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Beyond the ‘Day of Hate’: The best strategy to keep American Jews safe over the long term
(JTA) — My synagogue sent out a cautiously anxious email yesterday about an event coming this Shabbat, a neo-Nazi “Day of Hate.” The email triggered fuzzy memories of one of the strangest episodes that I can remember from my childhood.
Sometime around 1990, in response to local neo-Nazi activity, some Jews from my community decided to “fight back.” I don’t know whether they were members of the militant Jewish Defense League, or perhaps just sympathetic to a JDL-style approach. When our local Jewish newspaper covered the story, it ran on its front cover a full-page photo of a kid from my Orthodox Jewish high school. The photo showed a teenage boy from behind, wearing a kippah and carrying a baseball bat that was leaning threateningly on his shoulder.
As it happens, “Danny” was not a member of the JDL, he was a kid on his way to play baseball. Sometimes, a baseball bat is just a baseball bat. But not for us anxious Jews in America: We want to see ourselves as protagonists taking control of our destiny, responding to antisemites with agency, with power, with a plan. I’m sorry to say that as I look around our community today, it seems to me that we have agency, and we have power — but we certainly don’t seem to have a plan.
The tactics that the American Jewish community uses to fight back against antisemitism are often ineffective on their own and do not constitute a meaningful strategy in the composite. One is that American Jews join in a partisan chorus that erodes our politics and fixates on the antisemitism in the party they don’t vote for. This exacerbates the partisan divide, which weakens democratic culture, and turns the weaponizing of antisemitism into merely a partisan electoral tactic for both sides.
Another tactic comes from a wide set of organizations who have declared themselves the referees on the subject and take to Twitter to name and shame antisemites. This seems to amplify and popularize antisemitism more than it does to suppress it.
A third common tactic is to pour more and more dollars into protecting our institutions with robust security measures, which no one thinks will defeat antisemitism, but at least seeks to protect those inside those institutions from violence, though it does little to protect Jews down the street. Richer Jewish institutions will be safer than poorer ones, but Jews will continue to suffer either way.
A fourth tactic our communal organizations use to fight antisemitism is to try to exact apologies or even fines from antisemites to get them to retract their beliefs and get in line, as the Anti-Defamation League did with Kyrie Irving, an approach that Yair Rosenberg has wisely argued is a no-win proposition. Yet another tactic is the insistence by some that the best way to fight antisemitism is to be proud Jews, which has the perverse effect of making our commitment to Jewishness dependent on antisemitism as a motivator.
And finally, the most perverse tactic is that some on both the right and the left fight antisemitism by attacking the ADL itself. Since it is so hard to defeat our opponents, we have started beating up on those that are trying to protect us. What could go wrong?
Steadily, like a drumbeat, these tactics fail, demonstrating themselves to be not a strategy at all, and the statistics continue to show a rise in antisemitism.
Perhaps we are too fixated on the idea that antisemitism is continuous throughout Jewish history, proving only that there is no effective strategy for combating this most persistent of hatreds.
Instead, we would do well to recall how we responded to a critical moment in American Jewish history in the early 20th century. In the aftermath of the Leo Frank lynching in 1915 – the murder of a Jewish man amid an atmosphere of intense antisemitism — Jewish leaders formed what would become the ADL by building a relationship with law enforcement and the American legal and political establishment. The ADL recognized that the best strategy to keep American Jews safe over the long term, in ways that would transcend and withstand the political winds of change, was to embed in the police and criminal justice system the idea that antisemitism was their problem to defeat. These Jewish leaders flipped the script of previous diasporic experiences; not only did they become “insiders,” they made antisemitism anathema to America itself. (And yes, it was the Leo Frank incident that inspired “Parade,” the forthcoming Broadway musical that this week attracted white supremacist protesters.)
