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Commemorating Philip Roth means confronting his limitations head on
(JTA) — Next Sunday marks the 90th anniversary of Philip Roth’s birth. In celebration of the famed novelist’s work, a scholarly conference titled “Roth@90,” sponsored by the Philip Roth Society, will be held starting Wednesday at the Newark Public Library. That will be followed by a weekend of high-profile events — staged readings, panel discussions, a bus tour of Roth’s old Newark neighborhood — co-presented by the library and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
Exactly 10 years ago, we commemorated his 80th birthday in a similar fashion. Dozens of Roth scholars made learned presentations about his work, of which Roth attended exactly zero. Later that week, the author read aloud from his novel “Sabbath’s Theater” in front of hundreds of fans, friends and well wishers. The proceedings were televised on C-Span.
Roth was being acclaimed for having just wound down an exemplary career. With the exception of the Nobel Prize, what garland evaded him? Was there a high-culture literary platform where his name wasn’t a virtual watermark? Could he publish any novel without hundreds of reviews being written in newspapers across the world? Was there a serious fiction writer out there with greater renown?
So much has changed in the decade between the two conferences. To begin with, Roth died in 2018. In that same span, the country witnessed the election of Donald Trump and the fissure it exposed in society in general and the Jewish community in particular. America endured one convulsive racial reckoning after another. Finally, in October of 2017, the #MeToo movement gained massive public salience.
All of those events, along with digital media’s indomitable ascent, have combined to affect and reshape Roth’s literary legacy. That legacy is far less assured than all the (justified) praise and lionizing that will occur this week might suggest.
Let’s start with Jews. The Trump era yielded two seemingly irreconcilable data points. On the one hand, Jewish-Americans endured the Charlottesville riot, the Tree of Life synagogue attack and a stunning rise in antisemitic incidents. On the other, there was staunch support for Trump among Orthodox Jews and supporters of Israel’s right wing.
Leaving that conundrum for others to parse, I simply note that Orthodox Jews and right-wing Zionists are almost completely absent in Roth’s fiction. A young Roth wrote a sensitive portrait of Holocaust survivors who want to start a suburban yeshiva in “Eli the Fanatic.” He also sketched a militant religious-nationalist Zionist in “The Counterlife,” Mordecai Lippman, who, according to Roth biographer Blake Bailey (about whom more below), was based on Elyakim Haetzni, one of the so-called founding fathers of the settlement movement. In the same novel, a version of the narrator’s brother falls under the settlement leader’s sway.
And that’s it, across a half century of writing. For traditionalist Jewish readers, whose political and social influence in the United States and Israel is substantial and growing, Roth’s fiction is not a mirror, nor a signpost, nor a scroll upon which is inscribed some essential truth.
The Jews who populated his stories, the Jews he best understood, were of Ashkenazi descent, white, liberal, assimilated and secular. His courage was to valorize them over and against other Jews who viewed them as defective, lost or even as apostates. Thus Anne Frank in “The Ghost Writer” was portrayed as a patron saint of secular Judaism. Elsewhere, his stories abound in proud, professionally accomplished diaspora Jews. They rarely think about God. Synagogue attendance is reserved strictly for lifecycle events and High Holy Days, if that.
A novelist, of course, is not a political clairvoyant. However, the immediate future of Judaism is being greatly shaped by Jews whose population and influence are growing and whom Roth rarely portrayed. In this manner, another stellar writer like Cynthia Ozick — herself Orthodox and quite attuned to the mindset of her co-religionists — might fare better commercially and emerge as more relevant than her friend in the coming decades.
Roth didn’t just write about Jews. In my book “The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race and Autobiography,” I pointed out that depicting non-Jewish Black people was an unrecognized “obsessional theme” across his 28 novels and 25 short stories. Much to my dismay, I found Roth’s multi-decade treatment of his African and African-American characters often to be crude, thoughtless and sometimes racist.
