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From ‘how to’ to ‘why bother?’: Michael Strassfeld writes a new guide to being Jewish
(JTA) — “What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.” That’s known as Hansen’s Law, named for the historian Marcus Lee Hansen, who observed that while the children of immigrants tend to run away from their ethnicity in order to join the mainstream, the third generation often wants to learn the “old ways” of their grandparents.
In 1973, “The Jewish Catalog” turned Hansen’s Law into a “do-it-yourself kit” for young Jews who wanted to practice the traditions of their grandparents but weren’t exactly sure how. Imagine “The Joy of Cooking,” but instead of recipes the guide to Jewish living had friendly instructions for hosting Shabbat, building a sukkah and taking part in Jewish rituals from birth to death. Co-edited by Michael Strassfeld, Sharon Strassfeld and the late Richard Siegel, it went on to sell 300,000 copies and remains in print today.
Fifty years later, Rabbi Michael Strassfeld has written a new book that he calls a “bookend” to “The Jewish Catalog.” If the first book is a Jewish “how to,” the latest asks, he says, “why bother?” “Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century” asserts that an open society and egalitarian ethics leave most Jews skeptical of the rituals and beliefs of Jewish tradition. In the face of this resistance, he argues that the purpose of Judaism is not obedience to Torah and its rituals for their own sake or mere “continuity,” but to “encourage and remind us to strive to live a life of compassion, loving relationships, and devotion to our ideals.”
Strassfeld, 73, grew up in an Orthodox home in Boston and got his master’s degree in Jewish studies at Brandeis University. Coming to doubt the “faith claims” of Orthodoxy, he became a regular at nearby Havurat Shalom, an “intentional community” that pioneered the havurah movement’s liberal, hands-on approach to traditional practice. He earned rabbinical ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College when he was 41 and went on to serve as the rabbi of Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side and later the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the Manhattan flagship of Reconstructionist Judaism.
“To be disrupted is to experience a break with the past and simultaneously reconnect in a new way to that past,” writes Strassfeld, who retired from the pulpit in 2015. This week, we spoke about why people might find Jewish ritual empty, how he thinks Jewish practices can enrich their lives and how Passover — which begins Wednesday night — could be the key to unlocking the central idea of Judaism.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: I wanted to start with the 50th anniversary of the “Jewish Catalog.” What connects the new book with the work you did back then on the “Catalog,” which was a do-it-yourself guide for Jews who were trying to reclaim the stuff they either did or didn’t learn in Hebrew school?
Michael Strassfeld: I see them as bookends. Basically, I keep on writing the same book over and over again. [Laughs] Except no, I’m different and the world is different. I’m always trying to make Judaism accessible to people. In the “Catalog” I was providing the resources on how to live a Jewish life when the resources weren’t easily accessible.
The new book is less about “how to” than “why bother?” That’s the challenge. I think a lot of people take pride in being Jewish, but it’s a small part of their identity because it doesn’t feel relevant. I want to say to people like that that Judaism is about living a life with meaning and purpose. It’s not about doing what I call the “Jewishly Jewish” things, like keeping kosher and going to synagogue. Judaism is wisdom and practices to live life with meaning and purpose. The purpose of Judaism isn’t to be a good Jew, despite all the surveys that give you 10 points for, you know, lighting Shabbat candles. It’s about being a good person.
So that brings up your relationship to the commandments and mitzvot, the traditional acts and behaviors that an Orthodox Jew or a committed Conservative Jew feels commanded to do, from prayer to keeping kosher to observing the Sabbath and the holidays. They might argue that doing these things is what makes you Jewish, but you’re arguing something different. If someone doesn’t feel bound by these obligations, why do them at all?
I don’t have the faith or beliefs that underlie such an attitude [of obligation]. Halacha, or Jewish law, is not in reality law. It’s really unlike American law where you know that if you’re violating it, you could be prosecuted. What I’m trying to do in the book is reframe rituals as an awareness practice, that is, bringing awareness to various aspects of our lives. So it could be paying attention to food, or cultivating attitudes of gratitude, or generosity, or satisfaction. My broad understanding of the festival cycle, for example, is that you can focus on those attitudes all year long, but the festivals provide a period of time once in the year to really focus on, in the case of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, for example, saying sorry and repairing relationships.
