At an American Jewish conference in Tel Aviv, protesters are driving the energy
TEL AVIV (JTA) — At a marquee conference of American Jewish leaders that kicked off tonight in Tel Aviv, the loudest cheers were for anti-government protesters, most of the energy could be found outside of the convention center’s gates, and the biggest news was who didn’t show up.
The General Assembly, the signature conference of the American Jewish organizational world, was meant to be a celebration of Israel’s 75th birthday and a testament to the enduring strength of ties between Israel and Diaspora Jewry. Sunday’s opening event, the Jewish Federations of North America said, was meant to pay tribute to that relationship — and feature speeches by Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But in the face of loud protests outside the event, Netanyahu abruptly canceled his appearance on Sunday, citing a full schedule ahead of Israel’s Independence Day on Wednesday. Over the course of a series of speeches by international Jewish dignitaries, his name was not mentioned once.
Instead, both inside and outside the conference walls, the tone of the evening was set by the protesters. They gathered by the hundreds opposite one of the convention center’s entrances — and in smaller clusters around the building — giving the thousands American Jewish visitors a taste of the protest culture that has developed this year in Israel as huge numbers Israelis have taken to the streets to oppose Netanyahu’s sweeping proposals to sap the power of the judiciary.
From the stage, the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly in Tel Aviv was mostly business as usual — except that the prime minister backed out of attending. (Courtesy JFNA)
Protesters waved Israeli flags, chanted the word “democracy” syllable by syllable, and blew into small plastic horns whose blaring sound carried remarkably well — permeating the walls of the conference plenary session. An entrepreneur standing at a card table was selling packages each containing a horn and a small Israeli flag for, depending on who asked, either 20 or 30 shekels (roughly $5.50 or $8).
The most direct route from the train to the conference was blocked off, owing to Tel Aviv’s ongoing attempts to build a citywide light rail system. So, with roads closed, the best way to get from the train station to the event was to follow the protesters — identifiable by the huge Israeli flags they carried or wore around their necks. Many were also pushing strollers or walking dogs.
“Israel must be a free democracy,” protesters chanted as attendees exited the event. “Please help us. Fascism shall not pass.”
Most of the protesters were gathered far from the gate where conference participants actually entered. But they got a shout out in the conference program as well. Julie Platt, the Jewish Federations’ board chair, drew a sustained round of applause and whooping from the 2,000 attendees when she spoke about how inspiring the protests were.
“What is clear is how passionate we all are about Israel and how central Israel is to our lives,” Platt said. “Its struggles our are struggles, its success is our success, and its debates are our debates. To the leaders of Israel, including those attending tonight, we stand united in our support of dialogue and broad consensus based on mutual respect.”
Then, she added, “To the protesters exercising their democratic rights, we see you, we hear you and we are inspired by your love of Israel.”
When the Jewish Federations last held the General Assembly in Israel, in 2018, Netanyahu sat onstage for a Q&A with the group’s chairman for more than half an hour. In Netanyahu’s absence this year, the night’s keynote speaker was Israeli President Isaac Herzog. His role is largely ceremonial, but he has been spearheading dialogue about the judicial overhaul — as well as issuing dire threats about what may happen if that dialogue fails.
Herzog repeated a version of those warnings Sunday night, portraying the debate over judicial reform as a cautionary tale about the dangers of polarization.
“The fierce debate over Israel’s direction in recent months is a striking example of the ways that alienation between different groups, and polarization that festers for years, becomes corrosive and weakens the pillars that hold our nation together,” he said. “I am convinced that there is no greater existential threat to our people than the one that comes from within.”
In his speech, Herzog announced an initiative called “Voice of the People” that will be aimed at fostering dialogue between Jews of differing opinions across Israel and the Diaspora. That initiative will be anchored by a conference he called the “Jewish Davos,” in a nod to the Switzerland-based annual economics conference that is seen as a global meeting of the minds.
“Nonpartisan, apolitical, Voice of the People will be a collaborative forum — one that can hold and reflect the full and diverse range of Jewish voices,” he said. “It will be a place where we can engage in serious, sensitive and strategic discussions on the most complex and pressing issues facing our people.”
