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A New York Jewish childhood at the Dalton School where privilege met progressivism
I am what is called “a Dalton lifer.” I was born in Manhattan on Dec. 1, 1943, at Lenox Hill Hospital and was a New Yorker all my life before I married and moved away. For 14 of those years, from when I was 3 (going on 4) until I was 18, I attended the Dalton School.
My parents chose Dalton because it was a progressive school that was comfortable for Jewish children, who made up about one-third of the school’s population, and it admitted Black students. There were a number of such schools in Manhattan at the time; influenced by the educational philosophy of John Dewey, they believed learning should be taught by doing, and that education should include active inquiry and problem solving. (My father, in fact, had attended the University of Chicago Lab School that Dewey created in 1896.)
When I was little, I often walked with my older brothers from our apartment at 81st and Park Avenue to 89th where Dalton was located between Park and Lexington. On the way, we would pass a stationery store where adults would put down some change on top of the newspaper pile and take one or two of the papers that the shopkeeper had neatly arranged on a wooden bench outside of the store front. As a child, I sometimes stole some of that change and to this day I am horrified at myself.
By the time I was eight, I would walk back home by myself on Lexington Avenue, which formed the western boundary of Yorkville between 72nd Street and 96th. Yorkville was then populated by Germans and German-speaking immigrants such as Hungarians and Czechs. During the 1930s and World War II, it had been the headquarters of the German Bund. It was less than a decade after the end of World War II, and as Jews, my parents were keenly aware of Yorkville’s past. While they shopped on Lexington, they warned us it could be dangerous, and indeed, one of my brothers got held up there. My parents were reluctant to allow me, as a girl, to walk east of 86th and Lex – where there were still dance halls and beer parlors and clubs that seemed to me both alien and alluring.
Nevertheless, I strode down Lexington by myself, entranced by the wonderful shops. There was a fabulous marzipan store; I loved that candy, molded into tiny figurines small apples and lemons, hand-sculpted dogs and statuettes, and seasonal Christmas and Easter pieces. Near 82nd Street, there was a drug store with a soda counter that sold sandwiches and drinks where my mother would always order an egg salad sandwich and a coffee milkshake. There was an old-fashioned health-food store that sold specialty items such as nut bread, yogurt and whole grains.
Lexington was still a two-way street, and the bus price had recently gone up from a nickel to a dime. Later, when we were in high school, we would cheat on both the bus and subway and shove a whole bunch of us through without paying for everyone. But fixed in my memory is that contrast between the still-living fear of American Nazis that my parents embodied and the richness of store life on Lexington Avenue.
A privileged childhood
Of course, memories are tricky, and mine are probably filled with biases and mistakes. We misremember to be sure. And we imagine our childhood recollections through the prism of who we were. I was from a privileged German-Jewish family. At the time I did not think of myself as especially fortunate. It was just who I was.
When I went to college, I encountered the wonderful post-Civil-War writer, Henry Adams. Near the beginning of his masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams, he tells the story of being about 5 or 6, and playing on the grounds of his grandfather John Quincy Adams’ house. Adams’ gardener declared that young Henry probably believed that he would grow up to be president too. Henry recalled that it had never occurred to him that he would not become president; that’s what his family did.
Not only are my recollections filtered through an unconscious perception of privilege, they are also intertwined with my identity as a young Jew. When I was a student in Dalton’s lower school, I don’t remember if I was aware of the double luck of having been born into money and what we then called culture; and into an America with no close relatives who had been murdered in the Holocaust. My grandmother worried about some of her family back in Europe; she’d been told some of them were still alive, but she could not find them.
In the 1940s and 1950s, America was still a country made up largely of white European nationals and Blacks whose grandparents or great-grandparents had been born into slavery. The distinctions between European nationalities defined much of my world. I knew I was not Irish, Italian, or Polish Catholic, nor was I German-Lutheran or Scandinavian Most of the white children — other than the Jews — who attended Dalton were WASPs and I wasn’t one of those either. I remember only one boy who was Catholic, Fitzhugh Seamus MacManus Mullin whose father’s family was Irish and whose mother’s family was Spanish. His grandfather would come to Dalton, sit on a chair in our wonderful theater, and enrapture us by reciting Celtic tales. I assume that he was Seumas MacManus, who according to Wikipedia was considered by many to be the last great seanchaí, or storyteller of the ancient oral tradition.
