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Arthur Waskow, activist rabbi who brought Jewish spiritual wisdom to bear on progressive politics, dies at 92
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, an activist and author of more than two dozen books that refracted progressive causes like civil rights, economic injustice and, most pressingly in his last decade, climate change through the lens of Jewish text and tradition, died Monday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 92.
Starting with his creation in 1969 of the “Freedom Seder,” a version of the Passover Haggadah that introduced contemporary liberation struggles into the ancient story of the Israelite escape from Egyptian bondage, Waskow became one of the leading voices bringing Jewish spiritual wisdom to bear on the progressive political agenda.
Waskow disseminated these ideas as the founder of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, initially to address the threat of nuclear weapons through a Jewish lens. Over time, the organization came to focus on other concerns, including Middle East peace, interfaith relations and climate change.
In 1993, Waskow co-founded, with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and others, ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, a flagship for the Jewish Renewal movement. Waskow was said to have coined the term “Jewish Renewal” — a movement grounded in “Judaism’s prophetic and mystical traditions” — in an issue of Menorah, a magazine for social justice and ritual issues he launched in 1979.
The author of more than two dozen books, several of which have become Jewish classics, Waskow celebrated his 92nd birthday this month while in hospice care at a Zoom launch of two books that he’d written since turning 90. “Tales of Spirit Rising and Sometimes Falling” is an activist’s memoir; “Handbook for Heretics and Prophets: A New Torah for a New World” is a collection of essays by Waskow and fellow Jewish activists.
His reach was so extensive that, in 2012, the feminist icon Gloria Steinem told Oprah Winfrey that it had been Waskow’s urging that kept her going as an activist at a pivotal moment of disillusionment back in 1968. The pair reconnected for the first time since then in a public conversation about their eight decades of activism.
More than an armchair theologian, Waskow was arrested more than two dozen times, first while protesting a segregated amusement park in his hometown of Baltimore in the 1960s and continuing throughout his life. In 2019, Waskow was arrested outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Philadelphia while protesting the Trump administration’s treatment of migrant women.
Waskow was destined for activism from an early age. Both his parents were politically engaged — his father was a labor organizer who had headed the Baltimore teachers union and his mother registered Black voters. Both were active with Americans for Democratic Action. His grandfather was a precinct organizer for Eugene Debs, the union organizer who ran for president five times as a socialist between 1900 and 1920.
“That was in my bloodstream,” Waskow told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2021.
Waskow received a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1954 and a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Wisconsin in 1963. He went to work on disarmament and civil rights for Robert Kastenmeier, an influential longtime member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Later he became a fellow at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies. In 1970, he testified for the defense at the trial of the Chicago 7, Vietnam war protesters who had been arrested for incitement at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. The defendants included the Jewish radicals Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.
The trial was the first time that Waskow had worn a kippah in a nonreligious setting — the judge tried to have him remove it, but relented at the prosecutor’s urging. At the time, Waskow “was still wrestling with what this weird and powerful ‘Jewish thing’ meant in my life,” as he would write later. Though he had always observed Passover, Judaism had failed to seriously capture his attention until well into adulthood.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow speaks at a news conference to show support for a proposed mosque at 45 Park Place Aug. 5, 2010, in New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
That changed on an April evening in 1968 as Waskow headed home to prepare for the Passover Seder. Federal troops were out in force to quell riots sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. just days before. Seeing a machine gun pointed at his block in the Adams Morgan section of Washington, D.C., Waskow likened the show of force to Pharaoh’s army.
That insight inspired Waskow to write the “Freedom Seder,” which referred to King and Mahatma Gandhi as “prophets” and introduced quotes from a range of modern thinkers alongside the traditional text, including Thomas Jefferson, the enslaved abolitionist Nat Turner and the Black Power leader Eldridge Cleaver. In 1969, a group of young Jewish activists led by Waskow organized the original Freedom Seder, which was held in the basement of a church in Washington.
Although it was written in a long tradition of adapting the Passover seder script for contemporary issues, the Orthodox Rabbinical Alliance of America denounced the work as “most offensive” for making radical changes to the Haggadah without rabbinic authority and quoting alleged anti-Semites.
“There’s no question, it was chutzpadik,” Waskow said of the book, using a Yiddish expression that roughly means audacious. “I think it turned out to be holy chutzpah.”
The “Freedom Seder” would be the first of many works Waskow would pen that reimagined Jewish tradition to speak more directly to contemporary concerns, initiating a movement that many Jews now take for granted.
