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American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews?
(JTA) — Among Sandra Fox’s most memorable finds during her years mining American archives for materials about Jewish summer camps was a series of letters about the hours before lights-out.
The letters were by counselors who were documenting an unusual window in the day when they stopped supervising campers, leaving the teens instead to their own devices, which sometimes included romance and sexual exploration.
“It was each division talking about how they dealt with that free time before bed in ‘age-appropriate ways,’” Fox recalled about the letters written by counselors at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, the original iteration of the Conservative movement’s network of summer camps.
“I’ve spoken to Christian people who work at Christian camps and have researched Christian camps. There is no free time before bed,” Fox told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That’s not a thing if you don’t want kids to hook up. So it was just amazing to find these documents of Camp Ramah leaders really having the conversation explicitly. Most of the romance and sexuality stuff is implicit in the archives.”
The letters are quoted extensively in Fox’s new book, “The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America.” Fox, who earned a PhD in history from New York University in 2018 and now teaches and directs the Archive of the American Jewish Left there, tells the story of American Judaism’s most immersive laboratory for constructing identity and contesting values.
Next week, Fox is launching the book with an event at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. (Tickets for the Feb. 23 event are available here.) Attendees will be able to tour adult versions of some of the most durable elements of Jewish summer camps, from Israeli dance to Yiddish and Hebrew instruction to Color Wars to Tisha B’Av, the mournful holiday that always falls over the summer.
“I never considered doing a normal book party,” Fox said. “It was always really obvious to me that a book about experiential Jewish education and role play should be celebrated and launched out into the world through experiential education and role play.”
Sandra Fox’s 2023 book “The Jews of Summer,” looks at the history of American Jewish summer camps. (Courtesy of Fox)
We spoke to Fox about her party plans, how Jewish summer camps have changed over time and how they’ve stayed the same, and the cultural history of that before-bed free time.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. We’ll be continuing the conversation in a virtual chat through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Feb. 27 at 1 p.m.; register here.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Given how much Jews like to talk about camp, were you surprised that this book hadn’t already been written?
Sandra Fox: There’s been a lot of fruitful research on the history of various camps, but it’s usually been focused on one camping movement or one camp type. So there are articles about Zionist camps. There are certainly articles out there about the Ramah camps. A lot of camps have produced books — either their alumni associations or a scholar who went to let’s say, Reform movement camps have created essay collections about those camps. And there are also books about Habonim and other Zionist youth movements.
I don’t really know why this is the first stab at this kind of cross-comparison. It might be that people didn’t think there would be so much to compare. I think the overwhelming feeling I get from readers so far, people who preordered and gotten their books early, is that they’re very surprised to hear how similar these camps are. So perhaps it’s that scholars weren’t thinking about Jewish summer camps that came from such diverse standpoints as having something enough in common to write about them all at once.
Also distance from the time period really helps. You can write a book about — and people do write a book about — the ’60s and ’70s and have been for decades, but there’s a certain amount of distance from the period that has allowed me to do this, I think, and maybe it also helps that I’m generationally removed. A lot of the scholars who’ve worked on camps in the postwar period went to camps in the postwar period. It makes a lot of sense that it would be harder to write this sort of sweeping thing perhaps. The fact that I’m a millennial meant that I could write about the postwar period — and also write kind of an epilogue-style chapter that catches us up to the present.
What’s clear is that there’s something amazing about studying summer camp, a completely immersive 24/7 experience that parents send children away for. There’s no better setting for thinking about how adults project their anxieties and desires about the future onto children. There’s also no place better to think about power dynamics and age and generational tension.
I was definitely struck by the “sameyness” of Jewish camps in your accounting. What do you think we can learn from that, either about camps or about us as Jews?
I do want to say that while there’s a lot of sameyness, whenever you do a comparative study, there’s a risk of kind of collapsing all these things and making them seem too similar. What I’m trying to convey is that the camp leaders from a variety of movements took the basic structure of the summer camp as we know it — its daily schedule, its environment, its activities — and it did look similar from camp to camp, at least on that surface level.
If you look at the daily schedules in comparison, they might have a lot of the same features but they’ll be called slightly different things depending on if the camp leans more heavily towards Hebrew, or Yiddish, or English. But the content within those schedules would be rather different. It’s more that the skeletal structure of camp life has a lot of similarities across the board and then the details within each section of the day or the month had a lot of differences.
But I think what it says is that in the postwar period, the anxieties that Jewish leaders had about the future of Judaism are really, really similar and the solution that they found within the summer camp, they were pretty unanimous about. They just then took the model and inserted within it their particular nationalistic, linguistic or religious perspectives. So I think more so than saying anything about American Jewry, it shows kind of how flexible camping is. And that’s not just the Jewish story. Lots of different Americans have embraced summer camping in different ways.
