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Meet the rabbi who is helping bring legal cannabis to New York
(New York Jewish Week) — As New York gears up for a new landscape of legal marijuana, one rabbi will bring his experience retailing weed to help others “squeeze more out of life.”
Rabbi James Kahn is part of a company, “Keep It A 100,” that is one of the first to be licensed to open a cannabis dispensary in the state. When he wasn’t teaching Jewish college students or running chaplaincy services for a Jewish social service agency, he helped run a family-run marijuana business in Washington, D.C. and is the executive director of Liberty Cannabis Cares, the social impact arm of Holistic Industries, a prominent dispensary business in Maryland.
“Suffering is not a mitzvah,” Kahn, who was ordained at Boston’s Hebrew College and has served as the senior Jewish educator at the University of Maryland Hillel, told the New York Jewish Week. “Giving people permission to use cannabis to enjoy and to take time for self care, for healing, for connecting with people, it’s just another tool that Hashem has given us to live better lives.”
Keep It A 100 is one of the 36 winners of the state’s Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary (CAURD) program, which offered the licenses to sell weed to people and nonprofits who had previously been convicted of marijuana-related crimes. New York’s first dispensary, opening Thursday at 750 Broadway in Manhattan’s Astor Place neighborhood, is being run by Housing Works, the HIV/AIDS service organization.
“When done right, cannabis can be a force for good — for individuals and the communities they live in,” Kahn said. “That is my mission.”
Kahn has partnered with Marquis Hayes, a Bronx native and former drug dealer who got out of prison in 2007 and has since become a highly regarded professional chef. He will source the product for Keep It A 100, while Kahn will provide capital and expertise. Their first “retail experience” will be on Long Island.
Rabbi James Kahn, shown with a menorah-shaped bong, saw the benefits of cannabis when his grandfather sought relief from multiple sclerosis. (Courtesy)
“It’s focused on giving licenses to people who have been injured by the war on drugs, who have really worked to not let that injury define them, but have come out of that place and form businesses that were profitable,” Kahn said of the CAURD program. “I wanted to take what I know about how to run a successful and impactful cannabis retail store and share that knowledge with a partner who really deserves this opportunity. I want to make sure he is as successful as possible.”
Kahn does not have a set date for when the dispensary will open, but said that “it will be in a few months.”
Kahn also worked at the Washington, D.C.-area Jewish Social Service Agency. At Liberty Cannabis Care, he works “to make cannabis a force for good in every state we operate in, and in every neighborhood we’re lucky to be a part of,” according to its mission statement.
Other partners in Keep It A 100 include psychotherapist Kim Stetz and experienced Maryland cannabis business owner Christina Betancourt Johnson.
Kahn’s connection to cannabis goes back to his grandfather: When Kahn was a teenager, his mother’s father suffered from “severe” multiple sclerosis and asked Kahn to help him find marijuana.
“He was hesitant to try cannabis because of the stigma that surrounded it,” Kahn said. “He was not a fan of hippies or cannabis. An aide offered him cannabis and it worked. The first bong I ever saw was my grandfather’s.”
Kahn’s father, Rabbi Jeffrey Kahn, was a rabbi during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, where many people were “benefitting from cannabis around that time.”
“[My father] was thinking about it back then,” Kahn said. “There were a lot of folks who were concerned about the stigma and shame that was attached to cannabis. Was cannabis kosher? Not just from the technical standpoint — it is just a plant — but from a moral standpoint.”
In 2011, the family opened the capital’s first medical cannabis dispensary, the Takoma Wellness Center.
Kahn said that he sees his dispensaries as a gathering place for “folks of every kind and background who love cannabis.”
“It’s a place to be seen and to be valued and to get to talk about their favorite plan,” Kahn said. “Marquis is a world-renowned chef and knows how to create this unique experience.”
He added that the dispensary will also offer a delivery service, which will “probably open prior to the retail store.”
He added that while cannabis has not been “at the forefront of the modern Jewish age, the cannabis industry is full of Jews.” A current exhibit at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, “Am Yisrael High: The Story of Jews and Cannabis,” also explores the extensive Jewish presence in the weed industry, legal and not.
“Judaism is relevant because it helps us squeeze more out of life,” Kahn said. “It’s helped me use cannabis in a way that I would call sacred.”
Kahn said he is fascinated by the history of cannabis within Judaism, mentioning an archaeological dig site in Tel Arad in Israel, where traces of cannabis were found in the ancient remnants of a Jewish temple.
“This would have created a dense smoke that is responsible for creating a high from cannabis,” Kahn said.
He added that he has had “interesting experiences reading sacred texts while consuming cannabis.”
