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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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Brad Lander detained by Israeli police in the West Bank while helping Palestinians harvest; dozens of rabbis and activists arrested
Dozens of Israeli and international activists, including U.S. congressional candidate Brad Lander, were detained by Israeli authorities in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday morning while accompanying Palestinian farmers harvesting olives. After Landers was released, the Israeli activists were later placed under arrest, and the foreign citizens were reported to be awaiting interrogation.
The delegation was hours into their work when they were told they were unlawfully inside a closed military zone, according to Anton Goodman, acting CEO of Rabbis for Human Rights. Authorities detained the group even after he agreed they would leave immediately, he said.
Goodman told the Forward that 42 Israeli members of his delegation and another 28 foreign citizens were being held at the police station in nearby Beitar Illit.
“Those of us with Israeli citizenship are being detained outside of the police station,” Goodman said by phone while he was detained. “The foreign passport holders have been separated from us, and I have been told by a senior security officer that they will be interrogated by Army personnel.”
Shorty after speaking to Goodman, Tamar Glezerman, an activist from New York who holds Israeli citizenship, informed the Forward that the detainment had been converted to arrests “because you cannot detain people for more than three hours.” Glezerman also said the foreign citizens had been taken to a military base for interrogation.
According to Goodman, the delegation was helping Palestinians who have faced severe restrictions on access to their land since Oct. 7, 2023, when authorities informed the group that the area had been declared a closed military zone.
“There is no possible way we could have known that this morning,” Goodman said. “And even so, I told them we would respect the decision and leave immediately.
“But that was not good enough for them,” he continued. “I was informed that the entire group was being detained for ‘identification purposes.’”
At the time of the interview, Goodman said, only Lander had been released. The others remained detained, including a Palestinian woman whose family owned the olive grove where the harvest took place. Lander, a progressive Democrat running for Congress this year, has been vocal in his criticism of both settler violence and Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, also confirmed that she and dozens of other Americans, along with Canadian and British citizens, had been detained, their passports confiscated. They were being taken by bus to the same police station, she said at the time.
“There is a Jewish principle of accompaniment of those in danger,” Jacobs told the Forward. “We were living that out, in contrast to the settlers who justify stealing olives and carrying out violent acts contrary to Jewish law.”
Despite the uncertainty over what would happen to her delegation, Jacobs said they remained in good spirits.
“We are currently on the bus saying divrei Torah and singing niggunim and religious songs,” she said, referring to Torah teachings and wordless melodies.
“It is a sad comment on the current state of Jewish affairs that they are arresting rabbis picking olives, and not the settlers who steal them, poison trees, and violently attack human beings,” Jacobs added.
The detentions follow an especially brutal week in an already escalating wave of settler violence in the West Bank. On Friday, settlers severely beat Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine while she covered the olive harvest in Abu Falah, leaving her with fractured vertebrae and a broken rib. The following day, settlers attacked a delegation of European diplomats and other visitors near Taybeh. Palestinian residents have also faced repeated assaults, with dozens reported injured, several seriously.
Goodman called the mass detention “insane,” criticizing both its scale and the deployment of security forces against volunteers.
“This is the largest mass detainment we have ever seen,” he said. “But it’s not just that. All across the West Bank we have seen a complete deterioration of the rule of law as settler terrorists rampage through Palestinian villages with little consequence or deterrent. Now you have a completely peaceful delegation who are only here to help with the olive harvest and 100 security personnel are dispatched to detain them?
“What a complete and utter waste of public resources.”
The post Brad Lander detained by Israeli police in the West Bank while helping Palestinians harvest; dozens of rabbis and activists arrested appeared first on The Forward.
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Christiane Amanpour exits CNN with a legacy shaped by the debate over Israel
(JTA) — Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international anchor, is leaving the network after 43 years, closing a chapter in a career that made her one of television journalism’s most celebrated war correspondents — and one of its most controversial figures among Jewish and pro-Israel viewers.
For many viewers, Amanpour’s legacy is that of a fearless correspondent who brought the human costs of war into American living rooms, from the first Gulf War to Bosnia, Rwanda and Ukraine.
But her coverage of Israel and the Palestinians has long drawn sharp criticism from some Jewish viewers, who accused her of giving insufficient weight to Israeli security concerns, mischaracterizing events and disproportionately presenting Israeli religious nationalism in an especially unflattering light.
