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Book bans, Ukraine and the end of Roe: The year 2022 in Jewish ideas
(JTA) — Jewish eras can be defined by events (the fall of the Second Temple, the Inquisition, the founding of Israel) and by ideas (the rabbinic era, emancipation, post-denominationalism). A community reveals itself in the things it argues about most passionately.
It’s too early to tell what ideas will define this era, although a look back at the big debates of 2022 suggests Jews in North America will be discussing a few issues for a long time: the resurgence of antisemitism, the boundaries of free speech, the red/blue culture wars.
Below are eight of some of the key debates of the past year as (mostly) reflected in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s opinion section (which I have a hand in editing). They suggest, above all, a community anxious about its standing in the American body politic despite its strength and self-confidence.
Antisemitism and the Black-Jewish alliance
The rapper Kanye West spread canards about Jews and power. Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving shared an antisemitic film on Twitter. And comedian Dave Chappelle made light of both incidents on “Saturday Night Live,” suggesting comics like him had more to fear from cancellation than Jews did from rising antisemitism. The central roles played in these controversies by three African-American celebrities revived longstanding tensions between two communities who haven’t been able to count on their historic ties since the end of the civil rights era. The war of words was particularly vexing for Jews of color, like the rabbi known as MaNishtana and Rabbi Kendell Pinkney — who wondered whether “my mixed Jewish child will grow up in an America where she feels compelled to closet aspects of her identity because society cannot hold the wonder of her complexity.”
Jewish attitudes toward Ukraine
Russia’s war on Ukraine stirred up complex feelings among Jews. It led to an outpouring of support for the innocents caught up in or sent fleeing by Russia’s invasion, and the Jewish president who became their symbol of defiance. It reinvigorated a Jewish rescue apparatus that seemed to have been in hibernation for years. And it probed Jews’ memories of their own historic suffering in Ukraine, often at the hands of the ancestors of those now under attack.
Jews and the end of Roe v. Wade
In June the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 to overturn Roe v. Wade. It was an unthinkable outcome for liberal Jewish activists, women especially, who for 50 years and more had regarded the right to an abortion as integral to their Jewish identity and political worldview. Before the decision came down, Jewish studies scholar Michael Raucher questioned long-held Jewish organizational views that justified abortion only on the narrowest of religious grounds without acknowledging that women “have the bodily autonomy to make that decision on their own.” Conversely, Avi Shafran of Agudath Israel of America welcomed the end of Roe on behalf of his haredi Orthodox organization, writing that the rabbis “who guide us indisputably hold that, absent extraordinary circumstances, terminating a pregnancy is a grave sin.” Responding to Shafran, Daphne Lazar Price, an Orthodox Jewish feminist, argued that even in her stringently religious community, getting an abortion is a “conscious choice by women to follow their religious convictions and maintain their human dignity.”
Colleyville and synagogue safety
A police chaplain walks near the Congregation Beth Israel Synagogue in Colleyville, Texas Jan. 15, 2022. (Andy Jacobsohn/AFP via Getty Images)
After a gunman held a rabbi and three congregants hostage at a Colleyville, Texas synagogue in January, Jewish institutions called for even tighter security at buildings that had already been hardened after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre in 2018. And yet for some, the sight of armed guards and locked doors undermines the spirit of a house of worship. Raphael Magarik of the University of Illinois Chicago argued that the Colleyville incident shouldn’t lead to an overreaction, especially when congregations are struggling to come back together after the pandemic. Rabbi Joshua Ladon warned about the “impulse to allow fear to define our actions.” Meanwhile, Jews of color said armed guards and police patrols can make them feel unsafe. In a powerful response, Mijal Bitton and Rabbi Isaiah Rothstein of the Shalom Hartman Center wrote that Jewish institutions must think in “expansive and creative ways about how to fight for our combined safety in a way that takes into account the rich ethnic and racial diversity of our communities.”
