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For one group of friends separated by geography, a single Israel experience builds lifelong bonds
When Ashley Inbar of Portland, Maine, got married in a traditional Jewish ceremony at the Jamaican beach resort of Ocho Rios in early January, there were five very special names on the guest list.
Just half a decade earlier, they were all complete strangers.
But then they met in Israel on an unusual Birthright trip geared toward “older participants” — those ages 27 to 32 — and forged bonds that have only grown over the years. When that 2018 trip drew to a close, six of them resolved to hold annual in-person reunions, despite the vast geographical distances that separate them.
“Pretty much right when we got home, we started planning to meet up somewhere,” said Inbar, who heads fundraising for the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine. “Our first trip was to Denver, then we traveled north to Redstone, Colorado, and stayed for the weekend. As soon as we end one trip, we start planning the next one. We see each other as often as we can, and we talk every day through group chats on Instagram.”
The tight bonds established by the six friends — Inbar, Tim Campbell, Max Staplin, Carly Herbst, Simon Muller and Jared Glassman — are part of the goal of Birthright Israel, which seeks to offer participants a “life-changing experience.”
While forging bonds between Diaspora Jews and Israel is the main purpose of the trips, which are given to participants at no cost to them, the 10-day Birthright experience also aims to strengthen both participants’ Jewish identity and their connection to fellow Jews (including Israelis). Countless long-lasting friendships and romances that started on Birthright have blossomed into marriages and Jewish families.
From Inbar’s group five years ago, the vast majority of participants are still in touch, she said.
“There were 38 of us, and our entire group got along really well,” Inbar said. “We were all at similar places in life, and all of us already had careers. Even today, 95% of us are still connected through social media.”
During the pandemic, when the six couldn’t meet up in person, they held biweekly Zoom chats where they’d talk for hours on end, playing games and discussing the ups and downs of their lives — including engagements, illnesses, deaths of family members and job promotions — as well as their shared memories of their Israel experience.
Ashley Inbar, third from right, with her Birthright friends celebrates her January 6, 2023, wedding on the beach in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. (Courtesy of Ashley Inbar)
The group also stayed in touch with the Israeli security guard, Gal, who escorted them on the trip. Gal video-chats with the group at times of conflict in Israel to share his experiences on the ground — and at other times to practice his English. “He just became an integral part of our collective experience, and I think it was as impactful for him as it was for us,” Inbar said.
Staplin, 36, a franchise attorney in Philadelphia, says the 2018 Birthright trip was one of the best experiences of his life. While the tours to the Dead Sea and Masada were amazing and the vibrancy of Tel Aviv unforgettable, he said, what remains with him most are the friendships he formed during those 10 days.
“We’d stay up till 1 a.m. every night talking. We knew then that we’d be friends for the rest of our lives,” Staplin said. “We decided to have a reunion every year. The first was in New Orleans, then the next year we visited Ashley in Maine. As we were figuring out where to do the next reunion, Ashley got engaged.”
Since 1999, more than 800,000 young Jews from 68 countries have visited Israel on free 10-day trips offered through Birthright, known in Hebrew as Taglit (Discovery). The vast majority were 18 to 26, but from mid-2018 until recently some 13,000 Jews in the 27 to 32 age bracket got to visit Israel as well, according to Noa Bauer, Birthright’s vice president of global marketing.
Now that the pandemic has ended and trips to Israel are back in full force, the organization is seeing its highest demand ever and can’t accommodate all would-be participants without raising additional funds.
“Given the limited spots, we went back to the original age group of 18 to 26,” Bauer said, “though we did allow those who missed out during Covid to participate this past summer as a last chance even if they aged out during the pandemic.”
On Inbar’s trip, the cohort of older Birthright participants included two married couples and several people with children, including her.
Visiting Israel at an older age made all the difference to Glassman, a 36-year-old firefighter in New Orleans. He cited “a much higher maturity level” as one of the advantages of doing Birthright when he did.
“At 18 or 19, I wouldn’t have appreciated it as much,” Glassman said. “Everyone on our group really wanted to be there. In my case, as a young adult, I became much closer to my local Jewish community. I’m a pretty active member of my temple, Touro Synagogue, so when Birthright opened that slot for my age group, it was almost like it was meant to be.”
