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Extraordinary lives: 18 notable New York Jews who died in 2022
(New York Jewish Week) — Recalling the lives of what obituary writer Marilyn Johnson has called the “important dead” is one of the honors and pleasures of reading — and writing — daily journalism. Jewish tradition teaches that every life is of infinite value, but many people make their marks in ways that inspire readers to pause and ponder on the sheer variety of human endeavor.
In the case of the New York Jewish Week, we’ve been honored to remember those who died in 2022 and whose lives represent the diversity of Jewish experience and what it means to be a New Yorker. Below, we recall 18 Jewish New Yorkers whose contributions to religion, the arts, communal life, popular entertainment, public affairs or just their loving families were either the subject of an obituary that we had written, or who came to our attention thanks to their friends and relatives. May their memories be for a blessing.
David Henoch
Recent high school graduate who died doing what he loved.
Henoch and his parents, sisters, brothers-in-law and niece the day of his graduation from SAR High School in the Bronx, June 13, 2022. (Courtesy Henoch family)
The tight-knit Modern Orthodox community in the Bronx, where David Henoch grew up and attended the SAR Jewish day schools, remembered him as a curious, sensitive and empathetic leader among his peers, with a deep sense of humor and excitement for many different areas of life. Friends and family described “Divi” as an avid adventurer whose favorite activities — many of which he loved to do with his father Avi — included snowboarding, sailing and basketball. He was a certified scuba diver who died at 18 July 10 in a diving accident in Florida, a month after his graduation from SAR High School. He was buried in Israel, where he had planned to spend a year studying before going to college. “Divi always challenged me to improve. He was open to anyone and everyone’s ways no matter how mild or extreme,” a friend, neighbor and classmate recalled, adding, “He was as fearless as it gets and never once was he afraid to be himself.”
Michael Lang
A promoter behind the 1969 Woodstock festival.
Woodstock Music Festival co-producer Michael Lang attends a celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock at the at Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC in New York CIty, Aug. 13, 2009. (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
Michael Lang, the Jewish co-creator of 1969’s legendary Woodstock Music and Art Fair, died on Jan. 8 in Manhattan. He was 77. A concert promoter who was just 24 at the time, he was one of several Jewish collaborators who made the generation-defining festival, billed as “Three Days of Peace and Music,” happen. Other key players included music executive and promoter Artie Kornfeld — another Brooklyn-born Jew — and businessman Joel Rosenman, a Jewish native of Long Island. Lang was born in 1944 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Lang credited his Jewish parents, who were small-business owners, with teaching him the skills he needed to pull off an event of such scale. His father, he said, “gave me a strategy for getting out of tough situations: take charge and keep moving. Step back just enough to think clearly, and trust your instincts.”
Edward Schoenfeld
A Brooklyn-born maven of Chinese cuisine.
Ed Schoenfeld speaks at a Food Network event in New York City, Oct. 18, 2014. (Michael N. Todaro/Getty Images for NYCWFF)
Like a lot of Jews growing up in Brooklyn, Edward Schoenfeld learned to love Chinese food. He made it a career, opening a series of famed restaurants that introduced New Yorkers to the wide variety of Chinese cuisine. In 1973, he got his first restaurant job as assistant to restaurateur David Keh when he opened Uncle Tai’s, one of the first Hunan restaurants in New York. He went on to a career developing and running restaurants over some four decades. Among his well-regarded Chinese restaurants were Auntie Yuan and Pig Heaven, both on the Upper East Side, as well as Red Farm, a farm-to-table restaurant in Greenwich Village, which opened in 2010. “My personal joke is that I learned to speak Yiddish in the Chinese restaurant from my customers,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2013. Schoenfeld died Jan. 14 at 72.
Lori Zabar
A lawyer and activist devoted to landmarks — including her family’s gourmet food emporium.
Lori Zabar, left, with Kate Wood and David Sprouls at the book launch of “Interior Landmarks: Treasures of New York,” at The Four Seasons, Oct. 8, 2015. Zabar was the first director of the NYC Historic Properties Fund at the New York Landmarks Conservancy. (New York School of Interior Design)
Lori Zabar, a lawyer, author, antiques dealer and historic preservationist whose grandparents founded Zabar’s, the Upper West Side gourmet food emporium, died Feb. 3 the age of 67. The cause of death was cancer. The first director of the NYC Historic Properties Fund at the New York Landmarks Conservancy, she died shortly before the publication of “Zabar’s: A Family Story, with Recipes” in May. In an excerpt from her book published in the New York Jewish Week, she wrote about the perfectionism of her grandfather Louis when he opened the first reiteration of what became the famed “appy” store and a landmark in its own right: “For this new venture, Louis would sample deli meats and fish from various purveyors before he would commit to doing business with those suppliers. To taste fish, Louis would tour dozens of local smokehouses, large and small, mostly in Brooklyn and Queens. He was notorious among the wholesalers for rejecting more than he accepted. His retail mantra was simple: the highest quality at the lowest price.”