Familiarize yourself with the degrading portraiture we receive of Black people in “The Great American Novel” (1973), or a short story like “On the Air” (1970), and you might reconsider what Roth was after in “The Human Stain,” in which an academic who is accused of racism turns out to be an African American who had been “passing” as white and Jewish. The book, the 2001 Pen/Faulkner Award winner, is often seen as a sensitive treatment of racial issues in America, and perhaps as the author’s attempt to extend the hand of friendship to another oppressed minority.
In fact, my best guess is that, as with many Jewish writers post-1967, Roth was shaken by the deterioration of the Black-Jewish alliance. His frustrations were reflected in prose that often referenced Black communities in his hometown of Newark but showed little curiosity about their lives or sympathy for their plight.
Obviously, this type of literary rendering of African Americans — or any minority group — is disturbing and dated. Insensitive racial representation inspires calls for publishers to drop authors. They disappear from high-school or college syllabi. This bodes ominously for the afterlives of the titans of post-World War II American fiction, including John Updike, Saul Bellow Bellow and Norman Mailer, all three of whom have been accused of being racially insensitive and worse.
Roth’s marketability also seems to be sailing into a squall regarding gender. As women began demanding an accounting of sexual abuse and misogyny within the media, entertainment and other industries, numerous think-pieces wondered how the author of “Portnoy’s Complaint” — whose libidinous narrator identifies most of the women in his life by debasing nicknames — would fare in such an environment. Would he — should he — be “canceled”?
The question is more complex than his admirers and detractors make it out to be. No doubt, many of Roth’s male characters mistreated women. Accusations of Roth himself doing the same exist, but they are fairly rare, unsubstantiated and contested. The dilemma for researchers is that Roth was a deeply auto-fictional writer. You sense his presence in his stories — especially when protagonists share much of his biography, including Nathan Zuckerman and Peter Tarnopol, and when characters are named “Philip Roth.”
It’s hard not to speculate about the relation between the author and the many misogynistic fellows who cut an erotic swath through his pages. There will, of course, be readers who give him the benefit of the doubt. They might observe that Roth’s toxic males provide evidence of women’s experiences that needs to be explored, not censored.
Not helping him cleanse his reputation were the numerous allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against his hand-picked biographer, Blake Bailey. The ructions engulfing Bailey came to dominate the discourse about Roth, leading to a peculiar cancellation by proxy.
The episode also revealed that Roth had instructed his estate to eventually destroy a massive trove of personal papers he entrusted to Bailey. This led Aimee Pozorski (co-editor of Philip Roth Studies), myself and 20 other Roth scholars to issue a statement reminding his executors that “scholarship can only be advanced when qualified researchers engage freely with essential sources.”
As if all these concerns weren’t enough, his grim prophecies about the demise of an audience for serious literature seem to be coming true. “The book,” Roth worried, “can’t compete with the screen.” Meanwhile, the English major is in a very bad way, and the institution of tenure is under siege. Professors (insufferable as we might be) teach the next generation who to read and how to read. Writers might not like them, but they need them.
Roth is also getting the scrutiny that he was at pains to avoid in his lifetime. His disregard for scholars who might be critical of him always struck me, one such scholar, as misguided. Instead, he surrounded himself with friends — friends who had preternatural access to major media platforms. These friends built upon his own interpretations of his own work. It doesn’t mean they lacked wisdom. It just means that when they talked about Roth, they talked about what Roth wanted them to talk about. To wit: Jewish Newark, his sundry interpretations of his life, his pesky ex-wives and lovers, the close-mindedness of his critics, and so forth.
I think, in this cultural moment, it’s prudent to confront Roth’s limitations head on and chart one’s own path through his fiction. I pitch him to my students as a writer with some racial, religious and sexual hang-ups — who among us is innocent of those charges? I also present him as a bearer of unique and meaningful insights. Let scholars (while they still exist) parade those insights into sunlight.
I’ve tried to illuminate that his fiction was preoccupied, for 50 years, by how individual and collective bodies (like the Jews) change. Transformation, metamorphosis, metempsychosis — his obsession with those themes, I’ve noticed in my classrooms, is shared by Gen Z. If the span between Roth@80 and Roth@90 has taught us anything, it is that Roth was right: Life is about radical, unpredictable flux. Now his own legacy is in flux. I wonder who will read Roth@100.
