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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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Australia’s Jewish community is defined by Holocaust survivors, Yiddishkeit, and immigrants
An attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney on Sunday killed 15 people and left Jewish communities reeling worldwide. The violence has also drawn attention to the resilience of Australia’s distinctive Jewish community, shaped by the world’s largest concentration of Holocaust survivors outside Israel, a growing Yiddish revival scene, and a large number of South African Jewish immigrants.
Demographics and culture
About 117,000 Jews live in Australia, according to 2021 Census figures adjusted for likely undercounting. The community is largely urban, with 84% living in either Melbourne or Sydney.
Just over half of Australian Jews were born in the country. Among those born overseas, the largest immigrant groups come from South Africa and Israel.
Religious practice within the community is diverse, with roughly 4% identifying as Haredi, 18% as Modern Orthodox, 33% as traditional or Conservative, 11% as Reform, and 21% as secular. In other respects, the community is uniquely cohesive: About half of children attend Jewish day schools — the highest rate for Jewish day school attendance outside of Israel.
In recent years, the revival of Yiddish language and culture in Australia has drawn significant attention, with young people who view it as a “language of protest” leading the charge. Yiddish is a required daily subject at Melbourne’s Sholem Aleichem College, a secular day school with roots in the Jewish Labor Bund. The annual Australian “Sof-Vokh Oystralye” retreat immerses attendees in 48 hours of speaking Yiddish exclusively, while Kadimah, a Jewish cultural center and library in Melbourne, stages plays in the language.
Being in the Southern Hemisphere, Australians celebrate Hanukkah during their summer, taking pride in being among the first in the world to light the holiday candles due to their early time zone.
A destination for refugees
The Australian Jewish population nearly tripled in size from 1938 to 1961. The influx was driven by Holocaust survivors, Hungarian refugees who arrived after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, and British Jews who migrated under the “Ten Pound Poms” program, which allowed them to move to Australia for just 10 pounds.
In the aftermath of World War II, Australia accepted Holocaust survivors who were living in displaced persons camps, at a time when many countries either refused to take them or imposed strict quotas — including the United States.
Not only was Australia one of the few countries willing to accept survivors, it was also just about as far from Europe geographically as one could get, offering a sense of safety in its isolation.
Yet the acceptance of Jewish refugees was at times begrudging. Minister for Immigration Arthur Calwell sold large-scale immigration in the aftermath of World War II not as a humanitarian concern, but under the slogan “populate or perish,” reflecting the need for population growth to boost the economy and enhance national security.
Calwell also covertly introduced bureaucratic measures to limit the number of Jewish Holocaust survivors allowed to enter Australia, including restricting the number of Jewish survivors permitted on ships leaving Europe to a quarter of all passengers.
But Calwell’s efforts to limit Jewish immigration ultimately fell short. In the aftermath of the war, roughly 27,000 Holocaust survivors settled in Australia. As of 2023, about 2,500 of those survivors were still living.
One of those survivors, Alexander Kleytman, who immigrated to Australia from Ukraine, was killed in Sunday’s attack at Bondi Beach while protecting his wife.
Australia’s relationship with Israel
Relations between Israel and Australia have been increasingly strained in the past year. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had been sharply critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, calling Israel’s “excuses and explanations” for blocking aid to Gaza “an outrage.”
Tensions further escalated in September, when Australia was one of about 150 countries that moved to recognize a Palestinian state. In response, Israel revoked the visas of Australian representatives to the Palestinian Authority.
Yet Australia and Israel have historically been strong allies. Australia’s first external affairs minister, Herbert Vere “Doc” Evatt, played a key role in the United Nations partition plan for Palestine and the creation of the Jewish state.
In 2017, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became the first incumbent Israeli leader to visit Australia, and former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison had said he was considering recognizing Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. But that position was reversed in 2022 after Albanese, a member of the Labor Party, took office.
Relations deteriorated further after an arson attack on a historic synagogue in Melbourne in December. Netanyahu sharply criticized Australia’s government, saying, “It is impossible to separate the reprehensible arson attack from the federal government’s extreme anti-Israeli position.”
Following the attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach, Netanyahu doubled down, saying he had warned Albanese that “your call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on the antisemitic fire.” Albanese rejected any link between the two, arguing that support for a two-state solution is a widely held position.
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Australia welcomed my family’s Holocaust survivors — and Bondi Beach soon became a symbol of renewal for me
Like so many Jewish Americans whose families immigrated prior to World War II, I grew up believing that none of my family had survived the Holocaust. When I would ask my older relatives, they would shrug. Only my grandfather shared anything about our relatives: He remembered how his parents would receive letters from Lithuania in the late 1930s and early 1940s, until one day they stopped coming.
As far as I knew, we were the only ones left. That is, until my uncle got a strange phone call from an elderly man who spoke with a hybrid German/Australian accent.
My uncle was skeptical; the person on the other end of the line claimed to be a cousin from the Australian branch of the Carvin family, despite the fact that my great-grandfather Max had invented the surname only after reaching the United States in the early 1900s.
