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In Orthodox communities where women don’t read Torah, Purim offers a rare opportunity
(JTA) — When Alyza Lewin became a bat mitzvah in 1977, the fact that she had a ritual ceremony at all was still relatively revolutionary in Orthodox circles. But she took the rite of passage a step further, and did something that, for Orthodox Jews at the time, was considered the exclusive province of men.
She chanted the Scroll of Esther, known as the megillah, in front of a mixed-gender audience in suburban Washington, D.C. on the festival of Purim. Among the crowd were her grandfathers, who were both Orthodox rabbis. Lewin was the eldest of two daughters, and her father wanted to find a ritual she would be allowed to perform while remaining within the bounds of traditional Jewish law.
“My father, when it came time for the bat mitzvah, was trying to figure out what was something meaningful that a young woman could do,” she said. “So he decided: My Hebrew birthday is four days before Purim — he would teach me how to chant Megillat Esther.”
For many modern Orthodox women more than four decades later, women’s megillah readings have moved from the cutting edge to squarely within the norm. The increasing number of women’s readings is an indication of the growth of Orthodox feminism — and its concrete expression in Jewish ritual.
According to the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, at least 105 women-led megillah readings, for both mixed-gender and women-only audiences, are taking place worldwide this year. In 2019, according to JOFA, the number hit a peak of 139, up at a relatively steady pace from 63 in 2012, when the group began collecting data. The number of readings dipped last year due to COVID-19 precautions, but JOFA expects this year’s total to come close to the pre-pandemic high once congregations get around to notifying the organization of their events.
JOFA’s executive director, Daphne Lazar Price, said she had observed but did not quantify a related phenomenon where she’s seen “tremendous growth:” girls marking their bat mitzvahs with megillah readings, as Lewin did.
“Instead of a traditional Torah reading service or women’s tefillah [prayer] service or a partnership minyan service, we’ve seen a lot more… girls read, in part or the entire, Megillat Esther,” Price said.
Alyza Lewin’s personal megillah scroll cover is embroidered with an image of Mordecai being led on a horse by Haman on one side, and her name on the other side. (Photos courtesy of Alyza Lewin. Design by Jackie Hajdenberg)
Although traditional Jewish law, or halacha, obligates women to hear the megillah on par with men, many more traditionalist Orthodox communities still do not hold women’s megillah readings. Some Orthodox rabbis may believe that women need to hear the scroll chanted but should not themselves chant the scroll. Another objection stems from the idea that synagogues should gather the largest audience possible to hear the megillah, rather than fragment the crowd into smaller readings.
Still others worry that a women’s megillah reading will act as a sort of gateway to non-Orthodox practice more broadly. Gender egalitarianism is one of the principal dividing lines between Orthodoxy and more liberal Jewish movements, and some Orthodox rabbis say women who organize a megillah reading of their own may then venture into chanting Torah or leading public prayers, which women in the vast majority of Orthodox communities are not allowed to perform.
“The fear is, if we give a little, it’s a slippery slope and once we allow women’s megillah readings people intentionally will manipulate or maybe even accidentally just get confused,” said Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb, an Israeli Orthodox rabbi formerly based in Baltimore, describing some rabbis’ concerns regarding women’s megillah readings in a lecture last month surveying a range of perspectives on the topic. “If women’s megillah readings are OK, then women’s Torah reading is OK, then women rabbis are OK and before you know it, I don’t know what.”
In recent years, a growing number of Orthodox women rabbinic leaders have weighed in on the question as well. Maharat Ruth Friedman, a spiritual leader at the Orthodox congregation Ohev Sholom: The National Synagogue in Washington, D.C., said women reading megillah may feel more acceptable to Orthodox communities that see women’s performance of other rituals as a step too far away from Orthodoxy.
“It is kind of the one semi-kosher or kosher thing that women in more [religiously] right-wing communities can do,” Friedman said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that the rabbis allow them to meet in the synagogue space, but at least that there is a contingent of women who will go to them.”
In some communities, women’s megillah readings might take place in private homes or in other spaces outside the synagogue. Some Orthodox rabbis permit women to read the megillah for other women, but prohibit it in front of men.
The idea of feminist megillah readings has become so mainstream that it was a storyline on “Shababnikim,” an Israeli comedy series about renegade haredi Orthodox yeshiva students. One of them is alarmed by his fiancee’s determination to read the megillah for a group of women and barges in to stop the reading. He later decides that despite his discomfort he should be more flexible in the future, within the constraints of Orthodox law, to make the woman he loves feel respected.
