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At a book-lovers’ mecca, a celebration of the Jewish Diaspora
On the left side of the ground-floor gallery at the Upper East Side’s Grolier Club — an institution that bills itself as “America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles” — you’ll find elaborately decorated, centuries-old Jewish manuscripts from the likes of Italy, France and the Iberian Peninsula.
On the right, there’s a similar assortment of manuscripts, also organized geographically. These manuscripts are remnants of dynamic Jewish communities that once existed in Muslim lands such as Yemen, North African and Iran/Iraq.
Collectively, these works form “Jewish Worlds Illuminated: A Treasury of Hebrew Manuscripts from The JTS Library,” the first-ever exhibition dedicated to Jewish books and manuscripts at the storied club, which was founded in New York City in 1884.
On view through Dec. 27, the free exhibit is also the largest exhibition to date curated by the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, which is home to one of the world’s largest collections of Hebrew manuscripts and printed materials. Among the 100 objects on view are documents that date as far back as the 12th century.
The elaborately decorated works on display comprise a wide assortment of texts, such as prayer books, Passover haggadahs and ketubahs or Jewish marriage contracts. Most of them are written in Hebrew. But there are some stark differences between the two sides of the gallery: Human forms are plentiful in the manuscripts from Europe, for example, while works created by Jews in Muslim lands typically reflect the Islamic art style, with elaborate patterns, floral motifs and very few depictions of people.
“Jews adopted and adapted the art of the country in which they lived,” Sharon Lieberman Mintz, curator of Jewish art at the JTS library, explained during a private tour. “When Jews were living in Islamic lands, they eschewed figural arts. There may have been a bird or two here and there, but not humans, with rare exception.”
Examples like these spotlight the ways Jews lived their lives throughout years of diaspora, and how they integrated themselves within their culture of residence.
“If you look at the outstanding works in our collection — manuscripts in particular, but not just manuscripts — [they] reflect the geographical distribution that you see here,” said David Kraemer, the Joseph J. and Dora Abbell librarian and professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the JTS. “It is notable, but not intentional, that we don’t have material here from the land of Israel.”
Kraemer continued: “What that means is that during the ages that these works were being produced, and from which they survive, this is where Jews lived,” he said. “Very, very few Jews lived in the land of Israel, and there was very little production of this kind of material in the land of Israel.”
Left: Abraham Judah ben Yehiel of Camerino’s “Rothschild Mahzor,” from Florence, Italy in 1490. Right: A page from “Sermons and Collected Teachings,” from 17th-century Salonica, Greece. (Courtesy the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary).
Instead, the exhibit is filled with treasures from across the centuries and around the globe, including handwritten letters from the physician, rabbi, philosopher and author Moses ben Maimon — aka Maimonides. One such letter, penned in 1170 by Maimonides’ personal secretary, Mevorakh ben Nathan, is signed by the sage himself. It pleads for funds to ransom the Jews who were taken prisoner in November 1168 when the crusader king Amalric I of Jerusalem conquered the Egyptian city of Bilbeis, some 50 miles north of Cairo, which was home to a sizable Jewish community in the Middle Ages.
“So much of what happens, Jewishly, in North America is Ashkenazi-centric, which misrepresents Jewish life and history around the world,” Kraemer said. “When Ashkenaz was barely a blip, the vast majority of the world’s Jews lived in Muslim lands.”
The exhibit makes it plain just how embedded Jews were into the countries in which they lived. In the Italy section, there’s a page displayed from the Rothschild Machzor, a prayer book written by master scribe Abraham Judah ben Yehiel in Florence in 1490. An illustration depicts the children of Israel receiving the Ten Commandments as they’re decked out in the Florentine fashions of the time — with the receding hairline that was all the rage in during the Renaissance.
“When you look at these materials, you can’t just think of Jews as separated and isolated and ghettos and oppressed and all that kind of stuff,” Kraemer said. “That’s not what the story here is.”
Instead, the exhibit spotlights how Jewish communities reflected broader cultural trends, including fashion and art.
Just don’t ask the curators to select their favorites. Kraemer and Liberman Mintz both blanched when asked to choose three or four standout items in the gallery. Instead, we settled on finding particularly unusual works on display.
“The answer changes every five minutes,” Kraemer explained.
As an example, Kraemer points to a 17th-century manuscript from Salonica, Greece that he describes as “absolutely wonderful in its outrageous combination.” The page, from a collection of sermons and teachings, is a scholarly theological discussion — specifically, about how Moses, who was flesh and blood, was able to ascend to the realm of God, who is pure spirit. By contrast, the illustrations on the page — animals, birds and flowers — seem like something from a children’s book.
“Don’t we all somehow have those sensibilities built into us?” Kraemer mused. “We can be very, very sophisticated and very, very simple and childlike at the same time.”
