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An afternoon with Shayna Maydele, possibly the most Jewish dog in New York
(New York Jewish Week) — In my decades as a journalist, I’ve interviewed some pretty powerful, important and, yes, even famous people. But never before have I been so excited — starstruck, even — to meet a subject, and this one wasn’t even human.
I was positively giddy to visit the Upper East Side home last week of Shayna Maydele, a small, white dog who has captured the hearts of thousands of adoring fans on Instagram. Shayna Maydele’s popularity isn’t just owing to her adorable punim — though her punim is 100% adorable, as as this committed fluffy-dog lover can attest. It’s also because her Instagram is filled with charming, authentic expressions of Jewish pride, as well as humorous takes on life in New York City.
Leaving aside the big question of whether or not a dog can be Jewish (I say yes!) — or even if owning a pet is a Jewish thing to do — every Friday, Shayna Maydele’s account features a heartwarming “Shabbat shalom” message. The Shabbat photos often include homemade challah, other times they might feature her “Papa,” or her owner’s dad. I always let out a squeal of delight when I see the posts, and I’m hardly alone: “I wake up each a [sic] Friday and await such good posts,” wrote one commenter on a Shabbat post earlier this month. “Shabbat Shalom, Shayna!”
“My Shabbat posts get the most likes out of everything,” Shayna Maydele’s owner, Heidi Silverstone, told me.
Since emerging on social media in 2019, Shayna Maydele (whose name means “beautiful girl” in Yiddish) has garnered nearly 9,000 (and counting) fans from all over the world — many of whom go beyond simply “liking” or commenting on a post. The Jewish National Fund, for example, has, unbidden, planted a tree in her honor; she also played an important role in the engagement of one couple who happened to meet her at a dog park. Shayna Maydele’s Shabbat messages have been shared by a wide variety of high-profile social media accounts, including Humans of Judaism, Jewish Memes Only and several of the New York Jewish Week’s partner sites, including Hey Alma and The Nosher. Her followers include Grammy-winning Jewish musician Joanie Leeds and Jewish comedian Hannah Einbender, the star of the HBO comedy “Hacks.”
It’s a pretty remarkable following considering Silverstone — who is also Shayna Maydele’s social media manager, if you will — doesn’t have any social media accounts of her own, nor did she set out to make her pup a star. It all started in June 2019, when Silverstone and her husband, Rob, flew to Arizona to pick up their puppy from the breeder. (Shayna is a coton de tulear, a breed made famous by Barbra Streisand, who notoriously cloned her pup. The breeder later told Silverstone she also sold Streisand her famous dogs. “I’m not sure if they’re related,” Silverstone said of their mutual pets, “but I can pretend they are!”)
So many friends and family members had wanted to see pictures of the new puppy, said Silverstone, that she figured it would be easier to set up an Instagram account. “I didn’t make it private — I figured nobody’s gonna know her,” she explained. “And then, all of a sudden, people were following.”
Shayna Maydele’s account began to really take off when the Jewish content started, which happened organically. “It wasn’t a conscious thing — it was Shabbos and I put a yarmulke on her head and said, ‘Shabbat Shalom,’ thinking I’m wishing my family and friends a Shabbat shalom.” Followers took notice. “People were liking it so much I thought, ‘OK, we’ll do a Shabbat shalom post every week.’” Other Jewish holidays soon followed.
Heidi Silverstone poses with her coton de tulear, Shayna Maydele, whom she got in June 2019. (New York Jewish Week)
“The Jewish thing is just normal — it’s a part of our life,” said Silverstone, who chatted with me in her kitchen as Shayna Maydele, sitting beneath the table, interjected with an occasional woof.
Silverstone and her spouse are members of Park Avenue Synagogue; while they used to attend Shabbat services regularly, these days they are more likely to stream them. The parlor floor of the family brownstone is filled with Jewish art and Judaica (as well as some cool New York City treasures, such as coasters inspired by subway tokens).
In one corner of the the kitchen, where Shayna Maydele’s dog food sat untouched, hangs a framed Passover bagels recipe, handwritten by Silverstone’s grandmother, as well as a drawing her son Max made as a child of the Torah and other Jewish ritual objects made of cheese. (Max is now 25 and a fourth-year cantorial student at the Jewish Theological Seminary.) Around the corner is a painting made by a Shayna Maydele fan, a beautifully rendered version of an Instagram post featuring her holding a tub of Temp-Tee Whipped Cream Cheese.
