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Eric Adams wants to combat hate in NYC through interfaith dinners. Can that accommodate Orthodox Jews?
(New York Jewish Week) — Mayor Eric Adams is famous for his love of the city’s nightlife, and that mood was on display last Thursday as he hobnobbed with more than 100 people at the 40/40 Club, an upscale bar and restaurant in the Barclays Center, while dining on lamp-warmed samosas and chicken skewers.
The gathering came with a goal: to jumpstart a program, called “Breaking Bread, Building Bonds,” that aims to bring together leaders of the city’s diverse ethnic and religious communities over food. The attendees, mostly city workers and nonprofit employees, were there to experience what such a dinner could feel like, and to learn how to host one of their own.
“We are going to finish with 1,000 dinners,” Adams said, speaking to the crowd. “Ten thousand people will become ambassadors for our city. Then those 10,000 people will branch out and do their dinners, turn into 100,000. We will continue to multiply until this city becomes a beacon of possibility.”
The dinner initiative was conceived with the Jewish community at its center — launching at a JCC in partnership with one of the city’s biggest Jewish nonprofits. Now, it faces an additional hurdle: Engaging the large haredi Orthodox communities in Brooklyn that have experienced a series of street attacks — and that observe a set of strict religious laws surrounding food that could hinder their participation in some interfaith meals.
Some haredi New Yorkers have attended the “Breaking Bread” dinners, and members of at least one large Hasidic community are planning to host one of the meals. But other haredi activists in the city told the New York Jewish Week that they’re skeptical the program can be sufficiently sensitive to their dietary and religious restrictions, which include close adherence to kosher laws and, for some, gender separation at public events.
The first catalyst dinner for New York City Mayor Eric Adam’s ‘Breaking Bread, Building Bonds’ initiative was held at Barclays Center on Thursday, March 2. (Jacob Henry)
Speaking on the sidelines of last week’s dinner, Adams said the initiative does account for the needs of observant Jews. When he held similar dinners as Brooklyn borough president in 2020, he said, the meals were always “considerate of Shabbos.”
“We allow the dinners to happen throughout the week,” Adams told the New York Jewish Week. “Those who can’t come on a Friday night or until sundown, we do that. If they eat kosher, we do that. We keep the meals simple, nothing complicated, so that everyone can feel at home at the same time.”
But the event where Adams was speaking did not, in fact, include kosher food, according to Rabbi Shlomo Nisanov, who leads Kehilat Sephardim of Ahavat Achim, a Bukharian community synagogue in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens.
“It was a mistake,” Nisanov said. “I didn’t eat the food, I only had the drinks. I was complaining about it.”
However, three of the dinners hosted so far have been certified kosher, and many local Jewish activists — including Orthodox leaders — said they support the initiative and believe it can accommodate a broad portion of the city’s Jewish spectrum.
Devorah Halberstam, an adherent of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement and longtime campaigner against antisemitism, said she plans to host a dinner in the future.
“It’s actually not that complicated,” said Halberstam, who serves as director of foundation and government at the Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn. “You invite people to a table and you have conversations. If it’s Muslims, we’ll have halal stuff covered. Kosher food is in another setting. Ultimately, it ends up working.”
The initiative aims to hold 1,000 dinners across the city that bring together community leaders in the hope that eating together will foster mutual understanding that will trickle down to rank-and-file New Yorkers of different backgrounds. At the kickoff event at the Marlene Meyerson JCC on the Upper West Side in late January, Adams called the dinners a “potent weapon” against hate.
Breaking Bread is supported by multiple city agencies and Jewish organizations, including the UJA-Federation of New York; the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York; The People’s Supper, a non-profit that facilitates meals between people of different identities that began holding similar dinners in 2017; and the New York City Office of the Prevention Of Hate Crimes, which is overseen by the mayor. UJA is partially funding the program by reimbursing up to $150 per dinner.
The Adams administration, and organizations supporting Breaking Bread, declined to provide key pieces of information about the initiative, including a budget, list of hosts or people who had signed up or a list of scheduled dinners.