Sheldon Silver
A powerful politician undone by a corruption scandal.
Then-Speaker of the New York State Assembly Sheldon Silver walks in front of the State Capitol in Albany, New York, March 12, 2008. (Daniel Barry/Getty Images)
Sheldon Silver, who for two decades wielded enormous power as the speaker of the New York State Assembly before being brought down by a corruption scandal, died Jan. 24 at 77 at Otisville Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where he had been serving a 6 1/2-year sentence on federal corruption charges. An Orthodox Jew and Democrat who represented New York’s Lower East Side, Silver was one of the most influential political leaders in the state, using the power of his office to guide legislation and stall opposition even when, for 12 years, Republican George Pataki was governor and Republicans held a majority in the state Senate. Silver’s arrest and conviction sent shock waves through New York’s Jewish establishment. “Shelly Silver was one of the strongest forces for progressive issues in the New York State Legislature,” Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, a Jewish Democrat from Manhattan, told the New York Times. “It’s a tragedy that those achievements have been overshadowed by his criminal record.”
Pinchas Stolper
A leader of the Orthodox Union and its powerhouse youth movement.
Rabbi Pinchas Stolper delivers a Passover message to NCSY alumni on April 10, 2014. (YouTube)
Rabbi Pinchas Stolper, a pioneer in making Orthodox Judaism accessible to young people, died on May 25 at 90. Stolper helped turn the National Council of Synagogue Youth into a national powerhouse. He served as the first full-time national director of NCSY and as the longest-serving executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, and wrote a series of books making the holidays and Shabbat more accessible to younger readers. He retired from the leadership of the Orthodox Union in 2000, the same year that a rabbi under his supervision. Baruch Lanner, was accused of years of sexual and physical abuse. In the first report about the scandal, he told the New York Jewish Week that he had heard several complaints from young women about improper behavior by Lanner, but lacking specific allegations, let the youth leader off with a warning.
Miriam Winiarz
A Staten Island widow who was devoted to outreach.
Miriam Winiarz and her husband Rabbi Mendy Winiarz were known for their outreach to Jews on Staten Island. (Courtesy)
Miriam Winiarz lived through the unthinkable: In 2015, her husband Dovid Winiarz died in a Maryland car crash, leaving the Staten Island mother alone to raise their 10 children. And yet, after losing her husband, she remained a pillar in the borough’s Jewish community, Mendy Mirocznik, president of the Council of Jewish Organizations of Staten Island, told silive.com. She continued the kiruv, or outreach work that she and her husband had conducted before his death, bringing other Jews closer to their tradition through social media and through his rabbinate. “This was somebody who, when they got wind of the situation, somebody had a problem, they would interrupt their own lives and make you a priority,” said Mirocznik. Miriam Winiarz died in early December at the age of 56 after what was described as a brief illness. Her funeral at Young Israel of Staten Island in Willowbrook drew more than a thousand people. A fund has been set up to support her children, the youngest of whom is 14.
Philip Pearlstein
Modern realist painter and champion of Jewish art.
Modern realist painter Philip Pearlstein photographed in his New York studio in 1971. (Jack Mitchell/Getty Images)
Philip Pearlstein, an artist whose painting of nudes revived realistic painting after decades of dominance by abstraction, died in Manhattan on Dec. 17 at age 98. Born in Pittsburgh, he moved to Manhattan in 1949 as a sort of chaperone to a young Andy Warhol. He became an instructor at the Pratt Institute, and taught at Brooklyn College from 1963 until his retirement in 1988. Pearlstein served on the board of the Covenant Foundation in the early 2000s, and , according to Judith Ginsberg, former executive director of the foundation, opened the board to funding Jewish art in a bigger way and promoting the artists Debbie Friedman, Liz Lerman and Liz Swados.
Barbara Roaman
A grandma with a keen fashion sense and commitment to social justice
Barbara Roaman and her granddaughter, Sandy Fox. (Courtesy)
Barbara “Bobby” Roaman, who died on Nov. 6 at 91, was born in Manhattan and lived on the Upper West Side as a child. After attending Syracuse University and Columbia University, where she majored in Spanish, she moved to Long Island with her husband, Richard. In a eulogy shared with the New York Jewish Week, her granddaughter, Sandy Fox — an editor at In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies — remembered both her sense of fashion and her work in the civil rights movement on Long Island:
“Our conversations as a child instilled in me much more than a love of clothing. She taught me values of social justice and tzedakah, or what she would have called charitable giving, and because she wasn’t at all religious, those were the pillars of her Judaism. She and my grandfather were born in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They were upwardly mobile and privileged. In their class status and whiteness, they had blind spots when it came to race. Nevertheless, their commitments to social justice and civil rights were inspiring to me as a child and teen. They were involved in attempts to desegregate Long Island in the 1950s and 1960s. In more recent years, grandma had become involved in a local group called ERASE Racism, and donated to many non-profits that I also care about: Planned Parenthood, Democratic campaigns of all kinds, American Jewish World Service, and so on. It would have been so easy for them to become Republicans, as many Jews in their generation did. But they didn’t…. My mom died when I was 18, and from then on we tried to bridge that cavernous loss that affected us so differently but both so profoundly. She could not replace my mother and I could not replace her daughter, but we came pretty damn close. I sensed that she poured into me everything she wished she had poured into my mother.”
