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These NYC college students want to kickstart a Jewish arts renaissance
(New York Jewish Week) – On a mild Thursday evening in late March, some 100 people gathered at Kistuné, a hip café and bar in the West Village that’s associated with the French-Japanese “lifestyle brand” of the same name.
Sipping on custom-designed cocktails — like the Refusenik, a Moscow mule with a “resilient mix of vodka, ginger beer and lime” or the Tamar Collinsky, a Tom Collins reimagined and given “very possibly the name of someone you went to summer camp with” — guests mingled, discussing topics as varied as college classes, career choices and their favorite poetry.
Nearly everyone in the room was a Jewish artist or writer; the gathering was to celebrate the launch of “Verklempt!”, a new quarterly print magazine that bills itself as “The Magazine of Jewish Art and Literature.” The 75-page first issue is filled with paintings, photographs, drawings, poetry and fiction solicited from more than 30 Jewish artists around the country.
“We see the Jewish community as a place where people want to engage with fiction and poetry more seriously,” editor-in-chief Yoni Gutenmacher, a 24-year-old creative writing MFA candidate at Brooklyn College, told the crowd, which included two of his brothers and his parents. “This is a personal dream of mine so I’m very happy that it’s real.”
Specialty cocktails were on offer at the launch party of “Verklempt!” (David Gutenmacher)
The aim of “Verklempt!” (Yiddish-English slang for “overcome with emotion”) is to publish and amplify art and literature with a specifically Jewish lens — hopefully in a way that encourages pursuing art as part of a spiritual journey, Gutenmacher explained. A painting of a man praying with tefillin and tallit; a poem about Leopold Bloom, the Jewish anti-hero of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and a collage of the Lubavitcher Rebbe and a drawing of a half-drunk bottle of Kedem grape juice all grace the pages of the first issue, whose theme is, fittingly, “On Creation.”
“I write fiction and I have a whole friend group and community in New York who aren’t Jewish, and if they are, they’re not really interested in religious or communal Jewish life,” Gutenmacher told the New York Jewish Week. “Then I have my Jewish life on the Upper West Side and all my friends from summer camp and school and everything else who are not really interested in engaging with high quality literature and art. At certain points in my life, I felt like I kind of have to choose.”
By working on “Verklempt!” he’s come to understand that those choices shouldn’t have to be so mutually exclusive, he said.
The journal is a project of Havurah (Hebrew for “fellowship”), an organization founded by two Modern Orthodox sophomores at NYU whose lofty but determined vision is to be the “bearer of a new Jewish renaissance” for young Jews in New York, according to their impressively designed website.
Founded by Daniella Messer and Eitan Gutenmacher (Yoni’s younger brother), Havurah aims to create a gathering place, a “kehila (community) of frum Jewish creatives” — both virtual and IRL — where Jewish artists can meet and mingle, make art, perform and share ideas about how all of those endeavors connect them to religious life. One of their goals, according to the “manifesto” on their website, is to “invigorate a generation of young Jews and restore the Jewish artistic impulse.”
While “Verklempt!” has wide-reaching aspirations — the artists they hope to publish can come from anywhere and be of any age — Havurah was founded to appeal to a hyper-specific community: young New York artists who are dedicated to being Jewish and Jews who are dedicated to being artists.
The idea arose during Gutenmacher and Messer’s freshman year of college in the winter of 2022. “I remember going to Israel over winter break, experiencing such an obvious realization that art and creativity is so integral to religious lifestyles,” Eitan Gutemacher, who is studying studio art at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, told the New York Jewish Week. “But [at NYU] for example, in a lot of the artistic programs, if you’re a religious Jew, you are usually the only religious Jew in the classroom, and, more often than not, the only one in the department.”
“Daniella and I wanted to create a community of lively Judaism expressed in any artistic and creative way,” he added.
With funding from the Next Gen Inc., “a start-up style incubator” that’s a project of the World Jewish Congress and World Union of Jewish Students, Havurah pursues their vision through a variety of avenues, including real-life events and performances, such as art fairs, concerts and Torah study conversations held at bars, cafés, apartments and synagogues.
In addition to the physical journal, the organization’s high-design web site publishes essays, interviews, criticism, reviews and Torah commentaries, as well as “Sessions” for musicians, which are professionally mixed video tapings of live music performances similar to NPR’s “Tiny Desk Concerts.”
