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There’s a Grammy for Christian music. These musicians want Jewish music to get one, too.
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — There is a Grammy Award for just about every kind of music — from pop to metal to New Age to Contemporary Christian — but there’s no Jewish category. Two Jewish musician friends hope to change that.
Joanie Leeds, a children’s musician and Grammy winner in New York City, and Mikey Pauker, a self-described “devotional rock” artist from California, are working on a formal proposal to add “best Jewish music album” to the list of Grammys awarded each year. They plan to submit their proposal to the Recording Academy, the body that governs the Grammys, by March 1.
In the past, albums of what is traditionally considered to be Jewish music have been nominated in a variety of categories, including best contemporary world music. The Klezmatics’ “Wonder Wheel” album won in that category in 2006, and some referred to the award as “the first Jewish Grammy.”
But musicians who produce albums of Jewish music often find themselves caught between categories, Leeds said. The global category is not a fit for American musicians, and categories for religious music, even if expanded, are also not an easy fit, she said.
“‘Jewish’ is complicated, because it’s not just a religion like Christianity,” Leeds said. “It’s also a culture.”
To strengthen their proposal, the pair consulted with rabbis and Jewish educators about what constitutes Jewish music.
“We’re doing our best to be as clear as possible and as inclusive as possible, because not everybody knows that Jewish music is diverse,” Pauker said. “It’s transdenominational, it’s based in spirituality, it’s based in culture and it’s not just Ashkenazi.”
Mikey Pauker, seen here performing in Berkeley, California, is one of the musicians behind a petition to add a Jewish music category to the Grammys. (Courtesy Pauker)
In their proposal, Pauker and Leeds make the case for a new category that will encompass Jewish religious music, such as cantorial music, nigguns and Mizrahi music, as well as secular music, such as klezmer, Yiddish, Ladino and Judeo-Arabic music. Albums with Christian themes, including those produced by Messianic Jews, would not be eligible.
“It needs to have some sort of Jewish content in it to make it Jewish music,” Leeds said. “If there’s a song in Israel about some guy meeting a girl at a bar, or whatever it’s about that has no grounds in text or liturgy or anything, then it wouldn’t be considered Jewish music.”
“Our goal is really to educate not just the Recording Academy about what Jewish music is, but also educating the public as to what Jewish music is,” she said.
The Recording Academy regularly adds and modifies Grammy categories. This year, it added five new ones, including best score soundtrack for video games and other interactive media and best spoken-word poetry album.
Pauker said this is not the first time musicians have petitioned the Recording Academy to add a Jewish category. But this time, he said, he and Leeds can point to the consistent output of high-quality Jewish music in recent years. He noted that in the past two years alone, more than 100 albums were released that could have been nominated in such a category.
“We’re at a point in music history where we’re having a Jewish renaissance, and the market has arrived,” he said. “We have enough artists where we can get this done.” He added that the Recording Academy has been supportive of him and Leeds in their endeavor.
In an effort to raise awareness about their proposal, they have launched a petition on the Change.org website. By Friday, it had more than 1,800 signatures, including from non-Jewish musicians.
A petition to add a Jewish Grammys category garnered more than 1,800 signatures in its first week. (Screenshot from Change.org)
Among the signers is Sephardic singer and activist Sarah Aroeste. She said she supports the push to add a Jewish category at the Grammys because her albums, including 2021’s “Monastir,” do not fit cleanly into the other categories.
“Jewish music crosses so many musical boundaries, yet we get lost, or are ineligible, in existing categories,” she wrote. “As a Ladino musician specifically, I’ve always been put in the global music category. I am literally up against musical acts from all around the globe!”
She added: “Having our own category — much like other ethnic or religious groups have them — would highlight the breadth and diversity of Jewish music as a genre and would allow those Academy members knowledgeable about the music to be able to vote.”
Pauker, 37, lives in southern California and recently launched his own folk-rock-reggae-chant record label called Beautiful Way Records. He will help lead Shabbat services during Wilderness Torah’s upcoming Passover in the Desert festival.
Leeds, who is based in New York City, won a 2021 Grammy in the Best Children’s Music Album category for her ninth album, a compilation of secular children’s music called “All the Ladies” that included a song about Jewish Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She has also released multiple albums of Jewish kids’ music, including “Meshugana” and “Challah, Challah,” as well as a Christmas record called “Oy Vey” in collaboration with the rapper Fyütch.
Pauker said the two became close friends during the pandemic, when they spent many hours on the social media app Clubhouse discussing Judaism and music.
As the Recording Academy considers their proposal in the coming weeks, Pauker said he and Leeds will hold community conversations about trends in Jewish music.
“One of our hopes is this will launch hundreds of new artists, new records and collaborations that can really help push this genre forward,” he said.
