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Which side are you on: Jewish American or American Jew?
(JTA) — Earlier this month the New York Times convened what it called a “focus group of Jewish Americans.” I was struck briefly by that phrase — Jewish Americans — in part because the Times, like the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, tends to prefer “American Jews.”
It’s seemingly a distinction without a difference, although I know others might disagree. There is an argument that “American Jew” smacks of disloyalty, describing a Jew who happens to be American. “Jewish American,” according to this thinking, flips the script: an American who happens to be Jewish.
If pressed, I’d say I prefer “American Jew.” The noun “Jew” sounds, to my ear anyway, more direct and more assertive than the tentative adjective “Jewish.” It’s also consistent with the way JTA essentializes “Jew” in its coverage, as in British Jew, French Jew, LGBT Jew or Jew of color.
I wouldn’t have given further thought to the subject if not for a webinar last week given by Arnold Eisen, the chancellor emeritus at the Jewish Theological Seminary. In “Jewish-American, American-Jew: The Complexities and Joys of Living a Hyphenated Identity,” Eisen discussed how a debate over language is really about how Jews navigate between competing identities.
“What does the ‘American’ signify to us?” he asked. “What does the ‘Jewish’ signify and what is the nature of the relationship between the two? Is it a synthesis? Is it a tension, or a contradiction, or is it a blurring of the boundaries such that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins?”
Questions like these, it turns out, have been asked since Jews and other immigrants first began flooding Ellis Island. Teddy Roosevelt complained in 1915 that “there is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans.” Woodrow Wilson liked to say that “any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the Republic.” The two presidents were frankly freaked out about what we now call multiculturalism, convinced that America couldn’t survive a wave of immigrants with dual loyalties.
The two presidents lost the argument, and for much of the 20th century “hyphenated American” was shorthand for successful acculturation. While immigration hardliners continue to question the loyalty of minorities who claim more than one identity, and Donald Trump played with the politics of loyalty in remarks about Mexicans, Muslims and Jews, ethnic pride is as American as, well, St. Patrick’s Day. “I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants,” former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said in announcing her run for the Republican presidential nomination this month.
For Jews, however, the hyphen became what philosophy professor Berel Lang called “a weighty symbol of the divided life of Diaspora Jewry.” Jewishness isn’t a distant country with quaint customs, but a religion and a portable identity that lives uneasily alongside your nationality. In a 2005 essay, Lang argued that on either side of the hyphen were “vying traditions or allegiances,” with the Jew constantly confronted with a choice between the American side, or assimilation, and the Jewish side, or remaining distinct.
Eisen calls this the “question of Jewish difference.” Eisen grew up in an observant Jewish family in Philadelphia, and understood from an early age that his family was different from their Vietnamese-, Italian-, Ukrainian- and African-American neighbors. On the other hand, they were all the same — that is, American — because they were all hyphenated. “Being parallel to all these other differences, gave me my place in the city and in the country,” he said.
In college he studied the Jewish heavy hitters who were less sanguine about the integration of American and Jewish identities. Eisen calls Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the renegade theologian at JTS, “the thinker who really made this question uppermost for American Jews.” Kaplan wrote in 1934 that Jewishness could only survive as a “subordinate civilization” in the United States, and that the “Jew in America will be first and foremost an American, and only secondarily a Jew.”
Kaplan’s prescription was a maximum effort on the part of Jews to “save the otherness of Jewish life” – not just through synagogue, but through a Jewish “civilization” expressed in social relationships, leisure activities and a traditional moral and ethical code.
Of course, Kaplan also understood that there was another way to protect Jewish distinctiveness: move to Israel.
A poster issued by the National Industrial Conservation Movement in 1917 warns that the American war effort might be harmed by a “hyphen of disloyalty,” suggesting immigrants with ties to their homelands were working to aid the enemy. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
The political scientist Charles Liebman, in “The Ambivalent American Jew” (1973), argued that Jews in the United States were torn between surviving as a distinct ethnic group and integrating into the larger society.
According to Eisen, Liebman believed that “Jews who make ‘Jewish’ the adjective and ‘American’ the noun tend to fall on the integration side of the hyphen. And Jews who make ‘Jew’ the noun and ‘American’ the adjective tend to fall on the survival side of the hyphen.”