Amanpour, 68, announced Monday that she will wind down her daily CNN International program early next year, conclude its weekly successor in May and leave the network in June 2027. Her PBS program, “Amanpour & Company,” will end at the close of this year. However, she will continue her podcast, “The Ex Files,” with her ex-husband, Jamie Rubin, a former State Department official.
Amanpour did not give a specific reason for her departure, which comes as CNN enters a new era under Paramount Skydance ownership.
“Always be truthful, not neutral,” Amanpour wrote in her farewell message, summing up a philosophy that has animated her reporting — and helped make her a polarizing figure.
Amanpour’s admirers would argue that the same qualities that make her coverage uncomfortable for some Jewish viewers — skepticism toward official accounts, attention to civilian suffering and willingness to challenge powerful governments — are essential to journalism.
When the National Press Foundation honored her in 2025 with its Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism, its judges called her “a gold standard for international broadcast journalism” and praised her tough questioning of world leaders. The Committee to Protect Journalists, which honored her in 2016, likewise celebrated her commitment to press freedom.
Amanpour, who was raised in Iran and England by her Iranian Muslim father and British Roman Catholic mother, joined CNN in 1983 as a desk assistant and rose through the ranks to become one of its most prominent correspondents. Her reporting from the Bosnian war in the 1990s helped establish her reputation for confronting officials and challenging the language governments use to justify military action.
Some of the sharpest criticism of her work came in 2007, when Amanpour hosted “God’s Jewish Warriors,” the opening installment of a three-part CNN documentary series examining the role of religion in politics and conflict.
Andrea Levin, president of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA, condemned the program as a biased portrayal of Jewish religious life and Israeli settlers. A 2010 Jewish Telegraphic Agency commentary revisited the controversy, with Ron Kampeas noting that “the only explicitly religious people she interviewed were ultranationalist settlers,” and that Amanpour ignored religious Jews who opposed the settlements.
Kampeas also said the program’s treatment of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington exaggerated the power of groups like AIPAC and downplayed the shared strategic and moral imperatives that drove the U.S.-Israel alliance.
“God’s Jewish Warriors” became Exhibit A in the case against Amanpour’s work. Legitimate criticism of Israeli policy, her detractors asserted, was framed in a way that left Jewish viewers feeling that Jewish religious identity, political advocacy or national aspirations were inherently suspect.
Reporting from Lebanon during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Amanpour was part of a CNN team whose work rekindled a longstanding debate over how journalists should cover conflicts in which a state military fights an armed group embedded in civilian areas.
Even as Amanpour at times acknowledged the difficulty of covering such “asymmetrical warfare,” Israeli officials and supporters argued at the time that images of destruction and civilian suffering in Lebanon obscured Hezbollah’s role in initiating and sustaining the conflict. Those objections anticipated similar complaints, aimed at CNN and other outlets, over coverage of Israel’s devastating war in Gaza after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
Critics have continued to document what they see as a pattern. CAMERA has maintained a collection of complaints about Amanpour’s reporting, while HonestReporting, another pro-Israel media-monitoring organization, has accused her of repeated anti-Israel distortions.
Although both organizations have a clear advocacy perspective, they often provide specific examples of errors, and often extract corrections.
One example came in April 2023, when Amanpour described the killing of Israeli Lucy Dee and her daughters Maia and Rina in a Hamas-linked West Bank terrorist attack as a “shootout.” The women were driving on a highway when Palestinian gunmen opened fire on their vehicle. Amanpour subsequently apologized on air for her inaccurate characterization.
In 2024, Amanpour also drew criticism for a social media post about Marwan Barghouti, the imprisoned Palestinian political leader convicted by an Israeli court of involvement in deadly attacks. “To many Israelis, he’s a terrorist. To many Palestinians, he’s their Mandela,” she wrote.
The comparison accurately captured Barghouti’s sharply different reputations among Israelis and Palestinians, but critics argued that it risked reducing the gravity of the attacks for which he was convicted.
Complaints about CNN’s Gaza coverage gained a striking new dimension in February 2024, when Amanpour reportedly joined CNN colleagues in accusing the network of a pro-Israel bias in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
According to reporting by The Intercept and The Guardian, journalists at an internal CNN meeting raised concerns that the network’s editorial procedures were favoring official Israeli narratives and making it harder to convey Palestinian perspectives. CNN’s process required coverage of the conflict to pass through its Jerusalem bureau; Amanpour was heard on tape saying that the process led to “changing copy, double standards, and all the rest.”