So many people who have gone to camp have a fixed memory of what camp is like, where it’s caught in time, but you argue that camps have actually undergone lots of change. What are the most striking changes you documented, perhaps ones that might have been hard for even insiders to discern as they happened?
First of all, the Israel-centeredness of American Jewish education as we know it today didn’t happen overnight in 1948, for instance. It was a slower process, beyond the Zionist movements where that was already going on, for decades before 1948. Ramah and the Reform camps for instance took their time towards getting to the heavily Zionist-imbued curricula that we know.
There was considerable confusion and ambivalence at first about what to do with Israel: whether to raise an Israeli flag, not because they were anti-Zionist, but because American Jews had been thinking about proving their loyalty to America for many generations. There were some sources that would talk about — what kind of right do American Jews have to raise the Israeli flag when they’re not Israeli? So that kind of Israel-centeredness that is really a feature of camp life today was a slower process than we might think.
It fit camp life really well because broader American camps used Native American symbols, in some ways that are problematic today, to create what we know of as an iconography of camp life. So for Jews, Israel and its iconography, or Palestine and iconography before ’48, provided an alternative set of options that were read as Jewish, but it still took some time to get to where we are now in terms of the Israel focus.
One of the reasons I place emphasis on the Yiddish summer camps is to show that in the early 20th century and the mid-20th century there was more ideological diversity in the Jewish camping sphere, including various forms of Yiddishist groups and socialist groups and communist groups that operated summer camps. Most of them have closed, and their decline is obviously a change that tells a story of how American Jewry changed over the course of the postwar period. Their legacy is important, too: I have made the argument that these camps in a lot of ways modeled the idea of Yiddish as having a future in America.
What about hookup culture? Contemporary discourse about Jewish camps have focused on sex and sexuality there. What did you observe about this in the archives?
I think people think of the hookup culture of Jewish camps today and certainly in my time in the ’90s and 2000s as a permanent feature, and in some ways I found through my research and oral history interviews that that was the case, but it was really interesting to zoom out a little bit and think about how Jewish summer camps changed in terms of sexual romantic culture, in relationship to how America changed with the sexual revolution and the youth culture.
It’s not it’s not useful to think about Jewish hookup culture in a vacuum. It’s happening within America more broadly. And so of course, it’s changed dramatically over time. And one of the things I learned that was so fascinating is that Jewish summer camps were actually their leaders were less concerned in a lot of ways about sexuality at camp in the ’40s and ’50s, than they were in the late ’60s and ’70s. Because earlier premarital sex was pretty rare, at least in the teenage years, so they were not that concerned about what happened after lights out because they kind of assumed whatever was going on was fairly innocent.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, that’s when camps have to actually think about how to balance allowance and control. They want to allow campers to have these relationships, to have their first sexual experiences, and part of that is related to rising rates of intermarriage and wanting to encourage love between Jews, but they also want to control it because there’s a broader societal moment in which the sexuality of teenagers is problematized and their and their sexual culture is more public.
There’s been a real wave of sustained criticism by former campers about the cultures that they experienced, arguing that the camps created an inappropriately sexualized and unsafe space. There’s been a lot of reaction to that and the broader #MeToo moment. I’m curious about what you can speculate about a future where that space is cleaned up, based on your historical research — what is gained and what, potentially, could be lost?
Without being involved in camping today — and I want to really make that disclaimer because I know a lot of change is happening and lot of organizations are involved to talk about this issue better, to train camps and camp leaders and their counselors to not create a pressured environment for camper — I think what the history shows is that this hookup culture did not come about out of nowhere. It was partly related to the broader changes in America and the sexual revolution.
But it was also partly created because camps really needed to have campers’ buy-in, in order to be “successful.” A huge argument of my book is that we think about the power of camps as if camp directors have campers as, like, puppets on strings, and that what they do is what happens in camp life. But actually, campers have changed the everyday texture of life at camp over the course of the decades in so many different ways by resisting various ideas or just not being interested.
So hookup culture is also part of making campers feel like they have freedom at camp and that’s essential. That’s not a side project — that is essential to their ability to get campers to come back. It’s a financial need, and it’s an ideological need. If you make campers feel like they have freedom, then they will feel like they freely took on the ideologies your camp is promoting in a really natural way.
The last part of it is rising rates of intermarriage. As rates of intermarriage rose in the second half of the 20th century, there’s no doubt in my mind from doing the research that the preexisting culture around sexuality at camp and romance at camp got turbo-boosted [to facilitate relationships that could potentially lead to marriage between two Jews]. At that point, the allowance and control that camp leaders were trying to create for many decades leans maybe more heavily towards allowance.
