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A Jewish museum exhibit features the Palestinian flag. Some visitors wonder if it belongs.
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Tucked in the far corner of a large, brightly-lit exhibition hall on the ground floor of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, there is a delicate-looking piece of art with a strong political message.
At first glance, it appears to be three circular vases with flowers in them. The ceramic vases sit on shelves attached to the wall, and colorful collages hang above them. On closer inspection, visitors will notice that the flowers are made out of paper and that affixed to each vase is an image of the Palestinian flag printed on foam board.
A nearby label written by the curators of the exhibit, titled “Tikkun: For the Cosmos, the Community, and Ourselves,” explains that the piece was inspired by a conversation the artist, Tosha Stimage of Berkeley, had with a Palestinian man. He told Stimage about the plants that are native to Palestine — “a place which he can no longer access due to the ongoing conflict in the region,” the curators write.
The label also includes a note about the flag: “Some may find its presence at The CJM troubling or confusing, while others may find it appropriate and forthright. Stimage recognizes the potential for these divergent responses and hopes to use them as a means of generating dialogue.”
On a Sunday afternoon in October, Maury Ostroff read the label and walked away without inspecting the artwork.
Visitors to the “Tikkun” exhibit are encouraged to share their responses to the artwork via comment cards. (Andrew Esensten)
Asked how the presence of the flag made him feel, Ostroff, who is Jewish and lives in Muir Beach, in Marin County, replied, “Unhappy.”
Why?
“It’s not offensive to me in the same way that a swastika is. My skin is a little bit thicker than that. But I wish it weren’t here.”
He added, “What’s so Jewish about this? What’s so ‘tikkun olam’ about all of this?”
For the “Tikkun” exhibit, which opened Feb. 17 and runs through Jan. 8, the CJM invited both Jewish and non-Jewish Bay Area artists to contribute new works on the theme of repair, however they chose to interpret it. “No one is listening to us,” the piece by Stimage, who is not Jewish, is the first work of art featuring the Palestinian flag to be shown at CJM in recent memory; the museum could not say when or if the flag has been displayed on its walls before.
The piece prompted several internal conversations among CJM staff when it was first submitted and, since it has been on display, has generated a variety of responses from museumgoers who have left comments in a box at the entrance to the exhibit. Intentionally or not, Stimage has raised numerous questions with the artwork, including: Does a work of art that is sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle for statehood belong in a Jewish museum? And what is the role of a contemporary Jewish museum, anyway?
“To truly be a contemporary art museum, meaning embedded in the contemporary issues of our day, our job is to provide a platform for dialogue and to share a diversity of perspectives on our walls,” said Chad Coerver, CJM’s executive director since September 2021. “If any institution [like ours] took the path of withholding artwork that troubled our staff, our board or our community, it would be very difficult to mount exhibitions.”
CJM is a member of the Council of American Jewish Museums, a network of 76 museums across the country. CAJM does not have guidelines about the kind of art its member museums can and cannot display, according to Executive Director Melissa Yaverbaum.
J. reached out to several CAJM member museums in New York, Los Angeles and other places by email to ask if they had ever shown artwork with Palestinian iconography or works by Palestinian artists. The museums declined to answer or did not respond.
In recent years, two Jewish museums have been embroiled in controversy over issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago staged an exhibit in 2008 on Israeli and Palestinian concepts of homeland that included maps and portraits of Palestinians. Following outcry from members of the local Jewish community who felt the exhibit presented Israel in a negative light, the museum decided to close the exhibit after only a few weeks. And in 2019, the director of the Jewish Museum Berlin resigned after the museum tweeted a link to a pro-BDS article in a German newspaper. (The museum previously came under fire for welcoming anti-Zionist scholar Judith Butler and representatives of Iran.)
In a joint interview with J., two CJM staffers who worked on “Tikkun” — co-curator Qianjin Montoya, who is not Jewish, and a Jewish senior curator who served in an advisory role, Heidi Rabben — shared the story of how Stimage’s piece came to be in the exhibit. (Montoya’s co-curator for the exhibit, Arianne Gelardin, no longer works at the museum.)
Since 2009, CJM has invited local artists from different backgrounds to create new work as part of the museum’s annual Dorothy Saxe Invitational. The idea for “Tikkun” was hatched before the pandemic put the planning process on hold. Once the CJM and Saxe — a local philanthropist and art collector — agreed on the theme, the co-curators invited artists “already engaged in healing through their relationship to community or in their practice of daily life,” Gelardin told J. last February.
