Uncategorized
With ‘Let It Be Morning’ and ‘Cinema Sabaya,’ Israeli filmmakers are winning awards for portraying Palestinian stories
(JTA) — Years ago, the Israeli filmmaker Orit Fouks Rotem took a class led by director Eran Kolirin, best known as the maker of “The Band’s Visit.” This month, movies by both filmmakers are getting theatrical rollouts in the United States.
On a recent Zoom call, Palestinian author Sayed Kashua joked: “Was that his class — how to use a Palestinian story?”
Kashua was smiling on Zoom as he said it — he is, after all, known for his often fatalistic sense of humor, particularly when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the author had given his blessing for Kolirin to make an adaptation of his novel “Let It Be Morning,” and said he loved the final result.
But like most jokes, this one had a kernel of truth: Israel’s two most recent Oscar submissions, hitting New York’s Quad Cinema within a week of each other, both — to varying degrees — tell Palestinian stories.
“Let It Be Morning” is a dark comedy about an Arab Israeli village that has suddenly and with no explanation been cordoned off from the rest of the country by the Israeli military. This event forces its Palestinian residents, including a protagonist trying to return to his comfortable middle-class life in Jerusalem, to reckon with how their dignity as citizens has been denied to them by the mechanisms of the Israeli occupation. At the Quad, the film is accompanied by a retrospective of Kolirin’s work, including “The Band’s Visit,” the basis for the Tony Award-winning musical; the retrospective is sponsored by the Israeli consulate in New York.
The all-female cast of “Cinema Sabaya,” a mix of Jewish and Arab actresses, in a film directed by Orit Fouks Rotem. (Courtesy of Kino Lorber)
The following week will see the opening of Rotem’s film, “Cinema Sabaya.” It follows a group of eight women, some Jewish and some Arab and Palestinian, who bond with each other while taking a filmmaking class in a community center in the Israeli city of Hadera. Cast member Dana Ivgy, who plays the class’s instructor, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the filming experience “felt like how living in Israel should feel,” adding, “We have more women in the film than in the Israeli government.”
Stylistically, the two films couldn’t be more different. “Let It Be Morning” is a tightly plotted narrative with boldly realized characters; almost all of its dialogue is in Arabic. “Cinema Sabaya” is a loose, heavily improvisational piece that is almost entirely set in one room, and is mostly in Hebrew (although in one tense early scene, the characters debate whether to conduct their class in Hebrew or Arabic). One is a dry, Kafkaesque satire; the other is an intimate, naturalistic drama.
But together, the films provide a snapshot of the delicate dance Israeli filmmakers must perform in the current climate. On the one hand, these art-house directors are being feted on the international stage for their empathetic storytelling that incorporates or even centers entirely on Palestinian characters. But on the other, they’re being attacked by government officials for their perceived insufficient loyalty — and their films’ very status as “Israeli” is being questioned, too, sometimes by their own cast and crew.
“Everyone can call it what they want,” Rotem said of her film. “I’m an Israeli and it’s in Israel, but I have partners who call themselves Palestinians, and some of them call themselves Arabs, and each one defined herself. I think it’s really how it should be.”
“A film does not have an identity,” Kolirin insisted in an interview with JTA. “It is a citizen of the screen.”
Eran Kolirin accepted the award for Best Director for “Let It Be Morning” at the 2021 Ophir Awards in Tel Aviv on October 5, 2021. (Tomer Neuberg/ Flash90)
Kolirin isn’t a fan of the label “Israeli film” in this case, even though that is how “Let It Be Morning” was categorized at its 2021 Cannes Film Festival premiere; its own press notes also list Israel as the “country of production.” That Cannes screening took place shortly after Israel’s deadly conflict with Hamas that killed more than 250 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and around a dozen Israelis. The events turned Cannes into a political firestorm when the film’s Palestinian cast refused to attend the premiere.
“We cannot ignore the contradiction of the film’s entry into Cannes under the label of an ‘Israeli film’ when Israel continues to carry its decades-long colonial campaign of ethnic cleansing, expulsion, and apartheid against us — the Palestinian people,” the cast’s statement read in part.
