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A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’
(JTA) — Magda Teter’s new book, “Christian Supremacy,” begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 11, 2017. Hundreds of white nationalist neo-Nazis who ostensibly gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a local park broke into a chant: “Jews will not replace us.”
Other writers and scholars would note how antisemitism shaped white nationalism. But Teter, professor of history and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University, saw something else: how centuries of Christian thought and practice fed the twin evils of antisemitism and racism.
“The ideology espoused by white supremacists in the US and in Europe is rooted in Christian ideas of social and religious hierarchy,” she writes. “These ideas developed, gradually, first in the Mediterranean and Europe in respect to Jews and then in respect to people of color in European colonies and in the US, before returning transformed back to Europe.”
In the book, subtitled “Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism,” she traces this idea from the writings of the early church fathers like Paul the Apostle, though centuries of Catholic and Protestant debates over the status of Jews in Europe, to the hardening of racist attitudes with the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Antisemitic laws and theology, she argues, developed within Christianity a “mental habit” of exclusion and dominance that would eventually be applied to people of color up to and including modern times.
Teter is careful to acknowledge the different forms antisemitism and racism have taken, distinguishing between the Jews’ experience of social and legal exclusion and near annihilation, and the enslavement, displacement and ongoing persecution of Black people. And yet, she writes, “that story began with Christianity’s theological relation with Jews and Judaism.”
Teter is previously the author of “Blood Libel: On The Trail of an Antisemitic Myth,” winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award. At Fordham, the Catholic university in the Bronx, she is helping assemble what may be the largest repository of artifacts and literature dedicated to the Jewish history of the borough.
We spoke Thursday about how groups like the Proud Boys embrace centuries-old notions of Christian superiority, how “whiteness” became a thing and how she, as a non-Jew raised in Poland, became a Jewish studies scholar.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Your book was conceived and written during the COVID lockdown. Where did the idea for the book come from?
It’s an accidental project. I’ve been teaching the history of antisemitism for years, and I live in Harlem so questions of race and racism are very stark in my daily life. And since I grew up in Poland, and American history was not something we were taught or studied, I’ve never been satisfied with the various explanations for the strength of antisemitism and history of racism. And as I mentioned in my prologue, I watched the Raoul Peck documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” which has a clip with James Baldwin saying that white people have to figure out why they invented the idea of the N-word and must “embrace this stranger that they have maligned so long.” You could also say that the European Christians created the idea of “the Jew” and that sort of caricature had absolutely nothing to do with flesh and blood Jews. I kept noticing these parallels, as an outsider, reading American and African-American history.
I was also thinking about this idea of servitude that was attached to Jews in Christian theology, and then in law.
You write in your book that “Over time, white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” What do you mean by servitude in this context?
In Christian theology, from the earliest Christian texts, the idea of servitude and slavery is attached to the concept of Jews and Judaism. Paul does it in his Epistles. He uses this quote from the book of Genesis that “the elder shall serve the younger,” which becomes really embedded in Christian theology. It is the Jews, the elder people, who should serve the Christians, the younger people. Later on in medieval theology and canon law, Jews are in a servile position, consigned for their sin of rejecting Jesus to perpetual servitude. So even though Jews were free people and could live mostly where they wanted to live, marry whoever they wanted to marry — nobody was sold and some even had slaves — that idea of Jews as confined to perpetual servitude to Christians created a habit of thinking of Jews as having an inferior social status.
That language became secularized in modern times, and we see the development of the [antisemitic] trope of Jewish power: that they are in places where they shouldn’t be. I worked on fleshing out the parallels between the idea and then legal status of Jewish servitude and the conceptual perception of Black people in servile and inferior positions.
Magda Teter’s new book explores how “white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” (Chuck Fishman)
What other kinds of parallels did you find between racism and antisemitism?
In the Christian theology, Black people, like Jews, will be seen as cursed by God. Jews were [portrayed as] lazy because they didn’t work physically — they made money and exploited Christians. Black people were [portrayed as] lazy because they were trying to avoid physical labor at the expense of white men. Both people were seen as carnal, both as sexually dangerous, and so on.
I was struck by the fact that the racist turn of Christian supremacy — justifying the enslavement of Black people on theological grounds — is a fairly late development, taking hold in the early modern period when Europeans established slaveholding empires.
