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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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At L.A. Jewish community forum, Nithya Raman encounters tough questions on Israel — and a hostile audience
LOS ANGELES — Nithya Raman went into a Jewish community-hosted mayoral candidate forum Tuesday hoping to win over voters concerned about her stance on Israel and her membership in the Democratic Socialists of America.
But Raman’s reiteration that the war in Gaza amounted to genocide produced waves of groans in the Skirball Cultural Center crowd before incumbent Mayor Karen Bass took the stage and rejected that claim.
Tuesday’s forum, in which the candidates took turns fielding questions from Spectrum news anchor Alex Cohen, began when Raman’s campaign in a far more comfortable position than it was when the event was first announced. With five weeks remaining before the election, a poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times showed Raman surging ahead of Bass, 39% to 28%, with a third of voters undecided.
Raman, who has broken with DSA on municipal issues and on foreign policy in her two terms on L.A. city council, has not made Israel a focal point in her campaign. And she has made a concerted effort to develop stronger relationships in the Jewish community throughout the campaign.
But on stage, flanked by American and Israeli flags, Raman seemed unable to navigate her way out of the Middle East, as Cohen dove almost immediately into the questions many voters had come to hear Raman answer — about Gaza, socialism and an interview she did in May with Hasan Piker, a socialist streamer whose anti-Israel rhetoric has often drawn accusations of antisemitism.
Raman said Tuesday that while she recognized that genocide is “a deeply painful word,” she used it because she “felt compelled to speak out about issues that we saw, the images that are coming, the targeting of hospitals, the deaths of children.”
When it was Bass’ turn to be interviewed, she said flatly that she did not believe the war was a genocide.
Alex Cohen pushed Nithya Raman to say why she believed it was a genocide.
Raman said she recognized it was a deeply painful word, but felt compelled to speak out about the images she saw—“the targeting of hospitals, the deaths of children.”
The remark drew an audible reaction. https://t.co/JZliCkauvj pic.twitter.com/SGWZIQEgkT
— Louis Keene (@thislouis) September 30, 2026
The forum, hosted by Jewish Federation Los Angeles and co-sponsored by a slew of other community organizations, underscored Israel’s importance to Jewish voters even in elections for positions that do not deal heavily with foreign policy. And it may also have exposed a growing divide about Israel between LA’s Jewish mainstream and the city’s broader electorate.
The federation’s CEO, Rabbi Noah Farkas, said Tuesday that calling the war a genocide crosses a “red line” for elected officials, but that the organization would work with whoever became mayor.
“When a candidate describes what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide, it causes pain,” Farkas said. “Some of that pain is in this room, and some of that pain is on our streets, where Jews are often accused, indicted, and convicted for actions of the Israeli government whether they agree with them or not.”
Raman on Piker
Raman’s primary focus as a candidate has been on local issues like homelessness, housing and street safety. But many of Tuesday’s attendees — including a few hundred VIPs from the event’s sponsors — seemed most interested in Raman’s answers on her DSA membership, her interview with far-left streamer Hasan Piker, and her remarks calling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.
Piker has often been accused of antisemitism for equating Zionists with Nazis and suggesting that the Oct. 7 attacks were justified. (Piker has vehemently rejected the accusation.)
Raman defended her appearance on Piker’s stream, saying she had pushed back on some of his positions and that her responsibility as a candidate was to reach as many voters as possible.
“I wish that Kamala Harris had gone on Joe Rogan, for example, when she was running for office,” she said.
When Cohen asked Raman, who is Indian American, if she would have appeared with a streamer notorious for hateful remarks about that or any other minority group, Raman said, “I would hope so,” eliciting murmurs in the crowd. “But my hope is that I would apply the same principles, no matter the streamer or podcaster or platform was, and that I would be able to go and speak in different audiences and present myself honestly in full in those places,” she added.
The ‘g’ word
Cohen then turned to the question of genocide.
Raman said at a Muslim Policy Action Conference forum last month that “our tax dollars should not be going to funding a genocide.”
When Cohen asked her why she felt Israel’s actions rose to that level, Raman said she recognized that it was a painful word for many Jewish Angelenos and that it had important historical context.
She noted that she had been the first city council member to condemn the attacks on Oct. 7, and reiterated that her ambition was to be the mayor of the city and her goal was to make sure all of its residents were safe regardless of their opinions on foreign policy.