A lifetime of shul-going means that there are enough kippahs in the home for Shayna Maydele to rarely pose wearing the same one twice — Silverstone estimates that a basket in the corner of the dining room contains some 200 skullcaps in a variety of textures and colors. Silverstone makes an effort to coordinate Shayna Maydele’s kippah to other accouterments that may be in the weekly Shabbat photo; on the day of my visit, Silverstone selects an orange kippah to match a painted ceramic tzedakah box, one that Silverstone had previously gifted to her grandmother.
When it’s time for the photo shoot, Silverstone’s “assistant” — that’s Silverstone’s husband, Rob, who is vice president of finance at media company Dotdash Meredith — emerges from his upstairs office. I had been warned that dogs, like babies, are notoriously difficult photo subjects, but on that December afternoon — with Shayna Maydele placed atop a low table next to the tzedakah box, and with Rob deftly sticking his fingers in Shayna Maydele’s mouth to elicit a smile — the whole adorable thing is over in minutes.
These days, Silverstone typically posts three or four times a week to Shanya Maydele’s account. Though she has no formal media background — a former dental hygienist, she now works as a workshop instructor for an au pair program — Silverstone said she is coached by her son, Michael, 28, who, in addition to working at a tech company, has his own photography business.
In addition to the Jewish content, there is other shtick. My favorites are the “new business ventures” that feature the coton posing beside or atop something someone has discarded on the street. (In one recent example, Shayna Maydele is seen in front of a play kitchen. “Fine dining on the lovely streets of NYC,” the caption reads. “I will cook and serve delicious meals prepared in this top of the line toy kitchen. FREE dog hair in every bite!”)
“We have so much trash on the street,” Silverstone said. “What’s really funny is that people in New York get it — they know what it is. But I have followers from all over the world. So probably, when they come to the city, they’re going to be looking for the streets paved in garbage.”
But the Jewish posts seem to be the heart and soul of the account, and Silverstone said she is moved by the positive reaction she gets from Shayna Maydele’s followers, both Jewish and not. She makes a conscious effort to define Jewish terms and holidays so they are accessible to everyone: On Simchat Torah in October, a photo of Shanya Maydele posing with a stuffed Torah is accompanied by an explanation of the holiday.
Though Silverstone jokes she spends “too much time” on the account, it’s clear the family is getting just as much joy out of the process as Shayna Maydele’s followers get from the results. When she hears from followers who are inspired to light candles or do something Jewish, “I love that,” she said.
Considering the impetus of the account was simply to save some time, Silverstone seems overjoyed that Shayna Maydele’s account is helping people learn more about Judaism.
“I guess my goal is just to expand reach — and if her Jewish comments could soften anyone’s opinion on Judaism or get another ally, I think that’s a pretty good goal,” Silverstone said when pressed on her hopes for the account. “But I certainly didn’t go into it that way.”
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The post An afternoon with Shayna Maydele, possibly the most Jewish dog in New York appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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He was a hidden child during WWII. The French town that saved him lost his painting and rediscovered a chapter of its history.
The day Isabelle Siméon cleared out a basement storage area in the town hall in Houdan, France, and found a rolled-up painting on top of a bookcase, she discovered a forgotten piece of history. My father, Philip Orenstein, a professor of art at Rutgers University, had started work on that painting in 1989 and donated it to the town in 1994 at an event marking the 50th anniversary of its liberation by American forces.
My father donated the painting because he felt a deep debt to the town that saved his life during the Second World War. A hidden child in Houdan from 1942-45, my father was saved by a parish priest who threatened to excommunicate anyone in this small market town who informed the occupying Germans about the Jewish children, resistance fighters, or downed allied pilots concealed there, or other acts of resistance. And by a farming family — the Trouvers — that took in children of French POWs, including Jews.
Yet by 2024, when Siméon, a municipal official, made her discovery, the town had forgotten not only the painting that had gone straight into storage, but its proud history of sheltering Jewish children and its heroic French resistance priest Abbé Pierre Condé. A dramatic page in the town’s 1,200 years of recorded history was lost. Even among the Jewish community in Yvelines, the bucolic region immediately to the west of Paris, the story was unknown. In France, the story of the hidden children, Jewish children sent to the countryside or small towns under various pretexts to avoid detection by Nazi occupants is well known. Several towns have established national reputations as places of refuge. But not Houdan and not elsewhere in Yvelines according to Valérie Boussard, president of the Council of Jewish Communities of Yvelines.
After spending more than a year to find my father based only on his signature and then restoring the painting, the Tannery (La Tannerie) gallery in Houdan is now hosting an exhibition through Nov. 1 to celebrate the restoration of this painting and this forgotten page of the town’s history.