The 30 artists who accepted the museum’s invitation were given only four months to conceive of and submit new works. That was likely the shortest timeline in the history of the invitational, which has been held 11 previous times, according to the museum. Each artist received a packet of materials compiled by CJM staff, with input from the Shalom Hartman Institute, a non-degree granting Jewish education center, to guide their thinking on “tikkun.”
Stimage was invited to participate because she is “very active” in the Bay Area and because “her work reflects ideas of community and connection,” Montoya said.
The curators said Stimage’s inclusion of the Palestinian flag in her submitted piece came as a surprise and prompted challenging conversations. However, they noted that they found the content of some of the other artists’ work surprising, too, and that it’s not unusual for contemporary artists to push the envelope in their work.
“I wouldn’t say we expected to receive a piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but we weren’t steering anyone away from that, either,” Rabben told J., adding that the submission guidelines did not place any topic off limits. “That’s a commitment from the museum to authentically represent the creative spirit of the artists that we’re working with,” she said.
Still, the curators said they engaged in a dialogue with Stimage in order to better understand each aspect of her piece and her overall intentions. Through those conversations, the curators learned that Stimage wanted to explore a moment of “rupture,” and that through her piece she hoped to communicate “that before healing or repair might happen, you have to first acknowledge that rupture,” Rabben said.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco is showing “Tikkun,” an exhibit of works by Jewish and non-Jewish artists on the theme of repair. (Andrew Esensten)
Coerver, who was involved in some of the conversations, stressed that “careful consideration” was given to including the piece in the exhibit. “We felt an artwork addressing the plight of the Palestinians was appropriate in an exhibition on healing and repair,” he said. (No work submitted as part of the Dorothy Saxe Invitational has ever been outright rejected, the museum said.)
Stimage did not respond to interview requests from J. According to a CV on her website, she was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and earned an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2016. She is a past fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and was an artist-in-residence at Facebook in 2018. She also owns a floral gift shop in Oakland called Saint Flora.
Her work often touches on Black identity; she created a piece honoring Sandra Bland, an African-American woman whose 2015 arrest and death in a Texas jail cell sparked protests, and contributed to a 2019 San Francisco Art Institute exhibit on the Black Panther Party.
“I have a responsibility to create things that will, to the best of my present knowledge, do more good than harm, heal, inspire and uplift other humans,” she told the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper in 2015.
Stimage’s precise views on Israel are unknown. CJM referred J. to her artist statement for “No one is listening to us,” which reads: “Olive, sage, and sumac are flowering plants native to the Mediterranean (including regions of Gaza and the West Bank) that have a direct relationship to contested ancestral land and affect the livelihood of so many Palestinian farmers and families caught in the conflict. They are positioned in the space of The Contemporary Jewish Museum as a metaphor for the ongoing conflict over land rights and the desperate need for restoration and healing of an age-old wound.”
The curators told J. that during their conversations with Stimage about her piece, they asked her why including images of the Palestinian flag was important to her but did not request that she remove them.
“We determined that none of [the piece’s] components in and of themselves signified something problematic or concerning,” Rabben said. “Of course, we had the awareness that the symbol [of the flag] will be read in a variety of ways by a variety of people.”
(Rabben pointed out that the exhibit includes other works with national symbols rendered in provocative ways, such as a black-and-white photograph of an American flag that was torn apart and partially reassembled by Mexican-American artist Jose Arias.)
The Palestinian flag — which contains the Pan-Arab colors of black, white, green and red — was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964. Since then, it has been the primary symbol of Palestinian nationalism.
For decades, the PLO was considered an enemy organization by Israel, and anything associated with it “had no place in Israeli public life,” said Eran Kaplan, an Israeli-born professor of Israel studies at San Francisco State University. Israel never went so far as to ban the flag. However, during the First Intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993, Israeli soldiers sometimes followed orders to confiscate the flag from protesters in the West Bank and Gaza.
With the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993, Israel and the PLO recognized each other as negotiating partners. Yet the Palestinian flag remains a contentious symbol in Israel today. Kaplan noted that it recently served as a flashpoint during the funeral procession of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian American broadcaster who was killed in the West Bank in May. (The IDF conducted a review and admitted that the Israeli soldier who shot her had most likely misidentified her as an armed militant.) After warning Abu Akleh’s family not to display the flag, Israeli police attacked mourners in East Jerusalem, ripping flags out of their hands and off of the vehicle carrying her casket.
