For as long as I can remember, the golden samovar — a Russian teapot of sorts — has rested somewhere high in our home. In our first house, it sat imposingly on a shelf above the staircase. In our current home, it tops the boudoir in our guestroom. When I was growing up, I didn’t actually know what it was and, until a few years ago, I didn’t think to ask.

Spurred by some unknown impulse — possibly a quarter-life crisis or my mom and dad entering their 60s — I decided to interview my parents on the origin of every object and piece of furniture displayed in our home, gathering information that would otherwise die with them. Some of my questions yielded three-word answers (“It’s a lamp”); others evoked longer stories, like that of my black market-dealing great-great-grandmother.

Rivka Silberberg brought the samovar with her when she and her family — including my great-grandfather — immigrated to the United States from the Pale of Settlement sometime before World War I. According to my grandfather, while Rivka’s neighbors were fleeing religious persecution, she was evading authorities after a neighbor ratted her out for illegally selling items — some say tea, others tobacco — without the proper taxation. My mom thinks it was probably a combination of antisemitism and legal peril that motivated Rivka to leave.

Samovars were an important part of Russian social life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jenna Weissman Joselit, a professor of Judaic studies and history at George Washington University and former Forward columnist, wrote, “The samovar loomed large in Jewish immigrant culture” and “a hefty proportion of Russian Jewish immigrants … lugged the heavy and bulky contraption to the New World.”

They acted both as a comforting, familiar sight and as something that could be pawned when money was tight, Joselit wrote. Clearly, my great-great-grandmother valued her samovar enough to drag it across the Atlantic.

Learning about the items in my house has given me a new appreciation for the objects that were always just a part of my background. Since the samovar is one of the only pieces of my family’s old world life we still have, it’s imbued with a certain sacredness. This samovar is not simply a vessel for brewing tea; It is a symbol of my ancestors’ forced migration, a testament to their ability to make the hard choices necessary for survival.

I am the only grandchild on my mother’s side. My grandfather was also an only child, meaning I am the only great-grandchild of his parents. I alone carry this history. Like the samovar, I am a physical testament to my family’s survival.

It’s a lot of weight to have on your shoulders — or on your shelf.

Being an only child is what made me feel such an urgent responsibility to capture my parents’ stories; if I didn’t save them, no one else would.

But objects are impermanent. They tarnish (as our samovar has). They shatter. They get lost.

As these sacred objects become more enchanted, we also become more vulnerable to their loss. Any damage to them would feel like a devastating blow.

Since my grandmother passed away in 2020, I have been the owner of her wedding band. I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve worn it, primarily on occasions when I want to feel like she’s near, whether on Rosh Hashanah or my college graduation. Otherwise, I keep it in my jewelry box where it can stay safe.

My mom takes a much more relaxed approach. One Passover, a friend set down one of our dessert plates with too much force, and it cracked. My mom, in an effort to reassure the friend, said probably the last thing one wants to hear after breaking someone else’s belongings: “It was my grandmother’s.”

After the friend panicked for a moment, my mom realized how the words had sounded.

“No, no, no,” she said. “I mean that it’s so old.”

Old things break. It’s part of their natural course of existence. For my mom, this was just an inevitable fact of life. Even without the dessert plate, she has memories of her grandmother to hold onto.

It’s taken me longer to accept the impermanence of objects. Only recently has the loss of a cheap earring not felt like the end of the world.

Luckily, because of its size and shape, the samovar would be a hard thing to misplace. In the future, if it needs to be moved, I’ll make sure I do so with care. But if for some reason something should happen to it, I am comforted to know that the story of Rivka and her smuggling ways lives on within me.

The post How a Russian samovar connects me to the old country — and my black market dealing great-great-grandmother appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — The talk was timed just ahead of the Ninth of Av, one of the most mournful dates in the Jewish year, so Mark Mellman came prepared with a drash — a Torah commentary — and delivered it to a rapt room.

That the room at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston was packed with political operatives, not all of them Jewish, did not seem to matter to Mellman, the veteran pollster pro-Israel voice within the Democratic Party whose death was announced Friday by his family.

For Mellman, Jewish values and Democratic values went hand in hand. As soon as he heard the appreciative murmurs of “yashar koach” (roughly, “well done”) marking the end of his drash, he launched into an endorsement of party presidential nominee John Kerry.

“Mark possessed a profound understanding for American and Jewish history.” the Democratic Majority for Israel, the group he founded in 2019, said in a statement. “His unwavering commitment to Democratic values will continue to guide and inspire us.”

