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Extraordinary lives: 18 notable New York Jews who died in 2022
(New York Jewish Week) — Recalling the lives of what obituary writer Marilyn Johnson has called the “important dead” is one of the honors and pleasures of reading — and writing — daily journalism. Jewish tradition teaches that every life is of infinite value, but many people make their marks in ways that inspire readers to pause and ponder on the sheer variety of human endeavor.
In the case of the New York Jewish Week, we’ve been honored to remember those who died in 2022 and whose lives represent the diversity of Jewish experience and what it means to be a New Yorker. Below, we recall 18 Jewish New Yorkers whose contributions to religion, the arts, communal life, popular entertainment, public affairs or just their loving families were either the subject of an obituary that we had written, or who came to our attention thanks to their friends and relatives. May their memories be for a blessing.
David Henoch
Recent high school graduate who died doing what he loved.
Henoch and his parents, sisters, brothers-in-law and niece the day of his graduation from SAR High School in the Bronx, June 13, 2022. (Courtesy Henoch family)
The tight-knit Modern Orthodox community in the Bronx, where David Henoch grew up and attended the SAR Jewish day schools, remembered him as a curious, sensitive and empathetic leader among his peers, with a deep sense of humor and excitement for many different areas of life. Friends and family described “Divi” as an avid adventurer whose favorite activities — many of which he loved to do with his father Avi — included snowboarding, sailing and basketball. He was a certified scuba diver who died at 18 July 10 in a diving accident in Florida, a month after his graduation from SAR High School. He was buried in Israel, where he had planned to spend a year studying before going to college. “Divi always challenged me to improve. He was open to anyone and everyone’s ways no matter how mild or extreme,” a friend, neighbor and classmate recalled, adding, “He was as fearless as it gets and never once was he afraid to be himself.”
Michael Lang
A promoter behind the 1969 Woodstock festival.
Woodstock Music Festival co-producer Michael Lang attends a celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock at the at Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC in New York CIty, Aug. 13, 2009. (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
Michael Lang, the Jewish co-creator of 1969’s legendary Woodstock Music and Art Fair, died on Jan. 8 in Manhattan. He was 77. A concert promoter who was just 24 at the time, he was one of several Jewish collaborators who made the generation-defining festival, billed as “Three Days of Peace and Music,” happen. Other key players included music executive and promoter Artie Kornfeld — another Brooklyn-born Jew — and businessman Joel Rosenman, a Jewish native of Long Island. Lang was born in 1944 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Lang credited his Jewish parents, who were small-business owners, with teaching him the skills he needed to pull off an event of such scale. His father, he said, “gave me a strategy for getting out of tough situations: take charge and keep moving. Step back just enough to think clearly, and trust your instincts.”
Edward Schoenfeld
A Brooklyn-born maven of Chinese cuisine.
Ed Schoenfeld speaks at a Food Network event in New York City, Oct. 18, 2014. (Michael N. Todaro/Getty Images for NYCWFF)
Like a lot of Jews growing up in Brooklyn, Edward Schoenfeld learned to love Chinese food. He made it a career, opening a series of famed restaurants that introduced New Yorkers to the wide variety of Chinese cuisine. In 1973, he got his first restaurant job as assistant to restaurateur David Keh when he opened Uncle Tai’s, one of the first Hunan restaurants in New York. He went on to a career developing and running restaurants over some four decades. Among his well-regarded Chinese restaurants were Auntie Yuan and Pig Heaven, both on the Upper East Side, as well as Red Farm, a farm-to-table restaurant in Greenwich Village, which opened in 2010. “My personal joke is that I learned to speak Yiddish in the Chinese restaurant from my customers,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2013. Schoenfeld died Jan. 14 at 72.
Lori Zabar
A lawyer and activist devoted to landmarks — including her family’s gourmet food emporium.
Lori Zabar, left, with Kate Wood and David Sprouls at the book launch of “Interior Landmarks: Treasures of New York,” at The Four Seasons, Oct. 8, 2015. Zabar was the first director of the NYC Historic Properties Fund at the New York Landmarks Conservancy. (New York School of Interior Design)
Lori Zabar, a lawyer, author, antiques dealer and historic preservationist whose grandparents founded Zabar’s, the Upper West Side gourmet food emporium, died Feb. 3 the age of 67. The cause of death was cancer. The first director of the NYC Historic Properties Fund at the New York Landmarks Conservancy, she died shortly before the publication of “Zabar’s: A Family Story, with Recipes” in May. In an excerpt from her book published in the New York Jewish Week, she wrote about the perfectionism of her grandfather Louis when he opened the first reiteration of what became the famed “appy” store and a landmark in its own right: “For this new venture, Louis would sample deli meats and fish from various purveyors before he would commit to doing business with those suppliers. To taste fish, Louis would tour dozens of local smokehouses, large and small, mostly in Brooklyn and Queens. He was notorious among the wholesalers for rejecting more than he accepted. His retail mantra was simple: the highest quality at the lowest price.”