“Each time the film industry assumes that we and our work fall under the ethno-national label of ‘Israeli,’ it further perpetuates an unacceptable reality that imposes on us, Palestinian artists with Israeli citizenship,” the statement continues, calling on “international artistic and cultural institutions” to “amplify the voices of Palestinian artists and creatives.”
Kolirin himself supported the cast’s action. He knew they were grieving over the outbreak of violence in Gaza and didn’t want to put themselves in a situation where “some politician is going to wave a flag over their head or whatever.”
What’s more, he said, the status of “Let It Be Morning” as an “Israeli” film, despite the fact that around half the crew was Palestinian, was not his decision: “The film was not submitted to Cannes as an Israeli film,” he said. “You know, you fill in the form: ‘Which were the countries that gave money?’” In this case, the answer was Israel and France.
Most of the cast later did not attend the Ophir Awards ceremony, Israel’s equivalent to the Oscars voted on by its filmmaking academy, where “Morning” won the top prize (which automatically made it Israel’s Oscar submission for that year). In solidarity at the awards, Kolirin read aloud a statement from his lead actress, Juna Suleiman, decrying Israel’s “active efforts to erase Palestinian identity” and what she called “ethnic cleansing.”
Orit Fouks Rotem (Courtesy of Kino Lorber)
“Cinema Sabaya” hasn’t played host to as much offscreen controversy, but its vision of Israeli multiculturalism is still inherently political. Rotem’s mother is a local government adviser on women’s issues in Hadera, and the film was inspired by her experience participating in a photography class designed to unite Jewish and Arab women. Rotem herself later led filmmaking classes in a similar vein as research for “Sabaya.”
In the film, Ivgy’s character, who is modeled on Rotem, instructs her class to film their home lives, while secretly hoping to make a movie from their efforts. When her desire to do so is revealed, the women in the class feel betrayed: They thought they were just making films for themselves, not for their stories to be told by someone else.
Similarly, Rotem said that working with Arab and Palestinian actresses made her “aware to the fact that I can’t really tell their story.” Her solution was to allow the performers — some of whom are well-known activists who had to think twice about appearing in an Israeli movie — to voice their own opinions, and to establish the necessary trust to allow them to be unscripted on camera.
She theorizes that “Cinema Sabaya” has been so well received in Israel because “it doesn’t say ‘occupation, occupation, occupation.’ It says ‘humanity,’ so people are less afraid.” (She also noted that, in real life, the women who attended her filmmaking classes bristled at her initial suggestion to make a documentary about them, telling her to fictionalize their stories instead — which she did.)
Lately the Israeli government has a tendency to view its filmmaking class as agitators unworthy of national support, particularly when they make films criticizing the occupation. Former Culture Minister Miri Regev often disparaged films she thought were bad for Israel, including celebrated international hits such as “Foxtrot” and “Synonyms.” Her current successor, Miki Zohar, has already threatened the makers of a new documentary about the West Bank city of Hebron, saying the movie smears the military and that the directors might have to return government funds.
In recent years, Israel’s culture ministry has pushed two new controversial proposals: a grant program earmarked for those who make films in settlements, which are considered illegal under international law; and a form pledging not to make films “offensive” to Israel or the military that filmmakers would be required to sign in order to apply for certain grants, which many directors have likened to a loyalty oath. For years, some of the country’s largest grantmakers have required applicants to sign a form promising to represent their projects as Israeli on the national stage.
There has also been an effort among some members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new right-wing government to end funding to public broadcaster Kan, which the country’s film industry views as another attack on its free expression.
“Kan has all this dialogue,” Ivgy said. “It has Jewish and religious and Arab and Palestinian, for kids and for grownups. And nothing is taboo there. I feel that it’s very dangerous to close that option down.”
Many Israeli filmmakers are fighting back. Hundreds, including Kolirin and Rotem, have refused to sign the ministry’s pledge, and many have also protested the settlement grant program. Nadav Lapid, one of the country’s most celebrated and outspoken directors, harshly critiqued government restrictions placed on his own work in the 2021 drama “Ahed’s Knee,” which went on to win a special prize at Cannes.
