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As a rabbi in a small town, I understand the Jewish class divide — and how to close it
(JTA) — When you walk into the back door at my home away from home, Beth Israel Congregation of Waterville, Maine, you’re greeted with a faint scent of kosher matzah ball soup mixed with the slightest hint of mildew from a 70-year-old building that can’t quite manage its moisture anymore.
On your left, you’ll see the kitchen, the heart and soul of our congregation. It is often where the most invaluable Torah is taught and learned. That happened a few years ago, when my wife, Mel, was joined one snowy Saturday night by our rabbinical intern.
“Mel,” he asked, “do you always need to make this many sandwiches for the food pantry?”
“No,” she replied. “Demand has gone up over the past few years, but we always need to make double at the end of the month.”
“Why,” he inquired, “should you need to make any more at the end of the month than at the beginning?”
Mel stood there somewhat stunned by a question that should not have felt like a Talmudic riddle. How could he not know? I am sure he knew why we blessed two challahs for each Shabbat meal (to remember God’s grace in the desert, when ahead of Shabbat the Israelites were able to gather double the amount of manna [Exodus 16:22]). But why did he not know why we need to double the number of sandwiches we make at the end of the month?
“Most of the clients we serve, some of whom are members of our own congregation,” she explained, “rely on WIC and EBT, government benefits that are issued at the beginning of each month and that often run out by the end, especially in families with children.”
“Oh, okay. I didn’t know that,” he said with a humility that endeared him so deeply to all of us at Beth Israel.
He didn’t understand the significance of the double portion at the end of the month, but the truth of the matter is before I came to Waterville, I didn’t either. I knew nothing about communities like Waterville. And what I thought I knew was not only wrong, but actually, in retrospect, was harmful and offensive. And if I did think about class differences when I lived in Brooklyn, I rarely thought about it in connection to the Jewish community.
But my ignorance and that of my student should not surprise us. Because how many of us really talk honestly about class? Class isn’t just about money. It’s a messy alchemy of financial wealth, social connections, political and cultural power, the opportunities people encounter in their lifetime and the communal regard they receive. To put it more concretely, someone can have the money — through personal resources of scholarships — to attend a Jewish summer camp. But class is also knowing which brands everyone else is wearing, knowing where to access those in-fashion clothes, and being able to own them.
The trickiness of class is what brought one of my Maine rabbinic colleagues to warn me about sending the kids in my congregation to major Jewish summer camps, “Even if you can get them the scholarship, Rachel,” she said, “the teasing they might endure might not make it worth it.”
Why aren’t we talking about class? The topic is tender because class is inextricably linked with our dignity. In Hebrew, the word for dignity is kavod and it shares the same root with kaved, heavy. Dignity is about how much leverage we have — in creating a world that gives us what we need and brings us into spaces with the promise of fullness, respect and agency. And the inequitable distribution of this kavod is impacting the ability of the American Jewish establishment to sustain functional, holy communities equitably nationwide.
For many small-town rabbis like myself who travel back and forth regularly between large cities and our small-town synagogues, the disparity in services, luxuries and opportunities we witness between urban communities and our home shuls is striking and often painful.
Synagogues like ours are struggling to pay their heating bills so that their pipes don’t freeze. Our congregants often cannot make their rent or pay college application fees, and our boards struggle mightily to raise the funds for paltry part-time rabbinic salaries. These heroic small-town lay leaders work the equivalent of unpaid, full-time jobs so that every member of their congregation can have a human hand to hold when life gets real — during times both of transcendent joy and deep distress.
Over the past 50 years wealth and social power have been increasingly concentrated in 12 metro areas to the exclusion of large swaths of our nation. The organization I lead, the Center for Small Town Jewish Life at Colby College, estimates that 1 in 8 American Jews lives outside one of these areas. At the same time, we must also see that class disparities exist within every locale. And so, as we plan programs and craft policies as an American Jewish community, I would challenge all of us to ask ourselves and our institutions questions out loud that we usually don’t ask.
