Uncategorized
Jewish institutions awaken to climate crisis, with hundreds pledging action
(JTA) — For a decade starting in 2002, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi devoted herself to pro-Israel advocacy. After that, the Jewish philanthropist and activist from Annapolis, Maryland, went all in to fight for disability rights, working in the field for the next decade. Now, Mizrahi is focused on climate change.
“Let me put it this way: In 2021, we donated to one climate organization, and in 2022, we donated to 17 of them,” Mizrahi said, referring to the small charity fund she runs with her husband, tech entrepreneur Victor Mizrahi. This year, the couple made their largest climate-related donation yet, sending a group of nine climate reporters to Israel to meet tech startups working on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Mizrahi and her husband have also begun commercially investing in such startups.
“I was hoping other people would solve it,” she said. “But the pace of the change is not nearly meeting the demand at the moment. I felt that even though I don’t know the subject, I’m just going to have to do it because I have kids and I don’t want this world to fall apart.”
Climate change has long ranked at or near the top of a list of issues concerning Jews in the United States, according to multiple surveys, and Jews have been heavily involved in the wider climate movement. But until recently, the issue had a marginal place on the agendas of Jewish communal organizations, which neglected climate even as the subject took on importance in the activism and policies of other religious communities and in the larger philanthropic world.
Mizrahi’s newfound emphasis on climate is an early example of a larger shift that is underway in Jewish philanthropy, a multibillion-dollar world made up of thousands of individual donors, charitable foundations and nonprofit organizations.
“It’s the beginning of what will become a more widespread focus among Jewish groups,” said Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, the founder and CEO of the Jewish climate group Dayenu. “We’re seeing an awakening to this as a profoundly Jewish issue, and awakening to the role that the Jewish community has to play in addressing the climate crisis.”
Scientists say that decisions regarding carbon emissions made in the next few years will affect life on Earth for thousands of years to come. The most recent warning came in March, when leading global experts with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a new report, stating that “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”
The large Jewish populations living in the coastal United States are vulnerable to extreme storms, sea-level rise, severe heat and other weather disruptions — a situation dramatized in the recent Apple television series “Extrapolations,” in which a rabbi contends with rising sea waters infiltrating his Florida synagogue. Meanwhile, Israel is experiencing a slew of impacts from drought and floods to security threats tied regional climate-related instability.
A flooded road after heavy rainfall in the central Israeli city of Lod, Jan. 16, 2022. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
Israeli officials visit the site where a road collapsed into a large sinkhole at Mineral Beach in the Dead Sea on December 7, 2017. Many facilities and beaches have been closed or shut down in recent years following the increase in sinkholes caused by ever-declining sea levels, as climate change strains the country’s water resources. (Mark Neyman/GPO)
The last few months have seen a flurry of new initiatives aimed at both greening Jewish institutions and directing collective action on climate.
In December, for example, Rosenn’s group published a report calculating that endowments of Jewish organizations, from family foundations to local federations, are invested in the fossil fuel industry to the tune of at least $3 billion. The report launched an ongoing campaign called All Our Might that urges Jewish leaders to withdraw these investments and put the money toward clean energy instead.
Meanwhile, many of the most prominent Jewish organizations in the country — representing local federations, Hillel chapters, summer camps, community centers, day schools and nearly every religious denomination — had already joined a new green coalition organized by another Jewish environmental group and were preparing to unveil pledges to do more in the fight against climate change.
The unveiling of the climate pledges happened in March, under the leadership of Adamah, a nonprofit created through the merger of two stalwarts of Jewish environmentalism, Hazon and the Pearlstone Center.
“Climate and sustainability have not been on the list of priorities for the vast majority of Jewish organizations; this coalition and these climate action plans reflect a deep paradigm shift and culture change moving forward,” Adamah CEO Jakir Mandela said at the time.
The commitments made by members of Adamah’s Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition include sending youth leaders to global climate summits, reducing emissions of buildings and vehicles and lobbying the federal government to pass climate policies.
More than 300 congregations and nonprofits have joined. For Earth Day, Adamah announced a million-dollar fund offering interest-free loans and matching grants to Jewish groups for projects to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
If any single event can be said to mark the debut of the climate issue as a top Jewish communal priority, it is probably the recent annual conference of the Jewish Funders Network, which took place in March in Phoenix, bringing together thousands of donors and charity executives.
