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Can an idyllic dream of Israel ever be reality? She says: ‘Coexistence, My Ass’
“I promise, I’m only staying for seven minutes, not 70 years,” Israeli comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi said at the 2019 Palestine Comedy Festival in East Jerusalem.
The Palestinian crowd exploded in laughter. Shuster Eliassi doubled down.
“By the way, this is Amer’s joke, I stole it.” She gestured to Amer Zahr, the festival’s founder. “It’s mine now, God promised it to me!”
For a Jewish Israeli (and the first Jewish performer to play the Palestine Comedy Festival) to tell this joke to an audience of Palestinians requires an extraordinary level of chutzpah. Fortunately, for all of us, Shuster Eliassi — subject of the new documentary Coexistence, My Ass, in which this scene appears — has that in spades.
Coexistence, My Ass, which follows Shuster Eliassi, a 38-year-old Israeli Jewish comedian and activist, over five tumultuous years — including the Oct. 7 attacks and ensuing war — opens in select theaters next week. The film, directed by Amber Fares, is ostensibly about the shaping of Shuster Eliassi’s one-woman stand-up show as she works to incorporate more of her politics into her comedy, which she performs in Hebrew, Arabic and English. She began performing standup after pivoting away from a United Nations job, newly skeptical of the peace movement in which she was raised.
Because Shuster Eliassi is a product of Wahat al Salaam/Neve Shalom — a name that means “Oasis of Peace,” and belongs to the only intentionally integrated Israeli-Palestinian community in the Middle East. World leaders and celebrities like Hillary Clinton and Jane Fonda have visited her village to witness the admittedly beautiful example of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians it provides.
But as grateful as Shuster Eliassi is for her home, she’s furious at what she sees as the lack of political co-resistance from liberal Israeli Jews. “I’m mad and not in the mood for dialogue, and I don’t think there are two equal sides,” Ranin, Shuster Eliassi’s Palestinian best friend and fellow resident of Wahat al Salaam, vents at one point. “There’s one strong side that’s fucking over the other side.”
Coexistence, My Ass makes unbearably clear that merely coexisting is not enough. Yet I fear that instead of provoking a deeper self-reflection, the documentary will become a talking point for liberal Zionist Jews seeking to prove that Israel is worth loving and that true coexistence is possible. That takeaway is not inaccurate, but it is incomplete.
As Shuster Eliassi, the daughter of an Iranian Jewish mother and Ashkenazi father, describes it, Wahat al Salaam/Neve Shalom was an idyllic, if immensely unusual, place to grow up. Her parents are devout left-wingers; some of her earliest memories are of being home alone with her mother while her father was in prison for refusing to serve in the military in the occupied West Bank. Early in the film, she recalls him explaining to her as a child that they would not be barbequing on Israeli Independence Day out of respect for their Palestinian neighbors.
Shuster Eliassi’s bilingual education and her deep relationships with Palestinians in her hometown are an enviable sight for many who desire peace in the Holy Land. Wahat al Salaam/Neve Shalom is not perfect, but the documentary shows that there is a very real sense of idyllic optimism in its way of life. Shuster Eliassi’s humor is infectious, and it charms and connects her to people who are very different.
Yet the town — which as of 2023 had a population of 313 — and the children it produces are an extreme minority in Israel.
Despite the fact that 20% of Israel’s citizens are Palestinian — including one quarter of Israel’s doctors, and a whopping 49% of the pharmacists — most Israelis are not raised in a society that teaches them to be mindful that Israeli Independence Day is also Nakba Day. The documentary suggests that even among self-described liberal Israelis—the kinds of citizens who poured into the streets to protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial reform bill, and later, for the return of the hostages — that the concerns of the Palestinians are an afterthought. People like Shuster Eliassi, who continue to consider the occupation as the root cause of Israel’s suffering, are deluded radicals.
Over and over in the film, she is told by fellow Israelis that she is a traitor to her people. Even those who do not outright denounce her tend to feel that her focus on Palestinian rights and self-determination is misguided.
