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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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How a monument to a Jewish Confederate ended up in a storage unit, next to a vacuum cleaner
Behind an orange roll-up door at a self-storage facility in New Orleans, sits a vacuum cleaner, some lighting gear and a cardboard box.
Inside the box is a Confederate monument, one of the strangest Jewish heirlooms in America.
It is granite, four and a half feet tall, 1,600 pounds and shaped like a thick tombstone. It lies on its side on a crushed wooden pallet because it can no longer stand up. A third of it once sat underground, and when Charlotte, North Carolina, chipped it out of a sidewalk in the summer of 2020, the buried end came out ragged. It carries a few gouges where a protester swung a hammer. Until the city scrubbed it, it also carried three letters in black spray paint: BLM.
“There it sits to this day,” said Kenneth Hoffman, executive director of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, half a mile away in New Orleans, “and possibly will sit forever.”
The stone is one of the last left standing — or, more precisely, lying down — from a century-long campaign in which American Jews built monuments across the South to Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederacy’s Jewish secretary of state, because, for a time, he represented their own acceptance in the South. The monument’s fall tells the story of what changed — not just about Benjamin, but about the Jews who once celebrated him.
Its journey from a Charlotte sidewalk to a New Orleans storage unit involves a Yiddish-speaking ex-convict, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an antisemitic banker, two Polish-born rabbis, a dollar bill pulled from a stranger’s wallet, and a retired lawyer whose wife descends from the man who once hid Benjamin from the Union Army.
What nobody has figured out is what to do with it.
The brains of the Confederacy
Benjamin was a New Orleans lawyer, a sugar planter who owned 140 enslaved people, and a U.S. senator from Louisiana. When the South seceded, Confederate President Jefferson Davis made Benjamin attorney general, then secretary of war, then secretary of state. The two men worked side by side as much as 10 hours a day. Benjamin’s face was engraved on the Confederate $2 bill, likely the only paper money issued in America to feature a Jewish person.
He was known as “the brains of the Confederacy” — a phrase that started as an insult, the old canard of the Jewish puppet master, a way of pinning the Civil War’s loss on the one Jew in the cabinet. He married a Catholic woman, never joined a synagogue and was not a practicing Jew, but none of that mattered. A senator from Ohio sneered that Benjamin was an “Israelite with Egyptian principles.”
When the Confederacy collapsed, Benjamin ran. He disguised himself as a Frenchman who spoke no English, hid in a Florida swamp and slipped out to sea. He made it to London, reinvented himself as a barrister, and died wealthy and free in Paris in 1884, never having answered for any of his past.
That flight is why there are so few monuments to him. Davis went to prison. The generals surrendered and lived out their lives in the South. Benjamin escaped and never came back.
“Some considered Judah Benjamin a kind of traitor,” said Jonathan Sarna, the noted Brandeis University historian of American Jewry.
So the Lost Cause never fully claimed him. Southern Jews claimed him instead.
‘Judah P. Benjamin Nite’
The commemoration campaign that followed has been reconstructed largely by David Weinfeld, an assistant professor at Rowan University who is working on a book called Southern Jews and the Lost Cause. It was indifferent to geography.
Jewish war veterans presented a Benjamin portrait to Atlanta Mayor William Hartsfield in 1954 for the city’s collection of “Confederate Heroes and Statesmen.” Weinfeld found that Alabama’s B’nai B’rith opened its 1962 state convention with a dinner-dance called “Judah P. Benjamin Nite,” and offered to fund a monument at the state capitol honoring him as “a son of the Jewish people.”
Alabama didn’t have a strong connection to Benjamin, which was precisely the appeal there. He “provided a means for southern Jews to prove their southernness regardless of what former Confederate state they resided in,” writes Weinfeld.
Sarna puts the calculation more starkly. Jewish safety in the South depended on being counted as white, and Southern Jews understood the alternative.
“Why did they want to be white?” he asked. “Because the alternative was to be Black.”
The stakes weren’t abstract. In the years around those celebrations, synagogues across the South were bombed and set on fire, and rabbis who backed integration were punished for it. “There were people whose response was, ‘If we want to continue to be here in the South, this is the price we have to pay,’” Sarna said.
It was a bargain, mostly unspoken: stay loyal to the white South and you will be well treated. Many Southern Jews upheld their end of it. Plenty, Sarna said, “had prejudices not different from those of their non-Jewish counterparts.”
