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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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Columbia University student workers union drops Israel divestment demand
The student workers’ union at Columbia University has withdrawn its demand that the university divest from Israel — a significant reversal for the group, which has played a leading role in the campus’s pro-Palestinian movement since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
Divestment had been one of the union’s signature demands, and a recurring point of contention throughout negotiations.
The union, Student Workers of Columbia–United Auto Workers, represents over 3,000 undergraduate and graduate student workers and had long campaigned for Columbia to cancel its dual degree program with Tel Aviv University, stop plans to open a new facility in Tel Aviv, and financially divest from Israel. The demand it withdrew this week would have mandated that the university divest from state actors or companies deemed by the International Criminal Court and the United Nations to be in violation of international law
But in a Monday general body meeting, union members voted to withdraw the divestment proposal.
Columbia became an epicenter for campus protests following the onset of the Israel-Hamas war, sparking a wave of encampments, building occupations and high-profile arrests. Its union’s leaders, in particular, had been heavily involved in pro-Palestinian activism. In 2024, the group passed a resolution supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and pledged to strike if necessary to force the university to “end its complicity in the genocide.”
Former PhD student Grant Miner was arrested for his role in the occupation of Hamilton Hall in 2024 and was subsequently expelled but still identifies himself as the union’s president.
Miner acknowledged the decision to withdraw the demand in an interview this week with the campus newspaper The Columbia Spectator, saying the give-and-take realities of collective bargaining had forced the union to adjust its demands.
“You start off a campaign with one thing, and then as you bargain, you have to face the realities of where you are,” he said.
Earlier this year, Columbia alleged the union did not bargain in good faith by “conditioning bargaining on the presence of an expelled student,” apparently referring to Miner. They also alleged the organization attempted to “bargain over matters that are not related to terms and conditions of students’ employment with the University; and filing grievances that similarly have nothing to do with terms and conditions of students’ employment.”
Indeed, the move appeared to reflect the realities of federal labor law. Under the National Labor Relations Act, employers and unions are required to bargain only over wages, hours and other terms and conditions of employment. Because university divestment is generally considered outside those mandatory subjects of bargaining, Columbia is not legally obligated to negotiate over it, though it could choose to do so voluntarily.
The union also softened on other contentious demands, dropping and significantly modifying its proposal to remove all police officers from campus and narrowing a surveillance-related demand.
In November, a university Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing rejected three proposals filed by activists calling on Columbia to divest, citing a lack of financial viability and consensus on campus.
Columbia maintains its dual degree program with Tel Aviv University, and plans to open its Tel Aviv global center this summer, according to Nadav Eyal, a Columbia professor who spoke of the matter in an episode of the Call Me Back podcast this week.
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A Yiddish theater troupe condemned U.S. racism — then the Nazis came
In 1935, the experimental theater group Yung Teatr invited audiences in Warsaw to a new play that was virtually all in Yiddish but wasn’t about Europe or Jews. It was a modified retelling of the plight of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Tennessee in 1931. While the case was being retried in the United States for the second time, the three-act play Mississippi exposed Polish Jews to the injustice.
Penned by Yiddish writer Leib Malach, whose work as a journalist took him around the world including to Harlem, and directed by Michał Weichert, a trained lawyer with a love for avant-garde theater, Mississippi premiered in Warsaw in March 1935 at a time Yiddish culture in Poland was flourishing. Several troupes were staging translated works about American race relations, such as a Vilna Troupe production of Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, but scholars believe Mississippi was the first original Yiddish or Polish play on this issue to be performed in Poland.
Although it didn’t have the financial resources or popularity of traditional Yiddish productions, Mississippi had more than 100 performances in Warsaw and several in other Polish cities, where it was widely praised, as Jewish audiences identified with the mistreatment of the Scottsboro Boys. There is evidence of at least one production outside of Poland, all the way in Buenos Aires.
“Yiddish theater was much more given to a kind of transnational existence, probably more than any theater,” Alyssa Quint, a curator at YIVO and a co-editor of their translated Yiddish Voices series, said. “Because of all the communities, all the Jewish settlements that had been settled by that time were still really speaking Yiddish.”
Quint worked with scholars Ellen Perecman and Amelia Glaser to translate Mississippi into English for the first time and it has been published as a book with an introduction and notes from Quint.
Malach, who had been wanting to write a political play inspired by his time in America, made a few deviations from the real Scottsboro incident. In Mississippi, there are only seven Black defendants. Malach also invented characters to represent how the Black community and the boys’ family would react to the trial, although a mother of one of the accused is closely modeled after Ada Wright, the real-life mother of two of the Scottsboro boys who went on a European speaking tour about the case. White actors in blackface played the parts of the Black characters.
Acts Two and Three involve simultaneous actions on multiple small stages throughout the performance space, making Mississippi one the earliest examples of “immersive” or “environmental” theater.
“It’s experimental, but it was actually something that people flocked to as well,” Quint said. “That’s a very hard combination to strike even today, even under the best of circumstances.”