For Jews, the high-water mark of this strategy came in the aftermath of the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh. It was the low point in many ways of the American Jewish experience, the most violent act against Jews on American soil, but it was followed by a mourning process that was shared across the greater Pittsburgh community. The words of the Kaddish appeared above the fold of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. That is inconceivable at most other times of Jewish oppression and persecution. It tells the story of when we are successful – when antisemitism is repudiated by the general public. It is the most likely indicator that we will be collectively safe in the long run.
We were lucky that this move to partner with the establishment was successful. I felt this deeply on a recent trip to Montgomery, Alabama. Seeing the memorials to Black Americans persecuted and lynched by and under the very system that should have been protecting them from the worst elements of society is a reminder that not all minorities in America could then — or today — win over the elements of American society that control criminal justice.
Visitors view items left by well-wishers along the fence at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on the first anniversary of the attack there, Oct. 27, 2019. (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
A strategic plan to defeat antisemitism that must be collectively embraced by American Jews would build on this earlier success and invest in the infrastructure of American democracy as the framework for Jewish thriving and surviving, and continue the historic relationship-building that changed the Jews’ position in America. It would stop the counterproductive internecine and partisan battle that is undermining the possibility of Jewish collective mobilization.
It means more investment, across partisan divides, in relationships with local governments and law enforcement, using the imperfect “definitions of antisemitism” as they are intended — not for boundary policing, but to inform and help law enforcement to monitor and prevent violent extremism. It means supporting lawsuits and other creative legal strategies, like Integrity First for America’s groundbreaking efforts against the Unite the Right rally organizers, which stymie such movements in legal gridlock and can help bankrupt them.
It means practicing the lost art of consensus Jewish collective politics which recognize that there must be some baseline agreement that antisemitism is a collective threat, even if any “unity” we imagine for the Jewish community is always going to be be instrumental and short-lived.
It means supporting institutions like the ADL, even as they remain imperfect, even as they sometimes get stuck in some of the failed strategies I decried above, because they have the relationships with powerful current and would-be allies in the American political and civic marketplace, and because they are fighting against antisemitism while trying to stay above the partisan fray.
It means real education and relationship-building with other ethnic and faith communities that is neither purely instrumental nor performative — enough public relations visits to Holocaust museums! — so that we have the allies we need when we need them, and so that we can partner for our collective betterment.
And most importantly, it means investing in the plodding, unsexy work of supporting vibrant American democracy — free and fair elections, voting rights, the rule of law, peaceful transitions of power — because stable liberal democracies have been the safest homes for minorities, Jews included.
I doubt we will ever be able to “end” individual antisemitic acts, much less eradicate antisemitic hate. “Shver tzu zayn a Yid” (it’s hard to be a Jew). We join with our fellow Americans who live in fear of the lone wolves and the hatemongers who periodically terrorize us. But we are much more capable than we are currently behaving to fight back against the collective threats against us. Instead, let’s be the smart Americans we once were.
The real work right now is not baseball bats or billboards, it is not Jewish pride banalities or Twitter refereeing: It is quiet and powerful and, if done right, as American Jews demonstrated in the last century, it will serve us for the long term.
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Rabbi Alvin Kass, longest-serving NYPD chaplain famed for 9/11 response, dies at 89
Less than a week after rushing to Ground Zero as a police chaplain on 9/11, Rabbi Alvin Kass led Rosh Hashanah services — not only for his Brooklyn congregation but at a makeshift synagogue at LaGuardia Airport for emergency responders who had flooded into New York City after the terrorist attacks.
“It was,” he would later say, “the most meaningful religious service in my career.”
Kass died Tuesday at 89 as the longest-serving chaplain in the New York Police Department, with a career that included responses to global terrorism, local violence and the intimate needs of police officers — as well as a hostage crisis that he famously resolved with a non-kosher pastrami sandwich.
Born and raised in New Jersey, Kass attended Camp Ramah before enrolling at Columbia University in 1953. His freshman-year roommates there were Robert Alter, who would become a preeminent translator of the Bible, and Shalom Schwartz, later a leading psychologist in Israel.
