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A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
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Happy 166th birthday, Abraham Cahan! Fifth graders write about the Forward founder’s legacy
As America celebrates its 250th birthday on July 4, the Forward celebrates the 166th birthday of its founder and first editor, Abraham Cahan on July 7. The socialist newspaperman founded the Yiddish-language newspaper known then as Forverts in 1897 to help Jewish immigrants navigate life in their new home.
To celebrate, we’re highlighting letters to the editor from fifth graders at Guggenheim Elementary, a public school in Port Washington, New York, who argue that Cahan’s life and encounters with antisemitism in Europe helped shape his life and legacy in America and continue to inspire Americans today to stand up against injustice and hate.
More than 20 students wrote the letters as a class assignment during Jewish American Heritage Month. The Forward selected excerpts from a handful of the submissions.
“A lot of what kids are absorbing today is coming from social media and things that are not necessarily accurate,” said Amanda Bromberg, the parent who created the lesson plan. “So we just wanted to make sure that they were from a young age exposed to positive contributions of Jewish Americans.”
Cahan’s life and legacy
Born in 1860 in Tsarist Russia, Cahan came of age in a society where Jews faced severe restrictions on where they could live, travel, study and work.
“Just imagine, being told you have to live in just one place and you can’t move anywhere else just because you’re Jewish. That would be awful, right?” fifth-grader Maggie wrote. “Well, that’s what Abe went through.”
“Cahan was treated very poorly in his old home,” classmate Eli added. “He didn’t feel safe there.”
Conditions further deteriorated after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Jews were falsely blamed for his murder, triggering a wave of pogroms. Cahan, who had become involved in Russia’s Revolutionary movement as a teenager, came under suspicion. Police raided his home searching for radical literature, prompting Cahan, then 21, to immigrate to the United States.
“His experience in Europe toward Jews was terrible, so when he came to America, that influenced him to change the ways Jews are treated,” fifth-grader Lyla wrote.
Life in New York brought a new set of challenges. Several students noted how Cahan had no ego about learning English, studying the language as an adult among schoolchildren on the Lower East Side.
“He wanted to learn English so bad, so he learned in a classroom with people that were around 14 while he was 22,” classmate Sydney wrote. “This must have been awkward and embarrassing, but he took the only chance he had to learn.”
Cahan then used his knowledge to help other newcomers in the New World. He worked in a cigar rolling factory by day and gave English-language lectures on socialism to fellow immigrants by night.
“Even when he was still learning English, he decided that some people needed more help than he did,” Mayim wrote. “So he took on tutoring them while working day and studying night and somehow finding time to assist people in need of help.”
“He wanted for everyone to get education: old and young, big and small, rich or poor,” Sydney added.
Ask Abraham
In 1897, Cahan founded the Yiddish Forverts. Beyond reporting the news of the day, the paper became a practical how-to guide for life in America. One of its most beloved features was the “Bundle of Letters,” or “Bintel Brief” in Yiddish, an advice column where readers asked for guidance on everything from romance and money troubles to labor disputes.
“Soon he added a section called a ‘bundle of words.’ That made it so readers could ask questions,” student Kaeli wrote. “It worked so well: He helped so many people!”
“He showed people to do things the American way, so that when they came they wouldn’t feel confused or lost,” Mayim wrote.
Cahan’s advice could be blunt. One man wrote that he wanted to marry a woman, but he could not stop fixating on a single flaw: a dimple in her chin.
“The tragedy is not that the girl has a dimple in her chin but that some people have a screw loose in their heads!” he replied.
Other letters reflected harsher realities of immigrant life. One unemployed man wrote that he had “no strength to continue” and pleaded, “Please comrades help me do not let me die this way.”
Cahan answered with characteristic practicality and empathy, directing him to a social services agency, assuring readers “they will not let him starve.”
The Forverts also fought for workers’ rights, boosting labor unions, raising money for striking workers and advocating for workplace safety regulations.
