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18 notable Jews who died in 2022
(JTA) — Every year brings the opportunity to celebrate the accomplishments of well-known Jewish icons in every field and to mourn those we have lost.
Here are 18 Jews who died in 2022 and who leave outsized legacies on politics, the arts, sports and everything in between.
Madeleine Albright
Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, pictured here in 2018, died March 23, 2022. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The “first woman secretary of state in the United States” label will always follow Madeleine Albright, especially because of her success in such a male-dominated field of policy. But regardless of her gender, Albright’s moves as a part of Bill Clinton’s administration left a lasting mark on U.S. peacekeeping efforts around the world. Crucial to her worldview was her refugee story, which she did not fully grasp until after her time in the limelight. Her parents were Czech immigrants who had converted from Judaism to Catholicism and then Episcopalianism to avoid persecution before fleeing Europe. Albright did not like to talk about her parents’ choice to keep her in the dark, but when she did, it was in the voice of a blunt-edged diplomat who understood how the 20th century robbed some people of agency, and how they did what they had to do to reclaim it. “I can’t question their motivation. I can’t,” she told The Washington Post in 1997. Albright died March 23 in Washington, D.C., at 84.
Melissa Bank
American author Melissa Bank poses during a portrait session in Paris, Jan. 9, 2006. (Ulf Andersen/Getty Images)
Melissa Bank published just two books in her career, but both sets of short stories were bestsellers that explored the lives of Jewish women and still resonate with young readers decades later. Her 1999 debut, “The Girls’ Guide To Hunting And Fishing,” held a spot on The New York Times’ bestseller list for months. The comic misadventures of her two books’ Jewish protagonists often intersected with Jewish life: In “Wonder Spot,” Sophie Applebaum plays hooky from Hebrew class, considers taking a job with a Jewish newspaper, and contends with a cousin’s bat mitzvah and a sister-in-law’s passive-aggressive attempts to impose kosher rules on her home. Bank died of lung cancer at 61 in August.
Isaac Berger
Isaac Berger, left, at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. (Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Setting Moses and the Maccabees aside, it’s not a stretch to call Isaac Berger one of the strongest Jews ever. Known as “Ike,” Berger won three Olympic medals, two World Championships and eight U.S. national championships in weightlifting during a dominant stretch in the 1950s and 60s. At the 1957 Maccabiah Games, Berger was the first athlete to break a world record in any sport in Israel. His gold medal was presented by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who called Berger the “gibor Yehudi,” or “mighty Jew.” Berger was inducted into the U.S. Weightlifting Hall of Fame in 1965 and the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1980. Berger died in June at 85.
Peter Bogdanovich
Peter Bogdanovich at the 1999 New York City premiere of “RKO 281.” (Ron Galella/Getty Images)
Peter Bogdanovich was an Oscar-nominated movie director and actor whose films, ego and off-camera exploits encapsulated the personality-driven excesses of 1970s Hollywood filmmaking. He got his start making low-budget fare for shlock pioneer Roger Corman, then broke into the big leagues in 1971 with “The Last Picture Show,” a coming-of-age drama set in small-town Texas starring Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd (who became the director’s partner after he began an affair with her during filming). “The Last Picture Show” became a critical and commercial smash, scoring Bogdanovich Oscar nominations for best director and best adapted screenplay, and turned its 32-year-old director into a wunderkind whom the press frequently compared to his idol, Orson Welles. Bogdanovich’s 1972 follow-up “What’s Up, Doc?” was also a hit, and as a bonus, the screwball comedy helped make a Jewish sex symbol out of star Barbra Streisand. Though Bogdanovich rarely discussed his religious background in interviews, he was proud of his father’s role in rescuing his Jewish mother from Europe. “He was a really great painter and very highly praised in the former Yugoslavia,” Bogdanovich said of his father Borislav in a 2019 interview with New York magazine, “but he gave all that up to save my mother and her family because they were Jewish. He wasn’t, but they were.” Bogdanovich died Jan. 6 in Los Angeles at 82.
James Caan
James Caan stands under casino lights in a scene from the 1974 film “The Gambler.” (Paramount/Getty Images)
One of the leading movie stars of the 1970s, James Caan once said he was twice honored as New York City’s “Italian of the Year.” It made sense, in a way: his fans were used to seeing him in tough guy roles, including one in arguably the most famous Italian gangster flick of all time, “The Godfather.” But Caan was born to German-Jewish immigrants in Queens, where his father was a kosher butcher, before starring in movies such as “Brian’s Song,” “The Gambler,” and, later in his career, Will Ferrell’s hit comedy “Elf.” His onscreen (and offscreen) persona did much to break stereotypes about weak, wimpy Jewish men. “He’s in his own lane, Jew-wise,” Seth Rogen wrote in a 2021 memoir, calling Caan an unusually “scary Jew.” Caan died July 6 in Los Angeles at 82.
