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Tradition! Young adults on the Upper West Side flock to a new, independent Shabbat service
(New York Jewish Week) — It was a mild Friday afternoon in mid-December and Avital Katz and Ilana Sandberg didn’t know what to expect once Shabbat began.
The pair had texted, emailed and posted on Instagram to invite as many people as possible to an egalitarian Shabbat service that they were hosting in the living room of a friend’s townhouse apartment on West 75th Street. Katz and Sandberg were craving a younger, fresher Friday night experience on the Upper West Side, but while they knew others felt the same, they weren’t sure how many people would show up.
In the end, Katz said, the final tally was “shocking”: 55 people crowded into the room for that first service, bringing their own prayer books and traveling significant distances to join a Shabbat community they’d only just heard about.
“We knew people wanted it,” said Katz, 29, who teaches at a Jewish day school in the neighborhood. “But we were just so excited and so grateful that this was something that actually excited people and we weren’t just making it up in our heads.”
Over the next four months, Katz and Sandberg, a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, held four additional Kabbalat Shabbat services, with a tentative schedule stretching out into the summer. Their informal prayer community, known as a minyan, has no name — yet — but it does have a third organizer, growing buzz among young adults on the Upper West Side and the support of a slew of synagogues in the neighborhood and beyond.
This Kabbalat Shabbat minyan’s arrival marks something of a return-to-nature on the Upper West Side, a pulsing heart of Jewish life in New York City. Over the years, other minyans had sprouted up in the neighborhood, which is popular among young Jewish professionals because of its density of synagogues and kosher restaurants, the vibrancy of its dating scene and the networks of camp and college friends who are committed to maintaining Jewish community in their lives.
Some of these minyans faded away as members moved away, while others evolved into more established communities with dues, leases and programs for families. But the informal, lay-led minyans that were drawing young adults just before the pandemic — such as the Wandering Minyan, Shira B’Dira (Hebrew for “Songs in an Apartment”) and one sponsored by Camp Ramah, the Conservative movement’s summer camp network — have been slow to reemerge.
Katz and Sandberg are members of a congregation, Kehilat Hadar, that itself grew out of an informal minyan launched back in 2001. But Kehilat Hadar doesn’t regularly hold Friday-night services, which tend to be challenging for people with young children to attend. Plus, Katz and Sandberg thought that an independent minyan with less established roots might be more appealing for many people who hadn’t yet found a Jewish community of their own.
Of course, there are numerous synagogues in the neighborhood, but none seemed quite right: Congregations such as B’nai Jeshurun and Romemu use musical instruments — something considered taboo on Shabbat by many observant Jews — and Orthodox congregations tend not to appeal to people who are committed to egalitarianism. Plus, Katz, Sandberg and the third organizer, Bradley Goldman, were looking for a service led by people who aren’t rabbis, so the participants could feel more ownership over the experience.
“Obviously, there are some choices,” Katz said. “But there wasn’t anything that kind of fit with a more traditional Friday night davening [praying] that really focuses on young people who might end up moving away from the Upper West Side after a few years.”
She had heard others expressing the same longing as the world reemerged from Covid limitations. “All of these Shabbat meals that we were going to, everyone — whether or not they go to shul constantly or have rarely gone when they’ve moved to the Upper West Side — was talking about how there’s really not a lot of options for Friday night davening that are appealing to the 20s and 30s crowd, either religiously or age-wise,” she said.
The crowd at their services are all young people, many of whom know each other already, most who live on the Upper West Side — but anyone is welcome. In fact, Katz stays at the door to welcome anyone and everyone who walks by, which she said has been her favorite part of the experience.
A large contingent of attendees also have a background either attending or working for one of the camps in the Ramah network, and many prayers use Ramah tunes, creating a sense of nostalgia for those who attended the camps.
“We create such a powerful Shabbat experience at camp and I wanted to be able to capture that here with the same people,” said Adina Scheinberg, a Ramah alum who led a recent service that took place at Schechter Manhattan, the Conservative day school located on West 100th Street, that drew around 60 people.
After the service, which includes traditional Kabbalat Shabbat liturgy and maariv, or the evening service, attendees have the opportunity to schmooze with each other, snack and have a drink. “We want to be as inclusive as possible,” Katz said. “If you just want to come for the snacks, we love that too.”