All told, the exhibit, said Kraemer, is meant to challenge misconceptions about how Jews lived their lives during centuries of diaspora life.
“We have a lot of conceptions of what Jewish life was through the ages,” Kraemer said. “When one witnesses these materials — their splendor, their creativity, their embeddedness within the local culture, their languages, the visual language, all of that — it tells us that Jews and their neighbors were part of the same world.”
“In a world which has a very black and white vision of Jewish life and the relationship of Jewish life to the host cultures, this brings color to it,” Kraemer continued. “It wasn’t black and white. I mean both literally and figuratively — this brings color to the fullness of Jewish experience.”
“Jewish Worlds Illuminated: A Treasury of Hebrew Manuscripts from The JTS Library” is on view at The Grolier Club (47 East 60th St.) through Dec. 27. For more information, click here; to book a tour (highly recommended!) click here.
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The post At a book-lovers’ mecca, a celebration of the Jewish Diaspora appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Christians are displaying menorahs in their windows post-Bondi Beach attack. Why some Jews object
In the wake of Sunday’s attack on a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia, some non-Jews are placing menorahs in their windows as a visible show of support for their Jewish neighbors.
“My family is not Jewish. Our house is decorated for Christmas. Tonight we are adding a menorah in the front window,” one Threads user posted and received 17,000 likes. “We stand with our Jewish neighbors. 🕎 #hanukkah”
That was one of several viral posts shared by non-Jews lighting hanukkiot after the Bondi Beach attack, which left 15 people dead, including a Chabad rabbi, a Holocaust survivor, and a 10-year-old girl.
The practice, however, has also exposed a divide between Jews who welcome the gesture as an expression of solidarity and those who view it as a form of appropriation.
“Lighting a menorah is a closed practice and is not meant to be done by someone outside of our community,” one user replied to a non-Jew posting about her Hanukkah candles.
“We love you for this! You’re a mensch,” another commented in support.
An act of solidarity
In November 2023, Adam Kulbersh founded Project Menorah, an initiative that encourages non-Jews to display menorahs in their windows as a way to fight antisemitism. The practice gained traction in the aftermath of Oct. 7, he said, drawing thousands of participants across 16 countries and all 50 U.S. states.
After Sunday’s attack at Bondi Beach, Kulbersh, who is Jewish, said he noticed another surge in social media activity around the idea.
“This happens in a cyclical way, where non-Jews in many cases underestimate the amount of antisemitism that’s out there, and then it spikes, and they go, Oh, right, these are our friends and neighbors, and we can’t close our eyes,” he said in an interview with the Forward.
The idea for Project Menorah grew out of Kulbersh’s personal experience. When his then 6-year-old son, Jack, asked to put up Hanukkah decorations at their Los Angeles home, Kulbersh hesitated, worried that a visibly Jewish display could make them a target.
He mentioned the concern to a non-Jewish neighbor, who responded by offering to place a menorah in her window to show the family they weren’t alone.
Moved by the gesture, Kulbersh went all out with “flashy” Hanukkah decorations that year. Soon after, he launched Project Menorah to encourage other non-Jews to follow his neighbor’s example.
“I thought, This is an answer,” Kulbersh said. “We don’t need to wait for governments to solve all the problems. This is something neighbors can do for neighbors.”
It wasn’t the first time menorah displays had been proposed as a means of fighting hate: In Billings, Montana in 1993, neo-Nazis threw a brick through a 6-year-old Jewish boy’s bedroom window, which was displaying a menorah. In response, thousands of residents taped paper menorahs to their windows in solidarity — and the neo-Nazis retreated from town.
A ‘closed practice’?
The idea of non-Jews displaying menorahs, however, has elicited a different response from some Jews who take offense.
“I understand that the gentiles who are lighting their own menorahs as a show of solidarity mean well but that’s not for y’all to be doing. Judaism is a closed practice,” one user posted. “Get the circumcision first, then we’ll talk.”
The term “closed practice” reflects the fact that Judaism is a non-proselytizing religion and does not encourage people to adopt it casually. Unlike Christianity, which generally welcomes anyone who accepts Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, Jewish identity is not defined solely by belief. Becoming Jewish requires a formal and demanding conversion process, typically involving extensive study and approval by a rabbinic court.
The backlash may also reflect anxiety about increased adoption of Jewish rituals and symbols by messianic Jews and Christians. These practices tend to put off Jews who believe groups are co-opting Jewish rituals without fully appreciating their history and meanings — from “Jesus mezuzahs,” to Christian Passover seders and shofar blowing, to observing a “Jewish Sabbath,” aka Shabbat.
But for others, it’s possible to distinguish between those who combine Jewish symbols with Christian symbols, and well-meaning non-Jews want to express support.
For its part, Project Menorah offers paper cut-outs of menorahs on its website, not instructions for actually observing the holiday.