There are positives to camp environments being a place where campers can explore their sexualities. There’s definitely a lot of conversation about the negative effects and those are all very, very real. I know people who went through horrible things at a camp and I also know people who experienced it as a very sex-positive atmosphere. I know people in my age range who were able to discover that they were gay or lesbian at camp in safety in comparison to home, so it’s not black and white at all. I hope that my chapter on romance and sexuality can maybe add some historical nuance to the conversation and give people a sense of how this actually happened. Because it happened for a whole bunch of reasons.
I think there’s a consensus view that camp is one of the most “successful” things the Jews do. But it’s hard to see where lessons from camp or camp culture are being imported to the rest of Jewish life. I’m curious what you see as kind of the lessons that Jewish institutions or Jewish communities have taken from camp — or have they not done that?
Every single public engagement I do about my work has boiled down to the question of, well, does it work? Does camp work? Is it successful? And that’s been a question that a lot of social scientists have been interested in. I don’t want to oversimplify that research, but a lot of the ways that they’ve measured success have been things that are not necessarily a given to all Jews as obviously the right way to be a Jew. So, for instance, in the ’90s and early 2000s, at the very least, a lot of research was about how, you know, “XYZ” camp and youth movement were successfully curbing intermarriage. A lot of them also asked campers and former campers how they feel about Israel, and it’s always if they are supportive of Israel in very normative ways, right, giving money visiting, supporting Israel or lobbying for its behalf — then camps have been successful.
I’m not interested in whether camps were successful by those metrics. I’m interested in how we got to the idea that camp should be successful in those ways in the first place. How did we get to those kinds of normative assumptions of like, this is a good Jew; a good Jew marries a Jew; a good Jew supports Israel, no matter what. So what I wanted to do is zoom out from that question of success and show how camp actually functions.
And then the question of “does it work” is really up to the reader. To people who believe that curbing intermarriage is the most important thing, then camps have been somewhat successful in the sense that people who go to these heavily educational camps are less likely to marry out of the faith.
But I am more interested in what actually happened at camp. And in terms of their legacies, I wanted to show how they changed various aspects of American Jewish life, and religion and politics. So I was really able to find how camping was essential in making kind of an Israel-centered Jewish education the norm. I was also able to draw a line between these Yiddish camps over the ’60s and ’70s that closed in the ’80s and contemporary Yiddish. The question of success is a real tricky and political one in a way that a lot of people have not talked about.
And is camp also fun? Because you’re creating a camp experience for your book launch next week.
Camp is fun — for a lot of people. Camp was not fun for everyone. And so I do want to play with that ambivalence at the party, and acknowledge that and also acknowledge that some people loved camp when they were younger and have mixed feelings about it now.
The party is not really a celebration of Jewish summer camp. People will be drinking and having fun and dancing — but I want them to be thinking while also about what is going on and why. How is Tisha B’Av [the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem that falls at the height of summer] commemorated at camp, for example?
Or what songs are we singing and what do they mean? I think a lot of people when they’re little kids, they learn songs in these Jewish summer camps that they can’t understand and later they maybe learn Hebrew and go, whoa, we were singing what?! My example from Zionist summer camp is singing “Ein Li Eretz Acheret,” or “I Have No Other Country.” We were in America and we obviously have another country! I don’t think anyone in my youth movement actually believes the words “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” because we live in America and people tend to kind of like living in America and most of them do not move to Israel.
So at the party we’ll be working through the fun of it, and at the same time the confusion of it and the ambivalence of it. I want it to be fun, and I also want it to be something that causes people to think.
—
The post American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The dark message behind Tucker Carlson’s attempt to drum up drama in Israel
Tucker Carlson’s visit to Israel lasted only a few hours — not long enough to experience the country, but sufficient to stage a performance.
Carlson claimed he had experienced “bizarre” treatment at Ben Gurion Airport, a description that Israeli and U.S. officials dismissed. What actually happened: He underwent routine security questioning on his way to interview United States Ambassador Mike Huckabee.
In Israel, Carlson’s outrage was widely received with a mixture of indifference and eye-rolling. But Israelis with their ears to the ground understood that his attempt to stir the pot means they have a problem brewing in American public opinion — and a more immediate problem with public relations.
Because Carlson’s airport drama was never about Israeli airport procedures. It was about American politics, an arena in which Carlson has built a lucrative post-Fox career selling a particular worldview: one suspicious of alliances, contemptuous toward interventionism, and invested in the conspiratorial belief that shadowy forces distort American sovereignty.
