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A British spy, a notorious murderer, the Indiana Jones of the insect world, and a very Jewish history
Jews are often thought of as urban, bookish folks who don’t venture out into the wild. But there have been plenty of Jews who break that mold — Abraham Cahan, founder of the Forward, was himself a birder. In To Life: Jews Exploring Nature, author Joel Greenberg, with Judith Winston, a research associate at the Smithsonian Marine Station in Florida, tells the life stories of a group of Jewish researchers, naturalists and environmentalists. I spoke with Greenberg, a research associate of the Field Museum and the Chicago Academy of Sciences Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, book author and avid birder who lives in Westmont, IL, about the accomplished and often adventurous lives of the scientists he profiled. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Countering the common perception of Jews as indoor cats, you found a group of Jews who spent their careers hunting spiders, skinning mammal specimens and handling snakes. Is the cliché inaccurate?
I cite Fran Lebowitz, who says that the outdoors is what you pass through when you go from your apartment to a cab. For a variety of reasons, Jews are kind of urban people. But when you have a literature that goes back 4000 years, you can find anything in it. You find people loving nature and people hating it.
Did your subjects’ Judaism play a role in drawing them to study the natural world?
There are threads that are well recognized in the Jewish world, though they certainly aren’t unique to it, that had an influence — like education being important, and supporting your children. But I picked people who manifested their Jewishness in different ways. Joan Ehrenfeld, an ecologist and environmentalist, was very Orthodox, and Judaism was very much part of the foundation of what she did. Whereas Philip Hershkovitz, a neotropical mammalogist at the Field Museum, kept it to himself to the point that his kids were shocked to learn that they were Jewish.
Andrew Spielman, who studied insect vectors of infectious disease, was known for arguing with people over individual words when they were writing papers. Longtime assistants said he approached these things almost like a Talmudic scholar.
Some of the people you profile have Hollywood-worthy life stories, starting with Aaron Aaronsohn. Can you tell a little bit about him?
He’s the person whose story goes back the farthest in time. His family left Europe to escape the pogroms, and settled in Palestine. He became totally intrigued by insects and plants, and became a real authority. On a trip to Germany, he met some world-famous botanists. They were interested in an ancient form of wheat called wild emmer, a single specimen of which had been found close to what is now the Syrian–Israeli border. They encouraged Aaronsohn to look for the plant because it might hold qualities that would increase the resilience and nutrition of modern wheat strains. He searched — and found it in a vineyard near the Golan Heights. It made him world-famous.
Just before the start of World War I, in which the Ottoman Empire sided with Germany, there was an infestation of desert locusts — billions of them. The Ottoman army commander said, ‘Who can help me with this?’ Everyone said, ‘Aaronsohn.’ So they brought in Aaronsohn. He and the team he assembled were allowed to go everywhere — to transportation hubs, to military bases. They became a spy ring, feeding the British the most detailed and accurate intelligence that was available.
Britain’s principal military goal was to take Jerusalem. The general there had failed twice. Then they brought in Field Marshal Edmund Allenby. He developed a rapport with Aaronson, followed his suggestions, and took Jerusalem in one try. What Aaronsohn did on behalf of the British was a major factor in Arthur Balfour issuing the British declaration in support of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. So it had an incredible impact on the world.
Another remarkable story, in a very different way, is that of Nathan Leopold. He and his friend Richard Loeb murdered a 14-year-old boy in 1924; but he was also a highly respected birder. Talk a little about your decision to include him.
I’ve long had an interest in him. Leopold is beyond understanding. He and Loeb committed a horrific crime. But he was one of the youngest people ever to be published in The Auk (now Ornithology), the country’s premier ornithological journal, when he was just under 14 years old. And he did important work on Kirtland’s warblers, a bird which back then was very poorly known. He was the first to correlate the rarity of the warbler with parasitism by brown-headed cowbirds. That knowledge might well have been a factor in saving the bird from extinction.
While he was in prison, he agreed to be injected with malaria, which during World War II was a big problem for US troops in Asia. When he was paroled to Puerto Rico, he got a master’s degree in public health and wrote Checklist of Birds of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
He did this terrible thing — but he also had incredibly broad interests and accomplishments.
