As a kid, I had no idea schmuck wasn’t an English word.

In 1985, my fourth-grade Cheder class in Los Angeles was assigned to write a short story about a time we felt embarrassed. I had a great example I wanted to share, so while the other girls asked the teacher questions, I got straight to the assignment. My pen glided across the smooth, wide-ruled paper. Done! Without even looking up, I knew I had finished first. I raised my hand, and my teacher called on me.

Here goes:

“This past Shabbos, I slept at Mimi’s house. On Friday night after Shabbat dinner, Mimi’s father took us to a party celebrating a new baby boy born in the neighborhood. We ate delicious cake and sat around with the other kids, but it was getting late. Mimi and I looked at each other. “Ready to go?” she asked me. I was ready. We peeked into the dining room where all the men sat and realized that Mimi’s father had disappeared. Who were we supposed to walk home with now? Mimi spotted her neighbor getting up to leave and pulled me out of the house. We never asked him to walk us home; we just casually walked behind him. We figured out that he knew we were there, trailing him, when he suddenly spoke loud enough for us to hear: “What kind of schmuck leaves his kids at a party?”

Immediately, my teacher interjected, “Sit down this moment, Dena!”

“But, Ms. B, I’m not finished with my story!” I protested. I stubbornly read the last line as I made my way back to my seat.

“…I was so embarrassed that he lectured us, and I wanted to disappear. Thankfully, we made it home safely. The end.”

I was especially excited to tell this story because the neighbor who had embarrassed us was Ms. B’s brother. Mimi knew it. I knew it. All my classmates knew it. The one person who didn’t realize it was Ms. B.

What I didn’t know was that schmuck was a vulgar Yiddish word. This was my first clue that the language I thought was ordinary English was actually something else. The adults around me used it and got away with it — until I came along and said it out loud. That was the first time I understood that some words aren’t really about their meaning at all — they’re about who’s saying them, and why.

Yiddish couldn’t sound like profanity to me. It sounded like home, and we didn’t say curse words at home. It sounded like the people who loved me and raised me, their affection softening even its roughest edges.

* * *

The Yiddish I grew up with begins, fittingly, with the first English sentence my father remembers hearing when he landed in America from Israel at 11 years old:

Gey across the street tsu dem candy store, un keyf mir a candy.

Go across the street to the candy store and buy me a candy.

Although he didn’t understand English, the word candy was universal. He got the gist.

My Aba repeated this command to us throughout our childhood whenever he wanted us out of the room so he could prepare a class, take a phone call, or speak privately with my mother.

“Gey.”

Go.

We went.

For him, the joke was picking out the English words, like candy and street. For me, a generation later, it was the Yiddish.

This blending of Yiddish and English was the two worlds our family inhabited, meshing naturally into one. Growing up, I heard a lot of Yinglish — Yiddish peppered with English, accented with Polish, Russian, or Hungarian. The official language in our home was English, but even that was seasoned with Yiddish. At different times in my life, I understood less and then more of it, but somehow the meaning always came through. No matter what, I understood the shape of what the “old people” were trying to say.

Whenever a grandchild or great-grandchild was born, my Bubby Pearl, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, would say, “Mayn nekome afn Daytsh” — “my revenge against the Germans.”

Today, my parents are the age the “old people” were when I was a child. Their English is flawless, but still seasoned with Yiddish.

I want my children to know about my grandparents’ generation. I pepper my English with their sweet Yiddish (in truth, some of it is Russian), as though doing so might somehow seed a little of my ancestors’ courage and character into my children’s souls. It’s a bit like the crumpled bills my grandparents shoved into our pockets: We enjoyed the extra cash, but even as a child, it seemed to me that the givers were more enriched than we were. How grateful they were to have grandchildren, and to have something to give us. So now I do the same with language.

I plead with my children to pick up their shmutsike vesh off the bathroom floor and put it in the hamper. When someone sweeps the kitchen floor, the crumbs go into the savok and then the garbage bin. In the morning, I throw my khalat over my pajamas and slip into my warm tapkes.

When I wrote that story about my teacher’s brother, I knew I was being chutzpadik. No one would have accused me of being an eydl meydl.

These words wove themselves through the conversations of my parents and grandparents. I didn’t realize until much later that many of them weren’t English at all. (A few were less savory and such fun to say: paskutsveh, for being obnoxious; svolitch, if you were real scum; or smarkatsh, for rascal. And schmuck of course, which I thought meant idiot. Then there was krasavitseh — beautiful, in the eyes of all.)

