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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
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‘Spatial restructuring’ razes hundreds of residences in West Bank refugee camps
The Israel Defense Forces refers to the systematic demolition of hundreds of homes in the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps as “spatial restructuring,” a bureaucratic euphemism for operations designed to create maneuvering space. For years, Israel has used house demolitions in the West Bank as a punitive measure against terrorists, but over the past 18 months, the purpose behind the policy has changed: Israel is now razing homes in order to widen roads inside the camps, which will allow for the easier passage of military vehicles.
The destruction is part of a trend whereby Israel is importing combat tactics it has used in the wars in Gaza and Lebanon to the occupied West Bank. The main difference is the Israeli settlers — who engaged in persistent efforts to expel Palestinian populations first from Israeli-administered areas of the West Bank, and now from zones under the control of the Palestinian Authority.
In the aftermath of Oct. 7, the IDF distributed thousands of firearms to the settlers, some of whom were recruited as “regional defense soldiers.” As a result, IDF weapons have been used in many of the violent clashes between settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank. Last month, N12 News reported that the IDF will scale back the number of regional defense soldiers — and that Shin Bet will vet the recruits.
But even without the settlers — looking solely from the perspective of the IDF’s military activity — a significant change is underway. From the IDF’s perspective, the West Bank is turning from a place that is home to millions of Palestinians who are not involved in any hostile activity, into a combat zone. And combat zones can be “restructured” according to the military’s needs, even if that includes the demolition of entire neighborhoods or population transfer.
According to the IDF, the change was actually sparked by the Palestinian side. Even before Oct. 7 2023, the army claims, Palestinian terrorist organizations were setting up battalions — larger fighting units that held training exercises and activities based on an organized military doctrine. In July 2023, the IDF responded by launching Operation Home and Garden in the Jenin refugee camp — the largest Israeli military operation since Defensive Shield in 2002. It was a short, targeted maneuver that lasted just two days.
In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre, the IDF described an uptick in the activity of these battalions, which led, in August 2024, to Operation Summer Camps, during which the army entered the refugee camps in Tulkarm and killed the commander of a local battalion. The same month, as Israel Hayom reporter Amir Ettinger revealed, Israel Katz — then minister of foreign affairs and now minister of defense — made the IDF’s intentions quite clear: “The refugee camps are the root of the evil,” he said during a closed-door meeting with leaders of the Yesha Council. “They are not controlled by the Palestinian Authority, but by Iran. The Jenin refugee camp must be cleared of its residents and dealt with the same way we dealt with the Gaza Strip.”
In January 2025, Katz’s words became reality when the IDF launched Operation Iron Wall. According to figures issued by the military, 208 homes were destroyed in the Jenin refugee camp and 234 in the Tulkarm and Nur Shams camps. The goal was to allow armored Israeli vehicles to move within the camp. Satellite images leave no room for doubt as to the extent of the devastation.
The IDF currently has troops stationed permanently inside the refugee camps and is not allowing the tens of thousands of residents who left to return to their homes. Some Palestinians who were expelled have petitioned to Israel’s High Court of Justice, via the Association of Civil Rights in Israel and attorneys Hila Sharon and Reut Shaer. In February, the IDF told the court that it “does not intend to maintain a permanent presence in the refugee camps and, once the goals of the operation have been fully achieved, the current operation in the camps will be ended.” At the same time, the IDF added that “the necessary operational conditions have not yet been fully met.”
“We are a household of six people, including four children,” says Bassem — not his real name — who lived on the outskirts of the Tulkarm refugee camp and who was expelled around a year ago. “They gave us 10 minutes to leave. And that was that. Since then, we haven’t been home.”
According to Bassem, despite the IDF’s claim that it issues individual permits for residents to visit their homes, his request has been denied. He did manage to get access to the home one time — without permission — in the early hours of the morning. “All of the furniture was broken. The doors were open, there were cats and dogs inside, the trees in the yard had no fruit. Everything was dead. And I regret going to see it. I don’t have any security charges against me and I have committed no crime. Why would they do that to my home? And even if they do give me a permit — there’s no furniture left.”
Bassem and his family now live in rented accommodation. The financial assistance they got earlier is dwindling and he cannot see any kind of future. “UNRWA gave us some money at the start and a few cartons of oil, rice and things like that. Now, 80% of the aid has ended. In my opinion, there’s not even a 1% chance we’ll ever get back to our home.”