As women’s megillah readings have increased in popularity, they have reached the farthest parts of the globe, even reaching as far south as Antarctica. (Courtesy of Raquel Schreiber via JOFA)
At the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, a liberal Orthodox synagogue in New York City, women have been reading megillah for decades. Founding Rabbi Avi Weiss wrote a Jewish legal analysis explaining why women are permitted to read the scroll in 1998.
“I personally am someone who advocates, and in our synagogue community looks to expand, women’s roles and give more opportunities for women,” said the synagogue’s current senior rabbi, Steven Exler.
Lewin is also watching the practice expand at her synagogue, Washington, D.C.’s Kesher Israel Congregation, where women have read from the megillah for nearly three decades. This year, she’s reading the fewest chapters of the megillah she has ever read. She usually reads half of the scroll, including a difficult passage in the ninth chapter. But for this week’s women’s reading at her synagogue, a new volunteer signed up to chant the ninth chapter.
Still, despite her pioneering reading at age 12, and her decades of chanting, Lewin has encountered the Orthodox community’s ambivalence around women and megillah firsthand. For many years, she borrowed her father’s scroll when Purim came around. But about eight years ago, Lewin asked him for her own scroll as a gift, which can cost upwards of $1,800.
Lewin’s father traveled to Israel to find a scribe to commission the megillah. But he wasn’t comfortable telling the scribe the megillah would go to a woman, and instead said it was a gift for his son-in-law.
Years later, Lewin was at a wedding where she met the scribe who wrote her treasured megillah, and revealed to him that the scroll belonged to her.
“He was thrilled,” Lewin said. “I think it was his individual personality. There are some individuals who are very supportive of the increase in opportunity for women, that women are becoming much more learned in terms of Jewish law.”
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How to stop worrying about the Democratic Socialists of America
The question of why three candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America bested more mainstream Democrats in congressional primaries in New York and Colorado last month is being answered by pundits, not pollsters.
There have been no exhaustive exit polls to explain why, in Colorado, Melat Kiros unseated incumbent Democrat Diana DeGette and New York voters chose Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez — not to mention DSA victories in a slew of state races.
But there is an exhausting panic.
American Jews are worried that the often virulent anti-Israel positions these candidates take show that opposition to Israel is now a litmus test for political viability in the Democratic Party, that describing Israel as “genocidal” and “apartheid” is the ante for any blue candidate.
Given the nature of some of these races, it certainly looks that way. In Colorado, the policy differences between DeGette and Kiros were negligible. DeGette has one of the most progressive voting records in Congress. But she took AIPAC money and paid for it.
And her opponent Kiros wasn’t just critical of Israel’s government’s policies. She, like many other DSA candidates, blamed Israel for the Oct. 7 attacks. Avila Chevalier attended the Oct. 8, 2023, DSA-promoted rally that celebrated the attacks.
Meanwhile, the panic among mainstream Democrats is that primary voters are putting forth candidates who will get clobbered in general elections. In a May New York Times/Siena poll, 47% of Democrats said they want the party to move center, while 28% said the party should move to the left.
That means while DSA candidates may win in what some have called “cobalt blue,” or deeply Democratic districts, with a high number of young, white, educated voters, in crucial swing districts a DSA candidate will take the party down with them.
Israel, demonized
However the general election turns out, primary results show that among not all but a significant group of Democratic voters, two brands have become toxic: Israel and the Democratic Party.
Type “Gaza” into TikTok, scroll for five minutes, and it’s easy to understand at least one reason why. The carnage Israel has wrought in Gaza plays on a visceral loop on social media. Israel as the aggressive colonialist oppressor is a given in much of academia. And Israel’s own actions at the hands of its most right-wing government in history — well, not helpful.
DSA’s official platform on Israel — the first foreign policy position on its site — calls for an end to economic and military aid to Israel and “national sovereignty for the Palestinian people.”
Its best-known members, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have helped popularize the notion that funds spent by the U.S. to arm Israel could instead have been used to fund domestic programs, such as health care for all. On this point the DSA reflects the position of a plurality of American voters: Only 24% support maintaining current levels of aid, while 40% oppose it, according to an Economist/YouGov poll.
But other DSA candidates don’t criticize Israel; they demonize it, and they hesitate to condemn terror even when it attacks Americans. Kiros unapologetically appeared at a rally condemning Israel and refused to call the 2025 firebomb attack on peaceful Jewish marchers in Boulder an antisemitic act.
