Uncategorized
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.”
—
The post Book bans, Ukraine and the end of Roe: The year 2022 in Jewish ideas appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
‘Long overdue’: Henry Ford home to confront his antisemitism
(JTA) — DEARBORN – The bust of Henry Ford looked on sternly as hundreds of Jewish professionals flooded his pool room.
The visiting Jews admired the views of the Rouge River from Ford’s windows and strolled through his immaculately maintained garden. They studied a mock-up for a Navajo rug in his basement woven with a particular pattern — one that appeared to resemble a Nazi swastika.
The staff at Fair Lane, the historic Dearborn home of Henry and his wife Clara, welcomed the Jewish educators, historians and museum staff. Why they did soon became clear during a panel discussion in that pool room. When the home reopens to the public in June 2027, after a 17-year closure for restoration, staff will teach visitors about Ford’s antisemitism.
This facet of the pioneering industrialist’s life was hardly incidental. The onetime richest man in America published venomous conspiracy theories in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, for years. Hitler was a professed admirer, and Nazi Germany awarded him a medal.
Leaders of Jewish groups greeted the news that the home would address Ford’s antisemitism with optimism.
“We applaud Fair Lane’s commitment to addressing Henry Ford’s antisemitism publicly,” Catherine Cangany, CEO of the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement. “This history happened, it caused harm, and it continues to have consequences we all must confront.”
Cangany, who has research expertise on the Dearborn Independent, sat on the June panel with Fair Lane’s curators but is not involved in the antisemitism initiative itself. Local Jewish groups including hers have been pushing for Ford’s enterprises to acknowledge his antisemitism for years.
“The reckoning is long overdue, and we all will be better for it,” she said.
The curators did not broach specifics of their plan with their Jewish audience in June. For the rest of the summer, as Fair Lane proceeded with its renovations, most of the Detroit area’s Jewish leaders were kept in the dark.
More than two months after the conference, top staffers Austin Eighmey and Hannah McCready sat down with JTA in Ford’s library to outline their educational plans in more detail.
Surrounded by replicas of books on German race science that helped to inform Ford’s attitude toward Jews, they explained that they viewed discussions of antisemitism as core to the revitalized Fair Lane’s statement of purpose. Such information would sit, they said, alongside other unflattering aspects of Ford’s character, such as his union-busting activities.
“Our mission is to illuminate the lives and legacy of Henry and Clara Ford,” Eighmey, senior director of historic resources, said. Part of that legacy, he said, was noting that “he was an ignorant man, fed a lot of poor information that he himself sought out.”
“It’s our job to tell a more full picture and give people a lens with which to view history,” added McCready, the site’s director of interpretation and education.
In the Detroit area, where Ford’s name still looms large nearly 80 years after his death, such a commitment is notable. In 2023 the former president of the Ford Foundation, the family’s charitable arm, acknowledged and condemned its namesake’s antisemitism. Other local institutions devoted to historic purveyors of antisemitism have reckoned with their own legacies in recent years, including the church founded by demagogic “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin.
But as Ford the man continues to be heavily mythologized today, by new generations of entrepreneurs and gearheads — and white supremacists — the physical museums and educational institutions in the region that bear Ford’s name and have connections to his family largely have not broached his antisemitism.
Those include The Henry Ford, a museum built around his personal collections; Greenfield Village, a historic reenactment village that includes a restoration of the mogul’s childhood home; and the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant, a Detroit heritage site where Ford’s Model Ts were built.
For a long time Fair Lane, too, didn’t touch the subject. After Ford’s widow Clara died in 1950, the property was turned over to the Ford Motor Company, which brokered a deal with the University of Michigan to build a Dearborn satellite campus on the site.
For decades the university offered tours of the grounds on a largely volunteer basis, also using it as an events space. The house has been closed to visitors since 2010, as the team undertook an extensive restoration project with an eye toward reopening for the public.
Eighmey said the plan to teach about antisemitism had been the goal since the restoration’s early days. The staff met with representatives from the Zekelman Holocaust Center, the state’s flagship Holocaust museum, to discuss how such a project would look.
“They were straightforward about Henry Ford’s antisemitism and hope that it will be incorporated into the interpretive narrative where appropriate but, at the same time, they respectfully acknowledged many of Henry Ford’s strengths and expressed a deep regard for Fair Lane’s stories, physical spaces, and current restoration work,” reads one executive summary of the focus group that a consultant shared with JTA.
A spokesperson for the Zekelman declined to comment to JTA for this article.
Local controversies in the interim called such educational commitments into question. In 2019 the city of Dearborn — where the Ford Motor Company is the largest employer — quashed a planned historical magazine that would have discussed Ford’s antisemitism, tied to the 100th anniversary of his acquisition of the Dearborn Independent.