In “Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century,” Michael Strassfeld argues that the challenge of each generation’s Jews is to create the Judaism that is needed in their time. (Ben Yehuda Press)
Passover is coming. Probably no holiday asks its practitioners to do so much stuff in preparation, from cleaning the house of every trace of unleavened food to hosting, in many homes, two different catered seminars on Jewish history. Describe how Passover cultivates awareness, especially of the idea of freedom, which plays an important part thematically in your boo
The Sefat Emet [a 19th-century Hasidic master] says Torah is all about one thing: freedom. But there’s a variety of obstacles in the way. There are temptations. There’s the inner issues that you struggle with, and the bad things that are out of your control. The Sefat Emet says the 613 commandments are 613 etzot, or advice, that teach us how to live a life of freedom. The focus of Passover is trying to free yourself from the chains of the things that hold you back from being the person that you could be, not getting caught up in materiality or envy, free from unnecessary anxieties — all these things that distract us or keep us from being who we could be.
The Passover seder is one of the great rituals of Judaism. We’re trying to do a very ambitious thing by saying, not, like, “let’s remember when our ancestors were freed from Egypt,” but rather that we were slaves in Egypt and we went free. And at the seder we actually ingest that. We experience the bitterness by eating maror, the bitter herb. We experience the freedom by drinking wine. We don’t want it just to be an intellectual exercise.
Unfortunately the seder has become rote. But Passover is about this huge theme of freedom that is central to Judaism.
I think some people bristle against ritual because they find it empty. But you’re saying there’s another way to approach rituals which is to think of them as tools or instruments that can help you focus on core principles — you actually list 11 — which include finding holiness everywhere, caring for the planet and engaging in social justice, to name a few. But that invites the criticism, which I think was also leveled at the “Catalog,” that Judaism shouldn’t be instrumental, because if you treat it as a means to an end that’s self-serving and individualistic.
Certainly rituals are tools, but tools in the best sense of the word. They help us pay attention to things in our lives and things in the world that need repair. And people use them not to get ahead in the world, but because they want to be a somewhat better person. I talk a lot these days about having a brief morning practice, and in the book I write about the mezuzah. For most Jews it’s become wallpaper, but what if you take the moment that you leave in the morning, and there’s a transition from home to the outside and to work perhaps, and take a moment at the doorpost to spiritually frame your day? What are the major principles that you want to keep in your mind when you know you’re gonna be stuck in traffic or a difficult meeting?
And a lot of traditional rituals are instrumental. Saying a blessing before you eat is a gratitude practice.
But why do I need a particular Jewish ritual or practice to help me feel gratitude or order my day? Aren’t there other traditions I can use to accomplish the same things?
Anybody who is a pluralist, which I am, knows that the Jewish way is not the only way. If I grew up in India or Indonesia and my parents were locals I probably wouldn’t be a rabbi and writing these books.
But a partial answer to your question is that Judaism is one of the oldest wisdom traditions in the world, and that there has been a 3,000-year conversation by the Jewish people about what it means to live in this tradition and to live in the world. And so I think there’s a lot of wisdom there.
So much in Jewish tradition says boundaries are good, and that it’s important to draw distinctions between what’s Jewish behavior and what’s not Jewish behavior, between the holy and the mundane, and that making those distinctions is a value in itself. But you argue strongly in an early chapter that that kind of binary thinking is not Judaism as you see it.
Underlying the book is the notion that Rabbinic Judaism carried the Jewish people for 2,000 years or so. But we’re living in a very different context, and the binaries, the dualities — too often they lead to hierarchy, so that, for example, men matter more than women in Jewish life. And we’ve tried to change that. We are living in an open society where we want to be more inclusive, not less inclusive. We don’t want to live in ghettos. Now, the ultra-Orthodox say, “No, we realize the danger of trying to live like that. We don’t think there’s anything of value in that modern world. And it’s all to be rejected.” And it would be foolish not to admit that in this very open world the Jews, as a minority, could kind of disappear. But I think that Judaism has so much value and wisdom and practices to offer to people that Judaism will continue to be part of the fabric of this world — the way, for example, we have given Shabbat as a concept to the world.