I knew there were barriers between Jews and Christians, but they never impeded upon my sense of self. Park Avenue apartment buildings were either Jewish or gentile, and my building, 941 Park Avenue, was occupied entirely by Jewish families. The only non-Jews with whom I interacted in my building worked for one the families who lived there, or for the building itself; they were maids and supers and doormen, and they were white and largely Irish.
When I was little and in the lower school, I did not think about religion. Most of my family had come from Germany and had been in America since before the Civil War. They were not observant, in fact quite the opposite. My parents believed that religion was the opiate of the masses, and we ate shellfish and ham. My father banned uncured pork as in pork chops, so my mother often served lamb chops, which was unusual in the America of that time. Both of my parents grew up in Chicago, my mother in the northern suburb of Kenilworth, my father on the south side of the city near the University of Chicago. My mother’s family was wealthy and lived in a very large house where I happily played as a child and where my best companion there was the son of my grandparents’ chauffeur, whose family lived in an apartment above the garage.
Their world was German-Jewish, and my grandfather was one of the founders of that communities’ local country club. My grandparents, seeking spiritual meaning in their lives, followed Christian Science, but they still considered themselves Jewish, though as members of the upper-class German-Jewish world they would never have considered joining a Conservative or Orthodox community.
My father’s family was split between Eastern and Central Europe. His father was Lithuanian and Orthodox, his mother was German and reform, and that divide contributed to my paternal grandparents’ divorce. After my parents had married and moved to New York, our father would take us on excursions to the Lower East Side where we would buy challah, which we never ate on Friday night. I understood — without knowing the word — that we were part of what the larger Jewish world called Yekke. That is, we were of German and Central European descent and our grandparents and their parents before them did not speak Yiddish. This was in contrast to the Jews from the areas of Eastern Europe where Jews did speak Yiddish, who had not yet assimilated into American culture and language as we had, were often poorer, and were looked down upon by the Yekke.
My parents may have disliked organized religion, but they certainly felt Jewish. In the late 1930s, my mother and her mother sponsored Jews trying to get out of Germany. My mother had a letter from Albert Einstein, written in German and addressed to Fraulein Spiegel (her maiden name) thanking her for trying to help a Jewish family of mathematicians. And in retrospect, their Jewish identity must also have been reinforced in 1948 by the establishment of Israel, then a small, scrappy, underdog state. Like most American Jews, they thought of Israel as a symbol of survival: Hitler had not wiped us off the face of the earth.
Later I learned that my parents’ largest contribution every year was to the United Jewish Appeal (UJA). But this was true of the vast majority of Jews of their generation, and I would guess was so for the parents of virtually every Jewish child in Dalton’s lower and middle school. One of the girls in my Dalton class was Elizabeth Rosenwald (Varet), the daughter of William Rosenwald (and granddaughter of Julius Rosenwald) who, along with much of his family, helped found the UJA. Another was Ruth Slawson, daughter of John Slawson, who was director of the American Jewish Committee from 1943 to 1968. But, in the lower school I felt simply part of my environment, and a very large part of that environment was Dalton.
A world of progressives and universalists
When we were in kindergarten, our schoolroom had its own sandbox: Dalton allowed us to play and simply grow. When we started 1st grade, however, we were meant to learn how to read. But I had no interest in reading except for comic books, especially Tarzan. Not knowing how to crack the code to read all those words contained in the bubbles attached to each character’s head, I happily made up my own stories. A group of us remained illiterate until the fall of 3rd grade, when we attended a remedial class and I learned how to decode letters and symbols. When we each finally conquered the art of literacy, we were given a very small penknife clad in mother of pearl. Comics were never the same.
Each lower school grade was split into two classes, each with its own teacher. The lower school teacher I remember best was Ellie Seeger, a fabulous storyteller who regaled our class with stories until the other second grade class got so jealous she had to stop. Her husband was John Seeger, brother of Pete Seeger. John Seeger taught middle school geography where we made papier mâché maps, something I adored doing. He would sing for us sometimes, and although I became a great fan of Pete Seeger, I think John was just as good.
School at Dalton would frequently begin with a morning assembly. We would march into our wonderful proscenium theater with red-covered theater seats to piano music. It was there that John Seeger sang for us. It was there that we put on plays and made costumes in a wonderful anteroom space. And it was also there that Dalton held its Christmas Pageant, a re-enactment of the birth of Jesus and the story of the wisemen from the east, to which none of our Jewish parents objected.
In 1951, we went on a trip to Otis, a farm in Massachusetts. We crossed over a gully or a stream on a log. I still have a photo of myself milking a cow into a metal bucket
I was friends with a Black girl named Judy Walker and we had sleepover dates. She would come with us to our summer house in Connecticut, and I went with her to the vacation home her family was building, and to her home in Harlem. Her father was a chemist and one morning at her house I woke up to music, thinking it was the theme to the Lone Ranger. Her parents must have liked classical music because it was the William Tell Overture.