“If people want to light an actual menorah and put it in their window, great, and if they want to say a prayer that works with their religious beliefs, great,” he said. “But I’m not encouraging anyone who’s not Jewish to participate in the Jewish ritual, the Jewish prayers.”
He added that when he started the initiative, he consulted rabbis about the practice. As is often the case when asking a group of Jews about anything, he said, opinions varied.
But the majority, he said, agreed that “when the house is on fire, we don’t question the people who want to help put the fire out.”
The post Christians are displaying menorahs in their windows post-Bondi Beach attack. Why some Jews object appeared first on The Forward.
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My religion was ‘None of the above,’ until Oct. 7 and now Bondi
Judaism is on fire — or really, being Jewish is on fire. The mass murder of Jews on Bondi Beach during a Hanukah celebration was only the most recent example. But the reaction that surprised me the most was how unsurprised I was watching the news reports on Sunday morning. Like too many, I have become anesthetized to mass shootings in general and those targeted toward Jews in particular.
Antisemitism is raging across the world like a global pandemic, except the contagion this time is not a virus, it’s hate — and the fire is burning out of control. It shows up on our news platforms, our social media feeds, even, perhaps especially, in the polite company of dinner parties and faculty lounges. Jewish worshippers shot in a Manchester synagogue, an Israeli tourist viciously beaten on a busy Manhattan street while onlookers casually walked by, two Israeli embassy staff members murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C. are just a few recent examples.
Space doesn’t allow a full accounting of all the Jewish hate crimes in the last few years. But this much is true: Jewish hate is old, truly biblical, but it’s become increasingly hot in the aftermath of the war in Gaza that, parenthetically, was initiated by a heinous attack against the Jewish people. Though obvious, sometimes, especially as it relates to this conflict, the obvious needs restating. And now, for reasons that are beyond baffling, who started the war seems beside the point.
Until recently, I could feel removed from this global phenomenon, given the ambiguity of my own religious identity. Despite my last name and appearance, for most of my life, I didn’t identify as Jewish. Instead, I was the confused product of a Baptist mother from Selma, Alabama and a Jewish father who escaped Nazi Germany just in time. Both my parents turned away from their religions, my mother because of the silence of churches in the South in the face of racial injustice and my father as protection against Jewish persecution that didn’t end when World War II did.
Growing up, my religious identity was None of the Above, a designation that made me feel as though I was aimlessly wandering around a non-denominational desert.
As I grew older, the subject of my religious identity made me immediately uncomfortable, whether as a topic of conversation at a dinner party or as a simple question on a form. At times it elicited a visceral response — flushing, a bit of nausea, a bead of sweat on my back — not just because I didn’t have a ready answer, but because it made me feel disconnected from the rest of society. I would have rather been asked anything else: Who did you vote for or How much money do you make?
The question What religion are you? felt like an interrogation, a bright light shone in my face. While most people could respond to the question with a one-word answer, that was never going to be an option for me. And that made me feel like an outsider, a person that could not fit neatly into a religious box, akin to the children in military families who stumble when asked, Where did you grow up?
Everywhere, nowhere.
Because not having a religion to call my own never sat well with me, I went on a decade-long journey, one that went here and there, ending only when I spent the time to, once and for all, put the matter to bed. After thousands of hours of research, discussion, and a significant amount of rumination, I’ve decided to embrace my Judaism, to run into the burning building, as it were, when the convenient choice would have been to run away from it, an easy choice for someone that had spent his whole life undifferentiated when it came to religion.
Which brings me to today, to where I am now, to where we all are now.
Oct. 7 happened to occur in the midst of my grappling with my own religious identity. But even if that was still a bit murky then, I felt rage nonetheless when anti-Israel protests ignited in many Middle Eastern and Western capitals, all before one IDF plane was in the air. As I watched these images from the comfort of my living room, I thought of my father and his family, the knocks on the door in the middle of the night, the trains, and yes, the burning furnaces. As ever, societal opinions that surround Israel and Jewishness today have become conflated, manifesting as antisemitism when it might simply have been disagreement with the Israeli prosecution of the war in Gaza.
This country finds itself in a rare situation where extremists on the Right and the Left have merged into an unholy antisemitic coalition, exemplified by Progressives yelling and screaming about “genocide” without having a clue what that word really means and voting overwhelmingly to elect a New York City Mayor who refuses to walk back his call to “globalize the intifada.”
Meanwhile on the Right, Tucker Carlson, who has a podcast that goes out to 16.7 million followers on X, recently gave Nick Fuentes two hours to spew antisemitic rhetoric, including his comments that with regard to his enemies in the conservative movement, “I see Jewishness as the common denominator,” and that Jews are a “stateless people,” certainly true if Fuentes had his way.