“This city has to be a place where you can feel free to express those views, where you can feel free to worship as you wish, or you can be visibly Jewish and not feel unsafe,” she said. “The city must be one that is safe for every single resident in it.
She also acknowledged that some of the recent rise in antisemitism had come from the political left. As a progressive elected official, she said, “I never want progressive politics to be conflated with antisemitism. And so I will work harder to ensure that this city is safe for you.”
As she rejected the genocide term, Bass touted her deep history in the Jewish community, then pivoted to a longer response about the need to increase the size of the police force.
DSA and BDS
After Cohen concluded her interview, Raman continued to face more questions related to Israel from the event’s co-sponsors. A board member of the local American Jewish Committee chapter asked Raman where she stood on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which is endorsed by DSA.
Like many of the other Israel-related questions, Raman does not have a stated campaign position on BDS. And her response did not diverge from previous answers to the same question.
Massive groans in the Skirball auditorium when Nithya Raman defends BDS as a “legitimate form of protest.”
Question from @AJCGlobal. pic.twitter.com/W2Uml0lPMI
— Louis Keene (@thislouis) September 30, 2026
She prefaced by stating that BDS is a “legitimate form of peaceful protest” — and was immediately drowned out by audience displeasure — but that it was not part of her campaign platform. The answer drew perhaps the largest negative response of the night. (Bass later said she does not support BDS.)
The hostility towards Raman’s responses recalled a forum for California Senate candidates in the same room earlier this year, in which the lone Republican on stage, Steve Hilton, drew the largest cheers.
Outreach efforts
Still, the boos cut against an image Raman has sought to cultivate in recent weeks as a friend of the Jewish community. On Rosh Hashanah, Raman made a cameo at IKAR — a prominent non-denominational synagogue that counts former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti among its members. She also has dropped into backyard dwellings in Westwood and Beverlywood to engage Jewish voters during Sukkot.
Many of her skeptics may see in the two-term city councilwoman an echo of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned on a promise to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and drew heavily on local DSA membership to turn out voters. Since defeating a conventionally pro-Israel Democrat in former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani has continued to criticize Israel from City Hall.
Raman’s defenders are quick to reject those comparisons. Raman, unlike Mamdani, does not mention Israel on her website or harp on it on the campaign trail. She did not volunteer her opinion about genocide — she shared it only after being asked. And her remarks about Israel in the past — including defending its right to exist — have not only shown her willingness to break with DSA, they have come at a real political cost.
Her pursuit of an endorsement from Democrats for Israel-Los Angeles in 2024 earned her the censure of the organization’s LA chapter. With Raman in a close race for the second spot in the top-two primary, DSA chose not to endorse a candidate.
She told Piker she would not seek the DFI-LA endorsement again. But she has not campaigned with Piker like other candidates, including Huang and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
Meanwhile, Bass — who entered the race as an unpopular incumbent due to her handling of the city’s 2025 wildfires — has seen her support continue to flag after a warehouse fire that burned for two weeks spewed toxic chemicals on the city’s east side.
Nevertheless, the DSA affiliation and genocide accusation are disqualifying for some Jewish Angelenos — including Democrats.
Farkas declined to say whether Raman could have said anything to reassure those voters. The federation’s job, he said, was to call balls and strikes.
“It’s really up to each candidate to decide how they’re going to respond to those things,” he said, “and make definitive, executive-level statements that show that they’re the leader of this city and not just being reactive to things on the ground.”
The post At L.A. Jewish community forum, Nithya Raman encounters tough questions on Israel — and a hostile audience appeared first on The Forward.
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Mahmoud Khalil’s book reiterates his anti-Zionist stance
From the beginning, Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil denied claims that the protests at Columbia University after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel were antisemitic.
In his book, No Land to Stand On, released Tuesday, he stands by that.
Khalil, who became the face of the anti-Israel campus movement after he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2025, reiterates his anti-Zionist stance in the book while detailing “a life of exile, refuge, and resistance.”
Recounting the endless interviews with journalists that made him the face of a campus movement, he writes that the question of whether the protests were antisemitic kept coming up.
“I explained, repeatedly, that the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism was a strategy to stifle righteous criticism of Israel,” writes Khalil, who added that many Jewish students were involved in the protests. “Such weaponization of antisemitism was designed to place a state and its crimes beyond criticism by wrapping them in the protections owed to a faith and its people.”