Sheldon Silver
A powerful politician undone by a corruption scandal.
Then-Speaker of the New York State Assembly Sheldon Silver walks in front of the State Capitol in Albany, New York, March 12, 2008. (Daniel Barry/Getty Images)
Sheldon Silver, who for two decades wielded enormous power as the speaker of the New York State Assembly before being brought down by a corruption scandal, died Jan. 24 at 77 at Otisville Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where he had been serving a 6 1/2-year sentence on federal corruption charges. An Orthodox Jew and Democrat who represented New York’s Lower East Side, Silver was one of the most influential political leaders in the state, using the power of his office to guide legislation and stall opposition even when, for 12 years, Republican George Pataki was governor and Republicans held a majority in the state Senate. Silver’s arrest and conviction sent shock waves through New York’s Jewish establishment. “Shelly Silver was one of the strongest forces for progressive issues in the New York State Legislature,” Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, a Jewish Democrat from Manhattan, told the New York Times. “It’s a tragedy that those achievements have been overshadowed by his criminal record.”
Pinchas Stolper
A leader of the Orthodox Union and its powerhouse youth movement.
Rabbi Pinchas Stolper delivers a Passover message to NCSY alumni on April 10, 2014. (YouTube)
Rabbi Pinchas Stolper, a pioneer in making Orthodox Judaism accessible to young people, died on May 25 at 90. Stolper helped turn the National Council of Synagogue Youth into a national powerhouse. He served as the first full-time national director of NCSY and as the longest-serving executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, and wrote a series of books making the holidays and Shabbat more accessible to younger readers. He retired from the leadership of the Orthodox Union in 2000, the same year that a rabbi under his supervision. Baruch Lanner, was accused of years of sexual and physical abuse. In the first report about the scandal, he told the New York Jewish Week that he had heard several complaints from young women about improper behavior by Lanner, but lacking specific allegations, let the youth leader off with a warning.
Miriam Winiarz
A Staten Island widow who was devoted to outreach.
Miriam Winiarz and her husband Rabbi Mendy Winiarz were known for their outreach to Jews on Staten Island. (Courtesy)
Miriam Winiarz lived through the unthinkable: In 2015, her husband Dovid Winiarz died in a Maryland car crash, leaving the Staten Island mother alone to raise their 10 children. And yet, after losing her husband, she remained a pillar in the borough’s Jewish community, Mendy Mirocznik, president of the Council of Jewish Organizations of Staten Island, told silive.com. She continued the kiruv, or outreach work that she and her husband had conducted before his death, bringing other Jews closer to their tradition through social media and through his rabbinate. “This was somebody who, when they got wind of the situation, somebody had a problem, they would interrupt their own lives and make you a priority,” said Mirocznik. Miriam Winiarz died in early December at the age of 56 after what was described as a brief illness. Her funeral at Young Israel of Staten Island in Willowbrook drew more than a thousand people. A fund has been set up to support her children, the youngest of whom is 14.
Philip Pearlstein
Modern realist painter and champion of Jewish art.
Modern realist painter Philip Pearlstein photographed in his New York studio in 1971. (Jack Mitchell/Getty Images)
Philip Pearlstein, an artist whose painting of nudes revived realistic painting after decades of dominance by abstraction, died in Manhattan on Dec. 17 at age 98. Born in Pittsburgh, he moved to Manhattan in 1949 as a sort of chaperone to a young Andy Warhol. He became an instructor at the Pratt Institute, and taught at Brooklyn College from 1963 until his retirement in 1988. Pearlstein served on the board of the Covenant Foundation in the early 2000s, and , according to Judith Ginsberg, former executive director of the foundation, opened the board to funding Jewish art in a bigger way and promoting the artists Debbie Friedman, Liz Lerman and Liz Swados.