Not to be left out, Carlson helpfully added that the United States gets nothing out of the relationship with Israel. Given that Israel is the only functioning democracy in the Middle East, a part of the world not known for stability, I would argue that support of Israel is not just in the interest of the “Jews” (the monolith that Carlson and his ilk view them/us) but rather in America’s interest. Carlson obviously sees the geopolitics differently, arguing recently that Israel was not “strategically important” to the United States and, in fact, a “strategic liability.” For his part, President Trump defended Carlson, saying, “You can’t tell him who to interview,” without commenting directly on what was actually said in the interview.
For a confused maybe/maybe not a Jew like me, Oct. 7 provided an impetus to reassess my faith. So I did. But after hundreds of hours of research and thousands of miles of travel, I realized my Judaism didn’t start on Oct. 8, 2023 — it began in 1320 when the progenitor of my family, Juda Weill, was born. Juda was then followed by generations of Jewish family members, mostly rabbis and including the famous composer Kurt Weill, until the German Weills were either murdered by the Nazis, or for the lucky ones, dispersed all over the world. My grandfather, fresh off the horrors of Buchenwald, made it to America with my father, grandmother, and uncle.
Then — at nearly age 60! — I learned that my mother converted to Judaism, and the path toward my own Judaism was set, when all that was left was to walk along it and pick up the breadcrumbs along the way.
What did I find at the end of that road?
A burning building. And what did I do as I looked at that place on fire, whether in Australia, Europe, or on the streets of American cities?
I ran in, because that’s what we all must do, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and everyone else of any religious identity.
If any of us wonder what we would have done, Jews or Gentiles, during the early days of the Nazi regime, we are doing it now.
The post My religion was ‘None of the above,’ until Oct. 7 and now Bondi appeared first on The Forward.
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France 24, Mother Jones Receive UN Award for Work Built on Word of Discredited Ex-Contractor Who Lied About Israel
Anthony Aguilar, a former contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) who previously served as a US Army Green Beret. Photo: Screenshot
The UN press corps on Friday gave an award to news outlets France 24 and Mother Jones for their reporting based on the testimony of Anthony Aguilar, a US Army veteran and former contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) who has made discredited claims against Israel.
France 24 and Mother Jones were awarded the Bronze medal in the Ricardo Ortega Memorial Prize category at the UN Correspondents Gala Awards, an event hosted by the UN Correspondents Association at the global body’s headquarters in New York City. The award is for broadcast coverage of the UN, its agencies, and field operations.
According to France 24, its journalists were the first to interview Aguilar on camera on the morning of July 23, 2025. Aguilar claimed he witnessed human rights abuses perpetrated by the Israeli military and others at sites run by the GHF, which until the Gaza ceasefire went into place was an Israel- and US-backed program that delivered aid directly to Palestinians, with the goal of blocking Hamas from diverting supplies for terrorist activities and selling the remainder at inflated prices.
France 24 and Mother Jones both published a story based on Aguilar’s testimony.
However, it was revealed last year that Aguilar’s most explosive claim, about the death of a Gazan boy, was false and that he was fired by the GHF for his conduct and pushing misinformation.
Aguilar claimed he witnessed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shoot a child — Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hamdene, known as Abboud — as the GHF was distributing humanitarian aid on May 28.
After Aguilar made his claim, he rapidly rose to prominence, presenting himself as a whistleblower exposing supposed Israeli war crimes. His story gained traction internationally, going viral on social media. He subsequently embarked on an extensive media tour, in which he accused Israel of indiscriminately killing Palestinian civilians as part of an attempt to “annihilate” and “disappear” the civilian population in Gaza.
However, Aguilar, who erroneously labeled the boy in question as “Amir,” gave inconsistent accounts of the alleged incident in separate interviews to different media outlets, calling into question the veracity of his narrative.
The GHF launched its own investigation at the end of July, ultimately locating Abboud alive with his mother at an aid distribution site on Aug. 23. The organization confirmed his identity using facial recognition software and biometric testing.
Abboud was escorted in disguise to an undisclosed safe location by the GHF team for his safety, according to The Daily Wire, which noted that the spreading of Aguilar’s false tale put the boy’s life in danger, as his alleged death was a powerful piece of propaganda for Hamas.
Fox News Digital reported that Abboud and his mother were safely extracted from the Gaza Strip in September.
In footage obtained by both news outlets, the boy can be seen playfully interacting with a GHF representative and appearing excited ahead of their planned extraction.
During the summer, as Aguilar’s claims were receiving widespread media attention, the GHF released a chain of text messages showing that Aguilar was terminated for his conduct. It also held a press conference to present evidence showing that Aguilar “falsified documents” and “presented misleading videos to push his false narrative.”
There was no apparent mention of the revelations about Aguilar’s narrative when the award was given out on Friday.