In what Eighmey today refers to as “the whole fiasco here in Dearborn,” the city’s then-mayor, John “Jack” O’Reilly, fired the magazine’s editor, prompting outcry. O’Reilly died last year. His son, Devon O’Reilly, now serves as Fair Lane’s CEO.
Despite this history, the younger O’Reilly is supportive of the plan to teach Ford’s antisemitism on the site, the curators said. “We have not talked about his personal life, really, and his familial connections at all,” Eighmey said of O’Reilly.
The team has developed talking points about Ford’s antisemitism as part of their “non-negotiables,” museum terminology for facets of history that every visitor will encounter. Donna Braden, a museums consultant who formerly worked with The Henry Ford and who is Jewish herself, was hired to give her feedback on the plan and drafted her own proposed “non-negotiables” for the subject.
“Explaining the true story of Henry Ford’s antisemitism to non-Jewish people will help them understand why it is so important to the Jewish community,” Braden told the Fair Lane team in a report on their efforts.
In a summary she shared with JTA, Braden also advised the team to “be aware of many people who are unaware of Henry Ford’s antisemitism, and it will surprise them.”
Braden drew from “The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century,” an acclaimed 2006 biography by Steven Watts. Unlike other Ford biographers before him, Watts tackled his subject’s antisemitism head-on. His approach would later find surprising admirers within the Ford dynasty, leading to him presenting on the subject in 2018 to a room full of The Henry Ford staff and Ford family members.
“It was, I must say, quite an experience, because I spoke pretty frankly about all of this,” Watts, an emeritus history professor at the University of Missouri, recalled to JTA about his 2018 talk. “Most of the staff that talked to me about it actually indicated that they were a little relieved, I think, to have this brought out into the open in a fairly frank way.”
The talk, co-presented with the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan, did not lead to change — at least not at The Henry Ford, which has a separate ownership structure from Fair Lane. Today, no mention of Ford’s antisemitism can be found in The Henry Ford’s physical museum space, despite efforts from Braden and others to add such material. Some pages of its website now include some brief words on the subject.
Amid new efforts to push Ford’s family on the subject, Watts returned to Dearborn in 2024, partially to address Fair Lane at Braden’s invitation.
“I hope that they will move forward to bring Henry Ford’s antisemitism to the public,” he said, of both Fair Lane and The Henry Ford. “I got the idea when I was there that they were thinking strongly about a more frank and open approach to all of this, and I guess I would hope that is the approach that they take, and not the ‘sweep it under the rug’ maneuver.”
He told JTA that Ford’s antisemitism became most pronounced in the 1920s, shortly after the height of his business success.
Watts traces Ford’s antisemitism not to any one specific root cause, but rather to a confluence of factors, including the mogul’s economic populism; his failed efforts to send a “Peace Ship” of dignitaries to Europe during World War I, which he came to blame on a “Jewish financial interest in Europe”; and his embrace of conservative cultural signifiers, including square dancing.
“He basically begins to argue that Jews lay behind the corruption of that old-fashioned kind of rural, WASP cultural virtue, that Jews were behind jazz music, Jews were behind Hollywood movies, and that there was a kind of moral degradation that was at work,” Watts said.
Fair Lane has a separate ownership structure from The Henry Ford and Greenfield Village, both of which are largely built around other subjects Ford was passionate about, such as American innovation, rather than the mogul himself. Fair Lane, its curators say, is the natural place for visitors to learn about the Fords’ personal lives and beliefs.
Ford descendants still weigh heavily on Fair Lane’s board — including chair Edsel Ford II, Henry’s great-grandson, whom Eighmey refers to as “the Deuce.”
The family was onboard for this reappraisal, the curators said. Fair Lane’s models in the museum space include Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in Virginia that has taught visitors about his slaveholding; and the Frick museum in Pittsburgh, where industrialist Henry Clay Frick comes under scrutiny for his fierce anti-union stance.
Visitors to Fair Lane, Eighmey promised, will “never leave here thinking, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that big of a deal.’”
The Fair Lane team chose to restore the house to its condition in 1919 — in part because the home was photographed for an architectural magazine that year, allowing the curators to use it as a visual reference.
The date is significant for another reason. 1919 was also the year that Ford acquired the Dearborn Independent, which he would soon use to publish a series of antisemitic conspiracies called “The International Jew” as well as the Russian forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which purported to outline secret Jewish plans for world domination.
Ford would require his dealerships to distribute copies of the paper with every automobile purchase, making the Independent, for a brief time, one of the country’s highest-circulated newspapers. Ford’s role as newspaper publisher was, in Watts’ estimation, the most notorious and seismic way the mogul’s antisemitism manifested in his lifetime.