In class that day, I did not know I had uttered a dirty, vulgar word. I wish I could say that when I found out its meaning, I was embarrassed. The truth is, I was thrilled — because, as my mother said, I was a khutspinyak (one level up from regular chutzpah).

What is it about Yiddish? So many things. But as it does, so will I: compress whole stories into one word.

Take khutspinyak. There is no English word that carries my mother’s voice, her mother’s voice, and her mother’s mother’s voice. Or schmuck. In either of those words, I don’t hear an insult or vulgarity. I am folded right into the generations that came before me. Maybe that is why I never learned to hear these words as foreign; they never came to me as vocabulary. They were, and remain, simply love.

Dena Schusterman, a mother of eight and native Californian, is co-founder of Chabad Intown in Atlanta, a Jewish educator, preschool director and teacher. Stories Carry is her debut memoir.

 

The post How Yiddish compresses whole stories into one word appeared first on The Forward.

About a dozen Israelis gathered in my living room this week for a conversation that would have seemed unnecessary a decade ago. Some identified with the political left, others with the right. But everyone agreed that the bipartisan foundation of the U.S.-Israel alliance is being destroyed, that this is a disaster for Israel, and that restoring confidence among Democrats has become a critical priority, as important as preventing a nuclear Iran.

Leading the discussion was Rotem Oreg-Kalisky, the 32-year-old founder of LIBRAEL, an Israeli nonprofit built around that very challenge. The organization argues that support for Israel and liberal values are fundamentally compatible, and that rebuilding the relationship requires something more ambitious than better public relations. It sees its mission as educating members of Congress on the liberal Zionist perspective, training pro-Israel advocates to communicate more effectively in progressive spaces, and helping Israeli institutions — from the Foreign Ministry and the IDF to technology companies and NGOs — engage international audiences in language that resonates with liberal Americans.

The animating idea is that two things are true yet underappreciated: one, that most Israelis actually do believe in liberal values; and two, that most Americans actually are Zionists by the classic definition that means simply that the Jewish people have the right to a democratic nation-state in their ancestral homeland.

“There’s a growing big lie in America that says that if you are a liberal — if you believe in peace, justice, and human rights — you can’t be a Zionist, in the basic sense of believing Israel has the right to exist as the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people,” he told me. That belief, he argues, has become increasingly accepted among younger progressives, even though he believes liberal Zionism remains entirely compatible with progressive values.

This — while in my view completely true — obviously runs counter to the prevailing winds in the United States

In particular, there is a major challenge with the “genocide” claim — which, like me, he rejects —  that has become widely accepted even outside the far-left. He argues that it can be engaged, at least with liberals, and even with some progressives, provided Israel is willing to acknowledge its own failures and present a different political vision.

“At least some of them are persuadable,” he says of progressive Democrats. His strategy is to sidestep the legal label of genocide and argue that Israel regains credibility by acknowledging wrongdoing where it exists, refusing to defend indefensible actions, and changing policy. “I don’t think the IDF is a force for evil. But it makes mistakes and it sometimes makes stupid decisions.”

Either way, LIBRAEL has already begun turning that strategy into measurable activity.

Oreg-Kalisky, a former research advisor to U.S. Ambassador Dan Shapiro, says his group has developed relationships with 39 congressional offices from 19 states, sends a biweekly newsletter to 75 lawmakers and congressional staff with a 37% average open rate, has presented its liberal Zionist narrative to hundreds of liberal Americans, and has trained more than 1,800 pro-Israel advocates.

With a staff of 15, all volunteers, its ambitions are considerably larger still, including regular congressional engagement, expanded advocacy missions to Washington, and a dramatic increase in outreach — especially on social media — over the coming four years.

Oreg-Kalisky spends much of the money he succeeds in raising simply getting himself to Washington and New York, knocking on doors that are often closed even to official Israeli channels. Over the past three years he has repeatedly flown to the United States, meeting with Democratic lawmakers, congressional staff, policy advisers, and political operatives, but also with grassroots: college students, Jewish communities, non-Jewish liberal organizations and even a queer synagogue.

The value of those trips, he argues, often lies not in headline meetings but in quieter conversations. He described reaching Democratic offices that Israeli diplomats sometimes struggle to access. In one example, he said he was able to meet with the military adviser to Sen. Raphael Warnock — a conversation that officials from the Israeli embassy had found difficult to secure. His pitch was not that Israel deserved automatic support, but that liberal Israelis still existed, still shared many of the same values as American liberals, and still wanted to preserve the bipartisan alliance that had anchored Israeli security for decades.

