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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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1912 Yiddish operetta tackles class conflict and women’s rights
One of the smash hits of New York’s thriving Yiddish theater scene in the early 20th century grappled with socio-political issues that still resonate 100-plus years later. It’s coming back for a very limited run and you don’t have to speak Yiddish to enjoy it.
The production — a concert of songs from the 1912 Yiddish operetta Khantshe in Amerike — will be performed twice this month, first at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York and then at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan.
The protagonist, Khantshe, is a young working-class woman who dresses as a man, working as a chauffeur for a nouveau-riche immigrant family. Khantshe flirts with and romances the women she works for — mother and daughter alike. The operetta grapples with class conflict, women’s rights, gender fluidity and cars.
The performances, made possible by material reconstructed from archival documents, will feature students from Bard accompanied by piano. There will be no dialogue; instead the singers will deliver brief plot summaries in English before each song. A translation of the lyrics will be included in a booklet for the audience, who will also be able to follow along watching English supertitles.
The operetta first opened on Dec. 31, 1912 at Sarah Adler’s Novelty Theatre in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and was a runaway hit. It was mounted in Warsaw just six months after the New York premiere.
“This is one of the shows that were in dialogue with all of the political and social issues that people were talking about,” said Alex Weiser, director of public programs at YIVO and a member of the trio that reconstructed the performance materials. “They were made because the masses needed the cultural material in their language that spoke to the specificity of their milieu.”
Khantshe in Amerike was also a turning point in the career of both its composer, Joseph Rumshinsky, and its star, Bessie Thomashefsky. The previous year she had left her renowned husband Boris Thomashefsky, the titan of the Yiddish stage, known as a compulsive philanderer.
At the height of their influence, the Thomashefskys owned theaters in and out of New York, published their own magazine, The Yiddish Stage and wrote columns in the popular Yiddish newspapers of the day. When Boris Thomashefsky died in 1939, some 30,000 people lined the streets of the Lower East Side for his funeral.
“This show was a star vehicle for Bessie when she first left Boris,” notes Weiser. “They were a power couple and this was a really important turning point in her career. She left him, she went out on her own and there was a big question: ‘Is this it for her?’”
The angry, wily, rebellious and militantly feminist character that Bessie Thomashefsky portrayed became the prototype for a series of heroines she played going forward. They were tough, brassy, usually working-class fighters, endowed with chutzpah.
Bessie Thomashefsky also produced the operetta.
The musical was a watershed moment for Rumshinsky, as well. He went on to dominate the American Yiddish musical for the rest of the decade. It marked the first time that “American rhythm” had been incorporated in Yiddish music, a euphemism for acknowledging the influence of African-American music on the genre.
“Nothing had ever happened like that in Yiddish theater before,” said Ronald Robboy, who was part of the team that reconstructed the performance material. “Yiddish theater then quickly started incorporating elements of Tin Pan Alley. It also became interestingly more self-consciously Jewish, as smarter and better educated composers learned how to manipulate Jewish modal material, the scales that came from liturgical music and klezmer music. So the music was at once more American and at the same time more skillfully Jewish in its self-identity.”
Robboy’s connection to the material is a lengthy one. For five years he served as researcher for the Thomashefsky Project, an homage to the legacy of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky instigated by their grandson, the late conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. The culmination of the project occurred in April 2005 with the premiere of The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater at Carnegie Hall. A recording of a subsequent performance in Miami Beach aired on the PBS series Great Performances in 2012.
Robboy worked with Weiser and Max Friedman, a law student in Memphis, to turn a number of archival documents into the printed matter needed to do the Khantshe performance. In 2023 the team reconstructed Rumshinsky’s Shir-hashirim operetta.
The documents for Khantshe came from YIVO and the American Jewish Historical Society, among other sources. They included a copy of the libretto that had been published as a bootleg in Warsaw.
Friedman got obsessed with Yiddish while studying for a master’s degree in music composition at Brandeis. For his master’s thesis he set to music sound recordings of Yiddish poets H. Leivick, Yankev Glatshteyn, Kadia Molodovsky, and Rokhl H. Korn reading their own work.
The last musical number in Khantshe in Amerike has the protagonist singing about herself. Soon the song Khantshe was played whenever Bessie Thomashefsky walked into restaurants and social gatherings. Tilson Thomas often played it as she made her triumphant entrance into the family living room.
Khantshe in Amerike will be performed on Thursday, May 14, in the Bitó Conservatory Building at Bard College from 7 – 8:30 p.m.
It will also be performed at YIVO on Monday May 18, at 7 p.m., as part of Carnegie Hall’s United in Sound: America at 250 festival. Admission is $15, $10 for YIVO members and students. Registration is required for the free livestream on Zoom.
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They texted about Torah and mitzvahs. Feds say they were insider trading
The suspects texted one another as though they had everyone fooled.