If that conference happens, it would not be the first of its kind. Israeli President Shimon Peres, who served from 2007 to 2014, held an annual conference featuring famous names discussing hot-button issues. And historically, the federations’ General Assembly itself has been viewed as an ecumenical Jewish conference to discuss a wide range of issues.
Aside from that, the night’s program featured mainstays of traditional American Jewish gatherings celebrating Israel: a video with black-and-white stills from the country’s founding years, testimonials from Jewish immigrants to Israel from around the world, a performance by a musical group composed of Israeli soldiers. The conference will continue with a full day of sessions on Monday.
Near the end of the night, as the festivities were winding down, two people in the audience held up Israeli flags. One of them, in the corner, featured a quote from Israel’s national anthem that has become a protest slogan: “Free in our land.”
A little‑remembered Gilded Age millionaire helped make milk safe for American kids through his ‘retail giving’
The 1844 edition of the widely used schoolbook written by William H. McGuffey, “Newly Revised Eclectic Fourth Reader,” includes a dialogue about the difference between “true and false philanthropy”:
Mr. Fantom: I despise a narrow field. O for the reign of universal benevolence! I want to make all mankind good and happy.
Mr. Goodman: Dear me! Sure, that must be a wholesale sort of a job: had you not better try your hand at a town or neighborhood first?
As the discussion continues, the lesson becomes clear. Mr. Fantom’s approach is too ambitious to accomplish much, while Mr. Goodman’s, if narrower in scope, was likely to be more useful in practice.
Nathan Straus made his mark in philanthropy after a successful career running the Macy’s department store. Library of Congress Image by
Many of Straus’ contemporary philanthropists were setting lofty goals for their giving. In oil magnate John D. Rockefeller’s case, it was promoting “the welfare of humanity throughout the world.” For steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, it was “to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.”
Straus pursued more mundane objectives that included championing milk pasteurization. Although his efforts are not as well known today as those of his more ambitious – and wealthier – counterparts, they accomplished a lot and showed that what might be called “retail giving” can have far-reaching effects.
Successful immigration story
The Straus family came to the United States from Germany in the 1850s during the first big wave of Jewish immigration. Lazarus Straus, Nathan’s father, followed a familiar path for Jewish immigrants at the time, beginning as a peddler and eventually establishing his own store in the small town of Talbotton, Georgia, where the members of his family were the only Jews.
He prospered, became a respected citizen and saw that his children received good educations, including in their religion.
Then the Civil War upended the family’s life, first by reviving antisemitic prejudices and then, eventually, by destroying the family’s business.
Starting anew in New York City, Lazarus and his older sons, Isidor and Nathan, began to sell imported china, glassware and other crockery to retailers in the Northeast and South. One was Rowland H. Macy, who had founded an eponymous store that was on the cutting edge of what Fisher calls a “retailing revolution.”
Macy’s innovations included stocking large inventories of many kinds of merchandise, competitive pricing, extensive advertising and providing a variety of services like public restrooms and a cafeteria to make shoppers’ experiences more pleasurable.
Aided by the rapid urban and economic growth of the late 19th century, the model flourished. Department stores displaced smaller, specialty shops. Other retail powerhouses, such as Bloomingdale’s and Lord & Taylor, soon competed with Macy’s.
The Straus family sold their wares at Macy’s. After Rowland H. Macy died, the Straus family became partners with its new owners. By 1896, the Strauses owned the store outright. And Macy’s was expanding: It bought another department store in Brooklyn and created a flagship building on Manhattan’s Herald Square, which Macy’s still occupies.
The landmark Macy’s department store in New York’s Herald Square opened in 1902 while Nathan and Isidor Straus ran the retailer. Library of Congress Image by
His philanthropy journey begins
While Isidor Straus oversaw the store’s internal operations, Nathan focused on the company’s external activities, such as purchasing, marketing and dealing with government and business leaders.
A third brother, Oscar, pursued a career as a politician and diplomat, eventually becoming secretary of commerce and labor under President Theodore Roosevelt and the first Jewish member of a presidential cabinet. Perhaps inevitably, this led to a series of public appointments for Nathan Straus.
