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From ‘how to’ to ‘why bother?’: Michael Strassfeld writes a new guide to being Jewish
(JTA) — “What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.” That’s known as Hansen’s Law, named for the historian Marcus Lee Hansen, who observed that while the children of immigrants tend to run away from their ethnicity in order to join the mainstream, the third generation often wants to learn the “old ways” of their grandparents.
In 1973, “The Jewish Catalog” turned Hansen’s Law into a “do-it-yourself kit” for young Jews who wanted to practice the traditions of their grandparents but weren’t exactly sure how. Imagine “The Joy of Cooking,” but instead of recipes the guide to Jewish living had friendly instructions for hosting Shabbat, building a sukkah and taking part in Jewish rituals from birth to death. Co-edited by Michael Strassfeld, Sharon Strassfeld and the late Richard Siegel, it went on to sell 300,000 copies and remains in print today.
Fifty years later, Rabbi Michael Strassfeld has written a new book that he calls a “bookend” to “The Jewish Catalog.” If the first book is a Jewish “how to,” the latest asks, he says, “why bother?” “Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century” asserts that an open society and egalitarian ethics leave most Jews skeptical of the rituals and beliefs of Jewish tradition. In the face of this resistance, he argues that the purpose of Judaism is not obedience to Torah and its rituals for their own sake or mere “continuity,” but to “encourage and remind us to strive to live a life of compassion, loving relationships, and devotion to our ideals.”
Strassfeld, 73, grew up in an Orthodox home in Boston and got his master’s degree in Jewish studies at Brandeis University. Coming to doubt the “faith claims” of Orthodoxy, he became a regular at nearby Havurat Shalom, an “intentional community” that pioneered the havurah movement’s liberal, hands-on approach to traditional practice. He earned rabbinical ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College when he was 41 and went on to serve as the rabbi of Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side and later the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the Manhattan flagship of Reconstructionist Judaism.
“To be disrupted is to experience a break with the past and simultaneously reconnect in a new way to that past,” writes Strassfeld, who retired from the pulpit in 2015. This week, we spoke about why people might find Jewish ritual empty, how he thinks Jewish practices can enrich their lives and how Passover — which begins Wednesday night — could be the key to unlocking the central idea of Judaism.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: I wanted to start with the 50th anniversary of the “Jewish Catalog.” What connects the new book with the work you did back then on the “Catalog,” which was a do-it-yourself guide for Jews who were trying to reclaim the stuff they either did or didn’t learn in Hebrew school?
Michael Strassfeld: I see them as bookends. Basically, I keep on writing the same book over and over again. [Laughs] Except no, I’m different and the world is different. I’m always trying to make Judaism accessible to people. In the “Catalog” I was providing the resources on how to live a Jewish life when the resources weren’t easily accessible.
The new book is less about “how to” than “why bother?” That’s the challenge. I think a lot of people take pride in being Jewish, but it’s a small part of their identity because it doesn’t feel relevant. I want to say to people like that that Judaism is about living a life with meaning and purpose. It’s not about doing what I call the “Jewishly Jewish” things, like keeping kosher and going to synagogue. Judaism is wisdom and practices to live life with meaning and purpose. The purpose of Judaism isn’t to be a good Jew, despite all the surveys that give you 10 points for, you know, lighting Shabbat candles. It’s about being a good person.
So that brings up your relationship to the commandments and mitzvot, the traditional acts and behaviors that an Orthodox Jew or a committed Conservative Jew feels commanded to do, from prayer to keeping kosher to observing the Sabbath and the holidays. They might argue that doing these things is what makes you Jewish, but you’re arguing something different. If someone doesn’t feel bound by these obligations, why do them at all?
I don’t have the faith or beliefs that underlie such an attitude [of obligation]. Halacha, or Jewish law, is not in reality law. It’s really unlike American law where you know that if you’re violating it, you could be prosecuted. What I’m trying to do in the book is reframe rituals as an awareness practice, that is, bringing awareness to various aspects of our lives. So it could be paying attention to food, or cultivating attitudes of gratitude, or generosity, or satisfaction. My broad understanding of the festival cycle, for example, is that you can focus on those attitudes all year long, but the festivals provide a period of time once in the year to really focus on, in the case of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, for example, saying sorry and repairing relationships.