Who is included or excluded by the price of this event or membership?
What services should every member of a Jewish community be able to access, regardless of price? Who will provide it? Who will pay those who are providing those services and will they be paid a fair wage?
How do we work to address the pain and shame caused by unacknowledged class differences within our community?
Not all of these questions have simple answers, but we have to start addressing them. There are three steps we should be taking as an American Jewish community to make our community more economically equitable now.
First, even though livestreaming has been a blessing and increased accessibility and access in ways that cannot be overstated or taken for granted, we still need to reiterate — in all of our communities — that it doesn’t replace the importance of physical presence. For most of us, to be human is to be embodied, and we cannot let physical presence and contact become a luxury good.
Second, every state in America should have at bare minimum one full-time, at-large, pluralistically oriented rabbi with an endowed salary that serves the entire Jewish community of that state, regardless of ability to donate or pay.
Third, we need to find ways to make sure that everyone has a seat at the table, so that every Jew’s soul is fed. We cannot afford to lose anyone. The eternal faith of the people Israel is a covenant that should not be contingent on one’s class — it is up to all of us to make sure that every member of our people is spiritually sated, held by community, known and called by name. We need a new American Jewish budget that fulfills the basic birthright of every Jew in this nation — to be served and held as a worthy member of our people.
Recently I turned to Central Synagogue in New York City to support the work of the Center for Small Town Jewish Life. They answered the call immediately — partnering with us not only financially, but as thought partners in building community and capacity through Central’s The Neighborhood online community and my organization’s programs. Two other Manhattan synagogues — Rodeph Sholom and Park Avenue Synagogue — came in alongside them, eager to help us spread the story of small-town Jewish life and advance our mission. They are funding our National Impact program, Makom, that trains small-town lay leaders and Jewish communal professionals in order to make small-town Jewish life sustainable. They are also supporting our Shaliach Tzibur program that trains small-town Jews to lead rituals and services when no clergy are present.
But there is so much more to be done on a strategic, national scale to ensure that we are touching and serving every member of the American Jewish community with dignity. We will need to continue this work together, large and small Jewish congregations working together to serve the entirety of our people with dignity.
On every Shabbat to come, let’s dream of lechem mishneh, a double portion for all, and let’s start ensuring that everyone, at the very least, has the flour for a single loaf. As our rabbis teach, “eyn kemach, eyn Torah” — without flour, without physical sustenance, our Torah cannot live.
This essay was adapted from a guest sermon given by the author at Central Synagogue in Manhattan.
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Whether it’s viral dot cakes or Love Shack Fancy skirts, Chloe Hechter wants you to know that “Jewish-American Princesses did it first”
On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Butterfield Market currently boasts hour-long lines for the viral “dot cakes,” which are entirely covered by tiny sprinkles. For influencer Chloe Hechter, however, these cakes are nothing new — she saw them at every college bed party, birthday and Bat Mitzvah she ever went to.
“Jewish-American Princesses did it first,” she claimed in a recent Tiktok.
Hechter, who is 25, regularly receives thousands of likes on her content which is centered around relatable modern Jewish experiences: summer relationships at Jewish summer camp, drama within Jewish sororities, coming home from college for Passover seder. She’s described her mission as reclaiming the “Jewish-American Princess” stereotype, which often brings to mind a girl who is spoiled, materialistic and boy-obsessed. Hechter hopes to present a different narrative.
“Jewish American Princess means a headstrong, confident Jewish woman who knows what she’s worth,” Hechter wrote in a February Substack post. “A girl who knows her place in the world as a woman and as a Jew, and who isn’t afraid to be exactly who she is in those spaces.”