Waskow continued in this vein with his 1982 work “Seasons of Our Joy,” a New Age guide to the Jewish holidays (New Age became “modern” in subsequent editions). Written in the DIY spirit of “The Jewish Catalog,” the book reintroduced the earth-based, agricultural roots of the Jewish holidays decades before Jewish farmers and environmental activists would make such linkages seem obvious.
In 1982, when hundreds of Palestinians were massacred by Israel-aligned Christian Phalangists at Sabra and Shatila, Waskow was at a retreat center near Baltimore for Rosh Hashanah. Waskow took the front-page article on the killings from the Philadelphia Inquirer and chanted it as the haftarah at the morning service.
“He was almost a lone voice for a long time, really trying to bring Jewish values to the political situation,” Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, a fellow Philadelphia activist rabbi and the founder of the social justice training program at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, said in 2021. “Heschel certainly had done this, and there were two or three other rabbis who did that well — Everett Gendler, some more. But they weren’t as radical as Arthur.”
Waskow decided to seek rabbinic ordination in 1995, when he was 62 and already teaching at the Reconstructionist seminary. He also taught at Swarthmore College, Temple University, Drew University, Vassar College and the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute for Religion (where he taught the first course on eco-Judaism in any rabbinical seminary).
In 2007, Newsweek named him one of the 50 most influential American rabbis.
Waskow met Rabbi Phyllis Berman at a conference in 1982, some months after she read “Seasons of Our Joy” and sent Waskow a love letter, which he never answered. (It had been lost in the mail.) Berman confronted Waskow over the lapse and the two struck up a friendship. Four years later they were married and each took on a new middle name — Ocean — inspired by their shared love of the sea.
“People have said that I have softened him,” Berman told JTA in 2021. “And I think that I have. And he has also toughened me. So both things are true. He said to me very recently, in a very precious exchange, that I don’t take any shit from him anymore. And I think I probably did for a long time. He is a frightening man when he’s angry. But I’ve learned to stand in the face of it in a much, much more profound way.”
Waskow told JTA that he hoped his legacy would be a deeper shift in Jewish theology — and by extension in the Jewish psyche. Waskow believed that modernity presented Judaism with a challenge on par with the one faced by the ancient rabbis following the destruction of the Temple. That challenge, reflected in the cascading crises now facing humanity, will require a profound transformation in religious thought — from one centered on serving God as a ruler or king to a more ecological worldview that sees all of creation as part of an organic whole.
“Modernity did to us what Rome, and before Rome Egypt and Babylon, did,” Waskow said. “And the question is now, has modernity gotten so powerful, and so uncaring, and so uncontrollable, it’s going to wreck the whole joint before we can create an effective response. Or can we create an effective response? And that’s what I’ve been trying to do.”
Waskow’s successor at the Shalom Center, Rabbi Nate DeGroot, announced earlier this month, ahead of Waskow’s Oct. 12 birthday, that he had entered hospice care.
Berman survives him, as does a son, David Waskow; a daughter, Shoshana Elkin Waskow; stepchildren Josh Sher and Morissa Wiser, their spouses and five grandchildren.
His other books included “Torah of the Earth: Exploring 4,000 Years of Ecology in Jewish Thought,” “Down-to-Earth Judaism: Food, Money, Sex, and the Rest of Life” and “Godwrestling,” a collection of Torah commentaries.
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Stephen Spielberg wins Grammy, becoming 9th Jew in elite EGOT ranks
(JTA) — The legendary director Stephen Spielberg has become the ninth Jew to secure “EGOT” status after winning a Grammy for producing a documentary about the music of John Williams.
Spielberg was awarded the Grammy for producing “Music by John Williams,” which won best music documentary, before the televised ceremony on Sunday. The win makes him the 22nd person to win the coveted quartet of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards.
Spielberg has won three Oscars, including best picture for the 1993 Holocaust drama “Schindler’s List”; four Emmys for TV programming including two World War II dramatic miniseries; and a Tony for producing the Broadway show “A Strange Loop.”
Spielberg adds to a large proportion of Jewish artists to win all four of the top entertainment awards. Nine of the 22 EGOTs have been Jewish, including the first person to ever reach the status, composer Richard Rodgers. Rodgers and Marvin Hamlisch, who was also Jewish, are the only people to have added a Pulitzer Prize to the EGOT crown. The most recent Jewish winner before Spielberg was the songwriter Benj Pasek, who secured the status in 2024 with an Emmy.
One of Spielberg’s more celebrated recent works was a drama based loosely on his own Jewish family. “The Fabelmans,” released in 2022, earned him three Oscar nods — for best picture, best director and best screenplay — but no wins.