Elana Dykewomon
Lesbian author, poet and playwright Elana Dykewomon, photographed at her home in Oakland, Calif., on May 1, 2022, died Aug. 7, 2022. (Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty Images)
Despite never earning mainstream commercial success, Elana Dykewomon was a pioneer in the world of lesbian-themed fiction. “Beyond the Pale,” her award-winning 1997 novel, traced the intertwined stories of Jewish lesbians from Kishinev, Moldova, to the Lower East Side, in a saga that included both Russian pogroms and the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. “It can’t be that we are the first generation of Jewish lesbian activists on the planet,” Dykewoman said at the time. “So part of what the novel is about is searching for our ancestors and ancestral community as Jewish lesbians.” Born Elana Nachman in New York City in 1949, Dykewomon changed her name after the publication of her first novel, “Riverfinger Women,” in 1974. She wanted to distance herself from the Nachman line of rabbis from whom she descended, she told J. The Jewish News of Northern California, in 1997. She adopted Dykewoman, then Dykewomon, to demonstrate her allegiance to the lesbian community — but later regretted not using her name to assert her Jewish identity, too. “If I had to do it all over again, I might have chosen Dykestein or Dykeberg,” she said at the time. Though she rejected religion after becoming a radical feminist, she said, she studied Yiddish, Torah and Talmud while writing “Beyond the Pale”; often wrote on Jewish themes; and frequently included Jewish characters in her work. The 2009 novel “Risk,” for example, featured a Jewish lesbian who lives in Oakland and makes a living tutoring high school students. Dykewomon died in August at 72 from cancer.
Hanna Pick-Goslar
Hannah Pick-Goslar seen at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Oct. 11, 2012. (Marcel Antonisse/ANP/AFP via Getty Images)
Hannah Pick-Goslar appears multiple times in Anne Frank’s iconic diary — as both a close friend and a premonition of the Holocaust horrors to come for Frank’s family. As Anne wrote after having a nightmare about her friend: “[Her] eyes were very big and she looked so sadly and reproachfully at me that I could read in her eyes, ‘Oh, Anne, why have you deserted me? Help, oh, help me, rescue me from this hell!’” Their final meeting would be at a fence in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After recuperating from her liberation from the camp in the Netherlands and then later in Switzerland with her aunt and uncle, Pick-Goslar emigrated in 1947 to Israel, where she became a pediatric nurse and Holocaust speaker. Her friendship with Frank was the subject of a book, “Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend,” and a Dutch film, “My Best Friend Anne Frank” (2021). Pick-Goslar died in Jerusalem on Oct. 28 at 93.
Gilbert Gottfried
Gilbert Gottfried at SiriusXM Studios in New York City, Feb. 3, 2020. (Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for SiriusXM)
For a comic known for his grating, nasally voice and extremely R-rated jokes, Gilbert Gottfried was a surprisingly sweet and loving Jewish dad who grew more in touch with his Jewishness after marrying his wife in 2007. The man known as the Aflac duck voice got himself nearly canceled more than once: In 1991, Fox apologized after Gottfried, hosting the Emmy awards, kept joking about fellow comic Pee-wee Herman’s arrest for masturbating in an adult movie theater. He continued to score gigs in movies, on talk radio (frequently with Howard Stern), on sketch shows and sitcoms, and as a voice on cartoons. He was the funny animal sidekick, Iago the parrot, in Disney’s “Aladdin.” Then he famously told perhaps the first joke about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, just a few days after terrorists piloted airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. “I’ve always said tragedy and comedy are roommates,” Gottfried told Vulture in 2019. Gottfried died Feb. 28 at 67 in New York from complications related to myotonic dystrophy, a rare condition.
Estelle Harris
Estelle Harris and Jason Alexander greet each other at the after-party for “The Producers” at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, May 29, 2003. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Born Estelle, immortalized on TV as Estelle — Estelle Costanza, to be exact, the always shrill and frequently apoplectic mother to George Costanza, on the sitcom “Seinfeld” from 1992 until the show’s finale in 1998. According to Deadline, it was kismet: the character was named Estelle before Harris landed the part. Harris was born in New York City in 1928 where her parents, Jews of Polish descent, owned a candy store in Manhattan. When Harris was 7 years old, the family moved to Tarentum, Pennsylvania, where Harris suffered from antisemitic bullying at school. She quickly to turning to the theater, aided by elocution lessons, and found her calling. Though Harris went on to a prolific career recording voiceovers for commercials and playing minor characters in movies and TV shows, she became so identified with her “Seinfeld” role that fans frequently stopped her on the street to tell her her she reminded them of their own mothers. Jason Alexander, who played her character’s son George on “Seinfeld,” remembered his “tv mama” in a tweet after her death. “One of my favorite people has passed – my tv mama, Estelle Harris. The joy of playing with her and relishing her glorious laughter was a treat. I adore you, Estelle,” he wrote. Harris died in April at 93.