This story originally appeared in J. The Jewish News of Northern California and is reprinted with permission. Jackie Hajdenberg added reporting for JTA.
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Florida redistricting scrambled the map. Three Jewish Democrats found a way through.
Three Jewish Democratic House members from Florida emerged victorious from their party primaries Tuesday amid a redistricting shakeup that scrambled South Florida’s congressional map and threatened to end some of their political careers.
U.S. Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Lois Frankel and Jared Moskowitz all won Democratic nominations in newly redrawn districts, each facing different challenges from the new map and their primary opponents.
But their victories only secured their spots on the November ballot. The bigger question is whether they can win reelection under a successful Republican effort designed to flip four Democratic seats. Earlier this year, Florida’s state legislators approved the new congressional lines at the urging of Gov. Ron DeSantis, to increase the number of Republican seats from 20 to 24 of the state’s 28 districts.
The three Jewish incumbents took different routes for survival.
After her old seat was transformed into more favorable territory for Republicans, Wasserman Schultz, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee and one of Congress’ most prominent Jewish members, moved into Broward County’s heavily Democratic Black-majority precincts, raising questions about representation in a district with a large Black population.
Wasserman Schultz’s opponents argued that the seat should continue to be represented by a Black lawmaker. In her victory speech, Wasserman Schultz promised “to work every day to live up to the legacy of Alcee Hastings,” the congressman who represented the district from 2013 until he died in 2021.
Frankel, a seven-term Jewish Democrat and outspoken supporter of Israel, also relocated to the neighboring district and easily defeated Lake Worth Beach activist Victoria Doyle, winning 75% of the Democratic vote. The seat is now ranked solid Democratic, according to the Cook Political Report.
Moskowitz survives the left. Now he faces a Jewish Republican.
For Moskowitz, who was elected in 2022 after Ted Deutch retired to become chief executive of the American Jewish Committee, Tuesday’s outcome is likely just the beginning.
Moskowitz, who built a reputation as an outspoken supporter of Israel and one of the more bipartisan members of the House, defeated Oliver Larkin, a democratic socialist and fierce critic of Israel, by a 63%-37% margin.
Larkin called for ending U.S. military aid to Israel and accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. He also associated with popular streamer Hasan Piker, who has been embraced by progressive insurgents even as he has championed terrorist groups as righteous fighters against Israel — leading to accusations he trafficks in antisemitism.
“I’ve taken on extremes in the DSA and won,” Moskowitz said in his victory speech, adding in a post on X: “My condolences to @hasanthehun.”
But the new district with a substantial Jewish population was deliberately drawn to be far more favorable to Republicans than Moskowitz’s previous seat, which Frankel will now represent, making him one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the state this fall.
His Republican opponent, Scott Singer, the Jewish former mayor of Boca Raton, won a five-way GOP primary with 31% of the vote. Singer, a Miami Beach native and Georgetown Law graduate, highlighted his support for Israel and his roots in the district.
This setup will test Moskowitz’s political strength.
“We’re running in a tough district hand-drawn by Republicans to defeat me, but I plan to win that too,” Moskowitz said on Tuesday night.
“People here don’t want ideological purity tests. They want someone who will lower costs, fight for the middle class, and stand up to antisemitism and hate in both parties.”
Fine easily defeats openly antisemitic Bilzerian
Elsewhere in Florida, Jewish Republican Rep. Randy Fine easily fended off a primary challenge that attracted national attention because of the antisemitic rhetoric of Dan Bilzerian, the social media influencer once known as the “King of Instagram.”
Bilzerian had repeatedly attacked Fine as a “fat Jew,” called Judaism “terrible,” promoted conspiracy theories about Jews and said he wanted to “kill Israelis.” In the final days of the campaign, Bilzerian posted antisemitic dog whistles, expressing confidence that each voter in the district “understands the Jewish problem,” and that “a vote for Randy is a vote for Israel.”
The race was one of several Florida Republican primaries that tested whether a growing online movement on the right — hostile to Israel and that has at times slid into outright antisemitism — could translate social media followings into electoral success.
Fine won 57% of the vote, which is located just under the northeast part of the state and includes Daytona Beach. Bilzerian came in second, securing nearly 19%.
The race to succeed Ron DeSantis
A somewhat similar dynamic played out in the Republican primary for governor.
U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, the Trump-endorsed frontrunner, won the nomination to succeed DeSantis with about 48% of the vote. James Fishback, a 31-year-old investment manager who made opposition to Israel and AIPAC central to his campaign, finished third with about 10%.
Fishback, who ran what The New York Times described as a “rage bait” campaign, promised to pull Florida’s investments from Israel Bonds, criticized politicians who “visit another country” only to end up “kissing a stupid wall,” and associated himself with antisemitic personalities on the far-right.
