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Inside the auction house driving the rare-book craze in the Orthodox world
(JTA) – Israel Mizrahi joined dozens of fellow connoisseurs of rare Jewish books last December to watch the livestream of Genazym, the hottest auction house in the market. A bookdealer by trade, Mizrahi was also on the phone being paid to advise a wealthy client who had signed up to make bids.
But as the auction proceeded, Mizrahi’s advice had little use. His trigger-happy client didn’t seem to care about established valuations: He ended up paying about $50,000 for a book estimated at half that price. “He just pressed the button and kept on bidding until the bidding was over,” Mizrahi said. “There was no convincing him out of it. He spent nearly $600,000 that day and there was no sense to it.”
Behavior that confounds veterans of the rare Jewish book market has become routine at auctions organized by Genazym.
Mizrahi recalled the sale in 2021 of a Passover Haggadah printed in the 1920s in Vienna. With attractive illustrations of a prominent 19th-century rabbi named Moses Sofer and his family, the book makes for a nice addition to a collection. It also happens to be very common.
“I sell copies for $100, and I have probably sold 150 copies in my life,” said Mizrahi, whose shop in Brooklyn is a mecca for Jewish book lovers. “It sold for about $5,500 at Genazym’s auction. I currently have it on sale still for $100.”
At the highest end of sale prices, a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, commanded $620,000 at a Genazym auction last September, while a copy of Noam Elimelech, a classic rabbinic treatise, printed in 1788, fetched $1.4 million four months later — in both cases at least doubling or tripling what experts thought the items were worth based on past sales of the same texts.
“Genazym has come on like a freight train into the world of Jewish auctions. Some of the prices realized are far beyond what this market has seen before,” said David Wachtel, the former Judaica consultant for Sotheby’s auction house.
Since Genazym’s first auction in 2017, it has sold some 1,900 books, manuscripts and other collectible documents for about $26 million plus commission, roughly $12 million above total starting prices, according to an analysis by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of auction records on Genazym’s website. Genazym has increasingly outperformed the longest-standing Judaica auction firms in New York and Jerusalem.
A page from an illustrated Passover haggadah printed in Vienna in the 1920s. (Courtesy of Genazym)
It’s hard to tell exactly what’s driving the boom because the identity of Genazym’s customers is confidential and few flaunt their collections widely. One of the auction house’s owners, in a rare public comment, ventured that Jewish buyers are craving a connection with their heritage. What’s clear is that at a time when traditional libraries are cutting back on buying Jewish texts, Genazym is tapping into an emerging luxury market among Orthodox Jews — and fueling the rise of religious texts as both a status symbol and investment vehicle in some communities.
“I know the sellers, the customers and everybody involved and there is a new wealthy class of Orthodox Jews that have a limited range of things they can splurge on,” Mizrahi said. “They don’t go to Vegas, they don’t do crazy vacations. They keep kosher. So this is a way that they can splurge and show off.”
Rabbi Pini Dunner, who collects rare Jewish books, said investing in Judaica is likely attractive for some in the Hasidic community, whose religious observance is stricter than that of congregants at his Modern Orthodox synagogue in the Los Angeles area.
“There are people I know here in Beverly Hills who’ve got car collections worth tens of millions of dollars,” Dunner said. “In the Hasidic world that has no currency, just as the wow factor of a Picasso has no currency. An original manuscript or first-edition of the Noam Elimelech has a real wow factor, particularly if you can tell people the book sold for more than a million dollars at a Genazym auction.”
The impression that the Hasidic world has grown wealthier over the last decade or two is widespread and based, at least in part, on the proliferation of luxury products and services tailored for the community in places like Lakewood, New Jersey, and Kiryas Joel, New York. Weddings have become increasingly expensive and elaborate, fine dining options are common, and high-end kosher wine and liquor are more readily available.
“It wasn’t that long ago that sit-down dining was looked down upon or not even available. Now there are a plethora of options,” said Chaim Saiman, a law professor at Villanova University who studies the intersection of commerce and Jewish law. “It’s no secret that $200 bottles of Scotch appear at kiddush clubs all the time. $50 used to be a big deal, then $100 was a big deal, now we are at $200.”
