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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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These Jewish readers wanted happy endings — so they turned to romance
Until a few years ago, every book math teacher Dahlia Evans had read about Jews was Holocaust historical fiction. Searching for a change, she went to her rabbi, who recommended a romance called The Matzah Ball, a Hannukah-themed novel about two archenemies from Jewish summer camp who fall in love as adults.
“It brings a lot of joy, seeing yourself in the characters, reading about the holidays and all of these things that you’ve grown up with,” said Evans, a mother of two from New York who also runs a book-focused Instagram account.
Following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, Jewish authors have described an increasingly hostile environment in traditional publishing. In fact, the number of books marketed as Jewish have declined over the past three years — pointing to either fewer Jewish books, or fewer publishers willing to market them as Jewish.
Even so, the demand for Jewish romance novels from Jewish readers has flourished, aided by The Matzah Ball’s author Jean Meltzer and a book club she started called Jewish Joy.
“I think a reason why the community grew is because of what the romance genre itself offers the reader, which is basically happiness,” says Heidi Shertock, the author of two Orthodox Jewish romances and a leader of Jewish Joy. “We’re going to give you that happily ever after, no matter the struggles and the obstacles and the difficulties that the character is facing. And I think we need that so much right now, especially as Jews.”
Bodice rippers and book clubs
Few, if any, Jewish characters were present in mass market romance novels until 1995 when Alina Adams wrote The Fictitious Marquis, the first bodice-ripper with a Jewish protagonist. Other writers such as Jennifer Wilck and Felica Grossman continued writing Jewish romances through the 2010s.
The romance novel, whose sales had been declining, saw a resurgence after 2020, spurred by the pandemic, a TikTok reading community called BookTok and the streaming hit Bridgerton. From 2021 to 2025, romance book sales doubled to 51 million units sold.
As publishers pushed to make romance novels more diverse, Jewish romance enthusiasts had to educate the community that romances by and about Jews represent diverse perspectives too, Wilck said.
“There was slowly starting to become recognition of that and enthusiasm for that,” Wilck said. “It has gotten a lot more complicated after October 7.”
Dahlia Adler, a USA Today bestselling author of Y.A. novels, recently wrote her first adult romance titled Soon by You about a modern Orthodox perma-bridesmaid – always a bridesmaid, never a bride. She has been surprised by its lack of appeal.
“More people who usually enjoy getting to see inside a new culture do not seem to be going anywhere near this book,” said Adler, noting the book’s Jewish themes. “It could be related. It could be not.”
Where Soon by You has received positive attention is a Facebook page called “Jewish women talk about romance.” The page, launched by Meltzer in July 2023, saw an influx of members after the Oct. 7 attacks growing from 1,000 to 3,500 members.
Shertock said the online community has become a safe haven. “Jewish readers weren’t feeling safe anymore in their book clubs,” she said.
Some authors describe a similar feeling. Chayla Wolfberg, an author and Jewish Joy book club leader, said the online Jewish romance community gave her comfort and validation.
“I was seeing so many authors — a lot of people who I used to really admire and look up to — posting things blatantly in support of what happened on Oct. 7,” she said. “I was just so horrified.”
Meltzer said authors like her who had spoken up in defense of Israel or expressed grief about Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks found themselves doxxed, boycotted and lambasted in reviews.
In January 2024, Meltzer responded by launching the Jewish Joy book club, followed shortly by The Jewish Joy Box, which sends its members monthly boxes of mostly — though not exclusively — Jewish romance novels.
“It had one rule: we read books where nobody dies at the end, which was sort of a tongue-in-cheek nod to all the Holocaust books that we weren’t going to be reading,” she said. “We were going to be reading happy stories with happy endings and Jews who lived life.”
Litmus tests
Rachel Runya Katz’s novels focus on LGBTQ+ Jews of color. According to her Instagram bio, her books are “only ‘niche’ if you’re boring.” She is also vocal on social media about being an anti-Zionist Jew.
She has picked up on a “litmus test” for Jewish authors, which she said some readers won’t read if they have not spoken up about the Palestinian cause.
