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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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Israel just quadrupled its PR budget to $730M. Experts say it won’t work.
(JTA) — Israel is betting nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars that it can talk its way out of a reputation crisis.
Lawmakers in Jerusalem approved a 2026 national budget last month that includes roughly $730 million for public diplomacy — the broad category known in Hebrew as hasbara — more than four times the $150 million they allocated the year before. That earlier sum was itself about 20 times what Israel had spent on such efforts before the war in Gaza broke out in 2023.
The unprecedented expenditure comes as survey after survey show declining support for Israel in the United States, its most important ally. A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month found 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, up seven points in a single year, with only 37% viewing it favorably.
Most striking for a country long accustomed to bipartisan American support: 57% of Republicans under 50 hold negative views of Israel. Support has cratered among the religiously unaffiliated, Black Protestants and Catholics. Among American Jews, support has slipped below two-thirds.
On social media, the Hebrew word “hasbara” has become a dismissive shorthand for pro-Israel advocacy, indicating how widely known Israel’s uphill efforts to shape its image have become.
Congress is increasingly reflecting this drop in public support. Earlier this month, 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voted to block a $295 million sale of Caterpillar bulldozers to Israel, and 36 voted to block a sale of 1,000-pound bombs, representing the strongest congressional rebuke of U.S. military aid to Israel on record.
Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, says the country is engaged in a global war for hearts and minds and it must spend accordingly.
“We had a major breakthrough this year, but we must as a country invest much much more,” Sa’ar said in December as the government entered budget deliberations. “It should be like investing in jets, bombs and missile interceptors. In the face of what’s arrayed against us and what’s invested against us, it’s far from enough. This is an existential issue.”
Alongside the budget, Sa’ar won approval for a dedicated public diplomacy unit inside the Foreign Ministry, headed by a director equivalent in rank to the ministry’s top political official — a structural consolidation meant to end years of scattered hasbara work across rival ministries.
Public filings, Knesset testimony and Israeli business reporting show where a portion of the 2025 allocation went.
A $50 million international social-media ad buy was split across Google, YouTube, X and Outbrain. Roughly $40 million went to hosting 400 foreign delegations — lawmakers, pastors, influencers, university presidents. A “media war room” was erected to monitor 250 outlets and 10,000 daily Israel-related items.
The Foreign Ministry also signed a $1.5-million-a-month contract with former Trump campaign strategist Brad Parscale’s firm to deploy AI tools against antisemitism online, a $4.1 million campaign aimed at evangelical churches, and the “Esther Project,” a paid influencer network running up to $900,000 through a PR firm called Bridges Partners.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry did not respond to repeated requests for interviews and comment.
Defending the approach, Consul General Israel Bachar, Jerusalem’s top diplomat in Los Angeles since 2023, said in an interview that most of the money so far had gone into social media and delegations. His post oversees seven Western states and one of the largest Israeli expatriate populations in the world.
“We flew a lot of delegations to the country — whether it’s pastors, whether it’s politicians, universities,” Bachar said. “Everyone who returns from the country understands better and is more supportive. But you have to fly out a lot of people.”
A veteran Israeli political strategist before his consular appointment, Bachar argued the anti-Israel shift in the United States is not primarily a messaging failure. He pointed instead to “sociological changes in America that have nothing to do with us” that are “being used against us.”
He called the situation a complex problem with “no silver bullet,” and said he favors additional spending on what he called “productions” in the United States — sitcoms, documentaries, feature films that touch on Israeli themes — alongside the ad buys and influencer work.
Ask the people who study public diplomacy for a living whether any of this will work, and the answer is, overwhelmingly, skeptical.
Their central objection is that no amount of messaging can outrun entrenched rejection by its target audiences of Israel’s armed response to conflicts with its neighbors.
“My position is that history shows all the money in the world won’t help if the policy is wrong,” said Nicholas Cull, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California and one of the founders of the study of public diplomacy. “The U.S. discovered that in Vietnam when its own Cold War public diplomacy budget peaked.”
Cull coined the term “reputational security” to describe the argument Sa’ar is implicitly making — that a country’s standing is itself a strategic asset worth serious investment.
“It means protecting the country both by accentuating positive images and by eliminating negative realities,” Cull said. “I suspect that the government of Israel will be unable to sell its solutions to the world when so many of its own people dispute the validity of those solutions, and where the domestic consensus is wide of the international understanding of realities on the ground.”
The polling tells a similar story, according to a scholar who has been tracking it longer than almost anyone else.