Where the new wealth is coming from is not totally clear. Limited survey and U.S. Census data suggests that Orthodox Jews feel crunched by costs associated with practicing religion and that there are large pockets of poverty among them, particularly in Hasidic communities, according to Mark Trencher, the founder of Nishma Research, a nonprofit dedicated to studying the Orthodox Jewish community. The prevalence of large families also means that generational wealth can be harder to accrue for Orthodox Jews.
But there have always been high earners whose philanthropy has buttressed their communities, Trencher noted. “There are a lot of people in that community that are very successful in their businesses and they have large amounts of wealth,” he said. “Those people generally are huge donors to charities. From a financial perspective, those communities are probably doing much better than you would expect them to.”
Many of those high earners make their money through entrepreneurship rather than professional success in the white-collar world. Many nursing home chains — an industry valued at an estimated $171 billion and where growth is expected — have Orthodox owners. Amazon has also created new opportunities for Orthodox businessmen. Orthodox landlords, meanwhile, have benefited from skyrocketing real estate prices in places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
A page from a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, which fetched $620,000 at a Genazym auction. (Courtesy of Genazym).
Recent reporting in The New York Times about the Hasidic education system has provided a window into another stream of revenue for private businesses in the community. Entrepreneurs in the community have responded to the increased availability of government funding for special education in New York in recent years by establishing companies to service Hasidic schools, with the government footing the bill. In one example highlighted by the Times, a married Hasidic couple opened such a business in 2014 when they were 21 and 19 years old; in 2022, their company received more than $38 million in government funding.
The owners of another set of companies providing services to Hasidic schools appear to have used their windfall to purchase rare books through Genazym. The owners were indicted in January for allegedly billing the government for more than $1 million in childcare services that they never provided and otherwise defrauding the government out of more than $2.8 million.
Prosecutors are seeking to have the alleged fraudsters forfeit seven books and other documents as listed in a federal indictment. They include manuscripts with a rabbinic signature and rare books of blessing and Jewish law, all of which match items listed on Genazym auctions, where they sold for a total of about $274,000.
Buying Jewish texts at auction can seem like a savvy investment for buyers seeking to safeguard or grow their wealth. Before Genazym launched, a typical Genazym buyer might have invested in U.S. Treasury bills or the stock market, according to Wachtel, the former Sotheby’s consultant.
“I think Genazym has been able to convince people that this is a good vehicle for establishing and growing wealth,” he said. “That also dovetails with your ability to, let’s face it, show off. Somebody comes to your house, you can show them a first-edition Shulchan Aruch. But you’re not going to say, hey, come look at my T-bills.”
The auction house’s tactics appear tailor-made for this growing market. Its motto is “Own your heritage,” and it’s printed on the catalogs the company distributes through popular Orthodox magazines like Ami or Mishpacha or podcasts, places where people with no prior interest in books might encounter the hype. The catalogs also appear in synagogues in heavily Hasidic areas like Brooklyn or Lakewood, but without the prices printed on them so as not to violate a Jewish prohibition against discussing financial matters on Shabbat.
The descriptions in the catalogs emphasize any links that exist between the items for sale and notable rabbis from history, especially figures who established rabbinic dynasties that continue to exist today and who are revered by yeshiva-educated Orthodox Jews. The link might be a signature of a rabbi in a ledger from an old fundraising tour that took place 200 years ago. Or it might be that an important rabbi owned the book in question or even prayed out of it. Like a pair of pants of a prominent Israeli rabbi that drew widespread attention when they briefly went up for auction last month, these texts are seen by some as conferring holiness onto those who possess them. By virtue of their pedigree, these artifacts might even be seen as a segula, or Jewish protective charm.
In its promotional materials and live auctions, Genazym also uses more colloquial and hyperbolic language to describe its items than traditional auction houses, which tend to stick to the kind of terminology used by academic scholars.
“Genazym found a formula to make books and manuscripts really exciting for the layperson, especially in the Orthodox community,” said Yoel Finkelman, a former curator of the Judaica Collection at the National Library of Israel. “They are not using the vocabulary of experts, they’re using plain ordinary language, like ‘very old’ or ‘very rare.’ No one at Sotheby’s would ever refer even to a thousand-year-old book that way.”
