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Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022
(JTA) — All year long, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports about the deaths of Jewish newsmakers in our community. To close out the year, we wanted to turn our attention to people who may not have been such household names but whose stories deserve to be remembered.
Here, with the help of readers who shared the names of people they are remembering, we recall 18 Jews who shaped their local communities and made a difference in the lives of those close to them. They include rabbis whose impact extended for decades, teachers who inspired generations of students and activists who were working to build a better world. May their memories be a blessing.
Harriet Bograd
A champion of emerging Jewish communities in far-flung places.
Harriet Bograd, center, her husband Ken Klein, left, and daughter Margie on a visit to the Sefwi Wiawso Jewish community in Ghana in an undated photo. (Courtesy Kulanu, Inc)
Harriet Bograd, who as president of the nonprofit Kulanu supported emerging Jewish communities in Africa, Asia and other places far beyond the usual centers of Jewish life, died on Sept. 17 in a Manhattan hospital. She was 79. A Yale-educated lawyer and a stalwart at the West End Synagogue, she was inspired by a visit in 2004 to a remote village in Ghana, where about two dozen families considered themselves Jewish. In the years to come, she and Kulanu would provide support to emerging Jewish communities in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala, the Philippines and more. She once said of her work at Kulanu, “after the Holocaust and the decimation of Jewish communities in Arab lands, the idea [is] that we’re establishing Jewish communities that have their own richness and variety.”
Henry Berg-Brousseau
Transgender activist from Kentucky
Henry Berg-Brousseau (Courtesy Human Rights Campaign)
Henry Berg-Brousseau grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied history, political science and Jewish studies at George Washington University, where he was a founding member of an LGBTQ+ fraternity. He had recently gotten a major promotion at the Human Rights Campaign when he died by suicide in his Arlington, Virginia, home, on Dec. 16 at age 24. “Henry spent his life working to extend grace, compassion and understanding to everyone but especially to the vulnerable and marginalized. This grace, compassion and understanding was not always returned to him,” his mother, the Kentucky state legislator Karen Berg, wrote in a statement that criticized lawmakers who advance anti-LGBTQ views. She added, “He was doing work that was important to him to make the world a more accepting place. At 24 years old. he had finally found a community but that could not undo the brokenness that he already felt.”
Rabbi Simcha Krauss
Orthodox advocate for women’s rights
Rabbi Simcha Krauss speaks at a dinner hosted by Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi in his honor on Feb. 5, 2014. (Courtesy Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi)
Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a leading figure of Modern Orthodox Judaism who was a forceful advocate for women’s rights within Orthodoxy, died Jan. 20 at 85. Krauss’s efforts, which included creating a rabbinical court to support “agunot” — women whose husbands refused to divorce them — frequently earned him scorn from traditionalists within Orthodoxy. But many others saw him as a “gentle giant” who wielded his years of study and experience to fight for women’s rights in Jewish law. Krauss was born in Romania and came to the United States in 1948. Coming from a long line of rabbis, Krauss studied at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, and later studied with the Modern Orthodox luminary Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Krauss led the Young Israel of Hillcrest for 25 years. During his years in Queens, Krauss taught Talmud at Yeshiva University and began to get more involved in issues related to the role of women in Orthodoxy. He moved to Israel in 2005, and in 2014 came back to New York to found the International Beit Din, or religious court, to work on agunot cases. “Some say it is a modern revolution,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “I say that’s the way you should do it.”
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni
A survivor and scholar who teased out the many voices of the Talmud
Survivor and Talmud scholar Rabbi David Weiss Halivni was associated with Columbia University for 35 years. (Chaim Meyersdorf/Wikimedia Commons)
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, the Talmud scholar and Columbia University professor, died June 29 at age 94. A Holocaust survivor and refugee raised in Sighet, Romania, he earned his doctorate and taught for many years at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, until leaving the institution in 1983 over its decision to ordain women rabbis. He later became dean of the rabbinical school of the Union for Traditional Judaism, a movement created by rabbis and scholars who similarly broke with the Conservative movement. In works like his multi-volume opus “Mekorot u’Mesorot,” or “Sources and Traditions,” he galvanized the world of Talmud study by treating Jewish text as a living, mutable conversation across generations, as opposed to a static document. Halivni’s approach to learning was the “corollary to loving the text so much that you just had to understand it to its fullest, whatever tools would enable you to do so,” wrote Rabbi Ethan Tucker in an appreciation.