Delivering a message
“Spatial restructuring” is not a new concept, but, in the West Bank, its meaning has changed. In the past, it mainly referred to roadblocks designed to control the movement of Palestinian and Israeli vehicles and to allow the Israeli authorities to impose a military closure at will. In the past year it has taken on a new significance: the destruction of Palestinian homes and infrastructure.
For example, in August last year, Maj.-Gen. Avi Bluth, the head of the Central Command, ordered the uprooting of thousands of Palestinian olive trees from an area of about 300 dunams (74 acres) belonging to the village of Al-Mughayyir, following a shooting attack in which a Jewish Israeli was lightly wounded. “Every village and every enemy must know that if they carry out an attack against the [Israeli] residents, they will pay a heavy price. They will experience a curfew, they will experience a siege, and they will experience restructuring operations,” Bluth said. “We are now bearing down on this village, which has been responsible for quite a few attacks lately. We will also deliver this message to the village.”
Similar measures were also taken after the terror attack in May 2025 in which 30-year-old Tzeela Gez was shot dead while on her way to the maternity hospital to give birth. The IDF demolished homes in the adjacent village of Burkin overlooking Route 446 — including a four-story apartment block.
Another indication of the change in the IDF’s approach is the increase in the number of Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank since Oct. 7. According to data released by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 478 and 474 Palestinians were killed by IDF fire in 2023 and 2024 respectively. In 2025, that figure dropped to 221. These have been by far the most deadly years for Palestinians in the West Bank since the early 2000s, at the height of the second intifada. Figures issued by the IDF’s Central Command show a similar trend.
One of the reasons for this increase is the order issued by Bluth — which was revealed last year by Haaretz — that expanded open-fire orders in the West Bank. Here, too, the IDF is importing its operating tactics from the Gaza Strip. The instructions appear to reflect a broader change in the IDF’s combat doctrine, possibly influenced by the fact that many of its soldiers also fought in Gaza.
“A lot of things have changed,” says Meir — not his real name — an officer in the reserves who served for many months in the West Bank before and after Oct. 7. “I’m not sure whether this is something imported from another region, or rather that the security reality has simply changed. Once October 7 happened, it was understood that we can no longer just take it. So, we’re beefing up security: adding posts, bringing back patrols — every patrol that was ever cut has been brought back and every patrol that never existed before has been added.”
Meir claims that the rules of engagement have not been changed and insists that “no one is firing indiscriminately.” At the same time, he adds: “It’s true that there was an understanding that we have to respond more forcefully. Before October 7, people were less eager to use firearms; afterwards, the IDF suddenly remembered that you can’t fight terrorism with the foul odor of tear gas. We are given weapons so that we can use them. When there was a need — we used them. There was a long period of time when we were afraid to shoot, when even shooting in the air would mean that all hell broke loose. You shoot your gun — that’s what it’s for. We don’t walk around with our weapons slung over our shoulders just because it looks good.”
Meir also believes that the change is primarily a response to Palestinian terror. “The Palestinians responded very strongly to October 7. There were Hamas flags, rallies — even violence. It was something out of the ordinary. So, we used the means at our disposal to quiet it down. The Palestinians did things we hadn’t seen before — three armed men tried to infiltrate Adora [a settlement northwest of Hebron], for example, and there were bomb-making factories. We found crazy amounts of terrorist infrastructure.”
‘There’s a problem here. We’ll pay the price’
Maj.-Gen. (Res.) Gadi Shamni, a former Central Command chief, sees things differently. “It’s all a question of proportionality,” he tells Shomrim. “There has been a significant increase in the threat level — a lot of underbelly IEDs and all of that organization [of Palestinian battalions]. That said, October 7 and everything that’s happened since, along with the footage coming out of Gaza, ultimately mean that in a lot of places [the IDF] is sometimes using a ton of force — more than is always necessary. There are some sensitivities which, in the past, [the IDF] treated very seriously. Today, those sensitivities have disappeared — and that’s not a good thing.”
