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Arthur Waskow, activist rabbi who brought Jewish spiritual wisdom to bear on progressive politics, dies at 92
(JTA) — 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.
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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Anti-Israel Rep. Thomas Massie Trails in Race as New Kentucky Ad Targets Jewish Donor With Rainbow Star of David
US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) leaves a meeting of the House Republican Conference in the US Capitol on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
A new poll is signaling growing trouble for US Rep. Thomas Massie in Kentucky’s Republican primary, with Trump-endorsed challenger Ed Gallrein now leading the incumbent congressman 53 percent to 45 percent among likely GOP voters in the state’s 4th Congressional District.
The poll comes as Massie faces intensifying backlash over an advertisement released by a pro-Massie super PAC targeting billionaire Republican donor Paul Singer, a prominent Jewish supporter of pro-Israel causes who has backed efforts to defeat the incumbent.
The ad characterizes Singer as a “pro-trans billionaire” and features a rainbow-colored Star of David behind his image while attacking Gallrein’s allies.
NEW: Take a look at this #KY04 ad called “LGBTQ Mafia” from a PAC affiliated w/ Jan. 6 rioter Derrick Evans.
It depicts Jewish donor Paul Singer with an unexplained rainbow Star of David.
More on this insane, now record-breaking $25 million primary: https://t.co/iT3YN8wYEz pic.twitter.com/0YIRYmaJwL
— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) May 11, 2026
Critics condemned the imagery as antisemitic, arguing it invoked longstanding tropes about Jewish financial influence and used Jewish symbolism in a way designed to inflame cultural resentment. Many social media users accused the ad of crossing a red line at a time when antisemitic incidents in the United States remain elevated following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
The Kentucky ad was paid for by Hold the Line PAC — a group backing Massie that is “focused on Religious Liberty, 2A, and Restoring Election Integrity,” according to its website — not Massie’s official campaign.
The race has drawn national attention, with more than $25 million spent on ads, the most ever in a House primary election, according to AdImpact.
Outside groups have poured millions of dollars into the campaign, Because Kentucky’s 4th District is overwhelmingly Republican, the GOP primary is widely expected to determine who will ultimately hold the seat. According to data sourced from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Massie has only garnered roughly $70,000 from in-state donors, compared to over $1.1 million from out-of-state, a whopping 94 percent of his total donations.
The latest survey showing Massie trailing was conducted on May 12 by Quantus Insights. It marks one of the clearest signs yet that US President Donald Trump’s endorsement may be reshaping the race in Gallrein’s favor. The Kentucky primary has rapidly evolved into one of the most closely watched Republican intraparty battles of the 2026 election cycle, drawing national attention over divisions surrounding Israel, antisemitism, and ideological loyalty within the GOP.
Massie, a libertarian-leaning Republican known for frequently breaking with party leadership, has a long track-record of voting against sending aid to all foreign countries, including Israel. Although he has received substantial criticism over his voting record, Massie has argued that his positions do not reflect an animus against the Jewish state but are reflective of his staunch fiscal conservatism. He has also condemned Israel’s military operations in Gaza and Lebanon, arguing that the Jewish state has targeted civilian infrastructure and should not receive assistance from the US.
Critics contend his voting record and anti-Israel rhetoric have increasingly isolated him from the Republican mainstream, particularly on issues involving Israel and national security. Skeptics also claim that Massie’s criticisms of Israel are devoid of nuance, oftentimes omitting Hamas’s tendency to use human shields, repurpose civilian infrastructure for military purposes, and intercept trucks intended to distribute food.
The race has become a major test of Trump’s continued influence over Republican primaries. Trump has repeatedly criticized Massie in recent months before formally endorsing Gallrein, framing the contest as a battle between party unity and ideological obstructionism.
“We got to get rid of this loser. This guy is bad,” Trump said at a March rally in Hebron, Kentucky. “He’s disloyal to the Republican Party. He’s disloyal to the people of Kentucky, and most importantly, he is disloyal to the United States of America. And he’s got to be voted out of office as soon as possible.”