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The post Commemorating Philip Roth means confronting his limitations head on appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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U.S. ambassador calls settlers who sieged Palestinian homes in Qusra ‘terrorists’
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – The West Bank settlement movement’s leadership joined with one of its most prominent defenders, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, in condemning an Israeli settler outpost set up in a Palestinian family’s yard.
Huckabee’s remarks are a signal of the degree to which a group of radicals is rattling Israeli politics and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Israelis affiliated with the West Bank’s Tel Talpiot outpost, which is illegal under Israeli law, set up temporary structures at the entrances to Palestinian homes on the outskirts of the village of Qusra on Sunday.
Earlier this week, cables connecting the homes to the electricity grid and to solar panels were cut, and water pipes were damaged, leaving the Palestinian families unable to leave or bring in food. Israeli activists in the area who monitor settler attacks on Palestinians confirmed the account to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Huckabee wrote on X on Thursday that Israeli forces had gone to Qusra at the U.S. Embassy’s request and described the people who set up the outpost as “Israeli terrorists.” He posted that “the IDF & Israel Police have gone at our request to remove the Israeli terrorists doing this.”
The language was a departure for the ambassador, who told Israel’s Channel 14 last September that the United States “respects Israel as a sovereign state and will not tell Israel what to do” regarding sovereignty in the West Bank. Huckabee has also consistently described the territory by its biblical names Judea and Samaria. He routinely takes to social media to dismantle what he says are lies depicting Israelis as unfairly treating Palestinians.
He has condemned settler violence before, but has rarely done so in language as blunt as what he used on Thursday. In July 2025, he visited the Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank after an arson attack at its fifth-century church and called it an “act of terror and crime.”
The actions of Israeli settler extremists have been a major concern to Democrats in the U.S. Congress in recent months, adding fodder to their calls to condition aid to Israel on its behavior. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists the reports are overblown, and that Palestinian violence is much more serious. President Donald Trump, who has often supported Netanyahu, has called on the prime minister to crack down on the violence, seeing it as an impediment to his hopes for a broader Middle East peace. Huckabee’s intervention suggests that the Trump administration is increasingly concerned about ending the violence.
Yisrael Ganz, who chairs the Yesha Council and governs the Binyamin Regional Council, condemned the outpost.
“The events in Qusra are serious and do not reflect our values or our way of conducting ourselves,” Ganz said. “There is no place for individuals to take matters into their own hands and establish an outpost in someone’s backyard, even when dealing with an illegal home or an attempt to seize control of the land. There is no justification whatsoever for violence against uninvolved civilians or security forces.”
He added that some were “exploiting these events as part of a campaign against the Jewish communities,” but that this “must not obscure the simple truth: What happened in Qusra was wrong and is unacceptable to us.”
Huckabee amplified Ganz’s statement later on Thursday, writing on X, “’Settlers’ are not the problem in Judea/Samaria. ‘Unsettlers’ are,” he wrote, describing them as “very small minority who do great damage to Palestinian families & to Israel.”
The village is located in Area B, territory that is under the civil jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority and security control of the Israeli military and where Israeli settlement is not permitted. The Israel Defense Forces called such takeovers illegal and reprehensible on Tuesday. Overnight Wednesday, Israeli security forces said they demolished the structures at Qusra and detained one Israeli.
Marmar Odeh, a village representative, told JTA that the Israeli military remained inside Qusra, and footage circulating on social media showed Israeli soldiers stationed inside the homes of evacuated residents.
“I won’t be going anywhere. I am staying in my house and on my land,” Odeh said. “I may not be scared, but the children are all the time.”
In a voice memo recorded on August 12 and obtained by JTA, Aisha Abu Rida, a Qusra resident, spoke from inside one of the besieged homes.
“We are surrounded by settlers, but we are steadfast,” she said. “Despite the water and electricity being cut off, we will remain steadfast … and stay in our homes.”