René Slotkin
A survivor of Mengele’s sadistic experiments on twins.
Ita Guttmann and her twins, René and Irene (then Renate), were photographed for Nazi propaganda while they were imprisoned at Theresienstadt. (Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via Irene Guttmann Slotkin Hizme)
René Slotkin, who with his twin sister Renate (Irene) was subjected to Josef Mengele’s infamous medical experiments on twins, died July 10 at age 84. Born in Teplice-Sanov, a city in northern Bohemia, he and his sister were sent, at 4, with their mother, to Theresienstadt. After a year, the three were shipped to Auschwitz. Then they were split up, the children becoming part of the infamous medical experiments conducted by Mengele, the sadistic “Angel of Death.” Orphaned, Slotkin and his sister survived a death march and arrived in New York in 1950. He was married at a young age and, after serving as a sergeant in the U.S. National Guard, worked for a box manufacturing company as a cost estimator. In 2019, he joined the Speakers Bureau at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, sharing his testimony with students. “I am here because of good people, good people everywhere,” he told the museum in an interview.
Sarah Schlesinger
A force in musical theater education.
At NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts , Sarah Schlesinger was the recipient of the David Payne Carter Award and the University Distinguished Teacher Award. (tisch.nyu.edu)
Sarah Schlesinger was an award-winning lyricist and librettist whose works, with composer Mike Reid, included “The Ballad of Little Jo,” “The Last Day,” “Casanova Returns,” “Prairie Songs,” “A Wind in the Willows Christmas” and “In This House.” But her most lasting legacy may well be the composers and lyricists she mentored as an arts professor and dean at the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She joined the program in 1989, served as associate chair of the department from 1995 to 1997, and was named chair in 1998. “Under her leadership, the program produced a huge, international alumni network of artists who are at the forefront of every facet of musical theatre activity: as creators, teachers, scholars and business leaders,” the program said in a statement. “Her insight, razor-sharp mind and her ability to get things done and to identify and encourage faculty, students and alums was frankly staggering in its longevity and reach. Sarah was a force that could make things happen.” Schlesinger died Dec. 14 following an illness.
Menahem Schmelzer
The ‘go-to’ librarian at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Menahem Schmelzer tended perhaps the greatest collection of Judaica in the Western Hemisphere. (Courtesy Jewish Theological Seminary)
In 1966, after a fire gutted the library at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, Menahem Schmelzer led what the flagship Conservative seminary said in a statement was “the extraordinary effort to reopen it, restore it to health, and ultimately open a new Library building in 1983.” When he stepped down as its longtime librarian in 1987, he had watched over the resuscitation of perhaps the greatest collection of Judaica in the Western Hemisphere. Schmelzer, who spent four decades at JTS, also served as provost and held the title of Albert B. and Bernice Cohen Professor Emeritus of Medieval Hebrew Literature and Jewish Bibliography. A Holocaust survivor who was born in Hungary, Schmelzer was also a scholar in his own right, specializing in medieval Hebrew literature and the Jewish liturgical poetry known as piyyut. David Kraemer, the Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian at JTS, remembered his colleague as “the ‘go-to’ person on questions of Jewish bibliography for researchers around the world.” He died on Dec. 10 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.
Steven Salen
Holocaust survivor who dressed presidents
Steve Salen in an undated photo in his Manhattan atelier. (Family)
Born Zoltan Salomon in Czechoslovakia in 1919, Steven Salen first learned tailoring at a trade school run there by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Then the Nazis arrived and they deported Salen. He never saw his parents or seven of his 11 siblings again. But he stuck with his trade, establishing himself after arriving in New York City as a tailor to the elite, making garments for the likes of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Martin Scorsese (and keeping mementoes of their business at his Bayside home). Salen was an old-school, word-of-mouth tailor who started working at FL Dunn on Fifth Avenue in New York, and eventually had his own full-floor atelier on Madison Avenue and 53rd Street, at the heart of the city’s high-fashion district. In 2011, when Salen already topped 90, a New York style blog profiled his shop, noting that it was one of fewer than 30 bespoke tailors in a city that had once been home to more than 300. Salen would work until 95 before retiring; he died Nov. 23 at 103.
Maximilian Lerner
A World War II “Ritchie Boy” who went undercover behind German lines.