Chaim Kanievsky
Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky at his home in Bnei Brak, Israel, Dec. 26, 2019. (Yaakov Nahumi/Flash90)
For one of the most revered Torah scholars on Earth, at least for many haredi Orthodox Jews, Chaim Kanievsky had surprisingly small handwriting. People would write to him from around the world with questions on postcards, and he would usually give “quite short answers,” a professor told JTA. “But from all his answers there are many books,” she added. After the 2017 death of Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteinman, Kanievsky became the preeminent leader of Israel’s non-Hasidic haredi Orthodox community, an authority on matters of Jewish law. He was an isolated figure who kept to himself and studied Jewish texts in the city Bnei Brak, but he became more vocal on political topics late in life. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kanievsky first lobbied for yeshivas to stay open, but once vaccines became available, he bucked the opinions of many in his community and pushed Jews to get vaccinated — earning some death threats in the process. Kanievsky died at 94 in Bnei Brak in March.
Aline Kominsky Crumb
Aline Crumb and Robert Crumb attend A Night at Crumbland celebrating Stella McCartney and Robert Crum Collaboration and the R. Crumb Handbook at the Stella McCartney Store, in New York City, April 12, 2005. (Nick Papananias/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
In one of her autobiographical comics, Aline Kominsky Crumb wrote about seeing one Jewish girl after another coming into high school on Long Island after plastic surgery. “Me ‘n’ my friends developed a ‘big nose pride,’” she wrote, and one of the characters says, “I could not stand to look like a carbon copy!” Working with her husband Robert Crumb, also a leading underground comics artist, and then on her own, Kominsky-Crumb brought raw self-lacerating accountability to the genre, subverting stereotypes about Jewish women along the way. Seen by many in the 1970s and 80s as overly crude or controversial, she’s now an icon for many feminist artists. Roz Chast said her influence is seen in “every woman who creates her own cartoon voice.” Kominsky-Crumb died of pancreatic cancer at 74 in November.
Sam Massell
Mayor Sam Massell , center, and his daughter Melanie, seated, welcome members of the Jackson Five to the mayor’s office in Atlanta, April 7, 1971. (Photo by Afro American News via Getty Images)
Sam Massell was Atlanta’s first Jewish mayor, serving from 1970-1974, and the city’s last white mayor. But he was remembered as more than a single-term bookend: Massell was the first mayor to prove that the city’s Blacks had clout enough to elevate their chosen candidate to office, and he embedded Black leaders in government and built its mass transport system, forever changing the city. During his term as mayor, the number of Blacks in leadership positions doubled, to 40%. “Being black means you are always different,” he would say. “But being Jewish means I am always different, too.” Massell died March 13 at 94.
Miriam Naor
Supreme Court President Miriam Naor speaks during a swearing-in ceremony for newly appointed judges for the Supreme Court at the President’s residence in Jerusalem, Jun. 13, 2017. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Miriam Naor served on the Israeli Supreme Court for 14 years and became the second woman to helm the court as chief justice. Her tenure presided over a period when the court made several significant rulings around religious pluralism in Israel. One of the most important came in 2016, when the court ruled that Israel must recognize conversions to Judaism performed in Israel outside of the rabbinate, which controls all religious matters in Israel, for the purposes of citizenship under the country’s Law of Return. During her tenure, the court also ruled that mikvehs, or ritual baths, in Israel had to be made available for the use of non-Orthodox converts to Judaism. Speaking at her swearing-in ceremony in 2015, Naor spoke about the need to preserve Israel’s character as a “Jewish and democratic state that upholds the principle of equality” as well as to “protect human rights and the rule of law.” Naor died in Jerusalem on Jan. 24 at 74.