“There are people whose takeaway has been: I need to do a thorough background check on every Jew who I think about reading, and I’m not gonna do that to other people,” she said. “I do think that that is a form of bias.”
Katz has noticed other forms of antisemitism in the industry, both before and after October 7.
But she has also faced harsh criticism from other Jewish authors too. She said there were some “Zionist Jewish bookstagrammers who accused me of not being really Jewish and of identifying more as Black than as Jewish because I’m anti-Zionist.”
She thinks that Jewish Joy could very well be doing good work to fight antisemitism. But, she added, “I do not think that this is a good messenger for that because it’s somebody who has so prominently and publicly tried to link anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism … I think that’s a really dangerous translation to make.”
Jewish Joy leadership says that, in addition to creating a safe space for Jewish-romance fans, they want to make it welcoming for Zionists.
“We’re a pro-Zionist community,” said Meltzer. “We support Israelis, and you know the community has made the decision as a whole that they don’t want to support books right now from anti-Zionist authors.”
The Jewish Joy book club has also featured many books from authors who have not publicly commented on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“We don’t really talk about that too much,” Shertock said.
As much as the group was created to satisfy Jewish readers, Meltzer also created it to support Jewish authors.“We needed to move the needle on sales,” she said. In its less than two years, the network has purchased more than 2,500 Jewish books for its boxes.
Meltzer feels like the community has needed to advocate for itself to be taken seriously both in the Jewish world, which she says tends to embrace literary fiction, and in the romance world, which she believes has been more hostile toward Jewish books.
“People take for granted that Jewish romance is going to continue,” said Meltzer. “I do not believe that. I actually think if we don’t fight every day for these books, they will stop being published.”
The post These Jewish readers wanted happy endings — so they turned to romance appeared first on The Forward.
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From Jerusalem’s Old City, a book that defies Israel’s media image
A few years ago, I followed the author and journalist Sarah Tuttle-Singer deep into Jerusalem’s Old City searching for the best za’atar.
To be clear, I was searching. She knew exactly where to go.
Sarah plunged through the crowded, narrow market streets of the Shuq Attarin, or Perfumers Market, whose vaulted ceilings and open stalls served Crusaders and Mamluks. She turned at signless intersections and slipped through nameless passageways, before stopping at a mad scrum of customers outside a small, open shop.
“Here it is,” Sarah said. “The best.”
An elderly man filled orders from barrels of spices and shelves of herbs, potions and remedies. When we managed to grab his attention, Sarah used her surprisingly decent Arabic to order me a kilo.
It tasted nothing like the spice mix I was stuck buying in L.A. The wild oregano that forms the floral, green base of the mixture carried notes of cumin, caraway and dandelion. The sumac, salt and ground sesame made it bright and earthy at once — a blend of disparate flavors that don’t obviously belong together but somehow do.
“How did you find this place?” I asked Sarah.
“I mean, I live here.”
Sarah was raised in Venice Beach and moved to Israel in 2011 with her two children and then-husband, an Israeli. She began writing for The Times of Israel and eventually moved into the Old City itself. We long ago bonded over our common love of Jerusalem, journalism — and Venice Beach.
Her latest book, Fairy Lights in God’s Backyard , is her second nonfiction book about life inside those ancient walls. I loved her first, Jerusalem, Drawn and Quartered, but I wondered, how much more is there to say?
The answer is: plenty. The Oct. 7 massacre. The destruction of Gaza. The Iran missile barrages. A new child. A near-death explosion. All of it filtered through a sharp, sensitive observer living among Jews, Muslims and Christians in the most contested third of a square mile on Earth. I opened the book at 11 a.m. and finished it by 4 p.m., leaving behind circled passages, dog-eared pages and margin notes.
‘The least political way to tell the truth’
Her passage on the local grocery is a good place to start. “There is a shelf in a corner market that doesn’t make sense,” begins one of the book’s many short chapters. Sarah describes a single shelf stocked haphazardly with Bulgarian jam, Italian pasta, Polish pickles, Armenian spice mix, and “tahina labeled in Arabic, Hebrew and Turkish.” She asked the shopkeeper why he kept such a jumble of far-flung ingredients in one place. “People keep asking for home,” he said.