Barbara Roaman
A grandma with a keen fashion sense and commitment to social justice
Barbara Roaman and her granddaughter, Sandy Fox. (Courtesy)
Barbara “Bobby” Roaman, who died on Nov. 6 at 91, was born in Manhattan and lived on the Upper West Side as a child. After attending Syracuse University and Columbia University, where she majored in Spanish, she moved to Long Island with her husband, Richard. In a eulogy shared with the New York Jewish Week, her granddaughter, Sandy Fox — an editor at In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies — remembered both her sense of fashion and her work in the civil rights movement on Long Island:
“Our conversations as a child instilled in me much more than a love of clothing. She taught me values of social justice and tzedakah, or what she would have called charitable giving, and because she wasn’t at all religious, those were the pillars of her Judaism. She and my grandfather were born in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They were upwardly mobile and privileged. In their class status and whiteness, they had blind spots when it came to race. Nevertheless, their commitments to social justice and civil rights were inspiring to me as a child and teen. They were involved in attempts to desegregate Long Island in the 1950s and 1960s. In more recent years, grandma had become involved in a local group called ERASE Racism, and donated to many non-profits that I also care about: Planned Parenthood, Democratic campaigns of all kinds, American Jewish World Service, and so on. It would have been so easy for them to become Republicans, as many Jews in their generation did. But they didn’t…. My mom died when I was 18, and from then on we tried to bridge that cavernous loss that affected us so differently but both so profoundly. She could not replace my mother and I could not replace her daughter, but we came pretty damn close. I sensed that she poured into me everything she wished she had poured into my mother.”
René Slotkin
A survivor of Mengele’s sadistic experiments on twins.
Ita Guttmann and her twins, René and Irene (then Renate), were photographed for Nazi propaganda while they were imprisoned at Theresienstadt. (Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via Irene Guttmann Slotkin Hizme)
René Slotkin, who with his twin sister Renate (Irene) was subjected to Josef Mengele’s infamous medical experiments on twins, died July 10 at age 84. Born in Teplice-Sanov, a city in northern Bohemia, he and his sister were sent, at 4, with their mother, to Theresienstadt. After a year, the three were shipped to Auschwitz. Then they were split up, the children becoming part of the infamous medical experiments conducted by Mengele, the sadistic “Angel of Death.” Orphaned, Slotkin and his sister survived a death march and arrived in New York in 1950. He was married at a young age and, after serving as a sergeant in the U.S. National Guard, worked for a box manufacturing company as a cost estimator. In 2019, he joined the Speakers Bureau at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, sharing his testimony with students. “I am here because of good people, good people everywhere,” he told the museum in an interview.
Sarah Schlesinger
A force in musical theater education.
At NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts , Sarah Schlesinger was the recipient of the David Payne Carter Award and the University Distinguished Teacher Award. (tisch.nyu.edu)
Sarah Schlesinger was an award-winning lyricist and librettist whose works, with composer Mike Reid, included “The Ballad of Little Jo,” “The Last Day,” “Casanova Returns,” “Prairie Songs,” “A Wind in the Willows Christmas” and “In This House.” But her most lasting legacy may well be the composers and lyricists she mentored as an arts professor and dean at the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She joined the program in 1989, served as associate chair of the department from 1995 to 1997, and was named chair in 1998. “Under her leadership, the program produced a huge, international alumni network of artists who are at the forefront of every facet of musical theatre activity: as creators, teachers, scholars and business leaders,” the program said in a statement. “Her insight, razor-sharp mind and her ability to get things done and to identify and encourage faculty, students and alums was frankly staggering in its longevity and reach. Sarah was a force that could make things happen.” Schlesinger died Dec. 14 following an illness.
Menahem Schmelzer
The ‘go-to’ librarian at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Menahem Schmelzer tended perhaps the greatest collection of Judaica in the Western Hemisphere. (Courtesy Jewish Theological Seminary)
In 1966, after a fire gutted the library at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, Menahem Schmelzer led what the flagship Conservative seminary said in a statement was “the extraordinary effort to reopen it, restore it to health, and ultimately open a new Library building in 1983.” When he stepped down as its longtime librarian in 1987, he had watched over the resuscitation of perhaps the greatest collection of Judaica in the Western Hemisphere. Schmelzer, who spent four decades at JTS, also served as provost and held the title of Albert B. and Bernice Cohen Professor Emeritus of Medieval Hebrew Literature and Jewish Bibliography. A Holocaust survivor who was born in Hungary, Schmelzer was also a scholar in his own right, specializing in medieval Hebrew literature and the Jewish liturgical poetry known as piyyut. David Kraemer, the Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian at JTS, remembered his colleague as “the ‘go-to’ person on questions of Jewish bibliography for researchers around the world.” He died on Dec. 10 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.
Steven Salen
Holocaust survivor who dressed presidents
Steve Salen in an undated photo in his Manhattan atelier. (Family)
Born Zoltan Salomon in Czechoslovakia in 1919, Steven Salen first learned tailoring at a trade school run there by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Then the Nazis arrived and they deported Salen. He never saw his parents or seven of his 11 siblings again. But he stuck with his trade, establishing himself after arriving in New York City as a tailor to the elite, making garments for the likes of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Martin Scorsese (and keeping mementoes of their business at his Bayside home). Salen was an old-school, word-of-mouth tailor who started working at FL Dunn on Fifth Avenue in New York, and eventually had his own full-floor atelier on Madison Avenue and 53rd Street, at the heart of the city’s high-fashion district. In 2011, when Salen already topped 90, a New York style blog profiled his shop, noting that it was one of fewer than 30 bespoke tailors in a city that had once been home to more than 300. Salen would work until 95 before retiring; he died Nov. 23 at 103.