Anti-Zionism, antisemitism and “Jew-free zones”
When nine student groups at UC Berkeley’s law school adopted by-laws saying that they will not invite speakers who support Zionism, the Jewish Journal in Los Angeles ran an op-ed with the provocative headline, “Berkeley Develops Jewish Free Zones.” In the essay, Kenneth L. Marcus, who heads the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, argued that “Zionism is an integral aspect of the identity of many Jews,” and that the bylaws act as “racially restrictive covenants,” precluding Jewish participation. Defenders of the pro-Palestinian students countered that groups often invite only like-minded speakers, and that while being Jewish is an identity, Zionism is a political viewpoint. Faculty, politicians and activists weighed in on both sides of what has become a central debate on campuses and beyond: When does anti-Zionism become antisemitism, and how do you balance free speech rights against the claims by some students that their personal safety hangs in the balance?
“Maus” and school book bans
A Tennessee school board voted to remove “Maus” — Art Speigelman’s epic cartoon memoir about the Holocaust — from middle-school classrooms. (JTA photo)
Caught up in an epidemic of book-banning were Jewish books for children and young adults, a list that includes “The Purim Superhero,” “Family Fletcher” and “Chik Chak Shabbat.” A Texas school board removed a 2018 graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary. But perhaps the highest profile case of a Jewish-interest book being banned came when a Tennessee school board voted to remove “Maus” — Art Speigelman’s epic cartoon memoir about the Holocaust — from middle-school classrooms, citing its use of profanity, nudity and depictions of “killing kids.” Coverage of the ban misleadingly depicted “Maus” as an introduction to the Shoah for young adults, while Speigelman recently noted that he had become a reluctant “metonym” for the book-banning issue. Jennifer Caplan explained why the book is indispensable: “‘Maus’ forces the reader to bear witness in a way no written account can, and the [illustrations] are especially good at forcing the eye to see what the mind prefers to glide past.”
Artificial intelligence and real-life dilemmas
Artificial intelligence, or AI, has become a fact of corporate life, with computing advances that power robotic automation, computer vision and natural-language text generation. But what captured the public imagination — and dread — this year were sites like Dall-E, which threatened the livelihood of graphic designers by generating original, credible illustrations with no more than a simple prompt, and ChatGPT, which is able to expound cogently and humanly on practically any topic. Beyond everyday ethical dilemmas (“Can I write my book report using ChatGPT?”) AI raised profound questions about what it means to be human. “Rabbis have historically been very open to the idea of nonhuman sentience and have tended to see parallels between humans and nonhumans as an excuse to treat nonhumans better,” wrote David Zvi Kalman in an essay on the prospect of creating artificial life. Similarly, Mois Navon suggested in JTA that “if a machine is sentient, it is no longer an inanimate object with no moral status or ‘rights’ … but rather an animate being with the status of a ‘moral patient’ to whom we owe consideration.
A Pulitzer for “The Netanyahus”
Author Joshua Cohen won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel “The Netanyahus.” (Roberto Serra—Iguana Press/Getty Images)
Joshua Cohen was the somewhat surprising winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel “The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.” Or maybe not so surprising: The book is a fictionalized treatment of a real-life visit in the late 1950s by the Israeli historian Benzion Netanyahu for a job interview at a university very much like Cornell. With Benzion’s son Benjamin angling for an ultimately successful return to office in real life, a satire about Jewish power, right-wing Zionism and Israeli self-regard might have seemed to the judges very much of the moment. As critic Adam Kirsch wrote in a JTA essay, Cohen concludes that both American and Israeli Jewish identities “are absurd, crying out for the kind of satire that can only come from intimate knowledge.” Others weren’t amused. Jewish Currents criticized the novel for being derivative of both Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, and the Jewish Review of Books said that the novel includes “a capsule history of Zionism that is so blatant a distortion that I just gave up.”
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An Altadena synagogue’s mural was a symbol of community resilience after the LA fires. Antisemitic graffiti only proved the point.
ALTADENA, CALIF. – When Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center held services in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, Chann and Christina An, who lived across the street, sometimes sat on their front porch and listened to the songs.
And when the Eaton fire flattened the PJTC campus last January — and the An home, too — the synagogue helped its next-door neighbors with food donations and gift cards.
“Ever since the fire, they’ve included us like one of their members,” Chann An said.
So when a vandal earlier this week spray-painted swastikas on a mural the synagogue had painted on its only remaining wall, it felt like an attack on them, too. On Thursday, when PJTC organized a community-wide solidarity event at the site, the Ans were among many non-Jewish residents in attendance.
“They’re part of our community, and they’re always welcome, and I want them to feel that way,” said An. “And I want them to feel that all the neighbors support them.”