Kolirin said he had recently been on a call with several Israeli filmmakers looking to further organize against artistic restrictions, and that it had given him hope. “I had this feeling of some optimism, which I didn’t have for a long time,” he said. But he didn’t mince words when discussing Israel’s new governing coalition, which he likened to “a circus of mad dogs unleashed.”
Rotem said that the current government is “very, very bad and scary,” but that it has only strengthened her resolve to make political films.
“For me, it’s also political to show women in Israel in a deep way: I mean Arabs and Jews,” she said. “Because I don’t think there are enough films that are doing that.”
For Kashua, a veteran TV writer and opinion columnist, the question of identity in Israeli and Palestinian filmmaking is even more pronounced. After a long career of trying to write about the Palestinian experience in Hebrew as a way of reaching Israelis, he left Israel for the United States in 2014, becoming discouraged by an incident in which Jewish extremists burned a Palestinian teenager alive as revenge after Palestinian terrorists kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Now based in St. Louis, he has worked as a writer and story editor on Israeli series that center on both Palestinian and Jewish stories — including the global hit “Shtisel,” which focuses on haredi Orthodox Jews, and its upcoming spinoff, along with “Madrasa,” a young-adult series about a bilingual Hebrew-Arabic school.
Israeli filmmakers choosing to center Palestinian stories can be its own radical political act, Kashua believes. He noted that the dialogue in “Morning” is almost entirely in Arabic, a language that Israel demoted from national language status in 2018 — doubly ironic as he had deliberately chosen to write his original novel in Hebrew.
“The idea that this film is ‘Israeli’ — it really contradicts the idea of Israel being a purely Jewish state,” Kashua said. He added that, while he had initially hoped a Palestinian director might have adapted his novel, he was ultimately happy with Kolirin’s approach.
“I truly love the movie, and it’s barely Orientalist,” he joked, echoing Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said’s famous book about how a Western lens on Eastern cultures can be reductive and harmful. “Which is a big achievement for an Israeli filmmaker.”
—
The post With ‘Let It Be Morning’ and ‘Cinema Sabaya,’ Israeli filmmakers are winning awards for portraying Palestinian stories appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
As 1000+ rabbis sign anti-Mamdani letter, others decry mounting ‘red lines’ in Jewish communities
(JTA) — Two days after Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove delivered a sermon urging congregants to vote against Zohran Mamdani, rabbis across the country were asked to sign a letter quoting him.
By the time it was published Wednesday, 650 rabbis and cantors had done so, adding their names calling out the “political normalization” of anti-Zionism among figures like Mamdani, the New York City mayoral frontrunner.
By Friday, the letter had more than 1,000 signatories, making it one of the most-signed rabbinic letters in U.S. history.
But Cosgrove, the senior rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue on the Upper East Side, was not one of them.
“As a policy, I do not sign group letters,” he said in an interview.
“My fear of such letters is they can flatten subjects and reduce complex issues to ‘Who’s on a letter and who’s not on a letter?’” he added. “There are other platforms that rabbis can give expression to their leadership.”
As the letter has ricocheted across the country and escaped from rabbis’ inboxes to their congregants’ social media feeds, it has ignited a wave of scrutiny, plaudits and recriminations. Some people have voiced relief or disappointment in seeing their rabbi’s name on the list — or on not seeing it.
“Jewish communities are circulating spreadsheets of who signed and who didn’t,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein in an essay describing what she said was “a painful public reckoning” taking place both publicly and privately.
“I am not sleeping. These red lines are so dangerous,” responded Rabbi Lauren Grabelle Hermann, of Manhattan’s Society for the Advancement of Judaism, in one of dozens of comments representing a wide range of views. Hermann devoted her Yom Kippur sermon earlier this month to calling on her community to “become an antidote to the polarization and fragmentation in our broader Jewish community and society.”
Now, facing renewed pressure from their congregants over the letter, some New York City rabbis are articulating alternative strategies for responding to a political moment that many Jews are experiencing as fraught and high-stakes.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl wrote to all members of Central Synagogue, the Manhattan Reform congregation where she is senior rabbi, to explain why they would not find her among the letter’s signatories.