“There has been a paradigmatic shift that has taken place in America about Israel,” said Shibley Telhami, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, who has surveyed American and Arab attitudes toward Israel for decades. “I have been tracing shifts, particularly among Democrats, for a decade and a half. I have never seen a shift like the one we’ve seen.”
Born in Israel to an Arab family, Telhami was long a two-state advocate operating within the American foreign policy mainstream before moving considerably leftward in recent years.
He described a new “Gaza generation” — a majority of young Americans who, his polling shows, now see Israel as committing genocide and who see the United States as implicated in it.
Telhami said the moment reminded him of a previous episode. He served on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy in 2005, when Washington tried to spend its way out of the reputational damage of the Iraq War with campaigns aimed at Muslim audiences.
“Our conclusion was, it’s the policy, stupid,” he said. “Yes, you can do a lot with public diplomacy, and there are strategies that could help on the margins. But they’re only going to affect a small percentage, because the bulk of the impressions on issues that people care about are shaped by the actual policies, not how well you sell those policies.”
Many Israelis believe the country has simply never told its story well enough, and that with enough money and the right platforms, it can. But the conventional wisdom that Israel has not been active on the frontiers of public diplomacy simply isn’t true, according to Ilan Manor, a senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University who has long studied the Foreign Ministry’s online presence.
Israel was one of the first countries in the world to build a global digital-diplomacy operation, Manor said. Before Oct. 7, he said, its accounts reached roughly a billion people, a scale rivaled only by the United States.
“The problem is not that we lack infrastructure. The problem is not that we lack skill,” Manor said. “The problem is that people don’t believe the state anymore. And that’s a much, much deeper problem that no amount of money is going to repair.”
He calls it a credibility gap, borrowing the term American reporters used for Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam-era statements. “If you’re not a credible spokesperson, if you’re not a credible state, it doesn’t matter how good your message is,” Manor said. “It doesn’t matter how viral it might get. It doesn’t matter how many likes you get.”
The credibility problem is now compounding itself. As disclosures have revealed Israeli contracts with influencers, shell websites, and AI-driven campaigns, pro-Israel posts on American social media routinely draw comments accusing the poster of being a paid foreign agent, whether they are or not.
Similar concerns come from inside the pro-Israel branding world. Joanna Landau, founder of the Tel Aviv–based Israel branding nonprofit Vibe Israel, has spent more than a decade flying international influencers to Israel on lifestyle-focused trips. She said she was not available for an interview but has laid out her views in a recent series of essays on her Substack, “Reputation Nation.”
Landau called the 2026 allocation “a long overdue course correction” but warned that structural failures would swallow the money. “Israel’s narrative has no single strategic owner,” she wrote, noting that messaging responsibility is scattered across the Foreign Ministry, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Diaspora Affairs Ministry, the Government Press Office and the IDF.
According to the government’s own announcements, she added, most of the new funding is slated for “tactical activity” — “the same tools Israel has relied on for years, only now with many more zeros.” Her conclusion: “A large budget poured into a broken system produces scale, not strategy.”
The spending does vault Israel into the same league as some of the world’s largest public diplomacy operations, according to Landau.
Exact comparisons are hard to make, and there are no widely accepted figures for what different countries spend on public diplomacy — the work is scattered across culture ministries, state broadcasters, foreign affairs budgets, and intelligence agencies, often without a single label.
Germany, for example, funds Deutsche Welle, its international broadcaster, and the Goethe-Institut, its global network of cultural centers, at hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but both operate independently of the government. Britain spends around $450 million on the BBC World Service and millions more on international scholarships, also at arm’s length from direct messaging. The United States allocates an estimated $2.3 billion through State Department programs and the U.S. Agency for Global Media. China’s public diplomacy spending has topped $10 billion. Qatar has built Al Jazeera into a global network through state funding whose full scope is not publicly disclosed.
Israel, a country of roughly 10 million people, is now set to spend on its global image at a scale normally associated with much larger countries.
It may be too late, according to one Israeli scholar who has argued for two decades that Israel chronically underinvests in public diplomacy.
Eytan Gilboa, a professor of international communication at Bar-Ilan University, said he welcomes both the larger sum and its consolidation inside the Foreign Ministry, which he said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had deliberately “dried up” in favor of rival ministries.
But Gilboa agrees the current moment may be beyond repair.
“This is the worst crisis in Israel’s image abroad,” he said. “In the past, we have seen criticism of Israeli policy. Since Oct. 7, we have seen a rejection of Israel’s right to exist.” He argued that Israel has lost a generation of Americans, calling it “highly dangerous, because these people are going to be the next politicians, elites, journalists.”