Genazym’s unique approach extends to the delivery of items to buyers. A traditional buyer in the rare Jewish book market, like Michelle Margolis, Columbia University’s Jewish studies librarian, might only care that the book they bought is safely delivered. But with Genazym, the books come wrapped in a proper clamshell and velvet bag. “I rolled my eyes when my delivery arrived, but at the same time that’s a lot of investment,” Margolis said, adding that many other auction houses have been cutting costs, for example, by doing away with their customary printed catalogs.
Jacob Djmal, who lives in Brooklyn, has dabbled in Judaica collecting for many years, an interest he picked up from his grandfather. He remembers suddenly seeing Genazym’s advertising everywhere. “They started reaching out to you in every way possible, finding a demographic that wasn’t aware before. Every Genazym auction I have people texting me — ‘Did you hear about this? Did you hear about that?’ — as if something is happening that had never happened before.”
Sometimes, that is true. A breakout moment came during the December auction, when Genazym cleared $4.4 million in sales, about $2.6 million above total starting prices.
“If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on Earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for at least twice [the estimated amount],” a major British book collector living in France said on his anonymous Twitter account, which has around 110,000 followers, in December.
If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for *at least* twice estimate…. 1/https://t.co/iAC4sQudIz pic.twitter.com/eeunjqWzAs
— Incunabula (@incunabula) December 13, 2022
It remains to be seen whether Genazym can challenge Sotheby’s Judaica division as the destination for sellers with the rarest and most valuable books. Last year, a medieval prayer book sold for $8.3 million at Sotheby’s and this year, the New York auction house is accepting bids for the oldest known copy of the Hebrew Bible, which is expected to fetch as much as $50 million.
But Djmal considers especially remarkable about Genazym is not just the high prices but also the way in which rare books have caught on among Orthodox youth as something cool. “My son and his friends in yeshiva are talking about these items,” Djmal said. “These books represent rabbis they have heard about from a young age.”
The team behind Genazym’s success is led by three brothers from the Stefansky family who live in Jerusalem and New York. Before starting an auction house they worked for many years as private dealers in the rare book market. Their names, Chaim, Moshe and Bezalel, rarely appear anywhere and they almost never grant interviews. Chaim Stefansky made an exception for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and requested that this article not put him in the spotlight nor portray Genazym’s success as a product of his business acumen.
Stefansky said Genazym has tapped into a universal and deep-seated desire of people to strengthen their identities by connecting with the past. The Jewish community, he said, has been poorly served by an emphasis on historical and even current persecution.
“Always, we are victimized and we cry,” Stefansky said. “What we have in common maybe is that your grandmother and my grandmother were sharing the same bed in Auschwitz. Give me something positive of my past to be proud of. Your heritage has not only sorrow but also a happy, rich, and huge intellectual tradition. So Genazym comes and tells people about their heritage. It’s yours. It belongs to you.”
He said the same thing can be done with any ethnic or religious group.
“If you go to the Irish community and press the right buttons in terms of what you know that every Irish person is extremely proud of, I think you’ll be very successful,” Stefansky said.
He rejected the impression that Genazym’s buyers come primarily from the ranks of the nouveau riche in the Hasidic world.
“It’s coming from all sections,” Stefansky said. “People will say that there’s a lot of fresh money in the market. But we also have very good old money. We have institutions. And, also, the regular man. Mostly, the regular man, who never knew he could have access to any of this.”
One of the only customers who agreed to be identified and interviewed for this article is Rick Probstein, who says he’s spent more than $100,000 at the company’s auctions. He can’t remember when he started seeing Genazym catalogs but he had never collected Judaica before, which is perhaps surprising given that he’s an Orthodox Jew who’s been working in the collectibles business since he was a child trading baseball cards.
Today, at 53, Probstein is one of the largest sellers of sports collectibles in the world, operating through a dedicated account on eBay. “I run a humongous business — I am doing something like $160 million a year,” he said of his sales volume.
Probstein, who lives in Passaic, New Jersey, had long felt a pang of guilt about the lack of Jewish content in his collection. “I collect things but what do I have of my own heritage?” he recalled thinking to himself. “So when I started getting the catalogs, I said, ‘I gotta be a good Jew.’ I started bidding on things and I got really into it.”
Once Probstein got started, the Stefansky brothers began checking in on him, providing concierge service and cultivating him as a client.
“This is a boutique run by a Jewish family with a personal touch,” Probstein said “They call me on the phone, saying, ‘Rick, did you get the catalog? What did you think? Here are some items that you could really like.’”
