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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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The post Book bans, Ukraine and the end of Roe: The year 2022 in Jewish ideas appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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From Texas to Tel Aviv, invitations go out to Jews fleeing ‘Mamdani’s New York’
(JTA) — Just hours after New York City’s mayor election was called for Zohran Mamdani, a top Israeli official issued an invitation.
“New York will never be the same again, especially not for its Jewish community,” Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli tweeted. “I invite the Jews of New York to seriously consider making their new home in the Land of Israel.”
Chikli’s call dovetailed with another appeal to Jewish New Yorkers made by a spokesman for the Jewish settlement in Hebron, Yishai Fleisher.
“Indeed, it was a great run, and you were a blessing to NYC. But Jews will feel less and less comfortable in the Big Apple,” tweeted Fleisher. “So do yourself a favor, buy real estate in the Land of Israel.”
The outreach from Israel sought to reach the majority of New York Jews who voted against Mamdani, many of whom saw his criticism of Israel as a warning sign for the safety of the city’s Jewish communities under his leadership.
While Mamdani has frequently reiterated a commitment to protecting Jewish New Yorkers, the impulse to flee the city following his win loomed large over Jews attending Andrew Cuomo’s event on election night, when the former governor came in second.
“One-hundred percent people are going to be leaving New York City under this mayorship,” said Joshua Friedman, a 32-year-old Orthodox Jew from the Upper East Side, in an interview. “There’s no reason to stay. Someone that hates you in your own backyard, why would you want to be here?”
After the election was called, Victoria Zurkiev, an Orthodox Queens resident and social media influencer at the event, said she predicted that “people who are successful will leave New York because they wouldn’t want to put their life in danger.”
“I believe that there is no life with Jewish people in New York going forward,” Zurkiev said. “I’m a New Yorker, this is my town, and to now sit there and think, where are we going next? It’s pretty sad.”
Vowing to move after a disappointing election result is almost a cliche, and not just for Jews in New York — exit talk is high among the wealthy in the city, whom Mamdani hopes to tax at a higher rate.
But actually leaving — and uprooting homes, careers and family life in the process — is much rarer. Still, while it remains unclear how many Jewish New Yorkers will finalize plans to leave the city, some communities have begun pitching themselves as destinations.
In Annapolis, Maryland, which currently has a Jewish candidate leading its mayoral race, plans for a new Jewish federation to serve the state’s capital and Chesapeake region were quickly shored up to coincide with New York City’s election outcome, according to Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, a co-founder of the new federation.
“We do expect that we’ll be making an appeal to new Jewish New Yorkers,” Laszlo Mizrahi, who is active in Democratic politics, said in an interview. “We feel that we are uniquely well positioned for people who want to have a warm and wonderful Jewish life that is without drama.”
Rabbi Marc Schneier, a prominent rabbi of the Hampton Synagogue and friend of Cuomo, announced that he was planning to build the first Jewish day school in the Hamptons.
“This is in anticipation of the thousands of Jewish families that will flock to the Hamptons and greater Suffolk County to escape the antisemitic climate of Mamdani’s New York City,” Schneier wrote in a post on Facebook.
Les Schachter, the board president of Congregation Nishmat Am, a Conservative synagogue in Plano, Texas, issued an “open invitation” to New York’s Jews to settle in North Texas.
“With the recent changes in New York City’s political leadership, I’ve heard from many Jewish families and business owners who are weighing their options,” said Schachter in an email. “If you’re considering a new start, I invite you to look closely at Plano and the greater North Texas region — where Jewish life is thriving, community is strong, and you’ll be genuinely, unmistakably welcome.”
Michael Benmeleh, a real estate agent in Miami, a city with a sizable, and growing, Jewish population, also emailed an appeal to Jewish New Yorkers on Thursday, writing “Tired of traffic, taxes, and Mamdani? Stop kvetching, start packing.”
Perhaps the most intense response has come from Israel, a country built in large part by Jews who left places that had gone from hospitable to hostile. While Chikli and Fleisher are right-wing figures, the assumption that New York Jews would want to leave was so widespread that it was the subject of a skit on the satirical show “Eretz Nehederet.”
In the skit, a New Yorker and an Israeli fleeing their home countries cross paths at Ben Gurion Airport. The New Yorker making aliyah says, “Trust me, it’s just not safe for Jews,” to which the Israeli, on his way to New York, replies, “You literally came to the most dangerous place for Jews on the planet.”
A poll of 501 Israelis published Thursday found that nearly half said they would avoid traveling to New York while Mamdani is mayor. The Jerusalem Post dedicated its front page on Thursday to an image of a disintegrating Statue of Liberty under the headline “Jews at risk in New York City.” And a satirical image shouting out Mamdani as the employee of the month at Nefesh B’Nefesh, an agency that supports Jews in claiming Israeli citizenship, went viral on social media.
Widespread social media comments suggest that some New York Jews at least thinking about moving to Israel, or making aliyah, in response to Mamdani’s election can be found widely.
“We need to take all our money, all our business, and ourselves and go back home to Israel,” one Jewish New Yorker who said she had already “updated my Aliyah paperwork” wrote in a Facebook comment. “Not because we are afraid ( even though many of us are) but because we need to SHOW the world why it looks like when we take away all we give and bring it to the only place we are safe- Israel.”
But even among those who see Mamdani’s win as a potent portent of antisemitic trouble, the idea of a Jewish exit from the biggest Jewish city in the world doesn’t always hold attraction.
“Don’t allow anyone to push you out,” Mayor Eric Adams told the Israeli journalist Neria Kraus in July, months before he dropped out of the election Mamdani won. “If I’m a Jewish person I’m not plotting out my plan to flee. You’re not going to run around the country every time someone does something antisemitic.”