“As a Central clergy team, we have spoken from the pulpit in multiple past sermons and will continue to take a clear, unambiguous position on antisemitism, on anti-Zionist rhetoric, and on sharing our deep support for Israel,” she wrote.
But, citing the importance of “separation of church and state,” Buchdahl wrote that “it is up to each of us to vote our conscience.”
“There are political organizations, including Jewish ones, where electoral politics is the core mission. Get involved,” she wrote. “Central Synagogue, however, is a Jewish spiritual home and we want to keep it that way. It remains our conviction that political endorsements of candidates are not in the best interest of our congregation, community, or country.”
Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of the Conservative synagogue Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side sent out a letter of his own to congregants. He said he would not be voting for Mamdani but did not believe it was his role to tell them how to vote. And he raised concerns about what he said was the “shearing off of liberal from conservative liberal communities,” saying that Jews of all political outlooks should be able to pray and act together.
“The Torah commands lo titgodedu, traditionally interpreted to mean, don’t fragment yourselves into factions,” Kalmanofsky wrote. “I fear this happening to Jews. Frankly, I fear it more than I fear an anti-Zionist mayor.”
Rabbi Adam Mintz, who leads the recently rebranded Modern Orthodox congregation Shtiebel @ JCC, said he’d signed a smaller letter from Manhattan Orthodox rabbis urging the importance of voting. But Mintz felt this letter was outside his role.
“I’m a rabbi. I don’t want to take a political stand,” he said. “I understand that some people feel strongly and they want to take a political stand. I think that’s OK, but that’s not my role.”
Rabbi Michelle Dardashti of Kane Street Synagogue, an egalitarian Conservative synagogue in Brooklyn, did not sign the letter, either. She instead took a different approach to addressing her congregants in the lead-up to the election, hosting about 80 of them Tuesday night for an evening of dialogue.
Members representing a spectrum of views took turns sharing questions and concerns ahead of the election. Dardashti said congregants, despite conflicting views, were “deeply engaged and passionate, and spoke beautifully and respectfully.”
“I understand my rabbinic role to be one that creates space for people to learn from each other’s different experiences, and therefore perspectives,” she said.
Some Jewish leaders and groups outright opposed the letter and its message, rather than considering it an ill-advised strategy. Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish organization that endorsed Mamdani, released a statement excoriating the letter and its signatories for distracting from what it said was the real issue: Donald Trump.
“These Jewish leaders are doing Trump and the MAGA movement’s work for them: dividing our pro-democracy movement at a time when we need to be united to beat back fascism,” the statement read.
Josh Whinston, a rabbi in Ann Arbor, Michigan, expressed skepticism on social media about the letter’s origin and intentions, and noted that he did not sign it.
“This was not a call for moral clarity; it was a political move aimed at influencing a local race in New York City,” he wrote.
Upon first reading it, Whinston wrote that he “agreed with parts of what it said,” and that he “considered signing.” But, hoping to learn more about the Jewish Majority, the group behind the letter, Whinston wrote, “The site offered no substance. There was no mission, no vision, no leadership, no staff.”
The Jewish Majority’s goal, as stated on its website, is to counterbalance left-wing “fringe groups” like Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, which they say “weaponize the Jewish identity of some of their members to call for policy recommendations that are rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community.”
The executive director of the Jewish Majority, Jonathan Schulman, is a former longtime AIPAC staffer. In an interview, Schulman said he wrote the letter’s first draft before it underwent rounds of edits from about 40 rabbis of different denominations.
The inspiration came when “Rabbi Cosgrove’s sermon started making the rounds,” he said, adding, “By Sunday morning, rabbis were reaching out to me saying, ‘This is the kind of sentiment we’re feeling all over the country.’”
Unlike Cosgrove’s sermon, which included an endorsement of Andrew Cuomo, the letter does not mention either of Mamdani’s opponents. It does, however, say that political figures like “Zohran Mamdani refuse to condemn violent slogans, deny Israel’s legitimacy, and accuse the Jewish state of genocide,” and calls on Americans to “stand up for candidates who reject antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric, and who affirm Israel’s right to exist in peace and security.”