“Abe helped by speaking up for the rights of immigrants, workers and the poor,” Mallory wrote.
That mix of traditional journalism, practical guidance and social advocacy helped the newspaper build a devoted readership. By the 1920s, the Forverts had become enormously influential, with a daily circulation approaching 300,000 — surpassing that of The New York Times at the time.
Cahan remained the paper’s editor until his death in 1951, at age 91. But the fifth graders saw Cahan’s legacy as one that still endures.
“The Forward is still helping people around the world today,” fifth grader Juliana wrote, “all because of what Abe Cahan taught us.”
Student responses were lightly edited for spelling and grammar.
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How a 198-year-old New Orleans synagogue became one of America’s fastest-growing Jewish communities
NEW ORLEANS — By the time a trumpet player rose from the pews, candy was already flying through the sanctuary.
Children scrambled across the bimah beneath Touro Synagogue’s green-and-gold dome while the crowd clapped to the music and a 13-year-old boy in orange Nike sneakers stood beside his mom before two open Torah scrolls — one for the bar mitzvah boy, the other for his mother, who was 47, a recent convert celebrating her adult bat mitzvah.
By the end of services, congregants carrying guitars, flutes, and tambourines had transformed the sanctuary into something resembling a Mardi Gras second line.
In most American synagogues, this would have felt unusual. At Touro, located along the famous parade route, it felt nearly routine.
Across the country, congregations are shrinking, aging and consolidating. Denominational loyalty is weakening. Younger Jews are less likely to join synagogues at all. But here in New Orleans, Jewish communal life has experienced an unlikely revival.
New Orleans still carries Katrina in its census numbers. The city still has roughly 25% fewer residents than before the storm. Its Black population, while still the majority, has dropped most significantly. Jewish New Orleans, overwhelmingly white, tells a different story. Community leaders say the Jewish population has rebounded to — and perhaps surpassed — pre-Katrina levels.
The revival was driven partly by generational turnover. After the 2005 hurricane, many older New Orleans Jews decided not to return, choosing instead to spend retirement near children and family in cities like Houston and Atlanta. In their place came a younger generation of post-Katrina newcomers — volunteers, nonprofit workers, Tulane University transplants and young families drawn by the chance to help rebuild the city.
But the resurgence cannot be explained by demographics alone. Across the city, Jews describe a deeply interconnected communal ecosystem shaped by catastrophe, collaboration and a distinctly New Orleans instinct for improvisation.
The city’s Jewish institutions increasingly learned to share resources, blur lines between denominations and accommodate the realities of modern Jewish families. Interfaith couples found a warmer welcome. Synagogues that once occupied separate lanes began collaborating more closely. “Denominational boundaries here are very porous,” said Ilana Horwitz, a Tulane University Jewish Studies professor who is writing a book about how the Jewish community survived and rebuilt after Katrina.
At the center of that revival sits Touro Synagogue, a nearly 200-year-old Reform congregation that is defying institutional decline.
In 2019, Touro hired as its spiritual leader Rabbi Katie Bauman, a New Orleans native. She arrived just months before the pandemic would force synagogues across America to reinvent themselves.
At the time, the shul counted roughly 570 families. Today, it is approaching 750. Its religious school has grown from 131 students to 243 in six years. In 2019, the synagogue hosted eight b’nei mitzvah. Nearly 30 b’nai mitzvahs are already scheduled for the 2027-28 school year — so many that synagogue leaders have begun quietly confronting an unfamiliar problem: Are we growing too much?
“We’re not gonna turn people away,” said Kevin Wilkins, the synagogue’s president and the first convert ever to hold the role. “We’re not gonna have a waitlist.”
Two decades after Katrina nearly drowned New Orleans, Touro has become a kind of laboratory for what Jewish communal life can look like after disaster reshapes it.