Israel, in this rhetorical universe, functions as a convenient prop in a broader narrative of elite manipulation and national victimhood.
Carlson and Huckabee, the man he traveled across the world to interview, now personify two increasingly incompatible strains of MAGA politics. Huckabee represents something recognizable to mainstream conservatives: he’s traditionalist, evangelical, instinctively pro-Israel and broadly aligned with America’s historical posture as a global power.
Carlson speaks, instead, to a newer faction defined by nationalist retrenchment, hostility to foreign entanglements, and an often startling indifference to liberal democratic norms. He has been scathingly critical of U.S. support for Israel in its war with Hamas and has backed far-right conspiracy theories about whites being “replaced” by people of color. And when he attacks evangelicals like Huckabee for supporting Israel too much, there is extra value in the antisemitic dog whistle for the white supremacists with whom he is popular.
Call it deep MAGA: a coalition that regards alliances as burdens, admires strongmen — including and especially Vladimir Putin — and deeply disdains anyone who cares about democratic values and their promotion around the world. This large and growing constituency within American conservatism is eager for narratives that recast foreign policy debates as struggles against manipulation rather than disagreements over strategy. And Israel fits neatly into that story.
Carlson’s brief airport encounter was therefore not a journalistic episode, but content generation. The grievance was the product.
Nothing about the incident requires serious factual dispute to achieve its purpose. Its value lies in symbolism, not accuracy. Whether Carlson genuinely subscribes to every element of this worldview is, at this point, almost irrelevant. His extraordinary success after leaving Fox News suggests he understands his audience perfectly. He is not drifting toward obscurity by embracing this kind of stunt; he is responding to market demand.
In doing so, he is illustrating a story about a Republican Party negotiating an identity crisis.
President Donald Trump, widely seen in Israel as a huge friend, is not a reliable ally. If the wing behind Carlson becomes clearly stronger than that behind Huckabee, there’s no telling whether he would hew to their demands. His loyalties are famously contingent, and he has shown little hesitation in entertaining figures once considered radioactive within mainstream Republican politics.
In a movement defined by power, primacy will belong not to the most coherent worldview but to the most electorally useful one.
For Israel, the implications are uncomfortable. The country has long relied on the assumption that American support is both durable and bipartisan. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu badly upset that applecart by so clearly aligning himself with the Republican Party at large, and Trump specifically.
In growing sections of the progressive left, Israel is framed as a colonial antagonist, and Israel’s support on the Democratic side of the public is in free-fall. On parts of the populist right, it is cast as an entangling liability or worse. The political center sustaining the relationship is shrinking.
Carlson did not invent this shift. But he is capitalizing on it. Netanyahu’s outrageous behavior — including his alignment with the fascist underbelly of Israeli politics and ennabling of the ultra-Orthodox establishment — is causing a rift with U.S. Jews, and giving pundits like Carlson tailwind.
If a media entrepreneur of Carlson’s sophistication believes there is a vast audience for rhetoric that treats Israel as suspect, burdensome, or undeserving of American backing, Israeli policymakers would be unwise to dismiss the signal.
Carlson’s Ben Gurion theatrics were undeniably entertaining. What they reveal about the trajectory of American politics — and Israel’s place within it — is rather less amusing.
The post The dark message behind Tucker Carlson’s attempt to drum up drama in Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Rediscovering the ‘Dybbuk’ composer Henokh Kon
When the 1936 Polish Yiddish feature Al Khet (I Have Sinned) screened at the New York Jewish Film Festival last month after a decades-long restoration process, seeing the film was cause for celebration.
Hearing the soundtrack was my greatest joy. It was scored by one of my favorite Yiddish composers, Henokh Kon, who created the music for the 1937 film classic The Dybbuk. In his heyday between the world wars, Kon was already renowned as a prolific creator of catchy songs and sophisticated multi-genre instrumental repertoire, even years before his first film commissions.
My ears perk up for Kon’s distinctive, eclectic sound textures (as well as ingenious folk-stylized song repertoire) — from the iconic dance sequences of The Dybbuk, to angst-driven passages in the Bundist quasi-documentary Mir Kumen On (called Children Must Laugh in English), to darkly ironic background cues for the low-budget Freylekhe Kabtsonim (Jolly Paupers).
I heard a signature sonic palette: Brightly dissonant chords, off-kilter rhythmic patterns on moody drums, frantic flurries of plucked violins, haunting exotic double-reed instrumental leads (played by the oboe’s English horn cousin, or by bassoon) alternating with more klezmer-standard clarinet, flute or fiddle.