“I agree with you about the occupation,” one woman tells her at a Tel Aviv protest against the judicial reform, “and still, first and foremost, we need to protect our home.” At another judicial reform protest, an older man is enraged by Shuster Eliassi’s speech telling demonstrators that “there’s no such thing as democracy with occupation.” “You’re an enemy of the state!” he screams.
One of the most telling moments of the film is when Shuster Eliassi’s friend Elad, a fellow comedian, tells a story about his childhood growing up in Pisgat Ze’ev, a settlement within East Jerusalem. He describes how on Yom Kippur, still clad in white from services, he and his friends would go stand on the highway overpass and drop stones onto Palestinian cars.
“That was our ‘hang,’” he says dryly.
Shuster Eliassi asks why he thinks they did that. “Because someone instructs them to,” he says. “A fifth grader doesn’t just wake up one morning and decide to go throw stones.”
The point of documentary filmmaking is to get a slice of reality on the record. Shuster Eliassi’s slice is captivating, and I sincerely hope that her story inspires people and gives them a deeper understanding of both the Israeli psyche, and what co-resisting with Palestinians looks like.
Because the whole point of Shuster Eliassi’s comedy and activism is that coexistence is a goal that can’t be achieved without action. Instead of wondering why there is only one Neve Shalom/Wahat as Salaam in all of Israel — “The State of Israel doesn’t support our project,” community spokeswoman Samah Salaime says at one point — I worry that most American Jewish viewers will walk from the film complacent that it exists at all.
After two utterly miserable years, the Jewish community is desperate for stories of hope, which Coexistence, My Ass provides. Yet especially in the aftermath of a fragile ceasefire, when Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are confronting utter devastation and violence, the story of a dynamic comedian speaking truth to power is an opportunity to examine our own capacity for solidarity.
The emphasis on co-resistance, not simply coexistence, is laid bare late in the documentary, as Shuster Eliassi and her parents watch the news of violent riots in May 2021 in mixed Jewish and Arab cities. In Bat Yam, an Arab driver is pulled from his car and nearly beaten to death in front of a television camera crew.
“Aba,” Shuster Eliassi says to her father, “in this moment of truth, the Jews are nowhere to be found. They’re not in the struggle.”
Even the village WhatsApp feed, she remarks, during a moment of existential struggle for its Palestinian residents, is full of “love and light” activism from the Jews, versus an expression of true solidarity.
“They want to get back to the coexistence template,” she says, “and that’s not what’s needed now.”
The post Can an idyllic dream of Israel ever be reality? She says: ‘Coexistence, My Ass’ appeared first on The Forward.
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As 1000+ rabbis sign anti-Mamdani letter, others decry mounting ‘red lines’ in Jewish communities
(JTA) — Two days after Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove delivered a sermon urging congregants to vote against Zohran Mamdani, rabbis across the country were asked to sign a letter quoting him.
By the time it was published Wednesday, 650 rabbis and cantors had done so, adding their names calling out the “political normalization” of anti-Zionism among figures like Mamdani, the New York City mayoral frontrunner.
By Friday, the letter had more than 1,000 signatories, making it one of the most-signed rabbinic letters in U.S. history.
But Cosgrove, the senior rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue on the Upper East Side, was not one of them.
“As a policy, I do not sign group letters,” he said in an interview.
“My fear of such letters is they can flatten subjects and reduce complex issues to ‘Who’s on a letter and who’s not on a letter?’” he added. “There are other platforms that rabbis can give expression to their leadership.”
As the letter has ricocheted across the country and escaped from rabbis’ inboxes to their congregants’ social media feeds, it has ignited a wave of scrutiny, plaudits and recriminations. Some people have voiced relief or disappointment in seeing their rabbi’s name on the list — or on not seeing it.
“Jewish communities are circulating spreadsheets of who signed and who didn’t,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein in an essay describing what she said was “a painful public reckoning” taking place both publicly and privately.
“I am not sleeping. These red lines are so dangerous,” responded Rabbi Lauren Grabelle Hermann, of Manhattan’s Society for the Advancement of Judaism, in one of dozens of comments representing a wide range of views. Hermann devoted her Yom Kippur sermon earlier this month to calling on her community to “become an antidote to the polarization and fragmentation in our broader Jewish community and society.”
