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Synagogues are joining the ‘effective altruism’ movement. Will the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal stop them?
(JTA) — A few years ago, Adam Azari was frustrated over how little he could do to alleviate suffering in the world with his modest income as a writer and caretaker for people with disabilities.
He kept thinking about a set of statistics and ideas he had encountered during his graduate studies in philosophy. For example, he remembered reading that for the price of training a guide dog for the blind in the United States, one could prevent hundreds of cases of blindness in the developing world.
This hyper-rational way of thinking about doing good was called effective altruism, and it was growing into a movement, known as E.A. for short. Some proponents were even opting to pursue lucrative careers in finance and tech that they otherwise might not have chosen so they would have more money to give away.
Azari, meanwhile, had become a believer who was stuck on the sidelines. Then, one day, he had what he calls a “personal eureka moment.” Azari would return to his roots as the son of a Reform rabbi in Tel Aviv and spread the word of E.A. across the Jewish denomination and among its millions of followers.
“It suddenly hit me that the Reform movement has this crazy untapped potential to save thousands and thousands of lives by simply informing Jews about effective giving,” he recalled.
He badgered his father, Rabbi Meir Azari, and, for a moment, thought of becoming a rabbi himself. But he abandoned the idea and focused on pitching E.A. to the Reform movement’s international arm, the World Union for Progressive Judaism. Azari found an ally in WUPJ’s president, Rabbi Sergio Bergman, and the organization soon decided to sponsor his efforts, paying him a salary for his work.
Over the past year, Azari’s Jewish Effective Giving Initiative has presented to about 100 rabbis and secured pledges from 37 Reform congregations to donate at least $3,000 to charities rated as the most impactful by E.A. advocates and which aid poor people in the developing world. Per E.A. calculations, it costs $3,000 to $5,000 to save a single life.
“Progressive Judaism inspires us to carry out tikkun olam, our concrete action to make the world better and repair its injustices,” Bergman said. “With this call we not only do what the heart dictates in values, but also do it effectively to be efficient and responsible for saving a life.”
This charitable philosophy appears to be gaining traction in the Jewish world just as one of the figures most associated with it, who happens to be Jewish, has become engulfed in scandal.
Sam Bankman-Fried built a cryptocurrency empire worth billions, amassing a fortune he pledged to give away to causes such as artificial intelligence, combatting biohazards and climate change, all selected on criteria developed by the proponents of effective altruism.
A few weeks ago, Bankman-Fried’s fortune evaporated amid suspicions of financial misconduct and revelations of improper oversight at his company, FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange that was worth as much as $32 billion before a run of withdrawals ultimately left it illiquid. The situation has drawn comparisons to the implosion of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and authorities investigating the situation have said Bankman-Fried could face criminal penalties over his role.
In the wake of FTX’s collapse, Bankman-Fried has suggested that his embrace of E.A. was insincere, a tactic to bolster his reputation.
But Azari and the organizer of another initiative, a growing reading and discussion group called Effective Altruism for Jews, are undaunted and don’t believe the scandal should taint the underlying principles of the movement.
“Whether you call it E.A. or just directly donating to global health and development, it doesn’t matter,” Azari said. “The basic idea is to support these wonderful charities, and I don’t think the FTX scandal changes any of that. Malaria nets, vitamin A supplements and vaccine distribution are still super cost-effective, evidence-based ways of helping others.”
Azari added that he has had several meetings with rabbis since the news about Bankman-Fried broke and that no one has asked him about it.
“I don’t think people are making the connection,” he said. “And to me, there is no connection between us and FTX.”
When talking to rabbis about why E.A. would make a good fit with their congregation’s charitable mission, Azari cites the Jewish value of tikkun olam, a mandate to “repair the world” often used to implore people to care for others. He explains that donating to charities with a proven track record is a concrete way to fulfill a Jewish responsibility.
That kind of thinking proved attractive to Steven Pinker, the prominent Harvard psychologist, who has endorsed Azari’s initiative. In a recorded discussion with Azari and others last year, Pinker recalled his Reform upbringing, which included Hebrew school, summer camp and synagogue services.
“The thing I remember most is how much of my so-called religious education was like a university course in moral philosophy,” Pinker said. “We chewed over moral dilemmas.”
