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Judy Heumann, Jewish disability advocate who spurred a movement, dies at 75
(JTA) — In Judith Heumann’s 2020 memoir, the lifelong advocate for people with disabilities describes feeling shocked upon being invited to read from the Torah at her synagogue in Berkeley, California. Not only were women permitted to carry out the sacred task, unlike in the Orthodox synagogue of her Brooklyn childhood, but the bimah, or prayer platform, had been made accessible just for her.
“Oh my God, I thought, I’ve never been asked to do an aliyah,” Heumann wrote, using the Hebrew word for the ritual. “I learned how to do it.”
The moment was just one of many when Heumann, who died Saturday at 75, charted ground that had previously been off-limits to wheelchair users like her. Since contracting polio as a toddler, Heumann broke down barriers for disabled children and educators in New York City schools, protested until federal legislation protecting people with disabilities was passed and advised multiple presidential administrations on disability issues.
A cause of death was not immediately given for Heumann, whose website announced her death on Saturday in Washington, D.C. Heumann had lived there for 30 years, since being tapped by the Clinton administration to serve as assistant secretary of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services.
Heumann was born in 1947 to two parents who had separately fled Nazi Germany as children in the 1930s; all of her grandparents and countless other family members were murdered in the Holocaust.
She said she believed it was her parents’ experience that led them to reject doctors’ advise to have their daughter institutionalized after she contracted polio and lost the use of her legs. “They came from a country where families got separated, some children sent away, others taken from their families by the authorities and never returned — all part of a campaign of systematic dehumanization and murder,” she wrote in her memoir, “Being Heumann.” “Their daughter, disabled or not, wasn’t going anywhere.”
Instead, her parents and in particular her mother, Ilse, set about to advocate for her. When the city school system said Judith could not attend her neighborhood school, Ilse got a rabbi to agree that she could attend his yeshiva if her daughter learned Hebrew. Judith did, but the rabbi did not keep his word. Instead, Ilse lined up an array of activities for Judith, including thrice-weekly Hebrew school classes accessible only if her father carried her in her chair up a flight of stairs, until the city opened a program for children with disabilities.
Judy Heumann attends the 2022 Women’s Entrepreneurship Day Organization Summit at United Nations in New York City, May 20, 2022. (Chance Yeh/Getty Images)
There, Heumann wrote, she first encountered “disability culture” — what she described as “a culture that has learned to value the humanity in all people, without dismissing anyone for looking, thinking, believing or acting differently.” She would experience and then help craft this culture during a decade at summer camp, in a movement captured in the 2020 documentary “Crip Camp,” and then throughout a lifetime of advocacy that earned her the moniker “mother of the disability rights movement.”
One notable win came in 1970, after Heumann graduated from college with a degree in speech therapy. Told that she could not teach in New York City schools because she could not help children leave in case of fire, Heumann sued. She was represented in part by an attorney who would argue Roe v. Wade in front of the Supreme Court, and the case came before Judge Constance Baker Motley, the only woman on the NAACP legal team that argued Brown v. Board of Education. The city quickly settled and Heumann ultimately got a job at her old elementary school.
The public fight propelled Heumann into the leadership of an inchoate disability rights movement. Two years later, she participated in New York City protests in favor of federal anti-discrimination laws that President Richard Nixon ultimately signed. In 1977, she was one of dozens of disability advocates to occupy a federal building in San Francisco in a demonstration calling for enforcement mechanisms. Their advocacy led to Section 504, a federal statute that requires entities receiving government funds to show that they do not discriminate on the basis of disability.
The episode was dramatized on Comedy Central’s “Drunk History.” Heumann was played by Ali Stroker, a Jewish actress who was the first wheelchair user to perform on Broadway. Heumann was also recognized as Time Magazine’s 1977 Woman of the Year in a 2020 retrospective.
Heumann was a cofounder of the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley before returning to the East Coast and the government advisory roles. Through it all, Heumann remained involved with the Jewish communities where she lived, including by having a bat mitzvah ceremony as an adult. In Washington, she was a member of Adas Israel Congregation.
In 2016, she cited tikkun olam, the ancient rabbinical imperative to repair the world, during a 2016 White House event during Jewish Disability Awareness and Inclusion Month. “The Jewish community has an obligation, I believe, to be leaders,” said Heumann, then special advisor for international disability rights in the State Department.
She also traveled as an adult to her father’s hometown in Germany, Hoffenheim, where she was taken to the site of the synagogue that the Nazis destroyed but noted that no one there spoke openly about what had happened to the local Jews.