The United Daughters of the Confederacy embraced Benjamin right back. “They understood that celebrating a Jew made the Confederacy look tolerant,” Weinfeld told a room of scholars at the American Jewish Historical Society’s conference this June in Cleveland.
The Daughters chartered a Judah P. Benjamin chapter in Bradenton, Florida, in 1914, and after World War I began sponsoring Benjamin markers across the South.
In 1924, the Daughters bought Belle Chasse, Benjamin’s old Louisiana plantation, and a New Orleans rabbi spoke at the dedication, consecrating the house to “the impulse of patriotism.” The next year they bought the Gamble Plantation in Ellenton, Florida, where Benjamin is said to have hidden from Union troops, and gave it to the state. It remains a state park officially named the Judah P. Benjamin Confederate Memorial. With B’nai B’rith’s support, the UDC raised a monument in Sarasota in 1942 — pink Georgia marble, crowned with a bronze sundial — and another in Fayetteville in 1944.
The Sarasota dedication came six weeks after Pearl Harbor, and the Birmingham News found in it a wartime moral. Honoring Benjamin was fitting “especially so right now, when the United States is at war with totalitarian forces whose ringleader, Nazi Germany, proclaims and practices racial and religious intolerance,” the paper wrote. The monument was “in a way a part of the answer of the South, the land of the Confederacy, to Adolf Hitler’s assault upon those freedoms which Southerners and all Americans hold dear.”
It was a memorial to a slaveholding Confederate, offered as the South’s rebuttal to Hitler.
The Charlotte fiasco
In Charlotte, the arrangement broke down in public.
According to Weinfeld’s extensive research, the local UDC chapter was preparing to host the 1948 state convention and wanted a marker for the spot where Benjamin sheltered for a week in April 1865, in the home of a Jewish merchant named Abraham Weill. The chapter’s historian, Josephine Yarbrough, needed money. She wrote to Harry Golden.
Weinfeld has traced what happened next through Golden’s own account and contemporaneous records.
Golden was about the least Confederate man in North Carolina. Born in what is now Ukraine, raised on the Lower East Side, he had served federal prison time for mail fraud before reinventing himself in Charlotte as publisher of the one-man newspaper the Carolina Israelite.
Golden would go on to become a best-selling humorist and an ally of Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement. But in 1948, he called Benjamin “one of the greatest Jews America has ever produced.” He signed up the city’s two synagogues, Temple Israel and Temple Beth El, which agreed to buy the granite and present it to the Daughters as a gift.
Then came the letter.
A non-Jewish New York banker with Charlotte in-laws warned UDC members across the state that the Daughters were being used for Jewish propaganda. Charlotte’s so-called good Jews, he wrote, were “good only because they are as yet unrevealed.”
That was all it took. The local Daughters voted to yank their name off the stone, then went to the city council to stop the marker from being erected. They argued it would block passengers boarding city buses. The state and national organizations overruled them, and both synagogues voted to press on.
On Oct. 1, 1948, police blocked off South Tryon Street for the unveiling. The mayor came. A Presbyterian minister delivered the keynote. And the Jewish blessings came from two rabbis — Aaron Tofield of Temple Israel and Philip Frankel of Temple Beth El — both born in Poland. Three years after the Holocaust ended, two immigrant rabbis from the old country stood on a Southern sidewalk and consecrated a monument to the Confederacy.
Hidden in plain sight
The stone did what stones do. It stood there.
Charlotte changed around it — the streetcars, then the skyscrapers, then the FedEx store it eventually fronted. The inscription was right there for anyone who bothered to crouch down and read it. You could ship a package, grab a coffee and walk right past a monument to the Confederate secretary of state.
Charlotte’s Jewish community never forgot, exactly. During her years in Beth El’s pulpit, which ran from 1998 to 2016, Rabbi Judith Schindler used the marker to teach the congregation’s teenagers about Jews in the Confederacy.
In August 2017, white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and a counterprotester was killed. Soon after, Beth El’s board voted unanimously to push Charlotte to move the marker somewhere else — or find some other use for it. The answer was the same every time: North Carolina law barred removing Confederate monuments unless they were relocated somewhere equally prominent.
Then, in June 2020, artists painted a “Black Lives Matter” street mural along South Tryon, directly in front of the stone. The monument looked out over the M in “Matter.”