For the gathering’s first event, before the formal opening of the conference, a group of participants went on a field trip to downtown Phoenix to learn about the local effects of the climate crisis. Far more people signed up than organizers anticipated, and with about 55 passengers, the tour bus chartered for the occasion reached capacity. Mizrahi, who was among the participants, said the trip was helpful as a networking opportunity for like-minded philanthropists.
“We wanted to expose them to how the existential threats posed by climate change are not long term, but are already here,” Yanklowitz said. “People down in the Zone are dying every summer from heat exhaustion and dehydration.”
Based on his debrief with the group afterward, Yanklowitz feels the trip left an impact on participants.
“I didn’t hear anyone say, ‘Oh, I’m changing my commitments.’ But I did get the sense that climate change was kind of abstract for many people, and that now it really hit home,” Yanklowitz said.
The rest of the conference featured multiple talks and gatherings dedicated to climate, including on the main stage, and an announcement that Birthright, which offers free trips to Israel for young Jews, was increasing its own climate activism with the help of a new donation.
In an interview, Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and Stephen Bronfman, children of Birthright founder Charles Bronfman, said their $9 million gift is meant to honor their father on the occasion of his 90th birthday, while also bringing Birthright more in line with the values of a new generation that is environmentally-minded.
Birthright organizers will use the funding to develop programming focused on climate that could, for example, expose participants to Israel’s clean tech scene. The money is also intended to help Birthright lower its own carbon footprint, potentially by switching to electric buses or adding more vegetarian meals.
The Bronfmans hope that Birthright’s significant purchasing power in Israeli tourism will nudge the industry toward more ecologically sustainable practices.
“To me, Birthright is like Walmart — everyone wants to do business with them,” Stephen Bronfman said. “They have the power to dictate terms to their service providers and affect the supply chain.”
The widespread interest in climate mobilization among Jewish groups comes after years in which the issue languished outside the mainstream. Rosenn, the head of Dayenu, who has attended about 15 conferences of the Jewish Funder Network, noticed a change this year.
“There used to be half a dozen people at a breakfast before the program talking about climate. And it wasn’t even climate, necessarily — it was the environment writ large,” she said.
The Jewish world is, in many ways, still lagging behind the larger climate movement. Divesting endowment funds from the fossil fuel industry, for example, is seen as a bold step among Jewish groups even though at least 1,590 institutions representing nearly $41 trillion in assets have already publicly committed to doing so, according to a website tracking such pledges. About a third of the groups on the list are defined as faith-based organizations, but only three are Jewish: Kolot Chayeinu, a congregation in Park Slope, Brooklyn; the Reform movement’s pension system; and the American Jewish World Service, a global justice group.
Rabbi Laura Bellows, now Dayenu’s director of spiritual activism and education, waves matzah as she encourages major financial organizations to divest from fossil fuels at a rally in Washington, D.C., April 20, 2022. (Bora Chung | Survival Media Agency / Courtesy of Dayenu)
Adamah’s own climate plan doesn’t include a pledge to divest but only a promise that it will investigate the option of doing so for its endowment and employee retirement funds. Instead, the plan touts the group’s education and advocacy efforts, and focuses on reducing emissions at its retreat centers.
Adamah’s chief climate officer, Risa Alyson Cooper, acknowledged that Jewish community institutions have been “largely absent” from the divestment movement and said her group regards divestment as one of several required tools for addressing the climate crisis.
She said the Jewish community hit a milestone when 12 of the 20 founding members of Adamah’s climate coalition said in their climate plans that they would consider amending their financial practices. That was significant, she said, in light of the organizations’ complex and deliberate governing structures, which can make executing such changes onerous.
“While the Jewish community may have lagged behind in years past, we are catching up quickly,” Cooper said.
Such a shift would mark not only a milestone for Jewish climate activism but also a departure from how the Jewish community has historically done philanthropy, said Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, executive vice president of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.
She said wielding financial holdings for social impact has been a hallmark of advocacy by Christian groups. Last year, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) opted to divest from fossil fuels in light of the climate crisis.
The Jewish community, meanwhile, has tended to act primarily through charitable donations. One of the reasons for the difference, she said, is that the Jewish community is much less centralized with communal assets spread across many endowments, making the actions of any single group relatively less impactful.
“Adamah had done some really important work to change individual behavior and grow people’s connections to the environment, but the bigger piece of bold collective action to fight the climate crisis was missing,” Kahn-Troster said. “The overall community is late to respond to the urgency of the problem. But I do think that the work of these organizations is very significant, so I’m excited to see it.”