Houdan today has changed. For many Parisians, this part of France serves as a country retreat and Houdan has fought hard to preserve its ancient town center. The result is a small town that continues to serve as a delightful regional hub with open air markets, restaurants situated in old farm buildings, an enormous fair each September, and increasingly fancy small shops, perhaps akin to the Cotswolds in England.
I accompanied my father to Houdan for the opening of his exhibition on Sept. 10 and stood with my extended family and Mayor Jean-Marie Tétart who proudly announced the future installation of the painting to a pride of place in the town hall. A former parliamentarian, Tétart seeks for Houdan the recognition it deserves as a place that, when times were at their hardest, resisted antisemitism and sought to repair the world. Even today.
Yet the town’s proud embrace of my father, his work, and this vital chapter of its history raises an important question: How was this history lost in the first place? And why was it rediscovered only now?
According to my father, the hidden child whose family survived the war and then emigrated to Brooklyn, France was simply not ready to receive this history before. It was not until 1995 that France officially took responsibility for the Vel d’Hiv roundup in Paris that claimed the lives of my father’s cousin Henri Herzhorn and thousands of other children who died in the French concentration camp in Drancy in inhumane conditions or in Auschwitz, their final destination. My father intended the seven murals that he painted starting in the 1990s to force France to recognize this history.
Paradoxically, with the dramatic rise of antisemitism that has deeply worried the French Jewish community, this history and the history of those who resisted resonates even more loudly. With every online or physical or verbal attack, the Jewish community and its allies in France respond with acts of memory.
My father’s work is at once personal and political, mixing family imagery with images of the grand politics of the day and oddly juxtaposed popular culture references. His murals stun the viewer with outsized images of a DeGaulle and Pétain or the D-Day landings, overlaid with family photos, Parisian graffiti, posters, and film advertisements. The colorful, powerful, and emotional images rush together and appear to jump off a graffitied wall in Paris as you are passing by.
“The Big Cheese,” his painting in Houdan, features an outsized image of the Ile de France steamship sailing across a brightly tricolored French flag background. The ship that bore him and his family to New York appears to be racing away from images of the iron cross, yellow stars, Drancy, and Karl Marx towards Mt. Rushmore, Max Beckman, and Statue of Liberty sunglasses. The work is colorful and epic in composition, on the one hand, while also inlaid with engaging and perplexing historical symbols designed to draw one in from afar and up close. My father has always dwelt on this history.
“As I worked on the seven canvases I describe as murals — my major body of work — I constantly thought of my cousin Henri Herzhorn, whom I had never met, as well as the more than 4,000 Parisian children who were victims of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup — my contemporaries, who, like me, left France,” my father said when he was in Houdan.
Today, though France seems open to revisiting this history, mysteries still remain. Particularly the postwar life and fate of Abbé Pierre Condé. I spoke with Monsignor Luc Crepy, the Bishop of Versailles for Yvelines, who has begun to research Houdan’s wartime hero together with the current Curé of Houdan, Father Pierre Bothuan. Condé left behind a published journal recording the major events of the war, occupation, and liberation of Houdan. After that, he too disappeared from collective memory.
Growing up in my father’s house, surrounded by this history, I came away from Houdan shocked at the distances we have traveled and the voids that remain. My father and his older brother Stephen, a former professor of nuclear physics at CUNY — hidden with him in Houdan — never expected to survive 1944, let alone to return there in 2026. The house where they lived lay just beside a small bridge that the Germans planned to dynamite after D-Day to slow the advance of Patton’s army. Yet the town’s postman cut the wires and my father and uncle survived to consider the contemporary relevance of a lost painting and a lost history to a lost world in need of repair.
The post He was a hidden child during WWII. The French town that saved him lost his painting and rediscovered a chapter of its history. appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu to confront Mamdani’s call to arrest him in U.N. address this week
(JTA) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday accused New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani of supporting Hamas and inciting violence against Jews, setting up a showdown between the Israeli leader and one of the most prominent American pro-Palestinian politicians ahead of Netanyahu’s visit to the city.
Netanyahu said he would respond to Mamdani’s criticism of him and Israel during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, when he will visit New York for the first time since Mamdani took office.
Mamdani on Monday renewed his demand for the arrest of Netanyahu, who he called “a war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide of the Palestinian people” in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. He acknowledged that he did not have the authority to carry out a warrant for Netanyahu issued by the International Criminal Court, but said the warrant should still be “honored” to protect “accountability” to international laws.