The initiative is designed around dinners of roughly 10 people each. The host is given a guide that includes instructions on how to facilitate a dinner and sample questions to ask fellow diners. One question asks attendees to describe “a time, recent or long passed, in which you were made to feel… fully seen, heard and like you fully belonged.”
Rabbi Bob Kaplan, who is the executive director of the Center for a Shared Society at the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, told the New York Jewish Week that the organization is “taking this program very seriously.”
“We will be looking to encourage as much of this as we can throughout the city,” Kaplan said. “We really think that Breaking Bread opportunities are incredible ways of bringing together leadership and community leaders to really talk to each other.”
The few dinners hosted thus far have included religious leaders, city officials and leaders of nonprofit organizations. Anyone can sign up to host or attend a dinner via a city website. Hassan Naveed, executive director of the OPHC, told the New York Jewish Week that thus far, nearly 500 people have signed up as hosts or participants.
“There is so much interest happening,” Naveed said. “We want this to be something that is movement-building, that brings folks together from different parts of the city, to really build a relationship between communities.”
There have been several dinners in the weeks since Breaking Bread launched, including one that Naveed attended last month at Talia’s Steakhouse, a kosher restaurant on the Upper West Side, where the mayor himself made a brief appearance. Diners ate Jamaican cuisine, served by chef Kwame Williams, in honor of Black History Month. Other attendees ranged from a senior city official to Tenzin Tseyang, a community liaison for Queens City Councilmember Julie Won; UJA’s Rabbi Menachem Creditor and others.
Other dinners have taken place at the Manhattan JCC and at Manhattan College, both of which were also kosher. The JCC dinner included the executive director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project and a representative of the Asian-American Foundation, in addition to Jewish leaders and cosponsors of the initiative.
“Those who are seated around the table with one another will be able to call on one another for both simple and hard things,” said Rabbi Linda Shriner-Cahn of Congregation Tehillah in the Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale, who hosted the Manhattan College dinner. “When we strengthen our own communities, we’re more able to reach out to other communities.”
Bringing New Yorkers together to break bread is one of the best ways we can talk through differences and defeat the pipeline of hate.
Last night’s Breaking Bread Building Bonds event at Talia’s Steakhouse on the Upper West Side did just that. pic.twitter.com/Meugkqdt7Q
— Mayor Eric Adams (@NYCMayor) February 17, 2023
Nisanov, the Bukarian rabbi from Queens, said he believes in the concept and has hosted his own dinners with neighborhood Muslim leaders.
“We sat together at my synagogue with people from the Muslim faith because people didn’t know each other,” Nisanov told the New York Jewish Week. “Now, they know that kosher is the same as halal.” (Jewish and Muslim dietary laws are similar, but they are not the same.)
The initiative has not yet involved some large segments of the Brooklyn haredi community, including a major Satmar Hasidic organization. Moishe Indig, a prominent activist affiliated with another faction of Satmar, and a close confidante of the mayor, has also not attended. City Council member Lincoln Restler, who is Jewish and represents South Williamsburg, which is home to a large number of Satmar Jews, told the Jewish Week in a statement that he is “in touch with City Hall and eager to convene Breaking Bread gatherings” in his district.
“This is a wonderful new initiative building on the mayor’s work as borough president,” Restler said. “We will never arrest our way out of hate violence, so we need to deepen cross-cultural understanding to address our collective safety.”
Adams does have a close relationship with the Hasidic community. The mayor appointed Joel Eiserdorfer to the role of advisor in his administration, the first Hasidic Jew to hold that title. Adams received considerable Hasidic support in his 2021 election victory.
But despite that relationship, some Orthodox leaders and activists still have their doubts that the dinner initiative will successfully engage the haredi community. Some spoke to the New York Jewish Week anonymously, out of a fear that their criticism could hurt their community’s relationship with the mayor.
One Orthodox leader who works in government told the New York Jewish Week that “at this moment, it feels like this initiative doesn’t exist.”