Nehemiah Persoff
Nehemiah Persoff has hundreds of screen credits from classic Hollywood films and TV shows. Clockwise from top left: “Some Like It Hot,” “On The Waterfront,” “Red Sky at Morning,” “Yentl” and “Playhouse 90” (as Benito Mussolini). (Nehemiah Persoff/Photo illustration by Grace Yagel)
Few openly designate themselves as “character actors,” but Nehemiah Persoff didn’t shy away from the term. From the years following Israel’s independence through the Golden Age of Hollywood and beyond, Persoff had 200 stage and screen roles, working with directors such as Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Barbra Streisand and Martin Scorsese (playing a rabbi for the latter in “The Last Temptation of Christ”). He often played gangsters, including in the Marilyn Monroe classic “Some Like it Hot.” Born in Jerusalem, Persoff followed his family to the United States in 1929, and after World War II reconnected with his Israeli roots by performing onstage in the country. Though Persoff was not religious, he remained a devout Zionist his entire life and expressed regret for forgoing fighting in the 1948-49 War of Independence in order to further his acting career back in the United States. Persoff died in April at 102.
Svika Pick
Israeli singer Svika Pick, who died Aug. 14, 2022 at the age of 72, poses in a 1985 photo. (Moshe Shai/Flash90)
One of the most famous figures in Israeli cultural history, musician Svika Pick was a pioneer in his adopted country in many senses. He lightened up Israel’s pop music with simple chords and lyrics; he borrowed sounds from Mizrahi music and employed Black backup singers at a time when his government was trying to deport many would-be immigrants; and he set fashion trends with a feminine, Bowie-like aesthetic. In 1998, he wrote Israel’s third Eurovision winner, “Diva,” for Dana International, the first transgender person to win the contest. In his later years, Pick became a judge on reality shows and his daughter Daniella became paparazzi fodder when she married American director Quentin Tarantino, who moved to Tel Aviv to join the family. Pick died Aug. 14 in Ramat Hasharon, Israel, at 72.
Bob Saget
Comedian Bob Saget performs at the Improv Comedy Club at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Fla., Feb. 24, 2006. (Ralph Notaro/Getty Images)
A wholesome dad on network TV, and one of the raunchiest standup comedians in the business — few could boast a resume like Bob Saget’s. Before he got to Hollywood, Saget honed his comedy as a misbehaving Hebrew school student at Temple Israel in Norfolk, Virginia. “I go back and forth with my belief system, by the way. I’m not the best, most observant Jewish person you’ve ever met or talked to, and yet I’m Jewish and proud to be,” he once said. After a short stint contributing to CBS’ “The Morning Program,” Saget was cast to play a morning show host on TV. As Danny Tanner on “Full House,” Saget played a widowed dad and TV host raising three daughters in San Francisco with the help of his brother-in-law and his best friend. Saget was also known for hosting “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” The respected standup died in January at 65 from complications after a blunt head trauma.
Gerda Weissman Klein
President Barack Obama presents Jewish Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein a 2010 Presidential Medal of Freedom, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in 2011. (Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images)
Gerda Weissmann Klein’s liberation from concentration camps came after a brutal 350-mile death march to avoid the advance of the Allied forces. Of the 4,000 women who started the march, fewer than 120 survived. After moving to the United States, Weissman Klein became a bestselling author of 10 books, including her 1957 autobiography, “All But My Life,” which is frequently used as a text by Holocaust educators, and “The Hours After: Letters of Love and Longing in War’s Aftermath,” a chronicle of her and her husband’s correspondence in the years between liberation and their marriage. Decades later, Weissmann Klein’s story became the basis of the 1995 HBO short documentary “One Survivor Remembers,” which won both an Emmy and an Oscar (and is currently available for streaming on HBO Max). At the Oscars, she was almost played off before she could deliver an acceptance speech; but she stood her ground, and delivered a memorable message, concluding with, “Each of you who know the joy of freedom are winners.” Klein died April 3 in Phoenix, Arizona.
A.B. Yehoshua
Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua speaks after receiving an honorary degree at the University of Palermo, Sept. 10, 2019. (Francesco Militello Mirto/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Many of Israel’s leading writers take aim at the country’s moral and political dilemmas. But few attacked the subjects with such blatant intensity as A.B. Yehoshua, who authored 11 novels, three collections of short stories and four plays, in addition to other essays. His fiction centered on the on-the-ground lived experiences of Israelis, but there were always larger societal themes and critique. He experimented with format, too, leading critic Harold Bloom to compare him to William Faulkner in 1984. But he was arguably as well known for his sharp public statements on his homeland, politics and Diaspora Jews. A firm believer in a two-state solution who critiqued both the Israeli occupation and Palestinian leaders, Yehoshua also infuriated U.S. groups by saying “Only those living in Israel and taking part in the daily decisions of the Jewish state have a significant Jewish identity.” He died on June 14 in Tel Aviv at 85.