As an adult, Pinker returned to Jewish teachings on charity and, in particular, those of the medieval philosopher Maimonides, examining these ideas through the lens of E.A. He began to wonder about the implications of Maimonides’ focus on evaluating charity based on the motives of the donor. That focus, he concluded, doesn’t always lead to the best outcomes for the beneficiary.
“What ultimately ought to count in tzedakah, in charity, is, are you making people better off?” he said.
Also on the panel with Azari and Pinker was the man credited with authoring the foundational texts upon which E.A. is built. Peter Singer, who is also Jewish and whose grandfather died in the Holocaust, teaches bioethics at Princeton. Starting in the 1970s, Singer wrote a series of books in which he argues for a utilitarian approach to ethics, namely, that we should forgo luxuries and spend our money to save lives. The extremes to which he has taken his thinking include suggesting that parents of newborn babies with severe disabilities be permitted to kill them.
From Bankman-Fried to Singer, the list of Jews who have either promoted E.A. or lead its institutions is long. With their estimated fortune of $11.3 billion, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna have eclipsed Bankman-Fried as the wealthiest Jews in the field. There’s also popular philosopher Sam Harris and New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, who have each dedicated episodes of their podcast to the topic.
The website LessWrong, which defines itself as “a community blog devoted to refining the art of rationality,” is seen as an important early influence; it was founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky, an artificial intelligence researcher who grew up in a Modern Orthodox household but does not identify religiously as a Jew anymore. Two other Jews, Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, left the hedge fund world to establish GiveWell, a group whose research is considered the premier authority on which charities are deserving of E.A. donations.
The prevalence of Jews in the movement caught the attention of E.A. enthusiast Ben Schifman, an environmental lawyer for the federal government in Washington, D.C. About two years ago, Schifman proposed creating a group for like-minded individuals in hope of helping grow the movement. In an online post, he laid out the history of Jewish involvement and wrote a brief introduction to the topic of Judaism and charity.
Today, Schifmam runs a group called Effective Altruism for Jews, whose main program is an eight-week fellowship involving a reading and discussion group with designated facilitators. Schifman said about 70 people spread across 10 cohorts are currently participating. There’s also a Shabbat dinner program to bring people together for informal meetings with funding available for hosts.
Participants discuss how ideas that are popular in E.A. might relate to Jewish traditions and concepts, and also brainstorm ways to popularize the movement in the wider Jewish community, according to Schifman.
“There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit with regards to the Jewish community and sharing some of the ideas of Effective Altruism, like through giving circles at synagogues or, during the holidays, offering charities that are effective,” Schifman said in an interview that took place before the Bankman-Fried scandal broke.
Asked to discuss the mood in the community following the collapse of Bankman-Fried’s company and an affiliated charity, FTX Future Fund, Schifman provided a brief statement expressing continued confidence in his project.
He said, “While we’re shocked by the news and our hearts go out to all those affected, as an organization EA for Jews isn’t funded by FTX Future Fund or otherwise connected to FTX. We don’t expect our work will be impacted.”
Even if Schifman and Azari are right that their movement is robust enough to withstand the downfall of a leading evangelist, a debate remains about what impact E.A. can or should have on philanthropy itself.
Andres Spokoiny, president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network, wrote about the question with skepticism in an article published more than two years ago. He argued against “uncritically importing the values and assumptions” of effective altruists, whose emphasis on the “cold light of reason” struck him as detached from human nature.
In a recent interview, Spokoiny echoed similar concerns, noting that applying pure rationality to all charitable giving would mean the end of cherished programs such as PJ Library, which supplies children’s books for free to Jewish families, that may not directly save lives but do contribute to a community’s culture and sense of identity.
He also worries that too strong a focus on evidence of impact would steer money away from new ideas.
“Risky, creative ideas don’t tend to emerge from rational needs assessments,” he said. “It requires a transformative vision that goes beyond that.”
But Spokoiny also sounded more open to E.A. and said that as long as it does not try to replace traditional modes of philanthropy, it could be a useful tool of analysis for donors.
“If donors want to apply some of E.A. principles to their work, I’d say that is a good idea,” he said. “I am still waiting to see if this will be a fad or buzzword or something that will be incorporated into the practice of philanthropy.”
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Pro-Palestinian rally at Buchenwald memorial is shut down by German authorities
(JTA) — German authorities have shut down a planned pro-Palestinian vigil at the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp memorial after a fierce outcry.