Bidding on Genayzm items is not purely sentimental for Probstein. “I’m putting real money into it because I think that from an investment standpoint, it has a lot of upside,” he said.
Still, the items he buys tend to have personal significance.
“I am partial to items relating to the Chofetz Chaim,” Probstein said, referring to the rabbi and Jewish scholar Yisrael Meir Kagan, who died in 1933. Probstein’s oldest son is named Yisrael Meir in his honor. The Chofetz Chaim also appeals to Probstein because of his writings about lashon hara, the prohibition in Jewish law against speaking evil of people. “I think that speech is important and he’s sort of the embodiment of that,” Probstein said.
Genazym has sold six letters and a handwritten blessing signed or written by the Chofetz Chaim at prices ranging from about $16,000 to $68,000.
Ever since Probstein started collecting Judaica, these items have served as a draw for family and friends visiting his home.
“People in my community that come over for kiddush [refreshments after Shabbat service] know that I have this stuff and they always want to see it,” Probstein said. “Nobody ever looks at my sports memorabilia collection because it’s in my office but my Judaica stuff is in my house. They look at the letters and talk about the historical context. People love it.”
The revelation that so many Jews appear fascinated with their own history and want to engage with scholarly tradition comes at a time when many Jewish libraries have been struggling.
The library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, which has the most comprehensive and significant collection of Jewish books outside of Israel, has seen its footprint downsized amid budget cuts at the Conservative movement seminary. Also under financial pressure, American Jewish University was forced to sell its Bel Air campus in Los Angeles, which housed a library. Hebrew Union College, meanwhile, opted to end its Reform rabbinical training program in Cincinnati and even though the campus library has survived the cuts, financial uncertainty remains.
Genazym’s populist approach might hold lessons for Jewish institutions and university libraries with significant Judaica collections that hope to engage the public around books.
“The lesson is to lay off the snobbery a little bit,” said Finkelman, the former Judaica curator at the National Library of Israel, which is slated to reopen in a new and more accessible space later this year. “The goal of public institutions is to enable preservation but also to enable public access and public education. There are great stories in books and archives.”
Finkleman said he has encountered sneering reactions to the way Genazym promotes books, and they are similar to the response in the United States when the pop star Lizzo played a crystal flute that belonged to James Madison on stage at the Library of Congress.
“There are echoes of the same thing here,” he said. “Get out of the snobby ivory tower and realize you are preserving history for people.”
—
The post Inside the auction house driving the rare-book craze in the Orthodox world appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Pioneering restaurant chain Taïm closes, outlets padlocked for unpaid taxes
Taïm Mediterranean Grill, a pioneering fast casual Israeli food chain, is closing locations across the country, after New York State issued warrants for hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes.
The restaurant, founded by Israeli-American celebrity chef Einat Admony and now owned by the Illinois-based conglomerate Craveworthy Brands had expanded across New York, Washington D.C., and Chicago. Last week, pictures of two of New York City locations appeared on social media, with signage saying they had been seized by the state for nonpayment of taxes.
In an email to the Forward, a representative for Admony wrote that “she is unable to comment on the current status of the chain,” having not been involved with it since 2022.
When Admony first opened Taïm in New York’s West Village in 2005, it was one of the city’s first fast casual Mediterranean options. Zagat and New York Magazine gave the restaurant rave reviews, and lines formed outside the door.
Taïm opened its second location in 2012, and in 2018, former Chipotle executive Phil Petrilli and business partners invested in the restaurant and led its expansion across the country. By that time, Taïm faced a more crowded market, competing with Miznon, another Israeli fast casual creation by celebrity-chef Eyal Shani, and Cava, a Mediterranean bowl restaurant.
The restaurant switched ownership in 2024 when Craveworthy Brands bought Petrilli’s restaurant platform. But a year later, the state of New York issued dozens of tax warrants to Taïm-related entities at multiple locations. Some stores closed ahead of the recent round of state seizures.
The state has held both Pitrelli and Craveworthy’s CEO, Gregg Majewski, responsible for taxes owed. Pitrelli is currently suing Majewski, alleging that under their merger agreement, Majewski and Craveworthy are liable for all debts incurred by Taïm.