By Thursday, the structures were gone, but settlers remained on the hillsides above the homes, Odeh said, an account supported by footage he provided to JTA. Soldiers had left most of the homes they had entered, residents said Friday, but were informed the military operation could last until Sunday.
One of the affected homes belongs to Loui Ridi, a Toledo, Ohio, business owner who was born in Qusra and has followed the standoff through security cameras installed at the property. JTA attempted to reach Ridi through several channels and was unsuccessful.
Asked whether the State Department shared Huckabee’s characterization and whether the Embassy had requested the Israeli operation, a State Department spokesperson did not directly reply. “We are in regular dialogue with partners about improving stability and security in the West Bank,” the spokesperson said. “We condemn criminal violence by any party in the West Bank. A stable West Bank keeps Israel secure and is in line with this administration’s goal to achieve peace in the region.”
In a statement to JTA, the Israeli military said soldiers had been deployed in Qusra since Thursday morning “to protect the residents and maintain security in the area” and that they had been instructed that “the Qusra residents will remain in their homes.”
It added that troops would not operate inside the Palestinian family’s home near the site “where the tent that was evacuated and dismantled had been erected” and said Civil Administration liaison officers were in contact with Qusra’s local leadership and “working to avoid disruption to the daily lives of the residents in the area.”
Footage circulating earlier in the week appeared to show Israeli soldiers praying alongside the settlers at the outpost. The military said that the incident is under review and that soldiers found to have taken part in illegal activity would be disciplined.
The designation of Area B is the source of the ambiguity, according to Hanan Greenwood, head of the spokesperson and public diplomacy unit at the Binyamin Regional Council.
The council’s jurisdiction covers the settlements themselves, Greenwood said, not Area B land, meaning Qusra sits inside the council’s footprint but outside its authority. Its residents fall under Palestinian Authority civil jurisdiction and pay the council no arnona, the Israeli municipal tax.
“Geographically, Qusra is very much in our area,” Greenwood said. “But in real life, it’s not that we could go there, and it’s not that the residents of Qusra pay us.”
He described the result as a governance vacuum. “It’s ours, it isn’t ours,” he said. “It’s a whole mess, and the reason is that there’s no sovereignty.”
Israeli rights groups reject that framing, arguing that the military has the authority to remove outposts and does not use it.
The Israeli rights group B’Tselem said the events reflect a broader pattern.
“What is happening in Qusra is not an isolated incident,” said Yuli Novak, the organization’s executive director. “Settler militias, backed by the Israeli military, are expanding their attacks into Palestinian villages and towns, seizing land, attacking homes and forcing families out. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank is accelerating and expanding in plain sight.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post U.S. ambassador calls settlers who sieged Palestinian homes in Qusra ‘terrorists’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Some young Jews are pulling back from Jewish life over Israel discourse, study finds
(JTA) — Nearly four in 10 Jewish young adults say events affecting Jews in recent years have led them to pull back from Jewish spaces or become more selective about where they participate, with disagreements over how Israel and the Palestinians are discussed as a leading reason, according to a new survey.
The survey, which was conducted by Sense Worldwide and commissioned by the Jim Joseph Foundation, found that 39% of respondents have engaged less, engaged more selectively or disengaged entirely from Jewish spaces due to “events affecting Jewish people in the last few years.”
Among those nearly 40% of respondents, 42% of them said that it was because their “views don’t align with how Israel/Palestine is discussed, and I don’t feel there’s room for nuance,” and 40% said they engaged less because they did not want to “experience biased, one-sided messaging.” Forty-eight percent said it was because “conversations often feel hostile, toxic, or unproductive.”
And among all respondents, when asked what would make Jewish experiences more appealing to them, 30% said that they would be attracted to experiences that were more cultural and less religious, and 26% said “spaces where non-Zionist and anti-Zionist views can be expressed without being labelled antisemitic.”
At the same time, the study found that young Jews have hardly abandoned Jewish life. Three-quarters of Jewish young adults in the United States say they regularly do something Jewish, though most are finding their connections outside of synagogues and traditional Jewish institutions, according to the study.