The memoir weaves Khalil’s beliefs and frustrations through stories from his life, from where he was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and fled to Lebanon at age 18, to the protests at Columbia, his detention and finally his release. He uses the book as an opportunity to say his detention was unjust, and to critique the government’s case against him.
He notes a memo from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio that states his detention was a result of “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities, which fosters a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States,” adding those activities were “otherwise lawful.”
“Otherwise lawful,” writes Khalil. “They had written it themselves. My beliefs were lawful, and they wanted to deport me for them.”
Khalil argued that the administration was disingenuous in deporting him for alleged antisemitism, pointing to Trump’s personal visit with the openly antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes. He also accused the administration of platforming “white supremacist rhetoric and symbolism.”
Further, Khalil claimed pro-Palestinian protesters were peaceful, while “it was the pro-Israel students and Zionist groups that had provoked confrontations, harassed Palestinian students, and in some cases physically attacked them.”
Despite his status as a lawful permanent resident married to a U.S. citizen, the federal government apprehended him on March 8, 2025. Khalil spent 104 days in ICE detention, famously missing the birth of his first child.
His imprisonment sparked a fierce debate over free speech, along with a debate over what his beliefs were to begin with. Khalil clarified his stances in an April interview with the Forward saying he acknowledged “a Jewish connection” to Israel, but that “rejecting the self-determination of the Jewish people on the Palestinian land in itself is not antisemitism.”
He reiterates in the book that he does not “endorse” Hamas, though he told the Forward he was unsure if Hamas targeted civilians on Oct. 7, something that has been widely documented and substantiated.
While he expressed disdain for the way the university handled the protests and its messaging after Oct. 7, Khalil said the university was failing its Palestinian students long before 2023. He pointed to the school’s Tel Aviv Global Center, which opened this past summer despite protest.
“Columbia wanted to open an institutional outpost, funded in part by our tuition, in a place that had a policy of refusing entry to people like me, and call it a center for global learning,” he wrote.
He also took aim at Columbia’s dual degree program with Tel Aviv University.
“The dual-degree stream was largely built around Jewish Israeli students who had served in the Israeli army,” writes Khalil. “I couldn’t stop thinking that if I were in Palestine, some of these students would be stopping me at checkpoints, raiding my university, piloting the drones surveilling my community, killing my neighbors.”
Returning home to New York from the ICE detention center in Louisiana, he wrote that he was met with praise — and harassment.
When people approached him asking if he was the Khalil they’d seen in the news, he was unsure: “Whether they wanted to shake my hand or spit in my face, say ‘Thank you for what you’re doing’ or follow me through Midtown yelling ‘Am Yisrael Chai.’”
He saw all of those reactions and more, he wrote.
The 208-page book is dedicated to Khalil’s wife, to the Columbia students who participated in the protests, to ICE detainees and “Palestine, until you are free.” He will launch a book tour on Tuesday at a shop just two blocks from Columbia’s campus.
The post Mahmoud Khalil’s book reiterates his anti-Zionist stance appeared first on The Forward.
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Sydney Sweeney went to shul. But did she choose the right occasion?
Jewish internet spaces are alight this week with reports that actress, model and political lightning rod Sydney Sweeney was spotted in the pews on Rosh Hashanah.
According to GreenwichTime and The Free Press, Sweeney — who is not Jewish — attended services at Temple Sholom in Greenwich, Connecticut, with her boyfriend, music mogul Scooter Braun (who grew up there). Gossip rag DeuxMoi has since claimed that Sweeney, who has been linked with Braun since at least June 2025, is also contemplating conversion.
One can speculate on whether the most in-demand actress on the planet might be leaning a bit too hard into her Marilyn Monroe character arc. At the Forward, though, we’re wondering whether Sweeney’s Jewish beau picked the right holiday to bring her to shul.
After all, there’s a wide range of experiences when it comes to prayer services, and you want to make a positive first impression. You’d want their day in shul to be accessible, fun and not too long. That’s a Sydney Sweeney movie, though, not Rosh Hashanah services. So without further ado, here’s the official undisputed rankings of Jewish calendar days on which to bring your non-Jewish partner to shul.