Maximilian Lerner
A World War II “Ritchie Boy” who went undercover behind German lines.
Maximilian Lerner served as a translator and interrogated prisoners on behalf of U.S. intelligence during World War II. (Via Museum of Jewish Heritage)
Maximilian Lerner, an Austrian Jewish immigrant, served as a translator and interrogated prisoners on behalf of U.S. intelligence during World War II as a member of the “Ritchie Boys,” a special unit trained in espionage and frontline interrogation. He died Sept. 10 at his home in Manhattan at age 98. Lerner left Austria with his family two months after Germany’s March 1938 annexation of his homeland and, after layovers in Paris and Nice, came to the U.S., via Lisbon, in 1941. After volunteering for the draft, he became one of the 2,000 to 3,000 European-born Jews who learned to interrogate prisoners of war and civilians, interpret and translate for foreign officials, and read codes. “I wore civilian clothes”— posing as German behind enemy lines – “a number of times,” he told the New York Jewish Week in 2004. “This was my war. I would do whatever it took.” After the war, her worked for a horticultural products business and later started his own business in the same field. He also earned a master’s degree in business education from Teachers College at Columbia University in 1952, and wrote two spy novels and an autobiography. In recent years Lerner volunteered at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan, talking to groups about his experiences.
Chave Hecht
A camp director devoted to Jewish outreach.
Rebbetzin Chave Hecht and Rabbi J. J. Hecht receive a dollar and a blessing from the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, before a trip to South Africa in 1989. (Hecht Family/JEM van Chabad.org)
Rebbetzin Chave Hecht, the founder of Camp Emunah Bnos Yaakov Yehudah — an overnight camp for observant Jewish girls — and a host of other educational initiatives originating in the Chabad-Lubavitch community, died Feb. 8 at the age of 95. Born in the East New York section of Brooklyn and educated at public schools, she, along with her husband, the late Rabbi J.J. Hecht, also directed a Jewish summer day camp on Coney Island for public school children, pioneering Chabad’s outreach to non-observant Jewish families. Rebbetzin Hecht ran the day-to-day operations of Camp Emunah for decades, when her husband was back in Brooklyn running his synagogue. “She slept in her office,” her son, Rabbi Sholem Ber Hecht, a Chabad emissary in Queens, told Chabad.org. “She had no secretary; if you called the camp at 7 a.m. or 10 p.m., she answered the phone.”
Frederick Terna
Survivor, Brooklyn artist and “someone to watch” late into his 90s.
Artist Fred Terna, a Holocaust survivor, continued painting well into his late 90s. (Courtesy of Terna)
Holocaust survivor and painter Frederick Terna, who remained active at his Brooklyn studio into his late 90s, died on Dec. 8 at 99. Born in Vienna and raised in Prague, he was imprisoned in four Nazi concentration camps, including Terezin, where he began to make art. Terna moved to New York in 1952; his work was collected by a variety of museums and institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Albertina Collection in Vienna and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Earlier this year he was named to the New York Jewish Week’s “36 to Watch” list of notable Jewish New Yorkers.
Saida Somekh
Immigrant, entrepreneur and loving grandmother.
Saida Somekh demonstrates her cooking skills for her family. (via Instagram)
Saida Somekh, who owned Dora Hosiery, a go-to lingerie shop in Midtown Manhattan for decades, died Nov. 5. She was 94. Her granddaughter, Erin Dana Lichy, a real estate agent and a new cast member on “The Real Housewives of New York,” remembered her in an Instagram post:
“She came from a different world, married very young and was expected to raise a family as a stay-at-home mom with little choice in her major life decisions. Well, that didn’t work for her, so she forged her own path. As a young immigrant with little practice in English, she became a female homeowner, businesswoman and successful entrepreneur…. As a grandmother, she was simply always there, like one’s backbone. She was a pillar of strength. Her presence made me feel safe and warm. She loved purely, deeply and didn’t pass judgment. She was patient. If I ever needed to fix a garment or didn’t have something to wear, she’d sew me something from scratch, however long it took. She was warm to my friends and anyone close to me. She would send us home with bags of food and cook with me for hours if I wanted to learn new a new dish. All I had to do was ask. My kids adored her and she them. They brought her so much joy and watching how prideful she was of them was heartwarming. She had pictures of us all around her house just so she could look at ‘her babies’ every morning when she woke up.”