A small group of participants, 4%, also offered an explanation of the lasting impact that Jewish experiences had had on them. The study found that the clearest negative theme among those respondents was disillusionment around Israel and Zionism and the way it was presented in Jewish education or community spaces.
“A negative legacy I have been reflecting on is what I now understand to be a biased education/perspective on Israel,” one respondent wrote.
The study surveyed 2,071 Jewish adults aged 22 to 40 from December 2025 through April 2026. Respondents were sampled from panels created by NORC and GenLabs, and the margin of error was +/- 3.4%.
The survey found that 75% of Jewish young adults say they regularly do something Jewish in their lives, with 45% saying their only form of participation was informally, often at home with family or friends.
Just 30% said they regularly participate formally in Jewish life, including through institutions or organizations.
That divide was also reflected in where respondents said they most often feel a sense of Jewish connection. Fifty-five percent cited family and 44% cited Jewish friends, compared with 19% who cited Jewish community organizations or groups.
Sixteen percent said they found connection through social or political causes connected to Jewish identity, and 13% said they felt most connected through experiences related to Israel.
“The research gives us a much fuller and accurate understanding of where, how, and why Jewish young adults seek out and experience Jewish life,” said Stacie Cherner, the director of research and learning at the Jim Joseph Foundation, in a statement. “Now, importantly, we can begin to translate these insights to action.”
Another study of Jewish engagement across generations by the Jewish Federations of North America in March found that 40% of Jewish American adults describe themselves as engaged with their local Jewish community, while 60% were unengaged.
When asked how often they take part in “anything that feels Jewish,” 20% of respondents said very often or often, while 24% said sometimes, 33% said rarely and 22% said never, the new survey found. Those without earlier Jewish experiences were much less likely to participate at all.
Among those who rarely or never participate in Jewish life, 52% said it was because they “don’t feel a strong connection to Jewish life,” while 38% said it “feels too religious” and 36% said it “doesn’t feel relevant to my life right now,” the survey found.
Among the 11% who have engaged more with Jewish spaces in recent years, the most common reason was wanting to feel a stronger sense of solidarity with the Jewish community, cited by 71%.
And of that 11%, 61% said they wanted to “be around people who understand what I’m feeling,” and 54% said Jewish spaces felt safer or more supportive than other spaces. Eight percent said they sought spaces where non-Zionist and anti-Zionist views can be expressed without being labelled antisemitic.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Some young Jews are pulling back from Jewish life over Israel discourse, study finds appeared first on The Forward.
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There’s a new Judaism in town — or maybe it’s very, very old
In a townhouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a gathering for Tu B’Av was underway. There was chanting and breathwork, singing and ceremony. Several Brooklyn-based Jewish communities, including Temple of the Stranger and Lab/Shul, had come together for the experience.
These vibes are usually associated with Eastern traditions, paganism or indigenous American practices; most Westerners who want that form of spirituality go looking for it at Buddhist meditation centers or ayahuasca retreats, forms of engagement more often associated with the 1960s or ’70s counterculture movement than with a synagogue.
But a group of rabbis, leaders and spiritual seekers believe drum circles, chanting, meditation and mysticism are, in fact, just as core to Judaism as any rabbinic text — a sort of lost magic that has impeded vibrant, direct spiritual experience.
“I get this sense that my family believed God is dead, God died 2000 years ago when the Temple burned. Everything could only be archaeology,” said Rav Jericho Vincent, who grew up Haredi and now leads Temple of the Stranger, a Brooklyn based Ivri community. “I don’t accept God’s death.”
Instead, Vincent wants to teach a Judaism that is more alive, and more connected to the divine — one that can offer wisdom to Jews and non-Jews alike. To that end, at the Tu B’Av event, Becca Goldstein, a 34-year-old cultural entrepreneur and spiritual practitioner who is helping to build the new movement, announced a new name for what they were doing to those gathered for the ceremony: Ivri.
For some of the attendees, this was a word they’d already been using to describe their spiritual identity, and the announcement was met with celebrations. For others, it was confusing. Ivri is one the oldest words in the Torah for the ancestors of the Jewish people; it’s the Hebrew word for Hebrew. Weren’t they already Ivri?
