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American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews?
(JTA) — Among Sandra Fox’s most memorable finds during her years mining American archives for materials about Jewish summer camps was a series of letters about the hours before lights-out.
The letters were by counselors who were documenting an unusual window in the day when they stopped supervising campers, leaving the teens instead to their own devices, which sometimes included romance and sexual exploration.
“It was each division talking about how they dealt with that free time before bed in ‘age-appropriate ways,’” Fox recalled about the letters written by counselors at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, the original iteration of the Conservative movement’s network of summer camps.
“I’ve spoken to Christian people who work at Christian camps and have researched Christian camps. There is no free time before bed,” Fox told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That’s not a thing if you don’t want kids to hook up. So it was just amazing to find these documents of Camp Ramah leaders really having the conversation explicitly. Most of the romance and sexuality stuff is implicit in the archives.”
The letters are quoted extensively in Fox’s new book, “The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America.” Fox, who earned a PhD in history from New York University in 2018 and now teaches and directs the Archive of the American Jewish Left there, tells the story of American Judaism’s most immersive laboratory for constructing identity and contesting values.
Next week, Fox is launching the book with an event at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. (Tickets for the Feb. 23 event are available here.) Attendees will be able to tour adult versions of some of the most durable elements of Jewish summer camps, from Israeli dance to Yiddish and Hebrew instruction to Color Wars to Tisha B’Av, the mournful holiday that always falls over the summer.
“I never considered doing a normal book party,” Fox said. “It was always really obvious to me that a book about experiential Jewish education and role play should be celebrated and launched out into the world through experiential education and role play.”
Sandra Fox’s 2023 book “The Jews of Summer,” looks at the history of American Jewish summer camps. (Courtesy of Fox)
We spoke to Fox about her party plans, how Jewish summer camps have changed over time and how they’ve stayed the same, and the cultural history of that before-bed free time.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. We’ll be continuing the conversation in a virtual chat through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Feb. 27 at 1 p.m.; register here.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Given how much Jews like to talk about camp, were you surprised that this book hadn’t already been written?
Sandra Fox: There’s been a lot of fruitful research on the history of various camps, but it’s usually been focused on one camping movement or one camp type. So there are articles about Zionist camps. There are certainly articles out there about the Ramah camps. A lot of camps have produced books — either their alumni associations or a scholar who went to let’s say, Reform movement camps have created essay collections about those camps. And there are also books about Habonim and other Zionist youth movements.
I don’t really know why this is the first stab at this kind of cross-comparison. It might be that people didn’t think there would be so much to compare. I think the overwhelming feeling I get from readers so far, people who preordered and gotten their books early, is that they’re very surprised to hear how similar these camps are. So perhaps it’s that scholars weren’t thinking about Jewish summer camps that came from such diverse standpoints as having something enough in common to write about them all at once.
Also distance from the time period really helps. You can write a book about — and people do write a book about — the ’60s and ’70s and have been for decades, but there’s a certain amount of distance from the period that has allowed me to do this, I think, and maybe it also helps that I’m generationally removed. A lot of the scholars who’ve worked on camps in the postwar period went to camps in the postwar period. It makes a lot of sense that it would be harder to write this sort of sweeping thing perhaps. The fact that I’m a millennial meant that I could write about the postwar period — and also write kind of an epilogue-style chapter that catches us up to the present.
What’s clear is that there’s something amazing about studying summer camp, a completely immersive 24/7 experience that parents send children away for. There’s no better setting for thinking about how adults project their anxieties and desires about the future onto children. There’s also no place better to think about power dynamics and age and generational tension.
I was definitely struck by the “sameyness” of Jewish camps in your accounting. What do you think we can learn from that, either about camps or about us as Jews?
I do want to say that while there’s a lot of sameyness, whenever you do a comparative study, there’s a risk of kind of collapsing all these things and making them seem too similar. What I’m trying to convey is that the camp leaders from a variety of movements took the basic structure of the summer camp as we know it — its daily schedule, its environment, its activities — and it did look similar from camp to camp, at least on that surface level.
If you look at the daily schedules in comparison, they might have a lot of the same features but they’ll be called slightly different things depending on if the camp leans more heavily towards Hebrew, or Yiddish, or English. But the content within those schedules would be rather different. It’s more that the skeletal structure of camp life has a lot of similarities across the board and then the details within each section of the day or the month had a lot of differences.