Now, facing renewed pressure from their congregants over the letter, some New York City rabbis are articulating alternative strategies for responding to a political moment that many Jews are experiencing as fraught and high-stakes.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl wrote to all members of Central Synagogue, the Manhattan Reform congregation where she is senior rabbi, to explain why they would not find her among the letter’s signatories.
“As a Central clergy team, we have spoken from the pulpit in multiple past sermons and will continue to take a clear, unambiguous position on antisemitism, on anti-Zionist rhetoric, and on sharing our deep support for Israel,” she wrote.
But, citing the importance of “separation of church and state,” Buchdahl wrote that “it is up to each of us to vote our conscience.”
“There are political organizations, including Jewish ones, where electoral politics is the core mission. Get involved,” she wrote. “Central Synagogue, however, is a Jewish spiritual home and we want to keep it that way. It remains our conviction that political endorsements of candidates are not in the best interest of our congregation, community, or country.”
Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of the Conservative synagogue Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side sent out a letter of his own to congregants. He said he would not be voting for Mamdani but did not believe it was his role to tell them how to vote. And he raised concerns about what he said was the “shearing off of liberal from conservative liberal communities,” saying that Jews of all political outlooks should be able to pray and act together.
“The Torah commands lo titgodedu, traditionally interpreted to mean, don’t fragment yourselves into factions,” Kalmanofsky wrote. “I fear this happening to Jews. Frankly, I fear it more than I fear an anti-Zionist mayor.”
Rabbi Adam Mintz, who leads the recently rebranded Modern Orthodox congregation Shtiebel @ JCC, said he’d signed a smaller letter from Manhattan Orthodox rabbis urging the importance of voting. But Mintz felt this letter was outside his role.
“I’m a rabbi. I don’t want to take a political stand,” he said. “I understand that some people feel strongly and they want to take a political stand. I think that’s OK, but that’s not my role.”
Rabbi Michelle Dardashti of Kane Street Synagogue, an egalitarian Conservative synagogue in Brooklyn, did not sign the letter, either. She instead took a different approach to addressing her congregants in the lead-up to the election, hosting about 80 of them Tuesday night for an evening of dialogue.
Members representing a spectrum of views took turns sharing questions and concerns ahead of the election. Dardashti said congregants, despite conflicting views, were “deeply engaged and passionate, and spoke beautifully and respectfully.”
“I understand my rabbinic role to be one that creates space for people to learn from each other’s different experiences, and therefore perspectives,” she said.
Some Jewish leaders and groups outright opposed the letter and its message, rather than considering it an ill-advised strategy. Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish organization that endorsed Mamdani, released a statement excoriating the letter and its signatories for distracting from what it said was the real issue: Donald Trump.
“These Jewish leaders are doing Trump and the MAGA movement’s work for them: dividing our pro-democracy movement at a time when we need to be united to beat back fascism,” the statement read.
Josh Whinston, a rabbi in Ann Arbor, Michigan, expressed skepticism on social media about the letter’s origin and intentions, and noted that he did not sign it.
“This was not a call for moral clarity; it was a political move aimed at influencing a local race in New York City,” he wrote.
Upon first reading it, Whinston wrote that he “agreed with parts of what it said,” and that he “considered signing.” But, hoping to learn more about the Jewish Majority, the group behind the letter, Whinston wrote, “The site offered no substance. There was no mission, no vision, no leadership, no staff.”
The Jewish Majority’s goal, as stated on its website, is to counterbalance left-wing “fringe groups” like Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, which they say “weaponize the Jewish identity of some of their members to call for policy recommendations that are rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community.”
The executive director of the Jewish Majority, Jonathan Schulman, is a former longtime AIPAC staffer. In an interview, Schulman said he wrote the letter’s first draft before it underwent rounds of edits from about 40 rabbis of different denominations.
The inspiration came when “Rabbi Cosgrove’s sermon started making the rounds,” he said, adding, “By Sunday morning, rabbis were reaching out to me saying, ‘This is the kind of sentiment we’re feeling all over the country.’”