Kon soundtracks often juxtapose traditional Jewish modal scales with more angular chromatic passages. An opening scene in Al Khet features a lovely subdued range of his orchestration punctuated by a triangle chiming downbeats as though to clarify the air during a montage of shtetl vistas. Later in the film, Kon crafts a vibrant, sultry tune for Ruth Turkow (the real-life daughter of actor-directors Zygmund Turkow and Ida Kaminska) to sing from her parlor keyboard: “Zing zhe mir a lidele” (“Sing me a little song”) with a tango lilt.
I admire Kon the alchemist, infusing Hasidic melodies with both modernist expressionism and baroque techniques, as well as Kon the entertainer, gifted at popular singable hits. (He also set “Yosl Ber” — a humorous song about a Jewish soldier — and even led a jazz band for a secular New Year’s Eve Jewish ball.)
Kon was equally in demand for dramatic and satirical stage projects in an ever-shifting constellation of visionary writers, artists, production teams and performers that propelled Yiddish cultural movements of the 1920’s and ’30s.
Like many artists involved in interwar Jewish Poland’s kleynkunst (cabaret-style entertainment) and experimental performance scenes, Kon had himself grown up “between two worlds” (which, by the way, was the original title of the Dybbuk author An-sky’s groundbreaking play). Born in 1890 into a religious household in the Polish industrial city of Lodz, Kon was sent at age 12 to live with his grandfather, a rabbi in Kutno, since his family hoped the boy would become a yeshiva scholar.
Instead, intrigued by listening to klezmer musicians and badkhns (wedding entertainers), Kon followed a more creative path, and was sent as a teenager to Berlin to study at a royal music academy for several years. But homesickness for his Jewish roots led him back to Poland.
Arriving in Warsaw in 1912, he found creative encouragement and connections through the literary salons hosted by the classic Yiddish writer Y.L. Peretz and the Yiddish playwright and actress Tea Arciszewska. Peretz insisted that Kon compose settings for his poetry, and later Kon scored the premiere of Peretz’s groundbreaking expressionist stage play A Night in the Old Market.
In the cultural upheaval and ferment following WWI, Kon garnered various commissions from the Vilna Troupe, but more regularly partnered with the charismatic writer and impresario Moishe Broderzon for a series of collectivist performance projects, often with a leftist political edge.
All these productions used titles referring to radically reimagined Jewish culture. Their popular 1922 puppet parody company “Khad Gadye” — a Passover reference — was followed in 1924 by their ambitious yet low-budget, biblically-based modernist opera Bas-Sheve (Bathsheba, King David’s lover and future wife). When a lead singer fell ill, Kon sang his bass part from behind the piano.
Two visionary variety-show format “revue” theater collaborations by Broderzon and Kon came next. The first collaboration was the mid/late 1920’s variety theater collective Azazel (Scapegoat), famously rhyming with shlimazel which you hear in Broderzon and Kon’s “Azazel Shimmy” — a song that all of Jewish Warsaw used to hum. The Yiddish actress and playwright “Totshe” Arciszewska, whom Kon knew before WWI, was another key player in this group.
Broderzon next established the theater collective Ararat, the acronym for the Artistic Revolutionary Revue Theater, but also referring to Mt. Ararat, the place where Noah’s ark landed after the flood, signifying a fresh start.
Through the legendary 1930’s Ararat kleynkunst ensemble, Kon became well-acquainted with several cultural figures he would also soon write for in celluloid format. Dzigan and Schumacher, the comedy duo, first known to Polish-Yiddish audiences through live shows with Ararat, played supporting roles in the film Al Khet, adding humor to the screen melodrama.
The following year the pair starred in Freyklekhe Kabtsonim, scripted by Broderzon, the same guy who had discovered them.
Most significantly for Kon himself, the dancer Judyta [Judith] Berg joined Ararat. Kon encouraged her choreographic innovations, accompanying her solo dance concerts and using his established celebrity to draw elite Warsaw audiences for her in 1934. By the time the prestigious cinematic version of The Dybbuk was cast, Berg was not only recruited as choreographer, she also performed in white skull mask and tallis for the toytn-tants (Dance of Death) accompanied by Kon’s evocative music, the indelible Dybbuk scene for which she and Kon are best known. Kon and Berg became a romantic couple as well, though it’s not clear whether they ever married.
Like Kon, Berg had grown up influenced by Hasidic culture around her and then studied in Germany. At various Jewish celebrations, her grandmother led women’s dancing and told Judith about older traditional dance forms like the toytn-tants, while her brother would hold open the door so she could watch the men’s group dancing.