Days later, somebody spray-painted “BLM” across most of the granite and went at it with a hammer. The granite mostly won. “They probably whacked at it several times,” Hoffman said, “and it really only took out a few chips.”
On June 17 of that year, Temple Israel and Temple Beth El — the same two congregations that had paid for the stone in 1948 — wrote to Charlotte’s mayor, city council and city manager. This time, they demanded the monument be removed.
“We should neither celebrate the Confederacy nor honor the legacy of white supremacy,” they wrote. “The monument does not belong in a place of prominence within our city, just like German cities do not memorialize or erect statues to Nazis.”
A week later, Schindler and Mike Wirth, an artist in her congregation, placed a vinyl wraparound banner over the monument. On it was a quote from Emma Lazarus: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”
City workers then pried the monument out of the sidewalk, “sort of to the relief of everyone,” Hoffman said. The city scrubbed off the spray paint, declared the marker damaged and put it in municipal storage.
Then, hundreds of miles away and north of the Mason-Dixon line, a retired lawyer read a book.
The dollar
Barrett Freedlander was reading a biography of Judah Benjamin when he hit a half-page passage about a monument in Charlotte. He was shocked. He was also, he realized, related to the story.
Freedlander, 84, is a retired Baltimore attorney. His wife, Laura, is the great-great-granddaughter of Abraham Weill — the merchant who sheltered Benjamin, and whose name is misspelled “Abram Weil” on the stone.
“The only reason I cared about it,” he said, “is because of the family connection.”
That connection runs deeper than Benjamin. Richmond was days from falling. Confederate President Davis, worried about the “disorganized bands of troops roving about the country,” put his wife and their four children on a southbound train — and handed her a pistol and “showed me how to load, aim and fire it,” Varina Davis wrote.
When they arrived in Charlotte, the rented house was packed up and nobody in town would help a family everyone assumed would be arrested.
Except one man.
“The agent, Mr. A. Weill, an Israelite, came to meet us there and gave us every assistance in his power,” Varina wrote in her memoir, “and when he found there were no conveniences for cooking, he sent our meals from his own house for several days, refusing, with many cordial words, any offer to reimburse him.”
Freedlander thinks he knows why the Confederate first lady reached for the word “Israelite,” and why a Jewish merchant was the only person in Charlotte willing to take in a family the rest of the city was shunning. “Only the persecuted would appreciate her issues,” he said.
The Weills prospered. Weill helped found the synagogue in Wilmington, North Carolina, where relatives still belong. His granddaughter Laura married Julius Cone, a Greensboro textile tycoon. The family fortune allowed sisters Claribel and Etta Cone to buy the Matisses and Picassos that are the crown of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
So when Freedlander learned the marker had disappeared into municipal storage, he started making calls. A staffer in the mayor’s office said the city had no use for it and was willing to let it go. But the manager of the warehouse where it sat called Freedlander back with a complication: the city couldn’t simply hand over public property. He was obligated to charge for it.
“How much?” Freedlander asked. One dollar. Freedlander offered to send a check. The man said not to bother and paid it himself, out of his own wallet.
Freedlander’s original idea was to put the monument in his own backyard. “My wife didn’t want it,” he said.
A friend mentioned the new Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in New Orleans. Another friend of Freedlander’s, a Baltimore executive whose company hauls computer equipment around the country, priced out the job, got into four figures, then called back and said he’d do it for free. It was history, he said.
Monument vs. museum
The stone arrived in New Orleans via truck in November 2022. It was lowered onto the pavement outside the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience’s offsite storage with a jack lift, and has not moved since.
Hoffman’s first instinct had been to display it. The stone, he realized, tells three tales at once: the Civil War, when Benjamin rose to the Confederate cabinet; 1948, when the two Charlotte synagogues paid for a monument to him; and 2020, when it was defaced during the summer of Black Lives Matter protests.
Last October, when the Southern Jewish Historical Society held its conference in New Orleans, Hoffman and Weinfeld convened a roundtable of historians to figure out what to do with the monument. One idea floated that seemed to gain consensus was to display the marker alongside a light projection restoring the graffiti.
For now, the monument remains in storage. Hoffman said that if and when it goes up, it will be “with its full context. Not like it’s a historical marker.”
Samantha Baskind, an art historian at Cleveland State University, thinks the museum should not wait to display it.