“Personally everyone is rooting for the mayor on this,” the leader said, but he added that the initiative was “not comprehensive” in terms of reaching out to major Orthodox groups.
“Most of us haven’t heard of it,” another Orthodox community activist said. “The mayor’s head is in the right place. I’m sure this program is well-intentioned.” But he added, referring to kosher restrictions and norms of gender separation, that ”on a practical level, it’s hard to see how it will work in this community.”
He added that he believes leaders in the Hasidic community may participate, but “we don’t need to bring together leadership… We need people on the street to understand each other.”
Nisanov believes the Breaking Bread dinners can help accomplish that task by helping community leaders influence their constituents.
“It starts from the leaders and it goes down to the regular people,” he said. “It’s going to take a while, but at least when the elders do it, it will trickle down to the young. We will have to include young people to show and explain.”
He said that there are some people within the Jewish community who “would like to live in a secluded world.”
“That’s not possible,” Nisanov said. “There will always be restrictions. God will not change. We will always have that, but we have to learn to coexist.”
Motti Seligson, a Hasidic communal leader and Chabad spokesman, told the New York Jewish Week that “there are dinners already planned in neighborhoods like Crown Heights that will certainly have participation from the Hasidic Jews.” He added, “Building these bonds is something that Mayor Adams has not only seen and experienced first hand… he also created many of them through events like the Breaking Bread dinners in Brooklyn, which he organized.”
Deborah Lauter, the inaugural director of the OPHC, said Breaking Bread “has enormous potential” but acknowledged that navigating the range of haredi groups takes time.
“There are so many different factions within the haredi community,” Lauter said. “Some will be more inclined to participate than others. There’s a lot more work to get people on the ground to know each other.”
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The original anti-Zionists have been all but forgotten. Molly Crabapple wants to change that.
I first met nationally acclaimed artist and journalist Molly Crabapple in 2020 during the dark days of COVID. After discovering that we had both studied Yiddish at YIVO, albeit in different classes, we did a socially distanced fresh-air visit to Mt. Carmel, the Jewish cemetery in Queens where Sholem Aleichem is buried. Many tombstones there are inscribed not in Hebrew but in Yiddish. They include the graves of people who, in life, belonged to the Bund.
Founded in 1897 in Eastern Europe, the Bund was a socialist revolutionary group whose name, translated from Yiddish to English, is General Jewish Labor Union (“bund” is Yiddish for union). By the 1930s, Bundism in Poland, where most Ashkenazic Jews lived, had grown bigger and more politically powerful than Zionism. The group was a tireless promoter of Yiddish as the linguistic and literary underpinning of Jewish peoplehood. Bundists also fiercely opposed Zionism and a Jewish state; they believed in fighting for democracy and inclusion in the countries where Jews already lived.
The organization ended up being destroyed not just by the Nazi Holocaust but also by Stalinism. Except for people like me, who’ve been ensconced in the Yiddishist world, it is nearly forgotten today by all but a few academics. But by the time we met, Crabapple was writing a book about the Bund.
Almost six years later, she has finished it. Titled Here Where We Live is Our Country, it is part hefty historical documentation, part loving family memoir, and part literary nonfiction. Thoroughly engaging throughout, it moves back and forth from the author’s lefty-artsy life in contemporary New York City to earthshaking events in vintage Jewish Europe. Crabapple has disinterred the memory of a once-vibrant movement that waned even as its nemesis, Zionism, waxed.
I met her last month in her fifth-floor walkup apartment in Williamsburg to talk about how she made her book. Our conversation is edited for length and clarity.
Here Where We Live devotes significant space to the saga of your great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort. As a young man in 1904, he immigrated from the Pale of Settlement to New York City, under somewhat murky circumstances that he barely discussed after the move. In America, he made a living as a self-taught artist, including on a dairy farm in the Catskills, an egg farm in Long Island and in a big house near Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. But he died over a decade before you were born. When did you first realize he’d been an interesting guy who you wanted to tell the world about?