“I have spoken to soldiers and officers, young and old, who used to see things very differently,” Shamni adds. “Today, what they say is: ‘Take no chances — shoot at everything.’ This is a problematic approach and the IDF, at some stage, will have to take control of the situation — because we will end up paying a price. Once, officers dealt with these sensitivities, they briefed their soldiers on how to treat civilians, how to behave in sensitive areas. Today, the lower-ranking soldiers are unaware of any of this, because nobody talks to them. Everything is black or white. There’s no middle ground. And that’s a problem when you’re operating in a civilian environment.”
“[The principle of] proportionality has vanished,” he adds. “When you talk about proportionality, you are told, ‘Now’s the time to kick ass.’ There is also intense pressure from the settlements, the government, from [ministers] Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Ultimately, the IDF carries out the government’s policies. You can see what Smotrich is doing on the ground and it is incumbent on the IDF to execute those policies. We have a problem here.”
IDF: Freedom of action remains a necessary condition for regional security
The IDF submitted the following response: “The intensive efforts of the IDF to thwart terrorism in Judea and Samaria began before the outbreak of the war. Terrorist infrastructure developed in the refugee camps of the northern Samaria region, from which attacks were launched. In light of this, the IDF launched Operation Iron Wall in January 2025, during which operational and engineering activities were carried out to enable freedom of action for security forces, dismantle terrorist infrastructure and prevent terrorist organizations from establishing a presence.
“In addition to these operational activities, there has been a decrease of about 80% in the volume of terror attacks in northern Samaria recently. Most of the measures implemented during the operation, including the clearing of access routes and other engineering work, were also reviewed by the Supreme Court in response to petitions that were subsequently dismissed following the submission of a formal response and a hearing attended by all parties.
“Vegetation clearing is carried out according to established protocols, with the approval of relevant authorities in Central Command and based on operational requirements. These measures are designed to ensure the safety of road users, protect travel routes and prevent infiltrations and terrorist attacks. Every operation is preceded by a professional assessment. The IDF operates in accordance with the law and its decisions are subject to judicial review. Security forces act against structures built without authorization, prioritizing enforcement against illegal construction near roads that poses a security risk. Such enforcement actions are carried out under the planning and building laws applicable in the region.
“IDF forces continue to operate throughout Judea and Samaria, focusing on targeted counterterrorism efforts to ensure the safety of citizens. The freedom of action maintained by the IDF in terrorist hubs across northern Samaria remains a necessary condition for regional security.”
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Whether it’s viral dot cakes or Love Shack Fancy skirts, Chloe Hechter wants you to know that “Jewish-American Princesses did it first”
On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Butterfield Market currently boasts hour-long lines for the viral “dot cakes,” which are entirely covered by tiny sprinkles. For influencer Chloe Hechter, however, these cakes are nothing new — she saw them at every college bed party, birthday and Bat Mitzvah she ever went to.
“Jewish-American Princesses did it first,” she claimed in a recent Tiktok.
Hechter, who is 25, regularly receives thousands of likes on her content which is centered around relatable modern Jewish experiences: summer relationships at Jewish summer camp, drama within Jewish sororities, coming home from college for Passover seder. She’s described her mission as reclaiming the “Jewish-American Princess” stereotype, which often brings to mind a girl who is spoiled, materialistic and boy-obsessed. Hechter hopes to present a different narrative.
“Jewish American Princess means a headstrong, confident Jewish woman who knows what she’s worth,” Hechter wrote in a February Substack post. “A girl who knows her place in the world as a woman and as a Jew, and who isn’t afraid to be exactly who she is in those spaces.”
The modern-day stereotype of a “Jewish-American Princess” is known for a dress code of sweat sets from Free City or Aviator Nation, Roller Rabbit pajamas and ruffly skirts from Love Shack Fancy. Before that, as Jamie Lauren Keiles discussed in a 2018 Vox article, the “JAP” uniform included Juicy tracksuits in the 2000s, Calvin Klein jeans in the ‘80s and cashmere sweaters in the ‘50s. But, as the ‘princess’ moniker suggests, these looks have always come at a price (Free City sweatpants currently retail for $168).
Keiles explains that JAPs’ historic reputation for dependence on “daddy’s money” stems from Jewish men in the 1950s, still seen by many as nouveau riche, who sought someone to blame. The Jewish-American Princess was encapsulated, Keiles writes, in Goodbye, Columbus’ Brenda Patimkin, who, though educated and beautiful, is also characterized as vain, demanding and uncompromising. It is this kind of portrayal that Hechter hopes to challenge. Though she acknowledges her own privileged background, she also argues that privilege doesn’t necessarily mean out-of-touch.