The people who came after the storm
A Detroit native, Joshua Lichtman came to New Orleans in 2007 after spending time at a Jewish farming and environmental program in Connecticut. Like many people drawn south after Katrina, he was looking for purpose and a chance to help rebuild.
“It was volunteering and adventure,” Lichtman, 51, recalled one Saturday morning after services at Touro
Entire neighborhoods remained scarred by floodwaters. Lichtman spent those early months gutting homes, working in community gardens and helping with legal aid projects. Then he met Davida Finger, who ran the Katrina Clinic at Loyola University, which provided free legal assistance to residents displaced by the hurricane. They got married.
He came to help rebuild the city. Somewhere along the way, the city rebuilt him, too.
Lichtman stayed, helped launch Avodah New Orleans, a Jewish service corps program, and now works in financial planning. Today, he and his wife are raising two children in the city.
His story reflects a broader demographic shift that transformed Jewish New Orleans after Katrina. The Jewish community dropped from about 10,000 people to around 6,500 following the floods. “The Jewish population has been replenished,” said Horwitz, who moved to New Orleans from the Bay Area in 2021, making her both a scholar of the city’s Jewish revival and a participant in it. “But it’s a different configuration of people than there was before.”
Before Katrina, much of Jewish New Orleans was defined by continuity. Many families traced their roots in the city back four or five generations to German-Jewish immigrants who arrived in the 19th century. They attended the same schools, joined the same congregations and often stayed for life.
Reform Judaism, long the dominant expression of Jewish life here, reflected a distinctly Southern tradition — highly assimilated, deeply rooted in local civic affairs and often more connected to New Orleans than to the broader currents of American Judaism.
The community was tightly knit and deeply rooted. Institutional loyalty ran deep. Many worked in law, medicine or family-owned businesses built over generations. As the city’s economy shifted and younger residents left for bigger cities, the Jewish population had already begun slowly shrinking.
The people who arrived after Katrina brought different backgrounds and different reasons for coming. They were volunteers, nonprofit workers, academics, and entrepreneurs drawn not by inheritance but by opportunity — and by the chance to help rebuild.
The transformation was not entirely accidental. In the years after Katrina, the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans launched an incentive program for Jewish newcomers, offering a stipend for moving expenses, discounted tuition at the Jewish day school, and a year of free membership at a synagogue. According to the federation, hundreds of people participated in the program, which ran through 2012, and one in four have stayed.
One of the engines of that growth has been Tulane University, where 25% to 30% of undergraduate students are Jewish, according to local estimates, placing it higher than the University of Pennsylvania (17%), Columbia (16%) and Harvard (10%).
Today, some Jewish families view Tulane as an appealing alternative to more politically polarized campuses. Nicholas Lemann, the New Orleans-born author of Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries, said the university benefits from both New Orleans’ cultural appeal and a campus climate many parents perceive as less contentious than schools on the coasts.
“Kids won’t be exposed to anti-Zionism as at bigger Ivies,” said Lemann, a longtime professor and former dean at Columbia Journalism School. “That’s meaningful to many Jewish parents.”
Tulane functions as a pipeline bringing Jewish students, faculty and young professionals into the city, some of whom ultimately decide to stay.
Yet population alone does not explain the revival. What emerged after Katrina was a different way of organizing Jewish life in New Orleans. The city’s six synagogues and two Chabads routinely promote one another’s programs. Rabbis collaborate across denominational lines. Congregants often belong to more than one synagogue at a time.
Alan Smason, editor of the Crescent City Jewish News — which he founded after the hurricane — said much of that cooperation grew directly out of the storm. “We’ve got a Reform temple that actually lives next door to and partners with an Orthodox synagogue,” he said. “A lot of those traditions came about because of Katrina.”
Smason, a New Orleans native, has spent decades chronicling the city’s Jewish life. The cooperation he sees today would have been harder to imagine before the storm. “Out of the darkness,” he said, “came light.”
A different city
The community that emerged after Katrina was different. The result was a community that became more fluid and, in some ways, more open to experimentation than the one that preceded it. New Orleans has always been a city comfortable with reinvention.