Moris Albahari
A remnant of a Ladino-speaking past
Moris Albahari, shown in a documentary about his story called “Saved by Language,” was a pillar of Sarajevo’s Jewish community. (Courtesy of Brian Kirschen)
Moris Albahari was 11 when the Ustaša, Bosnia’s Nazi collaborator force, came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac, the country’s equivalent of Auschwitz. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and David was able to help his son escape from the train. Because Moris knew Ladino, the Jewish language that is mixture of medieval Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages, he was able to speak with the Italian soldier who saved him. Ladino would save him several more times before the end of the war, but afterwards, with most of Sarajevo’s Jews dead or forever dispersed, he spoke the language largely at home. At one point the director of Sarajevo’s airport, Albahari was a leader within Bosnia’s Jewish community. “It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevok,” said Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino in Israel. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members.”
Rachel Brodie
A “master Jewish educator” whose influence was vast
Rachel Brodie (Courtesy of J. The Jewish News of Northern California)
Rachel Brodie was unassuming and humble yet through her work as an educator had a vast influence on the Jewish community in the Bay Area of California, where she lived, and beyond. Brodie was the co-founder Jewish Milestones, an educational resource for Jewish lifecycle ceremonies that launched in 2004 as The Ritualist. She also served as “chief Jewish officer” at the Jewish community Center of San Francisco, a position created just for her, from 2011 to 2016. “To be in Rachel’s presence was to be illuminated by her wit, her laughter, and her fierce and tender heart,” wrote the founders of the Jewish Studio Project in Berkeley, where she had been a senior educator. “To learn with her was to be stimulated, delighted, and transformed.” Brodie, 55, died on April 11 after falling at her home in Berkeley.
Rabbi Steven Sager
“Leader, mentor, poet” in North Carolina and beyond
Rabbi Steven Sager at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, in 2017. (Courtesy Anna Carson DeWitt)
When Rabbi Steven Sager died May 15 at 71 after an extended battle with pancreatic cancer, he was mourned not only by his family and his congregants at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, from which he retired in 2011 after 32 years, but by a rabbinic and Hebrew poetry community spanning the globe. “Steve was a beautiful and deep human being,” the Israeli poet Rivka Miriam wrote. “I generally do not believe in translation, especially translation of poetry. It seems to me that every language has an inner secret that cannot be transposed into another vessel. Yet, when Steve translated my poems I had a different feeling — I felt he entered an inner layer, one that lies beneath any language, a layer carrying a hidden code.”
Nate Geller
Devoted to building stronger Jewish communities
Nate Geller, at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey. A colleague’s daughter made the “Nate” sign, which he took home and hung on his mantel. (Courtesy)
Nate Geller died on Jan. 24 at age 63, after a struggle with leukemia that he faced with characteristic humility, faith and optimism. His death was a blow to his colleagues at 70 Faces Media (JTA’s parent company); to his synagogue community in Teaneck, New Jersey; and to the Jewish communal world to which he had dedicated his life since graduating from the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University in 1983. In the hours after his death, chat rooms and email boxes filled up with loving tributes to Nate, remarkable for their consistency: Friends and colleagues remarked on his gentleness, his passion for Jewish learning, his commitment to Israel, his willingness not just to hear but to listen when a colleague kvelled or kvetched. Most of all, they remembered his devotion to his family: his wife Lyn Light Geller, herself a gentle and passionate force among “Jewish professionals,” his grown children Aliza, Ariana and Koby, Koby’s wife Talia, and their kids, Annaelle and Judah. Said one colleague and fellow congregant, “There is an enormous Nate-shaped void in the world now.”
Hedi Fried
A voice for Holocaust remembrance in Sweden
Holocaust survivor Hedi Fried stands between Sweden’s culture minister and handball player Linnea Claeson during a counterprotest against a neo-Nazi demonstration in Stockholm, Aug. 25, 2018. (Pontus Lundahl/AFP via Getty Images)
Born in 1924 in Sighet, in what was then Hungary and is now Romania, Hedi Fried survived Auschwitz and settled in Sweden, where she became a psychologist and advocate for Holocaust survivors. She created Cafe 84, a salon for survivors in Stockholm, and spoke widely about her experiences during the Holocaust, gathering some of the most common exchanges in “Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust,” published in English in 2019. “Your solidarity was boundless and no question too difficult to answer. You were brave, generous, dedicated and extremely wise,” Christina Gamstorp, the director of Stockholm’s Jewish museum, wrote in a remembrance. “Now your voice has fallen silent but not your message. It lives on in everyone who met you, in your texts, books, films and your belief that man is still good — and that it is possible to build a society free from antisemitism and racism, which threaten our entire existence.” Fried, who had three children, died in November at 98.