Today, the flag holds different meanings for Israelis and American Jews from different generations and political persuasions.
“There are large segments in Israeli society who view any form of Palestinian national identity as a threat to the existence of Israel,” Kaplan said. “There are others who view the PLO as legitimate partners in any form of negotiations [over the creation of a Palestinian state], but there’s an absolute split over those questions.”
Given the sensitive nature of Stimage’s work and others in the exhibit, the curators decided to solicit feedback from visitors via comment cards available at the entrance to the hall. Rabben said the museum has received a number of comments specifically about “No one is listening to us,” most of which were positive. “The majority of those comments were ‘Thank you for offering space for this topic at the museum,’” she said.
Last month, a security guard sitting in the “Tikkun” exhibition hall told a reporter that he had not witnessed any expressions of outrage or protest through the first nine months of the exhibit. “When we opened we were afraid of negative reactions, but they’re not stressed about it,” he said of visitors. “We have shown worse things here.” The guard, who has worked at the museum since it opened in 2008, mentioned a 2010 exhibit, “Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf,” which included a copy of Hitler’s autobiography. “Some people were cussing us out” for displaying the book, he recalled.
Meanwhile, on the same floor as “Tikkun,” there is another, smaller exhibit containing potentially offensive art. A sign outside of the room warns visitors that inside is a Hitler marionette created by the parents of puppeteer Frank Oz. “Our intention in displaying this object is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the objects and firsthand stories of those who experienced its persecution, and to encourage conversation and education about the ongoing horrors of antisemitism and authoritarianism today,” the sign says.
Coerver, CJM’s executive director, said he was proud that the museum’s three current exhibits — “Tikkun,” “Oz is for Oznowicz: A Puppet Family’s History” and “Gillian Laub: Family Matters,” which includes photographs that Laub took of her Trump-supporting relatives — are raising “challenging questions” and providing opportunities for both visitors and museum staff to “expand our horizons.”
“We’ve been wading into some issues that I think are a little thicker than maybe we’ve been confronting in the past,” he said, “and I hope that continues.”
A version of this piece originally ran in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and is reprinted with permission.
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Floyd Mayweather showered cash on Jewish causes — and now he’s suing their ‘Robin Hood’ alleging $175 million got diverted
They made for an odd photo: The diminutive boxing legend with a platinum grin and diamond chain, and the Orthodox macher who sported a black velvet yarmulke.
But when Floyd Mayweather, Jr., appeared in public in recent years — at LA Lakers games, promotional appearances and repeated trips to Israel — he was rarely without his jeweler, friend and business adviser, Jona Rechnitz.
For a few Jewish groups, the partnership was a gold mine.
With Rechnitz in his inner circle, Mayweather donated more than $1 million to Israeli and Jewish institutions that included United Hatzalah, Magen David Adom and Aish. And when Rechnitz and Mayweather traveled to Israel after Oct. 7, they were welcomed as heroes.
Now the relationship has come to a screeching halt with a lawsuit Mayweather filed last week in a Manhattan court, alleging Rechnitz defrauded him of $175 million in jewelry consignment funds, diverted settlement proceeds and unauthorized loans against his properties.
That their relationship collapsed in a big-money dispute did not shock anyone familiar with their histories. Mayweather had a long record of domestic violence incidents, with three separate convictions over the course of a decade, and more recently had allegedly skipped out on money owed. Rechnitz pleaded guilty in 2016 in a high-profile bribery case in New York City, getting a reduced sentence in exchange for cooperation with prosecutors. (Mayweather claims in his suit that Rechnitz, serving as his financial manager, did not initially disclose his criminal past.)
The two had also been linked to an alleged cryptocurrency pump-and-dump scheme in a case that was dismissed in 2022, and both are named as defendants in separate lawsuits related to an alleged ticket selling scam. (Rechnitz has denied the claims.)
Yet while the going was good, Jewish organizations and causes lined up to take part in their largesse. Now most have gone silent. But those willing to speak out say they have no regrets about the relationship.
“I don’t give a s— if he’s a Robin Hood and he’s stealing from the rich to help the poor — good, let him keep doing it.”
Adina SashOrthodox women’s activist, on Jona Rechnitz
Adina Sash, an Orthodox women’s activist, shared on Instagram a screenshot of an April 2025 message from Mayweather, asking her to contact Rechnitz so they could help her cause. Sash advocates for agunahs, women whose husbands refuse to grant a Jewish divorce, often generating headlines for stunt-driven pressure campaigns against the men.