We are long past the post-Oct. 7 period when anti-Israel activists were challenged to condemn Hamas. For these candidates, pro-Palestinian means pro-Hamas.
“Militant anti-Zionism became a wedge that the group’s more radical activists used to drive away critics of authoritarianism on the left,” wrote Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic.
The other tarnished brand is the Democratic Party itself. At a time when President Donald Trump is sending ICE agents and troops into American cities, jacking tariffs, making billions of dollars in office and conducting full-scale wars without congressional approval, sitting Democrats look feckless. Even the most moderate Democrats — much less non-MAGA Republicans and independents — can see how Democrats have failed to build housing or address affordability. One way to punish the mainstream is to vote for the extremes.
The DSA’s Zionist founder
All of this is especially ironic considering the history of the DSA, whose founder, Michael Harrington, was both a Zionist and a pragmatic if radical political thinker.
Harrington founded the DSA in 1982 to create a movement for social change free from authoritarian pro-Stalinist groups. He was, in the words of the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., America’s “only responsible radical.”
And yes, the founder of the DSA identified as a Zionist.
In a 1975 interview with a Jewish journalist, Harrington, who died in 1989, said, “I support Israel as an internationalist. Israel is a democratic country whose people are passionately defending its self-determination.”
After the United Nations voted to condemn Zionism as racism, Harrington wrote, “If one preposterously charges that Zionism is racist, then so are all nationalisms which joined to condemn it at the U.N. And that is to drain the concept of racism of any serious meaning.”
Clearly, Harrington has left the building. After Sanders’ presidential campaign inspired a membership surge a decade ago, the current national DSA swelled with more radical membership, including from struggling far-left and communist groups.
“Having dismantled the guardrails that Harrington built to exclude communists,” wrote Chait, “the group established new guardrails to exclude anybody opposed to Israel’s destruction.”
DSA’s first iteration included Jewish activists who worked toward coexistence and a two-state solution, wrote Jo-Ann Mort, a DSA cofounder. Now, she wrote, “its socialism is more concerned with ‘anti-imperialism’ than the democratic socialism that inspired the founders.”
Extremism feeds extremism
The Jewish fears that a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty will lead to pogroms in Manhattan have not been realized. But after Ocasio-Cortez, another DSA candidate, drew the wrath of the group for initially supporting defensive weapons transfers to Israel, she has now come out against them.
One can imagine a DSA that struggle-sessions Sanders, the man most responsible for its revival, subjecting him to a humiliating show trial for being insufficiently anti-Israel. Far-fetched as that seems, it’s unclear how DSA will address the clear schism between its liberal Zionists and its increasingly hardcore anti-Israel wing.
Meanwhile, the ascendant DSA is a boon to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose own brand of extremism thrives on creating an Israel-against-the-world mentality. On a visit to Israel last month, I found Israelis and the Israeli media obsessed with Mamdani. One woman told me she wouldn’t dare set foot in New York City as long as the putative leader of the DSA was still mayor. Extremism feeds extremism.
And if the DSA specter leads American Jews to think the Republican Party is a safe haven, think again.
Young Republican voters are shifting against Israel in the same way young Democrats are. And just this week, Tucker Carlson, a confidant of the vice president, the right’s most popular media personality and a vicious Israel critic, said, “I officially don’t care about Hamas.”
An Israel-less ‘Promise to America’
Democratic leaders have struggled with ways to recapture the young voters lured away by the DSA.
The group Promise to America, founded earlier this month, asks representatives and candidates to sign on to six “pledges” that seem focus-group-tested to appeal to 18- to 26-year-olds: free speech, “government that works,” fiscal discipline, fair capitalism, just national security and “national renewal.”
“Democrats that hold these values that do well in the party,” Felix Frisch, the group’s 20-year-old founding director, told me in a phone interview. Frisch, who took a leave of absence from the University of Chicago to run the organization, pointed out that two of the pledge’s signers — Rep. Tom Suozzi in New York and Rep. Adam Gray in California’s Central Valley — were the only two Democrats to flip a district that Trump won in the 2024 cycle.
How did he explain the DSA’s success?
“They’re a lot more organized,” he said. “The reason I got so fired up to do this was because we need some organization around our core principles.”
The website, I pointed out, doesn’t mention Israel, which for many young voters is a defining issue. Frisch suggested I speak to the pledge’s signers, which I took to mean: Where Democrats can win, it may be in spite of their support for Israel, not because of it.