Rabbi Sy Dresner
The “most arrested rabbi in America”
Rabbi Martin Freedman, right, and Rabbi Israel Dresner,center, are taken to the Tallahassee city building where they were charged with unlawful assembly after they and 10 other “Freedom Riders” were arrested attempting to eat at the Tallahassee airport in June 1961. (Getty Photos)
Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner, who demonstrated with Martin Luther King Jr. and was sometimes called the “most arrested rabbi in America,” died Jan. 13. He was 92. A Freedom Rider in the 1960s, Dresner built a career as a social justice-oriented Reform rabbi who was active in the fight against the Vietnam War and was a vocal opponent of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dresner was born on the Lower East Side in 1929 to an Orthodox family and grew up in Brooklyn, where his father ran a delicatessen. He attended yeshivas as a child but went on to become a Reform rabbi after serving in the Korean War and working on a kibbutz in Israel. “We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria,” he said after an arrest in 1964 outside a segregated motel in St. Augustine, Florida. “We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.”
Eli Evans
‘Poet laureate of Southern Jews’
Eli Evans, seen here in a picture from a trip to Israel in the 1970s, was “equally at home in New York.” (Courtesy Josh Evans)
Born in 1936 in Durham, North Carolina, where his father would become the first Jewish mayor and his mother the founder of Hadassah’s first chapter in the South, Eli Evans remained tied to his native home despite spending his adult life in New York City, where he was a prominent grant-maker whose giving fueled the creation of “Sesame Street” in both the United States and Israel. He wrote several memoirs about Southern Jews and also included the South in his philanthropy, which he pursued at multiple foundations according to an activist philosophy that helped launch the Children’s Defense Fund, seeded the South with Black lawyers who became local civil rights leaders and built ties between Israeli and Egyptian scientists after their countries made peace in 1979. “Eli was a Southern gentleman who interacted with the Jewish establishment and strengthened American Jewish life, without losing his Southern Jewish soul,” said Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history Jonathan Sarna. “It was a privilege to have known him.” Evans died July 26 in Manhattan of complications of COVID-19, after a period of declining health.
Sheryl Grossman
A lifelong advocate for people with disabilities
Sheryl Grossman was a Jewish disability activist. (Screenshot from 2021 JDAIM Interview Series at Towson University)
Sheryl Grossman stood small, at just 4’3″ and 48 pounds, but in the world of Jewish disability advocacy she loomed large, as both the founder of a Facebook group for people living with Bloom’s Syndrome and as a board member of Yad Hachazakah, the Jewish Disability Empowerment Center. She died March 28 at age 46, the result of a Bloom’s Syndrome-linked cancer. “I don’t think anyone will ever know just how much work Sheryl did during the pandemic to help Jewish communities support their most vulnerable neighbors who were in the hospital or isolated at home with COVID,” said Shoshana Finkel, a law student who met Grossman when she was an intern at the American Association of People with Disabilities. “She didn’t feel the need to share her accomplishments; that was never what the work was about for her.”
Dara Goldman
A professor of Spanish and Jewish studies in her prime
Dara Goldman was a professor of Spanish and Jewish studies at the University of Illinois. (Courtesy U of I)
Dara Goldman was preparing for graduation at the University of Illinois, where she was a professor of Spanish and chair of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, and for the American Jewish Historical Society conference, when she died May 13 of a heart attack. She was 51. A graduate of Columbia and Emory universities, Goldman produced scholarship so diverse that she was affiliated with eight units within the University of Illinois; most recently, she was researching Jewish cultural production in Cuba, where she brought resources for the Jewish community during her research trips, and co-edited a volume on 21st-century Jewish writing. “With her characteristic wit, she would often joke that she was a Jewish woman who took a wrong turn at diaspora,” said a remembrance published by the university. “But jokes aside, she could be at the same time a Jewish woman from New Jersey and an adopted daughter of Puerto Rico and Cuba, two cultures that she knew intimately and loved very deeply. … The echoes of her inimitable, hearty laughter will resonate within our halls for a long time.”
Yaakov Shalev
A beloved family man whose story was Israel’s
Yaakov Shalev, seated third from right, helped organize Iraqi Jews’ exodus to Israel. (Courtesy Asaf Shalev)
“When I arrived for a visit with family in Israel in my early twenties, my septum piercing outraged nearly everyone at our Shabbat morning gathering. Even my younger cousins badgered me to remove it. It took my elderly grandfather, Yaakov Shalev, to quiet everyone down and declare that I am his same beloved grandson, with or without the piercing.
“Calm, open-minded, steadfast, Saba Yaakov, as we called him, passed away peacefully in February at age 92 in Holon, with his five children at his side. He spent his last few hours listening to the melodies of his youth in Baghdad, the music of giants such as Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, and Fairuz.