“Yes, originally the statue commemorates Benjamin as a distinguished Jewish American and Confederate statesman,” she said. “But the fact that it was defaced during Black Lives Matter protests makes it acquire a second history. The graffiti isn’t merely vandalism in a conventional sense. It documents a moment when Americans were publicly reevaluating Confederate symbols.”
Which means the object now holds a double meaning: why Benjamin was honored in the 20th century, and why so many people rejected that honor in the 21st.
Baskind knows firsthand the cost of institutional flinching. In 2022, she curated an exhibition of 19th-century Jewish American artists for a gallery at Princeton, including work by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Jewish sculptor who spent part of his career producing Confederate monuments. Baskind, who wrote a book about Ezekiel, had written labels confronting Ezekiel’s Lost Cause loyalties head-on. Late in the process, the venue that was planning on showing the exhibition canceled it.
“It was almost devaluing what your students are capable of thinking about,” Baskind said. “And isn’t that what we do in an educational environment?”
Her verdict on the Charlotte stone is unambiguous. The city should never have cleaned it. “I wouldn’t see it as damage. It’s part of the object’s history.” The graffiti “deserves interpretation and not concealment.”
And the question a museum ought to ask, she said, isn’t whether Benjamin was good or bad. “The more interesting question is: Why did different generations understand him so differently?”
Early in the 20th century, American Jews saw a success story. Today most see a man who helped run a slaveholding rebellion that waged war on other states. “Neither perspective should replace the other,” Baskind said. “A museum explains how and when those shifts occurred.”
Then she offered the distinction she believes the argument comes down to. “A monument exists to honor,” she said. “A museum or gallery exists to explain.”
Visitors to the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience can still find Judah Benjamin there. He’s in a display case in an exhibit about Jews, slavery and the Civil War: two Confederate $2 bills bearing his portrait, one from 1862, one from 1864. Both are blank on the back.
“Which tells you something about the financial solvency of the Confederacy,” Hoffman said. “Save money. Just print it on one side.”
Half a mile away, one of the last monuments American Jews built to the highest-ranking Jew in the Confederacy, and to the standing he seemed to promise them, lies in a cardboard box in the dark, its graffiti scrubbed, its chips intact, waiting for somebody to decide what it means.
Freedlander hopes to take a trip to Wilmington later this month with some of his grandchildren to visit family graves — including that of Abraham Weill, the man who helped a fleeing family when nobody else in town would, and got a monument he never asked for.
“I’m a bystander to all this,” Freedlander said. “I’m just the messenger. But I did want to preserve it.”
The post How a monument to a Jewish Confederate ended up in a storage unit, next to a vacuum cleaner appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran appoints AMIA bombing suspect to National Security Council
(JTA) —
For the second time this year, Iran has named a wanted suspect in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires to a top security role.
A spokesman for the Islamic Republic’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said Monday that Mohsen Rezaei had resigned as an adviser to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, and would assume the role of secretary of Iran’s powerful Supreme National Security Council. Rezaei is a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Rezaei is wanted by Argentina and is subject to an Interpol Red Notice issued at Argentina’s request over his alleged role in the 1994 attack, which killed 85 people and remains the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history.
Earlier this year, Ahmad Vahidi, another suspect in the AMIA case and also the subject of an Interpol Red Notice, was appointed IRGC commander.
In a landmark ruling in 2024, an Argentine court held Iran and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, responsible for the bombing, setting the stage for international legal action.
In June 2025, Argentina’s federal judiciary ordered that 10 Iranian and Lebanese suspects accused in connection with the deadly 1994 AMIA bombing be tried in absentia. Rezaei and Vahidi are among them.
The eight other suspects accused by the late AMIA special prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, are: former Iranian Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahijan, former Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati, former Iranian ambassador Hadi Soleimanpour, former Iranian cultural attache in Buenos Aires Mohsen Rabbani and former Iranian diplomat Ahmad Reza Asghari, as well as suspected Hezbollah operatives Salman Raouf Salman, Abdallah Salman and Hussein Mounir Mouzannar.
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Israel and AIPAC on the ballot in the Minnesota Senate and U.S. House races
(JTA) — A pair of Democratic primaries in Minnesota on Tuesday are among a string of high-profile battles between progressive and moderate candidates, where Israel and the pro-Israel lobby serve as key wedge issues.