Defining the term is complicated, not least because the burgeoning movement is more of a loose web of teachers and spiritual seekers than a clearly defined organization with official values or tenets; every single person I spoke to for this story used the word “mycelial” to describe it. (A mycelium is the underground network of thread-like connections between mushrooms.)
“There’s been something happening, certainly in American Judaism for a while now,” said Vincent, who has a book on Ivri Judaism coming out next year. “This mycelial network of a different way of doing and being Jewish that’s embodied and mystical.”
Because of this diffuse nature, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly what Ivri is; there are commonalities — a desire to cultivate a more spiritual and mystical Judaism, an emphasis on the feminine aspect of the divine, a tendency toward participatory rituals, and a strong sense that they are reaching back to ancient or lost Jewish practices. But there’s no central structure meting out decisions or defined set of tenets, and each group operates independently.
There is Vincent, and their Brooklyn-based community, Temple of the Stranger, and Amichai Lau-Lavie and Shira Kline of fellow Brooklyn-based Lab/Shul; their organizations lean into queerness and often incorporate theater into their services. There is Rabbi Zvika Klein in Berkeley, the spiritual leader of the congregation Chochmat HaLev in Berkeley, and Adena Phillips, founder of a group called Kimu that serves “Jewish spiritual seekers” — both also lead Shabbat at the Burning Man festival as part of a camp called “Milk and Honey.” There is Rabbi Jill Hammer, who co-founded the Kohenet Institute, which ordained Jewish priestesses from 2005 until it closed in 2024 due to leadership changes and the pandemic; she now leads Beit Kohenet, an organization offering classes and retreats on Jewish witchcraft and the divine feminine. There is Shefa, an organization that cultivates psychedelic use and exploration for Jews.
But whatever the throughline is, it’s magnetic, powerful and popular.
Chochmat HaLev’s membership has tripled in the past three years, regularly maxing out their sanctuary’s 300 person capacity on Friday nights. Their yearlong intensive Jewish learning course, “Go Deeper,” planned for 30 participants, had to cap its first cohort at 90.
The Big Jewish Gathering, a sort of coming-out event for the Ivri movement in Brooklyn, organized by Goldstein, sold out with a waiting list of well over 100 people. The Burning Man Shabbat draws at least a thousand festivalgoers each year to pray in the dust. Vincent has nearly 20,000 followers on Instagram.
Yet Ivri offerings are also controversial. The rituals are so unrecognizable to what people expect Judaism to be that several people I spoke to wondered whether the Ivri movement was really Jewish at all — or whether they wanted to be.
“It’s a totally post-halachic model,” said Shaul Magid, professor of modern Jewish studies at the Harvard Divinity School. (He attended, spoke at and wrote about the Big Jewish Gathering.) “If you write something about this, people will be scratching their heads like, ‘This is crazy.’”
Roots and branches
At the Big Jewish Gathering in January, dozens of Jewish thought leaders and groups came together for a weekend event in Brooklyn. Though the event didn’t advertise the term Ivri, in practice, it was a kind of coming out party for the movement.
The event had some more familiar forms of engagement, such as panel discussions. But there was also drumming and breathwork. Hammer led “Heelooleem,” a vineyard ritual based on biblical descriptions of ancient Jewish celebrations; participants sang and danced as they stomped grapes in a wooden basin.
These rituals may sound New Age-y, but Ivri practitioners argue they are in fact callbacks to Jewish practice that was lost.
“We can read about the libations in the temple. They’re like, ‘OK, why don’t we just do them — if they’re so powerful and so important, then why don’t we just do them?’” said Magid by way of example.
It’s clear that Jewish practice has changed over time. Women’s rituals and folk rituals were rarely recorded, meaning they were lost over the years. Centuries of persecution forced Jews to gather more quietly. And, after the Temple’s destruction, rabbis had to form a new tradition that could survive without being anchored to a particular land; in creating a new, portable religion, they shaped Jews into the people of the book.