That’s right. In the summer of 2020, the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, we were all thinking about these issues of race and racism and America. And as I was in the middle of writing the article that became the book, I felt that there was a deeper history that needed to be told, and that slavery is not bound by color until the enslavement of Black Africans by Europeans during the colonial expansion of Europe.
After the French Revolution, when Jews were offered “emancipation” in much of Europe, there were deep debates about whether they could be citizens and be entitled to the same rights and protections as Christian citizens of France and England and other countries. How was that debate informed by Christianity?
In pre-modern Europe, there was obviously both a religious and legal framework under which Jews existed. They had their place in a social hierarchy. After the French Revolution, people are creating a new political reality. The idea of equality obviously challenged the social hierarchies that existed, including the idea that Christians were the superior religion. And that begins to play a role on two levels. One is the level of, well, “how can you be equal and be our judges and make decisions about us?” It’s fear of power — political power and political equality. That challenges the habit of thinking that sees Jews as inferior, in servitude and otherwise insolent and arrogant.
The other level comes from Enlightenment scholars who begin to place Jews in the Middle East and in the Holy Land, in Palestine. Jews are no longer seen as European. They are seen as “Oriental,” and they are compared to the non-European religions and practices that these Enlightenment scholars have been studying. Their differences are now also racialized. “They are not like us, they can’t assimilate. They can never be Frenchmen, they can never be Germans.”
And I guess it’s a short step from that to regarding people with dark skin as inferior and subordinate.
That’s right. Enlightenment scholars are also trying to to understand why it is justified to enslave Black Africans and they do it through “scientific” and other means. They classify Africans as inferior intellectually and they create this idea of race.
I began to think about these European politicians and intellectuals in terms of creating their identities, and what I ended up arguing is what we saw in Charlottesville, what we’re seeing in Europe. It’s not necessarily just about hate, but it’s about exclusion and rejection of Jews and people of color from equality, from citizenship.
And the common thread here is that whiteness and Christianity become inseparable. You write that “freedom and liberty now came to be linked not only to Christianity, but to whiteness, and servitude and enslavement to blackness.”
That’s right. White Christian “liberty” becomes embedded and embodied in law.
Did you see any pitfalls in drawing parallels between the Black and Jewish experiences? I am thinking of those in either community who might say, “How dare you compare our suffering to theirs!”
Yes, I was tempered. I think what some call “comparative victimhood” has paralyzed conversations about this subject, and I kept it in my mind all the time. What I hope comes through is that there’s incredible value in a comparative approach. Coming from Jewish studies as my primary field, the comparison with the Black experience gave me clarity on the nature of antisemitism as well as on the nature of the Jewish experience, and vice versa: The Jewish experience can also give clarity to some of the aspects of anti-Black racism.
What’s an example?
So, for instance, questions like, “Are Jews white? Are they not white? When did they become white?” That’s a whole genre of scholarship. And when you look at it through the lens of law and ideology, you begin to see that from a legal perspective, Jews were considered white in the United States because they could immigrate and they could be naturalized according to law. They did not have to go to court to become American. Their rights to vote were not challenged. There was discrimination, they couldn’t stay in hotels and in some places they couldn’t find employment, but by law, they were considered citizens. The debate about the whiteness of Jews is creating a fog of misunderstanding.
Black Americans were targeted by specific legal statutes from the very beginning in the Constitution and then in naturalization law and so on. And then there was the backlash even after the Civil War to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments [aimed at establishing political equality for Americans of all races].
Statues at the Strasbourg Cathedral depict Ecclesia and Synagoga, representing the triumph of the church, at left, and the servitude of Judaism, which is represented by a blindfolded figure, drooping and carrying a broken lance. (Edelseider/Wikimedia Commons)
How much do modern-day white supremacists, like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, see themselves as Christian? Or is this a kind of white supremacy that doesn’t name itself Christian but doesn’t even realize how many of its ideas are based in theology?
I think they might not be conscious of this legacy, but neo-Nazis take from the legacy of the Nazis who themselves were not thinking of themselves as Christian necessarily. But what I argue in the book is that white Christian supremacy becomes white supremacy. It never discards the Christian sense of domination and superiority that emerges from its early relationship with Jews and Judaism.
In the United States, Black people serve as contrast figures to whiteness, in the law and in the culture. You cannot have whiteness without Blackness. For Christians, Jews serve as that contrast figure. Consciously or unconsciously, the Proud Boys are embracing that. They talk of “God-given” freedoms for white people. That is the Christian legacy.