I was fucking born knowing he was interesting! My mother and my great-aunt and my dad told me about him constantly. I was surrounded by his paintings and stuff that he said. After he died, my great-aunt Ida still lived in his house. As a child, I would visit and it was exactly like when he was alive. I remember the pigments and oils still on the palette in the basement.
How did you find out he’d been in the Bund?
I’d always known he was involved in something illegal before he came to the United States. It was a cool family anecdote. In a book from 1952 that he published about his art, he wrote that as a teenager and young man he hadn’t known much about girls because “I was in the underground.” Another book, a catalogue of his art from a show, said he’d been in the Bund. My mom had a million of those catalogues in a bookcase, and I’d been looking at them since I was 11 or 12 years old. I also saw one of his watercolors, of a woman throwing a rock. He’d titled it “Itka the Bundist Breaking Windows.”
I had very little idea then of what “the Bund” was. But as an adult, one of my bad habits has been that sometimes when I get drunk, I Google things. That might be how I first understood.
From his own unpublished writing, you later found evidence suggesting that Sam might have fled to America at age 22 because he’d joined other Bundists in shooting a Tsarist policeman during a state-encouraged pogrom. You also read the yizkor book for Volkovysk, a town in what is now Belarus. It was Sam’s hometown. He is cited in the book as having helped produce its chapter about the Bund.
Look at this! [She walks me to her bedroom and points to an antique photograph on the wall.] When I was younger I’d always only thought of this as a very cool old picture that my mom had. But this same photo is in the yizkor book! It says it’s the members of the Volkovysk Bund in 1905. It’s Sam’s friends a year after he left for America. Look at this guy in the photo — he’s hot! Which one do you like the best?
The blonde.
Ugh!
I got really obsessed trying to track down these guys. When I went to the cemetery where my great-grandfather is buried I saw the tombstone of one of them. Later, in a box of family memorabilia, I found a photo of this same person in an old Yiddish news clip about people in New York City who were in the Workmen’s [now Workers] Circle’s Volkovysk branch. I asked the cemetery who was paying to maintain the grave. It was this guy’s grandson. I contacted him and he said his own father was still alive but very old. “Can you just ask him to look at this photo and see if that’s his dad?” I asked. I said I was writing about a revolutionary group. He says, “My grandfather never would have been involved in that! He was a truck driver.” And he hung up.
Why couldn’t the grandson entertain this history about his grandfather? Why did he not know it?
The Bund was an organization incredibly devoted to Yiddish language and literature. But it was also a socialist revolutionary political party. One thing I’ve noticed about how it has been written about is that certain things are de-emphasized and certain things emphasized. In the 1950s in the U.S. in the McCarthy years, Bundist survivors of the Holocaust were terrified they would be accused of being Communists, and deported. They had no faith that Americans would know the difference between a socialist and a communist. I think that sometimes the Bund’s’ Yiddishism is emphasized far more than the fact that they were revolutionaries. To focus on linguistic and cultural things is safe. To talk about revolutionaries as internationalists — and as people who always opposed Zionism — is dangerous.
Were you raised Jewish?
My father is Puerto Rican and a Latin American studies professor who’s a Marxist. He told me about Marx’s theory of surplus value when I was 6 years old. I’ve been a leftist in a leftist family all my life! My mother — Sam’s granddaughter — is very strongly culturally Jewish. When I was a child we’d do Hanukkah lights, and she made the best latkes. We were not religious, but I identify strongly as a secular Jew. I studied Yiddish in order to do research for the book. I’m not so good at Yiddish, but I can work my way through a socialist text using a dictionary.
I remember when we were at the cemetery and you were so excited about having just discovered that the political work of some Bundists in Poland was armed self-defense. They fought in militias, with their bodies and with weapons, to protect Jews from murderous pogroms, murderous Communist Party violence against socialists, and, finally, murderous Nazis. You called these militia members “thugs.”
I loved them!