Maximilian Lerner served as a translator and interrogated prisoners on behalf of U.S. intelligence during World War II. (Via Museum of Jewish Heritage)
Maximilian Lerner, an Austrian Jewish immigrant, served as a translator and interrogated prisoners on behalf of U.S. intelligence during World War II as a member of the “Ritchie Boys,” a special unit trained in espionage and frontline interrogation. He died Sept. 10 at his home in Manhattan at age 98. Lerner left Austria with his family two months after Germany’s March 1938 annexation of his homeland and, after layovers in Paris and Nice, came to the U.S., via Lisbon, in 1941. After volunteering for the draft, he became one of the 2,000 to 3,000 European-born Jews who learned to interrogate prisoners of war and civilians, interpret and translate for foreign officials, and read codes. “I wore civilian clothes”— posing as German behind enemy lines – “a number of times,” he told the New York Jewish Week in 2004. “This was my war. I would do whatever it took.” After the war, her worked for a horticultural products business and later started his own business in the same field. He also earned a master’s degree in business education from Teachers College at Columbia University in 1952, and wrote two spy novels and an autobiography. In recent years Lerner volunteered at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan, talking to groups about his experiences.
Chave Hecht
A camp director devoted to Jewish outreach.
Rebbetzin Chave Hecht and Rabbi J. J. Hecht receive a dollar and a blessing from the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, before a trip to South Africa in 1989. (Hecht Family/JEM van Chabad.org)
Rebbetzin Chave Hecht, the founder of Camp Emunah Bnos Yaakov Yehudah — an overnight camp for observant Jewish girls — and a host of other educational initiatives originating in the Chabad-Lubavitch community, died Feb. 8 at the age of 95. Born in the East New York section of Brooklyn and educated at public schools, she, along with her husband, the late Rabbi J.J. Hecht, also directed a Jewish summer day camp on Coney Island for public school children, pioneering Chabad’s outreach to non-observant Jewish families. Rebbetzin Hecht ran the day-to-day operations of Camp Emunah for decades, when her husband was back in Brooklyn running his synagogue. “She slept in her office,” her son, Rabbi Sholem Ber Hecht, a Chabad emissary in Queens, told Chabad.org. “She had no secretary; if you called the camp at 7 a.m. or 10 p.m., she answered the phone.”
Frederick Terna
Survivor, Brooklyn artist and “someone to watch” late into his 90s.
Artist Fred Terna, a Holocaust survivor, continued painting well into his late 90s. (Courtesy of Terna)
Holocaust survivor and painter Frederick Terna, who remained active at his Brooklyn studio into his late 90s, died on Dec. 8 at 99. Born in Vienna and raised in Prague, he was imprisoned in four Nazi concentration camps, including Terezin, where he began to make art. Terna moved to New York in 1952; his work was collected by a variety of museums and institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Albertina Collection in Vienna and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Earlier this year he was named to the New York Jewish Week’s “36 to Watch” list of notable Jewish New Yorkers.
Saida Somekh
Immigrant, entrepreneur and loving grandmother.
Saida Somekh demonstrates her cooking skills for her family. (via Instagram)
Saida Somekh, who owned Dora Hosiery, a go-to lingerie shop in Midtown Manhattan for decades, died Nov. 5. She was 94. Her granddaughter, Erin Dana Lichy, a real estate agent and a new cast member on “The Real Housewives of New York,” remembered her in an Instagram post:
“She came from a different world, married very young and was expected to raise a family as a stay-at-home mom with little choice in her major life decisions. Well, that didn’t work for her, so she forged her own path. As a young immigrant with little practice in English, she became a female homeowner, businesswoman and successful entrepreneur…. As a grandmother, she was simply always there, like one’s backbone. She was a pillar of strength. Her presence made me feel safe and warm. She loved purely, deeply and didn’t pass judgment. She was patient. If I ever needed to fix a garment or didn’t have something to wear, she’d sew me something from scratch, however long it took. She was warm to my friends and anyone close to me. She would send us home with bags of food and cook with me for hours if I wanted to learn new a new dish. All I had to do was ask. My kids adored her and she them. They brought her so much joy and watching how prideful she was of them was heartwarming. She had pictures of us all around her house just so she could look at ‘her babies’ every morning when she woke up.”
Freddie Roman
Catskills comedian and keeper of the flame.