Sash called Rechnitz a “massive” behind-the-scenes supporter of agunahs, estimating he had donated $250,000 to cover the women’s legal fees.
“I don’t give a s— if he’s a Robin Hood and he’s stealing from the rich to help the poor,” Sash said in an interview. “Good, let him keep doing it.”
Rechnitz, who denied Mayweather’s claims through an attorney, said he was unavailable for a phone interview Wednesday. But in a text message, he said he had brought Mayweather to organizations “involved in holy work.”
“Nobody stood by our side and I asked him to do so for me,” Rechnitz added, “and I also arranged for any out of pocket costs incurred for his trips to Israel such as airfare and hotels.”
Lavish gifts
In the first few days after Oct. 7, Mayweather quickly emerged as a rare ally for the Jewish state. He made public statements defending Israel on social media to his more than 25 million Instagram followers. He sent his private jet, loaded with emergency supplies, to the country less than a week after the attack. And he visited the country at least four times over the next two years, each time accompanied by Rechnitz.
Rechnitz, a real estate scion, had begun working his way into Mayweather’s inner circle after moving to his hometown of Los Angeles in 2017. Rechnitz was coming off a stint in New York that concluded with his sentencing to five months in jail for a bribery scheme involving the city’s then-deputy mayor for public safety and the leader of the New York City correction officers’ union. (The sentence was overturned on appeal in 2023.)
Mayweather was a controversial figure in his own right. In addition to his domestic violence record, he has been ordered by a judge to pay child support, and he is currently being sued based on allegations that he failed to pay rent and the bill for his private jet.
Rechnitz said he was forewarned. “Many people told me not to deal with him and criticized Jewish organizations for honoring him,” Rechnitz said in a text message to the Forward. “People make mistakes and I do not think that anyone can pass judgment without being in the same situation. Like many people, Floyd has his faults.”
The relationship between the two seemed to serve them both: Mayweather was flattered by Jewish leaders willing to look past their bad qualities, and bringing the boxer around helped rehabilitate Rechnitz in the Jewish world. Mayweather’s lawsuit described Rechnitz as his “de-facto” investment manager, real estate advisor, and banking liaison; it did not say how much Rechnitz was paid for those services but said it was a “constructive fiduciary relationship.”
They also made money together, according to one filing against them related to the cryptocurrency EthereumMax. Mayweather promoted the token at a boxing match and a Miami bitcoin conference in 2021. A class action lawsuit against the company alleged that Rechnitz had made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling his tokens after a raft of promotions from celebrities like Mayweather inflated their value. The filing claimed Mayweather was paid $2.5 million to be a “marquee promoter” of the coin. A judge later dismissed the case.
Despite the checkered past of both the boxer and his confidant, Jewish groups received them enthusiastically. United Hatzalah festooned its headquarters with Mayweather banners upon his first post-Oct. 7 visit to Jerusalem, with its president, Eli Beer, donning a Mayweather-branded cap during the visit. Magen David Adom’s American fundraising affiliate presented the boxer with a rhinestone-studded emergency vest.
Aish, an international Orthodox outreach group, bestowed Mayweather with a “Champion For Israel” award, with Mayweather and Aish CEO Rabbi Steven Burg posing for a photograph overlooking the Western Wall.
Mayweather also spoke to students and faculty at Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School, an Orthodox institution in New Jersey, last year, accompanied by Beer and Rechnitz and introduced by head of school Rabbi Eliezer Rubin, who said he was “exhilarated” to have Mayweather there.
Jewish groups characterized Mayweather’s support for the Jewish people as authentic and purely motivated. But it was also clear that it was driven by Rechnitz’s ties to the community. At a 2025 gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Jona’s father, Bobby — himself an eminence grise of the pro-Israel lobby — proudly told those gathered at the event that his son was the boxer’s entree into Israel and Jewish affairs. When Mayweather took the mic, he said he saw Bobby as a “father-like figure” and Jona as a brother.
Responding to questions about the lawsuit, United Hatzalah spokesperson Simmy Allen said in a statement Wednesday that the organization would not comment on legal matters between private parties.
“Mr. Mayweather visited United Hatzalah’s headquarters in Jerusalem twice and saw firsthand how United Hatzalah is on the frontlines of emergency medical services in Israel and we are grateful for his support,” Allen wrote. He did not mention Rechnitz.
In an email, Rubin, Kushner’s head of school, said he did not regret welcoming Floyd and that Rechnitz did not facilitate the visit.
