Uncategorized
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.”
—
The post In Orthodox communities where women don’t read Torah, Purim offers a rare opportunity appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
The Black Jewish experience, and Black-Jewish relations, take center stage on Fifth Avenue
The civil rights movement represented a kind of pax romana in Black–Jewish relations — symbolized most enduringly by the image of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching beside Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery.
While many Jewish and Black Americans recall that era with a sense of wistful nostalgia, the relationship has become increasingly strained amid debates over racial justice, Israel and Palestinians.
This week, Temple Emanu-El on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, one of the country’s most prominent Reform synagogues, is launching a new five-year effort as a contribution toward rebuilding those ties while also foregrounding Black Jews.
Shared Histories, Shared Futures: The Arielle Patrick & Aaron Goldstein Initiative on Black-Jewish Relations promises to bring scholars, activists, and religious leaders to the synagogue for a series of conversations on race, antisemitism and coalition-building. Its first event, set for May 29, will take place during a Friday night service.
“This is not a performance or a gimmick,” said Patrick, the Chief Communications Officer at Ariel Investments, a global investment firm, who endowed the initiative alongside her husband Goldstein. “This is intentionally not during Black History Month, it’s intentionally not on MLK Day. It’s embedded in how we’d like people to think about creating a better society for our children and grandchildren.”
A frayed bond
Patrick, who is a Black Jew, said part of the inspiration behind the initiative came from her sense that the relationship between the two communities is not what it once was.
“I think a lot of Jews felt that their Black brothers and sisters were silent after Oct. 7, and perhaps jumped into the conversation about Palestine versus Israel without having the full context,” she said. “And then I also think that for a long time, the Black community has felt almost deserted by the fact that Jews were enabled to be upwardly mobile from the communities we once lived in and shared because of assimilation.”
In recent years, debates over Israel have fractured many progressive spaces, leaving some left-wing Jews who refused to disavow Israel feeling isolated from circles they once felt a sense of belonging to. Segments of the Black Lives Matter movement have explicitly linked racial justice in America to the cause for Palestinian liberation, and some of its chapters have even endorsed militant resistance to that end.
At the same time, rising antisemitism in the aftermath of Oct. 7 has shifted how some Jewish organizations engage with social justice work. The Anti-Defamation League, which for years invested in broader civil rights and democracy initiatives, pivoted from much of that programming to focus its resources on the rise in antisemitism.
Fostering the relationship is also complicated by divisions within both communities themselves. “When we think about Black-Jewish relations, we have a tendency to assume that everyone who is Black thinks one way and everyone who is Jewish thinks one way,” said Dr. Susannah Heschel, the head of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth and the daughter of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. “Of course, there’s enormous diversity of all kinds: political, cultural, religious,” she added.
Relations in New York City reached a low point in 1991 after a Hasidic driver struck and killed a Black child in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, setting off days of unrest that left a Jewish student fatally stabbed and two communities grieving.
Though strain has reemerged in recent years, particularly during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and the war in Gaza, organizations have emerged during that same period seeking to rekindle Black-Jewish dialogue.
“I think a lot of Jews are inspired by the civil rights era, by the fact that so many Jews participated,” said Heschel. “I know that photograph of my father marching in Selma is very important to a lot of people.”
She considers that photo a spur to new generations to continue the work. “The question is, what do you do with a photograph like that?” she asked. “Do you say, ‘Isn’t that great, what we did,’ in the past tense? Or do you take it as a challenge?”
Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism launched a partnership with Hillel and UNCF in 2024 to host unity dinners bringing together Jewish students and students at historically Black colleges and universities.
One might recall the viral Super Bowl ad, sponsored by Kraft’s Blue Square Initiative, where a Jewish boy is taunted by his classmates for being Jewish before his Black classmate fearlessly comes to his aid. The two boys walk off together in an idyllic (and, as critics have noted, somewhat antiquated) display of Black-Jewish solidarity.
Other groups, including Rekindle and CNN commentator Van Jones’ Exodus Leadership Forum, have launched programs aimed at fostering conversations between Black, Jewish, and Black-Jewish leaders. And this month, in a significant development, a National Convening on the Black-Jewish Alliance will be hosted in Miami, bringing together representatives from 75 organizations focused on cultivating the relationship.
A recent PBS series, Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History, which came out in February also shed a light on the relationship, leaving many hoping to engage in the present — though also received pushback for not engaging seriously with the perspectives of Black Jews.
Centering Black Jews
Rabbi Joshua Davidson, the senior rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, grew up in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement and came to deeply value the stories of Black and Jewish communities working together.