Shoppers stop in front of that shelf, she writes — sometimes with a nostalgic look, a lump in the throat; sometimes to argue over a recipe, pulling items out, putting them back, defying any order. The shopkeeper gave up trying to organize it.
“Jerusalem, after all, does not behave politely or geographically,” Sarah writes. “It stacks centuries on top of each other and calls it a street. It builds apartments on Crusader arches and prays in languages that never learned to forgive each other. Why should a shelf obey borders that people themselves could not?”
Sometimes, she writes, a conversation starts in front of that shelf. My mother used to make this. We ate this only on holidays. You can’t get the good kind anymore. The shopkeeper, she writes, “understands something important: that in Jerusalem, food is often the least political way to tell the truth. You can argue borders for hours, but you cannot argue the taste of something that raised you.”
An apartment on the seam
It’s the same lesson, I realized later, sitting behind that scrum in the Perfumers Market: My kilo of za’atar was itself a shelf of sorts, oregano, sumac and sesame, none of it asking permission to belong together.
The Old City is divided into four quarters — Arab, Jewish, Armenian and Christian. Sarah moved into her last apartment there in October 2025, on the seam between the Jewish and Armenian Quarters, where Armenian conversation mixed with church bells and the Hebrew songs of schoolchildren next door.
The apartment itself crossed borders. It was built over a Byzantine well that connects to a system of Roman tunnels; the walls themselves were “much newer” — 17th century. She moved in with her toddler son and made it a home, decorating in bright colors and pastels, a style she calls “Mad Hatter in Ottoman Jerusalem,” and planted rosemary, lavender, mint, sage and, yes, za’atar on the roof. Even her garden was a small act of layering something new onto something ancient.
The war in a stone well
From that sweet base, she recorded a particularly fraught stretch in an always-fraught city. Her downstairs neighbor, Claire, whom she greeted several times a day, kept asking Sarah to explain how it is that she, an old woman, outlived her young son.
It’s a question Sarah has heard so many Israeli and Palestinian mothers ask since Oct. 7. “Every time I heard Claire ask why she was still here instead of her son, I heard echoes of mothers everywhere who have asked the same impossible question,” she writes.
Then the Iran war began and the sirens wailed, and each time, Sarah and her neighbors rushed down into the 1,500-year-old Byzantine well to wait out the incoming missiles: the ancient Armenian priest, the chain-smoking French tourists, the Arab TV broadcaster and his extended family, children scared of ghosts, the pedantic American with his “thirty-two-minute breakdown of geopolitical implications,” Muslims, Christians, Jews, and a pit bull named Baku — all brought together hoping to survive the mullahs’ wrath, “a regional war compressed into a stone cylinder beneath the Old City.”
The shelf upstairs holds whatever people ask for. The well below holds whoever happens to be home when the sirens go off. Between the two, Sarah keeps finding the same unlikely arrangement: people who don’t agree on much, sharing space anyway because the ground gives them no other choice.
There are other moments, too, when Sarah watches the divisions that outsiders think define Israel and Jerusalem melt away. When a fire breaks out and residents pour from their homes to help extinguish it. When she suffers an unexplained cardiac event one evening, and friends and neighbors show up to rush her to the ER.
“The paramedics arrived and so did, apparently, half the neighborhood,” she writes. “I haven’t seen this many Jews and Arabs crammed into one small room since the Oslo Accords.”
‘A deep, abiding care’
That’s what makes the book such a beautiful and important read. The hope it offers is earned. Sarah isn’t naive about the violence, fear and resentment tearing her society apart, but she also lives out something most of us, and most of the media, miss: a deep undercurrent of shared humanity running through that land as well.
That became vividly clear when her own sweet apartment blew up — a faulty propane tank burst, collapsing her home around her. The experience sent her through her own cycle of grief, exile and return. Friends, neighbors and strangers — Arab, Jewish, Armenian — rushed to her aid, literally dug her out of the wreckage, then helped her rebuild.
“In the smoke — acrid and choking — there was also something else rising,” she writes. “A deep, abiding care for one another. The kind that lives here but doesn’t make headlines.”