The biggest event of 5th grade was the Greek Festival — a very Dewey-inspired production. Tessie Ross was our teacher, and we loved her. She taught at Dalton for 43 years beginning in 1944 after she had fled to the U.S. from Belgium and she led the Greek Festival, which took place in the gym and had carriages and spears and shields and armor. We played at being Greeks — Athenians against the Spartans, with parents as our audience.
In high school, I had one other teacher who was a refugee from Europe, our history teacher Nora Hodges. Mrs. Hodges was born in 1899 as Nora August Warndorfer, from Vienna. She came from a family of wealthy Jews, and fortunately she got out of Vienna many years before the Anschluss. She went back to Austria in the mid-1930’s and told us how she had listened to the radio, and, hearing a magnetic voice come over the air, felt captivated — until she learned that it was Adolph Hitler.
In the lower school, girls got to wear pants on Fridays. That was a big deal then because girls still wore skirts and dresses. Always. I remember mine as being corduroy with an elastic waist. I believe that going casual on Fridays, however, was not simply a symptom of Dalton progressive philosophy, but an indicator that it was populated by well-off families. Of course, the America of the 1950s was not as divided between rich and poor as it is now, and those who were upper middle class, or even rich, were not inclined to be ostentatious. But many families had either country homes or were members of country clubs. So, the school allowed girls to sport trousers on Fridays so they would be dressed to go to their second homes.
Not that all families were wealthy. Robert Newman, whose daughter Hila was a class or two above me, was a radio-drama playwright turned children’s book writer. Wally Shawn’s father WIlliam was the editor of The New Yorker, so he was very well-known but wasn’t paid a banker’s salary. Bettye George Dockery’s father was a dentist. Michael Lerner’s father, Max Lerner, was a writer, professor, and public intellectual, and also famous, but not wealthy. Pebble Baker’s father was a journalist for Time.
We ended our school year with a festival called “Arch Day.” Each class went through an arch on the auditorium stage. We went in as part of one grade and exited as part of the next. There were skits as well. My brother Paul finished 8th grade in 1954, when so many Americans were obsessed with the McCarthy hearings, so Paul’s class put together a skit entitled “Point of Order.”
Most Dalton students, and I assume most of the teachers, were liberal, but establishment liberal. We all assumed Alger Hiss was innocent. His son Tony went to Dalton and was a few years ahead of me. One of his lawyers was Helen Buttenweiser. The Buttenweiser children went to Dalton. She and her husband Benjamin were wealthy German Jewish New York philanthropists..
But while we were all aware of Joseph McCarthy, of the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC), and of Alger Hiss, we never talked about Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Ethel Greenglass was a secretary and a member of the Young Communist League. Julius’ parents were immigrants from Russia who grew up on the Lower East Side and he also was a communist. Alger Hiss was accepted by much of German Jewish Yekke Manhattan, though he himself was not Jewish, but the Rosenbergs were not. They were the wrong kind of Jews — the ones who would never have sent their sons to Dalton.
That divide, between Hiss and the Rosenbergs, perhaps illuminates my Dalton world in the 1950s. We were comfortable progressives and post-World War II universalists. We believed in Civil Rights and the future of Blacks in the United States. We supported John Lindsay for congress and mayor. My father once chaperoned me and a friend to a Pete Seeger concert, and he was terrified by how Pete Seeger could whip up a crowd — it reminded him too much of Adolph Hitler.
In the 7th or 8th grade, I read The Diary of Anne Frank. I devoured it one summer when I was at my parents’ vacation house in Martha’s Vineyard. There was a great tick scare that summer, so I lay in my bed, clenching my teeth to ward off any ticks, reading Anne Frank and refashioning my identity.
By middle school, questions of my own identity began to intertwine with my Dalton childhood. My mother once told me that some of the girls whose parents sent them to Dalton in the lower and middle school did so in order to provide their children with a diverse environment but then put them elsewhere for high school so that they would not become romantically attached to a Jewish boy or too acculturated into Jewish (or at least Yekke) life.