Donalds, by contrast, has been a strong supporter of Israel, though he voted in 2024 against the Antisemitism Awareness Act, bipartisan legislation addressing rising antisemitism on college campuses. He is now listed as a cosponsor of a modified bill that clarifies First Amendment protections. Born in Brooklyn and raised for part of his childhood in Crown Heights, he has spoken of his familiarity with Jewish communities and has maintained relationships with Chabad leaders in Florida.
He will face former Republican Rep. David Jolly, who won the Democratic gubernatorial primary, in November. Both nominees are outspoken supporters of Israel.
A progressive upset for Senate
The night was not a clean sweep for establishment candidates.
State Rep. Angie Nixon, a new member of the Democratic Socialists of America, defeated Alex Vindman, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union, for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.
Vindman, who became nationally known after testifying during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment, entered the race with greater national name recognition and establishment support. Nixon, who pushed a pro-Palestinian agenda on a state level and actively campaigned with members of the Squad and alongside Larkin, pulled off an upset win, receiving 56% of the vote to Vindman’s 44%.
She will face incumbent Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, who easily won her primary. Moody was appointed to the seat after Marco Rubio left the Senate to become President Donald Trump’s secretary of state.
The post Florida redistricting scrambled the map. Three Jewish Democrats found a way through. appeared first on The Forward.
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I drove a friend to a protest in Jerusalem. Now Israel’s government wants to send me to prison.
‘The people fighting to save Israeli democracy are fighting for the only version of Zionism that can last.’
META: Amit Cahanovich is charged with five counts of joint arson after giving someone a ride to a demonstration where recycling bins were set ablaze.
For nine months I was a political detainee in Israel. My trial is about to begin.
I am as Israeli as they come. My grandparents came to this country — then Palestine, in the 1930s — as Europe began to burn. They helped found a farming village in the Jezreel Valley, Beit Shearim, while most of the family they left behind was murdered in the Holocaust. My late father was a colonel in the Israeli army. I served as a combat soldier in a classified unit, and after Oct. 7, I used my expertise as a data professional to consult for the army during the war. I am married with three young children.
We have no other passports, no other identity than Israeli. But I am now facing charges as an alleged criminal, part of a conspiracy no less — for nothing more than aiding a protest. My story speaks to the lengths of the Israeli government’s efforts to silence dissent.
On Sept. 3, 2025, around the 700th day of the war in Gaza, the families of hostages still held and tortured in Hamas’s tunnels begged Israelis to take to the streets. More than 40 hostages were already dead in captivity, some murdered, some dead from other causes. Like many Israelis, I could not stand by while the government worked to frame this as the families’ private grief rather than a national emergency — anything to delay a reckoning and stay in power a little longer.
I was arrested after a demonstration day in Jerusalem, where a few recycling bins were set on fire — a common occurrence at such protests, before and since. My alleged part is giving a ride to a friend who allegedly lit one of them. Seven of us now face charges that would fit an organized crime indictment. I’m charged with five counts of joint arson, each carrying a sentence of up to 15 years.
I did not know most of my co-defendants. Lawyers call this a legal dragnet, a familiar tool in democracies that are sliding.
For 33 days I was incarcerated in appalling conditions, classified as a danger to the public, moved between three prisons, and even spent one night in a dungeon, for no real reason. After those 33 days, I was released, but remained on house arrest. A probation officer eventually found I posed no danger. The prosecution fought the finding anyway. It took a High Court justice, ruling on a co-defendant’s appeal eight months in, to confirm what we had argued from the start: that “dangerousness” was being used not to assess a threat but to punish us before any verdict. A month after that ruling, I was released.
Since Oct. 7, Jewish terror against Palestinians in the West Bank has surged, met by law enforcement so weak it barely counts as such. Yet dozens of investigators were assigned to the conspiracy cases that included my own, and, according to press reports, the Shin Bet itself took part in interrogations over recycling bins. The Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent to the FBI, exists to fight terrorism and espionage, not to regulate protest. When a government routes political dissent through its most powerful security service, the question is no longer whether a protester broke a law. It is whether the state has begun treating opposition itself as a threat.
This is not incidental. It is the method of a coalition that unites Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the heirs of the banned, terrorist-designated Kach movement founded by the radical American-Israeli Rabbi Meir Kahane; and with ultra-Orthodox parties that take state money while keeping their youth from modern education and army service. Together they have spent years capturing the institutions meant to check them, the security services, the state comptroller’s office, a weakened judiciary. None of this happens in the dark. It happens on television, because the government’s allies all but run the news agenda. Nearly all criticism gets folded into “Israel as victim.” Antisemitism, though it does exist, gets invoked even when it doesn’t, as a method to silence dissent internationally. Protesters, including hostage families whose only demand was that the state bring their own home, got called traitors and enemies from within.