“Saba Yaakov helped organize the exodus of Iraqi Jewry to Israel in 1950 and then enlisted in the Israeli military as an airplane mechanic. He taught himself how to build houses and became a successful contractor in the 1960s. But he soon decided the stress was too much and opened a shop in south Tel Aviv where he fabricated canvases for Israeli artists and framed their paintings. He kept the shop running for more than 40 years, going to work every day until he was in his eighties.” — Asaf Elia-Shalev, JTA reporter
Trude Feldman
A journalist who specialized in Yom Kippur interviews
Trude Feldman interviews Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1978. (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)
The daughter of a rabbinical family, Trude Feldman launched her career covering the 1961 trial of Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she put her training as a Hebrew teacher to use by teaching the language to the Nazi’s lawyer. (She also taught Hebrew to famed converts Sammy Davis Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor, and to Paul Newman on the set of “Exodus.”) But it was in her coverage of American presidents that Feldman truly made her mark, becoming famous for scoring presidential exit interviews and Yom Kippur interviews, which she would pitch as an opportunity for redemption. That’s what got her the first interview with Bill Clinton after he copped in 1998 to yes, having sex with that woman. The mainstream media mocked her for her softballs — “Saturday Night Live” once did so in a sketch — but those close to her understood their value. “The joke, however, was on everyone else,” her nephew, Rabbi Daniel Feldman, wrote in a remembrance. “Paired with her signature persistence, her style more often elicited not puff but profundity, more sincerity than sugar. The unique access she earned — baffling to some, understood to the astute, acknowledged by all — yielded memorable results.”
Harlene Winnick Appelman
A revolutionary leader in Jewish education
Harlene Winnick Appelman in an undated photo provided by the Covenant Foundation.
Born in upstate New York, Harlene Appelman’s career in Jewish education took off in 1982 when she became the director of family life education at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. There, she pioneered interactive Jewish learning, bringing children out of dry frontal settings into a more tactile experience of Judaism. After joining the board of the Covenant Foundation, which funds and promotes Jewish education, in 1994, she became its director in 2005 and held that role until 2021, allowing her to influence a generation of Jewish educators. Many of them mourned her death at 75 on Aug. 18; the cause was cancer. “I am one of an entire congregation of Jewish educational leaders who Harlene mentored, supported, prodded and constructively critiqued, promoted, and made feel special,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, in an online remembrance. “I hope that in her memory, I will find ever new ways to help more Jewish rabbis and educators feel seen, heard, capable, and motivated.” This month, the Covenant Foundation initiated a new prize, in Jewish family education, in Appelman’s honor.
Tom Tugend
An indefatigable journalist
Tom Tugend in his Los Angeles home, Aug. 3, 2021. (Jacob Gurvis)
Tom Tugend was 13 when he and his family left their home in Berlin in 1939. He was 97 when he died Dec. 7 in Los Angeles, where he had lived for most of his life. In the intervening decades, he fought in the U.S. Army and the Israel Defense Forces; covered Jewish news for a wide array of publications, including JTA; and enjoyed 66 years of marriage during which he and his wife raised three daughters. “His authenticity came through to anyone who knew him,” said one of them, the journalist Alina Tugend. “He was a hero to many people.”
Judah Samet
A two-time survivor of antisemitic terror
Judah Samet stands next to his portrait, part of Luigi Toscano’s “Lest We Forget” project at the University of Pittsburgh in 2019. (Photo by Hector Corante, courtesy of Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh)
Judah Samet became a national face of Pittsburgh’s 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting because he survived: He had been running late that day, so was not inside the building when 11 of his fellow congregants were murdered. Months later, he was President Donald Trump’s guest to the State of the Union address. The experience was both very different Samet’s childhood in Hungary, where he was born in February 1938, and in some ways similar. As a young child, Samet was forced by the Nazis from his home and shipped with his family first to a labor camp in Austria and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After a stop in Israel, he moved to Pittsburgh in the 1950s, ultimately joining his father-in-law’s jewelry business there and remaining a committed community member until his death at 84 on Sept. 27.
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Longtime pro-Israel Democrat Steny Hoyer announces retirement from Congress
(JTA) — Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer, Maryland’s longest-serving member of Congress and a lawmaker with longstanding close ties to the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, has announced his retirement.
“I did not want to be one of those members who clearly stayed, outstayed his or her ability to do the job,” Hoyer, 86, told the Washington Post ahead of his announcement on Thursday.
Hoyer, who has served in Congress since 1981 and stepped down as House majority leader in 2022, frequently made pro-Israel advocacy a hallmark of his tenure, including backing unconditional U.S. aid to Israel and supporting the recognition of Jerusalem as the country’s capital.
Hoyer’s departure deprives Congress of a pro-Israel stalwart at a time when support for Israel is on the decline in both major parties. Already, a Jewish Democrat who is harshly critical of Israel had been challenging him.