“All cannabis is medicine,” Kahn said. “The word ‘recreational’ is often seen as less than. We Jews have long known the value of rest, of stopping. That’s at the heart of Shabbat. In order to have holiness, we need to give ourselves the space to experience it.”
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The post Meet the rabbi who is helping bring legal cannabis to New York appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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How seriously should we take San Francisco’s anti-Zionist hecklers?
The videos of local activists in San Francisco accosting Scott Wiener, the state senator running to replace Nancy Pelosi in the U.S. House, are hard to watch.
“Say ‘Free Palestine’ for the camera, dog,” Jesus Coba, who runs a popular Instagram account, tells Wiener as he’s trying to watch the World Cup at a bar. “Say ‘Free Palestine’!”
Coba is holding the camera close to Wiener’s face as the politician stares at him in silence.
A few days later Wiener was surrounded and screamed at as he made his way through Dolores Park, where he had come to participate in a Shabbat service as part of the Trans March.
“F— you and your Zionist handlers,” one person shouted at Wiener, who is both Jewish and gay, and has championed legislation protecting trans rights. “F— you and your Israeli masters.”
What happened to Wiener can be seen as part of a national trend. Jack Schlossberg, a Jewish heir to the Kennedy dynasty, face-planted in his attempt to replace Rep. Jerry Nadler in the U.S. House. He ran a poor campaign, but it wasn’t helped by the fact that he tried to trade on his status as a Millennial social media influencer while refusing to embrace the TikTok generation’s skepticism of Israel.
“Can you say ‘F— Israel,’ Jack?” an erratic fellow influencer who goes by the name Crackhead Barney asked visibly stressed Schlossberg during a street interview.
“No way, dude, I’m Jewish,” Schlossberg responds.
And other Democrats have spoken about the extent to which a candidate’s willingness to accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza has become a litmus test in primary contests.
But, at the same time, the people hounding Wiener in public are part of a radical but fringe minority — one with deep roots in San Francisco — that has struggled to gain political power even as its members excel at generating viral clips.
***
San Francisco is home to loud and often obnoxious activism fueled by the very real sense of alienation that comes when a region known for its radical politics is subjected to repeated rounds of displacement by the tech industry. I grew up in the city during the first dot-com boom, when the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project plastered the neighborhood with calls to vandalize luxury cars and sushi restaurants. The man behind the group was eventually arrested and police found instructions in his apartment for how to build acid bombs.
Gay Shame, an anonymous protest collective, carried on this style of activism with a promise to “instigate, irritate, and agitate” and graffiti insisting that “Queers Hate Techies,” while locals blockaded the private buses that ferried tech workers to their jobs south of the city.
When Google Glass — an early precursor to Meta Ray-Bans that embed a livestreaming camera in your glasses — became a symbol of gentrification, a woman was punched in the face for wearing the device into a local dive bar.
It’s not shocking that Jews have not always fared well among this set, for whom strident opposition to symbols of power reigns supreme. A disturbing precursor to the protests against Wiener came in 2018 when activists began weekly protests outside Manny’s, a cafe and “civic event space” in the Mission.
The business replaced a sushi restaurant, but it still somehow became the target of neighborhood activists who demanded a host of concessions from Manny Yekutiel, the cafe’s Jewish owner. Yekutiel agreed to many of the asks: bilingual signage and staff, affordable drip coffee and free event bookings for community groups.
But Yekutiel still found himself facing weekly protests, including by Gay Shame, accusing him of promoting a “pro-elite, pro-Zionist and pro-gentrification agenda.” Someone spray-painted a Star of David and “F— Zionism” on the exterior, and a window was smashed.
His sole crime was apparently a Facebook post from a few years before he opened the business asking for recommendations on “some good Zionist organizations in the Bay.”
The people who thought protesting Yekutiel was a good use of their Wednesday nights for several years are the same folks — sometimes literally — who are now harassing Wiener.
Coba, who was kicked out of the bar for yelling at Wiener, and whom Wiener said had previously accosted him at the airport and accused him of having a “tainted bloodline,” recently posted footage of someone chasing Yekutiel through a street fair.
Yekutiel is now running for the Board of Supervisors, which is San Francisco’s city council, and the man quizzing him was mad that Manny’s had once hosted pro-Israel activist Hen Mazzig. Coba claimed Mazzig was an Israeli commando, which I could find no evidence for, and Yekutiel said all he knew was that Mazzig had served in the Israeli military as most Israeli Jews are required to do.
“Well maybe having Israelis at the cafe isn’t a good idea,” the man, who does not identify himself, tells Yekutiel.
***
It could be difficult to summon much sympathy for tech workers whose commute was delayed by nudists trying to board their buses as a form of protest. But it’s much easier to see how corrosive the “Zionist” litmus tests being applied to Jews in San Francisco and elsewhere are.