“If the International Criminal Court deems someone worthy of an arrest because of a violation of those laws, then who are we to say that anyone should be above that?” said Mamdani.
Netanyahu responded in a video statement, “Shame on you for supporting the Hamas terrorist monsters who butchered our people. Shame on you for inciting riots against New York Jews.” A number of prominent New York Jewish figures have asked Mamdani to tamp down his rhetoric about Israel, linking it to rising violent attacks on Jews. Mamdani has said that he is mayor for all New Yorkers, including Jews, and denounces antisemitism.
“I’m coming to the U.N., I’m going to tell the truth about our heroic soldiers, and I’m going to tell the truth about you,” added Netanyahu.
Mamdani pledged during his mayoral campaign last year that he would seek to arrest Netanyahu if he visited, but admitted in July that the city could not legally do so.
The ICC issued its warrant for Netanyahu in 2024, accusing him of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The United States and Israel are not signatories of the treaty that created the ICC in 2002 and do not recognize its jurisdiction.
Netanyahu has prominently featured Mamdani in campaign ads as he currently seeks reelection in Israel, framing the mayor as both a pro-terror extremist and a leader reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
Netanyahu is set for one of his shortest trips to the United States, where he is not slated to meet with President Donald Trump, according to The Jerusalem Post. He is currently scheduled to leave New York on the same day he arrives. Protests are expected both outside the United Nations and inside during Netanyahu’s speech, which last year saw representatives from dozens of countries walk out.
Meanwhile, Mamdani had his third meeting with Trump on Monday, continuing a rapport between the two populist leaders on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Despite their stark differences on issues including immigration enforcement, Trump praised Mamdani during a press conference on the lawn of Gracie Mansion.
“I want him to be a great mayor, and he’s certainly got potential,” Trump told reporters before shaking Mamdani’s hand and patting his arm.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Netanyahu to confront Mamdani’s call to arrest him in U.N. address this week appeared first on The Forward.
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Could going to synagogue help or hurt a Jewish candidate? This poll offers a clue
Voters may react differently to a Jewish politician who publicly practices their faith than to one who simply identifies as Jewish, a new poll found. The distinction could matter for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a possible 2028 presidential candidate who has made his Jewish faith central to his public life and service.
The Politico poll of 2,002 U.S. adults showed that Democratic voters were less likely to vote for a candidate who regularly attends synagogue than for a candidate not practicing a religion or attending services once a year. Among Republicans, however, a candidate who regularly attends synagogue performed better than one who attends only once a year.
The survey, conducted online in partnership with the London-based polling firm Public First between August 8 and 14, asked respondents to choose between hypothetical candidates with different characteristics, including political ideology, age, race, profession, sexual orientation and religious practice. The sample has a reported margin of error of plus or minus 2.2%.
The poll offers a window into how religious observance may shape the way voters view a Jewish candidate. In an earlier poll conducted by the same firm in May, among 2,038 voters, candidates were identified simply by religion rather than how often or where they worshipped. Being identified as Jewish hurt a hypothetical candidate among voters in both parties compared with being identified as Christian.
The findings could be particularly relevant to Shapiro, the popular Pennsylvania governor running for reelection this fall. He maintains a traditional Conservative Jewish lifestyle, keeps kosher and is a longtime member of Beth Sholom Congregation in Elkins Park, outside Philadelphia. In his recent memoir, Where We Keep the Light, Shapiro detailed experiences shaped by and tied closely to his Jewish identity, including his vetting as a vice presidential candidate in 2024.
Shapiro has been viewed as a potential first Jewish president since his gubernatorial campaign in 2022 and is one of three prominent Jewish Democrats — along with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — mentioned as possible 2028 presidential candidates.
Religious identity, particularly Christianity, has become more central in Republican politics since President Trump returned to the White House in 2025. Trump and his Cabinet have made religious faith a prominent part of his administration’s agenda. He created a White House Faith Office to work with religious organizations and established a Justice Department task force focused specifically on what the administration calls anti-Christian bias. At the same time, an increasingly vocal faction on the far right has made Christian nationalism and antisemitism central to its politics.
The Politico poll does not explain why Republican voters responded differently to Jewish candidates based on how often they attended synagogue. But the gap aligns with the broader split in positions among conservatives who have warmly embraced visibly religious and politically conservative Jews, while criticizing liberal or less observant Jews over their politics and commitment to Judaism.
Trump has repeatedly drawn that distinction himself. During the 2024 election, for example, he said that Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats “hate their religion.”
The post Could going to synagogue help or hurt a Jewish candidate? This poll offers a clue appeared first on The Forward.