But I think what it says is that in the postwar period, the anxieties that Jewish leaders had about the future of Judaism are really, really similar and the solution that they found within the summer camp, they were pretty unanimous about. They just then took the model and inserted within it their particular nationalistic, linguistic or religious perspectives. So I think more so than saying anything about American Jewry, it shows kind of how flexible camping is. And that’s not just the Jewish story. Lots of different Americans have embraced summer camping in different ways.
So many people who have gone to camp have a fixed memory of what camp is like, where it’s caught in time, but you argue that camps have actually undergone lots of change. What are the most striking changes you documented, perhaps ones that might have been hard for even insiders to discern as they happened?
First of all, the Israel-centeredness of American Jewish education as we know it today didn’t happen overnight in 1948, for instance. It was a slower process, beyond the Zionist movements where that was already going on, for decades before 1948. Ramah and the Reform camps for instance took their time towards getting to the heavily Zionist-imbued curricula that we know.
There was considerable confusion and ambivalence at first about what to do with Israel: whether to raise an Israeli flag, not because they were anti-Zionist, but because American Jews had been thinking about proving their loyalty to America for many generations. There were some sources that would talk about — what kind of right do American Jews have to raise the Israeli flag when they’re not Israeli? So that kind of Israel-centeredness that is really a feature of camp life today was a slower process than we might think.
It fit camp life really well because broader American camps used Native American symbols, in some ways that are problematic today, to create what we know of as an iconography of camp life. So for Jews, Israel and its iconography, or Palestine and iconography before ’48, provided an alternative set of options that were read as Jewish, but it still took some time to get to where we are now in terms of the Israel focus.
One of the reasons I place emphasis on the Yiddish summer camps is to show that in the early 20th century and the mid-20th century there was more ideological diversity in the Jewish camping sphere, including various forms of Yiddishist groups and socialist groups and communist groups that operated summer camps. Most of them have closed, and their decline is obviously a change that tells a story of how American Jewry changed over the course of the postwar period. Their legacy is important, too: I have made the argument that these camps in a lot of ways modeled the idea of Yiddish as having a future in America.
What about hookup culture? Contemporary discourse about Jewish camps have focused on sex and sexuality there. What did you observe about this in the archives?
I think people think of the hookup culture of Jewish camps today and certainly in my time in the ’90s and 2000s as a permanent feature, and in some ways I found through my research and oral history interviews that that was the case, but it was really interesting to zoom out a little bit and think about how Jewish summer camps changed in terms of sexual romantic culture, in relationship to how America changed with the sexual revolution and the youth culture.
It’s not it’s not useful to think about Jewish hookup culture in a vacuum. It’s happening within America more broadly. And so of course, it’s changed dramatically over time. And one of the things I learned that was so fascinating is that Jewish summer camps were actually their leaders were less concerned in a lot of ways about sexuality at camp in the ’40s and ’50s, than they were in the late ’60s and ’70s. Because earlier premarital sex was pretty rare, at least in the teenage years, so they were not that concerned about what happened after lights out because they kind of assumed whatever was going on was fairly innocent.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, that’s when camps have to actually think about how to balance allowance and control. They want to allow campers to have these relationships, to have their first sexual experiences, and part of that is related to rising rates of intermarriage and wanting to encourage love between Jews, but they also want to control it because there’s a broader societal moment in which the sexuality of teenagers is problematized and their and their sexual culture is more public.
There’s been a real wave of sustained criticism by former campers about the cultures that they experienced, arguing that the camps created an inappropriately sexualized and unsafe space. There’s been a lot of reaction to that and the broader #MeToo moment. I’m curious about what you can speculate about a future where that space is cleaned up, based on your historical research — what is gained and what, potentially, could be lost?
Without being involved in camping today — and I want to really make that disclaimer because I know a lot of change is happening and lot of organizations are involved to talk about this issue better, to train camps and camp leaders and their counselors to not create a pressured environment for camper — I think what the history shows is that this hookup culture did not come about out of nowhere. It was partly related to the broader changes in America and the sexual revolution.
But it was also partly created because camps really needed to have campers’ buy-in, in order to be “successful.” A huge argument of my book is that we think about the power of camps as if camp directors have campers as, like, puppets on strings, and that what they do is what happens in camp life. But actually, campers have changed the everyday texture of life at camp over the course of the decades in so many different ways by resisting various ideas or just not being interested.