You know, in the first 11 chapters of the Torah, there are no Jews. So clearly, Jews and Judaism are not essential for the world to exist. And that’s a good, humbling message.
OK, but one could argue that while Jews aren’t necessary for the world to exist, Judaism is necessary for Jews to exist. And you write in your book, “If the Jewish people is to be a people, we need to have a commonly held tradition.” I think the pushback to the kind of openness and permeability you describe is that Jews can be so open and so permeable that they just fall through the holes.
It certainly is a possibility. And it’s also a possibility that the only Jews who will be around will be ultra-Orthodox Jews.
But if Judaism can only survive by being separatist, then I question whether it’s really worthwhile. That becomes a distorted vision of Judaism, and withdrawing is not what it’s meant to be. I think we’re meant to be in the world.
Your book is called “Judaism Disrupted.” What is disruptive about the Judaism that you’re proposing?
I meant it in two ways. First, Judaism is being disrupted by this very different world we’re living in. The contents of the ocean we swim in is very different than in the Middle Ages. But I’m also using it to say that Judaism is meant to disrupt our lives in a positive way, which is to say, “Wake up, pay attention.” You are here to live a life of meaning and purpose, and to continue as co-creators with God of the universe. You’re here to make the world better, to be kind and compassionate to people, to work on yourself. In my mind it is a shofar, “Wake up, sleepers, from your sleep!” “Judaism Disrupted” says you have to pay attention to issues like food, and justice, and teshuva [repentance].
You were ordained as a Reconstructionist rabbi. Do you think your book falls neatly into any of our current denominational categories?
[Reconstructionist founder] Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s notion of Judaism as an evolving religious civilization is the one that I feel closest to. But I feel that the denominational structure isn’t particularly useful anymore. There’s basically two categories, Orthodox and the various kinds of liberal Judaism, within a spectrum. The modern world is so fundamentally different in its relationship to Jews and Judaism that what we’re seeing is a variety of attempts to figure out how to respond. And that will then become the Judaism for the next millennium. It’s time for a lot of experimentation. I think that’s required and out of that will come a new “Minhag America,” to use Isaac Mayer Wise’s phrase for the emerging custom of American Jews [Wise was a Reform rabbi in the late 19th century]. And we don’t need to have everybody doing it one way. As long as people feel committed to Judaism, the Jewish tradition, even if they’re doing it very differently than the Jews of the past, they will be writing themselves into the conversation.
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A ‘deficit of courage’ killed the free press in Germany. Will American journalists find the courage to thwart Trump?
Paul Reusch was managing director of a major German industrial conglomerate known as GHH, whose holdings included Bavaria’s largest newspaper, the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten.
After two meetings with Adolf Hitler early in 1932, Reusch signed an agreement that the Munich broadsheet would refrain from “all unwarranted and personal attacks against Hitler and individual National Socialist leaders.”
One year later, Hitler lackeys were calling the shots in the newsroom, Jewish journalists had been forced out, and the newspaper was spewing hate propaganda.
The Third Reich brutally smashed free speech. Nearly a century later, it’s America’s Fourth Estate that is getting battered — by Donald Trump’s drive to muzzle his critics by exploiting the greed and hunger for power of corporate media executives.
Scott Pelley’s firing and the turmoil at CBS News are the freshest manifestations of this threat. But it’s been going on since the start of Trump’s second term — witness the craven settlements by ABC News and CBS News of frivolous lawsuits brought by Trump last year, his favored treatment of MAGA-aligned outlets, and his dehumanization of actual journalists.
“The news executives are acting as though, (if) we just placate Donald Trump we’ll get through this,” veteran TV journalist Jim Acosta said the other day in an interview on MS Now. “We have a deficit of courage and honor in this country right now and we need to get back to it.”