You write about how antisemitism nearly derailed the career of Libbie Henrietta Hyman when she was at the University of Chicago.
She loved plants and wanted to do botany, so she entered UChicago’s botany program. But she was in a class that was being taught by a graduate student who was an ardent eugenicist who hated Jews, among other groups. He forced her out.
But she found a home in zoology, staying at the University of Chicago from undergraduate to doctorate and staying 15 years as a research assistant to her advisor. She authored two lab textbooks that sold enough copies for her to reach financial independence. She left Chicago and moved to New York, where she worked on her greatest accomplishment — a six-volume compendium called The Invertebrates. She worked out of an office at the American Museum of Natural History, and illustrated the volumes herself. They received world acclaim.
Several of these folks sound like Indiana Jones-level adventurers, spending months in jungles collecting specimens — like Andrew Spielman, a public health entomologist who studied insects that transmit human disease.
His daughter called him “Indiana Papa.” Once he was in Jamaica monitoring water-filled pots for mosquitoes, and he encountered this big guy who said, ‘You know what they call me? “Big Blade.’” He showed him his machete. Spielman had to flee. Another time he was in Ethiopia and he and a colleague went out at night looking for hippopotamuses, and they were surrounded by Ethiopian armed forces who thought they were spies. It got really heated, but fortunately, things calmed down.
Hershkovitz went on his last field trip to Brazil when he was 82 years old. I’m blown away by this. Another time he took his wife and their oldest daughter to Colombia for 18 months. They stayed in cities and he was out there in the hinterlands collecting specimens. His wife would write to him. She was totally supportive of him, but she wrote, “My dream is to move back to Chicago, go to the A&P, and have a good doctor and dentist.”
There were even dangers back home. At the Field Museum, herpetologist Hymen Marx witnessed an awful incident with a venomous snake.
Marlin Perkins at the Lincoln Park Zoo had received a bunch of snakes. He thought one of them was a boomslang, a venomous tree snake, but it didn’t quite match the pictures. So he had somebody drive the snake over to the Field so that Marx, herpetologist Karl Schmidt and the herpetology curator could look at it. They all handled it — but it bit Schmidt in the thumb. He died within two days. He refused medical assistance because he didn’t want to alter the symptoms. He kept a diary of the details; he wanted it to be scientific.
Witnessing that affected Marx greatly. It used to be that you could have live snakes at the Field; Marx used to walk around with a python around his neck and torso. But after that there could be no live snakes.
You yourself are a Jewish naturalist and birder. Is being Jewish connected to your passion for the natural world?
My family was pretty secular; I went to Hebrew school for one year. But when I was at the University of Arizona, a group of us birders went to this remote area in southern Mexico. We actually contributed to scientific knowledge: We obtained the first known chicks of the horned guan, and we discovered that the azure-rumped tanager, which was thought to be rare, in fact just had a very narrow elevational range.
It was Passover, and a friend in Tucson gave us a piece of matzo and some of the other elements. It wasn’t a full-fledged seder, but we did this little seder in a place where I’m sure there’s never been one before or since. It’s a part of me.
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Do you suffer from ‘Israel Derangement Syndrome’? This ad says there’s a cure
It opens like a two-minute infomercial pulled off a 1990s VHS tape. Soft lighting, Clinton-era fashion, a narrator whose voice has the reassuring cadence of a prescription drug ad. “Do you or someone you love suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome?” he asks.
The two-minute ad has become one of the most-shared clips on Jewish and pro-Israel social media this week — posted Wednesday morning, it garnered 2.6 million views on X by Thursday afternoon.
“Israel Derangement Syndrome” is presented like a real illness, complete with a fictional treatment center, the Clarity Center, and patients who describe “recovering.” The “symptoms” are a list of ways people criticize Israel and its supporters — bringing up the conflict unprompted, refusing to see any other issue in the world as important, being unable to acknowledge nuance. The “cure,” according to the ad, is just reading more and checking your sources. It ends with a rapid-fire list of side effects: “reading past the headline, a sudden interest in Middle East history, and a constant urge to touch grass.”
The ad’s target is obvious: people who are sharply critical of Israel. The name isn’t new. It’s modeled on “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term used to dismiss criticism of the president as pathology.