After graduating from college, he earned both a doctorate from New York University and ordination as a Conservative rabbi from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America before joining the U.S. Air Force as a chaplain. Returning stateside, he took a pulpit in Queens before being urged to join the city’s police department as a chaplain.
At the time, he was only the third Jewish chaplain to work for the NYPD. He would become its longest-serving and the first three-star chaplain, working under eight mayors and 21 police chiefs, while also helming the East Midwood Jewish Center, a Conservative synagogue in Brooklyn, for 36 years until 2014.
The NYC Benevolent Association called Kass “a true pillar of the NYPD” in a Facebook post mourning him. “Every time we bowed our heads for one of his prayers, we appreciated his deep faith, his old-school wit and his unshakable devotion to the men and women who protect NYC,” the group said. “He was a champion of all that is good and noble about our profession. May his memory be a blessing.”
NYPD Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish, mourned Kass in a statement following his death. She noted that he was the youngest chaplain in the department’s history when he came on at age 30.
“Nearly six decades later, he remained its spiritual heart — a source of strength, guidance, and faith for generations of police officers and their families,” Tisch said, adding, “His loss is immeasurable. His example is everlasting.”
Within the NYPD, Kass was responsible for the spiritual care of all officers but especially the thousands who are Jewish. Kass successfully advocated for the right of Jewish police officers not to work on Shabbat and major Jewish holidays while also serving as the primary Jewish figure for Jewish officers who were otherwise unaffiliated with Jewish communities. He also served as spiritual director of the Shomrim Society, a fraternal organization for Jewish police officers.
“The main responsibility for a spiritual leader is to bring all people closer together, including those of your own faith,” he told the New York Jewish Week when he was honored as one of “36 to Watch” in 2024. “I feel particularly proud that the Shomrim Society embraces Jews of all backgrounds and points of view. The organization is a paragon of the unity that ought to bind all Jews together.”
NYPD Chief Chaplain Rabbi Alvin Kass receiving the Medal of Honor at the 23rd annual Ellis Island Medals of Honor ceremony and gala on Ellis Island, New York City, May 9, 2009. (George Napolitano/Getty Images)
After the terrorist attacks in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, Kass reported to Ground Zero, where he encountered a police officer he described as “crying like a baby” as well as the families of officers who were unaccounted for. Later, he attended the funerals of ever police officer who was killed that day, including two who were Jewish.
“I told their families that you’re supposed to say ‘Baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu melech ha’olam, dayan ha emet’: Blessed is the Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who is a judge of truth, or truthful judge. This means, essentially, that He knows what He’s doing. We don’t,” Kass wrote in an essay for The Forward on the 20th anniversary of the attack.
“We can’t comprehend what He’s doing very often, but presumably He knows what he is doing, and we submit. We bow our head to what is often inscrutable and incomprehensible, and we accept it with a measure of faith and hope,” he continued. “That really is the essential message of Judaism, in the face of evil.”
Kass would later say that 9/11 marked a transition in the role of the chaplain within the NYPD, peeling back some of the stigma that had been associated with seeking spiritual care in a department where machismo was long the currency.
Kass’ own encounters on the job ranged from lofty to the low-brow. He was pulled away from his son’s bar mitzvah celebration to tend to an officer who had been shot, according to a 2006 profile in the Columbia alumni magazine. On another occasion he flew upstate between Friday night services and Shabbat morning services to inform a family that their officer son had been murdered.
One of Kass’s more famous escapades came in 1981 when he was called in to negotiate with a Jewish man who had taken a woman hostage.
“I talked to him all night to give up his gun,” Kass recalled in a 2012 interview with the Wall Street Journal, neither the first nor last time he would recount the incident. “I was an utter failure. But by morning he was hungry.”
The hostage team ordered pastrami sandwiches from the (nonkosher) Carnegie Deli for the hostage-taker and for Kass. Kass traded one overstuffed sandwich for the man’s gun — but it turned out he had another. Kass, who ate only kosher meat, had not touched his sandwich and persuaded the man to accept it in exchange for the other gun. The police swooped in and ended the crisis.