Going from least to most desirable:
Erev Tisha B’av
I would have to respect the audacity of someone bringing their partner to synagogue for the first time on Tisha B’av, the day Jewish people grieve the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. It’s an intentionally unpleasant time to be in shul — you’re sitting on the floor, reading Lamentations. Also, you’re not supposed to greet people at all, which would almost certainly be awkward for a first-timer, considering how uncomfortable it is for regulars. On the flip side, if you’re Sydney Sweeney, that rule means no one can bother you for a selfie, either.
Shemini Atzeret
We pray for rain, which is an ancient word that means sustenance, but at this point everyone’s running on fumes for the High Holiday season, so you probably won’t get your senior rabbi delivering the sermon. Some years (including this one), your synagogue might be reading Ecclesiastes, which is both melancholy and long. Hard sell.
Passover
Passover isn’t known for its prayer services — the main event is, of course, the seder. If you’re taking a non-Jewish partner to services for the first time on Passover, it usually means one of two things: 1) You don’t want anyone to meet this person, because nobody goes to shul on Passover or 2) You didn’t have enough fun at the seder, because if you did, you’d be sleeping in with the rest of us.
One Passover plus: On the Shabbat that falls during the holiday, services also include the reading of the Song of Songs, the most risqué text in the Jewish canon.
Shavuot
In the height of summer, we read the story of Ruth — Judaism’s great conversion story. (Hint hint.) We also celebrate the receiving of the Ten Commandments, which your partner may already be familiar with from the movies, if not public school.
Shavuot morning is also a good service to go to because — at least in synagogues that observe two days of the holiday — the first day’s early services are led at a breakneck pace so that people who stayed up all night studying Torah the night before can go straight to sleep. No sermon! You’ll be out of there faster than you can say Na’aseh V’nishmah.
Simchat Torah
Like Sukkot, but swap out the lulav and etrog for Torah scrolls, which don’t smell as good or shake as well. Many synagogues (over-)serve alcohol on this holiday, which is a double-edged sword for a day you’d prefer everyone to be on their best behavior.
Yom Kippur
I’m gonna call this one underrated. There are surprisingly some things going for the Jewish day of repentance. The themes of atonement and forgiveness have universal appeal, and Jewish people do them well. You’ll probably get one of the rabbi’s strongest sermons of the calendar cycle. There’s a strange ecstasy that comes from being trapped in a room with hundreds of fasting people; the story of Jonah and the whale is one of our highlights. (This is also the only holiday I can attest to: My parents had their first date — ever! — on Yom Kippur services, and they’re still together.)
At the same time, Yom Kippur tends to have the longest prayer services of the year. It’s a fast day, so there’s no free food at the end of afternoon services (though you might get bagels at the break-fast). You usually have to pay to get in, plus there’s often a fundraising appeal woven into the service. And due to the prohibition on wearing leather shoes, you’d also be surrounding your partner with people wearing Crocs with dress clothes, which may scare them away from Judaism even if you try to explain it.
Sukkot
People like to call this our most pagan holiday, but marching around in circles with a giant asparagus and lemon is objectively fun, and the Four Species can represent basically anything you want. Let’s just hope your partner isn’t a willow.
Rosh Hashanah
Scooter Braun isn’t the first person to drag their partner to shul on Rosh Hashanah, and for good reason. Everyone wears their finest clothing, the shul will be beautifully decorated and the prayers are musically extravagant. The rabbi’s sermon will emphasize renewal and the commitment to doing better. There’s a decent chance apples dipped in honey will be served in the lobby. And above all else, the shofar blowing — done right — is arguably the highlight of the year in shul.
Plus, everyone’s there, so you can introduce your partner to everyone they need to know in one fell swoop. The only downside is you usually have to buy a ticket. (And on behalf of synagogue offices everywhere, if you’re the Jewish partner in the relationship, don’t try to arrange this over email 24 hours before the holiday.)
Purim
This is one thing Nobody Wants This got right: Purim is the ideal holiday for introducing a non-Jewish partner to the community. What better way to show up than in costume? You learn a foundational story of Jewish survival, a tradition that transforms our vulnerability into comedy. It’s also a family-oriented holiday — kids in face-paint, everyone with their graggers — which makes it a perfect picture-this set piece.
But the best thing about Purim? Thanks to the tradition of drinking ‘til you drop — if the relationship doesn’t work out, no one will remember a year later.
The post Sydney Sweeney went to shul. But did she choose the right occasion? appeared first on The Forward.
