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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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Synagogue protests have shocked NYC and LA. This Michigan congregation has faced them for 22 years
Protests outside prominent synagogues in New York City and Los Angeles have roiled the Jewish community in recent weeks, prompting scrutiny of how authorities respond when demonstrators at a house of worship frame their actions as Israel-related political speech.
Rabbi Nadav Caine of Beth Israel Congregation in Ann Arbor, Michigan has some experience with that: Every Shabbat for the past 22 years, protesters have shown up to Beth Israel holding signs with slogans like “Jewish Power Corrupts” and “No More Holocaust Movies.”
After years of legal battles that consistently sided with the protesters, Caine has been forced to accept that the courts view their actions as protected speech. More than two decades on, he has come to terms with the protesters’ enduring presence.
“There are long time members who come as little as possible, or who left the congregation, but for the most part, people have learned to ignore it,” Caine said.
‘Unseemly and distasteful’
The man behind the protests, Henry Herskovitz, was raised Jewish, had a bar mitzvah, and even attended Beth Israel for years. But he later adopted conspiracy theories blaming Israel for 9/11, became a Holocaust denier, and openly expressed hatred for Jews.
Starting in 2003, Herskovitz and a small group began protesting at the synagogue weekly during Shabbat, brandishing signs like “Antisemitism is earned, never given.”
In 2019, fed up with passing the demonstrators, a congregant and local Holocaust survivor sued the protesters and the city, arguing that their First Amendment rights to safely practice their religion were being violated. The American Civil Liberties Union represented the protesters, acknowledging the speech was “unseemly and distasteful,” but legally protected nonetheless.
Ultimately, the courts sided with the ACLU: A lower court dismissed the case, the Supreme Court declined to hear it on appeal, and a district judge ordered the congregants to pay nearly $159,000 in legal fees to the protesters — prompting the congregants’ lawyer, Marc Susselman, to accuse the judge of antisemitism.
Now, while the number of protesters has dwindled — it’s typically two people nowadays, Caine said — they still show up, week after week.
Caine said the sustained protests have affected membership, particularly as newcomers weigh which synagogue to attend. Some longtime members avoid in-person events, and others have left entirely. The display can also shock unsuspecting visitors attending bar or bat mitzvahs.
“Before you get used to it, it’s a little traumatizing and triggering,” he said.
‘A community issue’
Caine said he isn’t surprised by recent protests outside Park East Synagogue in Manhattan and Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. At Park East, demonstrators were protesting a synagogue event promoting immigration to Israel, chanting “death to the IDF” and “globalize the intifada.” At Wilshire Boulevard Temple, protesters took issue with the synagogue hosting speakers from the Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems.
Protesting at a synagogue is “not meant to raise consciousness about a human rights issue,” Caine said. “It’s about harassing a group.”
His advice for synagogues facing persistent protests: don’t engage. Beth Israel does not organize counterprotests, and Caine avoids posting about the protests on social media.
“These kinds of activists, they thrive on publicity. It’s their oxygen,” he said.
Still, Caine said he understands the desire to respond. One idea he finds promising: In New York City, two Jewish lawmakers introduced a bill that would ban protests within 25 feet of houses of worship. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has reportedly been receptive to the legislation.
Caine also cautioned against turning the protests outside synagogues into a political debate.
“I wouldn’t make it about the Israel issue,” he said. “I would make it about the fact that it’s a community issue.”
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Israel has a crucial lesson to learn from apartheid South Africa. It isn’t what you think
Some years ago, I traveled to South Africa with a group of Israelis to study the anti-apartheid movement. On our first morning, our guide posed a question: Why did apartheid end?
We offered the standard answers: because internal resistance grew stronger, because international pressure mounted, because the regime lost legitimacy. The guide listened and then said: Apartheid didn’t end for any of those reasons. It ended when the Berlin Wall came down.
His point was not that South Africans were passive. It was that political change does not happen on timetables set by internal movements alone. Power shifts systemically and globally, and when it does, the outcome depends on whether societies are prepared to move when the moment comes. Movements cannot control when history accelerates, but they can determine whether they have built the moral clarity, political vision and organizational capacity to act when it does.
A few years later, I traveled with the same group to Serbia and met former student leaders of Otpor, the movement that helped unseat the dictator Slobodan Milošević. They described how they began as a marginal, improvisational group, driven more by urgency than structure.
What eventually changed their trajectory, they told us, was recognizing that mobilization only works if people can see not just what they are resisting, but what they are building toward. They developed a concrete vision of a democratic Serbia that people could recognize as an alternative—not just to the regime, but to permanent instability. When the political opening arrived, there was something ready to replace what had collapsed.
Political change begins with imagination — but that imagination must be taken seriously.
This past weekend in Israel, something shifted quietly, and if you blinked, you may have missed it.
At a meeting for its 10th anniversary Standing Together — the largest Jewish–Arab grassroots movement in Israel — formally adopted a framework for ending the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that proposes two states not as sealed national projects but as overlapping political realities.
That vision, put forward by the group A Land for All, would see Israelis and Palestinians both have freedom of movement and equal rights in the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, and shared sovereignty in Jerusalem. It establishes mutual recognition of autonomy between the two peoples as a premise for peace, rather than as a final-status issue to address, as it was in previous peace efforts like the Oslo Accords.