It was a deficit of courage that killed the free press in Weimar Germany. And like Paul Reusch, German media baron Alfred Hugenberg is a case study in corporate submission to authoritarianism.
Hugenberg was a steel executive, ultra-nationalist politician, and owner of some 50 provincial newspapers, of the Telegraph-Union wire service, as well as Ufa, the Third Reich’s largest producer of movies and newsreels. The Great Depression hollowed out Germany’s newspaper market, allowing Hugenberg to use his considerable capital to buy distressed papers and blanket the market with articles calling for an end to democracy.
Hitler’s Nazis and Hugenberg’s German National Peoples’ Party joined forces in 1931 in the Harzburg Front, an attempt to topple Chancellor Heinrich Brüning. Although the alliance ultimately unraveled, it brought huge financial contributions to the Nazis from German industrialists.
After Hitler came to power he struck rapidly to muzzle any dissent, either shutting down newspapers or taking them over to serve as cogs in the Nazis’ propaganda apparatus.
As America nears its 250th birthday, media turmoil is playing into the hands of Donald Trump’s authoritarian ambitions.
Trump’s obsession with silencing truth-writing journalists kicked into overdrive early in his second term, with his banning of The Associated Press, my former employer, from the Oval Office and from Air Force One, the Trump administration dictating who gets to be in the White House press pool, and giving preferential treatment to journalists who ask softball questions or can be relied on to make fawning statements about Trump’s grandiose ideas, as Trump’s personal insults toward journalists — mainly women — pile up in number and in viciousness.
What’s been happening at CBS News and Scott Pelley’s firing are warning signs of moves by Trump to take control of news media and suppress criticism of him. The drama started last summer with CBS’ parent company — Paramount — agreeing to pay Trump $16 million to settle a toothless lawsuit over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. And then came approval by the FCC — led by Trump loyalist Brendan Carr — of Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media. No quid pro quo here!
David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, hired Bari Weiss to lead CBS News. After firing a half-dozen top people at 60 Minutes, Weiss was accused by Pelley of “murdering” the vaunted TV news program and doing Trump’s bidding.
“My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president,” Pelley said in an interview with The New York Times published this past Sunday.
Weiss and CBS News have denied Pelley’s allegations.
There’s more turmoil on the horizon — and more reason to fear the Trump administration will seek to deepen its influence on news operations.
This past February, Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery signed an agreement for Paramount to acquire WBD for $110.9 billion, and WBD shareholders approved the merger. Whether the deal goes through is up to regulators. The Trump administration is eager to see Ellison, the son of Oracle CEO and Trump buddy Larry Ellison, calling the shots for CNN. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said a few months ago: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
Ellison has said “editorial independence will absolutely be maintained” at CNN. But the purges at 60 Minutes are hardly reassuring. Jim Acosta maintains that the media conglomerate resulting from the merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery “will essentially act like a state media organization in support of Donald Trump.”
There are calls among journalists to show more support for each other, and to stand up to Trump when he personally attacks them. The optics at this year’s White House Correspondents Dinner weren’t great, with journalists giving a warm welcome to a man who regularly calls them “stupid,” “fake news,” “horrible,” “terrible,” among other insults. I wonder how they would have responded had a gunman not interrupted the proceedings and Trump gave a scathing speech about the assembled members of the Fourth Estate.
Acosta and other journalists are urging their colleagues — as well as news executives — to show more backbone.
“They (the Trump administration) are trying to put together a state-dominated media system in this country. And it has to be stopped,” Acosta said.
“There are a lot of journalists who can do something about it, and a lot of corporate executives who can do something about it. “
Acosta is not wrong.
Journalists working in the Third Reich were a mixed bag of Nazi fanatics, sycophants, opportunists, and career professionals who may have felt queasy about collaborating with the Nazis but kept quiet about it.