You said that the Nazis didn’t necessarily see themselves as a Christian movement. But I must ask, even though it is not the scope of your book, was the Holocaust a culmination of white Christian supremacy? Because I think many Christian theologians would want to say that Nazism was godless, and a perversion of the true faith.
I’ll say that when exclusionary ideology is coupled with the power of the state, that’s where it can lead.
In the years since the Holocaust especially, there have been many efforts by Christian leaders to address the ideological failings of the past. You write about Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration by the Catholic Church absolving Jews of collective guilt in the death of Jesus and some Protestant documents of contrition. But I got the feeling you were disappointed that many denominations haven’t gone far enough in reckoning with the past.
There was a sort of a moral sense that something needs to be addressed after the Holocaust. But then it is not fully addressed. I don’t think anybody has addressed the issue of power — the roots of hate, yes, but not the dynamics of power. We’ll see where the book goes, but maybe theologians will begin to grapple with this legacy of superiority and domination, and the way hierarchical habits of thinking have been developed through theology and through religious culture.
What other impact do you hope the book may have?
White supremacy is very much in the air. We need to speak up against it, and make connections and allyships. I hope that maybe because the book deals with law and power, it may create bridges among people who care about “We the People” as a vision of people who are diverse, respectful and equal, and not the exclusionary vision offered by white and Christian supremacy.
A cross burns at a Ku Klux Klan rally on Aug. 8, 1925. (National Photo Company Collection)
I’d love to talk about your background. You’re not Jewish but you are chair of Jewish Studies at Fordham, a Catholic university. What drew you to the study of Judaism and the Jews?
I grew up in Poland with a father who from the time I was a little girl would point out to me that there had been Jews in Poland. We would drive through the countryside, and he’d say, “This used to be a Jewish town and there used to be a synagogue and there was the Jewish cemetery.” I grew up being very conscious of the past’s presence and this kind of stark absence of Jews in Poland, where in the 1970s when I grew up Jewish history was taboo.
As soon as Jewish books on Jewish subjects began to be published, including those that dealt with antisemitism, we would read it together. We would talk about it. He wouldn’t just shift the destruction and murder of Jews in Poland on to the Nazis.
There was no Jewish studies program in Poland when I was applying to universities, so I studied Hebrew in Israel, and then studied Yiddish in New York at YIVO. I came to Columbia University to get my PhD in Jewish history and my career went in the direction it did. I was a professor of history and director of the Jewish and Israel studies program at Wesleyan University. I came to Fordham eight years ago and created a program in Jewish studies.
Your previous book was about the blood libel, the historic canard that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. This one’s about antisemitism. I don’t want to presume, but is your interest in these subjects in any way an act of contrition?
I grew up in a very secular household. I did not grow up Catholic. But I think growing up in Poland made me very, very aware of antisemitism and the history of antisemitism. I got my PhD from Columbia University in Jewish history, which did not emphasize Jewish suffering, but Jewish life, and I have studied Jewish life and teach about Jewish life — not just about Jewish suffering.
However, in the last few years, antisemitism has certainly been on the minds of many of us. I also am committed to the idea of shared history, and therefore all my scholarship, as much as it is about Jews, it is also about the church and Poland and the law. Jews are an integral part of that history and culture. And, as such, I’m committed to that, to teaching about the vibrancy of Jewish life as much as the dynamics of what made that life difficult over the centuries.
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Israel just quadrupled its PR budget to $730M. Experts say it won’t work.
(JTA) — Israel is betting nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars that it can talk its way out of a reputation crisis.
Lawmakers in Jerusalem approved a 2026 national budget last month that includes roughly $730 million for public diplomacy — the broad category known in Hebrew as hasbara — more than four times the $150 million they allocated the year before. That earlier sum was itself about 20 times what Israel had spent on such efforts before the war in Gaza broke out in 2023.
The unprecedented expenditure comes as survey after survey show declining support for Israel in the United States, its most important ally. A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month found 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, up seven points in a single year, with only 37% viewing it favorably.
Most striking for a country long accustomed to bipartisan American support: 57% of Republicans under 50 hold negative views of Israel. Support has cratered among the religiously unaffiliated, Black Protestants and Catholics. Among American Jews, support has slipped below two-thirds.