The NYPD commissioner noted the incident when promoting Kass to three-star chief in 2016, saying, “In a feat that has become legendary, you were able to trade two pastrami sandwiches for the man’s two guns.”
But for Kass, whose small stature added to a widespread impression of modesty, the real feat came not in his ability to disarm the hostage-taker but in the man’s appetite. “Have you seen the sandwiches from the Carnegie Deli?” he recalled. “They’re huge.”
Kass is survived by his three children and three grandchildren. He was married for 54 years to Miryom Kass, an educator, until her death in 2017. Speaking at the 2016 ceremony marking 50 years with the NYPD, Kass said about Miryom, “She has been by confidant, my partner, my co-worker, she’s been my inspiration, she’s been my chaplain.”
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In the tunnels of Gaza, hostage Eli Sharabi found a way to be a blessing
In synagogue this past Yom Kippur, someone handed me a machzor with a bookplate that read: “Dedicated by [X] in memory of Rabba Sara Hurwitz and Josh Abraham on the birth of Natan.”
Thank God, my husband Josh and I are very much alive. Somehow “in honor of” was replaced by “in memory of.” But my son, Natan, has just turned 9 years old — so what better reminder could there be to pause and examine my life? To ask the big questions that Shmuel in the Gemara (Yoma 87b) insists that we ask in the waning hours of Yom Kippur during Neilah: Mah anu, what are we? Meh chayeinu, what are our lives?
These questions don’t end with Yom Kippur. They echo back to the very beginning of our story as a people, when God calls Avram in Genesis 12:2, to leave his home with the divine promise: “I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.” The structure of this verse, which will be read in most synagogues this Shabbat, is striking. God doesn’t say “I will bless you” (that comes in the previous verse). Here, God says something different: “You shall be a blessing.” Avrahram is not a passive recipient but an active agent. His very existence, his life itself, will be a source of blessing to others.
This is God’s answer to Shmuel’s questions: What are we? We are blessings. What are our lives? Our lives are meant to be a source of blessing to the world. How do we live lives that fulfill this divine mandate?
This year, I hold these questions alongside the words of Eli Sharabi, the first hostage to publish his account of captivity. To call his book “Hostage” merely an autobiography misses its essence. It is a sacred text about what it means to live in darkness and fear and still choose life, still choose to be a blessing.
In the tunnels of Gaza, stripped of everything, Eli was forced to answer Shmuel’s questions in the starkest terms imaginable: What am I? What is my life? You would expect the answer to be: I am nothing. My life is nothing. But instead, his answer reverberates with a fierce, almost defiant vitality: “I don’t want to survive just for them [his family]. I don’t want to live just for them. I want to live for myself too. For me, Eli Sharabi. I want to live. I love life. I crave it.”
If Eli, who lived for 491 days in constant hunger, dealing with the brutality of his captors, living in the filth of the tunnels, without knowing if his beloved family were alive or dead — if he can still crave life against all odds, then I too, even when I feel shrouded in darkness and fear will not take what I have for granted, and I will embrace life.
To be a blessing begins with recognizing the gift of simply being alive, of breathing freely, off walking down the street. When we crave life itself, we become capable of blessing others. Eli writes: “I want to breathe life, to walk free, to return to the open skies, to go back home, to work, to purpose…. To return to the roads, to driving, to walking down the street, to my simple regular worry-free day-to-day.”
Sadly, Eli was released to learn that his wife Lianne and daughters Noiya and Yahel were murdered on Oct. 7 and that his brother Yossi, too, had been abducted and then killed in captivity. This week, we watched as Eli and his family buried Yossi in Israel, at long last.
A detail of the cover of “Hostage,” Eli Sharabi’s memoir of his time in Hamas captivity. (Harper Influence)
Still, Eli’s testimony offers something even more profound about what it means to fulfill “and you shall be a blessing.” In absolute darkness, starving, and humiliated, he and his fellow hostages created a daily ritual to think of good things that happened to them each day and express gratitude — from sweet tea to a day without humiliation. In hell, they chose to find gratitude and see the tiny miniscule blessings in their lives. And in doing so, they became blessings to each other.