The modern-day stereotype of a “Jewish-American Princess” is known for a dress code of sweat sets from Free City or Aviator Nation, Roller Rabbit pajamas and ruffly skirts from Love Shack Fancy. Before that, as Jamie Lauren Keiles discussed in a 2018 Vox article, the “JAP” uniform included Juicy tracksuits in the 2000s, Calvin Klein jeans in the ‘80s and cashmere sweaters in the ‘50s. But, as the ‘princess’ moniker suggests, these looks have always come at a price (Free City sweatpants currently retail for $168).
Keiles explains that JAPs’ historic reputation for dependence on “daddy’s money” stems from Jewish men in the 1950s, still seen by many as nouveau riche, who sought someone to blame. The Jewish-American Princess was encapsulated, Keiles writes, in Goodbye, Columbus’ Brenda Patimkin, who, though educated and beautiful, is also characterized as vain, demanding and uncompromising. It is this kind of portrayal that Hechter hopes to challenge. Though she acknowledges her own privileged background, she also argues that privilege doesn’t necessarily mean out-of-touch.
Hechter’s upbringing was “a gift I’ve been given,” she said. Although she didn’t discuss her background in detail, Hechter expressed her admiration for her parents, who run their own businesses and worked hard to make sure that she grew up in comfort. As opposed to the stereotypical Jewish-American princess, searching for a wealthy husband to provide for her, Hechter said that she uses her background as motivation to be self-sufficient — and as inspiration for her content.
Hechter started out as a child actor, and later went to high school at LaGuardia, the famed performing arts school in New York. At heart, though, she says she was also a writer. Even from a young age, she told me, she would write down funny or ridiculous situations she observed. For a Reform Jewish girl going to New York City private school, there was a lot of material — particularly during B’nei Mitzvah season.
“I’d be like ‘why am I in a party bus to a country club?,’” she joked.
For Hechter, Jewish experiences like these — along with her summers at sleepaway camp — were primarily cultural as opposed to religious. She observed the major holidays, but didn’t go to services regularly; she found the teachings of the Torah interesting but didn’t follow them to the letter.
After she graduated from Syracuse, Hechter began posting skits, which eventually began to go viral. Her first big video, currently at over 660,000 likes, was themed around getting ready for a camp social. In an interview with her college newspaper, she joked that she “would’ve put on makeup” if she had anticipated the video’s success.
Inspired that social media could be her calling, Hechter initially pushed herself to post five times a day, a pace that now seems inconceivable to her. It paid off, though; Hechter currently boasts over 186,000 followers on TikTok and 79,000 on Instagram.
In her videos, Hechter is dedicated to representing a version of her Jewish experience that is rarely shown on screen. Most Jewish characters in film, she says, tend to follow a limited set of archetypes: they’re deeply religious, there’s a depressing undertone or, like Shoshanna Shapiro from Girls, their religion isn’t discussed. When a funny, secular Jew appears on screen, he’s almost always a man.
“I love Adam Sandler and Larry David as much as the next girl, but I wish growing up that I had a cool, fun Jewish girl to look up to,” Hechter said.
Hechter explained that many of her skits draw from experiences she observed on the outskirts; as she tells it, she went to camp but wasn’t the mean girl, she attended lavish Bat Mitzvahs but didn’t have a party of her own, she was in a Jewish sorority but wasn’t super involved. Still, her characters are immediately recognizable.
“People either are experiencing these things firsthand and are like ‘oh my god, this is so me,’” she said. “Or they see it and they make fun of it, like ‘oh my god, this is so my daughter. Oh my god, this is so the people in my sorority.’”
Hannah Wiener, a high school senior from Oceanside, Long Island, is a longtime fan of Hechter. For Hanukkah one year, her sister gifted her a personalized Cameo video in which Hechter talked about their similarities and common interests.
Wiener said that she loves Hechter’s content because she finds it relatable. There are a lot of influencers who make similar videos about Jewish life, but Wiener feels like they make fun of it, rather than treat it “as a normal event like Chloe does.” For Wiener, who went to sleepaway camp herself, Hechter’s camp videos are her favorite. She said that she finds them “to be so funny and also just so heartwarming.”