Schulman recalled being told, “‘There’s the issue of Zohran Mamdani and calls to globalize the intifada and all this, but there’s anti-Zionist candidates running for mayor in Somerville, Massachusetts, in Minneapolis, Seattle — this is becoming normalized, this is becoming mainstream.’”
Rabbi Mark Miller of Temple Beth El in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, is one of the rabbis who helped edit the letter. He said part of his goal was to help clarify its nature as being national rather than local.
“This was not an attempt for the rest of us to get involved in New York politics,” Miller said. “It’s highlighting it, but the issue is that everywhere we are, this is a concern.”
Signatories on the letter include rabbis from across the United States, and even outside the country.
Rabbi Brigitte Rosenberg, the senior rabbi of a Reform congregation in St. Louis, signed the letter, and said the message about anti-Zionism resonated with her on a national level.
“Mamdani was the big race that was talked about in this, but it’s come up in other races, right?” Rosenberg said, pointing to the comeback bid of “Squad” member Cori Bush to represent St. Louis in Congress.
Rabbi Jeremy Barras from Miami said a number of his congregants have residences in New York, and “they’re just terrified.”
“But I would’ve signed it if it was the same issue in any city in America,” Barras said. “It just happens to be true that we’re a little more sensitive because so many of our families have connections in New York.”
Both Barras and Rosenberg said they couldn’t remember an open letter signed by this many rabbis. There have in fact been examples of open letters being signed by 1,000-plus rabbis, including an appeal to open Palestine to Jews in 1945; a 2017 letter calling on Trump to support refugees and a letter from earlier this year demanding Israel stop “using starvation as a weapon of war.”
Yehuda Kurtzer, co-president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, affirmed that open letters like the one distributed by the Jewish Majority are nothing new, and said there is “definitely a tension that emerges” for those expected to sign. Endorsements from the pulpit, on the other hand, are “new terrain,” he said, noting the Trump administration’s decision to stop enforcement of an IRS rule barring political endorsements from religious institutions.
“We felt pretty strongly that rabbis should not generally do this, and there’s a whole variety of reasons,” Kurtzer said. “It’s a plausible scenario that politicians will start doing quid pro quos with religious leaders around their needs. Once you do it once there’s an expectation that you’ll do it all the time.”
Some of the rabbis who signed say they weren’t making a partisan political statement. Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side and the leader of a Zionist organization within the Reform movement, acknowledged “worries” about alienating some congregants. But, like others who’ve come out against Mamdani, Hirsch said it was non-partisan to speak out against someone whose rhetoric could compromise Jewish safety.
“There’s always the risk that people will understand you in a partisan way, especially since we’re living in such a hyper-partisan atmosphere now,” Hirsch said. “But it’s a risk that we have to take because the stakes are so high.”
Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El made a similar point. “I’m not going to tell people who they ought to vote for. But I do think it’s important for me to let them know what I think they ought to be thinking about when they vote,” he said, pointing to issues like “the well-being of the State of Israel and the safety of the Jewish community.”
For Cosgrove, whose synagogue is located 20 blocks from Davidson’s, the division that’s arisen since his sermon is something to grieve.
“It deeply saddens me that, in a moment where the Jewish community should be thinking about the external threats that our community faces, that we should be spending an iota of energy on that which exacerbates any fault lines,” Cosgrove said.
The post As 1000+ rabbis sign anti-Mamdani letter, others decry mounting ‘red lines’ in Jewish communities appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Mamdani has created ‘great fear,’ and Jewish voters are ‘more motivated than I have ever seen,’ Cuomo says
Andrew Cuomo believes he’s made an effective case to Jewish voters, particularly those opposed to Zohran Mamdani or concerned about his statements on Israel. In an interview on Friday, Cuomo insisted that “the truth” will help him pull off an upset in the election for New York City mayor, despite lagging in all public polls.
Cuomo said that since his defeat in the Democratic primary, there’s an increased awareness of Mamdani’s rhetoric and positions, which will be key to the former governor’s success.