Because Poland’s censors had previously shuttered Weichert’s shows for being “politically provocative,” Yung Teatr left “Scottsboro” out of the title. Malach wrote that they chose Mississippi since it “is the name of a river along which reside communities of Black people, and it is also a state where ‘Scottsboro’ is a regular occurrence.”
Although few members of Yung Teatr had ever met a Black American, the play reads as a nuanced — if at times heavy-handed — investigation of the precarious position of Black people in American society.
The play also focuses a lot on class conflict, as Weichert thought it would make the story more accessible to Jewish audiences. While Weichert and Malach recognized the parallels between anti-Black discrimination in America and the antisemitism they experienced in Poland, Weichert wasn’t sure broader Jewish audiences would automatically sympathize with the Black characters. The communist-aligned Yung Teatr leaders also may have been hoping to inspire their Jewish audience to embrace class solidarity and at times, class seems to usurp race as the primary issue in the play.
One character, Shirley Silverstone, a Jewish labor activist who represents the real-life activists from the International Labor Defense that got involved in Scottsboro, argues that the case is really about “revealing the bloody intention of the ruling class to strangle us all.”
Mississippi offers a contrasting view in the form of Mickey, a Black Pullman train worker, who accosts Shirley for using the boys’ trial “for the benefit of your party” and playing “with the lives of the accused Negroes.”
“I think that you don’t really know where you necessarily stand or where the play stands,” Quint said.
The translation took several years. In 2020, as protests spread across the country in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Quint saw a connection between her work and the present, which she said can be a rare experience in the Yiddish world.
“Often you’re in your little corner and you have to have a more indirect relationship with the spirit of your time, or none at all even,” Quint said. “But it seemed like there was something very relevant about this play when I began translating it.”
“People were getting more and more engaged with deeper questions about the Black experience here in America.”
When it came to translating the Yiddish word for the n-word, Perecman, Glaser, and Quint had to decide whether or not to include the original language.
“I felt strongly that since this was placed in the 30’s in the South, we needed to use the word,” Perecman said about the ultimate decision to have the slur in the play.
Both the transcultural and serious nature of Mississippi make it a standout piece of Yiddish theater history. Perecman said that many people have a narrow idea of what makes Yiddish theater, something she’s experienced firsthand running the New Worlds Theatre Project, which translates and stages early 20th century Yiddish plays.
“People would come and they’d say, ‘Oh my God, I thought Yiddish theater was all about singing and dancing,’” Perecman said.
There is music in Mississippi, but it’s jazz and gospel inspired numbers instead of Jewish folk tunes. The translators don’t know how much interaction the composer, Henkh (Henoch) Kon had with Black American music, but the lyrical structures, including a call-and-response gospel, show an intent to mimic what he imagined were traditional forms. YIVO plans to have music experts at a book launch event on Nov. 30 to analyze the lyrics and possibly put them to music.
In the post-Holocaust world, the play’s message about discrimination carries a sense of foreboding. Several of the actors and crew were murdered in the Holocaust. Weichert survived and made aliyah to Israel in 1958, where he died in 1967. Malach died in Paris in 1936 during an operation.
The Nazi invasion forced Yung Teatr to close in 1939 after only ten years of operating, but the troupe left a mark on Yiddish theater with their ambitious, unorthodox projects.
“There was just very, very little support for what they did,” Quint said. “They were just very devoted to what they did, and that’s what kept them going.”
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A mayor exposed New York City Jews to chaos. It wasn’t Mamdani.
The mayor ventured to a Brooklyn synagogue, hoping to assure an overflowing crowd of Jewish New Yorkers who blamed him for fostering an environment of antisemitism that he understood their fears and their place in a city they considered increasingly threatening to their safety.
Not Zohran Mamdani, who stands accused by segments of the Jewish world of turning New York City into a hunting ground for Jews with his invective against Israel. Not David Dinkins, who was mayor in 1993 when violence descended on the Jews of Crown Heights for days and a Jewish man was murdered.
It was 1968, and Mayor John Lindsay’s attempt at making peace was an utter disaster: He had to flee East Midwood Jewish Center into his limo, with a jeering mob behind him. The cause of the furor was Lindsay’s cooperation with an experiment in community control of public schools in a district called Ocean Hill–Brownsville. The neighborhood, once a hub of immigrant Jewish life, was now mostly Black, mostly poor, and eager to exercise self-determination and power as the civil rights movement crested.
As historian Richard Kahlenberg recounted to the Forward, the new district school superintendent sought to have an all-Black teacher workforce. Teachers were largely Jewish — and expendable. The district transferred 19 of them, prompting strikes by the teacher’s union that roiled the city.
The union had another weapon in its arsenal: the charge that the firings were acts of antisemitism.
For his 1973 movie Sleeper, Woody Allen premised the futuristic sci-fi comedy on a joke few today would understand: that the world as we had known it ended when “a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”
Back then, as president of the United Federation of Teachers, Shanker was one of the most newsmaking Jews in America. And he had a compelling story to sell to his members, the media and elected officials. He seized on a flamingly antisemitic anonymous letter placed in teachers’ mailboxes at a middle school and had it reprinted by the hundreds of thousands to show the world.