Mellman died after a long illness, his family said in announcing his funeral, which will take place on Sunday in Maryland. They did not give a cause of death or mention his age, although some sources indicate he was born in 1955. 

Mellman joined his first political campaign in 1981, three years after graduating from Princeton and while he was a graduate student at Yale. He successfully managed the congressional campaign of Bruce Morrison, a Connecticut Democrat who unseated a Republican, Larry DeNardis, in the 1982 election.

The upset made Mellman’s reputation and, still in his 20s, he launched a career in Washington as a pollster and a consultant. His company was eventually known as The Mellman Group.

Within a couple of decades he was the go-to pollster, not just for Democrats but for a wide variety of firms, including the NBA’s Washington Wizards, United Airlines and both Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

He never let it get to his head: “The truth is we know damn little about what works in campaigns,” he wrote in The Hill, the insidery Washington newspaper, in 2006. “Most of what passes for evidence in this business is nothing more than dimly remembered anecdote or thinly disguised salesmanship.”

His self-deprecation came through after Kerry lost in 2004. Mellman was the campaign’s pollster. 

“You can’t imagine how much time it takes to lie on the floor in a fetal position, it really takes a lot out of me,” he told a conference a week after the election.

Mellman made himself accessible to Jewish groups, frequently appearing at events organized by the Jewish Federations of North America and at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and often opposite a Republican counterpart.

The debate was always friendly, with the understanding on both sides that ensuring the full-throated participation of Jewish Americans in the political process outweighed partisan differences.

“I always respected him and the fact that he was committed to fighting the rise of antisemitism and anti-Zionism in the Democratic Party,” Matt Brooks, the CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, told JTA. “Mark put principle over politics. He and his voice will be missed.”

He was sought-after mentor to younger Jewish operatives. “When I started working in Jewish Dem politics and needed a poll, we looked to Mark. When I first spoke at a JCC, I spoke alongside Mark,” Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said on X. “I learned from and appreciated Mark, and he’ll be deeply missed.”

William Daroff, now the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, recalled that Mellman’s mentorship crossed party lines, when Daroff was the RJC’s deputy director.

“During my own partisan youth, when I was loudly advocating for President George W. Bush and Mark was working just as energetically on the other side, he never treated me as an adversary,” Daroff told JTA. “He cared more about the Jewish community than about partisan labels and made a point of saying that pro-Israel voices in the GOP mattered.”

When Daroff a couple of years later sought to transition to nonpartisan work, applying for the top Washington job at JFNA, Mellman was one of his fiercest advocates. 

“He backed me, he vouched for me, and he helped open doors that I could not have opened alone,” Daroff said. “Mark believed deeply in communal unity, and he acted on that belief.”

Mellman was one of the first to warn fellow Democrats that the obituarywas a trend, not an anomaly.

“It is a small problem that could get bigger,” he told The Forward in 2013.  The numbers then of progressive Democrats holding negative views of Israel were not large, he said, “but you need to address problems when they are small.”

He was proved correct after the 2018 election, which swept into office four Democrats, known as “The Squad,” who made criticizing Israel their brand. A year later he launched DMFI. 

“Our mission at Democratic Majority for Israel is to strengthen the pro-Israel tradition of the Democratic Party, fight for Democratic values and work within the progressive movement to advance policies that ensure a strong U.S.-Israel relationship,” Mellman said then.

DMFI occupied a unique place in the Democratic firmament: Other partisan groups tread lightly in countering adversaries within the party. Mellman and his group did not.

“We’ve got two words in our name that are important,” he told JTA in 2024, when DMFI helped lead the successful effort to oust New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman in a primary challenge. “One is ‘Israel.’ The other is ‘Democratic.’ We believe in the Democratic Party, we believe in a Democratic agenda. We find fault with Jamaal Bowman because he’s anti-Israel, but also because he’s not supportive of a Democratic agenda.”

It was a statement typical of Mellman, who was not afraid to smash taboos. He freely aligned himself with opponents to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, crossing a red line for many in the pro-Israel community, who prefer to stay out of Israeli politics. He consuklted with opposition leader Yair Lapid. 

“He was one of the architects of the 2013 election success,” when Lapid’s party, Yesh Atid, barely a year old, earned 19 seats and a place in the governing coalition, “and of the campaign that led to us forming the government in 2021,” Lapid said on X. 