Freddie Roman, left and fellow comedian Shecky Greene attend “The Friars Club Salute to Freddie Roman and Stewie Stone” at New Tork’s Pierre Hotel, April 21, 2014. (John Lamparski/WireImage)
Comedian Freddie Roman, who died Nov. at 85, was never a crossover star in the mold of Alan King, Jackie Mason or Joan Rivers — three other Jewish comics with roots in the Catskills. And yet in a capstone to a long and steady career he resurrected the spirit of the Borscht Belt with the 1991 show “Catskills on Broadway” and, as the long-serving dean of the Friars Club, he injected new life into the fading Manhattan showbiz venue by inviting younger comics to join. Born Fred Kirschenbaum in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in Jamaica, Queens, Roman started emceeing at age 15 at the the Crystal Spring Hotel in the Catskills, which was owned by his uncle and grandfather. He soon was performing at hotels and resorts in the region for the largely Jewish crowd. “Catskills on Broadway,” starring him and fellow tummlers Dick Capri, Marilyn Michaels and Mal Z. Lawrence, was a bona fide hit, running for 453 performances. “I’m like the Fidel Castro of comedians,” he once said of his tenure at the Friar’s Club. “I’m president for life.”
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The post Extraordinary lives: 18 notable New York Jews who died in 2022 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Possible Platner replacements and their divergent stands on Israel
(JTA) — Following the implosion of Graham Platner — a harsh critic of Israel who lobbed a parting shot about “genocide” in Gaza in his video Wednesday quitting the Maine Senate race — a number of possible replacements have emerged. And as their names have surfaced, interest and questions about their positions on issues of concern to the Jewish community also have arisen.
There is a significant range of views among the possible candidates on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee pro-Israel lobby, arms sales to Israel and whether there was a genocide in Gaza, based on their past and recent comments.
In statements to JTA, pro-Israel groups Democratic Majority for Israel and the Jewish Democratic Council of America both urged the party to nominate a candidate aligned with their values; Platner had drawn concern from a number of Jewish groups because of his covered-up Nazi tattoo and stance on Israel.
Some of Platner’s former volunteers have said they want his replacement to fit his mold as a progressive and Israel critic who is taking on establishment politics in the effort to unseat GOP Sen. Susan Collins. After Platner dropped out, the Maine Democratic Party announced on Wednesday that to fill the candidate vacancy it will hold a nominating convention made up of about 600 people selected by county-level Democratic committees. The timing of the convention is not yet clear; the deadline for naming a replacement is July 27.
“There is an unprecedented amount of energy and enthusiasm among Maine Democrats, driven in part by many of the dedicated volunteers and supporters who were inspired by Graham Platner’s campaign,” the party said in a statement. “We look forward to coming together and harnessing that energy around our new nominee as we work to defeat Susan Collins in November.”
Here are some of the replacements being mentioned and what they’ve said about Jewish-related issues, Israel and AIPAC. None of the possible nominees responded to JTA’s requests for comment.
Nirav Shah, epidemiologist and healthcare executive
Nirav Shah, who ran for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in June, finishing second in ranked-choice voting, told reporter David Weigel on Tuesday that he supports an arms embargo on Israel, and he accuses the country of having committing genocide. Shah also said that in keeping with his policy he would not accept funds or an endorsement from AIPAC.
Shah has touted himself as a political outsider like Platner and said Tuesday that he had “no establishment support, and no major political endorsements” when he was running for governor. He has called on possible Platner replacement to participate in a televised debate and “multiple” town halls across the state to make the nomination process transparent.
Troy Jackson, logger and union leader
Troy Jackson, who has backing from the left, had a close political alliance with Platner until calling for him to step aside on Monday and officially launching his campaign for the nomination on Wednesday.
A number of Platner’s supporters have called for the party to nominate Jackson, who finished third behind Shah in the gubernatorial primary. He’s said little publicly related to Israel, but in his run for governor, Jackson had the backing of a number of left-wing, strongly pro-Palestinian politicians, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Rep. Ro Khanna, as well as Maine’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter.
Sanders’ group Our Revolution and left-wing streamer Hasan Piker — a staunch Israel critic who’s drawn accusations of antisemitism — are both backing Jackson to be the new Senate nominee.
In 2024, at the Maine State Democratic Convention, Jackson, who served as convention chairman, reportedly attempted to quiet down a small group of protesters who called for a ceasefire in Gaza and called Maine Rep. Jared Golden a “war criminal” during a video celebrating the Jewish congressman.
“I believe in the ability of people to demonstrate and protest,” Jackson said amid the outburst. “There is a time for that.”
Shenna Bellows, Maine secretary of state
Before assuming her current role, a position that is filled by state lawmakers every two years, Shenna Bellows served as the executive director of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine.
In May, Bellows spoke at the Jewish-Asian Friendship Dinner, hosted by the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine. Bellows said she began working with the JCA during her time leading the Holocaust museum, and said she’d attended numerous events that discussed “many stories of Holocaust survivors and of genocide around the world, and how important it is that we stand up for all of each other, and for unity, and the love that we have for all of each other.”
Bellows also commended the JCA for its response to the surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence over the winter, which included mutual aid to support people who felt unsafe leaving their homes.
Bellows does not appear to have commented extensively on Israel, although she signed Maine Gov. Janet Mills’ 2023 proclamation recognizing the 75th anniversary of the founding of modern Israel that wished the country “a peaceful and prosperous future.”