A story worth preserving
When I went through the arch in June of 1957, I entered as an 8th grader and emerged as a high school student. Four years later, in 1961, I graduated — 65 years ago. America was a different world then. The gap between rich and poor was not as yawning, and the wealthy were not as excessive. For Jewish children today, the memory of the Holocaust is often a nearly untouchable past that they learn about in Hebrew School; the story of Anne Frank is recalled from a school assignment; and secular Jews like my family have left the emotional ghetto in which my parents still lived. Our public and private contexts have changed. And so I have decided to tell my story of one German Jewish child living in Manhattan in the 1940s and 1950s, attending one progressive grade school, during one slice of time that I feel is worth preserving.
The post A New York Jewish childhood at the Dalton School where privilege met progressivism appeared first on The Forward.
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Michigan’s Senate race has become a referendum on Israel — and the future of the Democratic Party
Tuesday’s primary contest for an open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan has become a proxy fight over the Gaza war and a referendum on Israel supporters’ influence in Democratic politics. Democratic voters will decide whether to nominate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who is leading in the polls after assailing his opponent as beholden to the campaign fundraising group AIPAC, or Rep. Haley Stevens, a reliable supporter of Israel who has condemned what she called “inflammatory rhetoric” from El-Sayed.
Following a string of primary victories by insurgent Democrats who made condemning Israel central to their campaigns — from New York to New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Colorado — the outcome will become the clearest test yet of whether the vocally anti-Israel progressive movement may come to define the Democratic Party.
Recent polls show El-Sayed with growing momentum, leading Stevens by as much as 16 points.
Michigan, home to one of the country’s largest Arab-American communities, was already a national hot spot for voter pushback on pro-Israel politics as the birthplace of the 2024 “uncommitted” movement that protested President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza by submitting blank ballots in the presidential primary.
It also has an influential Jewish community that has become deeply invested in the race — and with some El-Sayed supporters among them.
Tuesday’s winner will have to prevail in the November general election, and success is not guaranteed: While Democrats are a majority of registered voters in Michigan, Republican President Donald Trump won the state in 2016 and 2024.
With Democrats counting on winning Michigan as they aim to retake the Senate, the questions looming over Tuesday’s primary aren’t just about the party’s direction on Israel — they’re also about whether running against Israel is a winning message in a swing state.
Democrats are facing a difficult path to winning Senate control even as polls show growing dissatisfaction with the Republican agenda.
A look at three possible scenarios shows the high stakes of the race for the Democratic Party and the place of Israel in U.S. politics:
An El-Sayed victory
An Emerson College survey of 700 voters shows El-Sayed leading Stevens by 16 points, despite more than $60 million of outside spending attacking him. AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, has spent $30.6 million backing Stevens, according to recent FEC filings. AIPAC also raised several million dollars for Stevens by directing its donors to online portals that funnel money directly to the candidate’s campaign. All in all, the Michigan contest is AIPAC’s largest investment this election cycle.
If El-Sayed wins, he would become the first Muslim nominated by a major party for the U.S. Senate and would immediately become one of the most prominent figures on the Democratic left. It would echo the victory of Zohran Mamdani in last year’s mayoral race as the city’s first Muslim mayor and the most prominent democratic socialist in office, with Jews divided between fierce opposition and fiery support.
But the immediate political meaning would be about AIPAC.
The progressive frontrunner has transformed AIPAC’s investment in the race into a centerpiece of his campaign message. Backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, El-Sayed used AIPAC as a political foil and a symbol of everything he says is wrong with Democratic politics: super PAC money, billionaire influence and demands for unconditional support for Israel. A poll of Michigan voters conducted by Data for Progress in April found that 64% of likely Democratic primary voters would be less inclined to support a candidate backed by AIPAC.
At a recent virtual town hall hosted by Progressive Democrats of America, El-Sayed compared his possible victory to David defeating Goliath. “AIPAC, if you’re listening, burn your money, come back and burn it again in the general,” he said. “I’m happy to burn your money for you, and then we can get onto the business of governing and asking whether or not our foreign policy ought to be dictated to us by the interests of a foreign government.”
An El-Sayed win would mark a reversal from AIPAC’s last confrontation with Stevens’ opponents in Michigan. In 2022, Stevens defeated Jewish Rep. Andy Levin by 20 points in a rare incumbent-versus-incumbent House primary after redistricting. Levin argued that the group was trying to punish him for criticizing Israeli policy and supporting Palestinian rights. AIPAC celebrated Levin’s defeat as proof that even a Jewish incumbent could not survive after crossing the organization. (Levin is supporting El-Sayed.)
It would also create immediate questions about how El-Sayed would operate in Washington.
Would he support Sen. Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in American history and one of Stevens’ most powerful allies, as Democratic leader if Democrats win the majority? And would he give Senate progressives new leverage over key votes on Israel?