Unlike Cosgrove’s sermon, which included an endorsement of Andrew Cuomo, the letter does not mention either of Mamdani’s opponents. It does, however, say that political figures like “Zohran Mamdani refuse to condemn violent slogans, deny Israel’s legitimacy, and accuse the Jewish state of genocide,” and calls on Americans to “stand up for candidates who reject antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric, and who affirm Israel’s right to exist in peace and security.”
Schulman recalled being told, “‘There’s the issue of Zohran Mamdani and calls to globalize the intifada and all this, but there’s anti-Zionist candidates running for mayor in Somerville, Massachusetts, in Minneapolis, Seattle — this is becoming normalized, this is becoming mainstream.’”
Rabbi Mark Miller of Temple Beth El in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, is one of the rabbis who helped edit the letter. He said part of his goal was to help clarify its nature as being national rather than local.
“This was not an attempt for the rest of us to get involved in New York politics,” Miller said. “It’s highlighting it, but the issue is that everywhere we are, this is a concern.”
Signatories on the letter include rabbis from across the United States, and even outside the country.
Rabbi Brigitte Rosenberg, the senior rabbi of a Reform congregation in St. Louis, signed the letter, and said the message about anti-Zionism resonated with her on a national level.
“Mamdani was the big race that was talked about in this, but it’s come up in other races, right?” Rosenberg said, pointing to the comeback bid of “Squad” member Cori Bush to represent St. Louis in Congress.
Rabbi Jeremy Barras from Miami said a number of his congregants have residences in New York, and “they’re just terrified.”
“But I would’ve signed it if it was the same issue in any city in America,” Barras said. “It just happens to be true that we’re a little more sensitive because so many of our families have connections in New York.”
Both Barras and Rosenberg said they couldn’t remember an open letter signed by this many rabbis. There have in fact been examples of open letters being signed by 1,000-plus rabbis, including an appeal to open Palestine to Jews in 1945; a 2017 letter calling on Trump to support refugees and a letter from earlier this year demanding Israel stop “using starvation as a weapon of war.”
Yehuda Kurtzer, co-president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, affirmed that open letters like the one distributed by the Jewish Majority are nothing new, and said there is “definitely a tension that emerges” for those expected to sign. Endorsements from the pulpit, on the other hand, are “new terrain,” he said, noting the Trump administration’s decision to stop enforcement of an IRS rule barring political endorsements from religious institutions.
“We felt pretty strongly that rabbis should not generally do this, and there’s a whole variety of reasons,” Kurtzer said. “It’s a plausible scenario that politicians will start doing quid pro quos with religious leaders around their needs. Once you do it once there’s an expectation that you’ll do it all the time.”
Some of the rabbis who signed say they weren’t making a partisan political statement. Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side and the leader of a Zionist organization within the Reform movement, acknowledged “worries” about alienating some congregants. But, like others who’ve come out against Mamdani, Hirsch said it was non-partisan to speak out against someone whose rhetoric could compromise Jewish safety.
“There’s always the risk that people will understand you in a partisan way, especially since we’re living in such a hyper-partisan atmosphere now,” Hirsch said. “But it’s a risk that we have to take because the stakes are so high.”
Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El made a similar point. “I’m not going to tell people who they ought to vote for. But I do think it’s important for me to let them know what I think they ought to be thinking about when they vote,” he said, pointing to issues like “the well-being of the State of Israel and the safety of the Jewish community.”
For Cosgrove, whose synagogue is located 20 blocks from Davidson’s, the division that’s arisen since his sermon is something to grieve.
“It deeply saddens me that, in a moment where the Jewish community should be thinking about the external threats that our community faces, that we should be spending an iota of energy on that which exacerbates any fault lines,” Cosgrove said.
The post As 1000+ rabbis sign anti-Mamdani letter, others decry mounting ‘red lines’ in Jewish communities appeared first on The Forward.
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Mamdani has created ‘great fear,’ and Jewish voters are ‘more motivated than I have ever seen,’ Cuomo says
Andrew Cuomo believes he’s made an effective case to Jewish voters, particularly those opposed to Zohran Mamdani or concerned about his statements on Israel. In an interview on Friday, Cuomo insisted that “the truth” will help him pull off an upset in the election for New York City mayor, despite lagging in all public polls.