On a humid afternoon, tour guide Roni Bossin led me through the French Quarter, pointing out traces of Jewish history hidden in plain sight.
There was the former factory where Joseph Haspel is credited with inventing the seersucker suit. There was Sam Zemurray — the Jewish immigrant known as “Sam the Banana Man” — who built a fruit empire from New Orleans. There was the Holocaust memorial overlooking the Mississippi River and the legacy of Judah Touro, the philanthropist whose name still adorns a hospital as well as the synagogue.
Jewish history here is less a chapter than a thread — stitched through the city’s commerce, politics, philanthropy and folklore. “Jews were woven into the story of New Orleans from the beginning,” said Bossin, a transplant from Israel.
Isaac Monsanto, the first Jewish settler in New Orleans for whom historical records exist, arrived in 1757. By 1828, local Jews had established a congregation that would eventually become Touro Synagogue.
But if Jewish New Orleans has deep roots, it has also changed dramatically. Lemann said the city he visits today feels markedly different from the one where he grew up. When he was young, many Jewish families had lived in New Orleans for generations. His father was born in the city. His grandfather was born in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. Local identity was often inherited.
Today, he said, the community includes far more newcomers. “The various elements of Jewish New Orleans have come together more,” Lemann said.
That history helps explain why Touro feels distinctly New Orleans. Unlike many American synagogues built on sprawling suburban campuses, the city presses right up against the sanctuary walls. The building sits along St. Charles Avenue with no parking lot separating it from the sidewalk. Streetcars rumble past. Mardi Gras floats pass the front doors. During carnival season, members gather there to watch parades together. The congregation builds viewing stands for children with disabilities. Families tailgate on synagogue grounds.
For Rabbi Lily Kowalski, an associate rabbi who joined the shul last year, one of her first Mardi Gras experiences at Touro came during Shabbat services. The congregation was praying when the parade began rolling past outside.
“There was something both ironic and beautiful,” she recalled.
Eventually, the clergy made a practical decision: They would skip a few songs from the end of the service. “The parade has started,” Kowalski remembered thinking. “We need to go outside and see the parade.”
On JazzFest weekend, Touro hosts a special musical Shabbat service that has become one of the congregation’s signature events for the past three decades. “We do love to party,” said Rabbi Bauman. “But it’s a symbol of how proud we are to be here.”
For generations, New Orleans has thrived by blending traditions rather than policing boundaries. Jazz emerged from that cultural mixing. So did much of the city’s cuisine, language and civic culture. Many congregants see Touro as a Jewish expression of the same instinct — a congregation more interested in bringing people together than sorting them into categories.
The open tent
The weekly pamphlet handed out to worshippers carries a simple message across the top: Touro synagogue welcomes all.
For Abby Gaunt, those words proved more than a slogan.
Raised Catholic in New York City, Gaunt had long felt drawn to Judaism. She married a Jewish man, sent her two children to Jewish schools and immersed herself in Jewish communal life. But she never felt the desire to convert.
Then came the 2018 Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh. As she read about the victims, one detail stopped her. Two of the people murdered that day — brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal — had Fragile X syndrome, the same genetic condition as her son, Mack.
The story felt personal. When schools struggled to accommodate Mack’s learning differences, Gaunt said New Orleans’ Jewish community had stepped forward to embrace him. The local Jewish day school accepted him when others would not. Congregants welcomed him. Families rallied around him.
“It just felt like they took you as you are,” Gaunt said of Touro. “There’s no asterisk.”
The experience led her to begin studying for conversion. This spring, she celebrated the culmination of that journey standing beside Mack. Mother and son shared the bimah. They recited prayers together. Each read from a Torah scroll — his for a bar mitzvah, hers for an adult bat mitzvah.