“How’s the rabbi?” one asked in a message. “Is he still scheduled for surgery?”
“We are still waiting for the doctor to check if it’s still needed,” came the response.
But there was no surgery, authorities say, and there was no rabbi. Instead, prosecutors allege, the men were referring to Amazon’s impending acquisition of the vacuum company iRobot, hoping to trade on what was then still a closely guarded secret. According to a pair of federal indictments unsealed last week, the deal was one of dozens leaked to a criminal network that used Jewish code words to plan their investments.
At the center of the alleged insider trading scheme was Nicolo Nourafchan, 43, a corporate lawyer who prosecutors say used his access to company files to collect and share deal information with a sprawling network of middlemen and investors. Capitalizing on the lawyer’s knowledge of in-progress mergers and acquisitions, the crew allegedly racked up tens of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds over the course of a decade.
The indictments are rife with Jewish code words that the defendants used in the alleged plot. “Torahs” and “mitzvahs” were stock tips, and a merger was a “flight to Israel.” A “chavrusa” — Aramaic for study partner — meant another lawyer or investor, and a company was a “shul.”
And to share the ticker symbol of a company soon to be acquired, one alleged co-conspirator spelled out its initials using Jewish names.
Nourafchan and the other lawyers received kickbacks when the deals hit, according to prosecutors.
Nineteen of the case’s 30 defendants have been arrested in Los Angeles, New York and Florida and have appeared in federal court. (Two located in Russia and Israel are considered fugitives, according to the Department of Justice.)
Of those, 16 defendants are each charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, two counts of securities fraud and one count of money laundering conspiracy. The conspiracy charges carry a combined sentence of up to 30 years in prison, while the fraud charges carry a sentence of up to 45 years and money laundering up to 20 years. Fines could exceed $5 million per defendant.
Those charged in the first indictment include Nourafchan, who prosecutors say drew extensively on a network of family and friends to build the scheme, and David Bratslavsky, the former director of the U.S. Israel Business Council, a group that brings together business leaders from those two countries.
An additional five alleged co-conspirators, including Nicolo’s brother Lorenzo Nourafchan, face two counts of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, two counts of securities fraud and one count of money laundering conspiracy.
Reuters has reported that Avi Sutton, a former Israeli Supreme Court law clerk, is among the unindicted co-conspirators involved in the alleged scheme. (Sutton could not be reached for comment.)
The prosecutions have caused an earthquake in the world of M&A law, with the Wall Street Journal calling it “one of the most brazen insider-trading schemes in years.” Nicolo Nourafchan had worked at top M&A law firms and leaked information on corporate giants that included Amazon, Johnson & Johnson and Burger King.
“Everyone charged today is accused of scoring significant profits from expected market moves and making out like bandits,” Ted Docks, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston division, said May 6 after the charges were announced. “That’s not merely gaming the system — it’s a federal crime.”
If proven guilty, the Nourafchan brothers, who have not yet entered a plea, could face decades in prison. Lawyers for each did not respond to a request for comment.
No attorneys are on record for other defendants and no pleas have been entered yet in the case. The Forward could not reach them for comment.
Ask the ‘rabbi’
To most who knew them, Nicolo and Lorenzo Nourafchan were LA brothers who had made good. They had graduated from top schools — Nicolo from Yale Law School, Lorenzo from Yeshiva University — and gone on to careers in corporate law and finance.
Nicolo bounced around between major law firms including Sidley Austin, Latham & Watkins and Goodwin Procter. At each stop, authorities said, he used internal document management systems to access information about deals that were in progress. He recruited Robert Yadgarov and Gabriel Gershowitz, respectively his former roommate and classmate, to gather tips from their firms, prosecutors allege.
The three would allegedly then pass on the tips to middle-men, who would share the knowledge with investors. (Yadgarov is among the 16 charged in the first indictment. Gershowitz has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with authorities, who have recommended a sentence of two years in prison.)
Eager for the next tip, the investors often badgered the middlemen in code, authorities say.
“Gavy, we are all just waiting for you to tell us when the next flight to Israel is,” one investor named Simon Fensterszaub asked alleged middleman Gavryel Silverstein. “It’s coming soon,” Silverstein replied. (Silverstein is also charged in the first indictment.)
In June 2022, court documents say, Fensterszaub, who had invested in a company expected to be acquired, asked Silverstein for an update on the deal: “Any chance you can find out how the rabbi is feeling?” Fensterszaub wrote.
“Unfortunately nothing,” Silverstein replied.
Then Fensterszaub dropped the code entirely: “Should I tell ppl to pull out?” he said.
Ultimately, he didn’t — and the brothers netted about $179,000 from their iRobot trades.