The rally was slated for April 12, marking the 81st anniversary of Buchenwald’s liberation by U.S. troops. But the city of Weimar said on Monday it would ban the event on the memorial grounds and offered a square downtown as an alternate location.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald, the group behind the campaign, announced it was challenging the ban in court. The group said it aimed to “commemorate victims of genocide and fascism” and “uplift the fundamental duty to fight against all genocides, particularly the genocide currently taking place in Palestine.”
The planned event had been heavily criticized by German leaders, such as federal antisemitism czar Felix Klein. In an interview with the Jüdische Allgemeine, Klein said he viewed the rally as “disrespectful self-promotion and a perfidious attempt to relativize the murder of over 11,000 Jews in the Buchenwald concentration camp by comparing it to Israel’s actions in the recent Gaza war.”
The campaign was also protested in a joint statement by a coalition of 17 organizations, including several Jewish communal and academic groups. They accused the organizers of “instrumentalizing the Buchenwald memorial site as a platform for anti-Jewish agitation.”
Kufiyas in Buchenwald had support from the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the German group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East.
Rachael Shapiro, an organizer with the International Jewish Anti-zionist Network, said the memorial foundation’s “insistence on the singularity and exceptionalism of the Nazi genocide of European Jews” served to “actively provide cover for Germany’s participation in and funding of the mass murder of Palestinians.”
“As Jewish, queer and other anti-fascists, many of us the children and grandchildren of survivors of and those persecuted and murdered in the Nazi genocide, we wholeheartedly reject the German state dictating conditions around commemoration,” Shapiro said in a statement.
The event originated as a protest against a German court’s decision that Buchenwald could refuse entry to visitors who wear a Palestinian keffiyeh. Kufiyas in Buchenwald also said the memorial had suppressed other voices that criticized Israel. They cited the treatment of Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm, the grandson of Holocaust survivors and a critic of the Israeli government, who was disinvited from giving a commemoration speech at Buchenwald after pressure from the Israeli embassy in Berlin.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald said it continued to call on the memorial foundation to “openly address the genocide in Gaza” and lift restrictions on pro-Palestinian symbols and speech at the site. The group said its demands honored the “Oath of Buchenwald,” a promise spoken by survivors of the camp during a memorial ceremony on April 19, 1945.
These survivors said in six languages, “We will only give up the fight when the last guilty has been judged by the tribunal of all nations. The absolute destruction of Nazism is our device. The building of a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Argentina designates Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization
(JTA) — Argentina announced on Tuesday that it had designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, a move that was quickly praised by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar.
The move stems from Argentina’s decades-long investigations into the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, which killed 29 and injured more than 200, and the 1994 attack on the AMIA Jewish center, which left 85 dead and 300 injured in what remains the deadliest terrorist attack on Argentine soil.
In a statement, President Javier Milei’s office described the attacks as “two of the most serious terrorist attacks in history, carried out in the 1990s by the IRGC’s operational arm in the region, the organization Hezbollah.”
With Tuesday’s decision, the Argentine government will now include the IRGC in the Public Registry of Persons and Entities Linked to Acts of Terrorism and its Financing, triggering financial sanctions and operational restrictions intended to curb its ability to operate in the country and safeguard Argentina’s financial system from illicit use.
The announcement by Milei, who has stood out as one of Israel’s staunchest international supporters, comes months after his office also designated the Quds Force, the foreign arm of the IRGC, as a terrorist organization in January. In recent years, Argentina has also designated Hamas and Hezbollah as terror groups.
Saar praised the move in a post on X Wednesday, writing that the designation “places Argentina, under [Milei’s] leadership, at the forefront of the free world in the fight against the Iranian regime of terror and its proxies.”
“With this decision, President Milei – one of the greatest leaders of our generation – has once again demonstrated moral clarity and an unwavering commitment to the values of freedom and the fight against its enemies,” Saar wrote.
Last month, just days into the ongoing U.S.-Israel war with Iran, Argentina issued an arrest warrant for Ahmad Vahidi, who was appointed as the head of the IRGC after its previous leader was killed in the first wave of U.S.-Israeli strikes.
Vahidi is currently the highest-ranking Iranian figure accused by the Argentine judiciary. An arrest warrant for him was first issued in 2006 in connection with the AMIA case.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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This isn’t Barbra Streisand’s ‘Yentl’ — it isn’t I.B. Singer’s either
There’s an FAQ on the website of the London theater where the Kadimah Yiddish Theatre of Melbourne’s production of Yentl is running through April 16. The very first item reads:
Is this a stage version of the 1983 musical film starring Barbara Streisand?