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The post 18 notable Jews who died in 2022 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Inspired by a queer Bundist poet, this Jewish composer set her work to Yiddish music
Composer Avi Fox-Rosen, like many Jews looking for meaningful community outside of religion, found a spiritual home in music.
“I think I was looking for, in some ways, a mentor or somebody in a generation ahead of me who can provide another model for how to be Jewish and work towards peace and intersectional justice,” Avi Fox-Rosen said.
He found queer Bundist poet Irena Klepfisz.
Klepfisz is the daughter of Rose and Michał Klepfisz, organizers of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Michał was killed on the second day of the revolt.
Fox-Rosen recently set to music a poem by Klepfisz, “Di rayze aheym/The journey home.” The Yiddish-English bilingual poem is one of her best known works and has been central to many people who have sought queer, secular and leftist framings for their engagement with Jewish identity. Fox-Rosen is releasing a new original album of the same title on May 30.
“Di rayze aheym” is based on a trip Klepfisz took with her mother to Poland in 1983 around the 40th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It was the first time either of them had been back since World War II.
In an interview with the author, Klepfisz compared today’s clean, well-kept condition of the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw with its appearance during her visit in the ‘80s, when it was overgrown and weathered by time. “It was practically wild,” she said.
“Where ‘Di rayze aheym’ sprang from was that cemetery — there are allusions in the poem to it,” said Klepfisz. The poem contains a total of nine sections, including “Vider a mol/Once again” and “A beys-oylem/A cemetery,” with many of them containing direct translations between English and Yiddish side by side.
Fox-Rosen remembers being drawn to Klepfisz’s work in the time following Oct. 7, as many Jews were finding themselves renegotiating their relationship to Jewish identity. “She has this incredible body of work that explores identity and displacement and diaspora. Also queerness, of course, and this exists alongside her work in prose and activism,” Fox-Rosen said.
Fox-Rosen, the son of Reform Rabbi Karen Fox, comes from Los Angeles. He was not raised with a particularly strong relationship to Yiddish culture. Describing his Jewish schooling, he said that “there was no significant Yiddish content, but a lot of Hebrew content.” He immersed himself in music, Jewish and otherwise, and eventually came to Yiddish music and culture in a roundabout way.
“My first big plan was to be a jazz guitar player, move to New York City and get famous that way. So I moved to New York City and as I worked in the jazz scene, I got to know a lot of Jewish musicians doing meaningful work with Yiddish content,” said Fox-Rosen. Frank London of the Klezmatics, as well as Greg Wall who is often referred to as the “Jazz Rabbi,” are among the musicians Fox-Rosen cites as influential in getting more involved in Yiddish culture.
He was initially drawn more to the secular Yiddish community than the actual Yiddish language or music traditions, he said. “I loved that there was this committed group of secular Jews making really interesting music, that’s what drew me in.”
He went on to become a member of the Yiddish-language rock band Yiddish Princess, alongside Sarah Gordon, Michael Winograd and Yoshie Fruchter.
“I’d been looking for a non-religious way to express Jewishness and find my people, and Irena has largely been one of the people to shape this community,” said Fox-Rosen.
Klepfisz has often referred to herself as a “practicing secular Jew.” She notes the intensely secular values of the Bund in interwar Poland. “The Bundists in interwar Poland didn’t deny their Jewishness; in fact, they emphasized it. But they were also militant secularists. For example, they would insist on meetings on Shabes.”
Not wanting to show up empty-handed when offering Klepfisz to set her poem to music, Fox-Rosen produced a demo of some verses of “Di rayze aheym” set to music.
“I was very flattered,” Klepfisz said. “I thought it was actually a very good choice, because it’s a very minimalist poem, so you don’t have a lot of words to fit. There are a lot of big blank spaces for the music.”
What resulted is an album of art-pop meets klezmer and Yiddish. Fox-Rosen noted influences for him from art-pop musicians Rufus Wainwright as well as Anohni and the Johnsons. Essential for Fox-Rosen in evoking a Yiddish sound are the instrumental contributions of two familiar faces in Yiddish music: klezmer fiddler Alicia Svigals and improvisational pianist Marilyn Lerner. “At times I wanted it to feel like a real fiddle kapelye, which it often does because of Alicia,” said Fox-Rosen. Kapelye is Yiddish for a klezmer band.
“You know, we used to say that Yiddish was ‘on life support,’ but I don’t think that’s true anymore,” Klepfisz said. “There was the revival that popped up in the ‘80s with klezmer music and now I think there’s a much greater appreciation for Yiddish culture.”
“Di rayze aheym/The journey home” is now available for pre-order through Borscht Beat on Bandcamp and will be released on May 30 alongside a concert at Jalopy Theatre in Brooklyn.