Middle and high schoolers make up a large proportion of Hechter’s audience — she told me that summer “camp girls”, like Wiener, are her biggest fans. Hechter believes her younger self would have been one of them.
“I genuinely think I would have been my own favorite creator,” she said.
The post Whether it’s viral dot cakes or Love Shack Fancy skirts, Chloe Hechter wants you to know that “Jewish-American Princesses did it first” appeared first on The Forward.
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The Iran war ended terribly for the US, and even worse for Israel
A war that began with immense ambition has ended with profound setbacks for both the United States and Israel.
With an emerging U.S.-Iran peace agreement, what initially appeared to be a historic demonstration of military dominance evolved into a vivid illustration of the limits of both Israeli and American power. The conflict also exposed profound failures in strategic competence within that alliance. Washington and Jerusalem planned effectively for the initial decapitation strikes, but were unprepared for the economic and geopolitical consequences that followed.
The result is a war that may ultimately strengthen the Iranian regime politically, despite the damage it suffered militarily; has weakened international perceptions of American military might; and has diminished both Israel’s own strategic circumstances and its most important alliance.
The opening phase of the war appeared spectacularly successful. Israeli intelligence and airpower decapitated large portions of Iran’s military and security leadership with astonishing speed, including by assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Key military infrastructure suffered major damage, and for a brief moment, it seemed plausible that the Iranian regime might genuinely face collapse or surrender on terms dictated by Washington and Jerusalem.
That perception proved short-lived.
Iran shifted the battlefield away from conventional military confrontation and toward economic coercion. Its closure of the Strait of Hormuz exposed the extraordinary vulnerability of the global economy to relatively inexpensive forms of pressure. Energy markets panicked almost immediately. Governments across Europe, Asia, and the Gulf pushed urgently for de-escalation.
The central strategic reality became impossible to ignore: the U.S.could not tolerate sustained economic disruption, and the Iranian regime has a strong stomach for suffering. The overwhelming military superiority of the U.S. and Israel effectively ceased to matter.
That asymmetry changed the balance of the conflict. And the resulting agreement appears to preserve much of Iran’s architecture of mischief, which the regime’s many critics had hoped to see dismantled.
Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities have been harmed but can be rebuilt; long-term reductions to that firepower are reportedly not on the table in a planned 60-day negotiation. The regime’s regional proxy network — including Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad — survives, even though Hezbollah and Hamas have been battered.
And as Israel is not a party to the ceasefire, it cannot advocate for more stringent terms on this front.
The regime itself remains firmly in power and may receive enormous sanctions relief and renewed economic access. Demands for democratic reforms seem to have been set aside, as has any kind of punishment for the regime’s massacre of thousands — and by some reports tens of thousands — of domestic protestors in January.
The latter aspect is especially galling given that President Donald Trump was driven to intervene because of the January massacre, after he promised Iranians that “help is on its way.” Upon launching the war, he declared that it would enable Iranians to “take your country back.”
Ironically, Trump in his first term pulled out of former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal over objections that it provided funds for the regime while allowing it to run riot. Now, he is settling for an effective reconstitution of that deal — except one with substantially less American leverage.
The implications extend far beyond Iran itself. The war demonstrated that Tehran can generate immediate global economic panic through relatively cheap tools and can leverage that panic into diplomatic concessions. Before the war, fears about Iran’s ability to blackmail the world economy remained somewhat theoretical. After the war, those fears became a demonstrated geopolitical reality.
There is little evidence that either the American or Israeli governments understood in advance the degree to which the global economy had become vulnerable to this form of coercion. This, even though the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz was completely predictable and indeed expected by every strategist I’ve spoken to for decades.
This outcome may be most devastating for the Iranian people themselves. Many Iranians who despise the regime interpreted the opening phase of the conflict as evidence that the dictatorship might finally face genuine collapse. Instead, the regime not only survived but also regained leverage. The machinery of repression remains intact.