For Touro, it was a fitting image. The congregation’s growth has been fueled by newcomers and young families, and by an expansive understanding of who belongs. Its membership includes interfaith families, former Orthodox Jews, lifelong Reform Jews, converts and a growing number of congregants who arrived from a local Conservative synagogue.
Rather than asking newcomers to conform to a single model of Jewish life, synagogue leaders have increasingly adapted the institution around the people walking through the doors. “We’re not just saying we’re an open tent,” said Beth Shapiro Lavin, Touro’s executive vice president, and the congregation’s next president beginning in 2027. “We mean it.”
In a city rebuilt by people who arrived from somewhere else, belonging has become one of Touro’s defining values.
When Lavin joined Touro’s board in 2022, the congregation was already growing. She now finds herself thinking less about survival than succession. Touro will celebrate its 200th anniversary in 2028, during her presidency. Around the same time, her own daughter will celebrate her bat mitzvah in the sanctuary where Lavin herself grew up.
“It’s a really exciting time,” said Lavin, who moved back home after Katrina.
The questions facing Touro are different from those confronting many American synagogues. The congregation worships beneath a dome completed in 1909. Memorial plaques line the sanctuary walls, some honoring congregants who died in the 1800s. The names on the walls grow older every year. The children running beneath them do not.
Growth has created a new set of questions for synagogue leaders. “What is the right size?” Lavin asked.
Part of the answer, she believes, lies in making participation as easy as possible for young families. More than a decade ago, Touro eliminated mandatory membership dues, replacing them with a voluntary giving model.
The experiment worked. This year, Lavin said, roughly two-thirds of donors increased their contributions. Some quadrupled them. “The model only works when we all give what we can,” she said.
The payoff is visible throughout the building. Parents linger after services. Teenagers tutor younger students in Hebrew school. Congregants volunteer to coach b’nai mitzvah speeches. Children who once sat on the sanctuary floor receiving blessings from clergy eventually return as youth group leaders and religious school teachers.
Beyond denominations
A few years ago, a group of families from Shir Chadash, New Orleans’ Conservative synagogue, found themselves searching for a new spiritual home. Some were drawn by Rabbi Bauman’s charismatic leadership. Others were looking for a congregation in the city rather than the suburbs. Many already had friends at Touro.
What they weren’t looking for was a typical Reform service.
“We really appreciate Touro’s big tent approach,” said Ben Horwitz (no relation to Ilana), who helped found a lay-led group that now meets twice a month — once in a community member’s home and once in Touro’s library. “We should be able to serve this community writ large.”
Known as the Chavurat Or’Leans, it offers a more traditional style prayer experience while remaining fully part of the larger congregation. On some weekends, 30 to 50 people attend when it meets at Touro. The synagogue provides space, children’s programming and logistical support.
“It has been a win-win situation,” Horwitz said.
The arrangement reflects a broader philosophy taking hold at Touro. Rather than asking congregants to fit neatly into denominational categories, the synagogue increasingly tries to meet people where they are.
When Horwitz and his wife, Ellie Streiffer, began planning their son’s bar mitzvah, they wanted a traditional, egalitarian service. Touro not only accommodated the request, but provided rabbinic support to help their son prepare.
Other families have made similar choices. “We’re trying to push boundaries,” Bauman said. “People are looking for community more than a particular movement.”
The same flexibility that led Bauman to accommodate different religious traditions has also helped it navigate other forms of difference. Touro’s political diversity is unusual in an era when many religious communities have become more ideologically homogeneous. New Orleans itself remains a blue enclave in a deeply red state.
Bauman said she has watched congregants repeatedly choose community over agreement. “Especially in the last two years, which have been so challenging and so politically divisive,” she said, “people want to be together more than they want to be right.”
A problem most synagogues would envy
Part of the congregation’s growth coincided with Bauman’s arrival. She became senior rabbi in 2019, just months before the pandemic upended American religious life.
While congregations around the country migrated online, Bauman took much of Touro outdoors. Youth groups met camp-style in parks and courtyards. Families gathered under oak trees. Children who might have disappeared into screens continued seeing one another face-to-face.
