of destructive force against these hapless police officers.
I think all of your examples of younger comics are women, who have always had fraught relationships with Jewish humor, both as practitioners and as the target of jokes. You write about “The JAP Battle” rap from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which both leans into the stereotype of the Jewish-American Princess — spoiled, acquisitive, “hard as nails” — and tries to reclaim it without the misogyny.
Rachel Bloom’s character Rebecca in “Girlfriend” self-identifies as a JAP, but she doesn’t actually fit the category. It’s her mother, Naomi, who truly is the Philip Roth, “Marjorie Morningstar,” Herman Wouk model of a JAP. So Bloom is kind of using the term, but you can’t repurpose the term when the original is still there.
So as an alternative, I offer up a new term: the Modern Ashkenazi American Woman. It’s very New York, it’s very East Coast, it’s very particular to a type of upbringing and community that in the 1950s and ’60s would have been almost exclusively Conservative Jews, and then may have become a bit more Reform as we’ve gotten into the ’90s and 2000s. They went to the JCC. They probably went to Jewish summer camp.
But even that doesn’t even really speak to the American sense of what Jewish is anymore, because American Jews have become increasingly racially and culturally diverse.
There is also something that’s happening historically with Generation X, and that’s the distance from the two major Jewish events of the 20th century, which is the Holocaust and the creation of Israel.
The Silent Generation and baby boomers still had a lingering sense of existential dread — the sense that we’re not so far removed from an attempted total annihilation of Jews. Gen X and millennials are so far removed from the Holocaust that they don’t feel that same fear.
But the real battleground we’re seeing in contemporary American Judaism is about the relationship to Israel. For baby boomers and even for some older members of Gen X, there’s still a sense that you can criticize Israel, but at the end of the day, it’s your duty to ultimately support Israel’s right to exist. And I think millennials and Zoomers [Gen Z] are much more comfortable with the idea of Israel being illegitimate.
Have you seen that in comedy?
I certainly think you can see the leading edge of that in some millennial stuff. The “Jews on a Plane” episode of “Broad City” is an absolute excoriation of Birthright Israel, and does not seem particularly interested in softening its punches about the whole idea of Jews going to Israel. I think we can see a trend in that direction, where younger American Jewish comedians do not see that as punching down.
You’re teaching a class on Jewish humor. What do your undergraduates find funny? Now that Woody Allen is better known for having married his adoptive daughter and for the molestation allegations brought by another adoptive daughter, do they look at his classic films and ask, “Why are you teaching us this guy?”
For the first time I’m not including Woody Allen. I had shown “Crimes and Misdemeanors” for years because I think it’s his most theological film. I think it’s a great film. And then a couple years ago, I backed off, because some students were responding that it was hard to look at him with all the baggage. He’s still coming up in conversation because you can’t really talk about the people who came after him without talking about him, but for the first time I’m not having them actually watch or read any of his stuff.
They have found things funny that I didn’t expect them to, and they have not found things funny that I would have thought they would. They laughed their way through “Yidl mitn fidl,” the 1936 Yiddish musical starring Molly Picon. I also thought they’d enjoy the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup” and they did not laugh once. Some of that is the fact that Groucho’s delivery is just so fast.
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How a 198-year-old New Orleans synagogue became one of America’s fastest-growing Jewish communities
NEW ORLEANS — By the time a trumpet player rose from the pews, candy was already flying through the sanctuary.
Children scrambled across the bimah beneath Touro Synagogue’s green-and-gold dome while the crowd clapped to the music and a 13-year-old boy in orange Nike sneakers stood beside his mom before two open Torah scrolls — one for the bar mitzvah boy, the other for his mother, who was 47, a recent convert celebrating her adult bat mitzvah.
By the end of services, congregants carrying guitars, flutes, and tambourines had transformed the sanctuary into something resembling a Mardi Gras second line.
In most American synagogues, this would have felt unusual. At Touro, located along the famous parade route, it felt nearly routine.
Across the country, congregations are shrinking, aging and consolidating. Denominational loyalty is weakening. Younger Jews are less likely to join synagogues at all. But here in New Orleans, Jewish communal life has experienced an unlikely revival.