But this result is damaging for every party to this war aside from the Iranian regime.
The war has transformed perceptions of American power. For decades, the U.S. has anchored a global system built on the assumption that Washington could manage regional crises with some strategy in mind. That strategy wasn’t always brilliant, but it was rarely clueless. With the Hormuz confrontation, the world watched the U.S. confront a regional adversary with vastly inferior capabilities and fail to control events.
For Israel, the alliance Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent years cultivating with the American right and with Trump personally has become dangerously fragile. As pressure mounted to stabilize energy markets and prevent wider regional escalation, Trump increasingly presented himself not as a partner coordinating with Israel but as a superior authority managing Israeli actions. He repeatedly framed Israeli military action as dependent on his approval. He cursed Netanyahu in public. He presented Israel as a vassal doing his bidding — something no U.S. president has previously done.
This will destabilize Israel, where much of the governing right previously viewed Trump as a uniquely reliable ally who would support Israeli military objectives without hesitation or conditions.
Previous American presidents pressured Israel privately while still preserving the outward presentation of a relationship between sovereign allies. Trump discarded much of that convention. The new perception weakens Israel’s deterrence dramatically. Plus, with bipartisan support for Israel in Washington even more completely collapsed than after the deleterious war in Gaza, and relations with much of Europe — Israel’s top trading partner — similarly deteriorated, Israel finds itself at a new peak of dangerous international isolation.
This strategic shipwreck bears no resemblance to the sweeping regional transformation that supporters of the war — myself included — initially envisioned. I assumed, partly because of the first days’ successes, that Trump and Netanyahu had a plan. This is not a mistake serious people are likely to make again.
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Would Judaism have an issue with ‘Disclosure Day?’
Steven Spielberg is in his aliens exist era — but in truth, he’s been there since at least 1977. That’s when the director said NASA sent him a 20-page letter objecting to the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, fearful the public might take to watching the stars the way they did beaches after Jaws. Did this indicate there was something to hide?
“I really found my faith when I heard that the Government was opposed to the film,” he said.
Spielberg’s fascination with UFOs goes back even further. In 1964, five years before the moon landing, he made the 8 millimeter alien invasion flick Firelight, a 17-year-old’s dry run at the topics he’d later handle with Roy Neary and his mesa-like mound of mashed potatoes and the world’s loudest game of Simon.
He’d return to aliens again, with E.T., War of the Worlds and the critically reviled Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But the 79-year-old director has never been so forthcoming with his views on alien life as he has been on this current press tour for Disclosure Day, where he made the controversial claim that first contact might pose a problem for the faithful.
“Is God, our God only on this planet, or is God a God for every system where there’s civilization, intelligent life, and even developing life?” Spielberg asked on CBS Sunday Morning. This is one of the questions posed by Disclosure Day, which is about the tug of war between a group dedicated to broadcasting the truth about intelligent extraterrestrial beings, and the shady agency determined to keep it under wraps.
Many in the church — meaning Christians, who are represented in the film by ex-novitiate Jane (Eve Hewson) — have said such a disclosure would be a nonissue for their belief. But what of Spielberg’s own coreligionists?
“Within the classic Jewish perspective is the idea that to embrace reality is to embrace our creator,” Rabbi Josh Breindel, whose teachings on speculative fiction earned him the moniker “sci-fi rabbi,” said in an interview. “So, if we were to have irrefutable proof of alien life, then that’s an opportunity for us to celebrate our creator in whose image we were made, and then maybe to probe and say, ‘Where do we see echoes or resonances of that image in this other life form in their sentient discourse?’”
We need not only take Rabbi Breindel’s word for it. The question pops up as early as the Middle Ages.
Writing in the 14th Century, the Spanish philosopher Hasdai Crescas claimed life on other planets wouldn’t be an issue for Jewish faith. Our texts feature many apparent allusions to other worlds in which God has dominion.