“We just never did the Zoom thing,” for youth and teen education programs, Bauman said. Looking back, she believes that decision accelerated the congregation’s growth by strengthening relationships at a moment when many institutions were struggling to maintain them.
The growth has been so pronounced that last year Touro hired a third full-time rabbi for the first time in its history. Rabbi Kowalski arrived in the summer of 2025 from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to serve as associate rabbi and education director.
Sitting in her office one afternoon beneath a hand-painted sign reading “Welcome Rabbi Kowalski,” she described the job as both “inspiring and daunting.”
On Sunday mornings and Wednesday afternoons, the synagogue hums with activity. Religious school classes fill nearly every available room. Parents attend adult education programs while their children study Hebrew. Choir rehearsals meet at the same time.
The building was designed to hold memory. It is now straining to hold momentum. “We’re using every nook of the building,” Kowalski said.
For generations, the challenge facing American synagogues was how to attract young families. At Touro, the question has become something else entirely: How do you keep growing without losing the intimacy that made people want to join in the first place?
The second tablets
For Bauman, the synagogue’s revival begins much earlier than Touro’s recent growth.
At the joint mother-son b’nai mitzvah, Bauman’s sermon focused on one of Judaism’s oldest stories of rupture and repair. In that week’s Torah portion, Moses descends Mount Sinai carrying the Ten Commandments, only to smash the stone tablets after discovering the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf below. Eventually, God commands him to climb the mountain again and carve a second set.
The first tablets, Bauman told the congregation, belonged to a world that was orderly and unbroken. The second set came afterward. “The first tablets are simple and clear,” she said. “But life is messier than that.”
In post-Katrina New Orleans, the metaphor hardly felt abstract. Rebuilding was never supposed to mean restoration.
Horwitz, the Tulane professor, sees echoes of biblical stories throughout New Orleans’ experience after the hurricane. Her forthcoming book traces the community’s journey through themes of flood, exile, wilderness and return.
Horwitz, whose own family arrived in the United States as Soviet Jewish refugees in the late 1980s, argues that what endured after Katrina was the community itself — not as a collection of buildings, but as a web of relationships that helped people find one another again. “It’s fundamental,” Horwitz said. “Jewish communities are there for you in a moment of crisis.”
The Jewish New Orleans that emerged after Katrina is not identical to the one that existed before the storm. Many of the people are different. So are the ways they have learned to build community.
But perhaps that is what Bauman meant when she spoke about the second tablets. The first version was lost. The second pair, which carried the Jewish people through the wilderness, was the one that endured.
The post How a 198-year-old New Orleans synagogue became one of America’s fastest-growing Jewish communities appeared first on The Forward.
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How to stop worrying about the Democratic Socialists of America
The question of why three candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America bested more mainstream Democrats in congressional primaries in New York and Colorado last month is being answered by pundits, not pollsters.
There have been no exhaustive exit polls to explain why, in Colorado, Melat Kiros unseated incumbent Democrat Diana DeGette and New York voters chose Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez — not to mention DSA victories in a slew of state races.
But there is an exhausting panic.
American Jews are worried that the often virulent anti-Israel positions these candidates take show that opposition to Israel is now a litmus test for political viability in the Democratic Party, that describing Israel as “genocidal” and “apartheid” is the ante for any blue candidate.
Given the nature of some of these races, it certainly looks that way. In Colorado, the policy differences between DeGette and Kiros were negligible. DeGette has one of the most progressive voting records in Congress. But she took AIPAC money and paid for it.
And her opponent Kiros wasn’t just critical of Israel’s government’s policies. She, like many other DSA candidates, blamed Israel for the Oct. 7 attacks. Avila Chevalier attended the Oct. 8, 2023, DSA-promoted rally that celebrated the attacks.