Hope was the hostages’ spiritual practice. Gratitude became resistance. Searching for good was an act of defiance against fear, and a way of being a blessing to those around them. In the tunnels of Gaza, Eli wasn’t just surviving, he was creating a practice of blessing. This is what God means when telling Avraham “and you shall be a blessing.” You don’t need to wait for perfect conditions. You don’t need to be free, comfortable, or secure.
As we move forward into a new year, Shmuel’s questions travel with me, now illuminated by God’s command to Avraham: Mah anu. What are we? We are called to be blessings. Like Eli, can we search for good even in difficulty? Can we be sources of hope and light for those around us, even when we ourselves are struggling?
Meh chayeinu. What are our lives? God tells Avraham that his life will be a blessing. What about ours? Do we only celebrate the extraordinary moments, or can we embrace the mundane — like walking down the street, breathing, being free to be at home with our loved ones? This is the wisdom of someone who faced death and chose, deliberately, consciously, to love life and to be a blessing, not despite the darkness, but in the darkness.
This year, I will hold Eli’s courage and search for good even when it’s hard to find. I will strive to make hope and gratitude a daily practice. I will try to fulfill “and you shall be a blessing” — to raise up those around me, in big ways and small.
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ADL enlists major law firms to launch pro bono network for antisemitism cases
(JTA) — The Anti-Defamation League is launching a nationwide legal service to connect victims of antisemitism with lawyers who are able to take their cases on a pro-bono basis.
The initiative comes as the ADL has increasingly turned to litigation as a tactic — the group says it has filed more lawsuits and legal complaints in the last years than in its previous 110 years combined.
Announced on Wednesday, the ADL Legal Action Network comes out of a partnership with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, one of the largest law firms in the country. In total, more than 40 firms have agreed to participate, collectively tapping a pool of 39,000 attorneys.
The network will accept online submissions involving discrimination, intimidation, harassment, vandalism or violence and use artificial intelligence to evaluate them. Tips that make it through the system will be referred to partner firms or the ADL’s in-house litigators.
“For decades, victims of antisemitism have come to ADL to receive frontline services,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. ”We are now dramatically expanding our capabilities to support more Jewish Americans by helping to provide direct access to legal support anywhere in the country.”
Gibson Dunn partner Orin Snyder called the network an “unprecedented legal firewall against antisemitism, extremism, and hate.”
The initiative comes as the ADL, which is flush with donations, retreats from some of its traditional advocacy and educational work while facing an onslaught from the right, including the cutting of longstanding ties to the FBI after the agency’s director, Kash Patel, said the ADL has been “functioning like a terrorist organization.” (The group has also faced criticism from the left.)
The group recently eliminated an online resource known as the Glossary of Extremism and Hate, which counted more than 1,000 entries after accusations of bias by conservatives. It has also, for example, eliminated a signature anti-bias training for students and school teachers that included a focus on racism and LGBTQ issues.
Greenblatt has said he is intentionally retooling the organization to prioritize countering antisemitism as American Jews report increased harassment and discrimination.
The legal network formalizes and expands the Campus Antisemitism Legal Line, which Gibson Dunn launched with the ADL, Hillel International and the Louis D. Brandeis Center in 2023. The ADL says CALL has received nearly 1,000 reports from 230 campuses and helped spur civil rights complaints and criminal cases. The new system extends that model beyond higher education to workplaces, public accommodations and allegations involving extremist organizations and individuals.
One example that originated with a tip is a federal complaint filed by the ADL and its partners in June alleging that a high school in the Boston suburbs failed to protect Jewish students from antisemitism.
The complaint said that Concord-Carlisle High School and Concord Middle School became hotbeds for abuse of Jewish of students, including “Nazi salutes in school hallways, students dividing themselves into teams called ‘Team Auschwitz; and ‘Team Hamas’ during athletic games, swastikas drawn in notebooks and on school property, and the use of antisemitic slurs such as ‘kike,’ ‘dirty Jew,’ and ‘go to the gas chamber,’” according to the ADL. School administrators allegedly downplayed or dismissed students’ complaints.