Eisen, a professor of Jewish thought at JTS, noted that the challenge of the hyphen was felt by rabbis on opposite ends of the theological spectrum. He cited Eugene Borowitz, the influential Reform rabbi, who suggested in 1973 that Jews in the United States “are actually more Jewish on the inside than they pretend to be on the outside. In other words, we’re so worried about what Liebman called integration into America that we hide our distinctiveness.” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the leading Modern Orthodox thinker of his generation, despaired that the United States presented its Jews with an unresolvable conflict between the person of faith and the person of secular culture.
When I read the texts Eisen shared, I see 20th-century Jewish men who doubted Jews who could be fully at home in America and at home with themselves as Jews (let alone as Jews who weren’t straight or white — which would demand a few more hyphens). They couldn’t imagine a rich Jewishness that didn’t exist as a counterculture, the way Cynthia Ozick wondered what it would be like to “think as a Jew” in a non-Jewish language like English.
They couldn’t picture the hyphen as a plus sign, which pulled the words “Jewish” and “American” together.
Recent trends support the skeptics. Look at Judaism’s Conservative movement, whose rabbis are trained at JTS, and which has long tried to reconcile Jewish literacy and observance with the American mainstream. It’s shrinking, losing market share and followers both to Reform – where the American side of the hyphen is ascendant — and to Orthodoxy, where Jewish otherness is booming in places like Brooklyn and Lakewood, New Jersey. And the Jewish “nones” — those opting out of religion, synagogue and active engagement in Jewish institutions and affairs — are among the fastest-growing segments of American Jewish life.
Eisen appears more optimistic about a hyphenated Jewish identity, although he insists that it takes work to cultivate the Jewish side. “I don’t think there’s anything at stake necessarily on which side of the hyphen you put the Jewish on,” he said. “But if you don’t go out of your way to put added weight on the Jewish in the natural course of events, as Kaplan said correctly 100 years ago, the American will win.”
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Mamdani was set to meet Colombian president known for inflammatory Israel rhetoric
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had planned to meet this week with Colombian President Gustavo Petro — who has compared Israel’s leaders to Nazis and recently defended his use of the phrase “Heil Hitler” on social media — during the South American leader’s visit to New York, a source familiar with the mayor’s schedule plans confirmed.
The meeting — set to be Mamdani’s first with a foreign leader — was reportedly canceled after the Trump administration intervened, directing Colombian officials to call it off, arguing that it would violate the terms of Petro’s entry into the United States for a United Nations Security Council session on Wednesday.
The State Department revoked Petro’s visa last fall after he appeared at a pro-Palestinian rally in Manhattan, calling on U.S. soldiers to disobey presidential orders over its support for Israel’s war in Gaza and urging an armed response to counter Israel’s action against the Palestinians. Petro was granted a limited waiver this week to attend the U.N. meeting on the Middle East.
A former member of Colombia’s M-19 guerrilla movement and elected in 2022 as the country’s first socialist president in decades, Petro has repeatedly drawn condemnation from Jewish and Israeli leaders since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks for comparing Israel’s military actions to those of Nazi Germany. In 2024, he severed diplomatic ties with Israel, accusing the Jewish state of committing genocide in Gaza, an allegation Israel has strongly rejected.
This week, Petro came under fire after posting the phrase “Heil Hitler” on X in response to an op-ed supporting the right-wing presidential candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, ahead of Colombia’s June 21 presidential runoff. Petro defended the post, saying he was criticizing what he described as the author’s “fascist” rhetoric rather than endorsing the Nazi slogan itself. In his UN remarks, Petro again compared Israel to the Nazis.
A City Hall spokesperson declined to comment on the matter.
The mayor’s canceled sit-down with Petro is the latest flashpoint in his fraught alliances with inflammatory critics of Israel.
Mamdani has faced scrutiny from Jewish leaders and Zionist organizations over his sharp criticism of Israel and embrace of Palestinian activism that is shaping his tenure as leader of the city with the largest population of Jews outside Israel. During his mayoral campaign, Mamdani refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and said he wouldn’t travel to the country and called for divestments in Israel’s economy. Recently, the mayor skipped the annual Israel Day parade.