Staplin said that what really stood out from his experience was the 360-degree view of Israeli life and history that the Birthright trip gave him – not something he could have gotten on a typical vacation.
Six participants of a 2018 Birthright Israel trip gather for their annual reunion in 2022 in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Courtesy of Ashley Inbar)
“The most meaningful part was gaining an understanding of what day-to-day life is like in a country with so much history but still in the middle of so much conflict in present times,” he said. “Watching the people of Tel Aviv just going about their regular work days despite the announcement of the largest rocket attacks in years. Taking a bus ride through the middle of nowhere to Masada and learning about what happened there centuries before America was discovered, and then seeing the daily struggles of the Bedouins the next day. Going from the Western Wall to the Mahane Yehuda Market. Eating schnitzel in a kibbutz and then eating fancy Thai-fusion food at a restaurant in Tel Aviv.”
Herbst was 32 when she went on Birthright. Until then, she said, her travel priorities were to visit countries other than Israel, even though her older brother had gone on Birthright and had a positive experience.
“I wasn’t that interested at the age when you’re supposed to go,” Herbst said. “But our group had a different perspective. We weren’t looking just to get a free trip. Even my Jewish identity was certainly different for me in my 30s than in my 20s.”
Now 37, Herbst works in business development at a New York City tech startup.
“For me, what’s special about Israel is the enduring history of religion, and not only of Judaism,” she said. “Even seeing how strong of a presence Islam and Christianity has there was really fascinating for me. There’s no other place in the world where you see that.”
Muller, 37, grew up outside Rochester, New York, and was supposed to go on Birthright in his mid-20s. But a month before his planned trip, Muller lost his job after the congressional office where he was working in Washington, D.C., suddenly closed. He never got around to rescheduling the Israel trip, and then he aged out.
Nearly six years later, he said, he got an email that Birthright was doing a pilot program for older Jews.
“It was just before my 32nd birthday, I didn’t know anybody else,” Muller recalled. “It was a shot in the dark. I had low expectations.”
The trip turned out to be one of the milestones in his life.
“I found people I really clicked with,” said Muller, now an international trade consultant in Seattle. “We all live in different places and have different interests, but Birthright really bonded us. It’s been a wonderful experience.”
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The post For one group of friends separated by geography, a single Israel experience builds lifelong bonds appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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How Jews made ‘Les Miz’ Christian again
At the end of the 1941 school year, 13-year-old Yitshkok Rudashevski went to meet his friend from the Soviet youth movement. Their confab, and that clear summer day, was soon disturbed by the howl of a siren and the raining down of bombs.
“The street was full of smoke,” Rudashevski wrote in his diary. “It is war.”
On Sunday June 22, Nazis mobilized Operation Barbarossa and began their push toward Vilnius. That Rudashevski was determined to fight back could be credited, at least in part, to the book he had with him at the start of the offensive, which he planned to share with his comrades.
“I carry with me Der Giber in Keytn [The Hero in Chains],” the Yiddish translation of Les Misérables, Rudashevski wrote, “from which we will read together about Gavroche, the child of the Paris proletariat who fell on the barricades alongside the adult fighters.” (Gavroche died in the street fighting of the 1832 June rebellion in Paris; Rudashevski would survive Lithuania’s June uprising, and its ensuing antisemitism, to be murdered by Nazis in the Ponary massacre of 1943.)
It makes sense that Rudashevski, a dedicated Marxist and product of the Lithuanian Yiddish school system, would find a kind of role model in Victor Hugo’s gamin.
That Les Misérables in translation was popular among Yiddish-speaking socialists — it was serialized in the Forverts in our first year of publication — is itself unsurprising, given the book’s preoccupations with social justice. That its ethic was a fundamentally Christian one seemed to matter less than its overall message: a universal concern for “the wretched” and vulnerable, particularly children, women and the formerly incarcerated. This last factor may have resonated deeply with Baderekh, a Yiddish theater troupe composed of displaced persons, who staged the story in 1946 Berlin.
I’ve been reading Les Misérables for about a year now (it’s long and brimming with Hugo’s commentary on post-Napoleonic revolts, essays on the argot of the underworld and digressions on Parisian city-planning) and was successfully influenced to buy a nosebleed seat to the arena tour of the musical at Radio City last Friday. Watching the megawatt melodrama, it occurred to me that in much the same way Jews conquered the Christmas song catalogue, the Jewish creative team behind Les Miz brought Hugo’s doorstopper to the world — and arguably made it more Christian.