Resistance could have fatal consequences. Fritz Gerlich, editor of the Munich-based newspaper Der gerade Weg (The Straight Path), was murdered at Dachau. Erwein von Aretin, political editor at the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, was also hauled off to Dachau, but survived. Editors and reporters at the Münchener Post, a pro-democracy newspaper owned by the Social Democrats, were rounded up, jailed, and after their release ostracized and forced to live in penury, a story I tell in my book Enemy of The People: The Munich Post and The Journalists Who Opposed Hitler.
German journalists never put up any serious resistance to Hitler’s suppression of the free press at least partly because most of the populace had turned against democracy.
American journalists are in a different situation, one far less perilous than that of their German colleagues. They might lose access to administration officials by standing up to Trump, perhaps forfeit their seat at press conferences to MAGA media, be banished from Air Force One, suffer juvenile insults from Trump, or anger their corporate bosses.
But today’s journalists need to ask themselves this: Isn’t standing up for democracy worth more than a seat in the briefing room?
While interviewing Trump on Meet The Press this past Sunday, Kristen Welker showed how it should be done, persisting in holding Trump to account. When Welker challenged Trump’s claims of election rigging by Democrats, he exploded.
“We’re like a Third World country,” he yelled at Welker. “Your elections are crooked. And you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked, and so is ABC and CBS and CNN.” Red-faced, Trump stood up and stormed out
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YiddishPOP can bring more diversity to American Jewish education
Every Sunday morning, a group of families in Stockholm, Sweden, meets in a local school to create handicrafts, do gymnastics — and learn Yiddish.
Katka Mazurczak, the instructor of this grassroots group called The Yiddish Club, told me that the families seem to really enjoy the weekly Yiddish immersion. One of the resources she uses is YiddishPOP, a free online animated and game-based learning tool that features short episodes about a young teenager named Nomi, her robot sidekick Moby and her friends.
I’ve known about YiddishPOP for years and often share its videos with my grandchildren. The episodes cover topics that are familiar and easy for children to relate to. In one, a friend of Nomi’s finally scores a basket. In another, Nomi and Moby laugh as they look at their comical reflections in funhouse mirrors.
Each story is accompanied by a video clip presenting the new vocabulary and grammar, interactive games and a multiple choice quiz.
“Children love YiddishPOP,” said Mazurczak, who also uses the program when teaching kids in more formal school settings like the Stockholm Jewish Hillel School, known as Hillelskolan. “It has captivating graphics, clear speech and the movie goes at a good pace. Some episodes are really funny and kids laugh out loud.”
Part of the appeal of YiddishPOP, particularly for beginners, lies in Moby’s slapstick antics. I too find myself laughing during those scenes.
In a time when seeking diversity has become a main focus in schools across America, Jewish educators might want to consider introducing young students to the multi-faceted language and culture of Ashkenazic Jewry, using a contemporary language learning tool like YiddishPOP.
Teaching the Yiddish language through animation and interactive games helps it come alive for children, depicting it as a natural, even cool way to express Jewish identity, rather than stereotypically sending the language to the dustbin of history.
One school that has tried out YiddishPOP is the Krieger Schechter Day School in Baltimore, MD. When the school piloted the program with its third-grade class last year, the director of the lower school, Toby Kaplowitz, was impressed.
“Though students had just four sessions, they were truly engaged and walked away with both a sense of the language and an appreciation for its connection to their Jewish learning,” Kaplowitz wrote in an email. Krieger plans to continue using YiddishPOP with these same students, as they transition to fourth grade.
Last year, YiddishPOP began distributing $500 microgrants to help teachers and parents bring the Yiddish program to schools. Dana Yudovich Katz, a teacher at Kehillah High — a supplemental program for students in grades 8–12, run by the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston — was the first recipient. She added YiddishPOP to a course she had initiated with the teens called TAM: A Taste of Yiddish Language and Culture. Tam is Yiddish for “flavor.”
Most of the students came away from using YiddishPOP with a positive feeling towards the language. As one student in Yudovich Katz’s class told her: “The film was good at using the words in a way I could understand because it was just slow enough.”