Later Berg went to Dresden, Germany, for intensive classes with modern dance pioneer Mary Wigman. (During the rise of Hitler, Judith and other Jewish dance students left Wigman’s school and Germany altogether.) In the late 1930’s, she and Kon escaped the Nazis separately, but Berg’s niece Yvette Metral told me she recalled seeing Kon once in 1948-49 when he came to visit her aunt at the dance school Berg established for Jewish survivor children in Wroclaw.
Kon’s legacy is being rediscovered in numerous recent cultural explorations. “Bas-Sheve,” the opera he wrote with Broderzon, was performed in 2019 at Yiddish Summer Weimar, based on a rediscovered partial piano score, with major arranging and re-imagining by klezmer performer Josh Horowitz and added libretto portions devised by the writer and Yiddish translator Michael Wex. This piece will soon be performed again by the UCLA Symphony.
Also in recent years, much research and revival effort has focused on two works that Kon composed for the avant garde leftist theater troupe Yung teater, both based on landmark American trials which galvanized political movements. One composition, called “Boston,” is about Sacco & Vanzetti, and the other, “Mississippi,” is about the Scottsboro Boys. Small wonder that a quote from the leftist anthem “Internationale” found its way into Kon’s score for Mir Kumen On (the Bundist film already under threat by Polish censors).
Last December brought us the diasporic Yiddish puppet show The Trial of Modicut, directed by Yael Horowitz, who gave a conference presentation on Kon, Broderzon and their Azazel Shimmy in 2025. Splendid music for the Modicut show was performed by the duo of Raffi Boden (cello/music director) and Ira Temple (accordion), which at one point featured a gorgeous adaptation of one of Kon’s most recognizable orchestrated Dybbuk motifs, graced by a fluffy puppet sheep.
While my musician friends who took part in the puppet show seemed unaware of the composer’s name, the spirit of his creation lives on in their fusion of conservatory training, deep klezmer chops, respect for cultural ancestors and antic humor aimed at serving the creative proletariat.
Eve Sicular is a cinema scholar, co-curator of the Yiddish New York Film Festival and a former curator of film & photo archives at YIVO Institute. She is also the drummer/bandleader for Metropolitan Klezmer & Isle of Klezbos whose latest album is “Yiddish Silver Screen.”
The post Rediscovering the ‘Dybbuk’ composer Henokh Kon appeared first on The Forward.
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She’s a Democratic Socialist who affirmed Israel’s right to exist. Can she be LA’s next mayor?
LOS ANGELES – City Councilmember Nithya Raman won the backing of two very different organizations the last time she ran for office. One of them was Democrats for Israel Los Angeles, a liberal Zionist group. The other was perhaps the most overtly anti-Israel collective in town — the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. Raman’s politics divided both groups, but the unconventional coalition helped lift her to re-election.
Two years later, Raman hopes to recapture that broad appeal in her bid to be the city’s next mayor. The 44-year-old DSA member, who represents parts of the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood and Silver Lake, surprised her colleagues and incumbent Mayor Karen Bass earlier this month with her late entry into the June 2 primary race. And while political observers on both coasts have noted her similarities to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose 50,000 campaign volunteers drew from a slew of progressive groups, Raman hopes her tenure on city council — and the Jewish allies she’s made along the way — can attest to the differences.
“Mamdani is clearly a very popular politician, and so to be compared to a popular politician who is very good at communication — it’s a good thing,” Raman told the Forward in a phone interview. “I will also say that I am my own person, and I have a record of service here — five years of service to the city and to my district that clearly lay out who I am, how I have governed, and my approach.”
Raman’s relationship with DSA is something of a rocky symbiosis. In 2020, she became the first member of the movement to win a seat on LA’s city council, with left-wing grassroots organizers helping turn out a record number of voters to defeat an incumbent. Raman has since broken with DSA on votes and in public comments, on both Israel-related issues — for one, she does not support the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement — and municipal ones. Yet even as three other DSA members have joined her on city council — and another, Rae Huang, runs for mayor — Raman remains the chapter’s biggest star as well as its strongest candidate in the race.
Her community outreach and her openness to engaging on Israel and antisemitism have endeared her to some Jewish voters in LA’s 4th council district, and she won re-election in 2024 despite a redistricting that largely subtracted the progressive base that put her in office. She touts her second victory as proof of her broadly effective governance. But some Jewish constituents remain ambivalent about or opposed to Raman due to politics they deem insufficiently pro-Israel or because of her affiliation with DSA.
Interviews with 10 local Jewish leaders, including five who live in her district or whose institutions predominantly serve her constituents, underscored both the inroads Raman made with Jewish communities during her tenure and the difficulty she may have winning over voters citywide. (The top two primary finishers advance to a November runoff if no candidate receives a majority of the vote.)