The mysterious Australian said he was visiting Boston and asked if he wanted to meet. My uncle declined and ended the call, assuming it was a hoax or a scam.
My cousins, though, were curious. One of them began calling hotels across Boston asking for a Mr. Carvin until she tracked down the Australian. His name was Leo, and he graciously renewed his offer to meet for lunch.
When she arrived at the restaurant, she saw a man who looked much like her father, but older. And he was holding an envelope of letters written on my great-grandfather’s stationery from his home outside of Boston.
Over the course of an afternoon, my cousin learned more about my family history than any of us had uncovered in decades. Leo explained that his mother was one of my great-grandfather Max’s sisters, making Max his uncle. She and Max had continued to correspond during the interwar period; when the Nazis annexed Austria, her young adult children, including Leo, fled to Italy. Coming to the U.S. was no longer as straightforward as it had been for so many European Jews a few decades earlier, but Max tried to arrange visas for them. He suggested they begin using the surname Carvin rather than his sister’s married name, hoping it might increase the chances of obtaining visas.
It made no difference. Despite all of Europe being on the precipice of another world war, the United States would not take them in. But Australia would.
Leo and one of his brothers arrived in Freemantle, Western Australia in October 1938. To honor Max’s efforts to help them escape from Europe, they legally adopted the surname Carvin soon after their arrival. Eventually they found their way to Sydney, where they and their descendants would thrive.
In the years since Leo Carvin made that phone call to my uncle, we’ve gotten to know our Australian branch. They’ve traveled the east coast of the U.S. visiting my family multiple times; two of them crashed my wedding in Baltimore.
I’ve also visited them in Sydney on three occasions, and on each trip, we’ve repeated the same ritual: having drinks overlooking Bondi Beach at a clubhouse founded by Australian veterans of World War II’s North Africa campaign.
It would be wrong to say Bondi is unlike any other beach I’ve been to; in fact, it’s one of several beaches nestled in coves along the southeastern shore of Sydney, all equally inviting and picturesque. But Bondi is the one I will always think of as our family beach in Australia, and the veterans’ clubhouse as our local pub. It’s a place where I got to rediscover my family in a way that all too many Jewish Americans will never get to do, reuniting with the descendants of relatives who escaped the horrors of the Holocaust and found refuge in a new home.
My great-grandfather, an old-school Bundist, probably would have described our family’s immigration to Boston as doikayt, the Yiddish word for “hereness” that celebrates the diversity of the Jewish diaspora and our ability to thrive wherever we end up, often against difficult odds. I can’t help but think of doikayt whenever I think of Bondi Beach and the country that welcomed my extended family when other countries would not. It symbolizes more than just survival – it symbolizes renewal, prosperity, and resilience.
Bondi Beach may be 9,800 miles away from my current home — effectively on the opposite side of the world — but it will also be here for me. It’s become my home away from home, and a place for joyful reunions that defy all odds. And it would never have been possible if Australia had not opened its arms to my extended family.
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Sydney Opera House lit by giant menorah as vigils for Bondi Beach victims take place across Australia
(JTA) — The Sydney Opera House was illuminated by a large menorah Monday night, a solemn tribute to the 15 lives lost the previous day in an antisemitic terror attack that rocked Australia’s Jewish community.
The projected menorah, displayed on the iconic opera house’s largest sail, was called for by the premier of New South Wales, Chris Minns.
“Lighting the Opera House is a simple but powerful gesture: a message to the world that we cherish our Jewish community, that we honour their courage, and that we stand with them in solidarity and love,” Minns said in a statement. “Tonight, those candles are a symbol of resilience and a reminder that even in darkness, we choose to stand with one another.”
The light of the menorah was one of several acts of remembrance that sprung up across Australia on Monday, a day after two terrorists opened fire on a ChabadHanukkah event on Bondi Beach, killing 15 and injuring at least 40.
In an interview with the Australian broadcaster ABC on Monday, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the two gunmen “weren’t part of a wider cell,” and had “engaged in this act of antisemitism, driven by ideology.”
Hundreds of bouquets were placed around a large menorah in front of the Bondi Pavilion on Monday, where more than 1,000 people gathered for a vigil, according to ABC.
“Yesterday was a tragic event, which words cannot explain,” Rabbi Yossi Shuchat told those gathered as he lit two candles to mark the second night of Hanukkah. “Lightness will always persevere; darkness cannot continue where there is light.”
At the vigil, a Jewish activist, Michelle Berkon, was removed by police for wearing a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headscarf that has become a symbol of anti-Israel protest, according to The Australian.
In Sydney’s Hyde Park, hundreds also gathered for an interfaith ceremony where speeches were given by First Nation community members and spokespeople from the Jewish Council of Australia and the Australian Imams Council.
“So many in our Jewish community have received messages of love from leaders in different faith communities, from Palestinian friends and friends around this country, and in so doing, we are now learning we are all just flesh and blood, and we are all also the light,” said Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins from the Emmanuel Synagogue in Woollahra, according to ABC.
The Caulfield Shule, a synagogue in a suburb of Melbourne that serves a large Jewish community, was also packed to capacity by 2,000 people on Monday.
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