What typically happens when a Jewish institution is tagged — an increasingly common story these days — is a familiar chain of events: Photos are snapped and posted online; Jewish leaders and local officials issue statements; the tag is covered up and people move on.
In Altadena, all of that happened. But so did something else: The synagogue was inundated with messages of support from surrounding faith institutions and Altadena residents, according to the temple’s executive director Melissa Levy. A few of those neighbors had offered to sand down the graffiti themselves.
“That kind of support has been really beautiful in the wake of all of this,” Levy said.
The Eaton fire devastated Altadena, killing 19 people and leveling cherished community institutions, including the temple’s 75-year-old campus and several other houses of worship. Dozens of congregants lost their homes in the blaze. Where PJTC’s sanctuary, chapel and religious school once stood, weeds now rise five feet off the ground.
The mural had been painted in May in response to graffiti on the same wall earlier this year. At the mural’s center was a fire poppy — a native flower known to rise from ashes — adorned with a message intended to be universal: We are all responsible for each other.
“When we look at the mural,” Christina An said, it reminds them: “We’re all going to be back.”
But this week, those inspiring words were painted over with another. Vandals painted more swastikas alongside the message: “Zionism is not welcome.” No arrests have been made in either instance, and it is unclear whether the same person was responsible for both incidents. LA County Supervisor Kathryn Barger has called on the county to offer a $20,000 reward for information on the culprit.
“There’s an increased feeling of vulnerability after the fire destroyed our home,” said Rabbi Josh Ratner, the synagogue’s senior leader. “To have any stuff happen after that compounds our vulnerability.”
Rising from the ashes
The stone wall abutting Altadena Boulevard was the only one on the complex that remained fully intact after the fire. But it didn’t become a symbol until after it was vandalized earlier this year, when passersby noticed on Jan. 13 that the charred stone wall had been tagged.
That graffiti read “F— Zionism” and “RIP Renee,” the latter message an apparent reference to Renee Nicole Good, an anti-ICE protester who had been killed the previous week in Minneapolis.
In response, synagogue leadership decided to cover it with art. Working with a local group called Art Against Hate, PJTC commissioned a muralist who invited synagogue members to contribute ideas — and recruited their children to help paint it.
The mural was sectioned like stained glass, with Stars of David in the corners and a border containing the animal symbols for the tribes of Israel. A peacock adorned one side — the birds have thrived in the area for more than a century — and while the children were painting it, one approached the scene, seemingly to admire it.
“It was for Altadena as much as the synagogue, and the neighbors appreciated it,” said Judy Callahan, a longtime PJTC member. “I think looking out and seeing it — they still see this vacant lot, but it just made things cheerier.”
Coming together
Many of those neighbors — and a phalanx of local officials — were on hand Thursday to condemn the latest graffiti and watch Miriam Hellmann, the muralist, apply the final touches for a second time.
Barger spoke, as did Pasadena Mayor Victor Gordo, U.S. Rep. Judy Chu and others. But just as important to the temple members in attendance were the locals who braved the scorching heat to embrace them.
After Ratner spoke, he invited the Rev. Amy Aitken to the podium. Aitken leads the First United Methodist Church of Pasadena, where PJTC has been holding their services for the last year.
After joking that most other Methodist churches don’t have a “campus rabbi” — that is, Ratner — she asked other clergy in attendance to stand up. Nearly a dozen did.
One of them was the Rev. Michael David Lewis of Altadena Community Church, who said he wanted to assure Jewish community members that he considered them family.
“When they are attacked, I want to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them,” he said. “I want to stand against the hate that was expressed here and stand against the fear that was expressed here.”
Hellmann, who is not Jewish, said every muralist knows their work might get tagged — murals tend to be in prominent places, and vandals want their message to be seen.
But this target had broader resonance than other walls, or even other synagogues. “It’s not just about the Jewish community,” Hellmann said. “It was supposed to be a symbol of hope for a lot of people.”
When Hellmann first painted the mural, she applied a layer of anti-graffiti coating that prevents spray paint from bonding to the surface. But the graffiti was not cleaned off immediately, allowing it to set.
“I’ll keep repainting it every day if I need to,” Hellmann said.
This time, she added an olive branch, that ancient symbol of peace.