“Mark embodied a love of the strong, successful, democratic Israel we believe in and worked tirelessly to secure the strategic relationship between Israel and the United States,” Lapid said. “His contribution to the Jewish people is far greater than most people will ever know.”

“A world class pollster and advocate for Israel, but a world class mensch, too,” Steve Rabinowitz, a longtime Washington PR maven told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “His loss is stunning.” 

The post Mark Mellman, pollster who championed Democrats and Israel, dies appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — TEL AVIV — Judy Chicago may not have been directly involved in organizing two new Tel Aviv exhibits of her work, but the question at the center of one of the shows could not be more relevant amid Israel’s war in Gaza: “What If  Women Ruled the World?”

That’s the title of the Judy Chicago show that opened this fall at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. It poses that question and other related ones, like “Would God Be Female?” and “Would There Be Violence?” on colorful art quilts. The questions are translated into Hebrew and Arabic, and visitors can record their responses.

“My motivation for bringing this project here, to a public space within the museum, was to shout in the loudest way we have at our disposal — where are the women who would end this war?” said Shahar Molcho, the exhibit curator, over the summer.

It’s a question that has echoed even after the ceasefire that began last month, as Israel’s male leaders have sparred over how to move forward and a new, all-male slate of leaders were chosen for Zionist institutions.

But some argued that the art exhibit should not go up. Just days before “What If Women Ruled the World?” was scheduled to open, a group of Israeli and Palestinian artists wrote to Chicago and her collaborator, artist Nadya Tolokonnikova, urging them to “not artwash the genocide and ongoing ethnic cleansing” in Gaza and the West Bank. The letter invoked Chicago’s feminism and said it would be hypocritical for her to display her work in Israel.

A second exhibit of Chicago’s artwork, on loan from a private collection and surveying the artist’s six-decade career, is on display at at Tel Aviv’s Nassima Landau Foundation through January 2026.

Chicago, 86, declined requests for comment from JTA and other news outlets. Tolokonnikova, a Russian musician and the founder of the feminist group Pussy Riot, told the online publication Hyperallergic that she agrees with the letter but has no control over where the project is shown.

The question of how the world would be different under women’s leadership frames the museum exhibit. But another question has dominated the discourse: Should international artists of Chicago’s stature be showing their work in Israel at all?

Molcho said she had anticipated backlash to the exhibit but was surprised that the condemnation came from Israeli artists, too, including those whose work is or has been on view at the museum, such as David Reeb and Guy Ben-Ner.

“Boycott is between Israel and the rest of the world, not amongst Israelis,” Ben-Ner, a signatory whose solo show at the museum ran through June 2023, told JTA.

The Israeli documentary filmmaker Barak Heymann had never heard of Judy Chicago but signed the letter opposing the exhibit. “Anyone who takes action with the intention to direct international attention at the genocide, and the demand to stop it now, will receive my automatic and almost blind support,” he said.

 

The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is situated just a few hundred feet from Hostage Square, the site of mass demonstrations during the two-year Israel–Hamas war. Molcho said that she and other museum leaders have frequently joined anti-war protests at their doorstep.

State funding accounts for just 2% of the museum budget, with over 45% coming from the Tel Aviv municipality, Tania Coen-Uzzielli, the museum’s director, said.

Coen-Uzzielli said she opposes efforts to boycott Israeli cultural institutions, noting, “If we silence critical voices, we’re just playing the same game being played by those running our country. We should be promoting criticism, dialogue, participation. Culture, at its essence, is about conversation.”

Several signatories said they were unaware that just last year, Chicago herself loaned two preparatory studies she created while working on her 1992 stained glass window, Rainbow Shabbat, to Israel’s Mishkan Museum of Art in Ein Harod, where they remain on display. Days after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, Chicago posted a photo of Rainbow Shabbat on Instagram, writing, “As the panels state: Heal those broken souls who have no peace and lead us all from darkness to light.”

The artist was not directly involved in bringing “What If Women Ruled the World?” to the Tel Aviv Museum. The exhibit is the result of a collaboration between the museum and the New York-based art tech company DMINTI.

This is Tel Aviv Museum’s culminating installation following a year of women-centered solo exhibitions. Inspired by a series of handmade banners Chicago created with the luxury goods brand Christian Dior for a 2020 haute couture show, the museum show comprises 11 art quilts, each posing a different question, a recording booth where “all who share feminist values” are invited to answer the questions, and a film about Chicago’s trailblazing career.

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