Why it lands the way it does
Anita Atwell Seate, a professor of communication at the University of Maryland who studies how people’s group identities shape the way they respond to criticism, called what’s happening in the video a textbook case of tribalism.
Our group memberships, she said, shape our psychological processes, since they’re so tied to our sense of self. That pushes us to process information in self-protective ways: “When we feel good about our social groups,” she said, “we feel good about ourselves.”
There’s a well-documented pattern researchers call the “intergroup sensitivity effect,” where people are far more willing to accept criticism from members of their own group than from people they see as outsiders. When criticism comes from outside, the instinct isn’t to engage with it; it’s to discredit whoever’s delivering it. “They’re deranged, they don’t understand facts,” Atwell Seate said, describing that reflex, which is more or less the whole premise of the ad.
She doesn’t see the video as an attempt at persuasion at all. “It doesn’t do anything to help change hearts and minds of the out-group,” she said “But it certainly does something important for the in-group, which is reify their beliefs.” Videos like this, she says, are like a pep talk — aimed at people who already agree, meant to bring them closer together.
Where it came from
It’s not entirely clear who actually made the video. What’s clear is that it was shared — and got millions of views — from an X account called the Trencher Broadcasting Company, whose bio reads: “Building the future of AI media. Mostly satire, always entertaining.” It appears to have been made with AI video tools, part of a broader wave of AI-generated political videos that have flooded social media this year.
TBC has posted this kind of thing before. Last week, the account shared an AI-fabricated video appearing to show Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and YouTube personality Ms. Rachel discussing Israeli “colonizers” with children — a conversation that never actually happened.
Ms. Rachel had, notably, donated to El-Sayed’s campaign, and both have been outspoken advocates for children in Gaza, which may have inspired the video.
The “Israel Derangement Syndrome” video ends with a display of fake contact info, which comes with its own punchline.
Call the phone number and it’s like spinning a roulette wheel. The first time I called, the robotic voice wanted to sell me a home security system. The second time: a medical alert device. And the third time, I got this message: “If you received a call displaying this telephone number on your caller ID, it has been spoofed, meaning the caller ID has been faked by a scammer trying to hide their actual telephone number. We are sorry this is occurring. Unfortunately, we cannot stop this from happening.”
The ad also promotes a website IDSHelp.org, a domain that was registered on Tuesday and redirects to DerekhLearning.com, the homepage of an AI-powered app for studying Torah and Talmud. It’s a fitting coda for a video built around telling people to check their sources.
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Did this field trip to a mosque violate the First Amendment? A group of Palo Alto parents think so.
A group of Jewish, Hindu and Zoroastrian parents and students are suing a California school district, alleging that a high school program’s field trip to a mosque — and no other houses of worship — violated the First Amendment.
The suit, brought forth by Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools – San Francisco Bay Area, focuses on two trips that were part of a social justice program at Palo Alto High School.
According to the complaint filed in the Northern District of California on August 7: “The district failed to maintain religious neutrality, failed to ensure equal treatment among faiths, failed to protect student privacy and failed to vet, supervise, and monitor religiously divisive outside speakers during the school-sponsored event.”
Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools nor the Palo Alto Unified School District immediately responded to requests for comment.
The trip was part of Palo Alto High’s Social Justice Pathway, where according to a promotional video, students in 10th through 12th grades take English and history courses “through a social justice lens rather than the standard analytical lens, where facts and dates are memorized.” Palo Alto High started the program in 2014.
Field trips around the Bay Area are a hallmark of the program, including travels to Angel Island, where many Asian immigrants arrived in the U.S. in the early 20th century, and to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Students also have heard from a variety of speakers, including a Holocaust survivor and a Cambodian refugee.
The field trips to the mosque happened in 2022 and 2025. The plaintiffs include three Jewish Palo Alto High students, at least one of whom took part in the Social Justice Pathway.
The parent plaintiffs allege that the school had not fully informed them that their children were going to participate in “religiously inflected activity.”
According to the complaint, female students were encouraged to observe the customary dress code of wearing head coverings inside the mosque. They also observed a midday prayer, interacted with participants of a Quran memorization program, received Qurans as gifts and were “taught that Islam, in particular, promotes social justice,” the suit says.