Where the DSA lost
Aside from online pledges, what hope is there for moderate Democrats who don’t put Hamas or Israel-bashing first?
I didn’t have to look far for an answer. In my Los Angeles City Council district, CD 11, a charismatic and accomplished DSA candidate, Faizah Malik, challenged incumbent Traci Park. In the early June election, Malik got trounced, 64% to 35%, in a district that teems with the same progressive, white voters who backed winning DSA candidates elsewhere.
The difference? Since taking office in 2022, Park has greatly reduced homeless encampments and, according to the Los Angeles Times, “became the face” of recovery after the Palisades fires. She pushed to bring 2028 Olympic events, Hollywood film shoots like Baywatch, several large affordable housing projects and a much-needed marine mammal recovery station to the area. Nothing sexy — well, except the Baywatch reboot — but noticeable.
Malik didn’t mention Israel or Gaza in her campaign materials, and it’s unclear whether doing so would have helped or hurt her. She did have the backing of Engage Action, the Muslim American lobbying group that considers Israel an occupier of Palestinian lands since 1948.
Park won because her record gave the district’s 284,000 residents plenty of reasons to vote for her, embodying what The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein called “a liberalism that builds.”
The same, by the way, could be said about Brad Lander, a liberal Zionist who beat Rep. Dan Goldman by running to his left on Israel but parted ways with DSA after Oct. 7. While the Israel issue helped tank his opponent, it was Lander’s record of delivering for his constituents as a City Council member and then city comptroller — including pushing through affordable housing initiatives and paid sick leave — that accounted for much of his popularity.
There is as much to learn in where the DSA candidates lost as where they won. When Democrats stand up articulate, social-media-savvy candidates who can galvanize voters around effective solutions to the problems they care about — and then make those solutions happen — they win.
The post How to stop worrying about the Democratic Socialists of America appeared first on The Forward.
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AIPAC attacked a Democrat for funding ICE. Now it’s backing one who voted the same way.
AIPAC’s super PAC is spending big to boost Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary — over a record that includes the same ICE funding vote the group used to attack a different Democrat earlier this year.
Stevens is one of three leading candidates in the primary, running against progressive insurgent Abdul El-Sayed, who called the Israeli government “evil” like Hamas, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow. A new 30-second ad from AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, praises Stevens for confronting Trump’s immigration policies — citing legislation she introduced to create an independent prosecutor for ICE misconduct, and her calls for then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign.
The ad is part of a multimillion-dollar campaign to boost Stevens, a longtime AIPAC ally, whom the group helped elect in 2018 and reelect in 2022.
But the message is hard to square with AIPAC’s own record elsewhere. Earlier this year, the group spent more than $2 million attacking former Rep. Tom Malinowski in a New Jersey special election for voting to fund ICE as part of a bipartisan border bill. “We can’t trust Tom Malinowski to stand up to President Donald Trump,” that ad said. Stevens voted for the same funding bill. Last June, she also voted for a House resolution thanking ICE agents “for protecting the homeland.”
An AIPAC spokesperson and a UDP representative did not immediately respond to explain why the vote to fund ICE was presented as a liability in Malinowski’s race but not in Stevens’ case.
AIPAC has spent years cultivating ties to Trump-aligned Republicans, many of whom strongly support aggressive immigration enforcement.
The Israel-boosting organization’s brand has become increasingly controversial among mainstream Democrats in recent years. Congressional candidates, including some Jewish Democrats, have promised not to take contributions from AIPAC. Last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani used the word “monsters” to describe AIPAC at a rally for progressive candidates he backed, all of whom won their primaries.
In the Michigan race, shaping up as one of the starkest tests of the Democratic coalition and how the party navigates policy towards Israel in Congress, United Democracy Project has already spent $10.7 million backing Stevens, making the Michigan contest one of its largest Senate investments this election cycle. AIPAC also raised several million dollars for Stevens by directing its donors to online portals that funnel money directly to the candidate’s campaign, effectively erasing its fingerprints in public data.
McMorrow has the endorsement of J Street, the liberal Zionist advocacy group that supports a two-state solution. The Jewish Democratic Council of America issued a rare dual endorsement of Stevens and McMorrow.
El-Sayed, the progressive frontrunner, is increasingly trying to transform AIPAC’s investment in the race into a centerpiece of his campaign message. Backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, El-Sayed has released videos accusing AIPAC of attempting to buy Democratic elections and police debate over Israel. In recent months, he has also reached out to Jewish voters while seeking to channel the energy of the 2024 Uncommitted movement, which protested the Biden administration’s support for Israel in the war against Hamas in Gaza. The state is home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States. Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in the state.