At the same time, some pro-Israel viewers saw CNN and Amanpour as too willing to accept Palestinian claims and too quick to foreground Gaza’s devastation.
In response to the reports, CNN defended its coverage of the conflict. “We remain absolutely committed to reporting all sides of this immensely challenging, complex and emotive story,” it said in a statement. “We absolutely reject the notion that any of our journalists treat Israeli officials differently to other officials.”
Amanpour again apologized on air in October 2025 for having said that surviving Israeli hostages released from Hamas captivity were “probably being treated better than the average Gazan, because they are the pawns and the chips that Hamas had.” Following backlash from political figures and organizations, Amanpour retracted the statement, calling her remarks “insensitive and wrong.”
Last month, in a rare long-form interview about her career with the podcaster Sam Fragoso, Amanpour discussed CNN’s coverage of the Gaza war. In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, she said, the network was “practically wall to wall with horrendous stories from the victims in Israel. I mean, just horrendous.”
But as Israel’s military response ground on, “the story flipped,” she said. “As the destruction of Gaza took place and the bodies piled up, most particularly the women and the children, the tone of the coverage reflected the reality.” At the February 2024 meeting with CNN executives, she said, her colleagues expressed frustration that the network took too long to cover the Palestinian side.
In the same interview, Amanpour also walked back an apology she made in 2020 — not about CNN’s Mideast coverage, but for a commentary on the 82nd anniversary of the Kristallnacht attacks. In that segment, she juxtaposed the Nazis’ anti-Jewish pogrom with what she called President Donald Trump’s “attacks on history, facts, knowledge and truth.” After Jewish groups, including the American Jewish Committee, complained that she had “instrumentalized” the Holocaust with a faulty comparison, Amanpour said on air that she regretted any pain her statement may have caused.
Speaking last month with Fragoso, Amanpour said that she stands by her assertion that Kristallnacht demonstrated how quickly “democratic values can slowly slip away.” She also suggested that her employers had bowed to outside pressure and instructed her to apologize.
“There were people, you know, in various communities in regard of this,” she said, referring to her critics, “who decided that I need to be slapped around and pull[ed] down a peg. But I think that’s just because some people are afraid of the truth.”
Amanpour’s departure comes at a moment of uncertainty about CNN’s future under its new corporate owner. Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company, has raised concerns among journalists about political influence and editorial independence, particularly given new owner David Ellison’s ties to Trump and the changes he has overseen at CBS News.
Amanpour herself expressed concern in May about what she called an “ideological realignment” at CBS News under its new leadership. “So clearly, obviously, I’m concerned,” she said, speaking at an investigative journalism conference in London. “I would like to think that we would have the very basic, which is editorial independence. I’m hoping for that. I know many of us at CNN are incredibly — including leadership — are very, very committed to that, clearly.”
For some Jewish and pro-Israel observers, however, the same changes have raised hopes that CNN’s coverage of Israel might become more favorable. Bari Weiss, who became CBS News editor in chief after Paramount acquired her strongly pro-Israel publication, The Free Press, has long argued that mainstream news organizations have mishandled Israel and antisemitism.
Amanpour didn’t mention the merger in her announcement. But she noted how her background shaped her perspective.
“Because of my upbringing — I’m half-Iranian and half-British — I’ve had the great privilege of being able to see the world from two very distinct perspectives,” she said. “I’ve always spoken out about the need to bridge gaps. I know we can live in a world that’s not 100% tribalized.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Christiane Amanpour exits CNN with a legacy shaped by the debate over Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Former Edmonton journalist admits to vandalizing monuments of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators
(JTA) —
EDMONTON, Canada – Duncan Kinney, a former journalist with the left-wing website Progress Report, pleaded guilty to criminal mischief on Monday, four years after he was arrested for vandalizing monuments to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in Edmonton, Alberta.
Monday’s guilty plea was an anticlimactic not-quite-end to a case that appeared to be run-of-the-mill vandalism but was so culturally charged that it drew the attention of everyone from the Premier of Alberta to Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto.
In 2021, Kinney broke the news story that someone had spray-painted “Actual Nazi” on a bust erected to honor WWII military commander and Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevych and then painted “Nazi Monument” and “14th Waffen SS” on a memorial to the SS Galizien, a Ukrainian military unit that was part of the Nazi Party’s military wing.