Cuomo said that since his defeat in the Democratic primary, there’s an increased awareness of Mamdani’s rhetoric and positions, which will be key to the former governor’s success.
“Look, I think there’s so much information out there now that the voters know the emes,” Cuomo said, using the Yiddish word for truth. “And the emes is the reason I’m going to win.”
Mamdani’s positions on Israel have roiled New York’s Jewish community — the largest outside of Israel, as he has faced scrutiny for: refusing to outright condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” calling the Gaza war a “genocide,” and pledging to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited the city.
Earlier this week, Mamdani made a direct appeal to Brooklyn’s Hasidic community, an influential constituency that often votes based on rabbinical guidance and supported Cuomo in the primary and Eric Adams in 2021.
In an open letter written in Hasidic Yiddish and published in Yiddish-language newspapers, Mamdani highlighted his plans to combat antisemitism and his proposals on affordability and childcare vouchers. Mamdani pledged on Wednesday to retain police commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish, which was viewed as a gesture to reassure Jewish New Yorkers worried about rising antisemitism.
Cuomo said that in his conversations with Jewish leaders and voters, he has “sensed a real fear” of what would happen if Mamdani got elected.
“The level of concern in the Jewish community is frighteningly high,” he said. Cuomo suggested that anxious Jewish voters “are more motivated than I have ever seen them in politics.”
Cuomo spent Friday meeting with Orthodox leaders in Flatbush, where he earned the endorsement of the Flatbush Jewish Community Coalition, the same influential group that Adams credited with helping secure his 2021 victory.
The former governor also addressed remarks made earlier in the day by Mamdani, who accused his opponents of targeting him because he’s the first Muslim favored to become mayor of New York. “I thought that if I behaved well enough or bit my tongue enough in the face of racist, baseless attacks, all while returning back to my central message, it would allow me to be more than just my faith,” Mamdani said in a speech outside a mosque in The Bronx. “I was wrong.”
Cuomo pushed back, saying his campaign against Mamdani is rooted not in religion but in the democratic socialist’s own record. “I think Mamdani has created great fear among the Jewish community and many other communities,” he said. “He is affirmatively offensive. It has nothing to do with his being Muslim. It has to do with what he says.”
Also on Friday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who had until now resisted weighing in on the mayoral race, endorsed Mamdani. In a statement, Jeffries said Mamdani has promised “to focus on keeping every New Yorker safe, including the Jewish community.”
A recent Quinnipiac poll showed Mamdani trailing Cuomo by 31 points among Jewish voters, while maintaining a double-digit lead citywide. Just 22% of Jewish voters view Mamdani favorably, while 67% hold an unfavorable opinion. The survey found that a plurality of likely voters share Mamdani’s views on the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Early voting in the election begins on Saturday.
The post Mamdani has created ‘great fear,’ and Jewish voters are ‘more motivated than I have ever seen,’ Cuomo says appeared first on The Forward.
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As 1000+ rabbis sign anti-Mamdani letter, others decry mounting ‘red lines’ in Jewish communities
Two days after Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove delivered a sermon urging congregants to vote against Zohran Mamdani, rabbis across the country were asked to sign a letter quoting him.
By the time it was published Wednesday, 650 rabbis and cantors had done so, adding their names calling out the “political normalization” of anti-Zionism among figures like Mamdani, the New York City mayoral frontrunner.
By Friday, the letter had more than 1,000 signatories, making it one of the most-signed rabbinic letters in U.S. history.
But Cosgrove, the senior rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue on the Upper East Side, was not one of them.
“As a policy, I do not sign group letters,” he said in an interview.
“My fear of such letters is they can flatten subjects and reduce complex issues to ‘Who’s on a letter and who’s not on a letter?’” he added. “There are other platforms that rabbis can give expression to their leadership.”
As the letter has ricocheted across the country and escaped from rabbis’ inboxes to their congregants’ social media feeds, it has ignited a wave of scrutiny, plaudits and recriminations. Some people have voiced relief or disappointment in seeing their rabbi’s name on the list — or on not seeing it.