“Perhaps $730 million is not enough,” Gilboa said. “You have to establish a mechanism, a system that would systematically address all the challenges. I am quite pessimistic.”
The post Israel just quadrupled its PR budget to $730M. Experts say it won’t work. appeared first on The Forward.
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A synagogue helped Palestinians raise money for Gaza — and found common ground over falafel
(JTA) — Six months after first sitting down with Dr. David Hasan for a meal, Rabbi Daniel Greyber returned to the table on Tuesday — this time bringing congregants from his synagogue to support Hasan’s work helping children in Gaza.
So many members of Beth El Synagogue wanted to attend the fundraiser at the Palestinian-owned Mediterranean Deli in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that the Conservative congregation asked them to sign up for shifts.
Between tables piled high with falafel and hummus, the daylong fundraiser offered an uncommon scene at a time when the war in Gaza has often strained relations between Muslim and Jewish communities.
Beth El had previously backed relief efforts for Israel, including raising $175,000 for Magen David Adom after Oct. 7, while also supporting humanitarian aid in Gaza through World Central Kitchen and Israeli-Palestinian dialogue initiatives such as Roots in the West Bank.
But Tuesday’s event marked the first time the congregation had participated in a Palestinian-led fundraiser for Gaza — a rarity for American synagogue communities and a move that Greyber said he’d had to defend to critics.
For the rabbi, the groundwork for the fundraiser was laid last fall, when he met Hasan at a Sukkot dinner hosted by Sophia Chitlik, a Jewish Democratic North Carolina state senator.
At the time, Greyber said he and other local Jewish leaders were “incredibly moved and incredibly impressed” by the work of Hasan, whose nonprofit, The Gaza Children Village, provides food, medical care, education, and trauma support to children in Gaza.
Through his nonprofit, Hasan, a Palestinian-American, has also created schools in the besieged enclave, where he offers a modified curriculum that promotes peace and reconciliation, and an alternative to the anti-Israel education he says has long dominated Gaza’s schools.
“Obviously he has support from so many different places around the world for the project, we wanted to ask ourselves: What could we do locally,” Greyber said.
Shortly after their introduction, Greyber invited Hasan to speak at his synagogue in November. There, Hasan shared that he had sought information about the Israeli hostages while working in hospitals in Gaza in April 2024.
That story carried particular weight at Beth El, where congregants had spent 484 days praying for the release of Keith Siegel, an Israeli hostage whose mother, Gladys Siegel, had long been a central figure in the synagogue community. Keith Siegel was released in January 2025.
As Greyber forged ties with Hasan, so did Jamil Kadoura, the owner of Mediterranean Deli, who spent part of his childhood living in a Palestinian refugee camp after the Six-Day War.
Mediterranean Deli has long been a fixture in the local Jewish community, with the restaurant serving as a caterer for lifecycle events at Beth El for many years. After the restaurant burned down in an accidental fire in July 2023, Beth El posted on Facebook urging its congregants to donate to a relief fund.
“My restaurant delivers Middle Eastern food, so it attracts customers from both sides,” Kadoura said. “I have Israelis that come and eat here. I have all walks of life, and, you know, they seem to like our food and come and eat…I think it’s a good thing, and I hope we would do as much as we can.”
In the lead-up to the fundraiser Tuesday, Greyber praised Kadoura and his restaurant in a social media post, writing, “If there is hope in the world, it is found in places like Mediterranean Deli, Bakery and Catering and people like Jamil Kadoura. I am grateful to God for his friendship and presence in my life and that of my community.”
Kadoura said that he had previously hosted fundraisers at the restaurant, including for Pakistani flood relief and Syrian refugees, adding that his own experience in a refugee camp, where he said he received aid from both Jews and Muslims, shaped his desire to help others in need.
“I feel like people need help, like I needed help when I was in that refugee camp, and when people come and feed us,” Kadoura said. “Jewish and Muslims.”
Kadoura said he approached Hasan with the idea for the fundraiser, which he saw as an opportunity to bring together communities that have often found themselves divided in recent years.
“I said I would like to do a fundraiser for your organization, but what I also like to do is bring the Jews and the Muslims and the Palestinians together, because there’s a lot of Jews and Palestinians in the area that are striving for the same goal — peace and love and an end to all this misery,” Kadoura said.
When Kadoura reached out to Greyber, a longtime friend, for his congregation’s support, Greyber replied that the synagogue would be “honored” to participate.
“I think it’s a powerful and important model, you know, that we don’t let what’s happening across the world tear apart the communities that we are living in,” Greyber said.