Kahn-Troster’s historical view is informed by the legacy of her father, Rabbi Lawrence Troster, an environmental activist who had pushed for communal Jewish action on climate, and by the passion for climate justice displayed by her 15-year-old, Liora Pelavin, a member of the Jewish Youth Climate Movement, an arm of Adamah.
“Finding a meaningful Jewish space to do grassroots-level climate advocacy that many young people are demanding has been really important to Liora,” Kahn-Troster said.
—
The post Jewish institutions awaken to climate crisis, with hundreds pledging action appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
He photographed the defining image of 9/11 – and Jewish history for 50 years
Robert Cumins stood on his ninth-floor balcony in Verona, New Jersey, camera in hand, when he saw a plane heading toward Lower Manhattan. He figured it was just another flight out of Newark. He snapped two quick frames anyway — a plane against a skyline, nothing more — and kept watching.
Then came the fireball.
He had no idea, in that instant, that he had already taken the photograph that would define his career — that he was, in fact, photographing the last seconds of the 65 people aboard United Airlines Flight 175, en route from Boston to Los Angeles. He wouldn’t even remember the plane was in the frame until he saw the developed film an hour later. For that hour, he believed he only photographed the explosion, not the moments before.
Twenty-five years on, Cumins, now 78, still lives in that apartment. He still faces the same skyline — a skyline he has spent 25 years learning not to search for two towers that are no longer part of it.
That photograph made Cumins famous. It is one entry — the most-viewed one, certainly — in a career now entering its sixth decade, a career that has put him, again and again, at the edge of history he did not make.
He straightened Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s bow tie backstage, 10 days before the prime minister was assassinated, then flew to Israel to photograph his funeral. He spent 10 days documenting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. He stood close enough to photograph the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Camp David Accords, the Israel-Jordan peace treaty — three of the defining diplomatic moments of the modern Middle East.
Call him the Forrest Gump of Jewish history.
‘Turn around, kid’
Cumins’ workday on the morning of September 11, 2001, started with a red light.
He was driving down the hill from his apartment, headed out for coffee, when he stopped at the bottom and, out of habit, flipped on the radio. A WCBS helicopter reporter was already mid-report, something about a tower. By the time the light turned green, an anchor had cut in with the words: the World Trade Center.
Cumins turned the car around. He drove back up the hill. The elevator was sitting there, waiting. He rode up to the ninth floor. Before he was all the way inside his apartment, he could already see smoke pouring off the North Tower, 15 miles across the water. He ran for his camera, loading film and changing lenses as he crossed the living room toward the balcony.
He got there at 9:03 a.m. — four and a half minutes after the stoplight turned green. He’s gone over that stretch of time so often he can repeat it without thinking. A slower elevator, and he never gets the shot.
Cumins believes it was his mother, who died about a month before 9/11, who led the way. “Sometimes I say it was a spiritual thing,” he said. “She was watching over me at that red light. ‘Turn around, kid. This is big.’”
A convertible and a Kinko’s
By the time Cumins got his film to the photo lab in New Milford, he had already forgotten about the plane entirely. The fireball, he remembered — that part was impossible to forget. The plane itself, the thing he’d actually pointed his camera at, was gone from his mind completely.
Cumins stood over the technician’s shoulder as the scanner worked backward through the roll of Kodak film — 19 frames total — hunting for the explosion. They found it. Then he asked to see the beginning of the roll.
The first frame showed the plane against the skyline, smoke already rising from the first tower. In the next, a red dot flared just above the plane’s tail. Then came the explosion. The moment took three frames of film. Getting the picture to an editor took the rest of the day.
Cumins called his agent, who reached an editor at People — the magazine wanted the image immediately, as large as he could send it. Cumins had an AOL account with a 16-megabyte limit. Every file he tried to send bounced back, too big.
He hopped in his Audi TT convertible, top up, and sped to a Kinko’s on Route 3 in Clifton, and spent the day with a store clerk, the two of them trying to coax something too large through a connection too small. Confirmation came at 9 p.m., just ahead of deadline. The photo ran on People’s cover as a double-page foldout.
The top of his car stayed closed for weeks after that. “I could not bring myself to put down the roof,” Cumins said, “to enjoy the simple pleasures of light and fresh air during such a dark time.”
Documenting modern Jewish history
Cumins built a career on trust. At 14, he sent a telegram to President John F. Kennedy’s press secretary asking to visit Washington. The press secretary said yes. It wouldn’t be the last time a powerful person said yes to him.