The setting at Schechter was familiar to anyone who has attended Kehilat Hadar services in recent years: Kehilat Hadar has partnered with Congregation Shaare Zedek since 2019 and they meet together every Saturday morning at Schechter while Shaare Zedek’s permanent space is undergoing a major redevelopment. For Kehilat Hadar, the new minyan is not competition but an exciting addition to the fabric of Jewish life in the neighborhood.
“Friday night davening has always gotten a different crowd from Shabbat morning davening,” said Emily Scharfman, president of Kehilat Hadar’s board. She said Kehilat Hadar has held monthly Friday night services but lacked the volunteer capacity to hold weekly ones, particularly as community members have grown their families over the past 20 years.
“We are happy to be supportive of something that was mission-aligned, from a traditional, egalitarian perspective, especially coming from two people within our community,” Scharfman said, adding that Kehilat Hadar and Shaare Zedek would likely not have sponsored a minyan with a mechitzah separating men and women, or one that brought in music.
Kehilat Hadar has sponsored at least one of the Shabbat services, paying to rent the space at Schechter Manhattan for the evening and providing the snacks. And they’re not the only ones: The Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel of Riverdale helped rent space at SAJ, a Reconstructionist synagogue, for a future Shabbat, while Ramah plans to sponsor a service on May 5.
Though the presence of JTS, the flagship Conservative seminary, has always meant that there are ample young adults on the Upper West Side committed to innovative prayer experiences, Sandberg said she’s especially pleased that her growing new minyan draws from beyond that community.
“It’s logical that I as a rabbinical student was looking for something like this and that I felt like there was a gap in the community that I was hoping to find on the Upper West Side,” Sandberg said. “But it is really gratifying that this sentiment is shared by so many people and that this minyan can be something that young Jews on varying levels of being involved and engaged and observant are looking for.”
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The definitive Oct. 7 book was written — and sketched — before the attack
As Salomé Parent-Rachdi and Zac Deloupy worked on the drawings for a book about Israeli-Palestinian romance, they had no way of knowing the world they were depicting was on the brink of collapse.
The day they finished their pencil sketches, we learn in the book’s introduction, was Oct. 6, 2023. The next day, Hamas invaded Israel, killing about 1,200 and taking another 251 hostage. By the time the book was published in April 2024, Israel was locked in a multi-front war that still hasn’t quite settled.
That context — a looming attack, a forever war that has not yet begun — colors every panel of Love and Desire in the Promised Land: The Private Lives of Israelis and Palestinians, a French graphic nonfiction book whose English translation was released this summer. Reading the book feels like opening a time capsule that had been buried in the distant past: Even as it reminds you how bad the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was before Oct. 7, it leaves you wishing desperately you could restore things to how they were.
The book follows Parent-Rachdi, a French journalist, as she travels across Israel and the Palestinian territories to interview 16 subjects about their love lives. She talks to a mix of singles and couples, straight and gay, in Israel, West Bank and Gaza. (That’s one giveaway this book couldn’t have been made today: No journalist has been permitted to enter Gaza unaccompanied since Oct. 7.)
A few tell of dating across Palestinian-Israeli lines. Lana, an Arab Israeli, finds herself in a situationship with a right-wing Israeli — and ends up marrying him. Samira, an Arab Israeli woman, tells us about her Israeli ex, whose enlistment during the 2014 Gaza war — when they are living together — brings the unspoken tension in their relationship out into the open. And we learn the complex family dynamics of a celebrity Muslim-Jewish couple: Fauda star Tsahi Halevi and his Arab-Israeli wife, TV anchor Lucy Aharish.
The less politically fraught experiences are relayed with the same empathy. Avi, an ex-Hasid, reveals that, despite unbearable teenage horniness, he initially didn’t know how to find porn on the internet due to his insular upbringing. (He searches for “woman in pajamas” instead.) Rami, Parent-Rachdi’s fixer and taxi driver in Gaza, says, as a single man in his thirties, he told people he had erectile dysfunction so they wouldn’t grow suspicious.
In between these revelations are glimpses of life as it was in Israel and the Palestinian territories before Oct. 7. We ride shotgun as Parent-Rachdi navigates checkpoints on her way out of the West Bank and deals with Israeli and Palestinian officials on the way into Gaza. Rami — who did finally marry — says he made sure his son was born in Jordan so that he wouldn’t be trapped in Gaza as an adult. Parent-Rachdi has brought his stepson a remote-control car — the kind of toy Rami can’t buy in Gaza due to the Israeli blockade.