He said his community had rallied around Hasan and helped provide a support network for his family in Durham, in part because his work, which has included partnerships with Israeli NGOs, had been “vilified by people who purport to be a pro-Palestinian community.”
Hasan’s work in Gaza began on a medical mission in December 2023, where he saw firsthand the devastation inflicted on children by the rapidly widening war. During that trip, Hasan told the New York Times he performed 20 operations in ten days, often without anesthetics or antiseptics, but that all of his patients eventually died from infections.
Since founding the Gaza Children Village last April, the nonprofit has built six “Academy of Hope,” which provide Palestinian children with daily education, meals, healthcare, and psychosocial support.
But while many nonprofits serving Palestinians affected by the war have faced allegations of ties to Hamas, Hasan has set his work apart through partnerships with Israeli organizations and a stated focus on coexistence, principles that have at times earned him the ire of some Palestinians who say his work is too aligned with the Jewish state.
“I try really hard to stay neutral,” Hasan told the Religion News Service in February. “I do not use any words like ‘war crimes’ or ‘genocide,’ because it’s not my position. I’m not a lawyer. There are courts out there that describe that. I describe events I saw. I show pictures, I don’t use subjective words.”
During his remarks at the restaurant Tuesday evening, Hasan announced that the proceeds would go to children in both Israel and Gaza who had been orphaned by Oct. 7, telling the crowd gathered that his work was motivated by one principle: “Never again for both sides.”
“We led this rehabilitation in Gaza, bridging between Israelis and Gazans, and it started here in Durham,” Hasan told the crowd, according to footage shared with JTA by Greyber. “And your action today — this is one of the very, very, very few events that have people from synagogue, mosque and are getting together and for once, just eating and hanging out. I can’t tell who’s Arabic and who’s Jew.”
Greyber said that Hasan also told attendees that he would be hosting a camp this fall in Italy for both Israeli and Palestinian orphans of the war.
While Greyber said he had received some concerns about the fundraiser from members of the broader Jewish community, as well as his friends in Israel, over the potential that aid would fall into the hands of Hamas, he said he assuaged their concerns by explaining that Hasan had himself been threatened by Hamas, and had worked to keep the terror group far from his operations.
“I understand their concerns, but, you know, in the end, I think this is a project that’s worthy of the Jewish community’s support,” Greyber said. “And one of the things that’s very important is that there are many people in the local Muslim community who are supporting this.”
Indeed, Greyber said that he had received a voicemail on Monday from a local Muslim community member who told him “how moved he was, that our synagogue was supporting this.”
Hasan’s wife, Lauren Hasan, who worked as a trauma surgeon, said that when she arrived at the fundraiser at 6 p.m., it was packed with attendees.
“Honestly, it was by all accounts an incredible success,” Hasan told JTA over text. “There were people from all walks of life: Muslims, Jews, Christians sitting at tables and sharing a meal. And at the end of the day, that is a microcosm of the reality my husband and I want to see.”
For Greyber, his congregation’s support for the fundraiser underscored the complicated reality that many American Jewish communities have grappled with since Oct. 7.
“Like every American Jewish community, the past two and a half years have been excruciating and have torn — have certainly stretched the seams that hold our community together,” Greyber said. “I think we have people who are deeply, deeply committed to Israel and its wellbeing, and we have people who are deeply committed to and carry with them the destruction that has happened to the community in Gaza.”
Addressing those divides, Greyber said his congregation had long approached the conflict “beginning from a place of care and relationship for actual people,” a mindset he said was shaped by the synagogue’s late matriarch, Gladys Siegel.
“Many, many people in our community carry both of those things in their hearts, right? And it’s not one or the other, they carry both,” Greyber said. “And, you know, I’ve done my best to try to keep our hearts big enough and soft enough to carry those concerns.”
The post A synagogue helped Palestinians raise money for Gaza — and found common ground over falafel appeared first on The Forward.
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This Jewish feminist has been the NYC’s sanitation department’s official artist for 50 years. A new movie tells her story.
(JTA) — In 1976, deep in New York City’s fiscal crisis, the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles read a review of her conceptual work in the Village Voice. In his review, critic David Bourdon made a radical suggestion inspired by Ukeles’ thesis: What if municipal work, like the Sanitation Department, were conceptual art? Could it get funded by grants, instead of by the city?
Ukeles presented the idea to Sanitation Department commissioner Anthony T. Vaccarello, who invited her to create art for 10,000 sanitation workers. The job would be unpaid. And, it turns out, she would keep it for nearly 50 years and counting.