In another instance, one of the investors, unable to remember the name of the company being purchased, asked a co-conspirator to remind him. The company’s name was Momentive — ticker symbol MNTV.
According to authorities, the person replied:
“Menachem
Nachman
Tuvya
Vladmir”
Silverstein and Simon Fensterszaub, who do not have lawyers currently assigned in court documents, could not be reached for comment.
Family affairs
The Nourafchans are not the only brothers named in the indictments, which in total run more than 120 pages. Text messages from Brian and Mark Fensterszaub, of Hollywood, Florida — Simon’s brothers — show the two using code to discuss Nourafchan with Silverstein, who is their brother-in-law.
The first indictment shows the brothers as regularly agitated about the status of deals. “We need that damn rebbe already,” Mark Fensterszaub allegedly told Silverstein in 2022 as the two discussed money issues.
Soon after, Silverstein came through, court documents say. With Amazon on the verge of acquiring iRobot, he used Hebrew letters to allude to iRobot’s stock symbol in a text, allegedly tipping the brothers to the opportunity.
The traders in Nourafchan’s network made a total of $1.7 million trading on the Amazon/iRobot deal, according to court documents.
After Nourafchan lost his job at Goodwin Procter in September 2023, the Fensterszaubs appeared worried that the tips might stop coming.
“Let’s say he’s not davening or doing any Torahs, mitzvahs,” Brian Fensterszaub told Silverstein that October. “Let’s say he said ‘I don’t have anything, f”ck you, give me my money.’ We’d still be like alright, torah and mitzvahs. We gotta do what we gotta do.” (The three Fensterszaub brothers are charged in the first indictment.)
Nicolo Nourafchan reassured Silverstein that December that more info would be on the way soon. “I’m working on getting a job,” he said, according to court documents. “So baruch hashem we’ll have more.”
Silverstein’s brother-in-law Yisroel Horowitz is also charged in the scheme, as is Brian Fensterszaub’s brother-in-law Joseph Suskind; Eliyahu and Daniel Kavian, another sibling duo, were allegedly connected to the plot through Simon Fensterszaub.
It was the relationship between the Nourafchan brothers, however, that may have led the decade-long scheme to unravel.
Lorenzo Nourafchan, 38, ran a business he started called Northstar Financial Consulting Group, and on LinkedIn had accrued several thousand followers. He also wrote a money column for the Los Angeles Jewish Home, an Orthodox print weekly, in which he wrote about the challenges and opportunities of being an Orthodox business owner. (The LA Jewish Home did not respond to an inquiry.)
Lorenzo was looser with the information, court documents show, recruiting his hair stylist to the scheme, who then involved nearly a dozen of his friends and relatives. Lorenzo instructed the stylist, Miakel Bishay, not to do the trading himself so the trail would not lead back to him, authorities say, but Bishay did anyway. Bishay’s friend, Nowel Milik, netted more than $700,000 in the iRobot deal, according to one of the indictments. (Bishay and Milik are both charged in the second indictment.)
Soon, the jig was up. In March 2024, a federal agent posing as a representative from FINRA, a regulatory organization that monitors trading activity, called Brian Fensterszaub asking for more information about the iRobot trade. The call alarmed Fensterszaub, who immediately called Silverstein to let him know.
“Listen, God forbid that I don’t think anything should come of it,” Fensterszaub told Silverstein, “but God forbid if something did, you don’t need it pointing back to you and you having to deal with it.”
A legal filing from Tuesday by lawyers for the Nourafchan brothers asked the court to grant Lorenzo permission to use the proceeds from the sale of his business to pay for Nicolo’s legal representation. Judge Leo T. Sorokin granted the request.
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Trump announced a national Shabbat — and a giant celebration of Christianity the very next day
To celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States, President Trump has announced several religious ceremonies. This weekend is Shabbat 250, in honor of Jewish Heritage month, beginning Friday night and carrying into Saturday.
“We celebrate the contributions that Jewish Americans have made to our way of life, we honor their role in shaping the story of our Nation, and we remember that religious devotion, learning, and service to others are enduring pillars of a thriving culture,” the announcement says.
But that recognition of Judaism is followed the very next day by Rededicate 250, a celebration “about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values,” as Paula White-Cain, Trump’s senior faith advisor, said in a webinar earlier this month for the National Faith Advisory Board, adding that attendees shouldn’t worry the event might include “praying to all these different Gods.”
In that same webinar, Brittany Baldwin, an executive of the America 250 taskforce planning the event, reassured viewers that the event would focus on Christianity and not give much space to other religions to ensure it has “the right focus for our community of believers.”
“The vast majority of the speakers are Christian,” Baldwin said. “If you do see another religion represented, it would probably be in a modest way, talking about religious freedom.”
All this is certainly mixed messaging as far as the place of Jews in the nation’s celebrations is concerned.