The timing could hardly be worse. Recent polling found that roughly 60% of Americans now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, with much of the deterioration concentrated among Democrats and younger voters. Even Republicans have become increasingly less supportive of Israel, while many Democrats have grown steadily more critical of Israeli governments and their policies. The result has been the erosion of one of Israel’s greatest strategic assets: broad bipartisan support in the United States.

Oreg-Kalisky does not believe this can be solved simply by improving messaging. He also claims Americans and Israelis increasingly process the same events through different moral vocabularies. Israelis naturally describe Oct. 7 as terrorism, while many younger Americans, he argues, do not have an emotional response to the word “terror” because they were not alive on 9/11 — but they will respond if the Nova massacre is described as the largest mass shooting in history. Israelis instinctively speak about terrorism when Jews are targeted; Americans, especially liberals, often first think in terms of hate crimes. The underlying facts remain identical, but the political language has diverged.

Nor does he believe the answer is asking Americans to lower their standards for Israel. Asked about today’s Israeli government, Oreg offered blunt criticism, especially of the tolerance of Jewish terrorism in the West Bank “at least by some segments of the government. Nationalistic violence is something I’m not proud of, to put it mildly, and something that needs to change. You won’t hear me defending an indefensible policy.”

That willingness to criticize Israel from within is central to LIBRAEL’s approach. Oreg-Kalisky, an IDF veteran with over 200 days of reserve duty since Oct. 7, argues that rebuilding Democratic confidence requires not simply changing how Israel explains itself but, in some cases, changing Israeli policy itself. Replacing Benjamin Netanyahu alone, he believes, would not be enough. Future governments would also need to phase out the military aid, demonstrate changes in the West Bank, preserve democratic institutions, confront extremist violence, and persuade allies that Israel still seeks a political horizon beyond permanent conflict.

At the same time, he rejects what he sees as another dangerous illusion taking hold in parts of Israel: that the United States can somehow be replaced. “If someone tells you Israel can replace the U.S. with India, the UAE, Azerbaijan, or anyone else — that’s bullshit. There are no alternatives to America. Israel needs to retain the support of the United States. I’m doing this because I want to save the alliance.”

That is the central wager behind Oreg-Kalisky’s work. Rather than writing off Democrats as lost, or asking them to “Support Israel and shut up” — as he says many government backers expect, — he believes Israeli liberals must re-enter the conversation themselves, speaking honestly about Israel’s flaws while defending its legitimacy as a democratic and Jewish state with serious security needs.

Whether that proves possible remains uncertain. Oreg is betting that enough common ground still exists to recover. But there are no illusions about the political side. What if Netanyahu wins the upcoming October election?

“Then we will certainly need to reassess.”

The post Can Israeli Liberals win back the Democratic center — and save the U.S.-Israel alliance? appeared first on The Forward.

Consider two acts of antisemitic violence.

In October 2018, a gunman entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered 11 Jews at Shabbat services, to date the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. Before he opened fire, the shooter had spent months online railing against HIAS, the Jewish refugee resettlement agency, for supposedly bringing in “invaders” who want to “kill us.” That language echoed, almost word for word, the “invasion” and “caravan” rhetoric that President Donald Trump had been using for weeks about Central American migrants heading toward the U.S. border. Days before the shooting, Trump had also mused publicly that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if philanthropist George Soros — a Holocaust survivor whose name has functioned as an antisemitic dog whistle for decades — was secretly funding that caravan.

This past week, two men were stabbed on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, one of them Jewish, allegedly by a man shouting “Allahu Akbar.” It was a frightening, ugly attack, and the Jewish man who was hurt deserves our concern, not our politics. But within hours, Israel’s government had turned the Jewish victim’s blood into a talking point — while conveniently erasing the Asian second victim, who does not fit so cleanly into the Israeli government’s preferred narrative.

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar declared that months of “incitement” from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had “helped create a climate in which Jews are targeted,” and Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, told Mamdani directly that his rhetoric is “putting Jewish lives in danger” and that he needs to “take responsibility for the consequences.” Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself got involved, declaring, “I don’t think it’s accidental that after he made this hate speech against Israel and against me, the next day a Jew is stabbed coming out of a synagogue,” and accusing Mayor Mamdani of “basically supporting Hamas” — despite Mamdani’s description of the October 7, 2023 attacks as “a horrific war crime” that should be opposed “with every single fiber of our being.”

Mamdani’s sin, in their telling, is calling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal and Israel’s conduct in Gaza a genocide.