In “Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century,” Michael Strassfeld argues that the challenge of each generation’s Jews is to create the Judaism that is needed in their time. (Ben Yehuda Press)
Passover is coming. Probably no holiday asks its practitioners to do so much stuff in preparation, from cleaning the house of every trace of unleavened food to hosting, in many homes, two different catered seminars on Jewish history. Describe how Passover cultivates awareness, especially of the idea of freedom, which plays an important part thematically in your boo
The Sefat Emet [a 19th-century Hasidic master] says Torah is all about one thing: freedom. But there’s a variety of obstacles in the way. There are temptations. There’s the inner issues that you struggle with, and the bad things that are out of your control. The Sefat Emet says the 613 commandments are 613 etzot, or advice, that teach us how to live a life of freedom. The focus of Passover is trying to free yourself from the chains of the things that hold you back from being the person that you could be, not getting caught up in materiality or envy, free from unnecessary anxieties — all these things that distract us or keep us from being who we could be.
The Passover seder is one of the great rituals of Judaism. We’re trying to do a very ambitious thing by saying, not, like, “let’s remember when our ancestors were freed from Egypt,” but rather that we were slaves in Egypt and we went free. And at the seder we actually ingest that. We experience the bitterness by eating maror, the bitter herb. We experience the freedom by drinking wine. We don’t want it just to be an intellectual exercise.
Unfortunately the seder has become rote. But Passover is about this huge theme of freedom that is central to Judaism.
I think some people bristle against ritual because they find it empty. But you’re saying there’s another way to approach rituals which is to think of them as tools or instruments that can help you focus on core principles — you actually list 11 — which include finding holiness everywhere, caring for the planet and engaging in social justice, to name a few. But that invites the criticism, which I think was also leveled at the “Catalog,” that Judaism shouldn’t be instrumental, because if you treat it as a means to an end that’s self-serving and individualistic.
Certainly rituals are tools, but tools in the best sense of the word. They help us pay attention to things in our lives and things in the world that need repair. And people use them not to get ahead in the world, but because they want to be a somewhat better person. I talk a lot these days about having a brief morning practice, and in the book I write about the mezuzah. For most Jews it’s become wallpaper, but what if you take the moment that you leave in the morning, and there’s a transition from home to the outside and to work perhaps, and take a moment at the doorpost to spiritually frame your day? What are the major principles that you want to keep in your mind when you know you’re gonna be stuck in traffic or a difficult meeting?
And a lot of traditional rituals are instrumental. Saying a blessing before you eat is a gratitude practice.
But why do I need a particular Jewish ritual or practice to help me feel gratitude or order my day? Aren’t there other traditions I can use to accomplish the same things?
Anybody who is a pluralist, which I am, knows that the Jewish way is not the only way. If I grew up in India or Indonesia and my parents were locals I probably wouldn’t be a rabbi and writing these books.
But a partial answer to your question is that Judaism is one of the oldest wisdom traditions in the world, and that there has been a 3,000-year conversation by the Jewish people about what it means to live in this tradition and to live in the world. And so I think there’s a lot of wisdom there.
So much in Jewish tradition says boundaries are good, and that it’s important to draw distinctions between what’s Jewish behavior and what’s not Jewish behavior, between the holy and the mundane, and that making those distinctions is a value in itself. But you argue strongly in an early chapter that that kind of binary thinking is not Judaism as you see it.
Underlying the book is the notion that Rabbinic Judaism carried the Jewish people for 2,000 years or so. But we’re living in a very different context, and the binaries, the dualities — too often they lead to hierarchy, so that, for example, men matter more than women in Jewish life. And we’ve tried to change that. We are living in an open society where we want to be more inclusive, not less inclusive. We don’t want to live in ghettos. Now, the ultra-Orthodox say, “No, we realize the danger of trying to live like that. We don’t think there’s anything of value in that modern world. And it’s all to be rejected.” And it would be foolish not to admit that in this very open world the Jews, as a minority, could kind of disappear. But I think that Judaism has so much value and wisdom and practices to offer to people that Judaism will continue to be part of the fabric of this world — the way, for example, we have given Shabbat as a concept to the world.
You know, in the first 11 chapters of the Torah, there are no Jews. So clearly, Jews and Judaism are not essential for the world to exist. And that’s a good, humbling message.