“Our country, the Democratic Party, and the pro-Israel movement are all in a better place today because of his service,” Brian Romick, the president and CEO of the Democratic Majority for Israel, said in a statement. “I will be forever grateful for his guidance, his friendship, and his faith in me. I am certain that future Democratic leaders will look to his career as a model and be inspired to embrace his legacy.”
Hoyer addressed changes in support for Israel in November 2024, when he celebrated after a proposal to restrict the sale of U.S.-made weapons to Israel was voted down.
“It is vital that we maintain Congress’ overwhelming bipartisan consensus supporting Israel. Israelis and Americans – and Democrats and Republicans – must continue to stand together as we navigate the most crucial period in the 76-year history of our U.S.-Israel relationship,” said Hoyer in a press release at the time.
Hoyer has also long been the unofficial leader of an annual tour of Democratic freshmen lawmakers to Israel with AIPAC. This year, Hoyer said in a video posted by AIPAC that he had been to Israel “22 times.”
“Contrary to world opinion, Israel has been doing everything it possibly can to ensure that there’s minimal damage to civilians who are not part of Hamas’ army,” said Hoyer in the video. “Unfortunately, the world is not seeing that, and one of the things I’ve tried to tell the leadership in Israel, please get that message out, please expose it.”
Hoyer’s trip to Israel was criticized by the only candidate who has already declared for his seat, Harry Jarin, who wrote in a statement at the time that Hoyer “knows what he is doing is wrong and unpopular, so he is deliberately hiding information about this trip.”
“While Donald Trump dismantles democracy here at home, Democrats lose all credibility by continuing to engage with an equally illiberal and self-destructive regime in Israel,” Jarin wrote at the time. “You cannot claim to defend democracy in one breath and embrace an authoritarian partner in the next.”
Jarin responded to Hoyer’s retirement announcement by saying that Hoyer had once represented Marylanders well. “His service deserves respect, and I acknowledge the role he played in shaping an earlier era of the Democratic Party,” he said in a statement, while also saying, while citing his outlook as the grandson of Holocaust survivors, that a new approach is needed to contending with the Trump administration.
Hoyer’s retirement comes as several other prominent backers of Israel have also announced their retirements from Congress ahead of the midterm elections.
Texas Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, who has close ties with AIPAC, announced he would not seek re-election in September. Democratic Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who is Jewish and closely affiliated with the liberal Israel lobby J Street, announced her retirement in May. Another pro-Israel Democrat in Illinois, Sen. Dick Durbin, announced in April that he would not seek a sixth term.
Amid the wave of retirements, several lawmakers and candidates have recently pledged not to take donations from AIPAC, as discontent with the longstanding U.S.-Israel alliance has grown significantly across the Democratic and Republican parties. Among Republicans, growing anti-Israel sentiment and the mainstreaming of fringe antisemitic voices has sparked outcry from top GOP leaders.
In Schakowsky’s district, the race for her seat currently includes leftist Palestinian-American influencer Kat Abugazelah, who praised Schakowsky for her stance on Palestinian rights, and Daniel Biss, the progressive Jewish mayor of Evanston, Illinois.
The post Longtime pro-Israel Democrat Steny Hoyer announces retirement from Congress appeared first on The Forward.
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Cameron Kasky embodies rising Gen Z Jewish criticism of Israel. Can it get him to Congress?
(JTA) — He’s running for Congress on Manhattan’s West Side, but lately Cameron Kasky has been focused on the West Bank.
Kasky, a 25-year-old Jewish progressive, recently went on a solidarity mission to the West Bank. He has shared experiences from the trip on social media, including chats with Palestinians who face security checkpoints and incursions by Israeli settlers, as well as videos of Kasky playing sports with Palestinian children. He joined Mehdi Hasan, a vocal critic of Israel and founder of the progressive media outlet Zeteo, for a live Q&A Thursday afternoon about the trip.
Among the pool of nearly a dozen candidates running in New York’s 12th Congressional District, Kasky is steering left of the Democratic establishment. His platform includes calling for sanctions on Israel, whom he accuses of committing genocide.
It’s a stance that could alienate some voters in one of the country’s most Jewish districts. The district covers the Upper West and East Sides as well as Midtown Manhattan, and has long been represented by Jerry Nadler, Congress’ most senior Jewish member.
But Kasky, the Jewish Parkland school shooting survivor and gun control activist, said in an interview that his stance on Israel doesn’t make him an outlier.
“I am not some anomaly,” Kasky told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The next generation of Jewish Americans is changing their tune on the State of Israel and how it operates.”