Jordan Wood, ex-congressional staffer
A former staffer for former California Rep. Katie Porter, Jordan Wood spoke extensively about his views on Israel and AIPAC in an interview as a Senate candidate in Maine last fall. He was the first Democrat to enter the race for Collins’ Senate seat before being overshadowed by Platner and later suspending his campaign to run for the House.
Wood told Democratic commentator Kaivan Shroff that he would support Sanders’ resolution to restrict offensive weapons sales to Israel but backs the continuation of aid to the Jewish state with conditions.
Wood said he believes Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, but stopped short of accusing the country of genocide, pointing to a connection between that accusation and a rise in antisemitism.
“I’ve hesitated on it because I’m also seeing a real rise in antisemitism in the United States,” Wood said. “My husband is Jewish, and the acts of violence toward Jewish Americans is very much connected to the language that we use.”
Wood added that it would be “a huge deal for the United States Congress to designate what’s going on in Gaza as a genocide officially.”
“There could be consequences to that of US citizens that have served in the IDF,” he said. “Do they get prosecuted?”
Wood also said he would not take money from AIPAC, and added that there is a “huge amount of distrust” of the lobbying organization among Democratic voters.
“I believe the only way to truly prove to a voter that you are voting and prioritizing policies in their best interest, and for our country’s best interest, is to remove any perception of corruption or misdealing,” Wood said.
Dan Kleban, brewery owner
Dan Kleban, who announced on Wednesday that he is back in the race for Senate after having suspended his campaign in October and endorsing Gov. Janet Mills, who dropped out before the primary after trailing in the polls, has a very different approach from Platner to the U.S.-Israel relationship.
In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Kleban refrained from accusing Israel of committing genocide, instead calling the military campaign in Gaza an “absolute tragedy.” Kleban said he would condition arms sales to Israel.
When Kleban — a political novice and co-founder and co-owner of the Maine Beer Company — first launched his Senate campaign last fall, he told Politico that he did not support the recent resolution from Sanders to block certain arms sales to Israel.
“I believe Israel has a right to defend itself,” he said. “I don’t think that we solve the horrific humanitarian crisis in Gaza by disarming Israel and exposing them to harm.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Possible Platner replacements and their divergent stands on Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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For generations of Jews, this cookbook defined the journey from immigration to assimilation
Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of the Settlement Cook Book
By Nora L. Rubel
Columbia University Press, 232 pages, $28
It was an inspiration for bestselling cookbook writer Mark Bittman, a trusted reference for James Beard, the first recipe book owned by New York Times food critic Mimi Sheraton, and the source of the recipes that famed Jewish cookbook writer Joan Nathan grew up with: The Settlement Cook Book, across 40 editions, sold over 2 million copies and defined Jewish American food.
In her book Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of the Settlement Cook Book, Nora L. Rubel traces the book from its birth as a 1901 fundraising pamphlet by Elizabeth “Lizzie” Black Kander, a kosher cooking-class instructor for Milwaukee immigrants, to its life as a hardcover distributed globally by Simon & Schuster into the 1990s.
For many Jewish Americans, the cookbook brings back memories of seder meals and their mother’s brisket. I didn’t grow up with a dog-eared copy of my grandma’s, but that didn’t mean I found the book any less interesting. Rubel, a University of Rochester professor of religion, discovered The Settlement Cook Book in graduate school. In it, she found not just a snapshot of the Jewish American kitchen throughout the 20th century, but also a continuous debate over what counts as American, conducted in the language of potato soup and noodle kugel.
Rubel credits Kander with pioneering “culinary pluralism” at a time when social reformers pushed immigrants to rid themselves of their garlicky and spiced ethnic cuisine in favor of a blander New England “diet of cornmeal mush and pea soup.“ Kander, a Reform Jew, aimed to help recently arrived Eastern European Jews integrate into American society. Unlike Christian reformers, Kander, an ethnic minority herself, envisioned an America where immigrant groups belonged.
The first edition contained kosher recipes for traditional Ashkenazi fare, but the Russian Jewish immigrant women in Kander’s class were also being prepared for domestic work in the Milwaukee homes of wealthier German Jews like Kander who did not keep kosher and had a taste for ethnic cuisine. Thus, the matzo ball recipe appears on the same page as the mulligatawny soup, and filled fish (gefilte fish) sits alongside scalloped oysters.
Rubel argues that, by not placing Jewish or other ethnic dishes in a separate section, the Settlement Cook Book is the among the first to define modern American cuisine through its immigrants. “Kander’s vision of American diversity,” she writes, “suggests that ethnic recipes are on equal footing with each other and traditional ‘American’ recipes, thus framing the United States as a multiethnic society.”