On social media, the Hebrew word “hasbara” has become a dismissive shorthand for pro-Israel advocacy, indicating how widely known Israel’s uphill efforts to shape its image have become.
Congress is increasingly reflecting this drop in public support. Earlier this month, 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voted to block a $295 million sale of Caterpillar bulldozers to Israel, and 36 voted to block a sale of 1,000-pound bombs, representing the strongest congressional rebuke of U.S. military aid to Israel on record.
Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, says the country is engaged in a global war for hearts and minds and it must spend accordingly.
“We had a major breakthrough this year, but we must as a country invest much much more,” Sa’ar said in December as the government entered budget deliberations. “It should be like investing in jets, bombs and missile interceptors. In the face of what’s arrayed against us and what’s invested against us, it’s far from enough. This is an existential issue.”
Alongside the budget, Sa’ar won approval for a dedicated public diplomacy unit inside the Foreign Ministry, headed by a director equivalent in rank to the ministry’s top political official — a structural consolidation meant to end years of scattered hasbara work across rival ministries.
Public filings, Knesset testimony and Israeli business reporting show where a portion of the 2025 allocation went.
A $50 million international social-media ad buy was split across Google, YouTube, X and Outbrain. Roughly $40 million went to hosting 400 foreign delegations — lawmakers, pastors, influencers, university presidents. A “media war room” was erected to monitor 250 outlets and 10,000 daily Israel-related items.
The Foreign Ministry also signed a $1.5-million-a-month contract with former Trump campaign strategist Brad Parscale’s firm to deploy AI tools against antisemitism online, a $4.1 million campaign aimed at evangelical churches, and the “Esther Project,” a paid influencer network running up to $900,000 through a PR firm called Bridges Partners.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry did not respond to repeated requests for interviews and comment.
Defending the approach, Consul General Israel Bachar, Jerusalem’s top diplomat in Los Angeles since 2023, said in an interview that most of the money so far had gone into social media and delegations. His post oversees seven Western states and one of the largest Israeli expatriate populations in the world.
“We flew a lot of delegations to the country — whether it’s pastors, whether it’s politicians, universities,” Bachar said. “Everyone who returns from the country understands better and is more supportive. But you have to fly out a lot of people.”
A veteran Israeli political strategist before his consular appointment, Bachar argued the anti-Israel shift in the United States is not primarily a messaging failure. He pointed instead to “sociological changes in America that have nothing to do with us” that are “being used against us.”
He called the situation a complex problem with “no silver bullet,” and said he favors additional spending on what he called “productions” in the United States — sitcoms, documentaries, feature films that touch on Israeli themes — alongside the ad buys and influencer work.
Ask the people who study public diplomacy for a living whether any of this will work, and the answer is, overwhelmingly, skeptical.
Their central objection is that no amount of messaging can outrun entrenched rejection by its target audiences of Israel’s armed response to conflicts with its neighbors.
“My position is that history shows all the money in the world won’t help if the policy is wrong,” said Nicholas Cull, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California and one of the founders of the study of public diplomacy. “The U.S. discovered that in Vietnam when its own Cold War public diplomacy budget peaked.”
Cull coined the term “reputational security” to describe the argument Sa’ar is implicitly making — that a country’s standing is itself a strategic asset worth serious investment.
“It means protecting the country both by accentuating positive images and by eliminating negative realities,” Cull said. “I suspect that the government of Israel will be unable to sell its solutions to the world when so many of its own people dispute the validity of those solutions, and where the domestic consensus is wide of the international understanding of realities on the ground.”
The polling tells a similar story, according to a scholar who has been tracking it longer than almost anyone else.
“There has been a paradigmatic shift that has taken place in America about Israel,” said Shibley Telhami, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, who has surveyed American and Arab attitudes toward Israel for decades. “I have been tracing shifts, particularly among Democrats, for a decade and a half. I have never seen a shift like the one we’ve seen.”
Born in Israel to an Arab family, Telhami was long a two-state advocate operating within the American foreign policy mainstream before moving considerably leftward in recent years.
He described a new “Gaza generation” — a majority of young Americans who, his polling shows, now see Israel as committing genocide and who see the United States as implicated in it.
Telhami said the moment reminded him of a previous episode. He served on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy in 2005, when Washington tried to spend its way out of the reputational damage of the Iraq War with campaigns aimed at Muslim audiences.