What if El-Sayed loses the general election?
For Democrats worried about electability, the primary is only the first test.
The winner will face former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, who narrowly lost Michigan’s 2024 Senate election and is now running with a largely unified Republican Party behind him.
Michigan remains one of the country’s key battlegrounds. President Donald Trump carried it in 2016, lost it in 2020 and won it again in 2024. Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a moderate Democrat who was an intelligence analyst in the CIA and served three tours in Iraq, won her race even as Trump carried the state.
Recent polls found Rogers leading El-Sayed by single digits.
Some Michigan Jewish Democrats are already considering whether they could support El-Sayed, vote for the Republican, or leave their ballot blank in November. Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in the state.
Stevens has sharpened those concerns in the final days of the campaign. She accused El-Sayed of blaming “all of your problems on Jewish Americans,” warning that his rhetoric would lead to defeat in the face-off with Rogers. El-Sayed, who has courted Jewish voters without moderating his views on Israel, rejected accusations of antisemitism.
“I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people,” he said.
A November loss would have consequences far beyond Michigan.
Democrats are already facing an uphill battle for Senate control after the collapse of Graham Platner in the competitive Maine Senate race.
Losing the seat being vacated by Sen. Gary Peters would further divide Democrats. Party leaders would almost certainly blame El-Sayed’s ideology, his vocal opposition to Israel and the progressive groups that elevated him for losing a swing state. AIPAC, meanwhile, would claim vindication despite losing the primary.
Speaking with reporters on Sunday, El-Sayed said he’s confident Democratic voters will rally behind his candidacy as they reckon with what is at stake.
What if Stevens survives?
A Stevens victory would offer a very different lesson.
It would show that experience, establishment support and a strong general-election argument can still overcome anger about AIPAC, even in the state where the uncommitted movement began. Even a narrow victory would preserve AIPAC’s reputation as one of the most effective forces in Democratic primaries.
But it would say more about Stevens and her personality. She first entered Congress in the 2018 Democratic wave, capturing a Republican-held suburban district. She then survived redistricting and defeated Levin in the bruising 2022 primary.
Stevens has the backing of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Schumer and much of Michigan’s Democratic establishment. And she leads Rogers in a November matchup.
By Wednesday morning, Democrats will know who won Michigan. It may take until November or even longer to know whether Tuesday’s vote marked the beginning of a new era in Democratic politics or another chapter in the party’s divide over Israel. Nonetheless, Democratic leaders still have to reunite a coalition fractured over Gaza and manage a growing progressive wing in the House.
The fight extends down the ballot
The Senate contest is not the only Michigan race testing the strength of the progressive left.
In Detroit’s 13th Congressional District, state Rep. Donavan McKinney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is challenging incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar with the support of Justice Democrats. The group, which helped launch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the Squad, made McKinney its first congressional endorsement in four years.
In Michigan’s 7th District, former climate activist William Lawrence is running against two centrist Democrats in the primary, making an end to all U.S. military aid to Israel a key part of his campaign. The seat was previously held by Slotkin.
On a state level, Abbas Alawieh, one of the leaders of the uncommitted movement in Michigan, is running for a seat in the state legislature in a Dearborn-area district with a large Arab and Muslim population. In a sign of his growing profile, Alawieh recently met with former Vice President Kamala Harris.
AIPAC and the debate over Israel is also spilling into a neighboring state Senate race. Pro-Israel donors are spending heavily to back Justin Onwenu against former State Rep. Abraham Aiyash, an outspoken critic of Israel’s war in Gaza.
It has also reached the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents. Michigan Democrats nominated Amir Makled, an attorney who represented pro-Palestinian protesters, after he defeated incumbent Regent Jordan Acker at the party convention. Makled faces scrutiny for past Hezbollah praise and antisemitic posts. Republican regent candidates Lena Epstein and Michael Schostak, both Jewish, have campaigned on antisemitism and campus safety. That race will be decided in November.
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Suspected arson gutted Montreal’s trendiest kosher restaurant. The city’s Jews say they saw it coming
Howard Szalavetz’s phone buzzed around 3:15 a.m. Saturday, startling him awake. It was news no landlord wants: a retail building he owned was on fire. Nöam, the kosher restaurant that anchors it, was burning.
He threw on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and hopped into his daughter’s Ford Bronco. The drive was only five minutes, but each one felt like an eternity. Police and fire crews had cordoned off several blocks around Montreal’s Décarie Boulevard, forcing him to abandon the car and run the rest of the way on foot. Eventually, they let him through.