“I know if I had a need, she would take my phone call and would do her best to be of assistance,” said Rabbi Sarah Hronsky, who leads Temple Beth Hillel, a Reform synagogue located just outside her district in Valley Village. “I think she genuinely cares about humanity. I just don’t think it is very clear to the Jewish community where she stands on the topic of Israel, and where she stands in terms of the increase in antisemitism.”
Those positions are well documented, and in some cases Raman has volunteered them. And though they were a wedge issue inside DSA, they also offer a point of departure from Bass, an establishment Democrat whose handling of Jewish issues — especially on anti-Israel protests — has been called into question.
Building a track record — and Shabbat-friendly crosswalks — in Jewish areas
Even as Raman, a Harvard-educated urban planner, soared from obscurity into office in 2020 on a groundswell of progressive activism, she did not neatly map onto DSA politics.
The national organization calls for an end to U.S. aid to Israel in its national platform, and the 90% of the LA chapter — some 2,000 dues-paying members, according to one longtime organizer — voted in 2017 to endorse the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Raman, with DSA’s endorsement already in hand, took a softer tack that summer on a Democrats for Israel questionnaire. In a written response, she affirmed Israel’s “right to exist” and said she did not support BDS, though adding her view that such efforts are protected by the First Amendment.
“I personally am deeply upset by policy decisions in India, my own country of origin, and while I have not participated in a boycott, I understand the argument for withholding economic activity,” she wrote. (Raman moved to the U.S. when she was 6.)
With Raman an outsider candidate for the council seat and not favored in the election, the responses attracted little attention outside of DSA. She eventually won in an unusually shaped jurisdiction that included Jewish and Israeli neighborhoods like Hancock Park and Sherman Oaks and young, progressive pockets like Koreatown and Silver Lake.
“I don’t think she’s afraid to diverge from the points of view of the DSA.”
Gregg SolkovitsPresident, Democrats for Israel Los Angeles
Once in office, Raman became a regular guest at Jewish community functions in and around her district. She joined Stephen Wise Temple for High Holiday services and the Silver Lake JCC for a Passover seder. Hronsky noted that Raman often stayed for the nearly two-hour duration of Valley-wide “Shabbat in the Park” gatherings, rather than the perfunctory photo-op-and-handshakes some might expect of a busy politician.
“When I ran, I actually didn’t know that this would be such a big part of my job,” Raman told the Forward. “But it’s been really good to be able to be a small part of the bigger Jewish community.”
Outside Chabad of Sherman Oaks, she helped push through the addition of a timed traffic signal that enabled Orthodox Jews to cross a busy thoroughfare on Shabbat — an improvement the synagogue’s rabbi, Mendel Lipskier, said he had sought for more than a decade.
The Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, in which around 1,200 people in Israel were killed and another 250 taken hostage into Gaza, thrust her connection to DSA into the spotlight.
That day, as Raman issued a statement “condemning the horrific violence by Hamas and praying for a peaceful end to this conflict,” the national DSA in its statement called the massacre a “direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime.” Raman, who had attended an Oct. 9 vigil at Stephen Wise, soon released a longer second statement in which she rejected DSA’s missive as “unacceptably devoid of empathy.”
Split constituencies
Her politics continued to defy easy categorization as the war in Gaza wore on. During a temporary ceasefire in November 2023, Raman adjourned a session of city council by memorializing the 11,000 Palestinians who had reportedly died to that point in Gaza. “My pain is unspeakable,” she said, closing the message by calling for “urgent action to stop these civilian casualties and bring the hostages home.”
The following June, she introduced a municipal resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and release of hostages. The resolution, which never reached a vote, was slammed by the local Jewish federation and other mainline Jewish groups as “fostering hostility toward the Jewish community.” (The federation declined to comment for this article.)
The ceasefire calls put her at odds with much of her Jewish constituency, which leans heavily pro-Israel. One Jewish leader said his synagogue, which serves many of her constituents, had had to keep Raman at arm’s length because not declaring Hamas entirely responsible for the devastation in Gaza meant Raman failed some congregants’ pro-Israel litmus test.
Yet as her term wound down, Raman found the support of DFI-LA, a Democratic Party club that considers local Jewish issues in addition to candidates’ stances on Israel. Gregg Solkovits, the organization’s president, said the combination of Raman’s public statements on Israel and her community engagement outweighed the ceasefire calls.
“She had reached out to the Jewish community and made clear indications that she was willing to be educated on our issues and to work with us,” Solkovits explained in an interview, “and she has continued to do that as she’s taken office.”
The vote of confidence had been controversial within the organization. “There were members of our executive board that are very bothered by anyone who comes out of DSA world,” he said. But Raman, Solkovits added, was not as ideologically rigid as other DSA politicians.