No — the London production of Yentl is a play. It is a new adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1962 short story,“ Yentl the Yeshiva Boy“ — just like the Streisand film was at the time.
This explanation does more than relieve box office staff of the tedious duty of informing Mrs. Lipschitz and Mrs. Rosenblatt from the sisterhood that no, they shouldn’t come expecting to sing along to “Papa, Can You Hear Me.” It argues that this theatrical “reimagining” (to use Kadimah’s own term) of Yentl is no less authentically Singerian than the musical. It also hints at how Kadimah prevailed, against considerable odds, in adapting a story whose rights Streisand still owns and fiercely guards.
As Gary Abrahams, Kadimah’s executive director and the director of the production, recently told the Jewish Telegraph, Singer’s estate gave him their approval on the condition that it be a Yiddish language, non-musical production. The London transplant, which comes on the heels of earlier stagings in Melbourne and Sydney, is enjoying a six-week run at the Marylebone Theatre, which is housed inside of an anthroposophical center. Both the limited duration of the run and the Off West End venue were critical to securing the Singer estate’s approval.
Kadimah’s production, a bilingual Yiddish-English chamber piece that has gained a certain notoriety for featuring male and female nudity, is the latest chapter in the long and unruly afterlife of Singer’s deceptively simple tale.
In “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” which first appeared, in English translation, in Commentary in September 1962, a rabbi’s daughter, shut out from the Talmud learning reserved for men, cuts her hair, dons male clothing, changes her name to Anshel, finds a chavrusa, the heartbroken Avigdor, and enters a yeshiva. But Singer’s tale is considerably stranger than both that simple summary and Streisand’s popular version suggest.
Yentl is not simply a tale of female exclusion and feminist defiance. It is also a story of impersonation, erotic confusion, spiritual hunger and metaphysical trespass. Yentl does not cross one line and stop there. Once she begins living as Anshel, all the categories meant to keep life orderly — male and female, study and desire, law and transgression — begin to blur.
That instability may explain why Yentl has proved so durable. Before Streisand made it famous on screen, Singer had already adapted it for the stage in the mid-1970s together with Leah Napolin. The show opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1974 and transferred to Broadway the next year, with Tovah Feldshuh in the title role.
“As a play it is altogether too anecdotal,” wrote Clive Barnes in the 1974 Times review. “The storyline wanders on and on like a river through a landscape, but the landscape happens to be worth looking at.” Napolin, who died in 2018 (and who claimed that Singer didn’t write a single word of the script) suggested that the second wave feminism of the time made the story and its themes feel relevant to contemporary audiences.
“This dark little gender-bending tale had an impact on many people who identified, as I did, with the heroine’s struggle to reinvent herself, to redefine herself,” Napolin once told an interviewer.
Half a century later, Kadimah’s Yentl leans heavily, and not always successfully, into our contemporary discourse about sex and gender. The story reemerges in a markedly — and overtly — queerer form than in previous versions.
Streisand’s film absorbed the title character so completely into her own star persona that for many people Yentl is now synonymous with Babs, not Singer. Her approach is expansive where Singer is compressed, ardent where he is dry-eyed, and schmaltzy where he is severe. Streisand gave the story glamor, emotional clarity and uplift. It also tilted the material away from Singer’s sharper ambiguities and toward the all-American theme of becoming oneself. The film, which Streisand also directed, produced and co-wrote, even ends with Yentl aboard a ship bound for America! (In Singer, Yentl simply ups and vanishes, an ending that has been interpreted as a reference to the legend of the Wandering Jew).
Yet Streisand’s victory over the material came with at an expense. As Linda Besner notes in an essay on Singer and Streisand and published in the Canadian arts review Arcade, the film’s feminist reclamation of Yentl also trims away some of the story’s deepest instability. Singer’s Yentl tells Avigdor, “I’m neither one nor the other,” and the story allows a degree of erotic and ontological confusion that the film flattens into a drama of self-realization.
Kadimah’s production, adapted by Abrahams, Elise Esther Hearst and Galit Klas, starts from dissatisfaction with that inheritance. Hearst has said the team wanted to get back to the story’s darker, more transgressive roots. In an interview with The Times of London, Abrahams said he had been struck by how unlike the movie Singer’s story really was, and described the original as a work about spirituality, identity, gender, sexuality, as well as plain old sex.