Composer Claude-Michel Schönberg, born in France to Hungarian refugee parents who lost much of their family in the Holocaust, and the Tunisian-born Sephardic lyricist Alain Boublil created a concept album and early stage version that was Gallic in the extreme, and so more concerned with Enlightenment concepts than an enlightened human soul.
But when the show was brought to British shores, Boublil, Schönberg and original directors John Caird and Trevor Nunn reimagined the structure, adding a prologue with Valjean and the bishop, who gifts him silver candlesticks to restart his life after 19 years slaving as a convict at the shipyard in Toulon.
The revamp, which brought on journalist Herbert Kretzmer as lyricist, gave the bloodhound Inspector Javert a new solo — beloved by Ben Shapiro — where he connects his unyielding policing to the watchful stars and the God who punished Lucifer for his challenge to the heavenly order.
Valjean prays. A lot. And it ain’t the Shema.
The key innovation of the musical may well be how it sets Valjean and Javert in opposition. Whereas in the novel, Javert seems to have no God save the rigid rule of law, in the show his dogma derives from what its creatives recently, and reductively, referred to in a New York Times interview as an “Old Testament” form of justice. His foil, Valjean, the redeemed man of mercy, stands in for the New Testament’s core of forgiveness, which the show clearly favors.
If it’s odd that the presentation of this false binary was trusted to a Jew named Herbert Kretzmer, it hasn’t seemed to deter many Jews from embracing the show as they once did the novel.
A couple of years ago, I attended a virtual Rosh Hashanah service that used the musical’s final takeaway, “to love another person is to see the face of God,” as its thematic thrust. (It was a bit much for me.) It would make just as much sense — though it would be cringe in the extreme — to deploy the show for a Yom Kippur sermon on atonement.
The Jewish affinity for the material is helped by that Hugo, unlike so many — probably most — of his contemporaries is not marred by antisemitism. He inveighed against pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 1880s, warning in an English paper that “Christianity is martyrizing Judaism” and publishing a not-so-subtle allegory about the Spanish Inquisition to drive the point home. I’d say he was doing the Emile Zola thing before it was cool, but it was never particularly popular to speak out in this way in the French Third Republic.
While Kretzmer was born in South Africa to refugees from a later wave of Tsarist pogroms, he and the other Jewish writers of the Les Miz musical do not seem to have been particularly observant. The strongest hint of the cultural inheritance is in the klezmeresque intro to “Master of the House,” a theme of the penny-pinching innkeeper Thénardier. (If that’s problematic, Thénardier later makes an antisemitic remark when the tune is reprised, implying he’s not Jewish himself.)
The show nonetheless points to universal values legible to Jews and, indeed, the world. Like Fiddler before it, Les Misérables is a global phenomenon not on the merits of its specificity, but for how it draws on a common humanity. The Yiddish left of the 20th century read the book; protesters in Hong Kong and China can now be heard singing the musical’s anthem of angry men.
As Hugo wrote in his introduction to the book, “so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use.”
It may be immodest, but history, and his own adapters, have proven him right.
The post How Jews made ‘Les Miz’ Christian again appeared first on The Forward.
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When a country has gone insane, a ‘psychotic’ Israeli play like this makes total sense
What happens when individuals — and societies — lose their grip on reality, sanity, truth, or all three at once?
Af Mila L’Ima, or “Not a Word to Mother,” a play, running now at Beit Lessin in Tel Aviv, is a window into the mental state of the State of Israel right now. Like much of great Jewish literature, it combines comedy with tragedy.
Written by Noam Gil, and directed by Udi Gottschalk, the play opens with an air-conditioner repairman who finds himself summoned to the home of a woman he does not know. But she hasn’t called him there to fix her air conditioner.
After a few awkward — and very funny — minutes, the lady spits it out: Four days ago, she found out that her husband is having an affair with the air conditioner repairman’s wife.
“No,” he says. “Not my Galya.”
The woman can prove it to him, she says. She asks the repairman to hide, lie in wait for the two philanderers —and then attack her cheating husband with a rolling pin.