OK, but one could argue that while Jews aren’t necessary for the world to exist, Judaism is necessary for Jews to exist. And you write in your book, “If the Jewish people is to be a people, we need to have a commonly held tradition.” I think the pushback to the kind of openness and permeability you describe is that Jews can be so open and so permeable that they just fall through the holes.
It certainly is a possibility. And it’s also a possibility that the only Jews who will be around will be ultra-Orthodox Jews.
But if Judaism can only survive by being separatist, then I question whether it’s really worthwhile. That becomes a distorted vision of Judaism, and withdrawing is not what it’s meant to be. I think we’re meant to be in the world.
Your book is called “Judaism Disrupted.” What is disruptive about the Judaism that you’re proposing?
I meant it in two ways. First, Judaism is being disrupted by this very different world we’re living in. The contents of the ocean we swim in is very different than in the Middle Ages. But I’m also using it to say that Judaism is meant to disrupt our lives in a positive way, which is to say, “Wake up, pay attention.” You are here to live a life of meaning and purpose, and to continue as co-creators with God of the universe. You’re here to make the world better, to be kind and compassionate to people, to work on yourself. In my mind it is a shofar, “Wake up, sleepers, from your sleep!” “Judaism Disrupted” says you have to pay attention to issues like food, and justice, and teshuva [repentance].
You were ordained as a Reconstructionist rabbi. Do you think your book falls neatly into any of our current denominational categories?
[Reconstructionist founder] Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s notion of Judaism as an evolving religious civilization is the one that I feel closest to. But I feel that the denominational structure isn’t particularly useful anymore. There’s basically two categories, Orthodox and the various kinds of liberal Judaism, within a spectrum. The modern world is so fundamentally different in its relationship to Jews and Judaism that what we’re seeing is a variety of attempts to figure out how to respond. And that will then become the Judaism for the next millennium. It’s time for a lot of experimentation. I think that’s required and out of that will come a new “Minhag America,” to use Isaac Mayer Wise’s phrase for the emerging custom of American Jews [Wise was a Reform rabbi in the late 19th century]. And we don’t need to have everybody doing it one way. As long as people feel committed to Judaism, the Jewish tradition, even if they’re doing it very differently than the Jews of the past, they will be writing themselves into the conversation.
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Can this suburban kibbutz and civil rights trailblazer maintain its identity in the 21st Century?
POMONA, NY— The Skyview Acres Cooperative is located about 30 miles north of New York City. Think of it as a suburban kibbutz.
“One felt like they had many parents,” recalled Carol Bowman, a professor of education at Ramapo College who grew up in this close-knit housing development in leafy Rockland County. “When I was growing up I could just walk into any of the houses where I had friends.”
“It was just a giant united family,” said Jo Simons, a retired piano teacher whose parents taught music and organized community singing events at Skyview.
Skyview was created in the aftermath of World War II as an intentionally integrated community. Quakers figured prominently in its creation. The land for Skyview was purchased in January 1947 with loans totaling $16,500 from two Quakers, who were strangers to the founding families and to each other. The loans came with terms that could’ve come from the Hebrew Free Loan Society: They were interest-free and simply said, “Pay us back when you can.”
The founding families scraped together the rest of the $29,500 purchase price. Today, Skyview consists of 115 acres and about four dozen homes. Most of them have at least two acres of land.
About a third of the original 45 or 46 families at Skyview were Jewish, according to Naomi Kleinberg, a retired editor and children’s book author, whose parents were among the original families who cleared land to build homes, make roads and create a swimming pond here. Key residents who played pivotal roles in Skyview’s evolution as a progressive bastion and a caring community included Jo’s father, Edward Simons, who founded what is now the Rockland Conservatory of Music, and Irving Wolfe, a political organizer for whom the cooperative’s ball field is named.
At the community’s recent 80th anniversary celebration, Wally Glickman recited an original poem. Skyview, he wrote, is a “ magic island in suburbia.”
‘My father wanted nothing more than to live in the woods’
Jack and Lena Kleinberg were among four Jewish couples who came to Skyview together from the Lower East Side. Back in the city their social lives revolved around the University Settlement House on Eldridge Street.
They raised a son and three daughters at Skyview. The son, Joseph, remains in the family home where he makes a living as a beekeeper and vegetable farmer.
“My father wanted nothing more than to live in the woods,” Naomi Kleinberg told me.
Jack Kleinberg was a World War II veteran who considered himself an atheist but was “adamantly, proudly, belligerently Jewish,” she said.