“It was insane,” he recalled in an interview Sunday. “There were 80 firemen.” The building he’s owned since 1987 — home to a car wash, an auto repair garage, and Nöam — was engulfed. The restaurant’s section, a wood-frame extension, “went up pretty quickly.”
By the time the fire was under control around 8 a.m., the restaurant was gutted top to bottom. The car wash and auto repair suffered less damage and plan to reopen this week.
Video of the fire that burned down Noam, a popular Kosher restaurant in Montreal pic.twitter.com/gVvvTVvcRQ
— Benyamin Cohen (@benyamincohen) August 2, 2026
Szalavetz and police were able to pull footage from a security camera mounted to the exterior of the auto repair shop. In it, a figure appears on the restaurant’s wood deck, bends down and lights a fire with what looks like a can of accelerant. The man’s face wasn’t hidden, but the footage was too poor in quality to make out much more.
When nearby shops that were closed over the weekend reopen Monday, investigators hope to gather additional footage. Szalavetz said a camera damaged in the Nöam fire might also contain more information.
Szalavetz’s father survived three concentration camps and lost much of his family in the Holocaust. He died in 2021. “Thankfully he didn’t see this,” Szalavetz said, “because this is how Europe started.”
The Nöam fire is the latest in a rapid drumbeat of attacks on Jewish targets in Canada. Last week, in Toronto, a gunman fired at the windows of one branch of Kiva’s Bagel Bar, a Jewish-owned bakery chain, about an hour after vandals had shattered the glass front of another location. In June, a man smashed a window at Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, a Reform congregation in Montreal, and tried to start a fire inside.
That same month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney acknowledged that two-thirds of all religion-motivated hate crimes in Canada are directed at Jews. “Canada’s civic compact,” he said, “is failing Jewish Canadians.” B’nai Brith Canada recorded 27 violent antisemitic incidents in the first six months of 2026 — nearly triple the count for all of 2025.
Deborah Lipstadt, the noted Holocaust historian and former U.S. special envoy to combat antisemitism during the Biden administration, said the Nöam fire was “utterly predictable.” Carney, she said, “does not have the chutzpah” to stand up and declare, without qualification, that antisemitism has no place in Canada.
“If this is not a wake-up call, I don’t know,” Lipstadt said. “Do more people have to die for it to be a wake-up call? How much more do you need? Spare me your pious sympathies and sincere regrets.”
A vigil and a crowdfunding campaign
By Saturday, Szalavetz said he’d fielded some 150 calls — more, he said, than he gets on his birthday. Montreal is home to an estimated 90,000 Jews, but Szalavetz said it still has the feel of a “shtetl,” and word traveled fast: a vigil drew a crowd outside the burned restaurant Saturday night, and the community plans on launching an online crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the two owners and roughly 30 employees, since insurance can’t cover the full scope of the loss.
Brothers-in-law Meir Azerad and Ynon Cohen opened Nöam in August 2024, transforming what had been little more than a car wash’s waiting room into a polished, sit-down kosher restaurant. They named it for Cohen’s brother, Noam, who had died years earlier and had dreamed of opening a restaurant of his own.
They turned out wood-fired pizzas at 1,000 degrees, two minutes a pie. Expanding the menu to include Mediterranean and Italian, Nöam grew to a following that surprised even its owners, and had a waitlist most weeknights. The partners had just spent a year renovating a second floor to keep up with demand.
Among the social media posts circulating Saturday morning was one from Francine Goldberg, a lifelong Montrealer, that quickly went viral. The fire broke out on Shabbat — the one day, she wrote, “we are forbidden to kindle a flame. Somebody kindled it for us.”
Politicians were quick to respond. Anthony Housefather, a Jewish member of Parliament who represents the area, demanded the fire be investigated as a hate crime. Police say they have not yet established a motive.
The Mamdani angle
But for many Montreal Jews, official statements have started to feel beside the point. Goldberg calls them “the typical Hallmark pleasantries: ‘Oh, it’s horrible, and it should never happen.’”
Goldberg, who works at a medical clinic in downtown Montreal, said she’s received more hate mail this year than at any point in her life. She doesn’t think Carney is an antisemite — just a politician counting votes. “There are far more of them than there are of us,” she said. Jews make up approximately 1% of the Canadian population.
Jesse Brown, a Canadian Jewish journalist who has tracked the country’s antisemitism surge since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust, sees the same pattern from a different angle.