New Orleans still carries Katrina in its census numbers. The city still has roughly 25% fewer residents than before the storm. Its Black population, while still the majority, has dropped most significantly. Jewish New Orleans, overwhelmingly white, tells a different story. Community leaders say the Jewish population has rebounded to — and perhaps surpassed — pre-Katrina levels.
The revival was driven partly by generational turnover. After the 2005 hurricane, many older New Orleans Jews decided not to return, choosing instead to spend retirement near children and family in cities like Houston and Atlanta. In their place came a younger generation of post-Katrina newcomers — volunteers, nonprofit workers, Tulane University transplants and young families drawn by the chance to help rebuild the city.
But the resurgence cannot be explained by demographics alone. Across the city, Jews describe a deeply interconnected communal ecosystem shaped by catastrophe, collaboration and a distinctly New Orleans instinct for improvisation.
The city’s Jewish institutions increasingly learned to share resources, blur lines between denominations and accommodate the realities of modern Jewish families. Interfaith couples found a warmer welcome. Synagogues that once occupied separate lanes began collaborating more closely. “Denominational boundaries here are very porous,” said Ilana Horwitz, a Tulane University Jewish Studies professor who is writing a book about how the Jewish community survived and rebuilt after Katrina.
At the center of that revival sits Touro Synagogue, a nearly 200-year-old Reform congregation that is defying institutional decline.
In 2019, Touro hired as its spiritual leader Rabbi Katie Bauman, a New Orleans native. She arrived just months before the pandemic would force synagogues across America to reinvent themselves.
At the time, the shul counted roughly 570 families. Today, it is approaching 750. Its religious school has grown from 131 students to 243 in six years. In 2019, the synagogue hosted eight b’nei mitzvah. Nearly 30 b’nai mitzvahs are already scheduled for the 2027-28 school year — so many that synagogue leaders have begun quietly confronting an unfamiliar problem: Are we growing too much?
“We’re not gonna turn people away,” said Kevin Wilkins, the synagogue’s president and the first convert ever to hold the role. “We’re not gonna have a waitlist.”
Two decades after Katrina nearly drowned New Orleans, Touro has become a kind of laboratory for what Jewish communal life can look like after disaster reshapes it.
The people who came after the storm
A Detroit native, Joshua Lichtman came to New Orleans in 2007 after spending time at a Jewish farming and environmental program in Connecticut. Like many people drawn south after Katrina, he was looking for purpose and a chance to help rebuild.
“It was volunteering and adventure,” Lichtman, 51, recalled one Saturday morning after services at Touro
Entire neighborhoods remained scarred by floodwaters. Lichtman spent those early months gutting homes, working in community gardens and helping with legal aid projects. Then he met Davida Finger, who ran the Katrina Clinic at Loyola University, which provided free legal assistance to residents displaced by the hurricane. They got married.
He came to help rebuild the city. Somewhere along the way, the city rebuilt him, too.
Lichtman stayed, helped launch Avodah New Orleans, a Jewish service corps program, and now works in financial planning. Today, he and his wife are raising two children in the city.
His story reflects a broader demographic shift that transformed Jewish New Orleans after Katrina. The Jewish community dropped from about 10,000 people to around 6,500 following the floods. “The Jewish population has been replenished,” said Horwitz, who moved to New Orleans from the Bay Area in 2021, making her both a scholar of the city’s Jewish revival and a participant in it. “But it’s a different configuration of people than there was before.”
Before Katrina, much of Jewish New Orleans was defined by continuity. Many families traced their roots in the city back four or five generations to German-Jewish immigrants who arrived in the 19th century. They attended the same schools, joined the same congregations and often stayed for life.
Reform Judaism, long the dominant expression of Jewish life here, reflected a distinctly Southern tradition — highly assimilated, deeply rooted in local civic affairs and often more connected to New Orleans than to the broader currents of American Judaism.
The community was tightly knit and deeply rooted. Institutional loyalty ran deep. Many worked in law, medicine or family-owned businesses built over generations. As the city’s economy shifted and younger residents left for bigger cities, the Jewish population had already begun slowly shrinking.