Hechter’s upbringing was “a gift I’ve been given,” she said. Although she didn’t discuss her background in detail, Hechter expressed her admiration for her parents, who run their own businesses and worked hard to make sure that she grew up in comfort. As opposed to the stereotypical Jewish-American princess, searching for a wealthy husband to provide for her, Hechter said that she uses her background as motivation to be self-sufficient — and as inspiration for her content.
Hechter started out as a child actor, and later went to high school at LaGuardia, the famed performing arts school in New York. At heart, though, she says she was also a writer. Even from a young age, she told me, she would write down funny or ridiculous situations she observed. For a Reform Jewish girl going to New York City private school, there was a lot of material — particularly during B’nei Mitzvah season.
“I’d be like ‘why am I in a party bus to a country club?,’” she joked.
For Hechter, Jewish experiences like these — along with her summers at sleepaway camp — were primarily cultural as opposed to religious. She observed the major holidays, but didn’t go to services regularly; she found the teachings of the Torah interesting but didn’t follow them to the letter.
After she graduated from Syracuse, Hechter began posting skits, which eventually began to go viral. Her first big video, currently at over 660,000 likes, was themed around getting ready for a camp social. In an interview with her college newspaper, she joked that she “would’ve put on makeup” if she had anticipated the video’s success.
Inspired that social media could be her calling, Hechter initially pushed herself to post five times a day, a pace that now seems inconceivable to her. It paid off, though; Hechter currently boasts over 186,000 followers on TikTok and 79,000 on Instagram.
In her videos, Hechter is dedicated to representing a version of her Jewish experience that is rarely shown on screen. Most Jewish characters in film, she says, tend to follow a limited set of archetypes: they’re deeply religious, there’s a depressing undertone or, like Shoshanna Shapiro from Girls, their religion isn’t discussed. When a funny, secular Jew appears on screen, he’s almost always a man.
“I love Adam Sandler and Larry David as much as the next girl, but I wish growing up that I had a cool, fun Jewish girl to look up to,” Hechter said.
Hechter explained that many of her skits draw from experiences she observed on the outskirts; as she tells it, she went to camp but wasn’t the mean girl, she attended lavish Bat Mitzvahs but didn’t have a party of her own, she was in a Jewish sorority but wasn’t super involved. Still, her characters are immediately recognizable.
“People either are experiencing these things firsthand and are like ‘oh my god, this is so me,’” she said. “Or they see it and they make fun of it, like ‘oh my god, this is so my daughter. Oh my god, this is so the people in my sorority.’”
Hannah Wiener, a high school senior from Oceanside, Long Island, is a longtime fan of Hechter. For Hanukkah one year, her sister gifted her a personalized Cameo video in which Hechter talked about their similarities and common interests.
Wiener said that she loves Hechter’s content because she finds it relatable. There are a lot of influencers who make similar videos about Jewish life, but Wiener feels like they make fun of it, rather than treat it “as a normal event like Chloe does.” For Wiener, who went to sleepaway camp herself, Hechter’s camp videos are her favorite. She said that she finds them “to be so funny and also just so heartwarming.”
Middle and high schoolers make up a large proportion of Hechter’s audience — she told me that summer “camp girls”, like Wiener, are her biggest fans. Hechter believes her younger self would have been one of them.
“I genuinely think I would have been my own favorite creator,” she said.
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The Iran war ended terribly for the US, and even worse for Israel
A war that began with immense ambition has ended with profound setbacks for both the United States and Israel.
With an emerging U.S.-Iran peace agreement, what initially appeared to be a historic demonstration of military dominance evolved into a vivid illustration of the limits of both Israeli and American power. The conflict also exposed profound failures in strategic competence within that alliance. Washington and Jerusalem planned effectively for the initial decapitation strikes, but were unprepared for the economic and geopolitical consequences that followed.
The result is a war that may ultimately strengthen the Iranian regime politically, despite the damage it suffered militarily; has weakened international perceptions of American military might; and has diminished both Israel’s own strategic circumstances and its most important alliance.
The opening phase of the war appeared spectacularly successful. Israeli intelligence and airpower decapitated large portions of Iran’s military and security leadership with astonishing speed, including by assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Key military infrastructure suffered major damage, and for a brief moment, it seemed plausible that the Iranian regime might genuinely face collapse or surrender on terms dictated by Washington and Jerusalem.