In promoting that movie, Spielberg said antisemitic bullying when he was a child had informed his sense of being an “outsider,” which he translated into his filmmaking.
“Schindler’s List,” meanwhile, spurred the creation of the USC Shoah Foundation, a leading center for preserving Holocaust testimonies that has also recently embraced the task of preserving stories of contemporary antisemitism, too.
“It was, emotionally, the hardest movie I’ve ever made,” Spielberg said about his most decorated movie — for which John Williams earned an Oscar for the score. “It made me so proud to be a Jew.”
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A border official mocked an attorney for observing Shabbat. Orthodox lawyers say the issue is not new.
Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol official who led immigration raids in Minneapolis, reportedly mocked the Jewish faith of Minnesota’s U.S. attorney during a phone call with other prosecutors in mid-January. According to The New York Times, Bovino complained that Daniel Rosen, an Orthodox Jew, was hard to reach over the weekend because he observes Shabbat and sarcastically pointed out that Orthodox Jewish criminals don’t take the weekends off.
The call took place at a moment of extreme tension in Minneapolis, as federal agents under Bovino’s command carried out an aggressive immigration crackdown that had already turned deadly. It came between the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, both killed during enforcement operations, and amid fierce backlash from local officials and residents.
Bovino made the remarks in a derisive, mocking tone, the Times reported, casting Shabbat observance as a point of ridicule. Bovino had already drawn national attention for frequently wearing an olive double-breasted greatcoat with World War II-era styling, leading some critics to call him “Gestapo Greg” and accusing him of “Nazi cosplay.” Bovino, who pushed back on those comparisons, has since been reassigned.
Rosen, a Trump nominee, was confirmed as Minnesota’s U.S. attorney in October 2025 after a career in private practice and Jewish communal leadership. He has said that rising antisemitism helped motivate his decision to take the job, and that prosecuting hate crimes would be a priority for his office.
For many Orthodox Jewish lawyers, Bovino’s alleged remarks were not surprising. They echoed a familiar challenge: explaining that Shabbat — a full day offline — is not a lack of commitment, but a religious boundary that cannot be bent without being broken.
In a profession that prizes constant availability, that boundary can carry consequences. Some lawyers say it shows up in subtle ways: raised eyebrows, jokes about being unreachable, skepticism when they ask for time off. Others say it has shaped much bigger decisions, including how visibly Jewish they allow themselves to be at work.
David Schoen, an Orthodox criminal defense attorney who served as lead counsel for President Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial, said he has long been mindful of how religious observance is perceived in the courtroom.
“I have made a conscious decision not to wear my yarmulke in front of a jury,” Schoen said, explaining that jurors often “draw stereotypes from what they see.”
Those concerns were reinforced by experience. Schoen said he has noticed a “definite difference in attitude” from some judges depending on whether he wore a yarmulke. In one case, he recalled, a Jewish judge pulled him aside during a jury trial and told him she thought he had made the right choice — a comment Schoen said he found disappointing.
For Sara Shulevitz, a criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor, the Bovino episode brought back memories from early in her career.
Orthodox and the daughter of a Hasidic rabbi — now married to one — Shulevitz said her unavailability on Jewish holidays was often treated as a professional flaw rather than a religious obligation. “It held me back from getting promotions,” she said.
In court, the scrutiny could be blunt. “I was mocked by a Jewish judge for celebrating ‘antiquated’ Jewish holidays,” she said, recalling requests for continuances for Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. In another case, she said, a judge questioned her request for time off for Shavuot and suggested she had already “taken off for Passover.”
When another judge assumed Passover always began on the same day in April, “I had to explain the Jewish lunar calendar in the middle of court while everyone was laughing,” she said.
Not every encounter, Shulevitz added, was rooted in hostility. Sometimes judges simply didn’t understand Orthodox practice. When she explained she couldn’t appear on a Jewish holiday, judges would suggest she join the hearing by Zoom — forcing her to explain that Orthodox Jews don’t use electrical devices on Shabbat or festivals.
The misunderstanding often slid into a familiar assumption. “They think you’re lazy,” she said. “It’s not laziness. Any Jewish woman knows how much work goes into preparing for Passover.”
Rabbi Michael Broyde, a law professor at Emory University who studies religious accommodation, said that Bovino’s alleged “derogatory remarks” are “sad and reflects, I worry, the antisemitic times we seem to be living in.”