It read, in part: “It is Impossible For The Middle East Murderers of Colored People to Possibly Bring To This Important Task The Insight, The Concern, The Exposing Of The Truth That is a Must If The Years Of Brainwashing And Self-Hatred That Has Been Taught To Our Black Children By Those Bloodsucking Exploiters and Murderers Is To Be Over Come.”
Jewish alarm in the face of such provocation — not to mention dismissals without cause, something out of a Soviet Union purge — was certainly warranted. Conflicts between the community-control school board and teachers escalated inside school buildings, prompting Jewish teachers to file complaints that prompted grand jury indictments and to seek police protection.
District leaders’ attempt to steamroll the union, and escalating clashes with the largely white workforce, created an intolerant and intolerable climate. All the same, Shanker’s conversion of the complex facts of the situation into a hardened story of war on the Jews only added to the turmoil. Lindsay’s crucial mistake was to deliver his support for a bold experiment in establishing Black and Puerto Rican power without heed to the force of nature that was organized labor in its heyday — which was by extension organized Jewish power. By the time he faced the furious mob during the second of three strikes, it was too late.
When thinking about Mamdani and the frenzy of the moment over the fate of New York Jews under his mayoralty, my mind sometimes flashes to the Daily News photo capturing Lindsay’s truly awful moment — dashing out of a synagogue turned into a battleground, after Rabbi Harry Halpern tried in vain to keep decorum in the sanctuary.
East Midwood today is my congregation and community, a vantage point from which to look at the present landscape through the lens of history and see two kinds of power at play.
There is the kind of war that Shanker fought: where Jews, faced with a competing claim for power, resort to charges of antisemitism as a shortcut to establishing moral authority and political leverage. Ultimately, what Shanker was doing was protecting the jobs of union members and the civil service apparatus that organized their world. That was his job! But saying that would have been a much harder sell than “antisemitism” against the enormous public sympathies for Black power as a righteous cause.
Benjamin Netanhayu, in a newly released campaign video responding to Mamdani’s declaration that he is a war criminal, is playing the same game Shanker did. The video, based on a Fox News interview with the Israeli prime minister, is a smear job, seizing on the recent stabbing of a Jewish man on the Upper West Side to accuse Mamdani and his wife of being personally responsible for making New York City unsafe for Jews. But they serve to elevate Netanyhu’s standing as a defender of Israel.
I found Mamdani’s video indictment of Netanyahu alarming, too: prosecutorial, selective in the facts presented, and utterly unconstructive in providing leadership, even knowing his goal of eliminating Israel as a Jewish state. It only turns up the heat fueling what has become a panic in American politics over U.S. aid, doubling down on Israel as a pariah nation.
But he is, ultimately, a mayor — someone who admitted he has no power to follow through on his vow to arrest Netanyahu but very much does control how he runs his city. As much as anything, the Upper West Side stabbing reflects years of leaders’ failures to fix broken mental health services, on top of which his nothingburger move to create a new Department of Community Safety to respond to mental health crises is just another layer of sedimentary crud.
Meanwhile, the fear that Netanyahu and others are exploiting for their own political purposes clouds a clear view of the second kind of power, which Mamdani’s administration is actually exercising on the ground. We see it in how his police department has responded to conflict involving Jewish communities: not pitting one group against another, the world against Jews, but carefully balancing rights, safety and interests in potentially explosive situations. Lindsay could have learned something here.
Infinite credit goes to Mamdani’s appointee as NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a Zionist and a capable leader — and to Mamdani for letting her do her job.
I was witness to how Mamdani and Tisch’s NYPD responded to the extremely difficult challenge of synagogue protests, which erupted this spring outside land sales events that included properties on the occupied West Bank. And once again, the story came to East Midwood Jewish Center’s doorstep, thanks to a sale happening at Young Israel across the street.
The protests culminated in some upsetting moments. Marchers parading through a Jewish neighborhood’s streets carrying Palestinian flags and “Free Gaza” banners sent an unmistakable message of disdain and exclusion. And yes, some scary clashes you might have seen on social media, such as a protester shining a strobe light into a Jewish teen’s eyes, actually happened.
But what the world did not see was the discipline the NYPD brought to keeping the demonstrators at a distance from the synagogue — and to keeping taunts and chants from escalating into anything worse.
The rival camps and their flags met face to face in the middle of a major intersection in what could have been a Brooklyn rumble, but police did their best to steer the sides into separate zones. Some of the most aggressive insults came from Jewish teens blindsided by a hostile presence on their turf. One protester-counterprotester pair got locked into an extended debate about their opposing views on the fate of Israel and Palestinians. I gave them my card and said, only half jokingly, that they should consider doing a podcast.
None of this is to say that Mamdani’s words on the global stage are making Jews any safer. His fixation on uniquely attacking Netanyahu, when a mayor’s job description requires governing all New Yorkers, gives permission to those determined to antagonize Jewish supporters of Israel — as does his encouragement to protest the prime minister when he visits for the UN General Assembly in September, where clashes could break the containment that was possible in sleepy Brooklyn.
But a look back at John Lindsay’s catastrophic scramble to make peace is a reminder that it’s the decisions about how to deploy power within a mayor’s domain that ultimately determine Jewish safety.
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