“Look, I think there’s so much information out there now that the voters know the emes,” Cuomo said, using the Yiddish word for truth. “And the emes is the reason I’m going to win.”
Mamdani’s positions on Israel have roiled New York’s Jewish community — the largest outside of Israel, as he has faced scrutiny for: refusing to outright condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” calling the Gaza war a “genocide,” and pledging to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited the city.
Earlier this week, Mamdani made a direct appeal to Brooklyn’s Hasidic community, an influential constituency that often votes based on rabbinical guidance and supported Cuomo in the primary and Eric Adams in 2021.
In an open letter written in Hasidic Yiddish and published in Yiddish-language newspapers, Mamdani highlighted his plans to combat antisemitism and his proposals on affordability and childcare vouchers. Mamdani pledged on Wednesday to retain police commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish, which was viewed as a gesture to reassure Jewish New Yorkers worried about rising antisemitism.
Cuomo said that in his conversations with Jewish leaders and voters, he has “sensed a real fear” of what would happen if Mamdani got elected.
“The level of concern in the Jewish community is frighteningly high,” he said. Cuomo suggested that anxious Jewish voters “are more motivated than I have ever seen them in politics.”
Cuomo spent Friday meeting with Orthodox leaders in Flatbush, where he earned the endorsement of the Flatbush Jewish Community Coalition, the same influential group that Adams credited with helping secure his 2021 victory.
The former governor also addressed remarks made earlier in the day by Mamdani, who accused his opponents of targeting him because he’s the first Muslim favored to become mayor of New York. “I thought that if I behaved well enough or bit my tongue enough in the face of racist, baseless attacks, all while returning back to my central message, it would allow me to be more than just my faith,” Mamdani said in a speech outside a mosque in The Bronx. “I was wrong.”
Cuomo pushed back, saying his campaign against Mamdani is rooted not in religion but in the democratic socialist’s own record. “I think Mamdani has created great fear among the Jewish community and many other communities,” he said. “He is affirmatively offensive. It has nothing to do with his being Muslim. It has to do with what he says.”
Also on Friday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who had until now resisted weighing in on the mayoral race, endorsed Mamdani. In a statement, Jeffries said Mamdani has promised “to focus on keeping every New Yorker safe, including the Jewish community.”
A recent Quinnipiac poll showed Mamdani trailing Cuomo by 31 points among Jewish voters, while maintaining a double-digit lead citywide. Just 22% of Jewish voters view Mamdani favorably, while 67% hold an unfavorable opinion. The survey found that a plurality of likely voters share Mamdani’s views on the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Early voting in the election begins on Saturday.
The post Mamdani has created ‘great fear,’ and Jewish voters are ‘more motivated than I have ever seen,’ Cuomo says appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
As 1000+ rabbis sign anti-Mamdani letter, others decry mounting ‘red lines’ in Jewish communities
Two days after Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove delivered a sermon urging congregants to vote against Zohran Mamdani, rabbis across the country were asked to sign a letter quoting him.
By the time it was published Wednesday, 650 rabbis and cantors had done so, adding their names calling out the “political normalization” of anti-Zionism among figures like Mamdani, the New York City mayoral frontrunner.
By Friday, the letter had more than 1,000 signatories, making it one of the most-signed rabbinic letters in U.S. history.
But Cosgrove, the senior rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue on the Upper East Side, was not one of them.
“As a policy, I do not sign group letters,” he said in an interview.
“My fear of such letters is they can flatten subjects and reduce complex issues to ‘Who’s on a letter and who’s not on a letter?’” he added. “There are other platforms that rabbis can give expression to their leadership.”
As the letter has ricocheted across the country and escaped from rabbis’ inboxes to their congregants’ social media feeds, it has ignited a wave of scrutiny, plaudits and recriminations. Some people have voiced relief or disappointment in seeing their rabbi’s name on the list — or on not seeing it.
“Jewish communities are circulating spreadsheets of who signed and who didn’t,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein in an essay describing what she said was “a painful public reckoning” taking place both publicly and privately.