“When Eitan and Daniella approached us and told us about Havurah, we knew instantly they would be a great fit for our incubator,” Yoni Hammerman, senior manager of the NextGen, told the New York Jewish Week via email. “Their work, to build a university student-run art community, perfectly aligns with NextGen’s mission of amplifying and supporting the voice and the work of Jewish student leaders.”
The Havurah staff — all eight of them are volunteers — believe that their offerings are the first time people who are both deeply involved in their Jewish communities and in their artistic pursuits have had a definable place to gather and collaborate that celebrate both.
“It’s so simple that you’d think it would already exist,” said Yosef Itzkowitz, a 24-year-old artist and poet who has three drawings in the first edition of “Verklempt!” “Jews love writing and art, and love talking about writing and art,” so why not make it happen?” Itzkowitz got involved, he said, after Eitan Gutenmacher reached out via Instagram.
Of course, similar initiatives have and do exist — for example, the fiction journal JewishFiction.net publishes original and in translation work from Jewish writers around the globe, while CANVAS matches emerging Jewish multimedia artists with funders and grants. The Jewish Book Council puts out their literary journal “Paper Brigade” with art, interviews, essays and fiction, once a year.
On Tuesday, the inaugural Jewish Writers’ Initiative Digital Storytellers Lab showcased works by creators taking part in an eight-month fellowship supported by the Maimonides Fund. The work shown at Manhattan’s Rubin Museum included animation for Jewish kids, pop songs about women in the Bible and a podcast about the gay Jewish dating scene in Los Angeles.
According to Yona Verwer, founder of the Jewish Arts Salon — “a global network for Jewish visual art” that does regular programming in New York — while what the group is doing may not be “new,” one of the most exciting things about Havurah is how young its members are and how dedicated they are to the cause.
“Being geared specifically towards people in their 20s” attracts people who have to be “very enthusiastic and very into it,” Verwer said.
“It’s interesting to see this immense interest in Jewish arts” from younger generations, added Verwer, who started the salon in 2008 and now serves as an advisor for Havurah. “When I started the salon, it was something that a lot of people were not interested in. Things have really changed over the years and it’s great to see people so dedicated.”
Yoni Gutenmacher reads a poem at the launch party of “Verklempt!”, March 30, 2023. (David Gutenmacher)
As of now, contributors are unpaid, though there are hopes that the cover price of “Verklempt!” ($10) may help change that. “There’s a lot of places I see where you submit completely unpaid and it is completely not worth my time,” said Kim Kyne, a 32-year-old painter and sculptor from Los Angeles whose painting was in the first edition of the journal.
“What felt different about this is it feels like everyone’s all in it together,” she added. “Yoni and his brother are super humble and super young. What was really attractive to me about it is being connected with all these other Jewish artists in a way that I haven’t been before.”
Messer and the Gutenmacher brothers understand that the media and literary magazine worlds are very crowded spaces, especially in New York. But for now, they are embracing the heimish vibe and say they’ve seen, first-hand, just how many Jewish artists were looking for a space exactly like this. Submissions are already arriving for the next edition of “Verklempt!”, which is set to be published this summer, and according to Gutenmacher, he doesn’t recognize any of the names — meaning no repeats of last time, and no friends submitting as a favor.
“Of course, there are Jewish artists all over the world. But it feels different because it has more of a modern take and the younger feel,” Kyne said. “It feels like the beginning of a movement.”
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The post These NYC college students want to kickstart a Jewish arts renaissance appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Jewish Chef Eitan Bernath Sets New Guinness World Record for Making Largest Matzah Ball Soup
Eitan Bernath set a new Guinness World Record for making the largest serving of matzah ball soup on Feb. 27, 2026. Photo: Eric Vitale
Jewish chef and cookbook author Eitan Bernath recently set a new Guinness World Record for making the largest serving of matzah ball soup.
The matzah ball soup weighed in at 1,356.9 pounds and was verified by Guinness World Records in Brooklyn, New York, on Feb. 27. The soup contained 847 hand-rolled matzah balls, and it took 10 chefs about 11 hours to prepare the soup, according to the Guinness World Records. All the soup was donated to City Harvest, New York City’s largest food rescue organization, which will serve it to thousands of hungry New Yorkers in food pantries and soup kitchens.