He added that the criticism of Rosen reflected a basic misunderstanding of how law offices operate, calling it “extremely rare” for a lawyer’s religious practices to interfere with their obligations, especially when senior attorneys delegate work and courts routinely grant continuances.
“No one works 24/7,” Broyde said.
The episode echoed a similar Shabbat-related incident during Trump’s first term. In his 2022 memoir, former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro described how a group sought to undermine Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s role in the 2020 campaign by scheduling a key White House meeting with Trump on a Saturday, knowing Kushner — who is Shabbat observant — would not attend. Navarro titled the chapter recounting the episode, “Shabbat Shalom and Sayonara.”
The tension between Jewish observance and public life is not new. Senator Joe Lieberman, the first observant Jew to run on a major-party presidential ticket, famously walked to the Capitol for a Saturday vote and ate fish instead of meat at receptions. His longtime Senate colleague Chris Dodd joked that he became Lieberman’s “Shabbos goy.”
Still, Schoen said, visibility can cut both ways. During Trump’s impeachment trial, while speaking on the Senate floor, he reached for a bottle of water and instinctively paused. With one hand holding the bottle, he used the other to cover his head — a makeshift yarmulke — before drinking.
The moment was brief, but it did not go unnoticed. In the days that followed, Schoen said he heard from young Jewish men and businesspeople who told him that seeing the gesture made them feel more comfortable wearing their own yarmulkes at work.
The attention, he said, was unexpected. But for some in the Orthodox community, it became a source of pride.
“I felt honored,” Schoen said.
My guess in all seriousness is that he normally wears a yarmulke and this was reflex. Schoen is modern Orthodox so that would make sense. But I defer to @jacobkornbluh https://t.co/MkKx6W03v2
— Jake Tapper 🦅 (@jaketapper) February 9, 2021
Jacob Kornbluh contributed additional reporting.
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Deni Avdija becomes first Israeli to be selected as an NBA All-Star
(JTA) — Portland Trail Blazers star Deni Avdija’s meteoric rise has officially reached a new stratosphere, as the 25-year-old forward has become the NBA’s first-ever Israeli All-Star.
Avdija was named an All-Star reserve for the Western Conference on Sunday, an expected but deserved nod after the northern Israel native finished seventh in All-Star voting with over 2.2 million votes, ahead of NBA legends LeBron James and Kevin Durant. Avdija’s breakout performance this season has earned him repeated praise from James and others across the league.
Avdija’s star turn began last year in his first season with Portland, when he further captured the adoration of Jewish fans across Israel and the U.S. But he took another step forward this season, averaging 25.8 points, 6.8 assists and 7.2 rebounds per game. His points and assists clips are by far the best of his career, and rank 13th and 12th in the NBA, respectively. He’s considered a front-runner for the league’s Most Improved Player award.
For close observers of Israeli basketball, Avdija’s All-Star selection is the culmination of a promising career that began as a teenage star with Maccabi Tel Aviv and made him the first Israeli chosen in the top 10 in an NBA draft.
“Deni Avdija being named an NBA All-Star reserve is an unbelievable achievement in the mind of every Israeli basketball fan,” Moshe Halickman, who covers basketball for the popular Sports Rabbi website, wrote in an essay for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “This is a dream come true for many — a dream that became realistic and even a must-happen during his breakout season — but something that in his first five seasons in the NBA never came across as something that was going to be real.”
Halickman, who has covered Avdija in Washington, D.C., and in Israel, wrote that Avdija is not only considered the greatest Israeli hooper of all time, but perhaps the best athlete to come out of Israel, period.
Oded Shalom, who coached Avdija on Maccabi Tel Aviv’s Under-15 and Under-16 teams, echoed that sentiment in a recent profile of Avdija in The Athletic.
“Even though he is only 25, I think he is Israel’s most successful athlete in history,’’ Shalom said. “We’ve had some great gymnasts — and I hope everyone forgives me for saying it, because we’ve had some great athletes — but I think Deni has become the greatest.”
Avdija’s ascension has also come against the backdrop of the Gaza war and a reported global rise in antisemitism, which he has said affects him personally.
“I’m an athlete. I don’t really get into politics, because it’s not my job,” Avdija told The Athletic. “I obviously stand for my country, because that’s where I’m from. It’s frustrating to see all the hate. Like, I have a good game or get All-Star votes, and all the comments are people connecting me to politics. Like, why can’t I just be a good basketball player? Why does it matter if I’m from Israel, or wherever in the world, or what my race is? Just respect me as a basketball player.”
Now, Avdija’s talents will be on display at the NBA All-Star Game, on Sunday, Feb. 15, in Los Angeles.
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