The people who arrived after Katrina brought different backgrounds and different reasons for coming. They were volunteers, nonprofit workers, academics, and entrepreneurs drawn not by inheritance but by opportunity — and by the chance to help rebuild.
The transformation was not entirely accidental. In the years after Katrina, the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans launched an incentive program for Jewish newcomers, offering a stipend for moving expenses, discounted tuition at the Jewish day school, and a year of free membership at a synagogue. According to the federation, hundreds of people participated in the program, which ran through 2012, and one in four have stayed.
One of the engines of that growth has been Tulane University, where 25% to 30% of undergraduate students are Jewish, according to local estimates, placing it higher than the University of Pennsylvania (17%), Columbia (16%) and Harvard (10%).
Today, some Jewish families view Tulane as an appealing alternative to more politically polarized campuses. Nicholas Lemann, the New Orleans-born author of Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries, said the university benefits from both New Orleans’ cultural appeal and a campus climate many parents perceive as less contentious than schools on the coasts.
“Kids won’t be exposed to anti-Zionism as at bigger Ivies,” said Lemann, a longtime professor and former dean at Columbia Journalism School. “That’s meaningful to many Jewish parents.”
Tulane functions as a pipeline bringing Jewish students, faculty and young professionals into the city, some of whom ultimately decide to stay.
Yet population alone does not explain the revival. What emerged after Katrina was a different way of organizing Jewish life in New Orleans. The city’s six synagogues and two Chabads routinely promote one another’s programs. Rabbis collaborate across denominational lines. Congregants often belong to more than one synagogue at a time.
Alan Smason, editor of the Crescent City Jewish News — which he founded after the hurricane — said much of that cooperation grew directly out of the storm. “We’ve got a Reform temple that actually lives next door to and partners with an Orthodox synagogue,” he said. “A lot of those traditions came about because of Katrina.”
Smason, a New Orleans native, has spent decades chronicling the city’s Jewish life. The cooperation he sees today would have been harder to imagine before the storm. “Out of the darkness,” he said, “came light.”
A different city
The community that emerged after Katrina was different. The result was a community that became more fluid and, in some ways, more open to experimentation than the one that preceded it. New Orleans has always been a city comfortable with reinvention.
On a humid afternoon, tour guide Roni Bossin led me through the French Quarter, pointing out traces of Jewish history hidden in plain sight.
There was the former factory where Joseph Haspel is credited with inventing the seersucker suit. There was Sam Zemurray — the Jewish immigrant known as “Sam the Banana Man” — who built a fruit empire from New Orleans. There was the Holocaust memorial overlooking the Mississippi River and the legacy of Judah Touro, the philanthropist whose name still adorns a hospital as well as the synagogue.
Jewish history here is less a chapter than a thread — stitched through the city’s commerce, politics, philanthropy and folklore. “Jews were woven into the story of New Orleans from the beginning,” said Bossin, a transplant from Israel.
Isaac Monsanto, the first Jewish settler in New Orleans for whom historical records exist, arrived in 1757. By 1828, local Jews had established a congregation that would eventually become Touro Synagogue.
But if Jewish New Orleans has deep roots, it has also changed dramatically. Lemann said the city he visits today feels markedly different from the one where he grew up. When he was young, many Jewish families had lived in New Orleans for generations. His father was born in the city. His grandfather was born in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. Local identity was often inherited.
Today, he said, the community includes far more newcomers. “The various elements of Jewish New Orleans have come together more,” Lemann said.
That history helps explain why Touro feels distinctly New Orleans. Unlike many American synagogues built on sprawling suburban campuses, the city presses right up against the sanctuary walls. The building sits along St. Charles Avenue with no parking lot separating it from the sidewalk. Streetcars rumble past. Mardi Gras floats pass the front doors. During carnival season, members gather there to watch parades together. The congregation builds viewing stands for children with disabilities. Families tailgate on synagogue grounds.