Now 86, Ukeles is the subject of the documentary film “Maintenance Artist” directed by Jewish filmmaker Toby Perl Freilich, which made its New York theatrical release last week at the IFC Theater in Greenwich Village.
The title refers to Ukeles’ 1969 manifesto, which declared that the everyday activities often relegated to women — cooking, cleaning, changing diapers — were “maintenance art.”
But the movie spans all of Ukeles’ career, looking at her role as the artist-in-residence at the New York City Sanitation Department to her early activism on behalf of Tanzanian independence. The throughline, Ukeles says, has been a belief — rooted in her Jewish identity — that people are more than the roles that society assigns to them.
“As a Jew, I was in love with the notion of freedom,” Ukeles said in an interview. “This message of art as freedom, I felt that’s what I’m about. That’s what I’m for.”
As artist-in-residence, Ukeles plans, stages, and records public works of performance and conceptual art that recognizes the workers of the Sanitation Department. After the piece’s initial staging, photos from the performance might be shown at a museum or gallery.
Despite having been coined New York’s “trash artist” because of her Sanitation Department role, Ukeles does not actually dig in dumpsters or landfills to create her work. But much of her art has mined something else: her Jewish values, as the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi who herself has divided time between New York and Israel.
Some of her pieces have included conceptual and interactive works focusing on Jewish themes and traditions, such as the creation story and the mikvah, or ritual bath.
A 2010 interactive piece “Birthing Tikkun Olam,” for example, invited onlookers to reflect in an installation of glass mirrors, then make a “covenant” to repair the world. Their responses were collected and exchanged for a mirror in the piece, which she staged at the Yeshiva University Museum.
“The site of the art is going to move out into the world, and with it, the acts that you will do,” Ukeles told the university’s newspaper at the time.
Though Ukeles does not consider herself a Jewish artist, because she prefers to avoid being categorized as such, she observes Shabbat — even turning down a stint in the Peace Corps and Friday-night gallery openings to maintain her observance. She lives in Israel, where she advises art students at the Bezalel Academy Academy of Art and Design and attends a “partnership” minyan that aims to widen women’s participation in Orthodox Judaism.
“I have many deep beliefs in great Jewish ideas and commitments,” Ukeles said.
For Freilich, the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors and a descendant of Hasidic dynasties who is herself an observant Jew, Ukeles’ identity was core to why she became so transfixed by the artist that she decided to make a movie about her.
“Her reading of Jewish texts, her reading of Jewish philosophy, of Judaism was profoundly moving to me because it emphasized things like, ‘we’re all created in God’s image’ and and we’re all equally deserving of respect and honor, or that the, the profane is the pathway to the sacred,” Freilich said. “And these are deep, deep kinds of concepts in Judaism that a lot of people aren’t really that familiar with.”
That first piece with DSNY, titled “Touch Sanitation Performance,” spoke to Freilich, who was inspired by a visit to the 2016 retrospective of Ukeles’ work at the Queens Museum.
“I was completely, really blown away,” said Freilich, whose previous documentary works have covered broad swaths of Jewish history, from the partisans of World War II to kibbutz life in Israel.
Ukeles’ works, funded by grants, endowments, fellowships, and commissions, have taken shape in every possible art medium — including performance art and landscape art.
Initially experimenting with paint, she got into trouble while at the Pratt Institute for creating a bulbous multimedia piece with cheesecloth and debris. The school’s administration found it provocative. Her mentor, the abstract expressionist Robert Richenburg, defended Ukeles’ work and ultimately resigned from the school, rather than change his teaching methods at the administration’s request.
“It was a very, very difficult time in my life,” Ukeles said. “I was shocked.”
That controversial piece, titled “Second Binding,” is currently hanging in New York’s Jewish Museum.
Ukeles’ work with the Sanitation Department is perhaps best known for a year-long project from 1979 to 1980, where she sought to shake all 8,500 department workers’ hands. It was documented in a series of photographs.
“They were looked down upon,” Ukeles said. “Not race, not religious, not ethnic, but as a kind of class of maintenance workers and names that people were called.”
Coming up on her 49th year with the New York Sanitation Department, Laderman still has project ideas for the city. She has two projects at Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island — formerly the largest landfill in the world. One of those projects is an ongoing conversion of the landfill into a public park, set to be completed in 2036. The other project is an overlook above the park.
“I now call it ‘intergenerational,’ because it’ll probably take other people to pick it up,” Ukeles said.
“There’s a Jewish source of that notion that the earth is sacred and that we have to redeem the earth when it’s been degraded,” she added. “I don’t know if it will ever finish.”
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