In “Being Heumann,” she connected the experience to her own efforts to bring people with disabilities into the mainstream. “What a pervasive influence silence and avoidance have had on my life,” she wrote. “Why wasn’t I in school? Silence. Why aren’t we allowed on buses? Silence. Why can’t disabled people teach? Silence. Where are all the Jews going? Piercing silence.
“I refuse to give in to the pressure of the silence,” she concluded.
Heumann’s allies in the Jewish disability advocacy community mourned her death.
“So sad to learn of Judy Heumann’s passing,” tweeted Jay Ruderman, whose family foundation has been a leader in supporting Jewish disability inclusion. “She was one of the preeminent disability rights leaders in our country’s history and her accomplishments made our world a better place. I’ll miss you Judy and may your memory be a blessing.”
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The post Judy Heumann, Jewish disability advocate who spurred a movement, dies at 75 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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At this interfaith calligraphy class, the lines between Jew and Muslim blur
“So…are you Middle Eastern?”
I had just walked into the American Sephardi Federation office in lower Manhattan, where 20 Muslim and Jewish young people gather twice a month to learn Arabic and Hebrew calligraphy together. I was clearly the newbie, and one of the participants was sussing me out.
“I am,” I replied.
“Fully?” he asked.
I gave my usual spiel, explaining my Iraqi and Iranian background.
“Sick,” he said. “I’m only half.”
It struck me then that neither of us had any idea whether the other was Muslim or Jewish.
As I broke bread with the group, we chatted over an odd but familiar spread of kosher pizza and Gojeh Sabz, golf-ball-sized and very tart plums – a common Middle Eastern fruit many of us grew up eating. Somehow, religion didn’t really come up.
Eventually, felt-tipped multicolored calligraphy pens were passed around, and we began learning to write Hebrew letters — letters I had been perfecting since I embarked on my Hebrew School journey as a fourth grader. I was terrible. My reyshes weren’t swooping as they should, my khafs were somehow uneven and my yuds looked suspiciously like daleds.
Across the table, a young man who had introduced himself to me minutes before as Mohamad from Saudi Arabia had effortlessly filled the page with elegant Hebrew letters. He noticed my frustration. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve done this like a million times. You’ll get it.” 
The person at the helm of this unusual form of interfaith exchange is Ruben Shimonov, a 39-year-old Sephardic polymath. I first discovered Ruben’s work when I saw an exhibit of his calligraphy blending Hebrew, Arabic and Farsi at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. I assumed he was a full-time artist, but soon learned that his main gig is serving as an educator and interfaith organizer. He mentors dozens of Sephardic college students, hosts LGBTQ+ Sephardic Shabbats. Now, he leads Sacred Scripts in NYC, a new six-month-long cohort-based interfaith calligraphy fellowship where Jewish and Muslim community leaders learn the intertwined history and etymology of Hebrew and Arabic.
Shimonov was born in Uzbekistan, a Muslim-majority country. For him, that background makes interfaith work feel like an extension of his upbringing.
“As a Jew from a community whose culture was shaped by Islamic cultures and histories, it is a natural expression of my Jewish identity to be in interfaith spaces,” he told me. “It’s not something I do because it’s cool or sexy or whatever. I just feel at home, because these are my people. This is my own background.”
From a young age, he was drawn to language, inspired in equal measure by the Hebrew letters he learned for his bar mitzvah and the Arabic script that adorned the mosques and architecture of his hometown.
Eventually, he taught himself calligraphy in three languages and came to see it as a powerful tool for the interfaith work he was already doing — organizing gatherings such as iftars in synagogues and seders in mosques through the Muslim Jewish Solidarity Committee. Over the past decade, Shimonov has led more than 100 interfaith calligraphy workshops around the world, highlighting the deep historical and linguistic connections between Hebrew and Arabic.
This year, Shimonov launched Sacred Scripts alongside his longtime partners at the Muslim American Leadership Alliance (MALA), drawing fellows from networks he and MALA have built over the years. The program brings together young artists and community leaders — many with Middle Eastern backgrounds — who they feel stand to benefit from sustained engagement. Over the course of six months, fellows study calligraphy and the histories of the languages, while connecting over shared meals and cultural outings. This month, they are attending a concert focused on Jewish and Muslim music from the Maghreb.
After Oct. 7, Shimonov said, he witnessed fractures between many Jewish and Muslim organizations that had been working together on interfaith initiatives. “That sense of betrayal and hurt was very real,” he said. “But if the only times you meet are when things are bad, what do you expect? I think the secret sauce to all this stuff is you’ve got to be in it for the long haul.”