For Rabbi Lily Kowalski, an associate rabbi who joined the shul last year, one of her first Mardi Gras experiences at Touro came during Shabbat services. The congregation was praying when the parade began rolling past outside.
“There was something both ironic and beautiful,” she recalled.
Eventually, the clergy made a practical decision: They would skip a few songs from the end of the service. “The parade has started,” Kowalski remembered thinking. “We need to go outside and see the parade.”
On JazzFest weekend, Touro hosts a special musical Shabbat service that has become one of the congregation’s signature events for the past three decades. “We do love to party,” said Rabbi Bauman. “But it’s a symbol of how proud we are to be here.”
For generations, New Orleans has thrived by blending traditions rather than policing boundaries. Jazz emerged from that cultural mixing. So did much of the city’s cuisine, language and civic culture. Many congregants see Touro as a Jewish expression of the same instinct — a congregation more interested in bringing people together than sorting them into categories.
The open tent
The weekly pamphlet handed out to worshippers carries a simple message across the top: Touro synagogue welcomes all.
For Abby Gaunt, those words proved more than a slogan.
Raised Catholic in New York City, Gaunt had long felt drawn to Judaism. She married a Jewish man, sent her two children to Jewish schools and immersed herself in Jewish communal life. But she never felt the desire to convert.
Then came the 2018 Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh. As she read about the victims, one detail stopped her. Two of the people murdered that day — brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal — had Fragile X syndrome, the same genetic condition as her son, Mack.
The story felt personal. When schools struggled to accommodate Mack’s learning differences, Gaunt said New Orleans’ Jewish community had stepped forward to embrace him. The local Jewish day school accepted him when others would not. Congregants welcomed him. Families rallied around him.
“It just felt like they took you as you are,” Gaunt said of Touro. “There’s no asterisk.”
The experience led her to begin studying for conversion. This spring, she celebrated the culmination of that journey standing beside Mack. Mother and son shared the bimah. They recited prayers together. Each read from a Torah scroll — his for a bar mitzvah, hers for an adult bat mitzvah.
For Touro, it was a fitting image. The congregation’s growth has been fueled by newcomers and young families, and by an expansive understanding of who belongs. Its membership includes interfaith families, former Orthodox Jews, lifelong Reform Jews, converts and a growing number of congregants who arrived from a local Conservative synagogue.
Rather than asking newcomers to conform to a single model of Jewish life, synagogue leaders have increasingly adapted the institution around the people walking through the doors. “We’re not just saying we’re an open tent,” said Beth Shapiro Lavin, Touro’s executive vice president, and the congregation’s next president beginning in 2027. “We mean it.”
In a city rebuilt by people who arrived from somewhere else, belonging has become one of Touro’s defining values.
When Lavin joined Touro’s board in 2022, the congregation was already growing. She now finds herself thinking less about survival than succession. Touro will celebrate its 200th anniversary in 2028, during her presidency. Around the same time, her own daughter will celebrate her bat mitzvah in the sanctuary where Lavin herself grew up.
“It’s a really exciting time,” said Lavin, who moved back home after Katrina.
The questions facing Touro are different from those confronting many American synagogues. The congregation worships beneath a dome completed in 1909. Memorial plaques line the sanctuary walls, some honoring congregants who died in the 1800s. The names on the walls grow older every year. The children running beneath them do not.
Growth has created a new set of questions for synagogue leaders. “What is the right size?” Lavin asked.
Part of the answer, she believes, lies in making participation as easy as possible for young families. More than a decade ago, Touro eliminated mandatory membership dues, replacing them with a voluntary giving model.
The experiment worked. This year, Lavin said, roughly two-thirds of donors increased their contributions. Some quadrupled them. “The model only works when we all give what we can,” she said.
The payoff is visible throughout the building. Parents linger after services. Teenagers tutor younger students in Hebrew school. Congregants volunteer to coach b’nai mitzvah speeches. Children who once sat on the sanctuary floor receiving blessings from clergy eventually return as youth group leaders and religious school teachers.
Beyond denominations
A few years ago, a group of families from Shir Chadash, New Orleans’ Conservative synagogue, found themselves searching for a new spiritual home. Some were drawn by Rabbi Bauman’s charismatic leadership. Others were looking for a congregation in the city rather than the suburbs. Many already had friends at Touro.