“No,” the repairman says, but soon a car is in the driveway, and the woman and the repairman dive behind the curtains.
It’s not who they think it is. Corinne, the woman’s teenage daughter, arrives with her crush, Nadav. The girl proceeds to discuss her mother in uncharitable terms. “I would kill myself if I turned out like her,” the girl says.
After a few minutes, another car arrives in the driveway.
This time it is the woman’s husband and the repairman’s wife, and they’re all over each other.
Just as they rip each other’s clothes off on the coffee table, the teenage daughter, dressed in her Scouts uniform, opens a door, and sees it all.
The repairman and the woman from the first scene emerge from their hiding places.
The horrified and traumatized teenage daughter has filmed the coffeetable make-out scene on her phone. And worse, she recognizes her father’s mistress; it’s her high school teacher.
The teenage daughter threatens to put the video up on TikTok. The adults panic. The situation spirals out of control; after catching his wife in the act, the seemingly peaceful repairman bloodies the nose of the woman’s husband. And Nadav, who can’t leave the apartment because no one will give him the keys — in Israel you need keys to leave the house —loses it.
“P’sichi! P’sichi! P’sichi! P’sichi! P’sichi, ” he yells. Psichi means “psychotic” or “crazy” in contemporary Israeli slang.
But this play is not just about one family’s petty, “psychotic” mess; these characters are each a type of mess in which the audience might recognize themselves: a philandering bal t’shuvah husband, talking big to his mistress about opening up new restaurants when he’s really bankrupt; a woman who has convinced herself she deserves a man with gigantic ambitions; a self-sacrificing, middle-aged mother who has given up on her own dream of writing a play to care for her husband and children; a teenage girl who claims to hate her own mother. Each character is trying to find a way of surviving this mess.
“When you live in a place that is psychotic, everything is normal,” one character observes. The entire audience laughed knowingly.
This line gains resonance as the play zooms out from the “psychotic” behavior of the four adults and the two teenagers to take a look at the place they are all living in: Israel.
In a chaotic household in a chaotic country, the characters look to Jewish tradition to try to stabilize themselves. “Ridfu shalom,” the air conditioner repairman keeps telling the screaming spouses around him, riffing off Psalms 34:15. “Pursue peace.”
But can you always pursue peace?
This play acknowledges that in some situations, that’s not possible. In that way, it looks straight at the belief of many Israelis that now, after everything — the Oslo Accords, the Second Intifada, the withdrawal from Gaza, and finally Oct. 7 — the two-state solution may simply not be something that can be pursued.
And maybe that’s why everyone has gone psychotic, and why so many theatergoers packed the house, to laugh in a time of tragedy — and, to use an American idiom, to “feel seen.”
As I was writing this in a Tel Aviv coffee shop, a young man came over and asked if he could ask me something. I said sure, expecting to be asked for money.
But he sat down and said he was a lochem, a fighter, and was just released, and needed to talk with somebody. Would I be willing to speak with him for a few minutes?
I said of course.
He wanted to be heard. He said his name was Tom, he was the second of six children and hoped to study business administration. We talked about where we grew up, how being a second kid feels like being inside a sandwich, and the difference between a mandatory draft in Israel and selective service in the US. And then he apologized. He said he had to keep walking to stay calm.
If he were to walk over to the Beit Lessin theater, he would find the benches on Dizengoff Street covered with bumper stickers memorializing young men lost in battle. Not far away, there is a fountain that memorializes those killed on Oct. 7. But these memorials do not provide answers. What’s sanity? What’s insanity? What’s “p’sichi” and what’s just a normal reaction to pain?
There are no easy answers. I waved to Tom as he walked on.
The post When a country has gone insane, a ‘psychotic’ Israeli play like this makes total sense appeared first on The Forward.
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It’s not just Harvard and Columbia. Small liberal arts colleges are quietly settling antisemitism complaints.
As major universities across the U.S. strike deals with the Trump administration over antisemitism complaints, a handful of small liberal arts colleges have been quietly settling cases of their own.
In the past week, Oregon’s Reed College and Pennsylvania’s Haverford College have both settled complaints accusing them of failing to protect Jewish students in the wake of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war. Pomona and Occidental Colleges, both in southern California, settled complaints in late 2024 and 2025, respectively.