The Sephardic connection
During each session, we practice writing while Shimonov lectures on the connections between the two languages. Shiminov gives each language its due, devoting several sessions to studying each before bringing them together.
Eventually, we learn the same words in Hebrew and Arabic — beit and bayt for home, Shabbat and al-sabt for Saturday — the list goes on. Before tackling day one of learning the Arabic alphabet, we practiced writing the phrase Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim, which appears at the beginning of every surah in the Quran, into Hebrew. Translated word-for-word, it sounds remarkably similar.
For Shimonov, that overlap is the point. He believes strongly that Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews occupy a unique place in interfaith work because of the seemingly endless cultural similarities they share with Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa.
That sensibility is reflected in the space itself. The fellowship is hosted at the American Sephardi Federation, a Jewish institution that looks more like a place to sip chai and do a close reading of Rumi’s greatest hits. The floors are covered with embroidered rugs, the walls are lined with ouds, a pear-shaped Middle Eastern instrument, and endless shelves are packed with rare books in Hebrew, Arabic and Farsi.
Because of these connections, the days focused on Arabic study are more Jew-y than one might expect. Shimonov takes care to highlight Jewish history in the Middle East, explaining how Iraq — not Europe — was the world’s foremost hub of Jewish life for centuries, where many Jews only spoke Arabic because Hebrew wasn’t widely taught, and presenting pivotal Jewish texts written in Judeo-Arabic.
In Shimonov’s Sephardic approach, the aim is less to “build bridges” — a phrase that has become a catch-all interfaith mantra — than to reveal how much was never separate to begin with.
Ali Saracoglu, a Muslim participant in the fellowship and an artist from Izmir, Turkey, said Sacred Scripts reshaped his understanding of Jewish identity.
When he moved to the United States, his primary exposure had been to Ashkenazi Jewish communities. “When you open the conversation to Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, you encounter people from Uzbekistan to North Africa to descendants of communities from Spain,” he said. “You start to see a much more global form of Judaism.”
Saracoglu joked that within the group, it was often impossible to tell who was Jewish and who was Muslim unless it came up in conversation.
Nora Monasheri, a 23-year-old Iranian Jew, said that after Oct. 7, she had participated in countless interfaith dialogues at her alma mater, Binghamton University. “I felt like I’d been there, done that on campus,” she said, lamenting that such gatherers were “always very focused on Israel and Palestine, and it felt very forced.”
For her, creating calligraphy rather than debating peace agreements from the ’90s is a welcome change.
“I found that some of our most important words in Hebrew are the same in Arabic — faith, charity, blood — So instead of debating each other, we’re discovering this shared history, tradition, and spirituality together.”
For Saracoglu, the program’s artistic aspect is particularly powerful. He first met Shimonov at a one-off interfaith calligraphy workshop two years ago, an experience that stayed with him as an artist. He has been creating ebru, the traditional Turkish art of marbling, since the age of five, and now practices it in his New York City apartment. In a recent series he calls “One Word: Peace,” he layers his marbled designs with calligraphy by both Jewish and Muslim artists — often including Shimonov himself.
During one session, Shimonov read aloud from a Judeo-Arabic translation of the Torah, explaining that many Jews in the Arab world historically translated religious texts into Arabic because many did not understand Hebrew. The word for God was therefore transcribed as the Arabic word, Allah.
I chimed in that my own Jewish parents say “Inshallah” all the time when they simply mean “God willing.” My non-Sephardic friends always found this bizarre, but among this crowd, it barely required explanation.
As he read from the Torah, one Muslim fellow suddenly interrupted.
“It sounds like the Quran!”
The post At this interfaith calligraphy class, the lines between Jew and Muslim blur appeared first on The Forward.
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Debating Zionism is good for Jews, actually
A group of Jewish Theological Seminary students were furious with the chancellor’s position on Jewish statehood. In protest, they draped flags around campus before graduation, which the administration removed before the ceremony.
The year was 1948. The flags were Israeli. And the dissenting students were protesting Chancellor Louis Finkelstein’s refusal to make support for Jewish statehood part of academic commencement. Some students even arranged for the bells at nearby Union Theological Seminary to play “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, after JTS officials declined to include it in commencement.