“There’s no food that brings back more memories of being surrounded by family than matzo ball soup,” Bernath, 23, told The Algemeiner in a statement. “So, when I set out to make the world’s largest version of a dish, choosing matzo ball soup was a no-brainer. Every bowl is a bowl of comfort. Being able to create a giant version was both an incredible challenge and a thrill. It meant even more to me that after setting the record, we were able to donate all the soup to New Yorkers in need — sharing the comfort of matzo ball soup even further.”
Bernath — who is also a social media content creator and the principal culinary contributor for “The Drew Barrymore Show” — said the matzah ball soup was comprised of 120 chickens, 300 carrots, and 250 bunches of herbs. The soup also included parsnip, turnip, celery root, onions, parsley, dill, paprika, and salt. Bernath used ChatGPT to scale up his grandmother’s matzo ball soup recipe to a 200-gallon version, and to help him also find the right vessels needed to make such a large portion. To hold more than 160 gallons of hot liquid, he ended up using a water trough, typically used for horses, which was lined with a food-grade liner.
On Instagram, Bernath shared behind-the-scenes photos that show the making of the massive matzah ball soup. In the caption, he explained that creating the record-breaking dish “was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done.”
“As a proud Jew, creating a record-setting giant version of such an important Jewish dish meant the world to me,” he added. “I couldn’t be prouder of my team and I for pulling this off. I will never look at a bowl of matzo ball soup the same again!!”
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The real reason for the US war with Iran may have nothing to do with Israel
The lack of a clear, coherent reason for this war is bad for the Jews.
Overstatement? Consider that Tucker Carlson is now blaming Chabad — yes, Chabad — for the conflict. Yesterday the watchdog organization The Nexus Project released a series of posts on X clarifying how to have a “robust debate about the U.S.-Israel war with Iran” without veering into antisemitism — because certain parties seem to have come to the consensus that, to put it bluntly, the Jews did it.
Americans need a good reason to shed blood thousands of miles away, and the problem is that while President Donald Trump has taken the United States to war, neither he, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, nor anyone else in his administration has offered a convincing explanation as to why.
So pundits like Carlson are filling the void with poison. As I wrote last summer during the first U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran, if the war goes badly, fingers will point at Israel and its supporters. It’s clear, now, that the blame game is also going to generate a huge amount of antisemitism.
A default explanation
Why strike now? Is it because of the Iranian nuclear weapons program, the one that Trump previously boasted the U.S. “obliterated” last summer? Is it because the Iranian regime has taken American hostages, killed American service personnel and sponsored terror abroad?
All those things are true, but they’ve been true for decades. So why now?
Sen. Tom Cotton, defending the choice to go to war, said on Fox News that “Iran has been an imminent threat to the United States for 47 years.”
That stretch of the word “imminent” only underscored the, um, imminent need for a better reason.
The lack of one has left Israel and its American Jewish supporters as the default scapegoat. Rubio told reporters earlier this week that the U.S. attacked Iran because Israel had decided to do so, and the U.S. had to join in because Iran would then hit back at U.S. targets.
He and the president later tried to clarify that the U.S. was going to attack anyway, and Israel’s intentions only influenced the timing.
Few on the left or right, or around the world, are buying it.
“No war for Israel!” former Marine and Green Party Senate candidate Brian McGuinness shouted during a congressional committee hearing March 4, before Capitol police and Sen. Tim Sheehy dragged him out. (McGinnis claimed his arm was broken in the process.)
“It’s hard to say this, but the United States didn’t make the decision here. Benjamin Netanyahu did,” said Carlson, days before he pivoted to blaming Chabad. The left-leaning investigative outlet The Lever titled its piece on America’s Operation Epic Fury, “Operation AIPAC Fury.”
The China syndrome
The Israeli commentator Haviv Rettig Gur stepped into this mess with a thoughtful and convincing explanation: That the attack is part of a great power game, as the U.S. makes a bid to stop Iran from being a Middle East outpost of Chinese power.
“America is in this fight because of China,” Gur wrote in an essay in The Free Press earlier this week.
After decades of effective American-led economic sanctions, Gur explained, Iran has become economically dependent on China through oil exports, which fund roughly a quarter of Tehran’s budget and sustain its military and internal security. China, which receives 90% of Iran’s crude oil, has used it to build a petroleum reserve that hedges against a potential U.S. naval blockade.