“Our conclusion was, it’s the policy, stupid,” he said. “Yes, you can do a lot with public diplomacy, and there are strategies that could help on the margins. But they’re only going to affect a small percentage, because the bulk of the impressions on issues that people care about are shaped by the actual policies, not how well you sell those policies.”
Many Israelis believe the country has simply never told its story well enough, and that with enough money and the right platforms, it can. But the conventional wisdom that Israel has not been active on the frontiers of public diplomacy simply isn’t true, according to Ilan Manor, a senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University who has long studied the Foreign Ministry’s online presence.
Israel was one of the first countries in the world to build a global digital-diplomacy operation, Manor said. Before Oct. 7, he said, its accounts reached roughly a billion people, a scale rivaled only by the United States.
“The problem is not that we lack infrastructure. The problem is not that we lack skill,” Manor said. “The problem is that people don’t believe the state anymore. And that’s a much, much deeper problem that no amount of money is going to repair.”
He calls it a credibility gap, borrowing the term American reporters used for Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam-era statements. “If you’re not a credible spokesperson, if you’re not a credible state, it doesn’t matter how good your message is,” Manor said. “It doesn’t matter how viral it might get. It doesn’t matter how many likes you get.”
The credibility problem is now compounding itself. As disclosures have revealed Israeli contracts with influencers, shell websites, and AI-driven campaigns, pro-Israel posts on American social media routinely draw comments accusing the poster of being a paid foreign agent, whether they are or not.
Similar concerns come from inside the pro-Israel branding world. Joanna Landau, founder of the Tel Aviv–based Israel branding nonprofit Vibe Israel, has spent more than a decade flying international influencers to Israel on lifestyle-focused trips. She said she was not available for an interview but has laid out her views in a recent series of essays on her Substack, “Reputation Nation.”
Landau called the 2026 allocation “a long overdue course correction” but warned that structural failures would swallow the money. “Israel’s narrative has no single strategic owner,” she wrote, noting that messaging responsibility is scattered across the Foreign Ministry, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Diaspora Affairs Ministry, the Government Press Office and the IDF.
According to the government’s own announcements, she added, most of the new funding is slated for “tactical activity” — “the same tools Israel has relied on for years, only now with many more zeros.” Her conclusion: “A large budget poured into a broken system produces scale, not strategy.”
The spending does vault Israel into the same league as some of the world’s largest public diplomacy operations, according to Landau.
Exact comparisons are hard to make, and there are no widely accepted figures for what different countries spend on public diplomacy — the work is scattered across culture ministries, state broadcasters, foreign affairs budgets, and intelligence agencies, often without a single label.
Germany, for example, funds Deutsche Welle, its international broadcaster, and the Goethe-Institut, its global network of cultural centers, at hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but both operate independently of the government. Britain spends around $450 million on the BBC World Service and millions more on international scholarships, also at arm’s length from direct messaging. The United States allocates an estimated $2.3 billion through State Department programs and the U.S. Agency for Global Media. China’s public diplomacy spending has topped $10 billion. Qatar has built Al Jazeera into a global network through state funding whose full scope is not publicly disclosed.
Israel, a country of roughly 10 million people, is now set to spend on its global image at a scale normally associated with much larger countries.
It may be too late, according to one Israeli scholar who has argued for two decades that Israel chronically underinvests in public diplomacy.
Eytan Gilboa, a professor of international communication at Bar-Ilan University, said he welcomes both the larger sum and its consolidation inside the Foreign Ministry, which he said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had deliberately “dried up” in favor of rival ministries.
But Gilboa agrees the current moment may be beyond repair.
“This is the worst crisis in Israel’s image abroad,” he said. “In the past, we have seen criticism of Israeli policy. Since Oct. 7, we have seen a rejection of Israel’s right to exist.” He argued that Israel has lost a generation of Americans, calling it “highly dangerous, because these people are going to be the next politicians, elites, journalists.”
“Perhaps $730 million is not enough,” Gilboa said. “You have to establish a mechanism, a system that would systematically address all the challenges. I am quite pessimistic.”
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A synagogue helped Palestinians raise money for Gaza — and found common ground over falafel
(JTA) — Six months after first sitting down with Dr. David Hasan for a meal, Rabbi Daniel Greyber returned to the table on Tuesday — this time bringing congregants from his synagogue to support Hasan’s work helping children in Gaza.