The post Inspired by a queer Bundist poet, this Jewish composer set her work to Yiddish music appeared first on The Forward.
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In Israel, an Arab-Jewish youth orchestra builds a new ‘East-West’ sound together
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — A raucous crowd of football fans filled the narrow strip of grass between Tel Aviv’s music center and Bloomfield Stadium, home to the Maccabi and Hapoel Tel Aviv soccer teams. Threading their way through them toward the concert hall was an incongruous procession of young musicians in eveningwear, lugging cases of every shape and size for contrabasses, violins, ouds, cellos and darbukas.
Inside the concert hall, a small audience of friends, siblings, parents and music lovers let out a swell of whoops and claps more in keeping with a soccer game than the polite demeanor usually reserved for orchestras.
The concert was the public culmination of a youth project composed of Jewish and Arab performers run by the Jerusalem Orchestra East & West, known as TJO, the Israeli orchestra led by conductor Tom Cohen that blends Western orchestral music with Middle Eastern, North African and Andalusian traditions. TJO has shared the stage with major Israeli artists including Matti Caspi, Danny Sanderson and Ehud Banai, and is due to perform at the Concordia Summit in New York in September.
The program brings youth orchestras from across the country under TJO’s guidance, training young musicians to carry forward the musical language Cohen has spent years developing. He describes that language as part of an evolving “Israeli sound,” made up of “everything that began with our grandparents in the various diasporas around the world and arrived with them here in waves of immigration.”
It grew out of his own journey from Western classical music into the music of the Maghreb and the Middle East, and “brings together elements from East and West without losing the identity and distinctiveness of either one,” he said.
“We’re creating something new that is greater than the sum of its parts,” Cohen said. Still, he was careful to add that the sound was not his orchestra’s invention, but part of “an evolution, not a revolution that erases what came before it.”
Last week’s concert brought together 80 musicians, ages 9 to 20, from half a dozen youth orchestras around the country, with some ensembles numbering in the dozens and others only a handful. Cohen said the project is meant to train a next generation of musicians who could one day join TJO, named the country’s leading orchestra by the Culture Ministry in 2022, while also sending them out as “ambassadors of its language” in their own work.
“Throughout the process, we placed special emphasis on artistic excellence, direct professional encounters and a connection to the adult orchestra as a mentoring body that sets the path,” he said of the youth project.
Ensemble Sdot, a nine-member group from the Sdot Negev Regional Council in southern Israel whose players mostly wore kippot, took the stage first to perform a reworked song by the late Israeli singer-songwriter Meir Banai. In the audience, waiting for his own performance, Youssef Sarhan, a 9-year-old violinist from Majd al-Krum, an Arab town in northern Israel, bobbed his head along from his seat. He had begun studying a year and a half earlier with Fadel Maana, a veteran violinist in the Arabic tradition from the same town and one of TJO’s senior musicians, who later brought him into the youth orchestra.
Addressing the young musicians from the stage, Cohen said he usually resists the familiar exercise of identifying who came from which community.
“This nonsense of saying who’s from where, it’s so unnecessary,” he said. But the mix was part of what made the music work, he told them, with Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze youth “backstage trading information about Umm Kulthum,” the revered Egyptian singer; maqams, the melodic modes used in Arabic and other Middle Eastern music; and other musical references.
“Even if you’ve never spoken to each other in your lives, when two children sit together on stage, catch each other’s eyes while they’re playing and creating something together, the connection that’s forged there is as deep as family,” Cohen told them.
Cohen, who lives with his family in Brussels, said the years of war had changed his relationship with his work, which had always been his greatest source of joy.
“It’s a feeling I can’t describe, a feeling of being outside of time,” he said by telephone after the concert. “But the last three years took that away from me.”
As an Israeli conductor who plays Arabic music, Cohen said, his international career went quiet amid growing hostility toward Israel abroad, while in Israel it became harder to enjoy performing when, as he put it, “half an hour away, the world is falling apart.”
The youth project offered a way back. Cohen said he found comfort in the connection between musicians “who come from completely different religions, backgrounds and places,” and came to see the orchestra as “a symbol of real hope, not just a professional artistic institution.”
Malak Aboufdaly, a teenage bassoon player from Acre, said that after years of war, she felt a responsibility to give the audience a measure of relief.
“It’s my job to make you feel how I play. Sad or happy,” she said. “But I think it’s really important that we can make people happy after two or three years of war.”