“I knew that ultimately it would become an important part of my rabbinate too,” he said.
He says has been engaged in intercultural work for years, cultivating friendships with faith leaders across New York City, including at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn.
“One doesn’t enter into a relationship with the expectation that you’re going to get something in return,” Davidson said. “There’s a difference between allyship and friendship. The way I approach this is I want to establish friendships.”
Davidson said those relationships have allowed him to stand together with clergy members from those communities during difficult moments. Following the 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, for example, he participated in a solidarity service at Abyssinian Baptist Church.
“There are times when a crisis hits, and you need allies, and so you reach out. You have no choice. But if you’ve been fortunate enough to be able to build the friendships when things were calm, you’re in a much better position,” he added, referring to the sense of abandonment many Jews felt after Oct. 7.
“I know around the country there’s been a great deal of frustration that expectations of one community showing up for another during moments of distress weren’t met. I can only say that my own experience has been different,” he said. “When something has happened to the Jewish community, I get the phone call from colleagues of other faith communities, and certainly among the leadership of the Black community in the city.”
The initiative also seeks to foreground Black Jews themselves, whose experiences are often absent from conversations about Black-Jewish relations.
“We have a tendency, all of us, to talk about Black–Jewish relations as if all Jews are white and all Black people are not Jewish,” Heschel said. “It’s gradually dawning on Jews that we have Black Jews in our community.” Estimates suggest Black Jews make up roughly 1% to 2 % of American Jews.
Patrick said she has often encountered those assumptions firsthand.
“When I go to synagogue or when I’m in a social setting, the first thing a person asks me is, ‘Did you convert?’” she recounted. “That’s not a normal question to ask anyone.”
According to a 2021 study by the Jews of Color Initiative, 80% of respondents who identified as Jews of color said they had experienced discrimination in Jewish settings. Another survey, conducted by the Black Jewish Liberation Collective, found that of 104 Black Jewish respondents, 62% reported feeling increased marginalization in Jewish spaces after Oct. 7.
Davidson hopes that bringing Black Jews to the fore, like Rabbi Tamar Manasseh — a Chicago-based activist and community leader known for her work combating gun violence, who will be Temple Emanu-El’s first speaker in the initiative — will encourage more Jews of color to feel at home in the congregation.
“If you don’t acknowledge that there are Jews of color, and if you don’t find opportunities for them to be front and center, then you’re less likely to actually have that segment of the Jewish community join you,” he said.
Temple Emanu-El has committed to the initiative for at least five years — a timeline Patrick said was intentional.
“I knew that just having one fun lecture was not going to do anything,” she said. “It has to be a sustained commitment.”
Still, she hopes the work will continue long beyond that.
“In my perfect world,” she said, “I’m 95 and still doing this.”
The post The Black Jewish experience, and Black-Jewish relations, take center stage on Fifth Avenue appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
A Yiddish lecture in Munich by literature scholar Nathan Cohen
דעם 17טן יוני וועט נתן כּהן, אַן אָנגעזעענער פֿאָרשער פֿון דער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור בײַם בר־אילן אוניווערסיטעט, האַלטן אַ רעפֿעראַט אויף ייִדיש בײַם אוניווערסיטעט אויפֿן נאָמען פֿון לודוויג מאַקסימיליאַן אין מינכן, דײַטשלאַנד.
כּהן וועט רעדן וועגן דער געשיכטע פֿון דער מאָדערנער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור און די וועגן און אָפּוועגן פֿון איר אַנטוויקלונג אויף די זײַטן פֿון דער ייִדישער פּרעסע, ווי אויך וועגן דעם פֿענאָמען פֿון דער שונד־ליטעראַטור.
די „שלום־עליכם לעקציע“, ווי מע רופֿט אָט די אונטערנעמונג, איז אַ יערלעכער רעפֿערעט אויף ייִדיש אין אָנדענק פֿון עוויטאַ וויעצקי, ז״ל, וואָס האָט די ערשטע געהאַט דעם שיינעם אײַנפֿאַל מיט 15 יאָר צוריק. „זי האָט אַרויסגעפֿירט ייִדיש פֿון די קליינע דײַטשישע אוניווערסיטעט־קלאַסן און פֿאַרבעטן אַ ברייטן עולם צו הערן אַ ייִדיש וואָרט – און דווקא אין אַקאַדעמישן פֿאָרמאַט,“ האָט דערקלערט דאַשע וואַכרושאָווע, אַ ייִדיש־פֿאָרשערין בײַם אוניווערסיטעט.