So many members of Beth El Synagogue wanted to attend the fundraiser at the Palestinian-owned Mediterranean Deli in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that the Conservative congregation asked them to sign up for shifts.
Between tables piled high with falafel and hummus, the daylong fundraiser offered an uncommon scene at a time when the war in Gaza has often strained relations between Muslim and Jewish communities.
Beth El had previously backed relief efforts for Israel, including raising $175,000 for Magen David Adom after Oct. 7, while also supporting humanitarian aid in Gaza through World Central Kitchen and Israeli-Palestinian dialogue initiatives such as Roots in the West Bank.
But Tuesday’s event marked the first time the congregation had participated in a Palestinian-led fundraiser for Gaza — a rarity for American synagogue communities and a move that Greyber said he’d had to defend to critics.
For the rabbi, the groundwork for the fundraiser was laid last fall, when he met Hasan at a Sukkot dinner hosted by Sophia Chitlik, a Jewish Democratic North Carolina state senator.
At the time, Greyber said he and other local Jewish leaders were “incredibly moved and incredibly impressed” by the work of Hasan, whose nonprofit, The Gaza Children Village, provides food, medical care, education, and trauma support to children in Gaza.
Through his nonprofit, Hasan, a Palestinian-American, has also created schools in the besieged enclave, where he offers a modified curriculum that promotes peace and reconciliation, and an alternative to the anti-Israel education he says has long dominated Gaza’s schools.
“Obviously he has support from so many different places around the world for the project, we wanted to ask ourselves: What could we do locally,” Greyber said.
Shortly after their introduction, Greyber invited Hasan to speak at his synagogue in November. There, Hasan shared that he had sought information about the Israeli hostages while working in hospitals in Gaza in April 2024.
That story carried particular weight at Beth El, where congregants had spent 484 days praying for the release of Keith Siegel, an Israeli hostage whose mother, Gladys Siegel, had long been a central figure in the synagogue community. Keith Siegel was released in January 2025.
As Greyber forged ties with Hasan, so did Jamil Kadoura, the owner of Mediterranean Deli, who spent part of his childhood living in a Palestinian refugee camp after the Six-Day War.
Mediterranean Deli has long been a fixture in the local Jewish community, with the restaurant serving as a caterer for lifecycle events at Beth El for many years. After the restaurant burned down in an accidental fire in July 2023, Beth El posted on Facebook urging its congregants to donate to a relief fund.
“My restaurant delivers Middle Eastern food, so it attracts customers from both sides,” Kadoura said. “I have Israelis that come and eat here. I have all walks of life, and, you know, they seem to like our food and come and eat…I think it’s a good thing, and I hope we would do as much as we can.”
In the lead-up to the fundraiser Tuesday, Greyber praised Kadoura and his restaurant in a social media post, writing, “If there is hope in the world, it is found in places like Mediterranean Deli, Bakery and Catering and people like Jamil Kadoura. I am grateful to God for his friendship and presence in my life and that of my community.”
Kadoura said that he had previously hosted fundraisers at the restaurant, including for Pakistani flood relief and Syrian refugees, adding that his own experience in a refugee camp, where he said he received aid from both Jews and Muslims, shaped his desire to help others in need.
“I feel like people need help, like I needed help when I was in that refugee camp, and when people come and feed us,” Kadoura said. “Jewish and Muslims.”
Kadoura said he approached Hasan with the idea for the fundraiser, which he saw as an opportunity to bring together communities that have often found themselves divided in recent years.
“I said I would like to do a fundraiser for your organization, but what I also like to do is bring the Jews and the Muslims and the Palestinians together, because there’s a lot of Jews and Palestinians in the area that are striving for the same goal — peace and love and an end to all this misery,” Kadoura said.
When Kadoura reached out to Greyber, a longtime friend, for his congregation’s support, Greyber replied that the synagogue would be “honored” to participate.
“I think it’s a powerful and important model, you know, that we don’t let what’s happening across the world tear apart the communities that we are living in,” Greyber said.
He said his community had rallied around Hasan and helped provide a support network for his family in Durham, in part because his work, which has included partnerships with Israeli NGOs, had been “vilified by people who purport to be a pro-Palestinian community.”