That perception proved short-lived.
Iran shifted the battlefield away from conventional military confrontation and toward economic coercion. Its closure of the Strait of Hormuz exposed the extraordinary vulnerability of the global economy to relatively inexpensive forms of pressure. Energy markets panicked almost immediately. Governments across Europe, Asia, and the Gulf pushed urgently for de-escalation.
The central strategic reality became impossible to ignore: the U.S.could not tolerate sustained economic disruption, and the Iranian regime has a strong stomach for suffering. The overwhelming military superiority of the U.S. and Israel effectively ceased to matter.
That asymmetry changed the balance of the conflict. And the resulting agreement appears to preserve much of Iran’s architecture of mischief, which the regime’s many critics had hoped to see dismantled.
Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities have been harmed but can be rebuilt; long-term reductions to that firepower are reportedly not on the table in a planned 60-day negotiation. The regime’s regional proxy network — including Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad — survives, even though Hezbollah and Hamas have been battered.
And as Israel is not a party to the ceasefire, it cannot advocate for more stringent terms on this front.
The regime itself remains firmly in power and may receive enormous sanctions relief and renewed economic access. Demands for democratic reforms seem to have been set aside, as has any kind of punishment for the regime’s massacre of thousands — and by some reports tens of thousands — of domestic protestors in January.
The latter aspect is especially galling given that President Donald Trump was driven to intervene because of the January massacre, after he promised Iranians that “help is on its way.” Upon launching the war, he declared that it would enable Iranians to “take your country back.”
Ironically, Trump in his first term pulled out of former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal over objections that it provided funds for the regime while allowing it to run riot. Now, he is settling for an effective reconstitution of that deal — except one with substantially less American leverage.
The implications extend far beyond Iran itself. The war demonstrated that Tehran can generate immediate global economic panic through relatively cheap tools and can leverage that panic into diplomatic concessions. Before the war, fears about Iran’s ability to blackmail the world economy remained somewhat theoretical. After the war, those fears became a demonstrated geopolitical reality.
There is little evidence that either the American or Israeli governments understood in advance the degree to which the global economy had become vulnerable to this form of coercion. This, even though the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz was completely predictable and indeed expected by every strategist I’ve spoken to for decades.
This outcome may be most devastating for the Iranian people themselves. Many Iranians who despise the regime interpreted the opening phase of the conflict as evidence that the dictatorship might finally face genuine collapse. Instead, the regime not only survived but also regained leverage. The machinery of repression remains intact.
But this result is damaging for every party to this war aside from the Iranian regime.
The war has transformed perceptions of American power. For decades, the U.S. has anchored a global system built on the assumption that Washington could manage regional crises with some strategy in mind. That strategy wasn’t always brilliant, but it was rarely clueless. With the Hormuz confrontation, the world watched the U.S. confront a regional adversary with vastly inferior capabilities and fail to control events.
For Israel, the alliance Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent years cultivating with the American right and with Trump personally has become dangerously fragile. As pressure mounted to stabilize energy markets and prevent wider regional escalation, Trump increasingly presented himself not as a partner coordinating with Israel but as a superior authority managing Israeli actions. He repeatedly framed Israeli military action as dependent on his approval. He cursed Netanyahu in public. He presented Israel as a vassal doing his bidding — something no U.S. president has previously done.
This will destabilize Israel, where much of the governing right previously viewed Trump as a uniquely reliable ally who would support Israeli military objectives without hesitation or conditions.
Previous American presidents pressured Israel privately while still preserving the outward presentation of a relationship between sovereign allies. Trump discarded much of that convention. The new perception weakens Israel’s deterrence dramatically. Plus, with bipartisan support for Israel in Washington even more completely collapsed than after the deleterious war in Gaza, and relations with much of Europe — Israel’s top trading partner — similarly deteriorated, Israel finds itself at a new peak of dangerous international isolation.
This strategic shipwreck bears no resemblance to the sweeping regional transformation that supporters of the war — myself included — initially envisioned. I assumed, partly because of the first days’ successes, that Trump and Netanyahu had a plan. This is not a mistake serious people are likely to make again.
The post The Iran war ended terribly for the US, and even worse for Israel appeared first on The Forward.