“I think that it’s important for non-Jewish people to stand with the Jewish community when there’s antisemitism,” she said. “So I’m happy to be a part of it. I think it’s a beautiful religion.”
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Columbia University student workers union drops Israel divestment demand
The student workers’ union at Columbia University has withdrawn its demand that the university divest from Israel — a significant reversal for the group, which has played a leading role in the campus’s pro-Palestinian movement since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
Divestment had been one of the union’s signature demands, and a recurring point of contention throughout negotiations.
The union, Student Workers of Columbia–United Auto Workers, represents over 3,000 undergraduate and graduate student workers and had long campaigned for Columbia to cancel its dual degree program with Tel Aviv University, stop plans to open a new facility in Tel Aviv, and financially divest from Israel. The demand it withdrew this week would have mandated that the university divest from state actors or companies deemed by the International Criminal Court and the United Nations to be in violation of international law
But in a Monday general body meeting, union members voted to withdraw the divestment proposal.
Columbia became an epicenter for campus protests following the onset of the Israel-Hamas war, sparking a wave of encampments, building occupations and high-profile arrests. Its union’s leaders, in particular, had been heavily involved in pro-Palestinian activism. In 2024, the group passed a resolution supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and pledged to strike if necessary to force the university to “end its complicity in the genocide.”
Former PhD student Grant Miner was arrested for his role in the occupation of Hamilton Hall in 2024 and was subsequently expelled but still identifies himself as the union’s president.
Miner acknowledged the decision to withdraw the demand in an interview this week with the campus newspaper The Columbia Spectator, saying the give-and-take realities of collective bargaining had forced the union to adjust its demands.
“You start off a campaign with one thing, and then as you bargain, you have to face the realities of where you are,” he said.
Earlier this year, Columbia alleged the union did not bargain in good faith by “conditioning bargaining on the presence of an expelled student,” apparently referring to Miner. They also alleged the organization attempted to “bargain over matters that are not related to terms and conditions of students’ employment with the University; and filing grievances that similarly have nothing to do with terms and conditions of students’ employment.”
Indeed, the move appeared to reflect the realities of federal labor law. Under the National Labor Relations Act, employers and unions are required to bargain only over wages, hours and other terms and conditions of employment. Because university divestment is generally considered outside those mandatory subjects of bargaining, Columbia is not legally obligated to negotiate over it, though it could choose to do so voluntarily.
The union also softened on other contentious demands, dropping and significantly modifying its proposal to remove all police officers from campus and narrowing a surveillance-related demand.
In November, a university Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing rejected three proposals filed by activists calling on Columbia to divest, citing a lack of financial viability and consensus on campus.
Columbia maintains its dual degree program with Tel Aviv University, and plans to open its Tel Aviv global center this summer, according to Nadav Eyal, a Columbia professor who spoke of the matter in an episode of the Call Me Back podcast this week.
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A Yiddish theater troupe condemned U.S. racism — then the Nazis came
In 1935, the experimental theater group Yung Teatr invited audiences in Warsaw to a new play that was virtually all in Yiddish but wasn’t about Europe or Jews. It was a modified retelling of the plight of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Tennessee in 1931. While the case was being retried in the United States for the second time, the three-act play Mississippi exposed Polish Jews to the injustice.
Penned by Yiddish writer Leib Malach, whose work as a journalist took him around the world including to Harlem, and directed by Michał Weichert, a trained lawyer with a love for avant-garde theater, Mississippi premiered in Warsaw in March 1935 at a time Yiddish culture in Poland was flourishing. Several troupes were staging translated works about American race relations, such as a Vilna Troupe production of Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, but scholars believe Mississippi was the first original Yiddish or Polish play on this issue to be performed in Poland.
Although it didn’t have the financial resources or popularity of traditional Yiddish productions, Mississippi had more than 100 performances in Warsaw and several in other Polish cities, where it was widely praised, as Jewish audiences identified with the mistreatment of the Scottsboro Boys. There is evidence of at least one production outside of Poland, all the way in Buenos Aires.
“Yiddish theater was much more given to a kind of transnational existence, probably more than any theater,” Alyssa Quint, a curator at YIVO and a co-editor of their translated Yiddish Voices series, said. “Because of all the communities, all the Jewish settlements that had been settled by that time were still really speaking Yiddish.”