So hookup culture is also part of making campers feel like they have freedom at camp and that’s essential. That’s not a side project — that is essential to their ability to get campers to come back. It’s a financial need, and it’s an ideological need. If you make campers feel like they have freedom, then they will feel like they freely took on the ideologies your camp is promoting in a really natural way.
The last part of it is rising rates of intermarriage. As rates of intermarriage rose in the second half of the 20th century, there’s no doubt in my mind from doing the research that the preexisting culture around sexuality at camp and romance at camp got turbo-boosted [to facilitate relationships that could potentially lead to marriage between two Jews]. At that point, the allowance and control that camp leaders were trying to create for many decades leans maybe more heavily towards allowance.
There are positives to camp environments being a place where campers can explore their sexualities. There’s definitely a lot of conversation about the negative effects and those are all very, very real. I know people who went through horrible things at a camp and I also know people who experienced it as a very sex-positive atmosphere. I know people in my age range who were able to discover that they were gay or lesbian at camp in safety in comparison to home, so it’s not black and white at all. I hope that my chapter on romance and sexuality can maybe add some historical nuance to the conversation and give people a sense of how this actually happened. Because it happened for a whole bunch of reasons.
I think there’s a consensus view that camp is one of the most “successful” things the Jews do. But it’s hard to see where lessons from camp or camp culture are being imported to the rest of Jewish life. I’m curious what you see as kind of the lessons that Jewish institutions or Jewish communities have taken from camp — or have they not done that?
Every single public engagement I do about my work has boiled down to the question of, well, does it work? Does camp work? Is it successful? And that’s been a question that a lot of social scientists have been interested in. I don’t want to oversimplify that research, but a lot of the ways that they’ve measured success have been things that are not necessarily a given to all Jews as obviously the right way to be a Jew. So, for instance, in the ’90s and early 2000s, at the very least, a lot of research was about how, you know, “XYZ” camp and youth movement were successfully curbing intermarriage. A lot of them also asked campers and former campers how they feel about Israel, and it’s always if they are supportive of Israel in very normative ways, right, giving money visiting, supporting Israel or lobbying for its behalf — then camps have been successful.
I’m not interested in whether camps were successful by those metrics. I’m interested in how we got to the idea that camp should be successful in those ways in the first place. How did we get to those kinds of normative assumptions of like, this is a good Jew; a good Jew marries a Jew; a good Jew supports Israel, no matter what. So what I wanted to do is zoom out from that question of success and show how camp actually functions.
And then the question of “does it work” is really up to the reader. To people who believe that curbing intermarriage is the most important thing, then camps have been somewhat successful in the sense that people who go to these heavily educational camps are less likely to marry out of the faith.
But I am more interested in what actually happened at camp. And in terms of their legacies, I wanted to show how they changed various aspects of American Jewish life, and religion and politics. So I was really able to find how camping was essential in making kind of an Israel-centered Jewish education the norm. I was also able to draw a line between these Yiddish camps over the ’60s and ’70s that closed in the ’80s and contemporary Yiddish. The question of success is a real tricky and political one in a way that a lot of people have not talked about.
And is camp also fun? Because you’re creating a camp experience for your book launch next week.
Camp is fun — for a lot of people. Camp was not fun for everyone. And so I do want to play with that ambivalence at the party, and acknowledge that and also acknowledge that some people loved camp when they were younger and have mixed feelings about it now.
The party is not really a celebration of Jewish summer camp. People will be drinking and having fun and dancing — but I want them to be thinking while also about what is going on and why. How is Tisha B’Av [the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem that falls at the height of summer] commemorated at camp, for example?
Or what songs are we singing and what do they mean? I think a lot of people when they’re little kids, they learn songs in these Jewish summer camps that they can’t understand and later they maybe learn Hebrew and go, whoa, we were singing what?! My example from Zionist summer camp is singing “Ein Li Eretz Acheret,” or “I Have No Other Country.” We were in America and we obviously have another country! I don’t think anyone in my youth movement actually believes the words “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” because we live in America and people tend to kind of like living in America and most of them do not move to Israel.
So at the party we’ll be working through the fun of it, and at the same time the confusion of it and the ambivalence of it. I want it to be fun, and I also want it to be something that causes people to think.
—
The post American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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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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