Outside the concert hall, 17-year-old Shoval Hayak, wearing a black evening gown, was being scolded to go back inside. She was excitable and effusive, not long removed from being a regular high school student in Moshav Hosen, near Israel’s northern border. After Oct. 7, her family was evacuated to Tel Aviv, where she threw herself into singing. She joined the youth orchestra framework and later performed with the Israeli hip-hop and funk band Hadag Nahash.
At the concert, she was preparing to sing “Hallelujah” with Nihaya Safadi, a singer and viola player also from Acre, in an arrangement Cohen wrote during the orchestra’s first summer seminar.
“I didn’t believe I could ever be a singer,” she said.
Some of her peers, she said, tried to escape the reality of war and displacement through recreational drugs. Hayak found her escape in music.
“I gave my heart and soul to this project. I got sucked into it more and more,” she said. “I truly believe that if I give my whole heart, all the small details that make everything shine come to the surface. Each time I go on, there are tiny improvements that I’m not even aware of at the time.”
She spoke quickly and warmly about the people around her: her mother, who she called “my support system”; Cohen, who she said had become like a father to her; and her boyfriend Yair, who could not attend because he was observing the Omer, the traditional mourning period between Passover and Shavuot when many observant Jews avoid live music. “Bless his soul, I adore him,” she said.
The same affection extended to the other young musicians she performed with. “They’re the best family I could ever ask for,” she said.
Cohen said watching young musicians like Hayak “become professional and be captivated by the magic of music” is part of what kept him invested in the project, which he took on as a volunteer effort. The next step, he said, is to give the program a larger stage and bring in more students.
The adult orchestra returned to the same East-West language last week in a concert about mixed identity at the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv, with additional performances scheduled elsewhere. The program centered on “matrouz,” Arabic for “interweaving,” a Judeo-Arabic tradition of placing Hebrew lyrics over Arabic melodies billed by the orchestra as the “original Jewish mash-up.”
Its pre-recorded guests included Dana International, the Israeli pop star who became the first transgender singer to win Eurovision in 1998, and Yousef Sweid, the Arab Israeli actor – performers who mirror the orchestra’s interest in what it calls “both/and” identities that can be Arab and Jewish, left-wing and right-wing, religious and secular.
The youth evening ended with all the young musicians together playing “Fatouma,” a Lebanese piece arranged and led by Cohen, who bounced on the balls of his feet, twirled on stage and flashed theatrical expressions at the players as he conducted.
“I was looking for a way back to my happiness and I found it in this world of children,” he said. “When I’m with them and making music, I go back to real, deep joy. Like a child.”
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Brooklyn grocer’s boycott of Israeli products spurs celebration and talk of lawsuits
The move by a members-only New York City grocery to ban products from Israel achieved a long-sought goal for a boycott movement, while leaving open questions about what happens next — including possible lawsuits.
Members of the Park Slope Food Coop voted Tuesday night to boycott Israeli products, with 67% of 6,772 votes cast in favor of the boycott and 31% against, following a related vote to lower the threshold for approving boycotts from 75% to 50% plus one vote. The measure specifies that the ban will continue “until Israel complies with international law, including by ceasing unlawful discriminatory practices, in its treatment of Palestinians.”
The co-op had debated a boycott for more than a decade, aligned with a global boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
Some longtime members and staff objected, voicing concerns about dividing a usually cohesive community where members must volunteer their labor and work in teams in order to shop. Tensions flared in the run-up to Tuesday’s vote, drawing in condemnations from a local rabbi and congressman.
But the only words on the measure itself Tuesday night came in the presentation from its sponsors, which cited “Israeli occupation and apartheid” and “genocide in Gaza” — followed by a successful motion to preempt discussion before the vote.
“Tonight’s win is proof that cooperative movements are powerful models for exercising solidarity and participatory democracy,” said PSFC for Palestine member Taylor Pate, who is running for the coop board. “I am so proud to be a member of the world’s largest member-labor-required food coop that has decisively voted no to supporting a country that has carried out genocide, occupation, and apartheid in Palestine.”
The campaign’s work is not finished. All Park Slope Food Coop boycotts — which historically included South Africa and Chile — must come up for an annual renewal vote.
Alyce Barr, a veteran Jewish coop member who introduced the ban proposal Tuesday night, says future efforts will involve “work with the members of our coop to make sure that our coop is everything we want it to be — welcoming, available to people across economic levels and ethnicities” as well as working “to get more people involved in the democratic effort.”
But some attorneys monitoring the vote and its aftermath suggest talk of democracy does not change an outcome they consider discriminatory.
Kenneth Marcus, CEO of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law — which helped negotiate a settlement in 2022 that prevented Ben & Jerry’s from refusing to sell its ice cream in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — said in a statement to the Forward the group “is actively evaluating all available legal claims arising from the discriminatory nature of this boycott and the procedural irregularities that allowed it to pass.”