When Carney announced a new council to combat hate this summer, Brown called it “disingenuous” — the council had already existed for months, under a different name, and included members with histories of anti-Israel advocacy. More pointedly, Brown said, Carney has refused to name the actual cause. “This is happening because of this global movement against Israel,” he said. “Jews in Canada are being targeted in the name of targeting Israel.” Naming antisemitism, he argued, is easy. Naming anti-Zionism as its engine is the part no Canadian politician has been willing to do.
Goldberg sees this dynamic playing out beyond Canada’s borders. In New York, Zohran Mamdani was elected the city’s first Muslim mayor in January and recently to called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide.” His win in the U.S. city with the largest population of Jews has been widely read as evidence that anti-Zionist politics can win elections across the country.
In the months since his election, antisemitic hate crimes in New York have climbed sharply: NYPD data show Jews, roughly 10% of the city’s population, were targets in 55% of all confirmed hate crimes in the first half of 2026, with anti-Jewish incidents up 182% year-over-year in January alone.
Goldberg sees that rhetoric traveling regardless of the border. “That has a trickle-down effect on Montrealers,” she said. She’s watched a segment of the city’s progressive activists argue that Montreal’s own mayor should “follow Mamdani” and formally declare that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Her worry isn’t that Israeli policy is off-limits for criticism — she says she criticizes the Netanyahu government herself — but that mainstreaming anti-Zionism as just another respectable political position is what’s fueling the rise in antisemitism she’s living through.
Goldberg said that people keep telling her to consider moving to Israel. She isn’t interested. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “It’s exactly what they would want, so I’m not going to clarify their mission.” That doesn’t mean the fear isn’t real, she added: “It’s very, very dark. It’s dark times for us.”
‘A lot of gaslighting’
Brown pointed to a pattern that predates the fire at Nöam. Last August, an Orthodox man was beaten in a Montreal park in front of his three children; his attacker tore the kippah from his head and threw it to the ground. Quebec prosecutors ultimately determined it wasn’t a hate crime — the attacker was found not criminally responsible due to mental illness.
When pro-Palestinian protesters marched down Toronto’s “hospital row” in February 2024 and mobbed Mount Sinai Hospital, organizers said the hospital hadn’t been targeted; it just happened to be along the route. Brown calls this a recurring dynamic. “There’s a lot of gaslighting that occurs,” he said.
He expects something similar will happen with the Nöam investigation: police have video of the fire being set, but Canadian hate-crime charges require proof of motive that’s notoriously hard to establish. More likely, he said, if the suspect is charged with arson alone “then people who want to deny what is happening will say, well, ‘We have no proof that was antisemitism.’”
There’s already a template for how that skepticism plays out. In December 2024, a man threw a Molotov cocktail into Montreal’s Beth Tikvah synagogue; windows were smashed the same night at a nearby Jewish federation office. The man who pleaded guilty to three of six arson-related charges, Mohamed Ilyes Akodad, testified this summer that he’d been paid $15,000 through an anonymous contact on Signal to firebomb two buildings and torch a car, and that he didn’t know one of them was a synagogue. Prosecutors are seeking a two-year sentence; his lawyer is asking for a suspended sentence and home confinement. A judge is expected to rule Sept. 10.
Rabbi Lisa Grushcow of Montreal’s Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, which experienced its own firebomb attack this June, has seen the pattern up close. “At this point, none of it feels surprising,” she said, “and that in itself is quite sobering.” Protective coatings on the synagogue’s windows kept the firebomb from getting through, and police apprehended the suspect that night. It could have been far worse, she said, “but we can’t just say ‘This is not who we are,’ because clearly this is who our society is right now.”
Still, she pointed to what happened the day after her synagogue was attacked: so many families showed up for a scheduled service that the congregation had to run two instead of one. She saw the same instinct play out in Toronto, where customers lined up outside Kiva’s Bagel the morning after the shootings there. “It shouldn’t take resilience to live as a Jew,” she said. But if the choice is between resilience and retreat, her community has made its decision: “We’re not going to give up or move away.”
Lipstadt’s message to Jews was also one of resilience, not despair. Asked whether Canadian Jews should consider leaving the country, she declined to answer directly. “That’s not my place,” she said. But she was unequivocal that Jews would endure. “We have survived worse,” she said. What worries her isn’t whether Jews will survive — it’s whether the societies around them will. “Will democratic society, writ very large, be okay?” she said. “I’m not so sure.”