Quint worked with scholars Ellen Perecman and Amelia Glaser to translate Mississippi into English for the first time and it has been published as a book with an introduction and notes from Quint.
Malach, who had been wanting to write a political play inspired by his time in America, made a few deviations from the real Scottsboro incident. In Mississippi, there are only seven Black defendants. Malach also invented characters to represent how the Black community and the boys’ family would react to the trial, although a mother of one of the accused is closely modeled after Ada Wright, the real-life mother of two of the Scottsboro boys who went on a European speaking tour about the case. White actors in blackface played the parts of the Black characters.
Acts Two and Three involve simultaneous actions on multiple small stages throughout the performance space, making Mississippi one the earliest examples of “immersive” or “environmental” theater.
“It’s experimental, but it was actually something that people flocked to as well,” Quint said. “That’s a very hard combination to strike even today, even under the best of circumstances.”
Because Poland’s censors had previously shuttered Weichert’s shows for being “politically provocative,” Yung Teatr left “Scottsboro” out of the title. Malach wrote that they chose Mississippi since it “is the name of a river along which reside communities of Black people, and it is also a state where ‘Scottsboro’ is a regular occurrence.”
Although few members of Yung Teatr had ever met a Black American, the play reads as a nuanced — if at times heavy-handed — investigation of the precarious position of Black people in American society.
The play also focuses a lot on class conflict, as Weichert thought it would make the story more accessible to Jewish audiences. While Weichert and Malach recognized the parallels between anti-Black discrimination in America and the antisemitism they experienced in Poland, Weichert wasn’t sure broader Jewish audiences would automatically sympathize with the Black characters. The communist-aligned Yung Teatr leaders also may have been hoping to inspire their Jewish audience to embrace class solidarity and at times, class seems to usurp race as the primary issue in the play.
One character, Shirley Silverstone, a Jewish labor activist who represents the real-life activists from the International Labor Defense that got involved in Scottsboro, argues that the case is really about “revealing the bloody intention of the ruling class to strangle us all.”
Mississippi offers a contrasting view in the form of Mickey, a Black Pullman train worker, who accosts Shirley for using the boys’ trial “for the benefit of your party” and playing “with the lives of the accused Negroes.”
“I think that you don’t really know where you necessarily stand or where the play stands,” Quint said.
The translation took several years. In 2020, as protests spread across the country in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Quint saw a connection between her work and the present, which she said can be a rare experience in the Yiddish world.
“Often you’re in your little corner and you have to have a more indirect relationship with the spirit of your time, or none at all even,” Quint said. “But it seemed like there was something very relevant about this play when I began translating it.”
“People were getting more and more engaged with deeper questions about the Black experience here in America.”
When it came to translating the Yiddish word for the n-word, Perecman, Glaser, and Quint had to decide whether or not to include the original language.
“I felt strongly that since this was placed in the 30’s in the South, we needed to use the word,” Perecman said about the ultimate decision to have the slur in the play.
Both the transcultural and serious nature of Mississippi make it a standout piece of Yiddish theater history. Perecman said that many people have a narrow idea of what makes Yiddish theater, something she’s experienced firsthand running the New Worlds Theatre Project, which translates and stages early 20th century Yiddish plays.
“People would come and they’d say, ‘Oh my God, I thought Yiddish theater was all about singing and dancing,’” Perecman said.
There is music in Mississippi, but it’s jazz and gospel inspired numbers instead of Jewish folk tunes. The translators don’t know how much interaction the composer, Henkh (Henoch) Kon had with Black American music, but the lyrical structures, including a call-and-response gospel, show an intent to mimic what he imagined were traditional forms. YIVO plans to have music experts at a book launch event on Nov. 30 to analyze the lyrics and possibly put them to music.
In the post-Holocaust world, the play’s message about discrimination carries a sense of foreboding. Several of the actors and crew were murdered in the Holocaust. Weichert survived and made aliyah to Israel in 1958, where he died in 1967. Malach died in Paris in 1936 during an operation.
The Nazi invasion forced Yung Teatr to close in 1939 after only ten years of operating, but the troupe left a mark on Yiddish theater with their ambitious, unorthodox projects.
“There was just very, very little support for what they did,” Quint said. “They were just very devoted to what they did, and that’s what kept them going.”
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