The love stories describe conflict, of course, and they do not uniformly lead to happy endings. (Or for that matter, breakups.) What they consistently show instead is people — as far as we can tell, basically good people — reaching out to each other in a pressure cooker of cultural, religious, sexual and political attitudes.
The stories also betray civilians’ genuine skepticism of their own communities with a frankness that seems unimaginable today. The clearest example of this comes in Gaza, where Mohammed, a closeted Palestinian looking for hookups, tells Parent-Rachdi about Hamas honor killings of gay men and his own brush with death. “They’re more likely to kill you if you’re a bottom,” he says matter-of-factly. Catfished by a Hamas intelligence officer, Mohammed escapes arrest by swearing he’s a virgin and flees to the U.S. a few days later.
Would Mohammed make the same disclosures today, when “What about Hamas?” has become a refrain for anyone defending Israel’s response to Oct. 7? The Gaza he left behind no longer exists. The book’s afterword, written in Feb. 2024, reveals that Rami’s wife’s cosmetics store — lovingly illustrated by Deloupy earlier in the book — was leveled in Israeli airstrikes; the family was now living in a refugee camp in Rafah. “We have gone from a life with all the modern comforts to a reality where we move with a cart, where we buy wood to split and burn in order to cook and take a shower,” he says.
As for Mohammed, his house was destroyed, as were many friendships with Jews and Israelis: “I write to them,” he says in the afterword. “They don’t respond, but they read my message.” As for Hamas, he says, “today, seeing the suffering, somehow I feel like I better understand their resistance.” When the authors checked in with the subjects, several did not respond. By then, some 30,000 Palestinians were dead.
As it reminds us what we’ve lost, Love and Desire in the Promised Land also points the only way toward a shared future: people on all sides defying the forces pulling them apart. It shows us it can be done. Even in the afterword, one of the interviewees, a Modern Orthodox Jew named Jean-Marc, is optimistic: “I am still convinced, even more so now, that we have to work with the Palestinians,” he says. “Our safety depends on it.”
The post The definitive Oct. 7 book was written — and sketched — before the attack appeared first on The Forward.
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Christian leaders are racing toward the Rapture. Is Israel really to blame?
End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World
By Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 384 pages, $32
Judaism is not usually a religion associated with apocalyptic thought. There’s no Jewish version of the Book of Revelation. There is a concept of a Messianic Age, but most observant groups forbid interfering with — encouraging or discouraging — its arrival.
Yet Judaism, or at least Israel, is central to Christian apocalyptic thought. The lines that drive its connection to Israel are well-traced. The Book of Revelation requires Jews to return to the promised land, and a Third Temple to be built for Jesus to return, and so, for years, Christian Zionists like John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel and Mike Huckabee, the current U.S. ambassador to Israel, have encouraged wars in the region, seeing them as part of prophecy.
Hagee and Huckabee have talked in glowing terms of the many lands they believe comprise “greater Israel” all becoming part of the modern nationstate, in fulfillment of biblical requirements for the Rapture. Byron Stinson, another wealthy evangelical leader, has worked to breed and import blemish-free red heifers to Israel, because their ashes are necessary to build the Third Temple that will herald the return of Jesus.
More recently, the Jewish extremists who are also hungry to build a Third Temple have moved from the fringe into the Israeli government. Several times now, Israeli security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has stalked around the Temple Mount, where Jews are officially forbidden from prayer, and led a large group in prayer, flanked by the police force he heads. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s minister of finance, has promised to fund the construction of a Third Temple.
But as powerful as these Jewish leaders are, the Christians are far bigger. CUFI, the group led by Hagee, is the biggest Zionist group in the U.S., far larger than AIPAC.
And yet End Times Fascism, a new book from activists and writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor — Klein is known for books like No Logo and Shock Doctrine, where she coined the relevant term “disaster capitalism” — focuses largely on Israel, and the extremists in its government.
The book’s central argument is that accelerationist fanatics believe an apocalyptic future will benefit them — whether in heaven or on earth. And they’re racing toward that future with increasingly fascistic terms.