Nöam’s owners Azerad and Cohen have said little publicly since the fire. Szalavetz described them as “very camera shy,” agreeing only reluctantly to a brief interview with a local reporter after Szalavetz pushed them to speak. “The world needs to know,” he told them. For now, what’s certain is the plan: rebuild in the same spot and reopen “bigger, better, newer” than before, said Szalavetz. He estimates that could take six months to a year. In the meantime, he said, he’s working on finding them a temporary home so the restaurant can remain open.
“Coming back is the goal,” Szalavetz said. “It’s my goal as a proud Jew. You’re not going to take us down.”
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Heeding a Saudi plea, Trump says he canceled a joint U.S.-Israel assault on Iran
(JTA) — President Donald Trump said he canceled at the last minute a planned joint assault with Israel on Iran’s energy infrastructure at the behest of Saudi Arabia, which feared the war blowing up into a wider conflict.
The U.S. alerts over the weekend warning citizens to evacuate the Middle East and then Trump’s announcement late Saturday that he was canceling the planned strike appeared to catch Israel off guard. It undercut Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim last week that he and Trump were in lockstep on Iran.
“The U.S.A. is locked and loaded and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran, at levels of Military Terror, Strength, and Power not seen since World War II,” Trump said on Truth Social, the social media platform he owns.
“Despite this, we have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to,” he said. “This would include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran’s nuclear threat.”
Saudi Arabia’’s official news agency confirmed that Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince who has close business and personal ties with Trump and his family, appealed to the U.S. president to stand down.
“The Crown Prince stressed the need to prioritize dialogue to reduce escalation and the importance of making every possible effort to achieve calm that paves the way for diplomatic solutions, preserves the region’s security and stability, and prevents a wider conflict whose repercussions would affect regional and international security and stability,” the Saudi Press Agency said.
Iran disputed Trump’s claim, instead saying that it was ready to respond to any attack on the country.
“The Iranian Foreign Ministry vowed that Tehran will use all means at its disposal to exercise its inherent right of self-defense in the face of the United States’ ongoing violations against the Islamic Republic,” the Fars News Agency said.
Fars, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps – the principal power in Iran since the war began – denied any stand-down on Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz.
“Iran’s Armed Forces have staged uncompromising retaliation in the face of each instance of violation, including those taking place in support of illegal vessel movement in the waterway,” the agency said.
The waterway is critical to the passage of a fifth of the world’s petroleum. Iran has asserted control of the waterway in the wake of the war the United States and Israel launched in February.
Trump’s statement came after CBS News reported on Saturday that the United States and Israel were set to attack Iran’s energy infrastructure, which would substantially escalate the war. The State Department put out a security alert advising Americans in the region to leave if they could, and to cancel plans to enter it.
Regional media reported that Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, conveyed warnings through Turkey and Pakistan to regional U.S. allies that it would hit back hard if the U.S.-Israel attack went through.
Israel appeared to be caught off guard both by the planned escalation and by Trump’s stand-down. “Israel is unaware of a decision to restart full military operations, nor has been requested of Israel to join any military actions against Iran,” CBS News quoted an Israeli official as saying – even as it quoted U.S. officials as saying that Israel was coordinating with the United States.
Israel’s government had no comment on Trump’s reported plan to attack the infrastructure, or his stand-down. Flights in and out of Ben Gurion Airport were unaffected. In his Truth Social statement, Trump said, “The Country of Israel joins me in this commitment.”
Trump has multiple times since the war’s launch threatened to escalate the war only to retreat at the last minute, something the Fars news agency noted in a sardonic tone.
“This narrative seems familiar and repetitive,” it said in a separate report on bin Salman’s appeal. “Every time Trump has made serious threats against Iranian infrastructure in the past, after Tehran has not backed down, he has claimed that friendly countries have asked him not to do anything.”
Trump escalated his rhetoric last week as Iran continued to attack ships attempting to transit Hormuz. “We’re going to beat the f***ing s**t out of them,” he told Fox News.
Trump has since the tentative signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran in mid-June asked Israel to stay out of the conflict – including in the wake of the resumption of fighting on July 13.
Netanyahu, facing a tough reelection in October, has in recent weeks sought to allay any perceptions in Israel that he had been sidelined by Trump. He met with the president last week.
“I just finished an excellent meeting with President Trump,” he told Israeli reporters after the meeting. “And when I say excellent, it’s not lip service – a conversation with full cooperation, with mutual support, with the understanding of the joint goal to ensure that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon, and other goals.”
The roller-coaster ride appeared to unsettle Netanyahu’s colleagues in his Likud Party. “You can say ‘no’ to Trump,” Knesset member Amit Halevi told Kan Reshet Bet, the government-run radio station. “Our commitment is to the security of the state.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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