Those ambitions are evident from the outset. This is not a shy Yentl. It foregrounds the body, goes hard on the story’s sexual unease and sharpens its queer implications. Amy Hack is alluringly androgynous in the title role, both attracted by and attractive to Avigdor and Hodes (Genevieve Kingsford in a very stiff performance), Avigdor’s erstwhile fiancée, who Yentl marries in bad faith. As in the film, she casts a prurient gaze at the bathing Avigdor (Ashley Margolis bares all onstage, one-upping Mandy Patinkin, whose naked tush is one of the film’s most memorable sights). Singer’s story can accommodate plenty of sexual discomfort and frustration, but Abrahams’ production lays it on too thick. Did he really need to make Avigdor a mikveh peeper?
The production also never settles on a convincing tone and register. The one-set production, with its vaguely Expressionist look, goes for too much shtetl schlock. The acting keeps sliding between modes without enough control to make the shifts meaningful: naturalistic for a few minutes, then suddenly pitched into something like Yiddish melodrama. Additionally, there isn’t any discernible logic to why certain passages are spoken in English while others are in Yiddish (with subtitles projected onto the set). The result is less daring than uncertain. No performance fully steadies the evening, although Evelyn Krape comes the closest. As the spectral “Figure,” she hovers, narrates, inhabits minor roles and hangs over the proceedings like a comic dybbuk. The device of a spectral conferencier does not entirely cohere, but Krape — hammy in a grotesque-vulgar-goofy way — almost pulls it off.
Kadimah’s production was lauded in Melbourne and Sydney but has met with a very different reception in London, which is, of course, a no-nonsense theater town. Despite the tepid and sometimes outright negative reviews (“Even with nude scenes, this is a schlep,” The Times of London’s critic wrote), the Thursday evening performance I attended was nearly full. And, the mostly grey-haired audience members, several of whom I recognized, from a nearby kosher deli where I wolfed down a pastrami sandwich before the show, were enthusiastic. A Yiddish Yentl in London now is enough of an event to draw not only the usual suspects but the theatrically adventurous — and, no doubt, some Streisand fans who should know to check their expectations at the door.
Kadimah Yiddish Theater, which recently passed its centenary, is, by some counts, Australia’s oldest theater company. This Yentl might well be the biggest hit they’ve had in their long history. Despite its shortcomings — and there any many, both in concept and execution — the production shows that the company understands the need to strive for more than nostalgia and sentimentality, à la Streisand, and to be a little impious and even impish.
Today’s most interesting Yiddish theater (and also film, to an extent) inscribes itself within tradition while treating that heritage as unstable, literate and vulgar. That is what makes the Yiddish work of another Australian director, Barrie Kosky, so refreshing and bracingly alive.
Earlier this season, Kosky directed K., a “Talmudic vaudeville” inspired by Kafka’s “The Trial” at the Berliner Ensemble. In interviews, Kosky has spoke of the polyglot, code-switching, cross-dressing Yiddish theater that formed part of Kafka’s world. His haunting and unsettling production moves between German, Hebrew and Yiddish (including a gorgeous translation of Schumann’s Dicherliebe into mamaloschen) and injects intellectual seriousness with showbiz energy.
There’s another reason I bring up Kosky, a prolific, influential, and deeply Jewish theater and opera director. In summer 2027, he will present a fresh musical version of Yentl at the Fisher Center for the Arts at Bard College, created together with Lisa Kron (the Tony-winning writer and lyricist of Broadway’s Fun Home) and Adam Benzwi, one of the director’s regular musical collaborators in Berlin. According to Bard’s announcement, Benzwi’s score will draw on American and European Yiddish theater, music hall and Hasidic choral traditions. That sounds less like an attempt to strip Yentl back to some pristine original than like an effort to push through the whole layered history of the piece and make something gloriously heterodox.
By this point Yentl exists not as a single work. Singer gave it severity, mischief and danger. Streisand gave it melody and yearning. Kadimah has tried, admirably if unsuccessful, to restore taboo, Yiddish abrasion and folkloric unease, sometimes vividly, sometimes crudely. Kosky may prove better placed than most to let those elements collide without trying to reconcile them too neatly.
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