Those in the Ivri movement feel that something important was lost in that process, including the wisdom of women, an ecstatic joy in prayer and Judaism’s connection to the earth. And, to critics who believe they are departing too far from tradition, they say that Judaism has always changed; they’re simply participating in that custom.
“When I hear those kinds of questions, I imagine them being asked of the rabbis who were forming what became rabbinic Judaism. How can you not have animal slaughter? How can you not have priests?” said Vincent. “I imagine the rabbis must have gotten that pushback, because they remade Judaism more than anything.”
The Ivri movement doesn’t want to get rid of existing wisdom — “I’m always trying to balance like, give me that quote from Rabbi Akiva, and also give me the wisdom of the mothers and aunties,” said Vincent. But they do want to add to it.
That said, many of the teachers I spoke to voiced a deep suspicion of preserving what was done purely for the sake of preservation, a tendency toward nostalgia-driven practice that they believe has reified.
“Too many people say, ‘I come to prayer services not because the prayer services are meaningful in any way but because it reminds me of the prayer services of my youth — even though I was bored out of my mind as a kid, and remain bored out of my mind,’” Krieger said. “I’m saying no, spiritual practice should be meaningful! It’s not just preserving tradition for the sake of preserving tradition.”
Hammer voiced a similar stance. “Ultimately rituals survived to support people. They exist to help people live in meaningful ways. And what can happen if you hold the rituals too tightly is that they become a kind of museum, like we’re going to do this thing to remember what our ancestors did,” she said. “And we forget what that was meant to do. We forget that the ritual was meant to transform.”
Making the old new again
Some of the boldness these leaders feel in designing rituals that are so different from what most Jews might expect may spring from the fact that many of them grew up more religious than the average American Jew. Krieger grew up Orthodox, as did Adena Phillips, who leads the Burning Man Shabbat with him. Goldstein went to a Conservative day school and an Orthodox synagogue. Vincent grew up Haredi.
Each felt unsatisfied with the Judaism they were raised with — restrictions around gender norms and limitations, a culture of social conservatism. And they felt the Judaism they were given was too cerebral, focused on studying texts instead of practicing them.
As Goldstein put it, “My experience is that it’s very hard to have a direct experience of the divine from your mind.”
Yet they also didn’t feel as though established progressive movements, like Reform Judaism, had the depth they were seeking.
“Their way of being progressive is watering down Judaism and making it as thin and vanilla as possible,” said Krieger. “There’s this myth that if you want to make Judaism accessible to people, lower the bar of what you’re asking of them.”
But, he pointed out, plenty of Jews and non-Jews alike are seeking a demanding spiritual practice, turning to rigorous practices like meditation or yoga that require specific diets and strict observance but also offer a deep experience of the divine. The issue isn’t that kashrut or Shabbat are too difficult; the issue, Krieger said, is that these people aren’t finding the transcendent experiences they crave in Judaism. But they want to.
“The folks I think of as being involved in this movement are folks who really don’t want the weak tea Judaism, the bagels and lox Judaism, or summoning in Native American teachers because we don’t have our own wisdom,” said Vincent. Instead, those drawn to the Ivri movement want to find that kind of spirituality within Judaism, without having to be an outsider appropriating or visiting another practice.
This has emboldened Ivri thinkers to look to the past, mining from folk tales, Kabbalah and biblical descriptions of celebrations to find what they seek within Judaism. On Shavuot, Krieger led a grief ritual based on the Shalosh Regalim, part of ancient Temple pilgrimage rituals in which pilgrims circled those grieving and ostracized. It was deeply based on real practices, but innovated to fit the modern moment; participants chanted the words to an ancient mourning song, stopping to share their stories and embrace. For Rosh Hashanah last year, Vincent designed a ceremony around the story of the binding of Isaac in which participants put Abraham on trial to interface with the tale’s traumatic themes.
And Magid pointed out that however woo-woo these rituals — often full of theater, witchiness and connection to the spirit world — might seem, they could arguably be seen as part of a Hasidic ultra-Orthodox tradition. To most people, an image of the black-hatted Orthodox Jew symbolizes the most Jewish kind of Jew, the most religious form of practice. But, the professor pointed out, the Judaism practiced in Hasidic sects is full of spirits and magic.