It took me more than a year, but I eventually worked my way through the little pillowcase of za’atar I’d carried home from the Old City that day — folded into turnovers, dusted over roasted vegetables, and, most often, the way it appears on nearly every Palestinian table: pooled in olive oil atop labne.
On my last trip to Israel, I met Sarah and her boyfriend for a drink at Hataklit, a neighborhood bar near Zion Square. She and her son have found a new place. She’s still at The Times of Israel, now writing a feature called Peoples of Israel, profiling an endlessly interesting cast of characters. And to share her love of Jerusalem’s people, cultures and food, she’s even leading occasional tours through the Old City.
If you go, I recommend the za’atar. It won’t taste like anywhere else — which, if Sarah’s book is right, is exactly the point.
A version of this essay first appeared in Rob Eshman’s Substack, Foodaism.
The post From Jerusalem’s Old City, a book that defies Israel’s media image appeared first on The Forward.
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‘I felt I couldn’t talk about the war’: Jewish and Muslim teens make space for tough conversations
For Jewish student Maxanne Wallace-Segall and Muslim student Nabila Rahman, the months after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel were filled with a tense quiet.
Then freshmen at Stuyvesant High School, a public school on Manhattan’s southern tip, the two girls had only been friends for a few weeks. As their social media feeds became inundated with polarizing content from across the spectrum, neither of them knew how to bring up what had happened.
“I felt like I couldn’t talk about the war with one of my closest friends in the world, just because I was terrified about what I would say and what she would say,” Wallace-Segall said.
That tension ended when Wallace-Segall interviewed Rahman for an article in their high school paper about the pain many students were experiencing in the first months of the Israel Hamas War. Broaching the subject for the first time, they realized that — despite coming from different perspectives — both were primarily concerned that their friends were OK.
“It wasn’t a question of ‘do you support Israel or Palestine?’. It was a question of [if you were] OK; if your family was OK. That was what mattered at the moment; her opinion didn’t matter, even if it differed from mine,” Rahman told Wallace-Segall for the article.
Now rising high school seniors, the duo runs The Together Project, a citywide organization dedicated to dialogue between Muslim and Jewish teens — Zionists and anti-Zionists alike. This summer, that dialogue has deepened and the reach has widened with the launch of a twice-weekly program called the Ohel/Ahl Fellowship, named after Hebrew and Arabic words for friendship. Since June, Jewish and Muslim teens from public, private, religious, and secular schools in the New York area have come together around sacred texts, swapped stories, consulted experts and explored each other’s neighborhoods and perspectives.
Emboldened by their first conversation, Wallace-Segall and Rahman began speaking about the conflict with Muslim and Israeli friends. But, when starting the organization, those friends opted not to participate. The Muslim friend’s family refused to let them talk to people who supported Israel, while the Israeli friend wasn’t allowed to talk to anti-Zionists. The organization continues to face this challenge, with some criticizing its inclusive nature. On one Instagram reel posted by the project, a user commended the concept, but pointed out the number of Palestinian deaths and disagreed with participants working alongside Zionists.
“i was like yessss this is what we need!!” they wrote at first. “only for u to include zionists 💀absolutely not. none of you are truly anti-zionists if you agree to work closely with zionists, especially at this time.”
But that misses the point, Wallace-Segall said. “To exclude the Zionist narrative would be to exclude the issue itself.” That widespread opposition toward dialogue highlights “the necessity and urgency of starting it even more,” she added.
To expand citywide, the girls drew upon their previous connections — someone with whom Wallace-Segall often debated about the subject, another who had written poetry about her religious identity. Currently, the organization has branches at four public high schools in three of the city’s five boroughs.
The Together Project also established a partnership with the New York Society for Ethical Culture, a social activism organization that offers meeting space for several grassroots organizations and hosts all branches of the Together Project, and other interested students, for a citywide conference three times a year in winter, spring and summer.
At those seasonal meetings, students go over historical timelines, read books, articles, sacred texts, and poetry and push themselves to grapple with hard topics. The conversation subjects range from comparisons of the Torah and Quran to what Muslim and Jewish teachings say about queerness, and how being a member of the LGBTQ community informs support for Israel, given its comparatively tolerant culture, and support for Palestinians in Gaza, given the nature of their collective struggle.