As a longtime politician, Wiener’s record of support for Israel is deeper than Yekutiel’s. But not by much. He joined a solidarity trip to Israel in 2024, but had also called for a ceasefire in Gaza in November 2023, opposes U.S. military aid to Israel at least until a new government is in place, and — after an awkward delay — he joined the other candidates in the race for Pelosi’s seat in accusing Israel of genocide.
Wiener is a relative moderate in a city where progressives sometimes treat that as akin to being MAGA, and both Coba and the people yelling at Wiener during Pride make allusions to disagreement with his preferred housing policy. Mayor Daniel Lurie, another moderate, was chased out of the Trans March last year, though without as much vitriol.
But it seems clear that the obsession with Wiener supposedly supporting genocide is tied to the fact that he’s Jewish.
His opponent, Connie Chan, is backed by labor unions and has staked out a position to Wiener’s left on Israel, though she has faced no backlash for being endorsed by Pelosi, who embodies moderate San Francisco politics and has been a stalwart supporter of Israel.
At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that the people leading the charge against Wiener have failed time and again to move the political needle.
They didn’t stop gentrification or slow the mass arrival of tech workers to the city and luxury buses still ferry them to work. Google Glass flopped, but now every other influencer on TikTok is wearing Meta Ray-Bans to film content. Manny’s continues to thrive with support from prominent progressives in the city, and Yekutiel appears to be leading in his race to join the city council.
Wiener rose from the Board of Supervisors to the State Senate, and despite his extremely vocal detractors he remains the favorite to win in November. Local media has not framed Israel as a key issue.
(Schlossberg, for his part, ultimately lost to another pro-Israel Jewish candidate who was to his right on Gaza.)
When Joe Eskenazi, one of the most astute journalists covering local politics in the city, wrote about the Manny’s protests years ago he aptly described the demonstrators as “a diminutive group of attention-seekers.”
That certainly seemed to be the case at the time. Whether the rising tide of animosity toward Israel will afford these hecklers a veto over Jewish politicians ascending the political ladder is now an open question.
The post How seriously should we take San Francisco’s anti-Zionist hecklers? appeared first on The Forward.
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As the Bible and the news from the Strait of Hormuz tells us, our world is in dire straits
The most important traffic reports these days usually come from the Strait of Hormuz.
“Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz dropped significantly over the weekend, The New York Times reported, “as a four-day exchange of attacks between Iran and the United States left some shipowners deciding it was too risky to transit.”
What’s going on with the Strait of Hormuz affects gas prices, stock prices, Americans’ moods — and the world economy.
But what does “strait” mean, anyway?
The word has been with us for a long time, and intriguingly, it appears in many famous translations of the Torah. It also pops up in translations of the New Testament.
“Strait” comes from the Latin for “strict.” It first appeared in English in the 14th century, when, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it referred to clothing — “a garment, etc.: Tight-fitting, narrow.”
Over time, the meaning changed a bit, but it always had something to do with narrowness. From 1561 to 1725, it meant: “Of bonds, a knot: Tightly drawn.”
As the centuries passed, it attracted the attention of poets.
”It matters not how strait the gate,” wrote William Ernest Henley in his poem “Invictus.” “How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”
It turns out that Henley was kind of into the subject of what words meant.
“The poet, who was one of the leading slang lexicographers of his day, saw the gates of heaven as strait — tight, narrow, difficult to get through,” the late great language columnist William Safire observed in 1984, when he wrote a column on “strait” and “straits.”
Maybe Henley had the New Testament in mind, too.
Matthew 7:13 in The King James Bible advises: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.”
Today, according to Merriam-Webster, “strait” means “a comparatively narrow passageway connecting two large bodies of water — often used in plural but singular in construction.”
Henley, the poet, was using an archaic meaning — a narrow passage, without water.
In contemporary English, “strait” also has a secondary meaning — “a situation of perplexity or distress — often used in plural,” according to Merriam-Webster, but also according to anyone who has used the phrase “dire straits,” including, one would presume, the band Dire Straits.
Both physical and emotional space
“Strait” describes both a physical space — for example, a body of water — and an emotional space, like “dire straits.”
Perhaps that dual meaning is why the word “strait” appears in translations of the Torah. In the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation, the Hebrew word tzar, or “narrow,” is translated as “strait.”
Consider 1 Samuel, 13:6, in the JPS translation from 1917:
“When the men of Israel saw that they were in a strait — for the people were distressed — then the people did hide themselves in caves, and in thickets, and in rocks, and in holds, and in pits.”
Tzar has both a literal descriptive meaning and a figurative emotional meaning. Sure, as an adjective, it means narrow, such as in the famous song about the entire world being “a narrow bridge” — gesher tzar me’od.