Meanwhile, the panic among mainstream Democrats is that primary voters are putting forth candidates who will get clobbered in general elections. In a May New York Times/Siena poll, 47% of Democrats said they want the party to move center, while 28% said the party should move to the left.
That means while DSA candidates may win in what some have called “cobalt blue,” or deeply Democratic districts, with a high number of young, white, educated voters, in crucial swing districts a DSA candidate will take the party down with them.
Israel, demonized
However the general election turns out, primary results show that among not all but a significant group of Democratic voters, two brands have become toxic: Israel and the Democratic Party.
Type “Gaza” into TikTok, scroll for five minutes, and it’s easy to understand at least one reason why. The carnage Israel has wrought in Gaza plays on a visceral loop on social media. Israel as the aggressive colonialist oppressor is a given in much of academia. And Israel’s own actions at the hands of its most right-wing government in history — well, not helpful.
DSA’s official platform on Israel — the first foreign policy position on its site — calls for an end to economic and military aid to Israel and “national sovereignty for the Palestinian people.”
Its best-known members, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have helped popularize the notion that funds spent by the U.S. to arm Israel could instead have been used to fund domestic programs, such as health care for all. On this point the DSA reflects the position of a plurality of American voters: Only 24% support maintaining current levels of aid, while 40% oppose it, according to an Economist/YouGov poll.
But other DSA candidates don’t criticize Israel; they demonize it, and they hesitate to condemn terror even when it attacks Americans. Kiros unapologetically appeared at a rally condemning Israel and refused to call the 2025 firebomb attack on peaceful Jewish marchers in Boulder an antisemitic act.
We are long past the post-Oct. 7 period when anti-Israel activists were challenged to condemn Hamas. For these candidates, pro-Palestinian means pro-Hamas.
“Militant anti-Zionism became a wedge that the group’s more radical activists used to drive away critics of authoritarianism on the left,” wrote Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic.
The other tarnished brand is the Democratic Party itself. At a time when President Donald Trump is sending ICE agents and troops into American cities, jacking tariffs, making billions of dollars in office and conducting full-scale wars without congressional approval, sitting Democrats look feckless. Even the most moderate Democrats — much less non-MAGA Republicans and independents — can see how Democrats have failed to build housing or address affordability. One way to punish the mainstream is to vote for the extremes.
The DSA’s Zionist founder
All of this is especially ironic considering the history of the DSA, whose founder, Michael Harrington, was both a Zionist and a pragmatic if radical political thinker.
Harrington founded the DSA in 1982 to create a movement for social change free from authoritarian pro-Stalinist groups. He was, in the words of the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., America’s “only responsible radical.”
And yes, the founder of the DSA identified as a Zionist.
In a 1975 interview with a Jewish journalist, Harrington, who died in 1989, said, “I support Israel as an internationalist. Israel is a democratic country whose people are passionately defending its self-determination.”
After the United Nations voted to condemn Zionism as racism, Harrington wrote, “If one preposterously charges that Zionism is racist, then so are all nationalisms which joined to condemn it at the U.N. And that is to drain the concept of racism of any serious meaning.”
Clearly, Harrington has left the building. After Sanders’ presidential campaign inspired a membership surge a decade ago, the current national DSA swelled with more radical membership, including from struggling far-left and communist groups.
“Having dismantled the guardrails that Harrington built to exclude communists,” wrote Chait, “the group established new guardrails to exclude anybody opposed to Israel’s destruction.”
DSA’s first iteration included Jewish activists who worked toward coexistence and a two-state solution, wrote Jo-Ann Mort, a DSA cofounder. Now, she wrote, “its socialism is more concerned with ‘anti-imperialism’ than the democratic socialism that inspired the founders.”
Extremism feeds extremism
The Jewish fears that a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty will lead to pogroms in Manhattan have not been realized. But after Ocasio-Cortez, another DSA candidate, drew the wrath of the group for initially supporting defensive weapons transfers to Israel, she has now come out against them.