What they weren’t looking for was a typical Reform service.
“We really appreciate Touro’s big tent approach,” said Ben Horwitz (no relation to Ilana), who helped found a lay-led group that now meets twice a month — once in a community member’s home and once in Touro’s library. “We should be able to serve this community writ large.”
Known as the Chavurat Or’Leans, it offers a more traditional style prayer experience while remaining fully part of the larger congregation. On some weekends, 30 to 50 people attend when it meets at Touro. The synagogue provides space, children’s programming and logistical support.
“It has been a win-win situation,” Horwitz said.
The arrangement reflects a broader philosophy taking hold at Touro. Rather than asking congregants to fit neatly into denominational categories, the synagogue increasingly tries to meet people where they are.
When Horwitz and his wife, Ellie Streiffer, began planning their son’s bar mitzvah, they wanted a traditional, egalitarian service. Touro not only accommodated the request, but provided rabbinic support to help their son prepare.
Other families have made similar choices. “We’re trying to push boundaries,” Bauman said. “People are looking for community more than a particular movement.”
The same flexibility that led Bauman to accommodate different religious traditions has also helped it navigate other forms of difference. Touro’s political diversity is unusual in an era when many religious communities have become more ideologically homogeneous. New Orleans itself remains a blue enclave in a deeply red state.
Bauman said she has watched congregants repeatedly choose community over agreement. “Especially in the last two years, which have been so challenging and so politically divisive,” she said, “people want to be together more than they want to be right.”
A problem most synagogues would envy
Part of the congregation’s growth coincided with Bauman’s arrival. She became senior rabbi in 2019, just months before the pandemic upended American religious life.
While congregations around the country migrated online, Bauman took much of Touro outdoors. Youth groups met camp-style in parks and courtyards. Families gathered under oak trees. Children who might have disappeared into screens continued seeing one another face-to-face.
“We just never did the Zoom thing,” for youth and teen education programs, Bauman said. Looking back, she believes that decision accelerated the congregation’s growth by strengthening relationships at a moment when many institutions were struggling to maintain them.
The growth has been so pronounced that last year Touro hired a third full-time rabbi for the first time in its history. Rabbi Kowalski arrived in the summer of 2025 from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to serve as associate rabbi and education director.
Sitting in her office one afternoon beneath a hand-painted sign reading “Welcome Rabbi Kowalski,” she described the job as both “inspiring and daunting.”
On Sunday mornings and Wednesday afternoons, the synagogue hums with activity. Religious school classes fill nearly every available room. Parents attend adult education programs while their children study Hebrew. Choir rehearsals meet at the same time.
The building was designed to hold memory. It is now straining to hold momentum. “We’re using every nook of the building,” Kowalski said.
For generations, the challenge facing American synagogues was how to attract young families. At Touro, the question has become something else entirely: How do you keep growing without losing the intimacy that made people want to join in the first place?
The second tablets
For Bauman, the synagogue’s revival begins much earlier than Touro’s recent growth.
At the joint mother-son b’nai mitzvah, Bauman’s sermon focused on one of Judaism’s oldest stories of rupture and repair. In that week’s Torah portion, Moses descends Mount Sinai carrying the Ten Commandments, only to smash the stone tablets after discovering the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf below. Eventually, God commands him to climb the mountain again and carve a second set.
The first tablets, Bauman told the congregation, belonged to a world that was orderly and unbroken. The second set came afterward. “The first tablets are simple and clear,” she said. “But life is messier than that.”
In post-Katrina New Orleans, the metaphor hardly felt abstract. Rebuilding was never supposed to mean restoration.
Horwitz, the Tulane professor, sees echoes of biblical stories throughout New Orleans’ experience after the hurricane. Her forthcoming book traces the community’s journey through themes of flood, exile, wilderness and return.
Horwitz, whose own family arrived in the United States as Soviet Jewish refugees in the late 1980s, argues that what endured after Katrina was the community itself — not as a collection of buildings, but as a web of relationships that helped people find one another again. “It’s fundamental,” Horwitz said. “Jewish communities are there for you in a moment of crisis.”