In congressional races in New York City, Mamdani has actively been campaigning for candidates who have made inflammatory statements on Israel, including challenging U.S. military aid to the country and accusing the Jewish state of genocide. In particular, Mamdani has thrown his support behind former Columbia University Gaza War encampment activist Daraliza Avila Chevalier, who is challenging Rep. Adriano Espaillat with the incumbent’s support for Israel front and center. Avila Chevalier, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s NYC chapter, attended the Oct. 8, 2023, pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square, which was broadly condemned for celebrating the Hamas attacks on Israel. She has continued to defend her participation, saying that she showed up in anticipation of Israel’s “outsized reaction.”
Mamdani reignited tensions with many Jewish communities by posting a Nakba Day video produced by his City Hall media team commemorating the displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding in 1948. That was followed by what was perceived as a delayed and ultimately supportive response to pro-Palestinian protesters who descended on a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood where a synagogue was hosting a real estate sale that included West Bank properties.
The head of Mamdani’s office of international affairs, tasked with interacting with the United Nations and handling diplomatic relations, is Ana Maria Archila, the past co-chair of the Working Families Party who led campaigns critical of Israel. On his first visit to the U.N. headquarters in March, Mamdani met with Secretary-General António Guterres, whom Israeli officials have criticized for his statements about the war in Gaza, accusing him of failing to sufficiently condemn Hamas. Israel recently cut ties with Guterres and barred him from entering the country following the blacklisting of Israeli authorities in a UN report regarding sexual violence in conflict zones.
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‘Dirty Dancing’ be damned. A new musical shows another side of the Borscht Belt
When the Woodstock Music and Art Fair defined a generation, Pamela Gray was on the outside looking in — literally.
She was 13 and summering at Dr. Locker’s Bungalow Colony in Mountaindale, New York. She remembers sitting by the pool with her little brother while the moms and bubbies played mahjong and glimpsing some long hair or fringe through the chainlink: hippies headed to Yasgur’s Farm.
“Looking back now, it’s like I literally was on the wrong side of history,” Gray said.
That moment was stamped in her memory for years, along with her attachment to the bungalow colony, where she got her first taste of nature away from the Flatlands in Brooklyn. Since around the time Dirty Dancing came out in 1987, she had struggled to explain to people the working-class version of the Borscht Belt she grew up with, a far cry from the resorts favored by dentists and lawyers.
In the early 1990s, Gray was in film school at UCLA and interning in the writers room on Star Trek: The Next Generation when she endeavored to capture the disappeared world of her youth in a screenplay. She recalled thinking, “I want to be the first person to set a movie in a bungalow colony.’”
I met Gray, a high school friend of my father’s, at a cafe steps away from where her Off-Broadway musical A Walk on the Moon, based on her 1999 film, is in rehearsals. She wore a cat-themed Catskills t-shirt and a Nova Festival dog tag.
She told me she’d seen a documentary about the colonies — narrated by an Attenbourighian Brit, with the same nature doc detachment — and glimpsed one in South Fallsberg in Enemies: A Love Story, but knew she wanted a more substantial tribute.
The script, with a working title of The Blouse Man, became A Walk on the Moon, directed by Tony Goldwyn and starring Diane Lane as frustrated young housewife Pearl Kantrowitz, Liev Schreiber as her TV repairman husband, Viggo Mortenson as Pearl’s goyische hippie lover and a 15-year-old Anna Paquin as Pearl’s teenage daughter. It features a pivotal Woodstock sequence, and a glimpse of naked hippies trespassing at the bungalow’s lake.
Gray said there was resistance to the material when the script was being shopped around. She was told films centering women lost money. Some asked if it had to be Jews in the Catskills in the 1960s. For the musical, she’s amped up some of the Jewishness both in casting and content.
Directed by Sheryl Kaller and starring Talia Suskaauer and Max Chernin, the show has been in the works for over a decade, and had a previous run with a different score at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick. It’s set to open in a climate Gray thinks is in need of Jewish stories. Not a Holocaust story, not a story of antisemitism (though some of that has been added) but one about a family, and, importantly, one without much money.
Gray was first approached to sell the rights to her film for a musical adaptation in the 2010s. A librettist and songwriter prepared a presentation to convince her, but she decided she wanted to take the project on herself. She had, in a sense, written musicals before.
Technically, Gray, whose other films include Music of the Heart starring Meryl Streep in a singular non-horror outing by director Wes Craven and the legal drama Conviction (also with Goldwyn and starring Hilary Swank), began her life in the theater in middle school.