“If you grow up in a modern Orthodox world or a Conservative world, it’s very different. It doesn’t have that very aesthetic, mythical flavor to it,” he said. “The ultra-Orthodox world is a very magical world — all of these mythic stories about demons floating around.”
But Vincent, for their part, rejects a framework of comparison; they don’t want to cede an automatic legitimacy to the Judaism of the Haredi world.
“There is this pandemic of a spiritual inferiority complex. Even rabbis will tell me: ‘I don’t know enough, I’m not a good Jew,’” said Vincent. “We’re letting it be defined by ultra-Orthodoxy. Those of us who have seen the wizard behind the curtain understand that actually ultra-Orthodoxy is a post-Holocaust version of Judaism. We understand the ways in which it is different than the Judaism of a hundred years ago.”
The birth of a name
The Ivri movement is far from the first to try to build a new, more spiritual, more embodied, more radically open practice of Judaism. Many of the hallmarks of what the Ivri teachers point to in their spiritual practice might be familiar from both the Renewal movement, the Kohenet movement and even the neo-Hasidut of Martin Buber or Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Indeed, many of the Jewish communities and teachers in the greater Ivri movement identify, or previously identified at least loosely, with Renewal Judaism; Krieger and Vincent were both ordained through ALEPH and Vincent has studied with Hammer, of Beit Kohenet. So why the need for a new name?
To Hammer, the difference between Ivri and what came before is a cultural one. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of the Renewal movement, died over a decade ago and his work grew out of 1960s counterculture. The Kohenet movement, too, was born decades ago now. Ivri feels like the product of a new generation.
“I also identify as a Kohenet, and I also identify as part of the Jewish Renewal movement. It’s not that Ivri would define me as a person or practitioner, but I’m finding it helpful,” she said. “Maybe if you think of a movement more as pieces of music that go together, but one comes after the other.”
Goldstein, who organized the Big Jewish Gathering, said meeting the cultural moment is a big focus of the movement — and one that draws funders.
“My bubbie’s voice comes to mind, she always says: ‘Why does your generation think so much and ask so many questions? Why can’t you just be and live and let live?’” she said. “We’re forced to right now because of identity. The Jewish identity signifiers that held up in our parents generation and grandparents generation aren’t working right now.”
Hammer echoed the sentiment, saying that many American Jews are too focused on “replicating the spiritual practice exactly,” becoming so rigid about both identity and prayer that they have forgotten that religion is supposed to be a living vehicle to create meaning and transformation.
Goldstein wants to find a Judaism that can speak not only to Jews, but show the rest of the world that Judaism has more to offer than the highly politicized identity that dominates today, an identity which is breaking down as Jews debate what their relationship to Israel, to the Holocaust and to persecution really should be. She believes the growing Ivri movement — which she is working to find funding and create new events and avenues to develop — can offer Jews a new way to relate to their Judaism that they feel joyous and proud to participate in.
Showcasing Jewish practices that have a spiritual appeal, and speak to today’s concerns — like climate change, a non-dual understanding of gender and a need for meaning — could make Judaism more accessible and appealing to Jews and non-Jews alike. (Most Ivri spaces welcome non-Jews to participate.) And it could give Jews a new way to relate to their Jewish identity, one that isn’t rooted in a Judaism these teachers see as rooted in a closely-held trauma that is doing damage.
Of course, the emerging school of Ivri Judaism won’t speak to everyone; however well-grounded in ancient traditions and practices it may be to stomp on grapes or chant in a circle, it just feels too woo-woo for some.
“Ideally we want people to follow a practice because it is transformative, and we can only find out what’s transformative if we experiment,” Hammer said. Even the changes that don’t end up sticking or stay on the fringes, she believes, get shape Judaism over time.
Of course, every Ivri leader acknowledged, not everyone wants to experiment. But that’s fine — there are already plenty of people who do. Their biggest problem is finding a space to fit them all in one room.
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