The Jewish New Orleans that emerged after Katrina is not identical to the one that existed before the storm. Many of the people are different. So are the ways they have learned to build community.
But perhaps that is what Bauman meant when she spoke about the second tablets. The first version was lost. The second pair, which carried the Jewish people through the wilderness, was the one that endured.
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How to stop worrying about the Democratic Socialists of America
The question of why three candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America bested more mainstream Democrats in congressional primaries in New York and Colorado last month is being answered by pundits, not pollsters.
There have been no exhaustive exit polls to explain why, in Colorado, Melat Kiros unseated incumbent Democrat Diana DeGette and New York voters chose Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez — not to mention DSA victories in a slew of state races.
But there is an exhausting panic.
American Jews are worried that the often virulent anti-Israel positions these candidates take show that opposition to Israel is now a litmus test for political viability in the Democratic Party, that describing Israel as “genocidal” and “apartheid” is the ante for any blue candidate.
Given the nature of some of these races, it certainly looks that way. In Colorado, the policy differences between DeGette and Kiros were negligible. DeGette has one of the most progressive voting records in Congress. But she took AIPAC money and paid for it.
And her opponent Kiros wasn’t just critical of Israel’s government’s policies. She, like many other DSA candidates, blamed Israel for the Oct. 7 attacks. Avila Chevalier attended the Oct. 8, 2023, DSA-promoted rally that celebrated the attacks.
Meanwhile, the panic among mainstream Democrats is that primary voters are putting forth candidates who will get clobbered in general elections. In a May New York Times/Siena poll, 47% of Democrats said they want the party to move center, while 28% said the party should move to the left.
That means while DSA candidates may win in what some have called “cobalt blue,” or deeply Democratic districts, with a high number of young, white, educated voters, in crucial swing districts a DSA candidate will take the party down with them.
Israel, demonized
However the general election turns out, primary results show that among not all but a significant group of Democratic voters, two brands have become toxic: Israel and the Democratic Party.
Type “Gaza” into TikTok, scroll for five minutes, and it’s easy to understand at least one reason why. The carnage Israel has wrought in Gaza plays on a visceral loop on social media. Israel as the aggressive colonialist oppressor is a given in much of academia. And Israel’s own actions at the hands of its most right-wing government in history — well, not helpful.
DSA’s official platform on Israel — the first foreign policy position on its site — calls for an end to economic and military aid to Israel and “national sovereignty for the Palestinian people.”
Its best-known members, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have helped popularize the notion that funds spent by the U.S. to arm Israel could instead have been used to fund domestic programs, such as health care for all. On this point the DSA reflects the position of a plurality of American voters: Only 24% support maintaining current levels of aid, while 40% oppose it, according to an Economist/YouGov poll.
But other DSA candidates don’t criticize Israel; they demonize it, and they hesitate to condemn terror even when it attacks Americans. Kiros unapologetically appeared at a rally condemning Israel and refused to call the 2025 firebomb attack on peaceful Jewish marchers in Boulder an antisemitic act.
We are long past the post-Oct. 7 period when anti-Israel activists were challenged to condemn Hamas. For these candidates, pro-Palestinian means pro-Hamas.
“Militant anti-Zionism became a wedge that the group’s more radical activists used to drive away critics of authoritarianism on the left,” wrote Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic.
The other tarnished brand is the Democratic Party itself. At a time when President Donald Trump is sending ICE agents and troops into American cities, jacking tariffs, making billions of dollars in office and conducting full-scale wars without congressional approval, sitting Democrats look feckless. Even the most moderate Democrats — much less non-MAGA Republicans and independents — can see how Democrats have failed to build housing or address affordability. One way to punish the mainstream is to vote for the extremes.
The DSA’s Zionist founder
All of this is especially ironic considering the history of the DSA, whose founder, Michael Harrington, was both a Zionist and a pragmatic if radical political thinker.