However, as they became wealthier, Nathan and his wife, Lina, increasingly devoted their attention to a series of philanthropic projects.
In 1893, the U.S. entered a four-year economic depression, its worst until the 1930s. As unemployment in New York City rose, Nathan Straus used his merchandising skills to address the needs of the jobless and poor.
He created a number of “depots” near tenements and boarding houses that sold coal, food and fuel at discount prices. Fisher, Straus’ biographer, rightly calls these early examples of what is now known as “social entrepreneurship”: the application of business principles to solving social problems.
Making milk less deadly
As these efforts were getting away, Straus also launched what would become his major preoccupation: promoting pasteurized milk.
In New York City in the early 1890s, Fisher writes, “the annual mortality rate among children under five was about 15 percent,” or 18,000 infants and toddlers per year. A main cause was consuming raw milk, which, unless certified by inspectors, was likely not only to contain a variety of pathogens, such as tuberculosis bacteria, but spoil easily going from farm to table.
Although scientists had long known that heating could make milk safer, doctors and public health officials worried that sterilizing milk might also destroy its valuable nutrients.
Straus, who had lost one of his own children to what he believed was a milk-borne infection, built on his projects for the unemployed by working with New York social service agencies to develop pasteurization plants and infant-milk stations near low-income neighborhoods.
They sold sterilized and refrigerated milk at below-wholesale prices, or donated it to those who could not afford to pay. Businesslike efficiency kept costs low, as did donations. Multilingual ads publicized the product’s availability, doctors and nurses advised parents on child-rearing, and careful recordkeeping aimed at assessing the program’s health benefits.
Straus and his wife devoted much of their time and money to this work. In addition to establishing 297 milk stations in 36 cities, they also spoke and wrote widely about the merits of pasteurization.
By 1908, their efforts paid off when the U.S. Public Health Service endorsed pasteurization and state and local governments began requiring that milk sold in their jurisdictions be pasteurized. Raw milk remained available in many states, and debates over its safety continue to this day.
As a result of this and other Progressive Era measures, New York City’s health commissioner estimated that infant deaths dropped by two-thirds
during the first two decades of the 20th century, with similar declines elsewhere in the country.
The coastal Israeli city of Netanya was named after philanthropist Nathan Straus. Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images Image by
Other causes
While most of Nathan Straus’ efforts occurred in the U.S., he used his trips to Europe for Macy’s to promote pasteurization on the continent.
During a 1904 visit, he toured the Mediterranean and stopped in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Impressed by the early Jewish settlements and holy sites he saw, Straus became an ardent advocate for creating a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, an unusual position for a Jewish businessman of that era, according to Fisher.
On a subsequent trip, a broken leg kept Straus from returning to New York on the maiden voyage of the Titanic; his brother Isidor and sister-in-law Ida were not so fortunate.
In the U.S., Nathan Straus led Zionist organizations, while in Palestine, his chief contributions involved supporting a variety of health care and economic development activities, including Hadassah, the women’s health and community development organization founded by Henrietta Szold.
Nathan Straus’ achievements as a philanthropist are not widely known today because he did not create a grantmaking foundation that outlasted him, as Rockefeller and Carnegie did.
Instead, by the time of his death in 1931, Straus had donated much of his fortune. Fisher writes that Straus used to invoke an old Hebrew proverb: “Money given in health is gold. Money given in sickness is silver. Money given after death is lead.”
He also didn’t donate heavily to the burgeoning network of communal organizations set up to assist the growing population of Jewish immigrants, as did the financiers Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg, who were also affluent Jewish immigrants from Germany.
As Fisher notes, this pattern of philanthropy resembles that of Straus’ friend – and pallbearer – Julius Rosenwald, the longtime head of Sears, Roebuck and Co. Both supported Jewish causes as well as major initiatives aimed at helping others: In Rosenwald’s case, it was schools for African American children in the South, while for Straus, it was milk pasteurization in New York City and beyond.
During and after World War I, they worked together to assist Jewish refugees in Europe. Fisher might have added that neither Straus nor Rosenwald sought much recognition for their work.
His thorough account should help give Straus the credit he deserves for his philanthropy. It should also show that donors do not have to aspire to “make all mankind good and happy” to make an important difference.