Gallrein, a retired Navy SEAL officer, has sought to position himself as a firmly pro-Israel conservative aligned with Trump’s “America First” coalition. His campaign has emphasized strong US-Israel relations, expanded security cooperation, and staunch support for the Jewish state following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.
Political analysts say the outcome could reverberate far beyond Kentucky, shaping how Republican lawmakers navigate issues surrounding Israel, antisemitism, and loyalty to Trump heading into the 2026 midterm elections.
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Jewish Teens in France Tell US Ambassador About Enduring Antisemitism in Schools
Members of French Cteen chapters meet with United States Ambassador to France Charles Kushner and his wife Seryl on Monday, May 4, 2026. They discussed their experiences with antisemitism and what keeps them motivated. Photo: US Embassy in France
Nine members of the Chabad youth group CTeen France met last week with US Ambassador to France Charles Kushner to discuss their experiences of antisemitism in the years since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, a massacre which left nearly 1,200 people dead and led to a surge in hate crimes targeting Jews around the world.
Following an invitation, the youth aged 14-18 visited the ambassador’s official residence at rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris for a two-hour discussion also attended by Kushner’s wife Seryl. Rabbi Mendy Mottal, CTeen’s director, and his wife Chaya also participated.
One member of the group, 18-year-old Younes, declined when offered a letter from the embassy to explain his absence from school. He explained that he did not want anyone at his school to discover he was Jewish, that only his best friend knew the secret of his true identity.
Another student, Salomé, described living 90 minutes south of Paris in Orléans and not knowing any other Jews in her region until the launch of a CTeen group. “All week at school I’m just waiting for the moment when I can see my Jewish friends,” she told the ambassador.
“These are teens who walk into their public school every morning knowing they may be the only Jew in their classroom,” said Rabbi Mendy Kotlarsky, chairman of CTeen International.
Discussing the meeting on X, Kushner wrote, “I love seeing motivated young leaders! CTeen is developing youth across France and focusing, like me, on countering antisemitism by combatting all forms of hatred in our communities.”
The teenagers received a tour of the ambassador’s residence and enjoyed Kosher refreshments before receiving two gifts: a kippah custom-made for the embassy and an embassy medal.
“These are teens regularly experiencing antisemitism on the front line,” Mottal said. “The ambassador was very moved by them and how they spoke. Frankly, so was I.” He described how Kushner “wanted to know what actually happens in the hallways, what they feel when they walk into a classroom knowing they might be the only Jews in the room.”
Kushner stated during the meeting that he intended the gathering to be the start of his collaborations with the CTeen group and that combating antisemitism in France had become a top priority.
“The fact that the ambassador sits with them, listens to their stories, and acknowledges the weight they carry on their shoulders — that means something profound to these young people,” Kotlarsky said.
The students’ fears align with survey responses from Jews in France and Europe. A 2026 Jewish Agency report found 78 percent of French Jews expressed feelings of fear in their country while 43 percent of European Jews surveyed said they experienced antisemitism in the last year either themselves or through a member of their family.
Last year authorities in France documented 1,320 antisemitic incidents recorded nationwide, a fall of 16 percent from the previous year’s high of 1,570. While Jews make up less than one percent of the French population — totaling 500,000 to amount to Europe’s highest Jewish population — they account for 53 percent of hate crime victims. French officials warned that the numbers were certainly undercounts of the actual number of incidents.
Last month, lawmaker Caroline Yadan put forward legislation to expand penalties for antisemitic speech. Dubbed the “Yadan law,” the proposed measure would ban “implicit” justifications of terrorism, advocacy for obliterating any state recognized by France, and comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. The bill’s supporters chose to withdraw the plan on April 16 after determining they were unlikely to succeed.
The centrist party Ensemble pour la République (EPR) blamed the leftist La France Insoumise (LFI) party for allegedly obstructing the bill’s progression.
In March, Dov Maimon, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, described the ideological dynamics in local French politics today and the threat they posed against the Jewish people.