Hasan’s work in Gaza began on a medical mission in December 2023, where he saw firsthand the devastation inflicted on children by the rapidly widening war. During that trip, Hasan told the New York Times he performed 20 operations in ten days, often without anesthetics or antiseptics, but that all of his patients eventually died from infections.
Since founding the Gaza Children Village last April, the nonprofit has built six “Academy of Hope,” which provide Palestinian children with daily education, meals, healthcare, and psychosocial support.
But while many nonprofits serving Palestinians affected by the war have faced allegations of ties to Hamas, Hasan has set his work apart through partnerships with Israeli organizations and a stated focus on coexistence, principles that have at times earned him the ire of some Palestinians who say his work is too aligned with the Jewish state.
“I try really hard to stay neutral,” Hasan told the Religion News Service in February. “I do not use any words like ‘war crimes’ or ‘genocide,’ because it’s not my position. I’m not a lawyer. There are courts out there that describe that. I describe events I saw. I show pictures, I don’t use subjective words.”
During his remarks at the restaurant Tuesday evening, Hasan announced that the proceeds would go to children in both Israel and Gaza who had been orphaned by Oct. 7, telling the crowd gathered that his work was motivated by one principle: “Never again for both sides.”
“We led this rehabilitation in Gaza, bridging between Israelis and Gazans, and it started here in Durham,” Hasan told the crowd, according to footage shared with JTA by Greyber. “And your action today — this is one of the very, very, very few events that have people from synagogue, mosque and are getting together and for once, just eating and hanging out. I can’t tell who’s Arabic and who’s Jew.”
Greyber said that Hasan also told attendees that he would be hosting a camp this fall in Italy for both Israeli and Palestinian orphans of the war.
While Greyber said he had received some concerns about the fundraiser from members of the broader Jewish community, as well as his friends in Israel, over the potential that aid would fall into the hands of Hamas, he said he assuaged their concerns by explaining that Hasan had himself been threatened by Hamas, and had worked to keep the terror group far from his operations.
“I understand their concerns, but, you know, in the end, I think this is a project that’s worthy of the Jewish community’s support,” Greyber said. “And one of the things that’s very important is that there are many people in the local Muslim community who are supporting this.”
Indeed, Greyber said that he had received a voicemail on Monday from a local Muslim community member who told him “how moved he was, that our synagogue was supporting this.”
Hasan’s wife, Lauren Hasan, who worked as a trauma surgeon, said that when she arrived at the fundraiser at 6 p.m., it was packed with attendees.
“Honestly, it was by all accounts an incredible success,” Hasan told JTA over text. “There were people from all walks of life: Muslims, Jews, Christians sitting at tables and sharing a meal. And at the end of the day, that is a microcosm of the reality my husband and I want to see.”
For Greyber, his congregation’s support for the fundraiser underscored the complicated reality that many American Jewish communities have grappled with since Oct. 7.
“Like every American Jewish community, the past two and a half years have been excruciating and have torn — have certainly stretched the seams that hold our community together,” Greyber said. “I think we have people who are deeply, deeply committed to Israel and its wellbeing, and we have people who are deeply committed to and carry with them the destruction that has happened to the community in Gaza.”
Addressing those divides, Greyber said his congregation had long approached the conflict “beginning from a place of care and relationship for actual people,” a mindset he said was shaped by the synagogue’s late matriarch, Gladys Siegel.
“Many, many people in our community carry both of those things in their hearts, right? And it’s not one or the other, they carry both,” Greyber said. “And, you know, I’ve done my best to try to keep our hearts big enough and soft enough to carry those concerns.”
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This Jewish feminist has been the NYC’s sanitation department’s official artist for 50 years. A new movie tells her story.
(JTA) — In 1976, deep in New York City’s fiscal crisis, the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles read a review of her conceptual work in the Village Voice. In his review, critic David Bourdon made a radical suggestion inspired by Ukeles’ thesis: What if municipal work, like the Sanitation Department, were conceptual art? Could it get funded by grants, instead of by the city?
Ukeles presented the idea to Sanitation Department commissioner Anthony T. Vaccarello, who invited her to create art for 10,000 sanitation workers. The job would be unpaid. And, it turns out, she would keep it for nearly 50 years and counting.
Now 86, Ukeles is the subject of the documentary film “Maintenance Artist” directed by Jewish filmmaker Toby Perl Freilich, which made its New York theatrical release last week at the IFC Theater in Greenwich Village.