As a historian of American Zionism, I have been thinking about that episode while reading the many vitriolic reactions to a few JTS undergraduates who spoke out in opposition to the seminary’s decision to welcome Israeli President Isaac Herzog as this year’s graduation speaker. Once again, a JTS commencement has become a battleground over Israel, but the sides are now reversed.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether this was the right moment to extend an invitation to Herzog to speak at commencement. What deserves attention is the outraged reaction to a group of students raising objections, and the speed with which those students’ concerns have been cast as a deviation from the historical contours of mainstream American Jewish politics.
A recent Times of Israel blog post, for example, argued that the mere fact that JTS students raised concerns about Herzog was a rupture with Judaism. “Jewish survival without sovereignty is fragile,” wrote the author, Menachem Creditor, adding that “the founders of JTS did not need to debate the necessity of Jewish self-determination,” and that Herzog “represents the state of Israel and the Jewish people.”
These claims erase JTS’s long and sophisticated engagement with Jewish nationalism and the conception of Jewish peoplehood. Reading American Zionism backward risks collapsing peoplehood and statehood, and creating traditions to ratify present assumptions out of a past that never existed.
The relationship between Zionism and JTS was nuanced from the start. Both founding president Sabato Morais and the seminary’s third chancellor, Cyrus Adler, opposed Zionism on religious grounds. Morais believed the restoration of Jewish sovereignty could only come through divine intervention at the dawn of a messianic era. Adler thought of the growth of a non-religious community in the land of Israel “as the greatest misfortune that has happened to the Jews in modern times.”
Solomon Schechter, as chancellor, brought a measure of support for the Zionist movement to JTS; shaped by the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha-am, Schechter insisted that Zionism transcended statehood. Its primary aim, he argued, was the national regeneration of global Judaism, not the creation of a secular state that would hollow out Jewish life from within.
And the controversies over the 1948 graduation exercises revealed how far Louis Finkelstein stood from political Zionism, even after the establishment of Israel. Where some Zionists celebrated sovereignty, Finkelstein remained focused on the Jewish character of the land and its people. That orientation drew him toward Judah Magnes’s binational vision — that of a federated framework in which Jews and Arabs would each hold recognized rights and a measure of national autonomy within a single shared political entity.
This reticence to conflate Judaism, Zionism and Jewish sovereignty was not limited to the seminary’s chancellors.
Henrietta Szold, JTS’s first female student, a central figure in its intellectual orbit, and the founder of Hadassah, similarly supported a binational vision from her new home in Jerusalem. Mordecai Kaplan — a longtime JTS faculty member, committed Zionist, and one of the most influential American Jewish thinkers of the 20th century — expressed concern throughout his career about the mistake of equating Jewish nationhood with Jewish statehood. In Judaism as a Civilization, he called for a “more ethical conception of nationhood fundamentally as a cultural rather than as a political relationship.”
After Israel’s founding, Kaplan went further, arguing to David Ben-Gurion in 1958 that “the basic assumption that the state of Israel is a Jewish state is itself open to question.” The Israeli government’s task, he insisted, was to establish “a modern state, not a Jewish state, an Israeli state, not a Jewish state.”
These questions did not disappear even as JTS evolved under new leadership.
Gerson Cohen, whose chancellorship beginning in 1972 marked a shift toward a more pro-statist posture, embraced the state’s significance for Jewish life and identity in ways his predecessors had not. Yet even Cohen insisted that commitment to Judaism must rest “not on political statehood or upon geography but solely on the idea of covenant and commitment to ethos.” He argued that a flourishing diaspora was a necessity for Jewish civilization as a whole, not adjunct to Israeli interests.
His successor, Chancellor Emeritus Ismar Schorsch, was more direct, saying in a recent warning that Jews must ensure that “Judaism qua religion is not submerged and shredded by the power of the Jewish state.”
One can disagree with any of these perspectives. In fact, the disagreement itself is the point.
The leaders who built JTS debated Jewish self-determination, Zionism and statehood while living through the Holocaust, the collapse of European Jewish life, existential danger in Palestine, and the precarious birth of the state of Israel. They were not naïve about antisemitism, indifferent to Jewish survival, or ignorant of Jewish sources. Nor were they unsophisticated about Zionism.
Instead, they offered a more demanding account of Zionism: one that affirmed a Jewish homeland and insisted that Jewish power remain answerable to Jewish ethics, all without diminishing Jewish life in the diaspora.
This is precisely the perspective that has been crowded out of our contemporary discourse, not because these questions were answered, but because the space to ask them has collapsed. As the boundaries of acceptable Zionist discourse have narrowed, issues that arose from within Zionism itself — the potential dangers of equating the Israeli state with the Jewish people, the risks of elevating political statehood above other ethical and communal commitments, and the need to have diaspora Jewish life be seen as carrying independent religious and moral weight — have come to be treated as anti-Zionist rather than part of a living internal debate.