יעדעס יאָר האַלט אַ היסטאָריקער, שפּראַך־וויסנשאַפֿטלער, ליטעראַטור־פֿאָרשער אָדער שרײַבער אַ רעפֿעראַט פֿאַרן ברייטן מינכנער עולם אין גאַנצן אויף ייִדיש. „אין עולם זיצן אי ייִדיש־קענער אי אַזעלכע וואָס ווייסן גאָר ווייניק וועגן דער שפּראַך, אָבער האָבן דעם מוט זיך אײַנצוהערן און זיך לאָזן טראָגן פֿונעם ייִדישן וואָרט, וויסנדיק אַז זיי ריזיקירן ניט צו פֿאַרשטיין דעם מיין אָדער צו פֿאַרשטיין אים פֿאַלש,“ האָט וואַכרושאָווע געזאָגט.
פֿאַראינטערעסירטע קענען בײַזײַן די לעקציע אָדער אויפֿן אָרט אין מינכן, אָדער דורך דער אינטערנעץ. כּדי זיך צו פֿאַרשרײַבן, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
The post A Yiddish lecture in Munich by literature scholar Nathan Cohen appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Hundreds of Jewish leaders call on Israeli ambassador to apologize for attack on J Street
(JTA) — More than 500 rabbis, cantors and Jewish communal leaders have signed onto a letter calling on Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, to rescind and apologize for remarks describing J Street as a “cancer within the Jewish community.”
The letter, which J Street shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Thursday, accused Leiter, a Netanyahu appointee and former settler leader, of using language that “dehumanizes fellow Jews” during his remarks in Washington, D.C., on Monday.
J Street is the leading liberal pro-Israel lobby, and has increasingly staked out positions that have departed from other mainstream pro-Israel groups. Last month, the group announced its opposition to continued U.S. military aid to Israel, which Leiter decried in his remarks.
The signatories wrote that while Judaism embraces vigorous debate, disagreements must be conducted with “humanity, humility and respect for the dignity of every Jew.”
“At this painful and polarized moment in Jewish life, leaders on both sides of the ocean bear a heightened responsibility to lower the flames rather than fan them further,” the letter read. “We therefore call on you to retract your remarks and issue a public apology to the many American Jews, rabbis, cantors and communal leaders who have been hurt by them.”
Among the signatories were New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, former U.S. ambassadors to Israel Daniel Kurtzer and Tom Nides, National Council of Jewish Women CEO Jody Rabhan, Union for Reform Judaism President Rabbi Rick Jacobs and Rabbi David Saperstein, the director emeritus of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami told JTA that his initial reaction to Leiter’s comments was “simply dismay on behalf of Israel and on behalf of the Jewish community.”
“It’s a shame, because Israel, right now, needs all the friends it can get, and it really needs diplomats who seek to open doors and not slam them in people’s faces,” Ben-Ami said.
The Israeli Embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment from JTA.
The comments from Leiter follow a long history of criticism of the lobby from pro-Israel officials. In 2017, former U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman called the group “worse than kapos,” a reference to Jews who aided the Nazis during WWII.
While Ben-Ami said that the latest attack was “not new,” he felt spurred to craft a communal rebuke of Leiter’s rhetoric because he felt it was “breaking” not just the US-Israel relationship, but the relationship between the “American Jewish community and the Israeli Jewish community.”
“Within 24 hours we had hundreds and hundreds of people, and I think it just shows what a raw nerve Ambassador Leiter has touched here, and just what a big mistake it is for the Israeli government to write off the majority of Jewish Americans who are deeply critical of the government but supportive of the state and the people,” Ben-Ami said of the number of signatories.
While Ben-Ami said that J Street had long been invited to meet with former Israeli ambassadors, he claimed that since Leiter arrived, the group had been “blacklisted by the Embassy, and there’s been no engagement whatsoever.”
The letter comes as J Street has also faced scrutiny from across the political aisle, with the Zionist Organization of America calling for Hillels, Jewish Community Relations Councils and federations to cease relations with the group, while the student government of Sarah Lawrence College rejected an application to form a chapter of the group on its campus.
“There’s going to be people to our left who are intolerant and you know engage in similar tactics to folks on the right who are intolerant and try to shut out those they disagree with, and that is just as disturbing,” Ben-Ami said.
Looking ahead, Ben-Ami said that he hoped the letter would serve as a reminder that Jewish leaders need to make room for ideological differences rather than treat dissent as disloyalty.
“The message more broadly here is, we need to embrace the diversity of opinion,” Ben-Ami said. “We need to embrace our disagreements and recognize that that is indeed part of Jewish tradition.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Hundreds of Jewish leaders call on Israeli ambassador to apologize for attack on J Street appeared first on The Forward.