This was not an organizational merger or a policy announcement. It was the articulation of a political horizon.
For most of its history, Standing Together has focused on equality within Israel itself: advocating for labor rights and a reasonable cost of living, combatting racism, and promoting shared civic life. Since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, it has been one of the only Israeli movements willing to organize sustained opposition to the war in Gaza, engage in civil disobedience, and try to deliver humanitarian aid in the face of increasing hostility.
Through this vote, the movement sought to expand its domain of responsibility — from Israel’s internal democracy, to the scope of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a whole.
It’s just one group; just one vote. But it’s also a reframing of what the future is allowed to look like, and a landmark moment of Israelis and Palestinians engaging in a joint political process. Its importance lies less in its technical details than in its structural ambition: replacing separation as the organizing principle, and establishing equality as the baseline.
In a context where imagination itself has been steadily eroded, this matters.
Israeli life has been governed for years by a doctrine of management — managing conflict, managing unrest, managing despair. The public has been trained to treat war as permanent; inequality as unavoidable; and a punishing power hierarchy as necessary for survival. This is not an accident. It is a governing logic that eliminates alternatives by framing them as incoherent, naïve or dangerous.
The most lasting damage done by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Israel may turn out not be the ways in which he’s degraded the country’s electoral system and democratic institutions. It may be psychological.
On his watch, Israel’s political culture has been systematically emptied of credible futures. What remains is a society fluent in fear, and increasingly unable to articulate what it is trying to become.
Comprehensive political visions change the conditions of organizing. When people can describe a wished-for future in concrete, realizable terms, political engagement stops being purely reactive and starts becoming constructive. It reshapes alliances, alters the language of debate, and changes the kinds of risks individuals and movements are willing to take.
South Africa understood this. Serbia understood it. Even New York City saw a version of this dynamic recently, when Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani went from polling at around 1% in the early days of the primary to winning the general election on a platform of affordability and thriving that did not dilute its goals in exchange for political safety.
Israel’s ruling order will not last forever. Regimes built on a premise of permanent emergency aren’t sustainable. What matters is whether there will be anything ready to replace it when it cracks.
Standing Together did not change reality with its vote in favor of a different kind of future — but it clarified what that future could practically look like, and in a country trained to believe that no future exists. And that, on its own, is a political marvel.
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Lithuanian government party leader convicted of inciting hatred towards Jews
(JTA) — The leader of a Lithuanian party in the ruling coalition government was convicted on Thursday for inciting hatred towards Jews and grossly minimizing the Holocaust in a series of public statements and social media posts in 2023.
Remigijus Žemaitaitis, the head of the populist Nemuno Aušra party, was fined 5,000 euros, or $5,835, by the Vilnius Regional Court.
In her decision, Judge Nida Vigelienė said that Žemaitaitis had “publicly mocked, demeaned and encouraged hatred” toward Jews as well as “grossly minimised the Holocaust carried out by Nazi Germany on Lithuania’s territory in an offensive and insulting manner,” according to the Lithuanian public service broadcaster LRT.
Žemaitaitis’ conviction was related to statements he had issued in May and June of 2023, including social media posts, a speech delivered in Parliament and an exchange with a journalist, in which he falsely accused Jews of killing Lithuanians.
“How long will our politicians continue to kneel to the Jews who killed our countrymen, contributed to the persecution, torture and destruction of Lithuanians,” wrote Žemaitaitis in all-caps, according to the country’s constitutional court. “There was a Holocaust of the Jews, but an even greater Holocaust of Lithuanians was in Lithuania!”
In other posts, Žemaitaitis also baselessly blamed Jews for the 1944 Nazi massacres in the Lithuanian villages of Pirčiupiai and Kaniukai.
The ruling Thursday was not the first time that a Lithuanian lawmaker has come under fire for Holocaust distortion. In 2021, Valdas Rakutis, a member of Lithuania’s parliament, was criticized by the U.S. ambassador to Lithuania for claiming in a speech that there was “no shortage of Holocaust perpetrators among the Jews themselves.”
In another post about the demolition of a school building in the West Bank, Žemaitaitis quoted an antisemitic nursery rhyme that encourages children to kill a wounded Jew.
“I want to give you a chance, dear Jews of Israel, to apologize to Palestine and the EU for your disgusting actions in a foreign country,” he wrote. “And I will repeat, ‘After such events, it is no wonder why such sayings are born: A Jew climbed a ladder and fell by accident. Take a stick, children, and kill that Jew.’”
The lawmaker, who frequently posts about the war in Gaza on social media, resigned from Lithuania’s parliament in April 2024 after the country’s constitutional court found his rhetoric had violated his oath and its constitution.
But he was reelected in October 2024 and his party joined the country’s new coalition government led by the Social Democrats.
Žemaitaitis and his lawyer were not present during the ruling Thursday in Vilnius and are expected to seek an appeal. He told reporters after the ruling that “everybody understands that this is a politicized decision,” according to the Associated Press.
“Any form of antisemitism, hate speech, or Holocaust belittling is unacceptable to us and incompatible with our values,” wrote the Social Democrats party in a post on Facebook following the ruling. “We respect the decision of the court. Together we point out that this decision is not yet final.”
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