The independent streak cost her some fans in DSA, whose LA chapter endorsed Raman but also censured her for pursuing the pro-Israel club’s support. Though Council District 4 lost DSA-friendly Koreatown in the redistricting process, Raman won reelection with a majority of votes in the first round of voting.
“I don’t think she’s afraid to diverge from the points of view of the DSA,” Solkovits said. “In fact, I think she’s broadened her base. Which is one of the signs of a smart politician.”
Raman continued to tackle Jewish issues after her re-election. After a pair of Israeli diplomats in Washington, D.C., were assassinated in 2025, allegedly by a pro-Palestinian gunman, Raman issued a statement condemning the attack as a “horrific act of antisemitism.” And when vandals spray-painted antisemitic graffiti in her district, Raman and a staffer went to paint over it.
“Ultimately, my role is to make sure that my residents feel safe, to make sure that my residents know that issues related to violence or antisemitism are being taken seriously — that our response will be aggressive, proactive, preventative,” Raman said.
But not everyone finds her record as convincing as Solkovits does — or feels as heard as Temple Beth Hillel’s Hronsky. Lindsey Imber, who sits on the Sherman Oaks Neighborhood Council, said Raman dodged her question about pro-Palestinian encampments on college campuses and never returned to the neighborhood council meetings after that.
But Imber, who is Jewish, suggested that Raman’s approach to homelessness — which included her opposition to a rule that banned encampments less than 500 feet from schools — may be just as problematic to Jewish voters as any other issue.
“That was one of the things that really created a schism between the council member and the and the actual constituency of the district,” Imber said.
Others outside the district say Raman’s DSA connections are inherently disqualifying. Nate Miller, an LA-based public relations executive who specializes in Jewish affairs, said that while he was frustrated with Bass, he could not vote for a member of the movement.
“I understand those concerns, and I respect those concerns,” Raman said. “But I think that I have been able to really, really work to make sure that the Jewish community in my district knows that I am there for them in the ways that a council member would need to be. And that is exactly the way that I would show up for them if I were to be the mayor.”
Senior leaders of several synagogues in her district — including Stephen Wise, Valley Beth Shalom and Temple Israel of Hollywood — declined to speak on the record for this story. (Lipskier, of Chabad of Sherman Oaks, said he did not follow city politics and that his interactions with Raman were limited but that “whatever we asked for, she was nice, she was available. I don’t have nothing negative to say.”)
Crossing to victory
The incumbent Raman wants to supplant is fighting to retain her own Jewish backing. Bass, who attended public high school in heavily Jewish West Los Angeles, has long enjoyed a broad base of support that includes labor unions, the liberal donor class and a coalition of legacy progressive groups.
But her approval rating has plummeted since the January 2025 wildfires, which wiped out the Pacific Palisades, a wealthy and heavily Jewish enclave. Two candidates running to her right — Adam Miller and Spencer Pratt — may siphon off some votes in the primary.
Jewish leaders also said Bass failed to deliver on commitments she made after a 2024 protest outside a West Los Angeles synagogue descended into chaos. One of those commitments was to establish buffer zones outside synagogues where protesting would be legally prohibited.
Raman told the Forward she was not sure where she stood on the issue. “The idea of protesting outside a religious institution is troubling to me,” she said, “but I also have voted to uphold First Amendment rights to speak up and to protest in the past. I think that we can find a way to balance people’s needs for safety with that First Amendment right.”
Raman will want to reignite the grassroots support that propelled her candidacy in 2020. But her late entry into the mayor’s race isn’t helping.
Raman admitted she had entered the fray too late to seek most primary endorsements, a reality underlined by Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez — himself a DSA member — declining to switch allegiances from Bass after her announcement. And Solkovits said he was not sure whether DFI-LA would support Raman this time around. (Bass received its support in 2024, but the group sometimes supports multiple candidates in the same race.)
And her positions on Israel make up only part of the frustrations that may be lingering among her DSA peers.
Raman broke with DSA council members on Measure ULA, a so-called “mansion tax” that had been a major progressive legislation but which Raman said hamstrung multifamily housing construction. She also voted against a $2.6 billion convention center upgrade supported by Soto-Martinez and fellow DSA member Eunisses Hernandez, who represent union-heavy districts. (Raman said the city was already under huge financial pressure and could not afford it.)
If that makes it harder to rally the base that first put her in office — and replicate the massive wave of progressive turnout that got Mamdani elected in New York — Raman says she isn’t worried.
“My goals here are centered around Angelenos, their safety and their ability to thrive in a city that is deeply unaffordable and in a city that is struggling to deliver basic services,” she said. “That’s the message that I think will activate voters.”
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