The ethnic mix and straightforward, simple recipes made Kander’s book the most successful of the era’s many charitable cookbooks. It funded the Abraham Lincoln House, which offered programming for impoverished Jews, as well as the Milwaukee Jewish Center, and helped establish Milwaukee’s first nursery school. By mid-century it had expanded from helping Jewish immigrants to funding programs for the broader public.
Kander was blunt that her philanthropy was rooted in what she called a “selfish motive.” The affluent German-Jewish community in Milwaukee feared the newly arrived Orthodox, unassimilated Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews might spark American antisemitism, which would threaten their own status. “To protect ourselves, our own reputation in the community,” Rubel quotes Kander, “we must work with tact, with heart and soul to better the home conditions of our people . . . and teach them habits of industry and cleanliness.”
The quote is a reminder that despite the framing of Kander as a multiculturalist, at its heart, The Settlement Cook Book was an assimilationist project. As Rubel notes in her introduction, “liking foodways does not automatically translate into welcoming the people who make it.” A century ago, Americans ate chow mein while backing the Chinese Exclusion Act; many today happily order tacos and arepas, while supporting ICE raids targeting Mexican and Venezuelan immigrants. Still, the book captures a real push-and-pull into what counts as American– with the immigrants being Americanized, inevitably changing what it means to be American. .
Unsurprisingly, many Jewish immigrants didn’t appreciate Kander’s “selfish motive.” While young Jewish women were enthusiastic about the classes, their parents resented the patronizing German-Jewish teachers. Kander’s plan to train domestic workers backfired, the immigrant girls rejected being “neat little housekeepers,” preferring clerical and garment work. Rubel notes that the Jewish women avoided work at the time associated with African Americans. “In a country with a distinct color line,” she wrote, “Jews found their whiteness still in question, tenuous at best.”
In response, Kander pitched the cooking classes as preparation for marriage, as captured in the book’s original title: The Way to a Man’s Heart: The Settlement Cook Book. For decades, the book was a quintessential bridal gift, yet its crowdsourced nature allowed it to evolve with the times.
Wartime editions included canning instructions; the book went dry during Prohibition; and new gadgets and processed foods were introduced to keep up with the post-war kitchen. By the 1970s, however, the nonprofit organization that held the rights to The Settlement Cook Book resisted change, and became a guardian of tradition. The book stubbornly kept old fashioned housekeeping tips like how to remove stains with cod-liver oil and a section entitled “When There Is No Maid.” Only in the last edition, published in 1991, did an editor prevail to have pad Thai, curried lentil and refried beans appear alongside kugel and kreplach, altering the book’s content, but returning to Kander’s multicultural instincts.
Most keenly, Rubel examines the paradox of what makes The Settlement Cook Book so profoundly Jewish, given its massive popularity among gentiles and while it had many Jewish recipes, one would never know from its cover. Simon & Schuster, which took over the book in 1954, further chipped away at any hint of Jewishness in favor of mass appeal.
But as was the case with mid-century Jews assimilating into middle-class America, the cookbook’s Jewishness was not erased; it was merely coded, obvious to anyone looking for it. It’s precisely the cosmopolitan blending of recipes that makes The Settlement Cook Book a truer representation of how Jewish Americans actually ate than a Haddasah cookbook or the popular 1958 Jennie Grossinger’s The Art of Jewish Cooking. “Unlike kosher cookbooks that eschew treyf,” writes Rubel, “it is what this cookbook includes, rather than what it omits, that codes the text as Jewish.”
Ultimately, this coded nature led to the book’s greatest irony. As mid-century Jewish Americans moved to the suburbs, they yearned for the food and customs of the old neighborhood, if not the old country. Once a tool to Americanize Jews, The Settlement Cook Book became the definitive guide for American Jews who wanted to remember how to make matzo brei and gefilte fish. Rubel argues that the book itself became a marker of a Jewish home without explicitly announcing religion or ethnicity.
Though nostalgia kept The Settlement Cook Book alive in its final decades, and has kept it in the Jewish American consciousness, I have no memory of my family ever using it and have zero nostalgia for it. The recipes Rubel reproduces in her book might be of historical interest, but a 1910 chop suey recipe with canned mushrooms and chicken gizzards is decidedly dated today. And yet, reading this book, I felt incredibly seen.
That is because, as early as 1901, Lizzie Black Kander defined part of being Jewish in America as a cosmopolitan embrace of the world. The 1921 edition, for instance, includes a “Chinese Supper” menu as well as a list of Passover Seder recipes, “allowing Jews,” as Rubel puts it, “to have their gefilte fish and eat chop suey too.”
Yet 125 years since Lizzie Kander wrote her recipe pamphlet, it’s clear that, when it comes to building a truly multicultural and tolerant society, enjoying both gefilte fish and chop suey is the easy part.
The post For generations of Jews, this cookbook defined the journey from immigration to assimilation appeared first on The Forward.