You mentioned their resistance in a piece you wrote in 2018 for the New York Review of Books about the organization. I’ve heard that many people were astounded and very happy to learn about this self-defense and to discover the Bund.
Especially young Jews, like in their 20s. They had no idea that Jews had fought back in Europe even before the Holocaust, or they had only vague ideas about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and that Bundists played a major role in it. It was very meaningful for them.
So much for the idea that only Zionists have been modern Jewish fighters.
Zionists have tried to say that they were the only tough Jews. Which is utterly untrue.
What do you think is most original about your book?
It’s very concerned with the emotional life of being in a movement. I think that sometimes the way that leftist movements are written about is as a series of conferences and decisions that are written down as texts, and people sign onto a resolution because that’s what they are thinking. The writing doesn’t show any awareness of emotional life. The love affairs, the gossip, the beefs that are going on, the thrill of thinking that you can change the world. I was much more concerned with that.
And as I worked on the book I quickly realized that I wasn’t just writing about the Bund. I was writing a history of the 20th century from the point of view of the defeated. The work was a form of necromancy. I would go to people’s graves and take dirt, and light candles in front of it and try to ask them if I could tell their story. At Ponary Forest, [near Vilna, where at least one prominent Bundist leader, a woman, was massacred by the Nazis in World War II and dumped into a mass pit] I went to the bottom with flowers and played Di Shvue [Yiddish for “The Oath,” the Bund’s anthem] on my phone.
What do you mainly hope that your book will accomplish?
I want leftists to know about something from our shared international history as leftists. I want young Jews to get to know their ancestors.
The Bund was anti-Zionist, of course, and many young American Jews are now also rejecting Zionism.
Yes. A lot of them were sold a bill of goods about their history, and when they reject that bill of goods, there’s a big hole in them. They don’t have any actual, positive Jewish history. They just have shit they’re ashamed of, because they realize [that Zionism] was actually a history of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. One of the things my book does is give them ancestors.
I’m an anti-Zionist. Whenever you have an ethnostate project, it always does unspeakable crimes. If Jewish institutions in America keep conflating Jews here with a state that is doing a livestreamed genocide and is now primarily known for the most heinous shit possible, it’s extremely dangerous for us Jews, as a small minority in America.
Some people internationally have been starting new Bund groups. What future do you see in that? And can you imagine Yiddish being resurrected as a secular Jewish language?
It’s hard to imagine huge numbers of people adopting Yiddish. But I think about a Jewish literary figure in the 1930s whom Isaac Deutscher quotes in his book The Non-Jewish Jew. He said that Yiddish was a dying language. But he didn’t mind, because Greek and Latin are dead languages, yet many people study them anyway, to access their linguistic treasures. And God bless everyone who’s doing leftist, anti-Zionist organizing and cultural work reclaiming our heritage! But is there a future for the Bund? The thing I’ve learned both from reading history and being a participant is, you never know what the spark is going to be. So you should always avoid making prognostications.
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Georgia political candidate apologizes for Passover ad that featured challah
(JTA) — When readers of the Atlanta Jewish Times opened their Passover edition last week, they saw something surprising: a fluffy challah.
The leavened bread, forbidden for Jews to consume during the holiday, appeared in an ad placed by Nathalie Kanani, a candidate for state Senate in a Metro Atlanta district.
“Have a blessed Passover,” the ad said, over an image of a challah draped in an Israeli flag alongside two towering candles. “Wishing you a Passover rich in divine love and blessings.”
The ad quickly drew ridicule online, particularly after Greg Bluestein, a Jewish Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, tweeted about it on Saturday, writing, “It’s the thought that counts, I guess.”
That night, Kanani issued an apology, calling the inclusion of challah in the ad “an oversight that should not have happened” and saying that her campaign was instituting new processes to prevent similar snafus in the future.
“My intent was to honor our Jewish neighbors and friends. We are all human, and even with the best intentions, honest mistakes can happen,” she wrote. “I believe in meeting those moments with grace and using them to bring people of different cultures together, not tear them apart.”