At least nine other small liberal arts colleges — which unlike universities mainly focus on undergraduate and interdisciplinary education over research — are still locked in disputes.
These include Sarah Lawrence and Union in New York; Swarthmore and Lehigh in Pennsylvania; Middlebury in Vermont; Whitman in Washington; Wellesley and Williams in Massachusetts; and Scripps in California.
All colleges declined the Forward’s requests for comment.
“Institutions are failing to effectively respond to anti-Zionist conduct targeting Jews, as they’re legally obligated to do,” said Denise Katz-Prober, special counsel of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a non-profit dedicated to advancing the civil rights of the Jewish people. “Most, if not all, of the measures that would apply to a larger institution also apply to a small liberal arts school.”
In most cases, Jewish legal advocacy organizations such as the Brandeis Center, the Anti-Defamation League, or StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice (SCLJ) have leveled the accusations by filing complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
Jews at Haverford, a group of Jewish students, faculty, parents and alumni of the Pennsylvania school, opted for a different tactic, filing a civil lawsuit against the college.
The Trump administration launched investigations of 60 colleges and universities, including small liberal arts colleges. But it has not taken the same drastic measures with them as it did with larger universities, where it used federal funding as leverage. While some schools agreed to the federal government’s demands and reached multi-million dollar financial settlements, others like Harvard did not, and were subsequently hit with lawsuits. A judge dismissed the lawsuit against Harvard on Thursday.
Most complaints have been filed under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and allege that colleges didn’t take sufficient action when Jewish students complained they were discriminated against. The complaint against Reed College alleged that the school’s inaction after a student claimed she was harassed for being a Zionist created an environment where, soon after, the mezuzah on her doorframe was destroyed and a rock was thrown at her through her dorm window.
At Lehigh, a Jewish student’s mezuzah was stolen, according to the complaint, and, shortly after, a “Stand With Palestine” sticker was placed outside the same door. Lehigh police conducted and closed a brief investigation, the complaint says, but when the student identified who admitted to placing the sticker, the college declined to discipline them or increase security surveillance in the dormitory. Because of this, the complaint says, the Jewish student requested alternative housing for his own safety.
“This is outrageous and blatantly unequal treatment,” reads the complaint, filed by StandWithUs.
The lawsuit against Haverford accuses the school of being too permissive with pro-Palestinian protesters, who occupied the school’s main administrative building in December 2023. According to the suit, protesters would perform chants “quoting from the Hamas Charter,” which calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews. The suit also accused the president of saying she would take “no punitive action” against the protesters.
At Wellesley, a student resident assistant sent an email to the underclassmen in her dorm saying, “there should be no space, no consideration, and no support for Zionism within the Wellesley College community,” according to the complaint filed by the Brandeis Center.
The RA sent an apology letter to residents, according to the complaint, but soon after posted on her social media that she stood by her statement, sent the apology because she “had a gun to [her] head,” and called students who objected to her message “some weak bitches fr.” The Title VI complaint against Wellesley alleges that the school didn’t do enough to address this issue.
As part of their settlements, Reed, Pomona and Occidental agreed to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism. The schools also agreed to include education to fight antisemitism in their bias training, and to strengthen the rules for campus demonstrations with regard to time, place and manner.
Haverford also agreed to adopt the IHRA definition, which states that claiming Israel’s existence is a “racist endeavor” or comparing “contemporary Israel policy to that of the Nazis” can be antisemitic.
Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at the University of Pennsylvania and an advocate for free speech on college campuses, fears that adopting this definition will stifle that freedom.
“I’m Jewish, and anti-Zionist rhetoric is hard for me to hear,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “But that’s why I should hear it. Zionism is probably the most contested question on our campuses right now. Unless everyone can address it freely and openly we’ll never get a good purchase on it.”
Katz-Prober of the Brandeis Center said the IHRA definition does not restrict or censor speech.
“The IHRA definition specifically and explicitly states that criticism leveled against Israel, similar to that leveled against any other country, is not antisemitism, and also requires context,” she said.
“Antisemitism cannot be effectively addressed without first being able to understand and recognize it and the IHRA definition is the most effective and widely accepted tool for doing just that.”
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