“I am not sleeping. These red lines are so dangerous,” responded Rabbi Lauren Grabelle Hermann, of Manhattan’s Society for the Advancement of Judaism, in one of dozens of comments representing a wide range of views. Hermann devoted her Yom Kippur sermon earlier this month to calling on her community to “become an antidote to the polarization and fragmentation in our broader Jewish community and society.”
Now, facing renewed pressure from their congregants over the letter, some New York City rabbis are articulating alternative strategies for responding to a political moment that many Jews are experiencing as fraught and high-stakes.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl wrote to all members of Central Synagogue, the Manhattan Reform congregation where she is senior rabbi, to explain why they would not find her among the letter’s signatories.
“As a Central clergy team, we have spoken from the pulpit in multiple past sermons and will continue to take a clear, unambiguous position on antisemitism, on anti-Zionist rhetoric, and on sharing our deep support for Israel,” she wrote.
But, citing the importance of “separation of church and state,” Buchdahl wrote that “it is up to each of us to vote our conscience.”
“There are political organizations, including Jewish ones, where electoral politics is the core mission. Get involved,” she wrote. “Central Synagogue, however, is a Jewish spiritual home and we want to keep it that way. It remains our conviction that political endorsements of candidates are not in the best interest of our congregation, community, or country.”
Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of the Conservative synagogue Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side sent out a letter of his own to congregants. He said he would not be voting for Mamdani but did not believe it was his role to tell them how to vote. And he raised concerns about what he said was the “shearing off of liberal from conservative liberal communities,” saying that Jews of all political outlooks should be able to pray and act together.
“The Torah commands lo titgodedu, traditionally interpreted to mean, don’t fragment yourselves into factions,” Kalmanofsky wrote. “I fear this happening to Jews. Frankly, I fear it more than I fear an anti-Zionist mayor.”
Rabbi Adam Mintz, who leads the recently rebranded Modern Orthodox congregation Shtiebel @ JCC, said he’d signed a smaller letter from Manhattan Orthodox rabbis urging the importance of voting. But Mintz felt this letter was outside his role.
“I’m a rabbi. I don’t want to take a political stand,” he said. “I understand that some people feel strongly and they want to take a political stand. I think that’s OK, but that’s not my role.”
Rabbi Michelle Dardashti of Kane Street Synagogue, an egalitarian Conservative synagogue in Brooklyn, did not sign the letter, either. She instead took a different approach to addressing her congregants in the lead-up to the election, hosting about 80 of them Tuesday night for an evening of dialogue.
Members representing a spectrum of views took turns sharing questions and concerns ahead of the election. Dardashti said congregants, despite conflicting views, were “deeply engaged and passionate, and spoke beautifully and respectfully.”
“I understand my rabbinic role to be one that creates space for people to learn from each other’s different experiences, and therefore perspectives,” she said.
Some Jewish leaders and groups outright opposed the letter and its message, rather than considering it an ill-advised strategy. Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish organization that endorsed Mamdani, released a statement excoriating the letter and its signatories for distracting from what it said was the real issue: Donald Trump.
“These Jewish leaders are doing Trump and the MAGA movement’s work for them: dividing our pro-democracy movement at a time when we need to be united to beat back fascism,” the statement read.
Josh Whinston, a rabbi in Ann Arbor, Michigan, expressed skepticism on social media about the letter’s origin and intentions, and noted that he did not sign it.
“This was not a call for moral clarity; it was a political move aimed at influencing a local race in New York City,” he wrote.
Upon first reading it, Whinston wrote that he “agreed with parts of what it said,” and that he “considered signing.” But, hoping to learn more about the Jewish Majority, the group behind the letter, Whinston wrote, “The site offered no substance. There was no mission, no vision, no leadership, no staff.”
The Jewish Majority’s goal, as stated on its website, is to counterbalance left-wing “fringe groups” like Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, which they say “weaponize the Jewish identity of some of their members to call for policy recommendations that are rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community.”
The executive director of the Jewish Majority, Jonathan Schulman, is a former longtime AIPAC staffer. In an interview, Schulman said he wrote the letter’s first draft before it underwent rounds of edits from about 40 rabbis of different denominations.