Freddie Roman
Catskills comedian and keeper of the flame.
Freddie Roman, left and fellow comedian Shecky Greene attend “The Friars Club Salute to Freddie Roman and Stewie Stone” at New Tork’s Pierre Hotel, April 21, 2014. (John Lamparski/WireImage)
Comedian Freddie Roman, who died Nov. at 85, was never a crossover star in the mold of Alan King, Jackie Mason or Joan Rivers — three other Jewish comics with roots in the Catskills. And yet in a capstone to a long and steady career he resurrected the spirit of the Borscht Belt with the 1991 show “Catskills on Broadway” and, as the long-serving dean of the Friars Club, he injected new life into the fading Manhattan showbiz venue by inviting younger comics to join. Born Fred Kirschenbaum in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in Jamaica, Queens, Roman started emceeing at age 15 at the the Crystal Spring Hotel in the Catskills, which was owned by his uncle and grandfather. He soon was performing at hotels and resorts in the region for the largely Jewish crowd. “Catskills on Broadway,” starring him and fellow tummlers Dick Capri, Marilyn Michaels and Mal Z. Lawrence, was a bona fide hit, running for 453 performances. “I’m like the Fidel Castro of comedians,” he once said of his tenure at the Friar’s Club. “I’m president for life.”
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The post Extraordinary lives: 18 notable New York Jews who died in 2022 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Ceasefire and political pressure test U.S.-Israel Iran war pact
Israel is now in a precarious position following President Donald Trump’s sudden declaration of a ceasefire in the Iran war, say experts on security and the Middle East.
On Tuesday evening, President Trump announced in a Truth Social post that he would declare a two-week pause to the war that began on February 28, just an hour and a half before his ultimatum to Iran was set to expire. He had demanded that Tehran reopen the Strait of Hormuz — which had been closed for weeks, choking global energy markets — or face a catastrophic military assault, warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”
The Pakistani Prime Minister, who had mediated between the U.S. and Iran, announced that the truce was “effective immediately” and would apply not only to the U.S. and Iran, but also to “their allies” — namely Israel and Lebanon, both of which had been involved in recent exchanges of fire.
But Israel had other ideas. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — while stating that the U.S. had coordinated with Israel before agreeing to the ceasefire — disputed the Pakistani claim that the ceasefire included Lebanon. Israel has continued to strike its northern neighbor hard in the wake of the announcement.
Netanyahu maintains the U.S. had assured him it would continue to press on issues critical to Israeli security — namely seeking to ensure that “Iran no longer poses a nuclear, missile and terror threat to America, Israel, Iran’s Arab neighbors and the world.” So far, Iran has resisted such demands.
Despite the ceasefire announcement, Iran struck Israel and Gulf countries well into the evening, and Israel, too, carried out several strikes in the immediate aftermath of the announcement.
Split support
The ceasefire has underscored growing differences between Washington and Jerusalem over both the conduct and goals of the war.
According to Jonathan Panikoff, the director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council and a former U.S. intelligence official, Israeli and U.S. objectives were misaligned from the outset. Israel sought not only to degrade Iran’s military capabilities but also to pursue regime change.
For the U.S., “it was always less clear … the regime change question was always much more up in the air, and even on the nuclear program, you haven’t seen nearly as much effort against it in the same way as obviously happened during June,” said Panikoff, referring to the 12-Day-War during which the U.S. targeting Iranian nuclear infrastructure with unprecedented force.
Panikoff also said that coordination between Israel and the U.S. on the ceasefire agreement itself was somewhat dubious. “The U.S. almost certainly talked to Israel about the potential ceasefire, but it’s unlikely that Israel played a meaningful role in the decision,” said Panikoff, who believes Israel would have preferred to continue the war to “get through the remainder of the target list.”
Misaligned public opinion in the two countries regarding the war is likely driving the divergence. While the majority of Americans do not support the war, with 61% saying they do not approve of Trump’s handling of the conflict, Israeli support has remained broad across the political spectrum, even amid sustained missile attacks. For Israelis, confronting Iran is viewed as existential. “Iran is a fundamental thing. On the American side, it just is not the same threat,” Panikoff said.
According to Dana Stroul, the Director of Research at the Washington Institute and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East in the Pentagon, Israel’s actions in the immediate aftermath of the ceasefire reflect that gap. She noted that Israel carried out additional strikes in Iran, “which indicates that they still had more targets on their strike list that they wanted to work through, and they were willing to risk, for a brief moment in time, not complying with the ceasefire to do more.”
Stroul said the U.S.-Iran peace talks scheduled to take place on Friday in Islamabad have exposed further tensions. Disputes over whether Israeli operations in Lebanon should halt have already complicated talks between Washington and Tehran. “The Iranians are saying, ‘if Israel doesn’t stop in Lebanon, we won’t go to Islamabad.’”