One can imagine a DSA that struggle-sessions Sanders, the man most responsible for its revival, subjecting him to a humiliating show trial for being insufficiently anti-Israel. Far-fetched as that seems, it’s unclear how DSA will address the clear schism between its liberal Zionists and its increasingly hardcore anti-Israel wing.
Meanwhile, the ascendant DSA is a boon to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose own brand of extremism thrives on creating an Israel-against-the-world mentality. On a visit to Israel last month, I found Israelis and the Israeli media obsessed with Mamdani. One woman told me she wouldn’t dare set foot in New York City as long as the putative leader of the DSA was still mayor. Extremism feeds extremism.
And if the DSA specter leads American Jews to think the Republican Party is a safe haven, think again.
Young Republican voters are shifting against Israel in the same way young Democrats are. And just this week, Tucker Carlson, a confidant of the vice president, the right’s most popular media personality and a vicious Israel critic, said, “I officially don’t care about Hamas.”
An Israel-less ‘Promise to America’
Democratic leaders have struggled with ways to recapture the young voters lured away by the DSA.
The group Promise to America, founded earlier this month, asks representatives and candidates to sign on to six “pledges” that seem focus-group-tested to appeal to 18- to 26-year-olds: free speech, “government that works,” fiscal discipline, fair capitalism, just national security and “national renewal.”
“Democrats that hold these values that do well in the party,” Felix Frisch, the group’s 20-year-old founding director, told me in a phone interview. Frisch, who took a leave of absence from the University of Chicago to run the organization, pointed out that two of the pledge’s signers — Rep. Tom Suozzi in New York and Rep. Adam Gray in California’s Central Valley — were the only two Democrats to flip a district that Trump won in the 2024 cycle.
How did he explain the DSA’s success?
“They’re a lot more organized,” he said. “The reason I got so fired up to do this was because we need some organization around our core principles.”
The website, I pointed out, doesn’t mention Israel, which for many young voters is a defining issue. Frisch suggested I speak to the pledge’s signers, which I took to mean: Where Democrats can win, it may be in spite of their support for Israel, not because of it.
Where the DSA lost
Aside from online pledges, what hope is there for moderate Democrats who don’t put Hamas or Israel-bashing first?
I didn’t have to look far for an answer. In my Los Angeles City Council district, CD 11, a charismatic and accomplished DSA candidate, Faizah Malik, challenged incumbent Traci Park. In the early June election, Malik got trounced, 64% to 35%, in a district that teems with the same progressive, white voters who backed winning DSA candidates elsewhere.
The difference? Since taking office in 2022, Park has greatly reduced homeless encampments and, according to the Los Angeles Times, “became the face” of recovery after the Palisades fires. She pushed to bring 2028 Olympic events, Hollywood film shoots like Baywatch, several large affordable housing projects and a much-needed marine mammal recovery station to the area. Nothing sexy — well, except the Baywatch reboot — but noticeable.
Malik didn’t mention Israel or Gaza in her campaign materials, and it’s unclear whether doing so would have helped or hurt her. She did have the backing of Engage Action, the Muslim American lobbying group that considers Israel an occupier of Palestinian lands since 1948.
Park won because her record gave the district’s 284,000 residents plenty of reasons to vote for her, embodying what The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein called “a liberalism that builds.”
The same, by the way, could be said about Brad Lander, a liberal Zionist who beat Rep. Dan Goldman by running to his left on Israel but parted ways with DSA after Oct. 7. While the Israel issue helped tank his opponent, it was Lander’s record of delivering for his constituents as a City Council member and then city comptroller — including pushing through affordable housing initiatives and paid sick leave — that accounted for much of his popularity.
There is as much to learn in where the DSA candidates lost as where they won. When Democrats stand up articulate, social-media-savvy candidates who can galvanize voters around effective solutions to the problems they care about — and then make those solutions happen — they win.
The post How to stop worrying about the Democratic Socialists of America appeared first on The Forward.