The inspiration came when “Rabbi Cosgrove’s sermon started making the rounds,” he said, adding, “By Sunday morning, rabbis were reaching out to me saying, ‘This is the kind of sentiment we’re feeling all over the country.’”
Unlike Cosgrove’s sermon, which included an endorsement of Andrew Cuomo, the letter does not mention either of Mamdani’s opponents. It does, however, say that political figures like “Zohran Mamdani refuse to condemn violent slogans, deny Israel’s legitimacy, and accuse the Jewish state of genocide,” and calls on Americans to “stand up for candidates who reject antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric, and who affirm Israel’s right to exist in peace and security.”
Schulman recalled being told, “‘There’s the issue of Zohran Mamdani and calls to globalize the intifada and all this, but there’s anti-Zionist candidates running for mayor in Somerville, Massachusetts, in Minneapolis, Seattle — this is becoming normalized, this is becoming mainstream.’”
Rabbi Mark Miller of Temple Beth El in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, is one of the rabbis who helped edit the letter. He said part of his goal was to help clarify its nature as being national rather than local.
“This was not an attempt for the rest of us to get involved in New York politics,” Miller said. “It’s highlighting it, but the issue is that everywhere we are, this is a concern.”
Signatories on the letter include rabbis from across the United States, and even outside the country.
Rabbi Brigitte Rosenberg, the senior rabbi of a Reform congregation in St. Louis, signed the letter, and said the message about anti-Zionism resonated with her on a national level.
“Mamdani was the big race that was talked about in this, but it’s come up in other races, right?” Rosenberg said, pointing to the comeback bid of “Squad” member Cori Bush to represent St. Louis in Congress.
Rabbi Jeremy Barras from Miami said a number of his congregants have residences in New York, and “they’re just terrified.”
“But I would’ve signed it if it was the same issue in any city in America,” Barras said. “It just happens to be true that we’re a little more sensitive because so many of our families have connections in New York.”
Both Barras and Rosenberg said they couldn’t remember an open letter signed by this many rabbis. There have in fact been examples of open letters being signed by 1,000-plus rabbis, including an appeal to open Palestine to Jews in 1945; a 2017 letter calling on Trump to support refugees and a letter from earlier this year demanding Israel stop “using starvation as a weapon of war.”
Yehuda Kurtzer, co-president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, affirmed that open letters like the one distributed by the Jewish Majority are nothing new, and said there is “definitely a tension that emerges” for those expected to sign. Endorsements from the pulpit, on the other hand, are “new terrain,” he said, noting the Trump administration’s decision to stop enforcement of an IRS rule barring political endorsements from religious institutions.
“We felt pretty strongly that rabbis should not generally do this, and there’s a whole variety of reasons,” Kurtzer said. “It’s a plausible scenario that politicians will start doing quid pro quos with religious leaders around their needs. Once you do it once there’s an expectation that you’ll do it all the time.”
Some of the rabbis who signed say they weren’t making a partisan political statement. Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side and the leader of a Zionist organization within the Reform movement, acknowledged “worries” about alienating some congregants. But, like others who’ve come out against Mamdani, Hirsch said it was non-partisan to speak out against someone whose rhetoric could compromise Jewish safety.
“There’s always the risk that people will understand you in a partisan way, especially since we’re living in such a hyper-partisan atmosphere now,” Hirsch said. “But it’s a risk that we have to take because the stakes are so high.”
Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El made a similar point. “I’m not going to tell people who they ought to vote for. But I do think it’s important for me to let them know what I think they ought to be thinking about when they vote,” he said, pointing to issues like “the well-being of the State of Israel and the safety of the Jewish community.”
For Cosgrove, whose synagogue is located 20 blocks from Davidson’s, the division that’s arisen since his sermon is something to grieve.
“It deeply saddens me that, in a moment where the Jewish community should be thinking about the external threats that our community faces, that we should be spending an iota of energy on that which exacerbates any fault lines,” Cosgrove said.
—
The post As 1000+ rabbis sign anti-Mamdani letter, others decry mounting ‘red lines’ in Jewish communities appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.