The choice to reset his home to the year he launched the paper “is further bringing all of this together as a narrative throughline,” McCready said.
After the paper shut down in 1927, owing in part to a libel suit brought against Ford by Jewish attorney and labor activist Aaron Sapiro, Ford — with the help of Jewish community figures — publicly apologized for spreading antisemitism. Around the same time, the celebrated Jewish architect Albert Kahn helped renovate Fair Lane.
The planned 90-minute Fair Lane tour, which is currently being workshopped, touches on the Peace Ship and Ford’s wielding of the Dearborn Independent. McCready described the tour’s intended arc: “He fails with the Peace Ship. He decides that there is a hostile press that’s controlled by financiers that’s against him. He purchases this failing local newspaper and starts getting really obsessed with his image in the media, and we kind of take it from there.”
It does not get into the Sapiro trial, though tour guides will discuss the topic if visitors bring it up. They also don’t plan to discuss the medal Ford received from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s when Hitler publicly expressed admiration for him, noting that it falls nearly two decades after the time period represented by the house’s restoration.
Watts, the Ford historian, told JTA that Ford had suffered two strokes at the time he received the medal, and “was in very bad shape” — possibly impairing his judgment.
“I think Ford’s got a lot to answer for, but I don’t think he was a Nazi,” Watts said. “I think things kind of went off the rails there.” By 1942, Ford was again publicly renouncing antisemitism, calling it “a distinct disservice to our country.”
At the Jewish museums conference, Cangany, the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan CEO, suggested the Fair Lane team should display copies of the Dearborn Independent around the house to demonstrate the effects of Ford’s worldview. That’s not part of the plan, Eighmey said: “It’s not on the site, and it never was.”
But the house does have other eye-catching artifacts. A room in the basement, in keeping with historic specifications, will be outfitted with a Navajo rug stitched with the ancient “whirling logs” symbol, which the Nazis later co-opted as the swastika. Ford had acquired the rug and displayed it in his home beginning in the 1910s, well before the Nazi swastika was popularized.
Maintaining an honest assessment of its founder’s troubling history is a tall order for any museum in modern times. Even Monticello, which Fair Lane held up as a model, has faced right-wing backlash from figures who want the site to minimize discussions of slavery.
Meanwhile, Ford’s legacy continues to shape the modern era as new conservative cultural figures from the business world push similar brands of populism.
In 2022, amid a dispute with the tech mogul Elon Musk over the prevalence of antisemitism on his social network X, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, called Musk “the Henry Ford of our time.”
Greenblatt later apologized for the comparison -– but some commentators noted that it was even more apt than he may have meant. “Twitter is to Musk as The Dearborn Independent was to Ford,” the writer Parker Molloy wrote at the time.
Last month in Dearborn, which today has a large Arab/Muslim community, neo-Nazi activists wearing swastika armbands staged an anti-Muslim rally. Their choice of venue carried historical echoes: They organized outside the Henry Ford Centennial Library.
The Fair Lane team is aware of the modern significance of Ford’s antisemitism, they said.
“Populist movements, they always end up using antisemitism as some sort of way to recruit people to their cause,” Eighmey told JTA. “And it’s a reality that I hope, after people leave their experience here, they do reflect on it and see, ‘Wow, wait a minute. Is this happening right now around me?’”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post ‘Long overdue’: Henry Ford home to confront his antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Jewish artists face a relentless culture war over Israel. Some are building a way around it.
The pop star P!nk went into Rosh Hashanah explaining herself.
After sharing a post calling for rapper Macklemore to be dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour over his pro-Palestinian performances, the Jewish singer faced a backlash of her own. On Friday, she clarified that she supported Palestinian humanity, opposed silencing artists and wanted room to express Jewish fear without being accused of endorsing Israel’s war.
Macklemore, meanwhile, said his criticism of Israel was not directed at Jews. Their exchange captured how quickly an argument about a performance can become a fight over identity — and who gets to define someone else’s.
Nearly three years after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, those fights are becoming part of the ordinary business of culture: promoting a movie, booking a concert, selling a manuscript. And some Jewish artists and executives are responding by building new places to take their work.
Consider Gal Gadot. While promoting her new Prime Video thriller, The Runner, the Israeli actress and former IDF soldier appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last week, where she and Kimmel blew shofars for Rosh Hashanah. “Why platform her?” read a typical comment under the video on social media. Even sharing an episode became a point of contention: A member of MUNA, the musical guest, subsequently said the band’s performance had been prerecorded and that it hadn’t known who else would appear, adding a message supporting Palestinian freedom.