The title refers to Ukeles’ 1969 manifesto, which declared that the everyday activities often relegated to women — cooking, cleaning, changing diapers — were “maintenance art.”
But the movie spans all of Ukeles’ career, looking at her role as the artist-in-residence at the New York City Sanitation Department to her early activism on behalf of Tanzanian independence. The throughline, Ukeles says, has been a belief — rooted in her Jewish identity — that people are more than the roles that society assigns to them.
“As a Jew, I was in love with the notion of freedom,” Ukeles said in an interview. “This message of art as freedom, I felt that’s what I’m about. That’s what I’m for.”
As artist-in-residence, Ukeles plans, stages, and records public works of performance and conceptual art that recognizes the workers of the Sanitation Department. After the piece’s initial staging, photos from the performance might be shown at a museum or gallery.
Despite having been coined New York’s “trash artist” because of her Sanitation Department role, Ukeles does not actually dig in dumpsters or landfills to create her work. But much of her art has mined something else: her Jewish values, as the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi who herself has divided time between New York and Israel.
Some of her pieces have included conceptual and interactive works focusing on Jewish themes and traditions, such as the creation story and the mikvah, or ritual bath.
A 2010 interactive piece “Birthing Tikkun Olam,” for example, invited onlookers to reflect in an installation of glass mirrors, then make a “covenant” to repair the world. Their responses were collected and exchanged for a mirror in the piece, which she staged at the Yeshiva University Museum.
“The site of the art is going to move out into the world, and with it, the acts that you will do,” Ukeles told the university’s newspaper at the time.
Though Ukeles does not consider herself a Jewish artist, because she prefers to avoid being categorized as such, she observes Shabbat — even turning down a stint in the Peace Corps and Friday-night gallery openings to maintain her observance. She lives in Israel, where she advises art students at the Bezalel Academy Academy of Art and Design and attends a “partnership” minyan that aims to widen women’s participation in Orthodox Judaism.
“I have many deep beliefs in great Jewish ideas and commitments,” Ukeles said.
For Freilich, the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors and a descendant of Hasidic dynasties who is herself an observant Jew, Ukeles’ identity was core to why she became so transfixed by the artist that she decided to make a movie about her.
“Her reading of Jewish texts, her reading of Jewish philosophy, of Judaism was profoundly moving to me because it emphasized things like, ‘we’re all created in God’s image’ and and we’re all equally deserving of respect and honor, or that the, the profane is the pathway to the sacred,” Freilich said. “And these are deep, deep kinds of concepts in Judaism that a lot of people aren’t really that familiar with.”
That first piece with DSNY, titled “Touch Sanitation Performance,” spoke to Freilich, who was inspired by a visit to the 2016 retrospective of Ukeles’ work at the Queens Museum.
“I was completely, really blown away,” said Freilich, whose previous documentary works have covered broad swaths of Jewish history, from the partisans of World War II to kibbutz life in Israel.
Ukeles’ works, funded by grants, endowments, fellowships, and commissions, have taken shape in every possible art medium — including performance art and landscape art.
Initially experimenting with paint, she got into trouble while at the Pratt Institute for creating a bulbous multimedia piece with cheesecloth and debris. The school’s administration found it provocative. Her mentor, the abstract expressionist Robert Richenburg, defended Ukeles’ work and ultimately resigned from the school, rather than change his teaching methods at the administration’s request.
“It was a very, very difficult time in my life,” Ukeles said. “I was shocked.”
That controversial piece, titled “Second Binding,” is currently hanging in New York’s Jewish Museum.
Ukeles’ work with the Sanitation Department is perhaps best known for a year-long project from 1979 to 1980, where she sought to shake all 8,500 department workers’ hands. It was documented in a series of photographs.
“They were looked down upon,” Ukeles said. “Not race, not religious, not ethnic, but as a kind of class of maintenance workers and names that people were called.”
Coming up on her 49th year with the New York Sanitation Department, Laderman still has project ideas for the city. She has two projects at Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island — formerly the largest landfill in the world. One of those projects is an ongoing conversion of the landfill into a public park, set to be completed in 2036. The other project is an overlook above the park.
“I now call it ‘intergenerational,’ because it’ll probably take other people to pick it up,” Ukeles said.
“There’s a Jewish source of that notion that the earth is sacred and that we have to redeem the earth when it’s been degraded,” she added. “I don’t know if it will ever finish.”
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