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Israelis are experiencing a new kind of international boycott
Israelis are not facing formal sanctions from Western corporations. No international business coalition has announced a boycott. No major bank or airline has openly declared that Israeli customers are unwelcome.
Yet many Israelis are increasingly encountering something quieter and more difficult to define: a new norm of friction and the sense that when systems fail for Israelis, nobody feels much urgency to fix them.
Consider a recent experience I had with the United Kingdom’s NatWest bank.
When NatWest stopped sending authentication texts to Israeli phone numbers in the spring, I assumed it was just a technical error. Banks malfunction. Security systems fail. But then the bank’s mobile app stopped properly recognizing my Israeli number — despite that number having functioned perfectly well beforehand. Customer service representatives offered contradictory explanations. The fallback solution was supposed to be a physical card reader for secure logins. I requested one repeatedly. Nothing arrived for months. Then, in early May, a representative informed me that NatWest apparently was not mailing card readers to Israel, either.
On a visit to London, I went to a branch, where they offered no explanations; they put me on the phone with customer service, where the agent repeated that they were no longer engaging in contact with Israeli phone numbers or addresses, due to “war tensions.” So I emailed every executive I could find to ask, directly, if the bank was boycotting Israel.
After lengthy exchanges, I was told that Israeli access was removed earlier in the year. The bank insisted the restrictions were not political and not specific to Israel, but rather part of broader fraud prevention measures. So I asked which other countries were affected. This, the bank refused to answer.
On its own, this could still be dismissed as another case of corporate opacity mixed with bureaucratic risk aversion. (Eventually, a physical card reader did make its way to me, still with no clear explanation for the delay.) But it was not the first strange interaction I had experienced.
In early 2024, I ordered a novel from Amazon. The book arrived at my home in Tel Aviv damaged and obviously used, despite being sold as new. Customer service initially handled the issue professionally, immediately agreeing to replace the order. Then I provided my address. There was silence.
“I see this address is not on the map,” the representative finally said. “I only see Palestine.” Then the line disconnected.
An alarming interaction, but the representative was expressing a personal political view, not enforcing corporate policy. What proved more revealing was Amazon’s institutional indifference afterward. Despite repeated inquiries to the company’s press office, I never received a clear decrial of the customer service representative’s actions. The issue simply disappeared into a bureaucratic void.
That sorry episode was felicitous in a way: It inspired my first op-ed for the Forward.
Then came British Airways.
After BA canceled flights between Tel Aviv and London in 2025 following a Houthi missile strike near Ben-Gurion Airport, my wife and I scrambled to reconstruct an itinerary at enormous personal expense. Wars disrupt aviation. That part was understandable.
What followed afterward was not. Months passed in a maze of contradictory responses, partial refunds, bureaucratic evasions and compensation offers so absurd that they bordered on parody. Only after I contacted the airline’s press office identifying myself as a journalist did the company suddenly rediscover the ability to communicate. Even then, the process remained exhausting and opaque. We were compensated perhaps a third the value of the ticket lost, with no apology whatsoever.
None of these incidents independently prove anti-Israel discrimination. Banks mistreat customers. Airlines fail passengers. Customer service departments malfunction. Yet together they illustrate a kind of new atmosphere for Israelis.
The most profound sign of that atmosphere has come in academia. As a new report by the Technion documents, what was once an academic boycott of Israel evolved from highly visible protests toward a more diffuse climate of exclusion.
Jewish students in Sweden reported hiding their identities in academic environments. British surveys found that roughly one in five students said they would not want to live with a Jewish roommate. Canadian campus activism increasingly moved from symbolic rhetoric toward operational demands for universities to sever ties with Israeli institutions and withdraw investments.
My friend Bar Harel experienced this personally at Portugal’s University of Coimbra. After complaining about antisemitic graffiti, pro-Hamas and Hezbollah imagery, and slogans such as “No Jews wanted” around campus, Harel became a target. He was threatened online, publicly vilified, physically assaulted near campus and told his family “should burn in a second Holocaust.”
University authorities largely deflected responsibility. Only after he fled Portugal at the advice of Israeli and American diplomats did the state ombudsman finally issue a report that said the university had adopted a “posture of fundamental passivity” in response to his harassment, failing to investigate despite clear evidence.
In business and academia alike, organizations don’t need to announce formal sanctions to change Israeli experience. They simply begin treating Israel operationally troublesome.
Does all this come from antisemitism — or is it a form of quiet protest against Israel’s brutality during the past years’ wars, or the indefensible situation in the West Bank? Does it relate to the current right-wing government — and if so, is it fixable should the moderate opposition return to power?
I do not have definitive answers, and there’s probably a mix of reasons. But it is clear that Israelis are losing the global narrative with astounding speed, and unless this is countered, more formal boycotts are on the way.
The post Israelis are experiencing a new kind of international boycott appeared first on The Forward.