The state’s highest-profile race is the U.S. Senate primary between Rep. Angie Craig, who has been endorsed by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, and Lieutenant Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who says she would reject AIPAC’s money and accuses Israel of committing a genocide.
The most recent data gathered in late July through early August has Craig with a 2-percentage point lead, within the 5.3% margin of error. Another poll, conducted in late July by a group supporting Flanagan, shows her with a 14-point lead. The Democratic nominee, whether it be Flanagan or Craig, is expected to win the general election in November.
The race, and the candidates’ sparring over AIPAC, comes as the lobby and Israel under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have become increasingly unpopular among Democratic voters. Israel is also an issue in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in neighboring Wisconsin taking place on Tuesday.
Flanagan has referred to Craig as “AIPAC’s candidate” in the Senate race, which prompted Craig to distance herself from the group’s spending during a TV debate in June.
“AIPAC has not contributed at all, the PAC, to my Senate campaign,” said Craig, whose wife, Cheryl Greene, is Jewish. “Not one penny.”
Flanagan countered that, while AIPAC itself has not donated to Craig’s campaign, it has held fundraisers for the four-term congresswoman. AIPAC did not respond to a request for comment.
Just last week in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, progressive Abdul El-Sayed defeated the moderate Rep. Haley Stevens, whose AIPAC endorsement was the frequent target of opposition attacks.
Flanagan has drawn the support of American Priorities, a pro-Palestinian super PAC that aims to counter AIPAC. The group spent about $54,000 on ads boosting her candidacy, according to FEC filings.
Flanagan’s platform includes blocking offensive weapons sales to Israel — a position that all but seven Senate Democrats voted for in April — and advancing a two-state solution that “allows for a secure Israel and Palestinian self-determination.”
Craig, who also backs a two-state outcome, voted against the recent amendment proposed by Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie that would have halted $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel.
In a statement explaining her vote, Craig panned Netanyahu and the war in Iran, but wrote that the amendment would endanger Israelis and American troops and allies in the region. After the vote, Flanagan wrote, “A vote to send $3.3 billion of taxpayer money to fund additional weapons of war to Benjamin Netanyahu is unconscionable. Enough.”
Craig has the endorsement of a number of Democrats in Congress and the Senate, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. She is also endorsed by lobbying group Democratic Majority for Israel, former Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg, and Minneapolis’ Jewish mayor, Jacob Frey, who rose to national prominence for his response to the deadly results of the deployment of immigrant enforcement officials in his city.
Flanagan has drawn endorsements from a swath of major progressive figures including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and outspoken pro-Palestinian Reps. Ro Khanna of California and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Flanagan is also endorsed by the state’s Democratic Party affiliate, the Democratic Farmer Labor Party.
On Sunday Sanders posted on X,”There is a reason why the super PACs and billionaires are flooding Minnesota with $20 million to defeat Peggy Flanagan. Same thing as Michigan. They do not want somebody in the Senate who will stand up for the working class.”
Spending by political action committees affiliated with AIPAC has also come to the fore in the Democratic primary race for the House seat that Craig is vacating.
The most moderate of the three leading candidates is State Sen. Matt Klein, who has expressed support for the U.S.-Israel relationship and is endorsed by DMFI. Last-minute spending by outside groups has sparked accusations that AIPAC is indirectly involved.
“AIPAC is coming after me,” said former Lakeville mayor Matt Little, one of Klein’s opponents, in a video.
Klein’s two opponents — Little and state Rep. Kaela Berg — both accuse Israel of committing a genocide, and have both speculated that AIPAC is behind some of the Klein spending.
Berg supports placing conditions on U.S. aid to Israel and halting weapons sales, and Little says the U.S. must end all military aid and weapons sales to the country. On the policy page of his campaign website, Little refers to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack as “an act of wanton slaughter against innocent civilians” and says that people should condemn “the anti-Semitism that followed.”
Berg is listed as “primary approved” by the liberal Jewish Middle East advocacy group J Street, while Little has been boosted by American Priorities, which has spent about $64,000 in his favor. He is also endorsed by the DFL and Congressional Progressive Caucus leader Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
The latest polling in the district — conducted at the end of May by a group that favors Klein — found Little leading Klein with a 7-percentage point lead, and Berg trailing by another 3 points. 39 percent of voters were undecided, and Little and Klein were about even after voters received more information about the three candidates.
Craig has declined to endorse any of the candidates to replace her.
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