“Jewish communities are circulating spreadsheets of who signed and who didn’t,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein in an essay describing what she said was “a painful public reckoning” taking place both publicly and privately.
“I am not sleeping. These red lines are so dangerous,” responded Rabbi Lauren Grabelle Hermann, of Manhattan’s Society for the Advancement of Judaism, in one of dozens of comments representing a wide range of views. Hermann devoted her Yom Kippur sermon earlier this month to calling on her community to “become an antidote to the polarization and fragmentation in our broader Jewish community and society.”
Now, facing renewed pressure from their congregants over the letter, some New York City rabbis are articulating alternative strategies for responding to a political moment that many Jews are experiencing as fraught and high-stakes.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl wrote to all members of Central Synagogue, the Manhattan Reform congregation where she is senior rabbi, to explain why they would not find her among the letter’s signatories.
“As a Central clergy team, we have spoken from the pulpit in multiple past sermons and will continue to take a clear, unambiguous position on antisemitism, on anti-Zionist rhetoric, and on sharing our deep support for Israel,” she wrote.
But, citing the importance of “separation of church and state,” Buchdahl wrote that “it is up to each of us to vote our conscience.”
“There are political organizations, including Jewish ones, where electoral politics is the core mission. Get involved,” she wrote. “Central Synagogue, however, is a Jewish spiritual home and we want to keep it that way. It remains our conviction that political endorsements of candidates are not in the best interest of our congregation, community, or country.”
Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of the Conservative synagogue Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side sent out a letter of his own to congregants. He said he would not be voting for Mamdani but did not believe it was his role to tell them how to vote. And he raised concerns about what he said was the “shearing off of liberal from conservative liberal communities,” saying that Jews of all political outlooks should be able to pray and act together.
“The Torah commands lo titgodedu, traditionally interpreted to mean, don’t fragment yourselves into factions,” Kalmanofsky wrote. “I fear this happening to Jews. Frankly, I fear it more than I fear an anti-Zionist mayor.”
Rabbi Adam Mintz, who leads the recently rebranded Modern Orthodox congregation Shtiebel @ JCC, said he’d signed a smaller letter from Manhattan Orthodox rabbis urging the importance of voting. But Mintz felt this letter was outside his role.
“I’m a rabbi. I don’t want to take a political stand,” he said. “I understand that some people feel strongly and they want to take a political stand. I think that’s OK, but that’s not my role.”
Rabbi Michelle Dardashti of Kane Street Synagogue, an egalitarian Conservative synagogue in Brooklyn, did not sign the letter, either. She instead took a different approach to addressing her congregants in the lead-up to the election, hosting about 80 of them Tuesday night for an evening of dialogue.
Members representing a spectrum of views took turns sharing questions and concerns ahead of the election. Dardashti said congregants, despite conflicting views, were “deeply engaged and passionate, and spoke beautifully and respectfully.”
“I understand my rabbinic role to be one that creates space for people to learn from each other’s different experiences, and therefore perspectives,” she said.
Some Jewish leaders and groups outright opposed the letter and its message, rather than considering it an ill-advised strategy. Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish organization that endorsed Mamdani, released a statement excoriating the letter and its signatories for distracting from what it said was the real issue: Donald Trump.
“These Jewish leaders are doing Trump and the MAGA movement’s work for them: dividing our pro-democracy movement at a time when we need to be united to beat back fascism,” the statement read.
Josh Whinston, a rabbi in Ann Arbor, Michigan, expressed skepticism on social media about the letter’s origin and intentions, and noted that he did not sign it.
“This was not a call for moral clarity; it was a political move aimed at influencing a local race in New York City,” he wrote.
Upon first reading it, Whinston wrote that he “agreed with parts of what it said,” and that he “considered signing.” But, hoping to learn more about the Jewish Majority, the group behind the letter, Whinston wrote, “The site offered no substance. There was no mission, no vision, no leadership, no staff.”
The Jewish Majority’s goal, as stated on its website, is to counterbalance left-wing “fringe groups” like Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, which they say “weaponize the Jewish identity of some of their members to call for policy recommendations that are rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community.”