These apocalyptic futures vary. For Christians, it might be the Rapture, and ultimately heaven. For AI techies, it’s a world ruled by the silicone grip of an all-knowing machine — or at least a world ruled by the superrich and filled with AI-driven propaganda masquerading as the voice of God while it surveils its users. For ethno-nationalists, it’s a homogenous country in which they can live out their nostalgia for an imagined perfect past. End Times Fascism is divided into sections, each taking on one of these groups and its ravenous vision for the end of the world, and how it is leading the world into fascism — through moral policing, surveillance, xenophobia.
But in the section on religious extremism, Israeli extremists get at least as much airtime as the Christians, despite the fact that these end time fanatics have far less global influence and don’t represent the vast majority of Jews.
It is, of course, important to understand the interplay between Christian apocalyptic thought and Judaism, and this is where things can get tangled. Christian Zionists’ desire for the Rapture leads them to support Israel and, sometimes, to display a kind of philosemitism. Ultimately, they are neither true friends to the Jews nor supporters of Israel; Hagee once gave a sermon claiming God sent Hitler as a kind of shepherd to force Jews back to Israel, in alignment with the biblical plan — when, of course, Jews will convert or burn in hell. But these beliefs have not made most Jewish groups cut ties with CUFI; Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has, for decades, referred to U.S. Christian Zionists, and Hagee in particular, as beloved supporters of Israel, and has said that Christian Zionists made Jewish Zionism possible. Many Jews are similarly grateful for evangelical support of Israel, regardless of what less supportive beliefs might undergird it, and are willing to ally with these religious extremists if it means support for Israel’s wars and annexations.
Certainly, all of these thoughts build on one another, and are difficult to untangle; plenty of hawkish Jews and Israelis want Israel to expand for non-biblical reasons. But the vast majority of Jews are not actively working to build a Third Temple and bring about the end of the world as we know it. Yet Klein and Taylor represent Jews largely through extremists like Ben-Gvir, and even focus their discussion of Christian apocalyptic thought on its overlap with Judaism and Israel. These religions share the Hebrew Bible, but little else.
There is far more to Christian apocalyptic thought than Israel. Plenty of Rapture-hopefuls in the U.S. believe their own country is the promised land; indeed, theological power is shifting away from Israel, as a new cohort of Christian extremists like Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson catch hold of the political discourse and steer it toward open antisemitism and harsh scrutiny of U.S. support of Israel.
The old guard is being replaced by a new Christian right that is suspicious of Israel’s every action, and doesn’t egg on its wars. When Tucker Carlson interviewed Ted Cruz, a staunch supporter of Israel, the senator explained the Christian theological grounding of his support for Israel; Carlson, also a loudly devout Christian, jeered.
That’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t still many Christian Zionists in power in the U.S., shaping its foreign policy regarding Israel. But End Times Fascism feels as though it is stuck in a previous era of American Christianity, and of U.S. politics.
This problem is not limited to the section on religious apocalypse. The second part of the book, focused on the AI hunger of transhumanist tech titans, spends time on neoreactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin’s plan for a New Gaza, as it was presented at a Peter Thiel conference. Thiel is, himself, a Christian who is famously obsessed with the antichrist and the end of the world — once again, there is crossover, and these topics all share threads. But Israel is not the major driver of the race toward AI killing us all, or any other tech-related doom.
The fundamental idea of Klein and Taylor’s work is that rapturous obsessions drive not only worldly destruction — that much seems obvious — but also fascism. It’s a smart idea, and they have plenty of examples, whether surveillance by our internet overlords or ICE raids pushed for by white nationalists. But the book spends so much time on its trendiest target — Israel — when it should direct its energy examining figures like U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the muscular Christianity driving his new testosterone regime for the U.S. military, or influential online figures like Owens or Fuentes agitating for a white, Christian U.S. (Some of these influencers are mentioned, but not as primary drivers.)
Certainly, Israel is involved in U.S. politics, in Christian nationalism, in the building of an ethnostate. (Israel in fact appears least in the third section on ethnonationalism, which is surprising given its identity as a Jewish state.) But despite Israel’s importance, the U.S., and its leaders, are still far more powerful.
The issue might be the book’s structure. The idea that apocalyptic thought drives fascism is a fairly simple one, and many of Klein and Taylor’s examples are familiar. The idea that is more subtle, and harder to grasp, is the way the threads of eschatological thought, ethnonationalism and tech wealth all share ideas and shape each other.