In many ways, Nathan Straus was an old-fashioned do-gooder, responding to the needs he saw with innovative solutions. As a result, he wound up accomplishing a lot of good.
“Emma,” a young Jewish woman who we met in 2019, didn’t belong to a synagogue. She didn’t have a Jewish partner. She didn’t observe Jewish rituals regularly. On most surveys about religion, she would not seem very engaged with Judaism.
But as Emma talked about what she did in her free time, a very different picture began to emerge. She visited Jewish websites and enjoyed listening to Jewish music. She read books about Jewish topics and had recently attended a retreat for young Jewish adults to learn Torah while also doing yoga.
She was highly invested in learning about Judaism, but she explored her identity without joining traditional institutions.
Most major surveys about religion ask whether someone belongs to a congregation, how often they attend services, whether they pray regularly and whether belief is important in their lives. Those measures help identify broad shifts, like the growing percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated: the “nones.”
But many Americans’ religious lives, like Emma’s, are not disappearing; they are moving away from membership of traditional institutions. To understand what religion looks like in 21st-century America, researchers may need to ask different questions.
Learning through art
As scholars of Judaismand education, we have been exploring how people learn about religion beyond traditional places like synagogues, Jewish schools and summer camps. Between 2019 and early 2023, we spoke with hundreds of people and explored different leisure time activities to discover what people learn about Judaism and Jewishness through cultural arts.
We interviewed dozens of audience members at Jewish-themed shows on Broadway, such as “Leopoldstadt”and “Parade.” We attended Jewish concerts and asked attendees what they learned. We explored how social media communities offer spaces to talk about different Jewish topics, like what fans learned about ultra-Orthodox Judaism from watching the television show “Shtisel.”
‘Shtisel,’ an Israeli series about an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem, ran for three seasons.
Our research revealed that there is a vibrant ecosystem of people learning about religion in their leisure time. Through the arts, both Jews and non-Jews encounter Jewish history, Jewish religious practices and representations of Jewish communities.
Screen and stage
Most people we spoke with told us that they felt meaningful connections to Judaism during activities that would rarely appear on a standard religion survey.
“Joan,” an unmarried woman in her 50s from Connecticut, told us that she was deeply invested in Judaism, but felt that synagogues and Jewish community centers were not welcoming to single people without families. Instead of joining a Jewish institution, she watched Jewish-themed TV shows and movies on Netflix, and joined social media communities to chat with other fans.
“Luis,” who lived in Boston but was born in Argentina, was a Sephardic Jew, a group that traces their ancestry and traditions to Jewish communities who once lived in Spain and Portugal. His wife was Ashkenazi, meaning her ancestors came from Central and Eastern Europe. She considered herself secular, and so the couple joined the Worker’s Circle, a nonreligious Ashkenazi institution rather than a synagogue.
Yet Luis loved deepening his knowledge of Sephardic culture, and he often attended concerts of music in Ladino, a Sephardic language related to Spanish, with other Sephardic immigrants.
American singer Sarah Aroeste writes and performs in Ladino.
For Joan and Luis, these activities were not peripheral to their Jewish lives. Rather, they were central avenues for learning and community. We interviewed hundreds of Jews who told us that cultural experiences were opportunities to reflect on Jewish practices, explore questions of belonging, connect with family histories and find friends with common interests.
New questions
Some aspects of these patterns were distinctive to Judaism. Historically, many Jews have understood Judaism to be a cultural world, and not only a theological tradition. Learning about cultural dimensions of Judaism has long been part of Jewish education.
The broader phenomenon of informal learning, though, extended far beyond a single tradition. Across America, increasing numbers of people learn about religion through media, cultural productions and digital networks. Christians may study biblical themes through podcasts, online discussion groups or religious influencers. Muslims may participate in online learning communities that connect believers across the world.
The challenge for religion researchers, then, is not simply to determine whether engagement with religion is rising or falling. Rather, it is to develop more nuanced ways of understanding how people explore religious themes and practices, beyond traditional institutions. Only then can we more fully understand how contemporary Americans actually live their religious lives.