“When even influential Jews are remain silent about the malicious and vile attacks against the Jewish people, we need to commend and support people outside of our faith who are standing with us,” Rubin wrote.
He added that the school had no relationship with Rechnitz.
Representatives from Aish and the Republican Jewish Coalition did not respond to questions.
The new allegations
Mayweather’s lawsuit alleges that Rechnitz exploited the boxer’s trust — and his property — to enrich himself.
The bulk of the $175 million claim relates to jewelry belonging to Mayweather that Rechnitz allegedly pawned to a Miami jeweler for $13 million. Mayweather says its real value was closer to $100 million, and that Rechnitz did not have permission to borrow against the assets.
Mayweather also claimed that Rechnitz drew loans totaling tens of millions of dollars on various properties owned by Mayweather entities without his consent, and diverted at least $15 million in funds intended for Mayweather into accounts controlled by co-defendants.
Morris Missry, an attorney for Rechnitz and co-defendants Ayal Frist and Alexander Seligson, said Wednesday in a statement that Mayweather’s claims were “utterly baseless.”
“Mr. Mayweather’s gambling issues, prolific spending habits, monies owed to third party creditors and IRS tax liens and levys, as well as other unseemly behavior will be exposed and we believe that Mr. Mayweather will be the one paying significant damages to our clients,” Missry wrote.
Mayweather’s lawsuit is not the first lodged against Rechnitz since his 2016 plea agreement. In 2023 a judge granted $17.7 million plus interest to a jeweler who said Rechnitz’s checks to him had bounced. Separate lawsuits filed by a former neighbor of Rechnitz’s, Joe Englanoff, alleged that Rechnitz convinced Englanoff to invest $1.4 million in tickets to a Mayweather fight, which Rechnitz promised he could resell at several times the value.
Englanoff, who was renting Rechnitz the house next door, moved to evict him and separately sued Mayweather and Rechnitz for $15 million, citing breach of contract. Rechnitz countersued, saying the property was in worse condition than what Englanoff advertised. Rechnitz said in a text that Englanoff “is a serial litigant whose greed has blinded his ways.” Litigation is ongoing.
Englanoff did not respond to an inquiry.
Some on social media called Mayweather’s Instagram post attacking Rechnitz into question for antisemitism, noting that Mayweather had compared him to vermin and chosen a picture of Rechnitz wearing a yarmulke.
One who appeared to side with Mayweather was Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School teacher Rabbi David Schlusselberg, who said on X that Mayweather had spoken admirably to his students when he visited last year.
“When a Jewish person in his inner circle backstabs him and is being sued for $175 million, it isn’t antisemitic for Floyd Mayweather to post about this,” Schlusselberg wrote on X. “I feel terrible for Floyd Mayweather who has only showed love and support for the Jewish people.”
But Schlusselberg later deleted the post. Though he did not want to say why, he told the Forward he did so after speaking to Rechnitz on the phone.
Sash, the agunah activist, said any sentiment supporting Mayweather for pro-Israel advocacy was naive.
“The only reason he ever stood with Israel is because that’s how Jona puppeteered him,” Sash said. “Floyd is a puppet. Jona was the puppet master.
“He told me explicitly that his goal was to position Floyd as a representation of someone who supports Israel,” she added. “He knew that it would be monetarily beneficial for Mayweather’s portfolio to align himself that way.”
Rechnitz said he told Sash he was behind Mayweather’s charitable giving to Jewish groups and that his goal was to position Floyd as a supporter of Israel, but denied mentioning any underlying financial motive.
And he added that he was surprised Sash disclosed his involvement in her cause, which he said was supposed to remain confidential. He said he helped agunahs independent of Mayweather, with the assistance of family and friends.
Despite Rechnitz’s overt machinations with regard to his friend and client, Sash saw Rechnitz’s support for agunot as genuine. In one instance, she said, he had offered an agunah’s husband $500,000 to grant a Jewish divorce. (The man did not accept, Sash said.)
What financial benefits Rechnitz believed would accrue to Mayweather from his pro-Israel support was unclear, but Sash — who said she never took money from Rechnitz or Mayweather — speculated it had to do with real estate, a shared area of interest for the two men.
As to the possibility that Rechnitz paid for his support with someone else’s money, Sash said it didn’t matter.
“Even if it were to be proven that that exact money was taken from someone else, good, because the system is so rigged against agunahs,” she said. “If there is someone else willing to do illegal activity to help agunahs, amazing — we need every ounce of help we can get.”
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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.
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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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