Peter Thiel alone, given his tech companies, his antichrist obsession, his love of Nazi theorists and his influence over Vice President JD Vance, could generate at least a chapter in any of the book’s three sections, or serve as a throughline for the entire book. Yet the topics are divided, as though each form of apocalyptic thought is its own entity, instead of woven together to show the ways they all reinforce each other.
End Times Fascism closes with a section on how to fight the rising fascism. Perhaps this should be the main focus of the book; many people who read the news already feels as though our leaders are racing toward the apocalypse, or at least WW III and a second Great Depression. The real question is what to do.
End Times Fascism offers some inspirations, including New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, as well as the Jewish Labor Bund. At least if the focus is once again on Jews, this time it’s positive.
The post Christian leaders are racing toward the Rapture. Is Israel really to blame? appeared first on The Forward.
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Why Dolly Parton sang a song about a Jewish journalist
A Broadway show, a star-studded television tribute, a new hotel and museum in Nashville. As odes to Dolly Parton keep coming, a recording of the late country music singer honoring an American Jewish journalist has recently surfaced.
Never before released in America, the song, “A Bridge Across,” sung by Parton and accompanied by the Nashville Symphony, honors slain journalist Daniel Pearl.
The song features spare lyrics set to violin music composed in honor of Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was brutally murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002.
Originally recorded in 2008 by Parton, renowned fiddler Mark O’Connor, and the Nashville Symphony, the song was intended to be part of a compilation album called This is My America, produced and funded, oddly enough, in Canada but never released in the U.S.
It was O’Connor and his wife Maggie who resurrected the recording this fall, shortly after the deaths of Parton and another musician that connected the four artists: Oregon violinmaker Jonathan Cooper, who died in September.
Deeply troubled by the journalist’s murder in 2002, Cooper learned Pearl was an amateur fiddler and set out to create a quartet of string instruments – two violins, a viola and a cello – in the journalist’s honor. He entrusted the instruments to O’Connor to use during his annual summer music camp in North Carolina. Every year since, four students from the camp have received one of the Daniel Pearl memorial instruments to play for a year.
“These young people carry the message that love fights hatred through music-making and understanding that Daniel Pearl’s family want him remembered for,” O’Connor told The New York Times. Likewise, Cooper’s loving gesture inspired Parton, O’Connor said.
Canadian violinist Samantha Robichaud received one of the violins in 2005 and has gone on to become a successful recording artist with more than a half dozen albums. She has toured North America as an ambassador for the Daniel Pearl Foundation, sharing Pearl’s story, including his passion for
music and its power to change lives. Enter songwriters Tom McBryde and Lynn Wilbanks, whose introduction to Robichaud inspired verse.
On the album, the Nashville Symphony played one of Robichaud’s compositions while Parton introduced Pearl to listeners.
“He believed that music was something that could cross all social barriers, political borders and imaginary boundaries,” Parton says, before singing McBride’s and Wilbanks’ lyrics.
“A bridge across a question one journey begins, one step at a time to a place within.
A bridge across a border, a hand reaching out one heart at a time to erase the doubt.
A bridge across a difference can close a divide, one song to be sung on the other side.”
“It was perfect. She knows what he stood for,” Pearl’s father, Dr. Judea Pearl, told the Forward. “She was such a giving person.”
Judea Pearl met Parton in 2018 at the Los Angeles Press Club where she received that year’s Public Service Award for Contributions to Civic Life for her Imagination Library, which sends free books to children. (It inspired the creation of the PJ Library for Jewish books.) The Press Club recently dedicated its upcoming National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards to Parton’s memory.
In 2018, Judea Pearl was there to present the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism to Saudi Arabian writer and blogger Raif Badawi whose wife accepted the award while he served a 10-year prison sentence for his online activism.
The foundation devoted to Daniel Pearl’s legacy has been less visible since the 2021 death of Pearl’s mother Ruth who, as a young girl, witnessed and survived the anti-Jewish pogroms in Baghdad known as the Farhud.
As the 25th anniversary of his son’s murder approaches in February, Judea Pearl said the foundation will start a new chapter under his daughters’ leadership. Parton’s song lends the effort a touching soundtrack.
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