Artists critical of Israel face their own confrontations. Last month, Paramount accused Mark Ruffalo of invoking antisemitic tropes after he attacked the Ellison family’s corporate interests and Oracle’s work with the Israeli military. Ruffalo rejected the accusation, saying he was criticizing executives and government policy. The disputes involve different conduct and different stakes, but they keep returning to the same contested boundary between political criticism and prejudice.
In publishing, the consequences can be harder to see. Jewish and Israeli authors told The Wall Street Journal that agents had dropped them, editors had sought to remove Jewish or Israeli elements from manuscripts, and overseas publishers had become unwilling to buy their work. Some agents explicitly reject submissions from Zionists.
The picture is uneven: Jewish writers across the political spectrum continue to produce bestsellers, and a rejected manuscript alone cannot establish discrimination. But the accounts have helped spur new businesses.
A wave of new publishers has emerged to give Jewish and Israeli writers a home after agents and editors say mainstream houses have quietly frozen them out since Oct. 7: Neil Blair, best known as J.K. Rowling’s literary agent, launched High Line Publishing Studio last week to publish authors he says have been shut out elsewhere; Canary Publishing opened this month with the same mission; and Meg Keene Books, a new fiction imprint, will publish the American edition of Howard Jacobson’s Howl, which struggled to find a U.S. publisher despite its Booker Prize-winning author.
A similar response is taking shape in Hollywood. Former NBC co-chairman Ben Silverman is among the backers of SHOOQ, a new platform connecting Jewish filmmakers with investors and philanthropists. Its founders say talented storytellers need help finding the funding to get their projects made.
These ventures offer something practical to people exhausted by defending their right to participate: a publisher, a financial introduction, a way to keep working. They also raise a question that will outlast the latest celebrity argument: Can new Jewish cultural institutions help artists reach a wider public, or will an increasingly divided industry leave them speaking mainly to their own?
This essay first appeared in our Forwarding the News morning newsletter. Subscribe here.
The post Jewish artists face a relentless culture war over Israel. Some are building a way around it. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘We return changed’: Michigan synagogue reopens for Rosh Hashanah six months after a gunman forced them out
Six months after he was injured protecting his synagogue, Danny Phillips helped carry a Torah back into its sanctuary. The security director was still recovering. So was the congregation.
On Friday evening, the Jews of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, returned to celebrate Rosh Hashanah in the sanctuary they had been forced to leave after a gunman attacked their synagogue in March. The Torah scrolls came home to their ark. Familiar prayers filled the room again. And the High Holidays’ ancient invitation to return took on a meaning no one there could have anticipated a year earlier.
“This room holds more than our services; it holds our memories,” Cantor Neil Michaels said in his welcome, recalling the weddings, coming-of-age ceremonies and farewells that had taken place there.
Throughout the service, clergy and congregational leaders spoke openly about what it meant to enter a sacred space where their sense of safety had been shattered. They described gratitude alongside grief, and the effort of caring for others while still struggling themselves. Returning to the building was one step toward learning to feel at home again.
The congregation’s co-presidents, Debra Gordon and Jodi Neff, gave that work a plainspoken expression: “How do you lead others when you are trying to steady yourself?” Gordon asked.
The answer, in the stories shared from the bimah, was that others helped carry the weight.
The prayer books came from other congregations. Temple Israel’s machzors had been destroyed in the attack, and the edition it used was out of print. Synagogues around the country sent replacements. Rabbi Harold Loss told worshippers that the book he picked up bore another congregation’s initials — a small reminder, held in his hands, of the community that had sustained them.
The children had already made their own return. Earlier that week, students came back to the early childhood center and received teddy bears marking the occasion with the Shehecheyanu, the blessing of gratitude for reaching a significant moment. An educator recalled a parent saying that, after six months in which nothing had felt normal, the first day back finally did.
Their neighbors had helped make the journey possible. On the day of the attack, the Chaldean Christian community’s Shenandoah Country Club across the street sheltered children and teachers. The following evening, it hosted the congregation for Shabbat. At the holiday service, Temple Israel’s leaders again thanked those neighbors, along with the staff, first responders and restoration workers who helped sustain and rebuild their community.
Coming home still required protection. The March 12 attacker drove a truck into the synagogue and exchanged gunfire with security personnel while preschoolers were inside. The reopening included additional security measures. Temple Israel’s Rabbi Josh Bennett has also spoken about the emotional and financial difficulty of making a synagogue secure while preserving its welcome — a challenge facing Jewish congregations far beyond Michigan.
Near the end of their remarks, the co-presidents described teshuvah, the season’s work of return, as something that allowed room for everything the congregation had endured.
“We return changed,” Neff said, “but still rooted.”
This essay first appeared in our Forwarding the News morning newsletter. Subscribe here.
The post ‘We return changed’: Michigan synagogue reopens for Rosh Hashanah six months after a gunman forced them out appeared first on The Forward.