Harrington founded the DSA in 1982 to create a movement for social change free from authoritarian pro-Stalinist groups. He was, in the words of the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., America’s “only responsible radical.”
And yes, the founder of the DSA identified as a Zionist.
In a 1975 interview with a Jewish journalist, Harrington, who died in 1989, said, “I support Israel as an internationalist. Israel is a democratic country whose people are passionately defending its self-determination.”
After the United Nations voted to condemn Zionism as racism, Harrington wrote, “If one preposterously charges that Zionism is racist, then so are all nationalisms which joined to condemn it at the U.N. And that is to drain the concept of racism of any serious meaning.”
Clearly, Harrington has left the building. After Sanders’ presidential campaign inspired a membership surge a decade ago, the current national DSA swelled with more radical membership, including from struggling far-left and communist groups.
“Having dismantled the guardrails that Harrington built to exclude communists,” wrote Chait, “the group established new guardrails to exclude anybody opposed to Israel’s destruction.”
DSA’s first iteration included Jewish activists who worked toward coexistence and a two-state solution, wrote Jo-Ann Mort, a DSA cofounder. Now, she wrote, “its socialism is more concerned with ‘anti-imperialism’ than the democratic socialism that inspired the founders.”
Extremism feeds extremism
The Jewish fears that a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty will lead to pogroms in Manhattan have not been realized. But after Ocasio-Cortez, another DSA candidate, drew the wrath of the group for initially supporting defensive weapons transfers to Israel, she has now come out against them.
One can imagine a DSA that struggle-sessions Sanders, the man most responsible for its revival, subjecting him to a humiliating show trial for being insufficiently anti-Israel. Far-fetched as that seems, it’s unclear how DSA will address the clear schism between its liberal Zionists and its increasingly hardcore anti-Israel wing.
Meanwhile, the ascendant DSA is a boon to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose own brand of extremism thrives on creating an Israel-against-the-world mentality. On a visit to Israel last month, I found Israelis and the Israeli media obsessed with Mamdani. One woman told me she wouldn’t dare set foot in New York City as long as the putative leader of the DSA was still mayor. Extremism feeds extremism.
And if the DSA specter leads American Jews to think the Republican Party is a safe haven, think again.
Young Republican voters are shifting against Israel in the same way young Democrats are. And just this week, Tucker Carlson, a confidant of the vice president, the right’s most popular media personality and a vicious Israel critic, said, “I officially don’t care about Hamas.”
An Israel-less ‘Promise to America’
Democratic leaders have struggled with ways to recapture the young voters lured away by the DSA.
The group Promise to America, founded earlier this month, asks representatives and candidates to sign on to six “pledges” that seem focus-group-tested to appeal to 18- to 26-year-olds: free speech, “government that works,” fiscal discipline, fair capitalism, just national security and “national renewal.”
“Democrats that hold these values that do well in the party,” Felix Frisch, the group’s 20-year-old founding director, told me in a phone interview. Frisch, who took a leave of absence from the University of Chicago to run the organization, pointed out that two of the pledge’s signers — Rep. Tom Suozzi in New York and Rep. Adam Gray in California’s Central Valley — were the only two Democrats to flip a district that Trump won in the 2024 cycle.
How did he explain the DSA’s success?
“They’re a lot more organized,” he said. “The reason I got so fired up to do this was because we need some organization around our core principles.”
The website, I pointed out, doesn’t mention Israel, which for many young voters is a defining issue. Frisch suggested I speak to the pledge’s signers, which I took to mean: Where Democrats can win, it may be in spite of their support for Israel, not because of it.
Where the DSA lost
Aside from online pledges, what hope is there for moderate Democrats who don’t put Hamas or Israel-bashing first?
I didn’t have to look far for an answer. In my Los Angeles City Council district, CD 11, a charismatic and accomplished DSA candidate, Faizah Malik, challenged incumbent Traci Park. In the early June election, Malik got trounced, 64% to 35%, in a district that teems with the same progressive, white voters who backed winning DSA candidates elsewhere.