The furor over the JTS undergraduates’ letter objecting to Herzog is a troubling sign that, across American Jewish life, it has become harder to think honestly about the risks of treating support for the state of Israel not merely as a Jewish commitment, but as one that takes precedence over other all other Jewish commitments. When the past is rewritten so that the equation of peoplehood and statehood appears inevitable, American Jews are left with a false choice: either embrace the state as an unquestioned and unquestionable expression of Jewish identity, or abandon Jewish life altogether.
JTS has offered its students a richer education because, in its halls, the relationship between the Jewish people and the Jewish state has been debated and contested. That discourse is not a failure of Jewish commitment, but an expression of it. The sustained engagement with the hardest questions of Zionism is one of the best things JTS has given American Jewish life, and one of the most important gifts it still has to offer.
The post Debating Zionism is good for Jews, actually appeared first on The Forward.
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ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Sidesteps ‘Genocide’ Accusations Against Israel
International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan speaks during an interview with Reuters in The Hague, Netherlands, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
Karim Khan, the embattled chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has cast fresh doubt on accusations that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza, arguing in a new interview that no legal conclusion has yet been reached in the ongoing legal battle.
In a lengthy interview with anti-Israel journalist Medhi Hasan this week, Khan refused to engage in the popularized rhetoric labeling Israel’s military campaign against Hamas terrorists in Gaza as genocidal, even as pressure mounts on the ICC by activists to pursue more sweeping charges against Israeli officials.
When asked directly whether Israel’s conduct amounted to genocide, Khan emphasized the need for sufficient evidence to level charges against Israeli officials and that prosecutors must follow evidence and legal standards rather than political narratives.
“So, you’re not ruling out that there could be a warrant in the future?” Hasan asked.
“Everything is a function of evidence,” Khan responded, arguing that accusing Israel of genocide for political purposes would be “reckless.”
“You’re saying in the past three years there hasn’t been evidence of genocide in Gaza?” Hasan asked, visibly flummoxed.
Khan lamented the “suffering” in Gaza but reaffirmed that the ICC could not proceed in making final judgements about the nature of Israel’s military operations in Gaza without sufficient evidence. He asserted that officials within the ICC are vigorously analyzing the case and that he cannot reveal more about the nature of the investigation.
“So, genocide is not off limits?” Hasan pressed.
“No crime is off limits if the evidence is there,” Khan responded.
Khan has come under fire for making his initial surprise demand for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on the same day in May 2024 that he suddenly canceled a long-planned visit to both Gaza and Israel to collect evidence of alleged war crimes. The last-second cancellation reportedly infuriated US and British leaders, as the trip would have offered Israeli leaders a first opportunity to present their position and outline any action they were taking to respond to the war crime allegations.
Nonetheless, Khan’s latest remarks are likely to reverberate through international legal and diplomatic circles, where the genocide accusation has become one of the most contentious aspects of the war between Israel and Hamas. Over the past two years, an array of humanitarian organizations and human rights experts have accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza. These accusations have been controversial and widely contested, with critics alleging these groups and individuals lack sufficient evidence.
Khan’s comments come as the ICC faces intense scrutiny over its investigation into the conflict. In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication.
Another challenge for Israel is Hamas’s widely recognized military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
Genocide is among the most difficult crimes to prove under international law because prosecutors must establish specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Hasan, one of the most prominent anti-Israel critics in media, has spent the past two years unleashing an unrelenting barrage of criticism against the Jewish state, repeatedly accusing the Israeli military of pursuing a “genocide” in Gaza.
In the interview, Khan also forcefully denied allegations of sexual misconduct that have engulfed his office in recent months, accusing critics of politicizing the claims amid the ICC’s high-profile investigations into Israel, Russia, and other global conflicts. He dismissed suggestions that his pursuit of Israeli leaders was intended to distract from the allegations against him, saying that he did not have evidence to substantiate the claim.
Khan further alleged that senior Western officials attempted to pressure the ICC over its investigation, including what he described as warnings from prominent American and British political figures about the geopolitical consequences of targeting Israeli officials.
The ICC’s investigation has placed the court at the center of an increasingly bitter international divide over the Gaza war. Khan’s comments won’t settle the debate, but the ICC prosecutor appeared to signal a more cautious legal approach than some of Israel’s fiercest critics have demanded.