Rededicate 250 will feature dozens of Christian speakers including pastors; figures such as Dr. Larry Arnn, the founder of Hillsdale College, a private, conservative Christian school; members of the Trump administration including Pete Hegseth, who has openly voiced support for Christian nationalism; Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus on the hit Christian show The Chosen; and a selection of Christian musical performers. Rabbi Meir Soleveichik is the sole non-Christian slated to participate.
Rededicate 250 and Shabbat 250 are both headed by the larger task force organizing the 250th birthday celebration, led by the public-private partnership organization founded for this purpose, Freedom 250, the funders of which include Exxon Mobile, Palantir, and Wall Builders, an advocacy group “integrating the elements of Biblical faith and morality throughout all aspects of American life and culture.” Its page highlights religion as a central piece of the nation’s birthday, advertising initiatives like “America Prays,” a site where Americans can post prayers and commit to praying 10 minutes every week for the country from May 7 until July 4 this year.
The back-to-back Shabbat and Rededicate events are taking place shortly after the Trump administration released its report on anti-Christian bias, the work of a task force on the topic Trump founded shortly after taking office for his second term. For nearly 600 pages, the report inveighs against what it frames as oppression of Christians in the U.S., with examples including American embassies flying rainbow pride flags, President Biden’s declaration of a Trans Day of Visibility and limitations placed on church services during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Though the report mentions the importance of freedom of religion to all Americans — and notes that Christians make up 62% of the U.S. population — the papers, much like the Rededicate 250 event, heavily emphasize Christianity’s particular importance in the U.S.’s founding. No one disputes this — the founders were Christian. But the document takes it a step farther, interpreting Christianity’s centrality in American history to imply that the religion should play an essential role in the government.
“Christianity was embedded into both American government and society, to its great credit and benefit,” the report says, “even as its laws strive to protect religious pluralism.” After outlining Christianity’s historical influence, the document concludes that it is just as central to the U.S. today. “The Christian faith has been an indispensable feature of American governance and society,” it says, “from the earliest colonies to present.”
The report, as its title implies, focuses exclusively on Christianity. But even then, it excludes certain beliefs. It offers a definition of the religion, stating that “most” Christians oppose LGBTQ marriage and abortion, quoting liberally from the Bible to support this point, though many churches differ in their interpretations of the verses or actively reject the stated beliefs on LGBTQ marriage or abortion.
“This belongs to a package, a story, about who ‘we’ are, when they talk about ‘we the people,’ or ‘in God we trust.’ When they use that word ‘we’ — who are the ‘we?” said Robert W. Tuttle, a professor of religion and law at George Washington University’s law school, of the report. “Whose voices are silenced in this? We know whose voices are being lifted up. But whose voices are silenced?”
The task force report, the America Prays page and the page for Rededicate 250 largely avoid mentioning Jesus by name, and Freedom 250’s site even has a brief “Jewish blessing for the government” from 1789. All ostensibly leave space for non-Christian religious observance and prayer. But looking at the contents and speaker lists, Christianity is the only religion that is given more than passing attention. Judaism is the only minority religion mentioned at all.
Instead, all of the events frame the nation’s founding, and its birthday, as a gift from God — a God implied to be Christian. On the Rededicate 250 site, three “pillars” are outlined for programming at the nine-hour event on Sunday. One is “a reflection on God’s providence throughout 250 years, honoring the faith that inspired America’s founders and has carried us forward in every generation since.” The next is personal testimonies, and the final is the titular rededication, asking for God to grant the U.S. another 250 years.
The rhetoric “suggests such an image of the state being the recipient of this divine blessing, this divine empowerment,” said Tuttle. “And it’s troubling because when the state claims that it has authority from God, it loses what is crucial about our specific political arrangement, which is the idea that we the people create the government. The government is not a creation of god. ‘We the people,’ — this is a secular compact.”
Why, then, among numerous events all dedicated to Christianity, have a national Shabbat? Many Christians see Jews as part of a unified “Judeo-Christian” society and system of values, one that often downplays the differences in beliefs, practices and culture between Jews and Christians. And Shabbat is becoming increasingly popular among Christians; Charlie Kirk’s book on the topic encouraged his fellow Christians to observe a specifically Jewish Shabbat on Saturday instead of the Christian Sunday Sabbath — all while downplaying and even stripping away the Jewish beliefs from the practice.
Shabbat 250 too encourages Americans of “all backgrounds” to observe Shabbat this weekend, one that Trump said should center “gratitude for our great Nation.” In this schema, Shabbat, too, can fit in with the celebrations’ Christian focus.
“How do we knit together a religiously pluralistic polity into a society? They’ve offered one way to do it — we’re going to center this one. If you don’t wish to join it, we’ll tolerate you,” Tuttle said, in summary. “It’s the story of who belongs and who doesn’t belong.”
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