A place called Meroz, mentioned in the Book of Judges, has been interpreted as being another planet. The school of Merkabah mysticism, inspired by Ezekiel’s vision of the wheel, is a sort of Judaism-forward UFO watcher group. If we’re talking biblically accurate angels, or even the revelation at Sinai, there’s plenty in the Hebrew Bible that appears otherworldly.
Disclosure Day, written by David Koepp from a story by Spielberg, is a chase film about Danny Kelner (Josh O’Connor), a whistleblower for a U.S. government-aligned group called Wardex, intent on studying alien life and technology and keeping their findings suppressed. Danny is a math genius, and in a relationship with Jane, the ex-nun played by Hewson. He’s carrying sacred cargo: a backpack full of flash drives with evidence of spacecrafts and a weird rod made by the alien life forms whose precise capabilities include, but are not limited to, letting you turn invisible or allowing you to control someone else’s body and swap eye colors with them in the process.
In an effort to explain why men in black SUVs are chasing them, Danny shows Jane footage of an alien interrogation. Her response to seeing a small creature tortured by humans is an odd one: She thinks people will worship them as deities.
Here the film stumbles. Jane’s concern about a breakdown in belief may be justified in the realization that we’re not alone, but her leap to calling extraterrestrials “supreme beings” feels unwarranted. Yes, they have impressive technology. Also yes, a human can wield their magic baton MacGuffins, provided they’re wearing surgical gloves.
The faith subplot takes a backseat in the end to a familiar Spielbergian preoccupation: his parents and what he’s inherited from them. We learn the aliens taught Danny math, “the language of the book of the universe,” and made Emily Blunt’s character, Margaret, a Kansas City weatherperson, into a supreme empath, like Star Trek’s Deanna Troi cranked up to 11. As established in The Fabelmans, Spielberg, a product of his engineer father and musician mother, is naturally both. (Gilding the lily of the parental metaphor, there’s a sequence with a train that’s hauling pianos.)
On their phones and on TV, the world will bear witness to “disclosure,” including scenes of emaciated and disemboweled little green men, recalling both images from the Holocaust and current conflicts including Gaza. (Spielberg made it so the coverup for these cruel experiments began in 1947, probably just to align with the year of the Roswell incident, but before that was explained, I was thinking of the UN partition plan.)
Sometime before, Jane makes a call to the abbess at her old nunnery.
Paraphrasing Genesis, she says God made humans his supreme creation, to which the Abbess (Elizabeth Marvel), applies a close reading: “his supreme creation on Earth.”
This view is consistent with rabbinic thought, and the Abbess’ subsequent line, “why would He make such a vast universe, yet save it only for us,” is essentially what the Lubavitcher Rebbe told microbiologist Velvl Greene: “for you to sit here and say there is no life outside of planet Earth is to put limitations on the Creator, and that is not something any of His creatures can do!”
A better question for Jews, perhaps, is if these aliens have a separate covenant with the creator.
If one is interested in the Catholic view, know that Pope Francis said he’d baptize aliens. As for how other sci-fi writers have treated on Jews in Space, Dune scribe Frank Herbert seems to believe the faith was uniquely durable, having made it the only religion from an Earthbound society to survive in an intergalactic reality.
One thing that’s striking about Spielberg’s latest foray into the galaxy is its implications for geo-politics.
The backdrop of Disclosure Day is one of military escalation said to rival the Cuban Missile Crisis. Colin Firth’s foppish Brit bad guy warns that the truth would “tip the balance in an already destabilized world.” This runs counter to works like Watchmen and Independence Day, which posit a great common cause when people are confronted with life forms from outer space.
The difference is that these aliens are no invaders. They come in peace to teach us a lesson in empathy. That, the film seems to say, is the true threat to the world order: that humans behave with humanity.
In the final minutes of the film, the truth comes out and we are given a simple message, conveyed first through click consonants, then a math equation, and finally a single English word: “Listen.”
“I saw that, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s Shema,’” Breindel said. “If you get it you get it.”
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