As a result, she said, “the issue of Israeli behavior and Israeli military action will become a hinge of whether these negotiations proceed on the ceasefire.”
“Within less than 24 hours, the debate shifted from whether or not the parameters for the talks on Friday in Islamabad are acceptable for U.S. national security interests, to where Israel is within this framework,” said Stroul.
Stroul said that this could also create a moment of “peak vulnerability for Netanyahu,” who tied his political future to his alignment with Trump.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid has already taken a swing at Netanyahu in a post on X, stating: “Netanyahu led us to a strategic collapse. There was here a disgraceful combination of arrogance, irresponsibility, negligent staff work, lies sold to the Americans that damaged the trust between the countries. A military success that turned into a diplomatic disaster.”
He added, “Israel had no influence whatsoever on the agreement signed tonight between the United States and Iran. Netanyahu turned us into a protectorate state that receives instructions over the phone on matters concerning the core of our national security.”
Finger-pointing at Israel
The ceasefire coincided with revelations published in the New York Times on internal White House deliberations as Trump weighed military intervention in Iran earlier this year. According to the Times, Netanyahu used a private meeting with Trump and key U.S. officials at White House to present a plan outlining how the U.S. and Israel could work together to bring down the Islamic Republic, including a montage featuring potential alternative leaders for Iran.
While the presentation appeared to have impressed Trump, the report indicates that the President did not completely buy Netanyahu’s argument that regime change was a viable outcome. Instead, he relied on U.S. intelligence assessments that concluded the U.S. had the capacity to decapitate Iran’s leadership and dismantle its military capabilities, but that hopes for regime change were “detached from reality.”
Based on those assessments, Trump moved forward with a strategy focused on more limited and easily achievable objectives, though working in lockstep with Israel.
The report is unlikely to quell criticism from those who argue that Israel pushed the U.S. toward confrontation with Iran at the expense of U.S. interests.
Panikoff warned of potentially broad political consequences for the longtime allies depending on the outcome of the peace talks and any future fighting. “If this war ends with Iran being in a stronger strategic position regionally.… I think you’re going to get a lot of Republicans, especially in the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, who are going to start to question how this relationship has gone forth. When you combine that with where the Democratic Party is and with Democratic bases right now, I think it portends some real future challenges for the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
The post Ceasefire and political pressure test U.S.-Israel Iran war pact appeared first on The Forward.
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Why I interviewed Mahmoud Khalil
Since he was targeted for deportation by the Trump administration, Mahmoud Khalil has become both a celebrity among those who supported the campus protests against Israel and a villain for Jews who thought the demonstrations fueled antisemitism and sought Israel’s violent destruction.
While Khalil had addressed general allegations that the protests had created a hostile climate on campus in previous interviews — arguing that they may have made students uncomfortable but not unsafe — he had not spoken in detail about some of the most pressing questions for Jews who may have been alarmed by his arrest but were unsure about his actual beliefs.
What did a “free Palestine” — a core demand of the protesters — mean to Khalil?
What did he think about Oct. 7 and Hamas?
And how did he think the protest movement should relate to Jews who don’t share their views?
When a representative for Khalil reached out last month asking whether I wanted to interview him, it presented an opportunity to present his answers to these questions to the Forward’s audience.
I had no illusion that Khalil was going to assuage the concerns of every reader who believe he is antisemitic or otherwise misguided, but I saw my job as trying to understand where he was situated within a protest movement that is gaining political power and influence but remains more fractious than many people outside the movement are aware.
These divisions include divergent views over what the acceptable forms of Palestinian resistance are, what the ultimate objective of anti-Zionism should be, and how the movement should treat Americans — and especially American Jews — who disagree with it.
I know that such distinctions may not matter for those who think that any failure to recognize Israel’s right to maintain a Jewish majority, or opposition to Zionism, period, crosses a red line.
But even those who find anti-Zionism unacceptable may appreciate the opportunity to grapple with how and why a growing number of Americans, including Jews, are turning away from support for Israel in the wake of the wars in Gaza and now Iran. The question of who is going to harness that political sentiment and what they plan to do with it is becoming more important.
I wanted to know where Khalil stood on looming questions.
***
His answers, corroborated through conversations with others who knew and worked with him during the encampments at Columbia as well as his past public statements, were revealing.
Overall, they situated Khalil as a leader of the more conciliatory wing of the protest movement when it came to how it should engage with Israel’s supporters. He has read about and seriously engaged with liberal Zionism, and expressed sympathy for Jews who support Israel; he said Hamas was not a true representative of the Palestinian people, and that it was unacceptable for them to target and kidnap Israeli civilians; and he said that Israeli Jews should remain in a “free Palestine” with full rights.