It was almost by accident that his persuasiveness led him into Jewish photography at all. In 1970, a colleague asked him to shoot a Jewish Federation breakfast in Miami. His first Jewish communal assignment — a parlor meeting in a private home in Elizabeth, New Jersey — followed a few months later. It was the first of hundreds. Over the next five decades, he photographed scores of events and made roughly 250 trips to Israel, building trust as he went.
In 1988, that trust bought him 10 days inside Yitzhak Shamir’s daily life — meetings and meals, including moments when no one else was in the room. “He was very kind to me,” Cumins recalled. The photographs ran in The New York Times Magazine, in Life and in newspapers across the globe.
In October 1995, Cumins was backstage at a black-tie reception in Washington when he noticed Yitzhak Rabin’s borrowed bow tie had come loose from his collar. Cumins walked over and fixed it. “I had spent a lot of time previously with Rabin,” he said. “Otherwise, I would never have gotten near his neck.”
Ten days later, Rabin was assassinated. Cumins flew to Israel and back in a single day to photograph the funeral — soldiers saluting the casket, an aide reading from the blood-stained speech recovered from Rabin’s jacket. Two weeks before, at that reception in Washington, he’d photographed President Bill Clinton and Leah Rabin laughing together. Now he photographed Clinton consoling her as a widow — two photos, worlds apart, taken by the same man.
Even after 9/11 made him famous, Cumins kept doing what he had always done. He signed on as one of Hillary Clinton’s photographers during her first Senate campaign. After she won, he asked to come along, at his own expense, when she made her first trip to Israel as senator. He wanted total access. He got it, as he generally did.
On that trip in 2002, in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office, Clinton introduced Cumins to those gathered: “Mr. Cumins, he took the great picture of 9/11,” she said. Later that trip, at a dinner in Tel Aviv, Cumins caught a quiet moment between Clinton and Shimon Peres, one of his more striking portraits.
‘Split second of innocence’
Somewhere along the way, the work of chronicling history gave way to the work of storing it.
What’s left of his archive now sits in a couple of private storage units in New Jersey — roughly 600 square feet of file cabinets and boxes, labeled by project, holding a record of Jewish and Middle East history that exists nowhere else. It has cost what Cumins describes as “a fortune” over the years. He’s hoping a philanthropist will buy the collection and gift it to an institution built to care for things longer than any one person can. He hasn’t found one yet.
In the meantime, he’s still in the same ninth-floor apartment in Verona, still facing the same Manhattan skyline. He photographs it constantly — beautiful sunrises and sunsets, weather rolling in over the water — and he says there’s almost always a plane somewhere in the frame, whether he’s trying to catch one or not.
Cumins has a phrase for what he photographed 25 years ago: “the final split second of innocence” this country ever had. Between the first plane and the second, there were 17 minutes in which the country still believed, or wanted to believe, that this might be an accident.
Then reality hit. The U.S. was under attack. Life would never be the same, especially for the man who captured that moment in history.
Some photographs you take. Others, it turns out, take you — and don’t ever quite let go.
The post He photographed the defining image of 9/11 – and Jewish history for 50 years appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Portuguese artists pull out of Jerry Seinfeld-headlined festival
(JTA) — Several Portuguese artists have dropped out of a comedy festival in Lisbon headlined by Jerry Seinfeld, citing their support for Palestinians and implying opposition to Seinfeld’s support for Israel.
At least six acts over recent days have canceled their appearances at the MEO Commedia a La Carte Fest, a new international comedy festival in the Portuguese capital. The event from Oct. 29 to Nov. 1 has advertised that it will host Seinfeld’s first live appearance in Portugal.
Though none of the artists who withdrew mentioned Seinfeld by name, some hinted at a boycott against his pro-Israel views. The Jewish comedian has become one of Hollywood’s most prominent advocates for Israel since October 2023.
Actress and comedian Inês Aires Pereira announced on Instagram on Saturday that “one of the names” featured at the festival “persistently defends ideas and acts that I consider indefensible,” adding, “We cannot relativize or normalize a genocide.”
The comedy duo Cebola Mol posted a graphic of themselves with a watermelon, widely recognized as a symbol of solidarity with Palestinians. “We will celebrate justice, freedom and joy with you on another occasion,” they said on Instagram.
The festival announced on Friday that performances by the groups Tributo Pop and Conjunto Cuca Monga were also canceled, but did not provide reasons. Two other acts, comedian Pedro Tochas and visual artist Vhils, shared their cancellations on Instagram without further details.