Coop4Unity, a group of members who opposed the boycott, said in an email that they had already retained legal counsel and begun to develop a litigation strategy.
New York City and state Human Rights Law prohibit boycotts that discriminate against someone because of a protected class, such as race or national origin. Groups including the Lawfare Project have argued that provision makes it illegal to engage in boycotts of Israeli goods, which they view as a form of discrimination based on national origin.
Craig Gurian, executive director of the Anti-Discrimination Center — which helped draft parts of New York City’s human rights law — said he believes a suit could be brought that alleges the coop is unwilling to do business with vendors based on their national origin or religion.
“If anybody on the pro-boycott side is thinking, ‘Oh, this is a slam dunk, there’s no risk of liability here,’ they’re being imprudent,” Gurian told the Forward.
But legal advocacy groups including the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal have argued boycotts are protected under the First Amendment because they target the policies of the Israeli government, not Jews or Israelis because of their religion or nationality.
A food coop in Olympia, Washington, successfully fought off a lawsuit after it approved an Israeli products ban in 2010.
Meanwhile, U.S. food companies that import products from Israel are waiting to hear what happens next.
One is Seed + Mill, a Manhattan-based sesame and halva brand. Australian co-founder Rachel Simons said she hasn’t heard from the coop, but she assumed after yesterday’s vote that the company’s products would no longer be stocked.
The Park Slope Food Coop has been one of the company’s largest, most high-profile retail outlets, Simons said, accounting for thousands of dollars in sales. She said that the company works with a tahini factory in Israel owned by Arab Israelis, and that her team in New York employs people of many different nationalities and religions.
“I feel a tremendous responsibility to humanize the entire business, the supply chain, the people who are being hurt and harmed by this decision,” Simons told the Forward. “The people who voted against our products, I don’t know how much they really know about who they’re hurting.”
Park Slope Food Coop for Palestine responded with a statement: “Our Coop’s boycott policy is a response to genocide and apartheid, consistent with our values and past boycotts including apartheid South Africa.”
Fresh Traction
The Park Slope Food Coop ban comes as the larger BDS movement is finding fresh traction following the Gaza War.
Bestselling Irish author Sally Rooney, who long refused to work with Israeli publishing houses in compliance with the boycott, recently announced plans to publish her latest novel in Hebrew through an Israeli publisher that now complies with specific tenets of BDS by accepting the movement’s central three demands — “an end to Israel’s occupation of territories captured in 1967, full civil equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the implementation of the Palestinian right of return” — and not doing business in West Bank settlements or receiving money from the Israeli state.
In the U.S., opposition to Israel boycotts attracted bipartisan consensus even relatively recently. In 2019, Congress passed a resolution condemning the boycott, divest and sanction movement by an overwhelming margin of 398-17, and nearly two dozen states have their own restrictions.
But that consensus is breaking down as the conflict in Gaza and war with Iran has brought the movement to boycott Israel to the fore, such as when BDS advocates last October claimed victory for the closure of a popular Israeli restaurant chain in Washington, D.C.
BDS activists are also renewing efforts to repeal legislation or executive orders aimed at limiting boycotts against Israel. Illinois was one of the first states to pass legislation banning the state’s public pension funds from investing in foreign companies that boycott Israel in 2010. The law passed unanimously.
Now, State Rep. Abdelnasser Rashid has introduced legislation to repeal the law. He has found support from Daniel Biss, the Jewish mayor of Evanston, Ill., who is now a Democratic nominee running for Congress.
Biss voted for the anti-BDS law when he was a state senator in 2015, but now he says he’s changed his mind.
“We should all be able to agree that our government must not be wielded to stop people from using their economic agency to advocate for their values,” Biss wrote in a Substack post.
Similar efforts to repeal laws or executive orders that bar state transactions with companies that boycott Israel are ongoing in Maryland, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
“People in other states have reached out to us,” Rebekah Levin, a Jewish Voice for Peace member in Illinois, told the anti-Zionist news site Mondoweiss. “They want to know what we did and how we did it. If we overturn this it would be a boost to other states. It’s a powerful message. This is why pro-Israel groups are afraid of this passing. It’s about more than just Illinois.”
Supporters of the Park Slope Food Coop boycott also see their effort as the beginning of a broader fight.
“The Park Slope Food Coop has inspired and facilitated the growth of co-ops in New York City and around the world, and organizers hope that tonight’s victory will resonate in a similar way,” Park Slope Food Coop Members for Palestine said in a statement.
Sarah Diaz contributed research.
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