In his lawsuit, Pitrelli alleged the Taïm outlets owed $632,000 in unpaid taxes. Majewski did not respond to a request for comment; the Forward has reached out to his attorney.
Since the Hamas-led October 7 attacks on Israel, Taïm, which is Hebrew for “delicious,” has received some pushback. It has appeared on boycott lists and posts, criticizing it for being “Israeli owned,” even though its current owner is not Israeli. In a recent Instagram post noting the closure, users took to the comments to criticize the restaurant for being Israeli. However, a push to boycott Taïm specifically has not received as much widespread attention from the BDS movement as Goldie, a Philadelphia chain run by celebrity chef Michael Solomonov that recently closed six locations.
The restaurant currently brands itself as “Mediterranean,” though in the past it hashighlighted its Israeli background.
Others criticized Taïm for reasons unrelated to geopolitics. “They ruined that place when they changed the menu and made it like a big chain fast casual place,” one FoodNYC Redditor commented.
“Place has been going downhill for years, I’m not surprised,” another said.
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Antisemitism flourishes amid cultural and historical illiteracy. Classrooms should be a cure.
School will be back in session before we know it. A smattering of the headlines in the final weeks of the last academic year, coinciding with Jewish American Heritage Month in May, suggest that fighting antisemitism in educational environments will remain a monumental challenge.
They include a lawsuit against the nation’s largest teachers’ union for encouraging discrimination against Jewish teachers and students, a Texas private school displaying maps of the Middle East erasing Israel, swastikas scrawled on multiple school grounds in Massachusetts and in Georgia, and — just a few blocks from my child’s former school, which has had its own share of such issues — a flag bearing the hate symbol billowing over New York University.
The scene in the streets this summer has been arguably as bleak. Hate crimes against Jews are on the rise, even as rates of other major crimes fall. In response to the stabbing of a Jewish man in a kippah as he exited the Jewish Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Democratic congressional nominee Micah Lasher implored Mayor Zohran Mamdani to do more than react with the requisite expressions of empathy and promises of increased security, but to “take the temperature down” rather than foster a climate that jeopardizes Jewish safety.
Taking the temperature down is exactly what’s in order. We need proactive, preventative action from our political leaders, in New York City and beyond, to transform an environment in which antisemitic attacks still comprise the majority of hate crimes, and harsh words can too often combust into violence.
The good news is that we have a ready-made place to continue this urgent work: classrooms. As an educator, I have a strong sense of how historical and cultural illiteracy are far more rampant than unrepentant antisemitism, and that this is where we must focus our educational efforts in a more deliberate way than we currently do.
Ignorance provides antisemitism, an insidious shapeshifter that infects and unifies the otherwise polarized political right and left, with a powerful accelerant. Yet the only times when K-12 students might encounter Jewish experiences are in a Holocaust unit — mandated in 29 states — or in an antisemitism training, often introduced reactively after an incident. Neither approach addresses a generalized illiteracy about Jewish identity and experience that allows this hatred to fester. These traditional methods of “fighting antisemitism,” including in classrooms, are important but inadequate.
Rather than teaching about Jews primarily as targets of hatred — the obvious organizing principle of many lessons on the Holocaust and antisemitism training — it is crucial that students learn about Jewish identities and experiences as inextricable from our broader national narratives. When Jews are understood as full members of the polity, and as diverse participants in every historical era — as labor organizers and industry leaders, fashion designers and film directors, athletes and intellectuals — it becomes much harder to caricature us as evil or outsiders, or to render us invisible.
Such historical accuracy, rigorous source analysis, and a spirit of cultural inclusiveness, is the ethos of the New York City public schools’ Hidden Voices: Jewish Americans in United States History curriculum materials, for which I serve as lead scholar. Volume 1 is out now, and Volume 2 will be released later this fall.
A two-volume collection of profiles, original sources, guiding questions, and analytical essays written and reviewed by experts, the free materials enable history and social studies teachers to enrich existing lessons, or to create entirely new units of study.
Rich narratives about individuals illuminate broader historical eras, whether organizer Clara Lemlich on Progressive Era labor legislation, Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis on transformed legal approaches to monopoly, or Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s advocacy for sex education, to name a few. Moreover, Hidden Voices explores how each individual’s Jewishness shaped their contributions to American society.