Arno Rosenfeld and Hannah Feuer contributed to this article
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Adam Sandler officiates Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce wedding, fueling theories about singer’s Israel stance
(JTA) — A Jewish comedian who played one of cinema’s most notable Israeli characters took center stage — literally — at Taylor Swift’s wedding at Madison Square Garden on Friday.
Adam Sandler officiated the ceremony between Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, a spokesperson for Swift confirmed to media after the wedding.
The event included a wide range of Jewish attendees, including the Haim sisters, who recently attended a Knicks game with Swift; the writer and actor Lena Dunham; Joshua Kushner, the businessman whose brother Jared is a top Middle East advisor to President Donald Trump; and Kelce’s former teammate Mitchell Schwartz.
Sandler’s presence in particular fueled criticism from anti-Israel voices, who argued it was significant that someone who has described himself as “very pro-Israel” officiated the wedding. Sandler has discussed his friendship with Swift and Kelce publicly, saying that it developed through his daughters, who are Swift fans.
Swift has largely avoided wading into polarizing political issues, and her outlook on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a source of confusion for many fans, who have struggled to interpret her silence on the topic at a time when many celebrities have publicly voiced support for Gaza. Her decision not to publicly criticize Israel is seen as having bolstered her popularity among Israelis. At the same time, some pro-Palestinian fans have decried her silence and protested at her concerts, while others have speculated that she is privately pro-Palestinian but has avoided speaking out for fear of alienating fans.
“For all the Swifties defending Taylor Swift regarding her silence on Palestine she had Adam Sandler … a well-known Zionist, officiate her wedding so I think we know where she stands now,” tweeted an account called Land Palestine that had nearly 2 million followers on Instagram before being suspended last year.
“They’re all Zionists, clearly, and no doubt about it,” tweeted the Oxford University student Kate Crawford, a prominent pro-Palestinian voice on X who identifies as partly Jewish.
Some pro-Israel voices joined in the speculation. “I wonder if she is publicly aligning herself with certain people for a soft launch of her views. If she were to say some pro-Israel or pro-Jewish things, I think it could go a long way amongst the younger generation,” wrote one user on Reddit’s “Jewish” forum, in a post that was deleted but yielded nearly 200 comments parsing Swift’s possible Israel attitudes. (Among the evidence offered for possible pro-Israel leanings: She and Kelce recently dined at a buzzy Israeli restaurant. But other commenters noted that Gigi Hadid, a Palestinian-American celebrity who has spread anti-Israel rhetoric, was also at the wedding.)
The chatter about the wedding and Israel swelled so much that the parody account Buzz Crave riffed off of it with a viral post proclaiming: “Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce have left the U.S. for Israel to start their honeymoon.”
Like Swift, Sandler is not among the celebrities to engage in activism on Israel or Gaza. In fact, Sandler — whose early hits included “The Hanukkah Song” — is not known to have visited Israel, after disclosing in a 2022 interview that he had never traveled to the country of one of his signature characters. He played Zohan Dvir, an Israeli soldier who prefers partying to war, in the 2008 comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.”
Sandler made the “very pro-Israel” comment in 2015 while criticizing artists who boycott Israel during an appearance on Howard Stern’s radio show. He has said little publicly about Israel since the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack that began the war in Gaza, when he said his “heart is shattered” and signed onto an entertainment industry letter calling on then-President Joe Biden to help return the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas.
For some, the reaction to Sandler’s officiation added to a growing sense that no Jewish figure can escape being targeted by anti-Zionist activism. “You can stay silent. You can avoid politics. You can try not to get involved,” the pro-Israel influencer Ran Alkalay posted on Instagram. “For antisemites, none of that matters.”
For other Jewish voices commenting on the wedding, the guest list was immaterial. On Facebook, Rabbi David Glickman of Kansas City noted that Swift and Kelce had doled out $26 million in charitable gifts ahead of their nuptials.
“Jewish tradition says that a bride and groom have the ear of God on their wedding day — so the couple will say silent prayers for folks in need. I’m grateful your prayers weren’t only silent,” Glickman wrote. “You gave an example for all of us that personal celebration is made greater through tzedakah and generosity. Your charitable gifts are more impressive than a wedding at MSG — I hope it will get the same publicity.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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