His maternal uncle’s entire family perished in Poland during the Holocaust and Kleinberg resolved that his family would know how to defend itself, so he taught them how to shoot revolvers and rifles.
“My father said he would never allow his family to be led like sheep to the slaughter, like in Europe,” Naomi Kleinberg said.
Her parents grew up on the Lower East Side amidst much misery and poverty. That experience prompted her late mother, who was raised in an observant Sephardic household on Orchard Street, to work as a social justice activist. In the 1930’s, Lena Kleinberg campaigned on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys, the Black men wrongfully charged with the rape of white women in Alabama. During the 1940’s, Lena worked for the establishment of the Jewish state, volunteering with the American League for a Free Palestine. During the Cold War, she demonstrated at missile sites near Skyview and, in more recent years, stood vigil at a local abortion clinic, to counter anti-abortion protesters intimidating patients.
“All this involvement in social justice, making tikkun olam, it’s so Jewish,” Naomi told me.
‘Can you imagine how dangerous that was in the ’40’s?’
Although there were seders and Hanukkah parties held at the cooperative, Kleinberg remembers only two Skyview families who attended synagogue regularly.
The other families had “Jewish upbringings, Jewish identities,” Kleinberg said, “but not a Jewish existence.”
For the most part, religious tradition was supplanted by political activism. Skyview residents attended seminal civil rights marches in Washington, brought medicine to Cuba, demonstrated against the Vietnam War and went to Nicaragua to aid the Sandinista regime. To this day, residents demonstrate regularly against the Trump administration at an intersection in Nanuet that has long served as Rockland’s town square for political protest.
A handful of key political activists lived at Skyview during the 1960s. Among them were Conrad Lynn, the Black civil rights attorney who defended Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown and one of the Puerto Rican nationalists who carried out the attack on the U.S. House of Representatives in 1954; George Houser, a co-founder of both the Congress of Racial Equality and the American Committee on Africa; and Alfred Hassler, a Methodist minister who served as executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the interfaith peace and justice group. Lynn, Hassler and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin went on a freedom ride down south in 1947.
“They did that in the 40’s, not in the 60’s,” noted the poet Wally Glickman. “Can you imagine how dangerous that was in the 40’s?”
Skyview has also been home to some prominent entertainers, including Krishna Das, a globe-trotting Jewish performer of Hindu devotional music. The late Steven Hill, born Solomon Krakovsky, had starring roles in the TV shows Mission: Impossible and Law & Order. Hill left Skyview after becoming an observant Jew and moved to nearby Monsey. Eliot Asinof, who wrote for such classic western TV shows as Maverick and Wagon Train and authored the nonfiction account of the Chicago “Black Sox” World Series scandal in 1919, Eight Men Out, rented a home at Skyview during summers in the 1950’s and 60’s. And two founding members of the Grammy-nominated jazz fusion group Spyro Gyra currently live at Skyview.
But no one in showbiz had quite the run as Ed Simons, who was said to be the oldest working conductor in the country when he wielded a baton at the age of 100. The maestro’s career included performing in the military band that accompanied President Harry Truman to the Potsdam Peace Conference in the Summer of 1945 and conducting pit orchestras for eight Broadway musicals, including My Fair Lady.
Edmund Gordon, a Black psychologist who was one of the architects of the federal Head Start program, is still professionally active at the age of 105. He treads water in the indoor pool at his Skyview home.
Several people I spoke with offered the same quip to comment on the longevity of the cooperative’s residents: “There must be something in the water.”
‘I was the first Skyview baby’
Some of the children who lived at Skyview Acres inherited their parents’ political sympathies. In the 1950’s, several Skyview kids refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or participate in the “duck and cover” drills held during the Cold War to prepare students for a nuclear attack. In 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign set up a tent city dubbed Resurrection City on the National Mall in Washington D.C., some teenagers at Skyview erected their own Insurrection City in the woods. And, no matter how liberal and left-leaning the cooperative’s grown-ups may have been, young people skinny dipping in Skyview’s man-made pond upset some of the adults.
Several people who grew up at Skyview and are now in their 70s or 80s, recall attending the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” in 1963 where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Skyview’s roughly four dozen households filled two buses for the march. That year, Skyview block party attended by some 400 Rockland County residents raised money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The contribution elicited a signed thank-you letter from Dr. King, then SCLC’s president.