In a year when Israel is expected to play a central role in a number of midterm races, Kasky’s candidacy will be a test of how going all-in against Israel resonates with voters. But Israel isn’t his only Jewish issue: He also spoke about plans to improve Holocaust education and address rising antisemitism on the right.
He’s also not wrong about shifting sentiments among younger Jews. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that Americans ages 18-29 were the only age group more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israelis. Half of Jewish Americans ages 18-34 believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza; that percentage number is hovering in the 30s among older groups, according to a September 2025 poll by the Washington Post.
While this shift on Israel is occurring in the electorate, Kasky said he’s not aware of likeminded Jewish Gen Zers who are running for office — but he expects that to change.
“I imagine we’ll be seeing plenty more soon, especially given that far more Jewish Americans in our generation are aligned with the foreign policy positions on peace to which I’ve committed,” he said.
Gen Z has not quite reached the age of typical candidates in national elections. Young progressive Jews with staunch pro-Palestinian views are, however, starting to appear in politics, and win races.
Across the Hudson River from Kasky’s district, a Jewish democratic socialist named Jake Ephros was elected to Jersey City Council last month. Ephros has been a vocal pro-Palestinian advocate. In October 2023 he co-organized an open letter titled “Not in Our Name! Jewish Socialists Say No to Apartheid and Genocide,” which compared Israel to Nazi Germany.
And a 26-year-old Jewish political strategist, Morris Katz, has made a splash behind the scenes, helping run the victorious mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani in New York City. He is now advising the U.S. Senate campaign of another anti-Zionist progressive, Maine’s Graham Platner. Katz has said he was “radicalized” by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby.
“This is something that we are seeing all over the place,” Kasky said, of his sentiments about Israel.
In the aftermath of Mamdani’s election success, progressive candidates are starting to emerge as primary challengers to more moderate Democrats in this year’s midterm elections, and the topic of Israel figures to play a role in those congressional races. That may prove especially true in the race for Nadler’s soon-to-be vacant seat, where Kasky’s many opponents include several other Jews.
The 12th district includes younger neighborhoods such as Chelsea that voted strongly in favor of Mamdani, where Kasky, a democratic socialist and Mamdani supporter, could be well aligned with voters’ politics. But even for those who feel represented by his policies, Kasky’s youth and inexperience may prove too large an obstacle for getting their vote.
“I look at his positions — if he was an experienced guy, I would be very enthusiastic,” said Arlene Geiger, coordinator of the Upper West Side Action Group.
Geiger, who is Jewish, said she is also in a Signal group chat with about 15 other progressives in the district, including Democratic Socialists of America members who are “really enthusiastic” about Kasky.
“But he’s still too young and untested, so I don’t know,” said Geiger.
Eric Alterman, a journalist and author of the 2022 book “We Are Not One,” which looks at American Jews’ growing divide over Israel, said he doubted that Kasky could win the race, even as people’s views on Israel are shifting.
In the general election, Alterman pointed out, Mamdani was able to win the Upper West Side with similar views to Kasky on Israel.
“But Mamdani’s issue was not Israel, it was affordability,” said Alterman, who lives on the Upper West Side. “A lot of DSA types were there [supporting Mamdani] because of Israel, but most people were not there for Israel. They were there saying, ‘OK, I sort of agree with some of what he says, not all of it,’ or, ‘Who cares about the mayor’s foreign policy?’”
Brad Lander, another progressive Jewish congressional candidate and Mamdani ally, is challenging incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman on his support from AIPAC, and Israel figures to play a major role in their primary. But Alterman pointed to a key difference between Lander’s messaging on Israel and Kasky’s, which centers the charge of genocide.
“His position is, ‘I love Israel and I wish it would behave better,’” Alterman said of Lander.
In his race, Kasky has positioned himself as the democratic socialist candidate in a crowded — and decidedly Jewish — field that includes state Assembly members Micah Lasher, who is Jewish and considered Nadler’s preferred successor, and Alex Bores, whose wife is Jewish; John F. Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg, who has said he’s “at least 100% half Jewish”; civil rights lawyer Laura Dunn; LGBTQ rights activist Matthew Shurka, who is a Jewish Israeli-American; broadcast journalist Jami Floyd; ex-Republican lawyer and anti-Trumper George Conway; and Alan Pardee, who previously worked in finance.
Kasky said he wants to strike a dialogue with voters who may have liked much of Mamdani’s platform but were uncomfortable with the now-mayor’s harshly critical views on Israel.
“I intend to talk to them in their places of worship, I intend to talk to them in their community meetings, and just have a conversation about this,” Kasky said. He also said that, if people were against Mamdani solely because of Israel-Palestine, he found this “ridiculous” since the mayor does not have a say in foreign policy.