“[The plaintiffs] belong to religious traditions that practice social justice,” the suit says. “The government’s endorsement of Islam in particular as a social justice faith denigrates their respective traditions and their identities as members of faith communities due equal treatment and appreciation within the District, State and country.”
The plaintiffs allege that the visit violated the First Amendment, since the public school was promoting a specific religion, and the 14th amendment, for elevating one religion over others.
A student at Palo Alto High who is part of the Social Justice Pathway disagreed, describing it as part of a broader religion unit.
“There was never a point on this trip where I felt in any way that the mosque or the school was trying to even suggest conversion,” he wrote in an Instagram comment on a local news post about the lawsuit. “The goal was obvious to us: Learn about an underrepresented religion present in our community.”
But plaintiffs also objected to the history of one of the speakers. Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who has faced allegations of antisemitism.
In 2019, Billoo was removed from the board of the Women’s March for past remarks she had made. She faced criticism for a 2021 Facebook post, where she warned against “polite zionists” like Hilllel and the Jewish federations, saying “they are not your friends.” A tweet of hers from October 7, 2023, following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks against Israel, also has faced scrutiny: “Pray for Gaza. We are witnessing decolonization,” she wrote.
In an emailed statement to the Forward, Billoo wrote, “Public schools have an obligation to remain neutral toward religion, but neutrality does not mean shielding students from learning about religion or religious communities.”
“Visiting a mosque, observing Muslims practice their faith, or learning about Islam is not the same as being compelled to practice Islam,” she wrote. “We are concerned that this lawsuit risks turning ordinary engagement with Islam and Muslims into something suspicious and could have a chilling effect on educators who want their students to learn about the diverse communities around them.”
But plaintiffs said allowing Billoo to speak with the students demonstrated negligence on the part of the school.
“Ms. Billoo was allowed unfettered access to students to advocate personal religious and political views without balancing perspective or adequate supervision.”
The school also allowed photos of the high schoolers to be taken at the event without parents’ permission, the suit says.
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Remains of last Israeli soldier missing from First Lebanon War’s Sultan Yacoub battle found
(JTA) — The remains of Yehuda Katz, the last Israeli soldier still missing from the 1982 Battle of Sultan Yacoub during the First Lebanon War, have been recovered after 44 years, the Israeli military said Tuesday, bringing to a close one of the country’s longest-running missing soldier cases.
Katz, a 22-year-old tank gunner and yeshiva student who disappeared just 10 days before he was due to complete his military service, was one of three soldiers whose fate was unknown for decades after Israeli forces became trapped by Syrian troops in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on June 11, 1982.
Twenty Israeli soldiers were killed and dozens more were wounded in the battle, with six initially listed as missing. Three were later returned or confirmed dead, leaving Katz, Zachary Baumel and Zvi Feldman as the only soldiers whose fate were unknown. The remains of Baumel and Feldman were recovered in separate operations in 2019 and 2025.
Katz’s remains were located during a special overnight operation carried out by the IDF in cooperation with Mossad and based on intelligence obtained in recent months. They were returned to Israel and military representatives informed Katz’s family of the discovery Tuesday morning.
For the soldiers who survived Sultan Yacoub, the news ended a wait that had followed them for much of their lives.
Avi Rath, who fought alongside Katz, said the unresolved fate of his comrade had stayed with him for decades. “The look on the family’s faces stays with you your entire life, a look that says, ‘You didn’t finish the job,’” Rath said in an interview on Tuesday with KAN public radio’s “Kalman Liberman” program. “Thank God, this closes a circle and resolves some of the uncertainty, but there is also great pain. It weighs on our conscience.”
Katz had studied in the Hesder program at Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, combining Torah study with military service. According to the yeshiva, he slept barely four hours a night while immersed in his studies. He had planned to become a rabbi and teach at a yeshiva after completing his military service.
On the night before the battle, Katz gathered fellow soldiers around him and taught them Maimonides’ laws governing the conduct of Jewish soldiers in battle, the yeshiva said on its website. He then led them in singing Psalm 23, including the verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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