The executive director of the Jewish Majority, Jonathan Schulman, is a former longtime AIPAC staffer. In an interview, Schulman said he wrote the letter’s first draft before it underwent rounds of edits from about 40 rabbis of different denominations.
The inspiration came when “Rabbi Cosgrove’s sermon started making the rounds,” he said, adding, “By Sunday morning, rabbis were reaching out to me saying, ‘This is the kind of sentiment we’re feeling all over the country.’”
Unlike Cosgrove’s sermon, which included an endorsement of Andrew Cuomo, the letter does not mention either of Mamdani’s opponents. It does, however, say that political figures like “Zohran Mamdani refuse to condemn violent slogans, deny Israel’s legitimacy, and accuse the Jewish state of genocide,” and calls on Americans to “stand up for candidates who reject antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric, and who affirm Israel’s right to exist in peace and security.”
Schulman recalled being told, “‘There’s the issue of Zohran Mamdani and calls to globalize the intifada and all this, but there’s anti-Zionist candidates running for mayor in Somerville, Massachusetts, in Minneapolis, Seattle — this is becoming normalized, this is becoming mainstream.’”
Rabbi Mark Miller of Temple Beth El in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, is one of the rabbis who helped edit the letter. He said part of his goal was to help clarify its nature as being national rather than local.
“This was not an attempt for the rest of us to get involved in New York politics,” Miller said. “It’s highlighting it, but the issue is that everywhere we are, this is a concern.”
Signatories on the letter include rabbis from across the United States, and even outside the country.
Rabbi Brigitte Rosenberg, the senior rabbi of a Reform congregation in St. Louis, signed the letter, and said the message about anti-Zionism resonated with her on a national level.
“Mamdani was the big race that was talked about in this, but it’s come up in other races, right?” Rosenberg said, pointing to the comeback bid of “Squad” member Cori Bush to represent St. Louis in Congress.
Rabbi Jeremy Barras from Miami said a number of his congregants have residences in New York, and “they’re just terrified.”
“But I would’ve signed it if it was the same issue in any city in America,” Barras said. “It just happens to be true that we’re a little more sensitive because so many of our families have connections in New York.”
Both Barras and Rosenberg said they couldn’t remember an open letter signed by this many rabbis. There have in fact been examples of open letters being signed by 1,000-plus rabbis, including an appeal to open Palestine to Jews in 1945; a 2017 letter calling on Trump to support refugees and a letter from earlier this year demanding Israel stop “using starvation as a weapon of war.”
Yehuda Kurtzer, co-president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, affirmed that open letters like the one distributed by the Jewish Majority are nothing new, and said there is “definitely a tension that emerges” for those expected to sign. Endorsements from the pulpit, on the other hand, are “new terrain,” he said, noting the Trump administration’s decision to stop enforcement of an IRS rule barring political endorsements from religious institutions.
“We felt pretty strongly that rabbis should not generally do this, and there’s a whole variety of reasons,” Kurtzer said. “It’s a plausible scenario that politicians will start doing quid pro quos with religious leaders around their needs. Once you do it once there’s an expectation that you’ll do it all the time.”
Some of the rabbis who signed say they weren’t making a partisan political statement. Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side and the leader of a Zionist organization within the Reform movement, acknowledged “worries” about alienating some congregants. But, like others who’ve come out against Mamdani, Hirsch said it was non-partisan to speak out against someone whose rhetoric could compromise Jewish safety.
“There’s always the risk that people will understand you in a partisan way, especially since we’re living in such a hyper-partisan atmosphere now,” Hirsch said. “But it’s a risk that we have to take because the stakes are so high.”
Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El made a similar point. “I’m not going to tell people who they ought to vote for. But I do think it’s important for me to let them know what I think they ought to be thinking about when they vote,” he said, pointing to issues like “the well-being of the State of Israel and the safety of the Jewish community.”
For Cosgrove, whose synagogue is located 20 blocks from Davidson’s, the division that’s arisen since his sermon is something to grieve.
“It deeply saddens me that, in a moment where the Jewish community should be thinking about the external threats that our community faces, that we should be spending an iota of energy on that which exacerbates any fault lines,” Cosgrove said.
—
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