He supported the statement from protest leaders that condemned a Columbia student who had said “Zionists don’t have a right to live,” opposed the ultimately violent takeover of Hamilton Hall and avoided the slogan “globalize the intifada.”
But his answers also underscored the gulf between even the more moderate protesters and the position of many liberal American Jews, who believe Israel committed war crimes or genocide in Gaza but remain horrified by the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 and think that a two-state solution is the only way to preserve Jewish safety while respecting Palestinian rights.
Khalil wanted to assuage Jewish fears that he believed were at least partly responsible for the appeal of Zionism, and yet he did not acknowledge the full extent of violence on Oct. 7 — that Palestinian militants intentionally killed Israeli civilians — which perfectly epitomized a major source of these fears.
Whatever you may think of Khalil or his political views, I’m glad that the Forward can serve as a forum for people both inside and outside the Jewish community to speak with American Jews and I hope you’re able to learn something about Khalil and the movement he helped lead from our conversation.
The post Why I interviewed Mahmoud Khalil appeared first on The Forward.
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In rallies taking on Israel, a defiant Hasan Piker boosts Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed
(JTA) — ANN ARBOR, Michigan — Outside, in a line that stretched around the block, the hundreds of people who turned out for Abdul el-Sayed’s campaign rally with Hasan Piker gave a range of reasons for showing up.
Some said they liked el-Sayed’s message of Medicare for All, a key plank of the former county health executive’s bid for an open Senate seat. Some were furious about the war in Iran, which the candidate has angrily denounced.
Others just liked the guy. “He’s a really great speaker and a really passionate person,” Natalie Gould, a master’s candidate in public health who had worked with el-Sayed in Detroit, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Inside, though, one issue made the crowd roar louder than any other: any time a speaker, from el-Sayed to Piker to the newly elected student body president, accused Israel of genocide. The progressive movement in which Piker has styled himself a kingmaker, one that is ardently pro-Palestinian while largely dismissive of any claims of antisemitism, was coalescing.
“In the beginning it was a lot lonelier when we spoke out. They used the same exact heinous smear: They said, ‘You’re antisemitic,’” Piker told the crowd. “And back then I felt a lot lonelier. But I don’t feel lonely anymore.”
Piker, the leftist Twitch streamer with millions of followers, was the evening’s biggest draw — and its biggest lightning rod. After el-Sayed announced the two would hold a pair of campaign stops together Tuesday, the streamer’s past clips and comments about Jews and Israel led numerous Jewish leaders and both of el-Sayed’s opponents to denounce the events. Some compared Piker to Nick Fuentes, the openly antisemitic far-right streamer who has divided Republicans. Leading Democrats called for the party to distance itself from Piker altogether.
Hasan Piker looks on as U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed delivers a stump speech in Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 7, 2026. Piker, a popular Twitch streamer accused of antisemitism, prompted controversy for campaigning with El-Sayed. (Andrew Lapin/JTA)
Pushback continued until just before the events started. An hour before the first rally, at Michigan State University, that school’s president and governing board issued a joint statement affirming their campus free speech principles while also condemning antisemitism. The school’s Hillel chapter had already called Piker a “known antisemite,” expressing concern about his appearance.
At the next stop at the University of Michigan, el-Sayed told the crowd that the campus pro-Israel club Students Supporting Israel had planned to protest the event. But the group wasn’t visible outside the building, and the club’s Instagram page announced that its “March Against Extremism” had been “postponed,” which the group attributed to “extenuating circumstances” that it did not explain.
El-Sayed leaned into the energy, embracing Piker onstage and mocking the negative attention the rally had received. The rally overlapped with President Donald Trump’s deadline for Iran to make concessions or “a whole civilization will die,” which led to a temporary ceasefire in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
“Apparently, the most important thing happening on Twitter was whether or not we were going to campaign with Hasan,” he told the crowd. “Somehow Fox News found it fit to cover this rally six f–king times and not talk about the fact the president wants to commit a genocide in Iran.”
Also leaning in were the night’s other speakers, who were all being showcased on Piker’s livestream — where, during downtime in-between speeches, he bemoaned what he described as a bad-faith campaign to paint him as antisemitic. (He also said he’d been hoping to eat at Zingerman’s, a famous Jewish-style gourmet deli in Ann Arbor.)
“I told Piker just now, I was like, ‘You’re never going to be canceled up in Michigan,’” Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the House’s fiercest critic of Israel, said during her own stump speech.
Rep. Summer Lee, of Pennsylvania, also delivered a speech, and Rep. Debbie Dingell, of Michigan, attended but did not speak.