The difference? Since taking office in 2022, Park has greatly reduced homeless encampments and, according to the Los Angeles Times, “became the face” of recovery after the Palisades fires. She pushed to bring 2028 Olympic events, Hollywood film shoots like Baywatch, several large affordable housing projects and a much-needed marine mammal recovery station to the area. Nothing sexy — well, except the Baywatch reboot — but noticeable.
Malik didn’t mention Israel or Gaza in her campaign materials, and it’s unclear whether doing so would have helped or hurt her. She did have the backing of Engage Action, the Muslim American lobbying group that considers Israel an occupier of Palestinian lands since 1948.
Park won because her record gave the district’s 284,000 residents plenty of reasons to vote for her, embodying what The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein called “a liberalism that builds.”
The same, by the way, could be said about Brad Lander, a liberal Zionist who beat Rep. Dan Goldman by running to his left on Israel but parted ways with DSA after Oct. 7. While the Israel issue helped tank his opponent, it was Lander’s record of delivering for his constituents as a City Council member and then city comptroller — including pushing through affordable housing initiatives and paid sick leave — that accounted for much of his popularity.
There is as much to learn in where the DSA candidates lost as where they won. When Democrats stand up articulate, social-media-savvy candidates who can galvanize voters around effective solutions to the problems they care about — and then make those solutions happen — they win.
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AIPAC attacked a Democrat for funding ICE. Now it’s backing one who voted the same way.
AIPAC’s super PAC is spending big to boost Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary — over a record that includes the same ICE funding vote the group used to attack a different Democrat earlier this year.
Stevens is one of three leading candidates in the primary, running against progressive insurgent Abdul El-Sayed, who called the Israeli government “evil” like Hamas, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow. A new 30-second ad from AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, praises Stevens for confronting Trump’s immigration policies — citing legislation she introduced to create an independent prosecutor for ICE misconduct, and her calls for then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign.
The ad is part of a multimillion-dollar campaign to boost Stevens, a longtime AIPAC ally, whom the group helped elect in 2018 and reelect in 2022.
But the message is hard to square with AIPAC’s own record elsewhere. Earlier this year, the group spent more than $2 million attacking former Rep. Tom Malinowski in a New Jersey special election for voting to fund ICE as part of a bipartisan border bill. “We can’t trust Tom Malinowski to stand up to President Donald Trump,” that ad said. Stevens voted for the same funding bill. Last June, she also voted for a House resolution thanking ICE agents “for protecting the homeland.”
An AIPAC spokesperson and a UDP representative did not immediately respond to explain why the vote to fund ICE was presented as a liability in Malinowski’s race but not in Stevens’ case.
AIPAC has spent years cultivating ties to Trump-aligned Republicans, many of whom strongly support aggressive immigration enforcement.
The Israel-boosting organization’s brand has become increasingly controversial among mainstream Democrats in recent years. Congressional candidates, including some Jewish Democrats, have promised not to take contributions from AIPAC. Last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani used the word “monsters” to describe AIPAC at a rally for progressive candidates he backed, all of whom won their primaries.
In the Michigan race, shaping up as one of the starkest tests of the Democratic coalition and how the party navigates policy towards Israel in Congress, United Democracy Project has already spent $10.7 million backing Stevens, making the Michigan contest one of its largest Senate investments this election cycle. AIPAC also raised several million dollars for Stevens by directing its donors to online portals that funnel money directly to the candidate’s campaign, effectively erasing its fingerprints in public data.
McMorrow has the endorsement of J Street, the liberal Zionist advocacy group that supports a two-state solution. The Jewish Democratic Council of America issued a rare dual endorsement of Stevens and McMorrow.
El-Sayed, the progressive frontrunner, is increasingly trying to transform AIPAC’s investment in the race into a centerpiece of his campaign message. Backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, El-Sayed has released videos accusing AIPAC of attempting to buy Democratic elections and police debate over Israel. In recent months, he has also reached out to Jewish voters while seeking to channel the energy of the 2024 Uncommitted movement, which protested the Biden administration’s support for Israel in the war against Hamas in Gaza. The state is home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States. Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in the state.
Arno Rosenfeld and Hannah Feuer contributed to this article
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