She wrote The Girl from A.C.N.E. — a parody of The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. — for her hygiene class in sixth grade and later, while editor of the yearbook at James Madison High School, penned A Log Day’s Journey into Night an evident sendup of Eugene O’Neill.
Her first brush with an audience hearing her words came when she worked on Sing!, a student-run musical competition for outer borough high schools, which was a stealth incubator of talents like Paul Simon, Neil Sedaka and, at James Madison, where Gray and my dad are alumni, Carole King and Gerry Goffin.
Gray and my dad, Mark a retired optometrist who also writes screenplays, wrote parody lyrics, and probably fought a fair bit as script co-chairs. Gray remembers one year’s production, themed around clothing throughout history, had her kitted out in a French Revolutionary outfit and smacking my dad in the face while he was dressed like Napoleon.
Sing!, had a Borscht Belt Bungalow quality to it. When director Michael Greif was discussing the musical with Gray several years ago, they bonded over Sing!, which he directed at Abraham Lincoln High School on Ocean Parkway.
Music was central to Gray’s film, with needledrops from the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company’s cover of Gershwin’s “Summertime.” The ending has Pearl and her husband, Marty (Schreiber), transition from Dean Martin’s version of “When You’re Smiling” to trying their best to groove to Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” (Gray said it was supposed to be “Light My Fire,” but Ray Manzarek wanted too much money.)
The musical’s new score by AnnMarie Milazzo, a vocal designer and arranger for shows like Spring Awakening and Next to Normal, captures the trapped-in-amber quality of the bungalows, with inspiration from the 1950s in the scenes with adults and, in a sequence with Pearl’s teenage daughter Alison and her summertime beau, a protest song.
“We’re living in a time right now where musicians and music artists are speaking out and talking about politics and talking about women’s rights and talking about antisemitism,” said Kaller, the director, whose parents took her to Catskills hotels as part of their temple bowling league. The show, she says, is “reminding audiences that in 1969, we were doing the same thing.”
A love letter to her parents’ generation and her own coming of age, Gray says the project may be even more personal in this iteration. Scenic and video designer Tal Yarden has incorporated Gray’s home movies into his projections. Also new to the musical is a moment when Alison learns the history of the Catskills, where Jews weren’t always welcome.
Gray said the addition came with “Trump 2,” a reference to his second term, that could also serve as an allusion to the film’s 1999 premiere, where the future president was in attendance.
“I still remembered the exact moment,” Gray said. She was on the aisle, and across from her was my father, their friend Karen and, next to Karen, Donald Trump and a blonde woman who was his date.
“The first thing he did was he ripped all the reserved signs off,” Gray recalled. “When your dad went to go to the bathroom, Trump put his leg up, and he had to climb over him. Is that your dad’s story?”
Not exactly. My dad now maintains that he was going to the lobby to tell Gray’s parents their seats were taken. It’s only when I said this that Gray remembers who the seats were reserved for. She then called Trump a certain Yiddish epithet, meaning pig.
(The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Trump’s presence or actions at the premiere, his enjoyment of the film or any plans to see the musical.)
Though a presidential encore is unlikely, members from Gray’s extended shtetl of Brooklyn are coming, along with a group of children who met at a bungalow colony for Holocaust survivors. (In other Jewish geography, the show’s casting director, Merri Sugarman, has known Kaller since they were around 2 — her parents were also in the bowling league.)
When Gray first wrote a treatment for the musical version of her film, she couldn’t help thinking of the first musical she ever saw: Fiddler on the Roof. It too had a forgotten Jewish milieu, with a self-contained community, an aura of nostalgia and an outside world pressing for change.
“It had to have influenced me, and I’m proud of that influence,” Gray said.
At this point I told her when my father and I saw the Yiddish Fiddler on the Roof, Charles Kushner, Trump’s mechutan, sat in front of us. What are the odds?
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When a Jewish language is lost, we lose more than just words
Always Carry Salt
By Samantha Ellis
Pegasus Books, 288 pages, $29
This charming and important memoir starts with two mothers in a cold London playground talking about where to send their young children to school. One mother says she would like her son to go to a French nursery so he could grow up with two languages, just like her. But then this playground moment takes a surprising turn.
“Why not send him to a nursery in your language?” one mother asks.
“I can’t,” author Samantha Ellis responds. “My language is dead.”