Meanwhile war has become the alibi. War in Gaza. War in Lebanon. War in Iran. Every operation begins with tactical wins and promises of strategic victory that never fully arrive. Every day of it was used to postpone the prime minister’s own corruption trial a little further.
In 1938 the Yiddish poet Mordechai Gebirtig wrote “Undzer Shtetl Brent” — “Our Town Is Burning” — about the violence closing in on Polish Jews. It calls out to brothers standing with folded arms, watching the fire instead of fighting it. By the time the song became an anthem, the fire had become a catastrophe. I think about it constantly now, not because I believe Jews are fated to see danger only once it’s too late, but because I fear we are, again, mistaking smoke for weather.
Israel is scheduled to hold elections in late October. Ahead of them, the government’s allies are working to inflame the West Bank, the same cynical mechanism that has worked before: unite a divided public against an external enemy, and postpone the reckoning again. There are even signs that the government could try to postpone the election using so-called emergency regulations or putting up other obstacles. Netanyahu himself once made this exact argument when he demanded former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert resign while on trial for corruption, warning that a leader facing charges can never be trusted to put the country’s survival ahead of his own. He was right then. The dynamic he described is now his own government.
The people fighting to save Israeli democracy are fighting for the only version of Zionism that can last: an independent judiciary, free elections, equality before the law, a state that answers to its citizens rather than demanding loyalty to one man. If this government is not replaced, if it teaches a country that dissent is danger, the price will not be paid only by protesters like me. It will be paid by the dream my grandparents crossed the sea to build.
Amit Cahanovich is a native Israeli, married and a father of three, and an independent data consultant. He recently spent nine months as a political detainee in Israel and is now writing a play based on his experience.
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Whistleblower claims Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown was a cash grab
A new whistleblower report alleges that the Trump Administration’s investigations into campus antisemitism were merely efforts to extract millions from universities, under the pretense of rooting out hate.
The report, written by the Washington, D.C.-based Government Accountability Project on behalf of former Department of Justice Attorney Haley Van Erem, alleges that the administration’s antisemitism task force carried out “politically motivated” investigations that were “unsupported by facts and contrary to law.” The investigations did not follow proper Title VI procedure, she said, adding that they were opened with predetermined outcomes, and did not respect the First Amendment.
The report has prompted Jewish U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) to initiate an investigation into the allegations. The Nexus Foundation, a watchdog organization dedicated to combating antisemitism and protecting free speech, released a statement supporting Raskin and Van Erem.
This is not the first time Raskin or Nexus have criticized the administration’s antisemitism task force. Many left-leaning Jewish organizations have long criticized Trump’s efforts, with Raskin describing them as “weaponizing, distorting and exploiting the reality of antisemitism to attack academic freedom.”
In a statement to the Forward, the DOJ denied that Van Erem worked on university investigations. “And for all matters, the Department stands behind the integrity of these investigations,” a spokesperson wrote.
According to the report, Van Erem was involuntarily re-assigned from her role as a DOJ Civil Rights attorney to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in order to investigate alleged antisemitism at medical schools — a probe prompted by a single New York Post article about protesters shouting “Free Palestine” and wearing Palestinian flags or keffiyehs at a medical school graduation.
Unable to find enough evidence of antisemitism at medical schools, Van Erem said, the task force soon expanded its probe to entire universities to increase the chances of finding it.
“This was one of the first major indications to the DOJ assignees that the investigations were not grounded in law or fact,” the report reads.
HHS did not immediately respond to request to comment.
Van Erem also criticized the administration for breaking the protocol of Title VI investigations, pursuing enforcement before first issuing a finding and allowing universities to resolve issues voluntarily. That enforcement: withholding funds.
To restrict funds, the administration used a separate legal mechanism that allows them to do so “for convenience” and for “not satisfying purpose.”
“The funding suspensions were meant to be coercive irrespective of investigative findings,” according to the report.
Van Erem and colleagues found no evidence at Brown of “deliberate indifference” to antisemitic incidents, the report said. But a supervisor allegedly discouraged sending Brown a closure letter stating those findings. According to the report, the administration settled with Columbia before an investigation was finished. Harvard sued the Trump administration, before its own investigation was complete, claiming the funding freeze was unlawful.
Van Erem said she observed findings of discrimination that she believed were actually “protected First Amendment activity” and believed that the task force’s settlement “content-based conditions” violated free expression.
Brown and Columbia both settled with the administration to restore federal funding, with Columbia paying the government $200 million and Brown agreeing to pay $50 million to Rhode Island workforce development organizations. A federal judge recently dismissed the Trump administration’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard, saying antisemitic incidents were “too isolated and episodic” to constitute a Title VI violation.
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