“Yes, he said he’ll arrest Netanyahu — Netanyahu can prevent that by going to the Hague himself and facing justice,” Kasky said, referring to the Israeli prime minister whom Mamdani has pledged to arrest if he enters New York.
Kasky, unlike Mamdani, would have a say in American foreign policy if elected to Congress. His platform on Israel includes opposing “sending money or weapons to the State of Israel, ‘defensive’ or otherwise,” and backing “meaningful sanctions against Israel and the UAE for their continued support of genocides in Gaza and Sudan.”
Kasky has drawn criticism from pro-Israel figures like Adam Louis-Klein, who recently launched the Movement Against Antizionism. Louis-Klein called Kasky a “young token” who “recently realized the political benefits of the anti-Jewish hate grift.”
On the other hand, Ro Khanna, the progressive California congressman, praised Kasky on X. “Thanks for the boldness you are showing @camkasky! You are inspiring a lot of folks,” he wrote.
After Kasky’s recent trip to the West Bank, he said in a video that he witnessed the “devastating human toll of the illegal actions that are encouraged right here” in the 12th district.
“This hell that our government and the State of Israel have created for the people living there — it is so much worse than you think,” Kasky said following his trip.
Kasky has said he will share more about the visit; he has so far shared videos of him playing sports with Palestinian children and photos from a Christmas peace march in Bethlehem. He has written that “we must end the settlements that violate international law and stop encouraging New Yorkers to move there. It is cruel.” He also recorded a video speaking to the camera, which he said he filmed at 5 a.m., during a night shift to look out for Israeli settlers.
His platform doesn’t only center on Israel: He also cites as priorities establishing Medicare for all, abolishing ICE, fighting artificial intelligence oligarchs and preventing gun violence.
Kasky said he gradually came to his current views on Israel after being raised with a rosy picture of the country.
“It was a slow drip over the years, following the news closely and seeing strikes in Gaza, where I learned that the reality of the situation was not the simple ‘milk and honey land’ narrative I was raised to believe,” he said.
He was raised in a Jewish area of South Florida, which he described as “basically just Long Island II.” He attended a Reform synagogue, Congregation B’nai Israel, and attended a heavily Jewish private school in Boca Raton before his family moved to Parkland.
He also attended Hebrew school, which Kasky said was a seminal experience — though he complained that he was cast as Haman what felt like “every single year in the Purim spiel,” and wished he could’ve played Vashti.
Kasky said the Hebrew school curriculum included things like learning about Jewish holidays and traditions. But it also meant learning about the Holocaust at a young age — an experience that he contrasted to the curriculum of his public school history classes in middle and high school.
“The Holocaust education in at least the Florida public school system is not very in-depth,” Kasky said, adding the caveat that he had dropped out of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School before he would have taken their dedicated class on the Holocaust. (Kasky had dropped out to focus on March for Our Lives with his classmates after the shooting.)
Kasky, who co-founded the gun-control activist group Never Again MSD after surviving the shooting, said he did not learn “that America was turning away Jews” until he was “much older.” He said his classes were fairly black-and-white, and did not include anything about Nazi collaborators in the U.S. government, which he said he had come to believe was important after reading a book on the topic.
Florida has required some form of Holocaust education in public schools since the 1990s, and was one of the first states in the union to adopt such requirements. Today 30 states mandate Holocaust education. The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School gunman had fired into the school’s Holocaust class, killing two students and wounding four, as part of his killing spree; he had also scrawled a swastika onto one of his ammunition magazines.
Now, Kasky wants to expand Holocaust education, and said he is meeting with education policy experts and Jewish community leaders about the issue.
In an email, he wrote that his positions include expanding funding for the Never Again Education Act of 2020; working to “develop and advocate for K-12 teacher training on combating antisemitism and preventing Holocaust denialism from reaching our children, who are already being exposed to skyrocketing Jew hate around the world, especially on social media”; and expanding “federal grants for states who are leading the way in the development of Holocaust/genocide education standards.”
He also expressed concern about far-right figures like Nick Fuentes, who themselves speak to Gen Z audiences highly critical of Israel, but blend such criticism with sympathy for Hitler and Nazi Germany. Kasky said “dangerous antisemitic actors” like Fuentes “exploit the suffering of the Palestinian people as a way to spread Jew hatred, while having no real sympathy for Palestinians.”
Still, Kasky cautioned against Sen. Chuck Schumer’s resolution to officially condemn Fuentes in Congress, saying it would bear “unintended harmful consequences.”
“Fuentes’ base thrives on the idea that they are being attacked because they are right, and because the establishment and the Jews and the Zionists hate seeing how right they are,” Kasky said. “The idea that Fuentes’ name will even be uttered in the halls of Congress, I think only reinforces Fuentes’ message to his followers.”