Kanani added, “While this content was created by a consultant working with my campaign, I take full responsibility for everything shared in my name. We are implementing stronger review processes to ensure this does not happen again. As always, my campaign stands for inclusion, respect, and bringing all people together.”
The incident is also spurring potential reforms at the Atlanta Jewish Times. “The ad should not have passed proofing checks,” Michael Morris, the newspaper’s owner and publisher, wrote in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday.
Kanani’s apology earned the Democrat dozens of supportive comments on Facebook — as well as constructive criticism that highlighted the complexity of Jewish American identity.
“We all make mistakes and learn from the[m],” wrote one man. “If you want to honor your Jewish neighbors, however, you might also want to rethink using a foreign flag. While many (though not all) of us, myself included, feel close ties to Israel (if not its government and policies), American Jews are Americans, not foreigners.”
Another woman offered an opposing take. “If you want to reach out to the Jewish community then you need to hire a Jewish consultant for Jewish content. Not only was the picture a big gaffe that you are undoubtable being mocked relentlessly for, but the wording sounds Christian,” she wrote. “But I do appreciate the Israeli flag.”
Kanani’s ad is not the first Passover bread to ignite a social media firestorm: The sight of leavened bread at Christian seders, which have surged in recent years, has generated sharp criticism in the past.
Unlike the Christian seders, which are widely denounced as appropriative, Kanini’s ad also elicited appreciation at a time when antisemitism is making many American Jews feel insecure.
“Unpopular opinion: we shouldn’t dunk on non-Jews who are trying to be nice to Jews,” tweeted David Greenfield, the head of a Jewish anti-poverty organization in New York City.
Kanani is a former prosecutor who is running in the May primary against Kevin Abel, who says his values are rooted in his identity as a South Africa-born Jew whose grandfather escaped Nazi Germany. Abel has chaired the American Jewish Committee’s local antisemitism task force.
Esther Panitch, a Jewish member of the Georgia House, urged her followers to back Abel when criticizing Kanani’s ad.
“Bless her heart, someone put challah in a Passover ad. This candidate wants to be my senator,” she tweeted on Saturday. “As the only Jewish member of the Georgia General Assembly, I am available for holiday consults — or you could just consider a candidate who knows the difference, whose ad is just a few pages after this one.”
After Kanani’s apology, Panitch said she had heard from Kanani’s campaign.
“I appreciate Nathalie Kanani’s campaign reaching out and taking responsibility for the challah-in-a-Passover-ad mix-up,” she wrote on Facebook. “Mistakes happen. What matters is how you respond, and she responded with grace. This is how we build understanding across communities. My door is always open for holiday consults. 
“
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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4 killed in Haifa strike as Trump issues ‘you’ll be living in Hell’ ultimatum to Tehran
(JTA) — Four people — including a couple in their 80s — were killed when an Iranian missile crashed into their home in Haifa on Sunday, in the latest direct strike in the month-old U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
The missile was not intercepted because it had broken off from a larger munition, determined Israeli authorities, who said the people killed were not in their building’s bomb shelter at the time of the strike.
The strike brings the civilian death toll in Israel to 18 as uncertainty reigns about the future of the war, with U.S. President Donald Trump threatening multiple times over the weekend to pummel Iran imminently if it does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz to oil shipping imminently.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social early Sunday. “Open the F–kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Iran offered no indication that it would meet Trump’s deadline, which comes as the president has extended previous deadlines for action by Tehran. A top Iranian official said the regime would respond “crushingly and extensively” to further attacks on civilian targets, including power plants and bridges. And a spokesman for the foreign ministry responded to questions about a reported framework for a ceasefire by saying, “Negotiations are in no way compatible with ultimatums, crimes, or threats of war crimes.”
The sparring comes after a dramatic weekend in the war. U.S. forces rescued an airman whose plane had been shot down during a commando raid in rural Iran, while Israel said it had killed the intelligence chief of the Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guards during a strike on an office building in Tehran.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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