“On one side, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left party, La France Insoumise (LFI), which didn’t hold a single seat on any municipal council, has now entered hundreds of councils and captured real cities for the first time,” Maimon wrote. “On the other side, the far right took approximately 40% of the vote and clinched dozens of mayoral races.”
Maimon warned that “the center seems to have collapsed. According to current polls, Mélenchon has a real chance of reaching that final round as the standard-bearer of the left. His political movement has weaponized hostility toward Israel, and his ties to Islamist networks are well-documented.”
In March, French authorities arrested two brothers alleged to have planned an antisemitic terror attack. Investigators found a semi-automatic firearm, a bottle of acid, and an ISIS flag during a traffic stop.
Kushner is the grandson of Holocaust survivors. His son Jared is US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and serves as the Special Envoy for Peace where he has acted as a key foreign policy negotiator during the ongoing conflict with the Islamic regime in Iran.
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Long Island school district pays $125K to settle lawsuit over erased pro-Palestinian student art
(JTA) — A Long Island school district agreed to pay a $125,000 settlement to a former student whose pro-Palestinian artwork was painted over in a high school parking lot.
The lawsuit stemmed from a September 2024 incident at Half Hollow Hills High School West, which permitted seniors to decorate their campus parking spots. A Muslim-American student, who was a senior at the time, painted a watermelon featuring a keffiyeh pattern alongside her name in Arabic and the phrase “Peace be upon you” on her space.
At the time, protests against the war in Gaza were at a peak, and the watermelon and keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headscarf, are both widely used symbols of Palestinian solidarity. The school painted over the artwork after it drew outcry from some Jewish parents in the district, determining that it had run afoul of the district’s rules barring political designs.
“For the school district, neutrality is the single most important issue when it comes to limiting speech,” the Half Hollow Hills School District’s attorney, Jacob Feldman, said at a school board meeting at the time, according to a contemporaneous Newsday report.
The student, who has not been identified publicly, testified at that meeting last year. “I was told by my principal that the watermelon was being interpreted as antisemitic by anonymous adults,” she said, according to the Newsday footage. “I feel deeply offended that the word antisemitic was used to describe a piece of my artwork.”
In March 2025, the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed a lawsuit on behalf of the student alongside Stoll, Glickman & Bellina LLP, alleging that the district had violated her free speech rights and caused her emotional distress.
“The whitewash of Plaintiff’s pro-Palestinian speech was not to prevent substantial disruption of any school activity or threatened harm to the rights of others, as Half Hollow permitted and even amplified speech on other equally, even more, controversial issues,” the lawsuit stated, according to the Associated Press.
In court filings, Steven Stern, an attorney appointed by the district’s insurance provider, wrote that the watermelon image “symbolized anti-Semitic hate speech,” arguing that the district should be able to dictate art allowed in the parking lot.
“Any student, teacher, or member of the public could have driven into the parking lot and reasonably understood the school was endorsing a political message — or worse, anti-Semitic hate speech — by allowing it,” Stern wrote, according to Newsday.
The settlement, which was approved by the Half Hollow Hills school board at a meeting on April 21, will be paid by the district’s insurance carrier, according to Superintendent John O’Farrell.
In a statement obtained by Newsday, O’Farrell said that students were no longer allowed to paint their parking spaces “following the incident and the disruption it caused.”
The lawsuit was not the first time that the school district had courted controversy over Israel-related issues. Last year, the district drew scrutiny after a study guide distributed to some 10th graders described Zionism as “an example of extreme nationalism,” prompting condemnation from Rep. Elise Stefanik.
Christina John, a staff attorney for the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which filed the lawsuit alongside Stoll, Glickman & Bellina LLP, welcomed the outcome in a statement.
“This settlement sends a clear message that viewpoint discrimination and the censorship of Palestinian expression cannot be justified under the guise of neutrality,” John said. “No student should be interrogated, silenced, or punished for peacefully expressing their identity or solidarity with oppressed people.”
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