Candidates for local office also stood next to Piker, including Amir Makled, a candidate for the university’s Board of Regents who was the legal defense for the school’s student pro-Palestinian encampment movement.
The crowd was young and diverse in age and race. While Piker received cheers when he shouted out his fans, some of the attendees told JTA they were more mixed on him, while others had little familiarity with his streams. But they all agreed he had juiced El-Sayed’s campaign.
“I mean, there’s tons of people here,” Ann Arbor resident Joey Ryan said while queuing up for the over-capacity rally outside, gesturing behind him. “I remember the Joe Biden Michigan stuff, and it was not like this. I remember the Bernie Sanders rally in early 2020, and it was more like this.”
Ryan said that Piker, like other streamers, operated in the “attention economy” space, where “saying inflammatory things sometimes can get you attention.” But, he said, “I also think it’s been blown completely out of proportion when you have the president of the United States calling Iranians non-human, as an example, to bomb them, and that includes the synagogue that was blown up in Iran today. Like, there are Jews in Iran as well. Is that not antisemitism?”
“Some of the stuff he says is kind of crazy. I’m not going to lie, there’s some stuff he said that I disagree with,” another attendee, a current University of Michigan student who declined to give her name, said of Piker. Content creators, the student said, can “get out over their skis.”
If anything, Piker and el-Sayed became more honed in on Israel as the day went on. At their first East Lansing stop, both made only a handful of comments about Israel and AIPAC. By the time they reached Ann Arbor that evening, the headliners had amped up their broadsides, with Piker referencing a new Pew Research Center study showing that 84% of Democrats under 49 have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Israel.
“There’s only a handful of Democrats that are actually outspoken on this atrocity, outspoken on the relationship that we have with a foreign country that we simply always have to send unlimited billions of dollars to — a country that has health care, mind you,” Piker said. “You do not, but Israel has free health care.” The crowd booed at this line.
(L-r) U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker pose during a rally for El-Sayed, April 7, 2026. (Andrew Lapin/JTA)
As another rallying cry, he told them, “When you feel really sad, when you feel really angry, remind yourself of the worst fascist that you know. It could be Donald Trump, it could be Rabbi Shmuley. They’re going to be very excited if you stop fighting.” (Piker later told JTA that he was referring to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a pro-Israel Twitter gadfly who Piker said was “pro-genocide.”)
The candidate, too, amped up his criticisms of AIPAC in particular. The pro-Israel lobby, which has poured millions of dollars into congressional elections, is facing a resolution of opposition from the Democratic National Committee this week.
“AIPAC tells us that the number one goal of our foreign policy is to align with a foreign government,” el-Sayed said, to boos. “You know, when I talk about AIPAC, everybody says, ‘Well, it’s because you’re Arab Muslim.’ No it’s not. It’s because I’m f–king from Michigan, and I want my tax dollars back in Michigan.”
He also joked that AIPAC ads against him might finally give him something he’s dreamed about. “The one thing you’re supposed to have, as an American Muslim, is a nice beard,” he said. “And I was never gifted with that. But for three months this summer, AIPAC’s going to give me the beard of my dreams.”
At both campaign stops, El-Sayed, who grew up in a heavily Jewish Detroit suburb not far from Temple Israel, the synagogue that was attacked last month, also said he welcomed Jews to his movement.
“All of us love and revere Jewish folk, our Jewish neighbors, the faith of Judaism,” he said in Ann Arbor, to applause. “Trust me, nobody will fight harder against antisemitism than somebody who intimately understands what it’s like to be discriminated against because of how I look.”
He reiterated the point in an interview after the event.
Supporters of Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed cheer Rep. Rashida Tlaib as she denounces Israel during a rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that also featured Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, April 7, 2026. (Andrew Lapin/JTA)
“I am so grateful I’ve grown up in a community with a large proportion of Jewish Americans. I learned a lot from the Jewish tradition. I’m grateful to have been invited to bar and bat mitzvahs and to be invited to Seders and to be invited to spend time at shul,” el-Sayed told JTA.
“I stand deeply and profoundly against antisemitism in the same way that I stand deeply and profoundly against Islamophobia,” he added. “Those two things always run together. It is not antisemitic to criticize a foreign government, and it’s not antisemitic to criticize a super PAC that is intent on aligning our interests with the foreign government.”
In the interview, the candidate also reiterated the sentiment behind his own statement on the Temple Israel attack, in which he had referenced the Israeli war in Lebanon. “I also think it’s just critical for us to understand that hurt people do hurt people, and the circumstances happening 6000 miles away can affect the lives that we live here,” el-Sayed said Tuesday.
At the end of the rally, Piker climbed back onto the stage with El-Sayed to a standing ovation. The two men embraced, then posed for a selfie with the crowd behind them.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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