According to court documents, Kinney was caught on a security camera spray-painting the Shukhevych monument shortly after midnight on Aug. 10, 2021, and caught again eight hours later photographing his handiwork. He then sent an email to the staff of the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex, where the monument was located, explaining that Progress Report had received photos of the defaced monument. The brief email concluded with “Do you have any statement or information on this matter? Was Roman Shukhevych a Nazi or Nazi collaborator? Our deadline is 3:15 pm. Thank you.”
Kinney initially pleaded not guilty to one count each of criminal mischief and mischief relating to a war memorial. He suggested he’d been targeted because he was critical of the Edmonton Police Service and alleged that they were trying to silence him.
He is due to be sentenced Jan. 25, 2027, at which time the crown prosecutor is expected to drop the more serious charge of defacing a war memorial, which carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
Neither Kinney nor his defense attorney, Tom Engel, would comment after the court appearance. However, the board of Progress Report issued a statement decrying its former employee’s actions, calling committing a crime and reporting that somebody else did it “a cardinal breach of journalistic ethics and not acceptable behavior within any media organization. Mr. Kinney has always maintained his innocence in this matter and we trusted him; today’s news was an unpleasant surprise for us.”
Ultimately, the case exposed deep divisions in the Ukrainian diaspora about the role that Ukraine played in the Holocaust.
Shukhevych was a leader in both the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). He was also an officer in a Third Reich auxiliary battalion. During World War II, he commanded troops that murdered Jews, Polish civilians, other national minorities, communists and his countrymen from Ukraine. And he helped marshal the fight for Ukrainian independence from the Soviets.
The monument to the SS Galizien is located at St. Michael’s Cemetery, less than two miles from the complex housing the Shukhevych bust. Among the unit’s members was Yaroslav Hunka, who, at age 98, received two standing ovations for his service in WWII and fighting for Ukrainian independence when he appeared in the House of Commons alongside visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in September 2023.
Nobody in Parliament, it seemed, was aware of Hunka’s Nazi past. When the news became public, the incident became a national embarrassment. At least temporarily, the country was forced to examine how it dealt with WWII war criminals.
In Edmonton, however, the blunder appeared to have no impact on Kinney’s case. For his alleged vandalism to the SS Galizien monument, he had been charged not with simple mischief, but with vandalizing a war monument.
“We do not consider a statue honoring a Nazi to be a war monument,” says Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, senior director of policy and advocacy at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto. “When we talk about veterans’ monuments, we are talking about Canada’s veterans. We are not talking about Nazi veterans.”
Kirzner-Roberts’ organization, B’nai Brith Canada and the Jewish Federation of Edmonton, as well as local politicians and academics, have been asking for years for the monuments to be removed.
“I think that in the case of the Shukhevych monument, you shouldn’t put up monuments to people responsible for mass murder,” says John-Paul Himka, a University of Alberta professor emeritus of history, whose 2021 book “Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust” examines the role that the OUN and UPA had in destroying Ukraine’s Jewish population during WWII.
“As for the Waffen-SS memorial, Austria has also been trying to get rid of their Waffen-SS memorials and it’s an issue around the world, really, how much you want to put up memorials to SS men or to people who collaborated with the Nazi state.”
Less than six months after the Hunka debacle in Parliament, the monument to the SS Galizien at the St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery in Oakville, Ontario, was permanently removed. Himka doesn’t see anything like that happening in Edmonton, a city with the largest population of people with Ukrainian descent in a country with one of the largest populations of people with Ukrainian descent outside of Ukraine.
“The diaspora community doesn’t want to hear about this,” he says. “They don’t want to confront the history, and nobody is telling them otherwise really.”
The courtroom, though, did host one such confrontation. At the conclusion of Kinney’s appearance, two women who appeared to be in their 40s and who had spent the half-hour proceedings knitting, engaged in a conversation with two men who appeared to be at least twice their age and were sitting across the aisle.
The discussion started innocently enough, with inquiries as to what brought each of them to the courtroom. When the women said that Shukhevych was a Nazi who had killed thousands of innocent people, the temperature heated up.
When the women insisted, the men all but rolled their eyes. “That’s Russian propaganda,” they scoffed, then got up and marched together out of the courtroom.
The post Former Edmonton journalist admits to vandalizing monuments of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators appeared first on The Forward.