Rabbi Tali Adler, a faculty member at Yeshivat Hadar who lives in New York City, wrote in a Facebook post the morning after the election that she understood why Jews in the city were scared about its result. But, she reminded them, thinking about or planning to flee was not the only traditional Jewish path ahead of them.
“We are the descendants of ancestors who not only knew when to leave, but so much more often, how to stay,” Adler wrote.
The post From Texas to Tel Aviv, invitations go out to Jews fleeing ‘Mamdani’s New York’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish Iranian-American sentenced to prison in Iran for visiting Israel 13 years ago
(JTA) — A Jewish Iranian-American man has been sentenced to prison in Iran for traveling to Israel 13 years ago for his son’s bar mitzvah, his family members have disclosed.
Kamran Hekmati, 70, of Great Neck, Long Island, which is home to a large Persian Jewish population, traveled to Iran in May for what was supposed to be a brief visit.
But in July, he was detained and sent to Evin prison in Tehran, his relatives told the New York Times, which reported Hekmati’s imprisonment for the first time on Thursday.
The notorious prison was heavily damaged during Israel’s 12-day war with Iran in June. Directly following the war, Iran arrested 35 members of the Jewish communities in Tehran and Shiraz on charges of having contact with Israel.
It was not clear whether Hekmati was included in that total. But Iranian authorities had realized that he both held an Iranian passport, despite having moved to the United States as a child, and had violated a law barring Iranians from traveling to Israel. (Iran does not recognize dual citizenship.)
In August, he was sentenced to four years in prison by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court. His sentence was reduced to two years in September, and a lawyer for his family has filed an appeal seeking his release on humanitarian grounds because he has cancer, according to the newspaper.
Kamran Hekmati, a 70 yo Jewish Iranian American from New York has been arrested by the Islamic Regime for the crime of traveling to Israel 13 yrs ago for his son’s bar mitzvah.
He was arrested in May while visiting Iran, and is sentenced to 4 years in Evin Prison. pic.twitter.com/Il3tYaciNo
— The Persian Jewess (@persianjewess) November 7, 2025
“Kamran was the person who glued the family together. He was always there for everyone, his wife, his kids, all his relatives, anyone he met in Iran,” Hekmati’s cousin, Shohreh Nowfar, told the New York Times. “It’s so ironic that the country he loved so much and tried to help has now imprisoned him.”
Hekmati’s family came to the United States several years before the Iranian Revolution in 1979 caused tens of thousands of Iranian Jews to flee to the United States and Israel. Today, Iran has an estimated 8,000 Jews who are permitted to practice their religion but barred from any contact with Israel or display of support from it.
Hekmati is currently one of four U.S. citizens held in Iranian prison, but appears to be the first case of the country arresting an American Jew in recent years. The Human Rights Activists News Agency in Iran, an affiliate of the Human Rights in Iran NGO, reported in July that a second Jewish American had also been imprisoned and released on bail.
“The Iranian regime has a long history of unjustly and wrongfully detaining other countries’ citizens,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement to the Times. “Iran should release these individuals immediately.”
The post Jewish Iranian-American sentenced to prison in Iran for visiting Israel 13 years ago appeared first on The Forward.
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Rep. Elise Stefanik, self-styled protector of Jews on the right, announces run for New York Governor
New York Rep. Elise Stefanik announced a run for governor Friday, as the Republican seeks to leverage her elevated profile as a vocal supporter of the Jewish community to a role in higher office.
She aims to challenge the Democratic incumbent Kathy Hochul, who angered many Jews in New York with her endorsement of New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, despite his track record of Israel criticism.
In an announcement video for Stefanik’s gubernatorial run, a narrator notes that she “fought woke insanity in our schools,” as a headline referring to her campus antisemitism hearings fills the screen.
Stefanik, who is not Jewish, has been one of the loudest voices on Capitol Hill condemning antisemitism since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and war in Gaza. Her relentless questioning of university presidents about the campus climate for Jews was credited with leading to the resignations of the top posts at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and others.
Many invitations to address Jewish groups followed, including the Anti-Defamation League and Yeshiva University (which awarded her the Modern Orthodox school’s highest honor over the objections of many faculty). Her newfound allyships came despite Stefanik’s past platforming of the antisemitic “Great Replacement” theory, and other troublesome aspects of her history that confounded liberal Jews.
Stefanik, who seeks to become the first Republican since George Pataki to move into the governor’s mansion in Albany, seems likely to make antisemitism a main flank of her campaign. Her video attacks Hochul for the governor’s Mamdani endorsement, saying Hochul “cozied up to a defund-the-police, tax hiking, antisemitic Communist.” Hochul is facing a primary challenge from her top lieutenant, who had endorsed Mamdani much earlier in the election cycle and who is married to a Jewish filmmaker.
Among the Republican endorsements of Stefanik’s campaign the candidate retweeted Friday morning were Leo Terrell, who heads an antisemitism task force within the Trump administration, and New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, who is Jewish and vocally pro-Israel.
“Elise Stefanik will clean up our college campuses from the rot they have become and will confront antisemitism head on!” Vernikov wrote.
A staunch ally of President Donald Trump, Stefanik had been in line to become his ambassador to the United Nations, where she had promised to be a vocal defender of Israel. Her nomination was withdrawn in order to keep her in the House to help protect the chamber’s slim GOP majority, but Stefanik has been eyeing a bigger platform ever since.
Her announcement comes as the GOP is facing an internal civil war over right-wing antisemitism, with pundit Tucker Carlson, the head of the Heritage Foundation, and Vice President J.D. Vance among the figures taking criticism for embracing or failing to condemn antisemitic viewpoints. Stefanik was absent from this year’s Republican Jewish Coalition summit, where various speakers denounced antisemitism on the right.
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