The YiddishPOP team is now working on teacher materials that will make it easier for people without a background in Yiddish or language teaching to use YiddishPOP. Teachers and school administrators who’d like to apply for a YiddishPOP microgrant can do so here until July 31.
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UK Jewish leaders demand answers after Muslim police group paper calls Zionism a form of hatred
(JTA) — British Jewish groups say they are alarmed about revelations that a fraternal society for Muslim police officers published a policy paper that described Zionism as a form of anti-Muslim hatred and called the Israeli army a “Zionist terrorist group.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews called the paper posted by the National Association of Muslim Police “disturbing” in its presentation of Jewish identity, history and the nature of antisemitism.
“If this is being circulated among officers, it poses a direct challenge to the integrity of policing and it should be withdrawn immediately,” the group said.
NAMP has distanced itself from the report and, in a statement, rejected any allegation that the group “supports Hamas.”
The 39-page paper titled “From Past Prejudices to Present Policies: Confronting anti-Muslim hatred and Promoting Human Rights,” was written by NAMP’s then-vice president, Khaldoun Kabbani, and published in July 2025. It says “Zionism represents one of the manifestations of anti-Muslim hatred”; likens the war in Gaza to the Holocaust; and disputes facts about Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, including that Israeli children were killed.
The Spectator, a right-wing British newspaper, drew attention to the report in a piece published on Friday that said the report illuminated “the disturbing truth about the National Association of Muslim Police.” The group has a formal affiliation with 16 of 43 police departments in the U.K. and says it represents more than 20,000 officers.
Kabbani, a forensics officer, was briefly the chair of the Scottish Muslim Police Association but planned to move abroad after retiring earlier this year, according to a post by the group on LinkedIn.
The revelation of the NAMP report comes at a time of heightened tension over policing in the U.K., amid both a surge in anti-Jewish crimes and a renewed uproar over a December murder that has fueled allegations of “two-tier policing” that treats some victims differently from others. The Spectator referenced the victim, Henry Nowak, in the column about NAMP.
The NAMP report has spurred distress for many British Jews who are on edge amid a string of violent incidents targeting Jewish communities. The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a watchdog group, said its polling shows that 83% of British Jews do not think the police are doing enough to protect them — and that the report suggested their concerns were well founded.
“The people responsible for publishing this extremist screed on the official police.uk web domain are unfit to be police officers and must be immediately investigated by their respective forces’ professional standards departments and dismissed,” Steven Silverman, CAM’s director of investigations and enforcement, said in a statement.
“British Jews have long suffered two-tier policing that sees antisemitic crime go unpunished,” he said, adding that CAM would press the British government “ensure a clear message is being sent. This cannot pass with the document being quietly deleted.”
The report was removed from NAMP’s website over the weekend. The group distanced itself from the report in a statement published on Tuesday, saying that it had removed the report “immediately” after learning about its existence and emphasizing that the author was “no longer associated” with NAMP.
“We understand that the publication of this document has affected several communities, and we regret any concern, discomfort, or misunderstanding it may have caused,” the group said.
It added, “NAMP categorically does not ‘defend’ Hamas or any other proscribed organisation. We condemn all forms of terrorism and extremism.”
The document is “deeply troubling,” a spokesperson for the Jewish Leadership Council, which coordinates British Jewish groups, said in a statement.
“This document appears to falsely associate an ideology held by the majority of Jewish people as a threat to Muslims. It also engages in deeply troubling Holocaust inversion and denial of some of the worst atrocities carried out by Hamas on October 7th,” the spokesperson said. “At a time of rising antisemitism including violent attacks on British Jews, this document further threatens community cohesion and police forces should be clear in distancing themselves from it.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said it plans to speak with the “relevant” government and police departments to discover the paper’s provenance, how it’s being used and “how to ensure that the valued relationships of trust between British Jews and the police are not being undermined.”
The Metropolitan Police of London, the largest police department in the U.K. and a formal NAMP affiliate, declined to comment on the report. The department has recently stepped up policing in Jewish communities in an effort to stem antisemitic violence.
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