Rather than just sprinkling in a few Jewish figures into existing narratives, “Portrait of an Era” essays show how integrating stories of both luminaries and lesser known Jews nuances and challenges dominant historical frameworks – like “the Civil Rights Era,” or “Postwar America” – in ways that render history more accurately, and more interestingly.
For example, what does it say about the early national period of a country founded on religious freedom that Rabbi Isaac Leeser worried Jews would become “Christianized,” and thus offered sermons in English, while simultaneously advocating for the “Judaization” of American Jews? Or, how is the notion that American Jews “became white” after World War II challenged by the fact that the first, and only, Jewish Miss America, Bess Myerson, sparked a torrent of complaints to pageant organizers, was disinvited from various appearances, and was encouraged to choose a less Jewish name (she didn’t)?
Hidden Voices is no hagiography — history as hero worship — even as one of its aims is to challenge negative stereotypes. Since students might only encounter one of these profiles throughout their studies, we were especially judicious in selecting individuals that highlight the complexity of history and of humanity. For example, Spaniard Luis de Caravajal y de la Cueva, whose family converted to Roman Catholicism but secretly practiced Judaism under the threat of death, arrived in the New World to advance colonization. Yet he used this position to rescue other persecuted conversos. Many years later, we profile Groucho Marx, who with his brothers indelibly shaped the worlds of vaudeville and film, new industries where Jews found success in part because antisemitism excluded them from more established ones.
Emphasizing Jews’ role in U.S. history at large is crucial, but so is educating about the specificity of Jewish experience, from the momentous — including the Holocaust and Israel’s founding – to the everyday, like mainstreaming blue jeans and bagels and establishing overnight camps. Cultural topics are especially powerful teaching tools, for students are often less guarded in discussing food or fashion than when grappling with the most fraught political questions. Given so many current conversations about Jews now turn to Gaza, Hidden Voices decenters this conflict to offer a wider lens on a diverse people too often unhelpfully decontextualized.
Why isn’t a more robust Jewish-American history curriculum already a staple in more schools, especially given how largely other identities loom in our classrooms and our culture? Indeed, Hidden Voices — which has covered race, ability, and other categories — has existed since 2018 in New York City, home to the largest population of Jews outside of Israel, and yet the project I lead was only commissioned in late 2023, spurred by Oct. 7. While Volume 1 has been downloaded 200,000 times, and encouraging reports of teachers using the materials are rolling in, integrating these Jewish stories into the study of U.S. history and culture remains optional.
Multiple factors account for this relative absence of Jewish stories in the teaching of American history, in New York City and nationwide: foremost, the widespread, reductive assumption that identity and power in the United States operate around a Black-white binary, with Jews on the white, privileged side, and thus not a marginalized group worthy of attention. Similarly, many identity-based frameworks focus on “underrepresented” groups, which Jews — despite comprising a tiny minority — are not. Lastly, many such curricula are introduced due to parental advocacy, but Jewish Americans have largely expended such energy on building a Jewish education network outside the public system.
Overlooking Jewish American history and experience intensifies both antisemitism and historical illiteracy, and must be addressed. While Hidden Voices may appear to “just add Jews” into a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion framework, it actually represents a subtly, but substantially, different intervention. First, the argument for such programs is often for people to “see themselves.” While I hope Jewish schoolchildren feel affirmed by such visibility, that aim is profoundly parochial. Learning the history of Jews — or Latinos, LGBTQ people and others — is not primarily valuable in order to cultivate particularistic pride, a dubious aim for a secular school in a pluralistic society. Rather, it is to equip all students to navigate our shared society with evidence, empathy, and universalism. Actually, a Jewish history curriculum arguably stands to be most valuable in districts without Jews at all, but ample room for antisemitism to fester unchecked by interpersonal experience.
I understand the skepticism of staking our hopes on a better future for Jewish Americans in educational institutions; I’ve been a vocal critic of how alienating these places have been to many since 10/7. To be sure, education is no magic pill, and ignorance is not our only enemy. Avowed antisemites and ideologues exist in K-12 and college classrooms, as in all professions, and they too demand our unsparing attention. But for the vast majority of Americans with scant awareness of Jewish history or experience, teaching and learning about Jews as integral to this nation’s past and present is a new, and potentially powerful intervention. We owe it to each other to pressure our politicians and our public schools to at least try it.