Set aside for a moment whether or not one agrees with Mamdani’s language, and look instead at how differently Israel’s government behaved in these two moments, because it has been here before, and it responded in exactly the opposite way.

When American Jews connected Trump’s rhetoric to the Pittsburgh massacre, Naftali Bennett, who was then Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister, was dispatched to Pittsburgh and New York specifically to represent the Israeli government in the wake of the shooting. Bennett went out of his way to shield the president. Tying Trump to the massacre was, in Bennett’s own words, “unfair” and “wrong.” He praised Trump as a “great friend of Israel and of the Jews,” and pointed to the president’s decision to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem as supposed proof.

This is the same Naftali Bennett who Israeli politics has since rehabilitated as the anti-Netanyahu alternative, the reasonable face of the Israeli right. And it’s worth sitting with what he chose to do the last time American Jews were murdered in their synagogue: not investigate whether rhetoric had consequences, but rather fly across the ocean to make sure nobody blamed the man whose rhetoric the killer had directly echoed.

Here’s the part that should really sting. Bennett was not criticizing some fringe, unpopular position. A poll conducted right after the Pittsburgh shooting found that a whopping 72% of American Jewish voters believed Trump’s comments and policies bore at least some responsibility for the attack, and majorities of Jewish Americans said they were alarmed by the rise of antisemitism and right-wing extremism on his watch. Naftali Bennett was not speaking for us. He was speaking over us, on behalf of a foreign leader most American Jews didn’t trust, at the exact moment American Jews were burying our dead.

Now compare that to how Israel’s government treats American Jewish opinion today. A Washington Post poll from October 2025 found that 61% of American Jews believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, and 68% rate Netanyahu’s leadership negatively. In other words, a clear majority of American Jews already hold something close to the view Mamdani was attacked for expressing. On immigration, the issue at the center of the Pittsburgh shooter’s radicalization, polling from the nonpartisan Jewish Electorate Institute has repeatedly found large majorities of American Jews disapproving of Trump’s approach and his broader agenda, by margins as lopsided as 72–24%.

If Israel’s Foreign Ministry genuinely believed that a politician’s rhetoric about Israel and Jews should be judged by how it lands with actual American Jews, it would have to conclude that Mamdani is, on the substance, much closer to representing the American Jewish community’s views than Trump is.

None of this means Mamdani’s language is beyond criticism, or that rhetoric never has consequences. It obviously can, and this is a conversation which American Jews are entitled to have. But there is a real difference between the statements made by Mayor Mamdani and those made by President Trump. Mamdani made an argument, however harsh, about the actions of one specific head of state, in a conflict where accusations of war crimes have been leveled by the International Criminal Court, United Nations bodies, and human rights organizations, and are shared by a majority of American Jews themselves. Trump invented a conspiracy theory, unsupported by any evidence, that reached for one of the oldest and most dangerous slurs in the antisemitic playbook, the idea of a shadowy Jewish financier secretly engineering demographic change, and aimed it at a private citizen.

If either statement deserves to be investigated for the violence it might have inspired, it is not the one about a specific government’s wartime conduct. It is the one that reanimated a genocidal myth and pointed it at an elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor.

The Israeli government does not seem interested in that comparison, because the comparison was never really the point. When American Jews are attacked, Israeli officials do not ask what will actually keep us safer or what we, as a community, actually need. They ask which conclusion helps Israel’s ruling coalition politically. In 2018, that meant protecting the president who had just moved the embassy to Jerusalem, and who was at the time wildly popular among Israeli Jews (though not among American Jews). In 2026, it means punishing a mayor who has called Israel’s conduct genocidal, even though a higher percentage of American Jews agree that Israel has committed genocide than support Trump’s immigration policies.

The Israeli government does not listen to American Jews. It speaks over us, in real time, in the wake of real violence against us.

As an American Jew, I do not need a foreign government — one that answers to its own voters, not to me — to tell me which grief is politically convenient and which is not. American Jews are capable of grappling honestly with antisemitism, with Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, and with the real dangers of eliminationist rhetoric wherever it comes from, without being used as a prop in someone else’s electoral strategy.

If the Israeli government truly cared about the safety of the Jewish diaspora, it would have been just as quick to call out Trump’s Soros conspiracy-mongering as it was to call out Mamdani’s. It was not. That silence is the whole answer. As an American Jew, I deserve better than to be spoken for by people who only remember I exist when it becomes useful to them.

The post Israel’s government doesn’t want to protect American Jews. It wants to use us. appeared first on The Forward.