Furthermore, China has armed Iran with advanced anti-ship missiles, hardened its cyber infrastructure, conducted joint naval exercises, and given it the wherewithal to control global trade through the Strait of Hormuz.
Gur isn’t alone in asserting that what matters to the U.S. isn’t Israel’s immediate needs, but rather the China-U.S. chessboard.
China, wrote Zineb Riboua, a scholar of Chinese-Middle East politics, “bet a decade of foreign policy on Khamenei’s ability to withstand American pressure, and the bet did not pay off.”
Gur, Riboua and others making this argument might be wrong. And their reasoning still raises questions of “why now?” that are hard to answer. But it’s striking that it sounds so much more coherent than anything that’s been offered by our government.
Why we fight
Right now, about 60% of Americans oppose the war. As it drags on, and casualties and costs mount, those polling numbers will get worse — especially without a clear rationale to explain why the suffering is necessary.
One casualty of every modern Mideast war is the standing of American Jews.
After the first Gulf War in 1991, the ADL recorded 1,879 antisemitic incidents — an 11% spike over the prior year. It was the highest number since tracking began, driven largely by “politically related antisemitism” in the war’s opening months.
After the second, far more unpopular Gulf War broke out in 2003, incidents climbed again — reaching 1,821 in 2004, the highest in nearly a decade. Never mind that 70-77% of American Jews opposed the Iraq War, a higher rate than any other major religious group.
Why? Because the right and left converged on the same target: Israel-supporting neoconservatives who supposedly dragged the U.S. into a war for Zionist interests. Researchers called the conspiracy a “Trojan horse” — age-old tropes about Jewish power and dual loyalty wheeled in as foreign policy critique.
And here we are again.
In the scheme of things, now, there are bigger worries. American service personnel, innocent Iranians and their Arab neighbors are in harm’s way, Israelis are once more locked down in shelters, facing the barrages of madmen.
But these sacrifices make it more, not less urgent for the administration to land on a coherent reason for this war, and a clear set of aims.
Just as the U.S. entered into World War II, the director Frank Capa made a series of propaganda films called “Why We Fight”. By then, the title was rhetorical. In early 1941, 68 % of Americans supported the campaign against Japan and Hitler. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, support was nearly unanimous.
Now, appropriately for our polarized age, we are fighting over why we are fighting. And so much is riding on the answer.
The post The real reason for the US war with Iran may have nothing to do with Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Noam Bettan Releases Song ‘Michelle’ He’ll Perform as Israel’s Rep for 2026 Eurovision Song Contest
Noam Bettan in the music video for “Michelle.” Photo: YouTube screenshot
Noam Bettan revealed on Thursday the song he is set to perform when he represents Israel at the 70th Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, Austria, in May.
“Michelle” is a trilingual song written by Bettan, Nadav Aharoni, Tzlil Klifi, and Yuval Raphael, who represented Israel in last year’s Eurovision and finished in second place. The song features lyrics in Hebrew, English, and French, and premiered during a special broadcast on the Kan public broadcaster.
“‘Michelle’ tells the story of choosing to break free from a toxic emotional cycle. It’s a story about emotional growth and maturity, at the moment when the protagonist realizes they must let go and choose a new path for themselves,” Eurovision stated in its official description of the song.
“Michelle” is largely in Hebrew and French with only one verse in English. “Walking down Florentin/Ocean eyes/Memories/I, I’m losing my mind,” Bettan sings in English. “An angel but it is hell/Trapped in your carousel/Round and round/Under your spell.”
Bettan, who turned 28 on Thursday, was born in Israel and raised in the city of Ra’anana. His parents are French and lived in the French city of Grenoble before immigrating to Israel with their two older sons.
Bettan is fluent in French, Hebrew, and English. He won the Israeli television show and singing competition “HaKokhav HaBa” (“The Rising Star”) in January, which automatically secured him the position of representing Israel at this year’s Eurovision. Bettan will perform “Michelle” during the second half of the first Eurovision semi-final on May 12.
“I’m very proud of the song,” Bettan said in a released statement. “It’s a great privilege to bring such a creation to the Eurovision stage. The song is full of energy and emotion that touches on a wide range of feelings. I feel that ‘Michelle’ will bring us moments of shared joy and pride, and I hope this song can bring a little of that light with it.”
Watch the music video for “Michelle” below.