Ellis grew up speaking Judeo-Iraqi Arabic. Her mother tongue isn’t exactly dead, but it is dying, like many Jewish languages that are not Hebrew or Yiddish, and like many of the beautiful Jewish languages spoken by Jews of the Arab world. The Jewish community in Iraq is one of the world’s oldest, dating back to the sixth century B.C.E., when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judea and sent most of the population there into exile in Babylonia. In 1939, Baghdad was at least one-third Jewish. As of Passover 2021, there were reportedly just four elderly Jews left in Iraq.
“Ghosts walk the pages of almost every Iraqi Jewish book I have read,” Ellis writes.
Always Carry Salt is about language, food, family, and above all, a way of being. Ellis, whose other books include How to Be a Heroine and Take Courage, as well as plays like How to Date a Feminist, struggles with the fact that she is not wholly bilingual. She herself is part of why her language is dying. But then, after the birth of her son, she wants to pass Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic, and all the history and recipes it carries, onto him, and eventually, to us.
Food as a Way Into a Culture
I loved reading the many Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic idioms about the heart, like ekel kallsi, or “he ate my heart.”
Ellis often reserves the starring role for words related to food. When she wants to tell us that everything feels upside down or inside out, she says we are living eeyun al balangan, “in the days of the aubergines.”
While trying to describe a dish Iraqi Jews eat, she turns to etymology and history, and sometimes to literature. Before offering her recipe for makhboose, or date cookies, she expounds upon The Epic of Gilgamesh in which bread is said to make the wild man, Enkidu, human. She then goes on to discuss a rolling pin that can imprint your dough with a Cuneiform passage from Gilgamesh.
As you might guess, this book is not linear; it has its own rhythm and its own way of presenting a story as Ellis investigates complicated subjects like why some languages are dying, the deep roots of contemporary antisemitism, and the lasting effects of the Farhud — the massacre of Jews in Baghdad in 1941.
“Farhud” means “the breakdown of order.” It was once called a “pogrom,” but Ellis quotes her grandmother’s cousin, historian Sylvia Haim, who once asked, “Why use the Russian word, pogrom, when we have a perfectly good word of our own?”
By the time Ellis asks her grandmother, who lived through the Farhud at age 11, to describe the massacre in 1941— during which “for thirty days, Baghdad’s Jews stayed at home, terrified, listening to Rashid Ali and the mufti broadcast antisemitism. Swastikas and violence filled the streets,” permanently transforming Iraqi Jews’ sense of safety after thousands of years there— readers understand it’s not just about the loss of physical lives but also about the beginning of the diffusion of a community and an entire culture.
Ellis is the child of a father whose family fled shortly after the Farhud, when around 180 Jews were murdered, and many Jewish women were raped, along with thousands injured, and a mother whose family tried desperately to stay in Iraq, thinking it would get better. And so just in the lives of her parents, she is able to offer an important window into how Iraqi Jews were treated after the Farhud, and then, after the establishment of the State of Israel.
She explains that in the early decades of the 20th century, Zionism was seen as an Ashkenazi priority. But eventually, as various harrowing episodes make clear, it became increasingly dangerous to be Jewish in Iraq. According to a law passed in March 1950, Jews could leave, but they had to renounce their Iraqi citizenship, becoming stateless on their exit.
Then came the financial devastation. In March 1951, “when the denaturalization law was about to expire and 125,000 Jews had registered to leave, the Iraqi government met in secret and passed another law: they would seize property, money and assets from all 125,000 Jews, as well as any Jews who had already left Iraq,” Ellis writes. “The law came into force overnight, leaving many Iraqi Jews destitute and starving, relying on charity as they waited for the planes to come.” Only a few thousand Jews stayed behind in Iraq, including Ellis’s mother’s family.
While it has always been a criminal offense in Iraq to have any connection with Israel, as of 2021, having any association with Israel is punishable by death. This means it is deeply dangerous for Ellis and other Iraqi Jews to visit Iraq; she cannot even go on a heritage tour.
But despite all this history, or perhaps, because of it, Ellis is trying to hold onto words and ways of framing the world. She is also racing against time. She knows that what makes a language “endangered” is when mothers don’t teach it to children. She knows that the Jews who grew up in Baghdad are dying out. And while trying to pass along Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic to her own British-Iraqi son, she manages to pass along the story of a community to the world.
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