But as ki tzar lo in Samuel 1 6:13 demonstrates, it can also refer to a tough circumstance, a strait. Similarly, perhaps, in contemporary Hebrew, someone might say, tzar li, or “I am saddened.”
These multiple meanings might lead a person to the hazardous question of whether one should say the “Strait of Hormuz” in the singular, or “Straits of Hormuz” in the plural.
That was what fascinated Safire in 1984. Today, his take feels like a postcard from another time — but it’s also soothing in this moment of, well, dire straits:
“My advice,”Safire wrote. “Go with the familiar; follow your ear. If you’re happy with the Straits of Gibraltar or Magellan, use the final s; if the place name is new to you, let the gazetteer crowd have its way.”
“Hormuz is unfamiliar to most Americans, and the Strait of Hormuz is therefore the name I would use, going along with Gary Hart and the stylebooks,” Safire continued. “But retain the singular sense: ‘The Straits of Gibraltar’ is a passage.’ ‘’The Strait of Hormuz’ is the next Quemoy and Matsu.”
I liked being distracted for a moment from Iran and Trump with the mention of “Gary Hart.”
That nostalgia reminded me that today’s Strait of Hormuz news cycle, about a traffic jam for the fuel and food we need to live, is about both a location and a feeling.
Sure, the waterway may be physically open, or, at least of this writing, effectively closed because of fear, but its status has other meanings too — like whether the Iranian regime actually won this war, and whether that narrow space is also a symbol of future peril.
And in those multiple meanings, strait echoes the Biblical tzar —narrow, yes, but also dangerous.
In Hebrew and in English, narrowness, perilousness and sadness frequently go together, indicating a world or a situation that must be navigated carefully. Perhaps a word like strait — a little bit singular, a little bit plural — captures it all.
The post As the Bible and the news from the Strait of Hormuz tells us, our world is in dire straits appeared first on The Forward.
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Mamdani says ‘I can’t tell you I support’ Israel as a Jewish state
(JTA) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he could not endorse states that privilege one religion over another, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, during a one-on-one interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday.
“Democratic Socialists of America now says they no longer favor a two-state solution. “Is that the way you see it as well? Karl asked in the interview, which came days after Mamdani’s endorsed Democratic socialist candidates for Congress swept their New York Democratic primaries.
Among them, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier campaigned on platforms that included opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel and support for Palestinian rights.
Mamdani replied to Karl: “The way I see it is equal rights for all people. And I think that that’s the truth for Israel. It’s the truth for any country in the world.”
When pressed by Karl that Israel is in fact a Jewish state and “that’s in the charter, that’s the way it is now,” Mamdani said he has consistently stated he supports “the state of Israel as a state with equal rights.”
However, he added, “I believe that any state that privileges one religion over the other is one that I can’t tell you I support, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.”
The backlash to Mamdani’s comments was quick. In a statement Sunday, Ambassador Ofir Akunis, Consul General of Israel in New York, said, “Mamdani, we do not need your recognition of the Jewish state. If you knew a little history, instead of spending all day inciting and spreading hatred, you would know that Israel’s Declaration of Independence guaranteed full equality for all its citizens. That has been the reality since the day our state was established.”
Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, posted on X, “Mamdani is either willfully ignorant or maliciously mendacious,” adding that “Israel has no official state religion.”
He also stated that there are multiple countries for which Islam is the state religion, with additional Muslim-majority countries declaring Islam as the state religion in their constitutions.
Karl also asked Mamdani about his broader views on Israel, which became a prominent issue during the New York Democratic primaries, particularly among candidates who support Israel and continued U.S. military aid.
Mamdani said voters made it clear that “they were tired of tens of billions of dollars being spent in our taxpayer dollars to violate international law to kill thousands of civilians.”
He added that currently “Palestine is described as if there is a ceasefire,” but more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed during it. He said New Yorkers want to “follow international law, to believe in the humanity for all.”
Karl also pressed the mayor on the Poetica coffee shop incident in Brooklyn last week, where staff refused to take New York Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman’s money for a coffee purchase, calling him a “genocide enabler” because he supports Israel.
Mamdani said while he has “political disagreements” with Goldman (who lost his seat to Mamdani-backed Brad Lander), “I do believe that that’s a response that goes beyond that.”
And when asked about rising antisemitism in New York City, the mayor said that while Jews are a minority of the city’s population, they constitute a majority of victims of the hate crimes committed in the city. ”That’s something that’s unacceptable,” he said.
Akunis said, however, that “The surge in antisemitism across the United States, and particularly in New York, is the result of ignorance and a lack of knowledge, combined with a fundamental hatred of the Jewish people.”
He added, “I once again warn that Mamdani’s inflammatory rhetoric will end in very serious and violent acts against Jewish and Israeli communities throughout the city.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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