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What does DSA actually want? Its national co-chair can’t say.
It’s been a heady couple of months for the Democratic Socialists of America. Candidates the organization rallied behind ousted establishment Democrats in New York, Michigan, Colorado and Wisconsin state primaries. Pundits who doubted the movement last year are now eating crow.
With the DSA having forced its way into the spotlight, national co-chair Megan Romer went on The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast to share what the movement is all about. But the interview has elicited an online backlash — and some ridicule — after Romer said she would have attended an Oct. 8 protest and that she would have sought to stop Russia’s advance in Ukraine through diplomacy.
Just as damning to some viewers was Romer’s reluctance to provide specifics on a number of DSA policy positions when pressed for them by New Yorker editor David Remnick.
The backlash to the interview put Romer on the defensive. The day after its publication the national co-chair called Remnick a “debate bro” who had tried to make her look and feel stupid during the conversation. Remnick, a Pulitzer Prize–winner and former Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, has edited The New Yorker since 1998.
“Luckily lots of practice keeping my temper in check when debate bros are well-actually’ing me, tho it still flusters me,” Romer wrote Saturday on X. “I am def particularly sensitive when people are actively trying to make me look/feel stupid and it can throw me off my game.”
The interview highlighted a challenge that faces the organization as it gains members and breaks through on the Democratic stage: Translating its rallying cries into the gritty work of partisan politics — or, for the candidates DSA champions, getting things done while remaining true to the movement’s ideals.
Nowhere was that clearer than Romer’s talking points on Israel. Romer said the organization’s position was “a free Palestine with a capital in Jerusalem, and so I think that can safely be read as a one-state solution.” When Remnick asked her if DSA would have supported the proposed terms of the Camp David summit in 2000, had the Palestinians accepted it, Romer said: “Good question — I’d have to actually look at what the specifics there were.”
(The exact terms discussed at the summit are in dispute, but most agree it would have involved a separate Palestinian state with a capital comprising several Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem.)
A testy exchange followed around Romer’s stance on the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
Asked whether she supported New York congressional primary winner Darializa Avila Chevalier in attending a “pro-Hamas” rally on Oct. 8, Romer said yes — she would have gone herself.
“If you put people in an open air concentration camp, and you deprive people of rights, of dignity, of food, of the ability to live in safety,” Romer said, “you have to expect that they are going to not take that for that long. And that is not defending any harm of civilians or of non-combatants.”
Remnick replied, “Well, sure it is — you said you’re supporting it.”
Romer said, “I’m saying that I think it was inevitable.”
On issue after issue, Remnick pressed Romer for details and found few.
- Romer said DSA wanted to “tax the hell out of millionaires” but demurred on what that would mean in practice.
- Romer said she believed in open borders, but not in “throwing the gates open.” When Remnick asked if that wasn’t just immigration reform — which is to say the Democratic policy platform — Romer replied, “It means reforming the system we have while we rethink the system, while we build this new one from the ground up, and then hopefully eventually flipping the switch.”
- Romer said she did not believe in sending arms to support Ukraine in its war against Russia. She asked Remnick, “Why aren’t we doing any amount of actual diplomacy? Why aren’t we doing any amount of actual sending actual human beings to talk to human beings?” Remnick pointed out that there had been many attempts of diplomacy, “however failed,” since the beginning of the war.
- Remnick asked Romer what she meant when she said she believed in prison abolition. She answered that the safest communities were not ones with cops on every corner, but ones with “good schools, good jobs, good park systems, good recreation for their teenagers, things like that. Those are the safe communities.”
- As for her support for defunding the police, Romer said she was “not in favor of getting rid of police entirely tomorrow” but that she supported decreasing their budgets until a point where social services were sufficiently funded.
For the most part, Remnick — trying to fit Romer into a 30-minute podcast slot — let Romer’s answers speak for themselves whether they answered his question or not. But he did hint at a broader argument in one of his final questions, about the DSA’s position in favor of abolishing the U.S. Senate.
Given the scant likelihood of such a measure passing, Remnick asked, didn’t it distract from policy goals that were more likely to succeed?
“I don’t think so,” Romer replied. “I think taking principled positions tells people that you’re principled, and I think we see voters really responding to that, and we see people saying, ‘Oh, you’re actually thinking about the systems.’”
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