The district has said it takes antisemitism seriously and that it is cooperating with officials. It also said it is consulting with Jewish groups as it reviews its classroom policies and training programs.
Directing the expanded network is James Pasch, who was tapped in 2023 to head a new litigation division for the organization. In an interview, Pasch said the organization is deliberately making the courthouse a central arena.
“ADL does and has done, historically, three things incredibly well — we educate, we advocate and we investigate — and now we litigate,” he said. The aim, he added, is to “create life-altering costs to perpetrators who are committing illicit acts of antisemitism,” develop case law that better protects Jews, and give victims “a necessary outlet to tell their story in a complete way.”
Pasch said the ADL’s litigation team has grown into “like a boutique litigation firm inside ADL,” with roughly seven litigators plus support staff, while most large matters proceed with support from outside law firms. The expansion comes amid skyrocketing fundraising, which topped $170 million in annual donations, according to its most recent audited financial statements — a $65 million increase over its best year.
Pasch said settlements, or even the threat of a filing, can lead to immediate impact and set standards for other institutions.
The ADL’s case list since Oct. 7 ranges across campuses, K-12 districts, workplaces and terror-finance suits. The group filed federal actions seeking to hold Iran, Syria and North Korea responsible for allegedly supporting Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack; separate complaints invoke Title VI against universities and school districts over what the ADL calls failures to adequately respond to antisemitism. The organization has also backed a church lawsuit targeting intimidation by a white supremacist group.
The initiative comes as many large firms reportedly recalibrate their pro bono work under pressure from the Trump administration, which has elevated antisemitism as a signature priority. To avoid becoming targets over more politically sensitive matters such as immigration and asylum, some firms are reportedly steering clear of those cases. Partnering with Jewish organizations on antisemitism claims lets the firms align with an issue the administration has endorsed.
Under President Donald Trump, the Department of Justice has reorganized its civil rights division to focus on a narrow list of priorities, among them antisemitism. The department has launched probes into universities accused of mishandling last year’s protests over the war in Gaza, and last month brought charges against an alleged Palestinian militant who participated in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel before entering the United States as an immigrant.
Pasch said he welcomes federal efforts but added that increased government action is no reason for civil society to let up the legal pressure.
“This is a moment that will take an all-of-society approach from the government, to NGOs, to private business,” he said. “In legal cases, the Justice Department generally does not represent private individuals who are victims of antisemitism, but ADL along with our partners in firms have the ability to bring those cases to the forefront.”
The ADL is not the only Jewish group also ratcheting up litigation.
The Brandeis Center, a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit dedicated to advancing “civil and human rights of the Jewish people” on Monday announced five new hires. The group is led by Kenneth Marcus, who is credited with pioneering the use of federal civil rights law — especially Title VI — to address antisemitism in education.
The pro-Israel group StandWithUs reports that its legal team has tripled in since the Oct. 7 attacks and has been publishing semiannual reports detailing new cases.
The increase in legal activity comes amid a broader debate about how to balance civil rights enforcement with free-speech protections. As part of settlement negotiations, the ADL has demanded that school districts and universities formally adopt what’s known as the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
But civil liberties groups and Palestinian-rights advocates have criticized the use of Title VI complaints tied to the IHRA definition because they say aggressive enforcement can stifle political discussions about Israel. The ADL and its partners counter that the cases target conduct — harassment, threats, discrimination — not viewpoints, and that filings have already yielded concrete changes on campuses and in districts.
In explaining how he selects what cases to pursue, Pasch said the criteria include whether a filing would disrupt harmful activity, strengthen or establish law, and give victims a full voice.
“We can’t heal the injured and we can’t bring people back from the dead,” he said. “But we can provide a voice and some semblance of relief for victims, whether that be policy change or monetary relief.”
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