Wallace-Segall’s favorite conversations are those that question “why do you believe what you believe?”
“It really gets everyone to think about the specific moments with their families and their friends and reading the news in which different aspects of their opinions have been shaped,” she said.
Last November, members of the group attended a United Nations conference on establishing a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction. As she listened, Wallace-Segall was inspired by those “dedicating their lives to committing to peace.” At the end, four of The Together Project members were given the opportunity to speak about their organization and share their thoughts on the solutions that had been presented.
“So often in the UN, when we see discussions of rebuilding communities … it’s decades or years after the conflict happened,” Wallace-Segall said in her speech. “I think the time to start rebuilding communities is now.”
At Ramaz Upper School, a Jewish day school in Manhattan, now rising senior Gabriel Flatto-Katz found himself in a Jewish bubble. Amidst the tensions of the New York City mayoral election, he realized that he “didn’t have any Muslim person that I could call a friend,” and sought to start an interfaith student organization.
Despite reaching out to many Muslim organizations, however, he wasn’t able to find any interested partners. Then he discovered the Together Project and helped Wallace-Segall and Rahman develop this summer’s Ohel/Ahl Fellowship.
The fellowship has enabled students who were already involved, along with many new ones like Flatto-Katz, to engage more deeply with meetings twice a week. So far, the fellows have hosted speakers from the Rose Castle Foundation, which helps equip leaders to navigate conflict; explored the Islamic wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and analyzed poetry by Israeli and Palestinian writers.
Rather than jump right into sensitive political discussions, students explored each other’s religious identities and established trust in initial meetings, so they have felt more comfortable sharing sensitive opinions in the latter half of the fellowship.
According to Gershon Rozenberg, a rising senior at SAR High School, a co-ed modern Orthodox yeshiva in Manhattan, that turning point arrived during a recent discussion the students had about war. Participants shared conflicts that felt most personal to them and their families and how this might impact their thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some mentioned the Vietnam War, the Bangladesh Civil War and the Holocaust.
Rozenberg called it “the most vulnerable conversation we’ve had among fellows.”
For Rahman, this conversation helped her realize just how personal the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is for Jews. “For people like Gabi who literally have family in Israel, there was so much more at stake,” said Rahman, who doesn’t know anyone who is Palestinian.
Along with speakers, the fellowship has a board of mentors from Jewish and Muslim organizations, including Rose Castle, the Tannenbaum Foundation, Jewish Theological Seminary, and a Palestinian representative from Debate for Peace.
“We’re still kids running a kids’ program,” Flatto-Katz said. Mentors provide necessary guidance on how to run an interfaith organization, advise on ground rules during sessions and recommend texts to study. To build a consistent base of students at each meeting, mentors also have helped recruit teenagers they had worked with previously.
Flatto-Katz recruited Rozenberg after reading Rozenberg’s piece in SAR’s campus newspaper arguing that the school “should do a better job of understanding the Palestinian perspective.”
To complement the students from private Jewish day schools, leaders have been reaching out to private Muslim schools. But they’ve encountered difficulty.
“A lot of the kids have never met a Jewish person before, so it’s hard for them to make that first step,” Rahman said.
Many of the students from private Jewish schools say they have been moved by the contributions of Muslim participants, including rituals like chanting from the Qur’an or talking about their religion. “People have enjoyed the ability to hear something so different than what they’re used to,” Flatto-Katz said.
Within Jewish youth spaces, Flatto-Katz said students strongly support Zionism, but also crave hearing new perspectives. It’s not always easy for Flatto-Katz to “have really hard conversations,” as he has family in the region, but he senses and shares a “hunger for understanding.” Agreement or consensus is not required, he said.
“This is my friend Nabila who doesn’t agree with me on 99% of things, and I think it’s really cool that we get frozen yogurt together,” Flatto-Katz said.
To Rahman, the diversity of high school environments and the formative teenage years are what makes the work they are doing now so significant.
“Making sure younger people are involved in this kind of things is so important,” she said, “because they are the ones who are going to be shaping the future.”
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