Kasky said he and his family had been the subject of antisemitic conspiracy theories online in his time as a gun control activist. He has criticized pro-Israel organizations like the Anti-Defamation League for doing “everything they can to avoid indicting the Right and MAGA.”
Kasky has also blasted moderate Democrats including Goldman and New York Rep. Ritchie Torres, who’ve both received funding from AIPAC (and are both facing primary challengers calling out that support). Kasky, meanwhile, has been endorsed by Track AIPAC, the X account that posts candidates’ AIPAC donation numbers in order “to end AIPAC and the Israel lobby’s stranglehold on American Democracy,” according to its website.
Alterman noted that, since Oct. 7, American politics around Israel have changed in a way that he “could not have imagined” while he was writing his book, particularly among Jews. Before Hamas’ attack on Israel and the war in Gaza, the election of Mamdani as an anti-Zionist mayor of New York would have been “inconceivable,” he said.
“So things are moving so rapidly that I’m not here to predict the future,” Alterman said, of Kasky’s fate in this primary. “But there’s definitely a base there to begin a political career.”
The post Cameron Kasky embodies rising Gen Z Jewish criticism of Israel. Can it get him to Congress? appeared first on The Forward.
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The ICE shooting in Minneapolis shattered my Holocaust survivor father’s’ American dream
Last fall, I visited a train platform in Zbaszyn, Poland, where my father saw his parents for the last time.
There, he and his brother boarded a Kindertransport to seek refuge in England in 1940. They survived the Holocaust; my grandparents and my aunt were murdered by Nazis. The years before that separation were marked by profound betrayals by the German government, which lied to them, their neighbors and the rest of the world about the violence being enacted against them, and what their future held.
I recalled that visit early Thursday morning, as I stood in front of the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, less than a mile from Bdote — the unceded land, sacred to Minnesota’s Dakota people, where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers meet.
That land is where Minnesota’s earliest white settlers displaced, brutalized and killed the Dakota before building Fort Snelling, one of the first United States military outposts in the American West. Later, in 1862, the federal government set up a concentration camp in the same area. Some 1,600 Dakota were sent there, and hundreds died from disease and the harsh conditions.
Now, the thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents sent by our federal government to terrorize Minneapolis gather and stage at the Whipple Building. And yesterday, an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross left that building, traveled a couple of miles west to South Minneapolis, and murdered Renée Nicole Good.
Good, 37, was a beloved community member. I didn’t know her, but I have friends who did. Their grief is devastating.
Renee was a treasured wife, they tell me. A mom to three children. A poet, an artist, and a community caretaker.
Her unjust death is horrific. And the resonances between our federal government’s bad faith response to it, and the kinds of stories I grew up hearing about the authoritarian government under which my father was raised, are terrifying.
Within hours of Good’s killing, President Donald Trump was spreading false claims about how it happened, claiming that Good ran over the ICE agent who shot her. Multiple video analyses have shown how inaccurate his words are. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Good, who was driving at the time of shooting, was engaged in “domestic terrorism.” It has been sickening to hear these leaders not only desecrate Good’s memory, but also try to weaponize it to further energize their campaign against our immigrant neighbors and loved ones.
LIke many American Jews, I was raised to believe in the American dream, and in a government that was here to represent me, care for me, and be a force for good in the world. And as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, I always knew how fragile principles of liberty and equality can be.
I have known for a long time that the U.S. government has never equally defended the lives and rights of all people — and that it has too often, as in the case of the Dakota and other Indigenous Americans, actively destroyed those lives. But amid the Trump administration’s campaign against immigrant communities, it’s the tragedy of Good’s death that has most completely shattered the vision of what my Holocaust survivor father had taught me to hope for in the U.S.
Our current federal government lies to us, and lies about us. They blur the lines between fact and fiction. They gaslight. They have specifically tried to foment discord within the Jewish community, and between us and our allies. They try to divide us because they’re afraid of the strength and power that we have when we rise up as one.
That is why we gathered at the Whipple Federal Building today to honor Good’s memory, and to protest ICE’s ongoing assault on our fellow Minnesotans. This is the place where some of our neighbors go to be detained, and never come back. Instead, they are deported — sometimes to countries where they have never before set foot — and ripped from those they love, just as my father was ripped from his parents.
As Jews, we remember our family histories not to make us fearful or to isolate ourselves, but rather to prepare us for moments just like this one. Our history is not meant to be forgotten. It is not meant to sit neatly on museum shelves or be tucked away in old family albums. We are meant to carry it. We are meant to learn from it. And we are meant to act because of it.
The post The ICE shooting in Minneapolis shattered my Holocaust survivor father’s’ American dream appeared first on The Forward.