Seinfeld has aligned himself with Israel during its current conflict in Gaza, following decades of largely avoiding commenting on political issues. He visited Israel in December 2023 to meet with the families of hostages seized by Hamas on Oct. 7 of that year. Since then, he has attracted attention for a series of dismissive remarks toward pro-Palestinian advocates.
During an appearance last year at Duke University, Seinfeld compared pro-Palestinian activists with the Ku Klux Klan, saying, “The Klan is actually a little better here because they can come right out and say, ‘We don’t like Blacks, we don’t like Jews.’ OK, that’s honest.”
Representatives of Seinfeld and producers of the MEO Commedia a La Carte Fest did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The post Portuguese artists pull out of Jerry Seinfeld-headlined festival appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
UK, France, Canada to ban goods from Israeli settlements
(JTA) —
The United Kingdom, France and Canada will ban goods produced in the West Bank settlements and Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told Parliament on Tuesday, explaining that all such communities were deemed by his country to be illegal.
The declaration exacerbated the rising tensions riling the traditionally strong Israel-U.K. alliance. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar warned that these steps stoked antisemitism against British Jews in an on-camera statement to reporters in Jerusalem.
Sa’ar charged that the measures were a politicized hostile action deliberately taken ahead of Friday’s Jewish New Year holiday, with an eye toward influencing the country’s Oct. 27 elections.
Israel, he said, is responding by closing the British Consulate in Jerusalem that services Palestinians. It will also remove British representatives from the International Gaza Support Center in Kiryat Gat and halt the British training of Palestinian Authority security forces. He added that Israel would bar the entry of 12 British politicians and other nationals involved in anti-Israel activity.
France and Canada have also announced a ban on the import of settlement goods, Miliband told parliament. He noted that the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Spain and Norway have either banned goods or in the process of doing so.
In the same address, Miliband affirmed Israel’s right to exist, reflected on his own Jewish roots and rejected the notion that there was a connection between the policy steps against West Bank settlement activity and the safety of British Jews.
What is motivating the U.K., Miliband said, is “a deep sense of shame about what has unfolded in Palestine under the eyes of the international community” as well as Israel’s “clear intent to bury the Palestinian state.”
In response, he said, the U.K. “will introduce an import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied [Palestinian] territory” as part of a “new comprehensive sanctions regime” that will be put in place within nine months.
This will include, he said, “action against specific companies and individuals who provide services, such as construction, infrastructure, financing or real estate for settlement expansion.”
To those who “finance or facilitate illegal settlements, let me say this, you will face the full force of U.K. sanctions,” Miliband warned.
Miliband clarified that the ban would not affect the export of religious items or life-saving Israeli medications. He explained that trade with the settlements was minimal and that the greater impact would be the sanctions on services.
As part of declaring the ban, Miliband said that the British government is also adopting the International Court of Justice’s 2024 advisory opinion that all Israeli settlement activity over the pre-1967 border was illegal.
But others in Parliament pushed back against Miliband’s declaration. MP Richard Tice of Britain’s right-wing Reform party said that the sanctions were a grave mistake that would “embolden the scourge of antisemitism against British Jews on British streets,” endanger ties with the United States and lead to “tit for tat” sanctions from Israel.
Miliband shot back that “no British Jew is responsible for the policies of the Israeli government and it behooves all of us to make sure that there can be no confusion about that,” saying that Tice’s statement “fell foul” of that goal.
The U.K. action is the latest escalation in tensions between Israel and the Labour-led British government headed by Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who took power in July.
The prior government, led by former Labour Premier Keir Starmer, had already angered Israel by recognizing Palestinian statehood in 2025, suspending licenses for the export of arms to Israel and freezing talks toward a free-trade agreement.
France and Canada are also announcing a ban on the import of settlement goods, Miliband told parliament. He explained that the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Spain, and Norway have either banned goods or in the process of doing so.
In concert with Miliband’s appearance at Parliament, Britain and 11 other countries issued a joint statement pledging “their intention to introduce national and/or support European restrictions on trade in goods with settlements which are illegal under international law.”
Those other countries were Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.
The 12-country bloc said it was taking this step to maintain the viability of the two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, describing the situation in the West Bank as “rapidly deteriorating.”
In its statement, the bloc stressed that it was taking this step amid an “unprecedented level of settler violence and settlement expansion, including the unacceptable decision to publish tenders for the E1 settlement project.” That project is seen as cutting through land that would render a Palestinian state unviable.
The post UK, France, Canada to ban goods from Israeli settlements appeared first on The Forward.