And many of the Skyview kids carried on the good works of their parents.
Two of Edmund Gordon’s children are tenured college professors. Ted Gordon teaches Black Studies at the University of Texas. Jessica Gordon Nembhard teaches political economy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Then there is Laura Hassler, the daughter of Skyview co-founder Alfred Hassler, a conscientious objector during World War II and the man responsible for introducing Martin Luther King Jr. to the Vietnamese monk Thich Nnat Hanh in 1966, a connection credited with influencing King’s opposition to the Vietnam War.
“I was the first Skyview baby,” Laura Hassler told me during a phone interview. “I wear it with pride.“
Hassler started the Netherlands-based non-profit Musicians Without Borders. She recalled kids at school calling the Skyview students hippies and communists. One oral history of the cooperative recounted a local hardware store that refused to service Skyview because its residents were “commies.
Some of the Skyview residents had, in fact, been members of the Communist Party earlier in their lives. Conrad Lynn was active in the party during the 1920’s and 30’s. Irving Wolfe was also a member. Wolfe, whose Honda sedan bore a VIVA CHE license plate, defied the U.S. embargo against Cuba 16 times to bring humanitarian aid to the island. In the 1980’s, he served on a construction brigade in Nicaragua.
Ed Simons, the conductor, was suspected of communist sympathies and called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1958 where he was successfully represented by a lawyer from Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians.
‘Still a genuine community’
Skyview is located about six miles north of the burgeoning ultra-Orthodox community of Monsey. New Square, another Haredi hamlet, is even closer. Those communities have a pressing need for more housing. Many current Skyview residents told me they are reluctant to speak publicly about the threat posed by new housing development, fearing that their efforts to limit development might be interpreted as antisemitism.
A number of Skyview residents have been active in the NAACP, which has been battling the East Ramapo school board run by Orthodox Jews who tend not to send their children to public schools. Test scores, graduation rates and other data indicate that the school district, once the best in New York State, is now among the worst, according to Oscar Cohen, a Jewish NAACP activist and retired school administrator who lives nearby. A 2026-2027 U.S. News & World Report ranking of high schools noted that Ramapo High School had proficiency rates in math and English of 18% and 44% respectively.
Skyview residents are particularly concerned about the future of a 75-acre forested parcel known as the Stryker property that borders Skyview to the south, according to Anna Friedberg, a lawyer who serves as president of the Skyview’s board. Friedberg noted that the property’s development could impact traffic in the area, as well as the local watershed, which includes a stream that feeds Skyview’s pond and the west branch of the Hackensack River, a source of water for Nyack and Northern New Jersey.
“There have been some plans by the town to suggest that they would develop that entire property,” she told me at the cooperative’s annual Winter Doldrums party in March. “There is a tremendous population boon in this area and so there’s significant pressure to find more housing for folks.”
The Stryker property was purchased with a public bond approved by residents of the Town of Ramapo that earmarked the land for open space and low-income, clustered housing for first responders. But the town subsequently commissioned a planning study that cited a religious campus as one potential use of the Stryker property. Michael Specht, the Ramapo town supervisor, wrote in an email, “There are no plans at this time to develop the Stryker property or use it as a religious campus.”
“I would take anything that the town says with a grain of salt,” said Bob Trostle, a retired builder who grew up in Skyview and now lives just outside its border. “We’ve learned that the hard way, especially concerning development planning, zoning, and things like that.”
In 2015, the Skyview Acres Land Trust was created to preserve the cooperative’s greenery. Membership in the trust is voluntary but once a homeowner joins, subsequent owners of that home can’t add more buildings to their property or clear-cut trees. The trust is headed by Paul Nagin, a longtime Skyview resident who now lives in Connecticut. Nagin not only continues to be involved in the land trust but is still active in the Spring Valley NAACP, which has been in court fighting the East Ramapo school district.
“As far as I’m concerned, the Stryker property is a sword of Damocles hanging over Skyview,” Nagin told me. “It’s going to be an ongoing issue for sure.”
Skyview is “a pretty blue dot in the middle of a reddish part of Rockland County,” according to Robin Shapiro, a Skyview resident who describes himself as a checkbook Democrat active in J Street. He sees the concerns over housing development in the area as “a special case of NIMBYism with an overlay of religion and politics.”
“I don’t think that you can explain the opposition to development plans as antisemitic,” he told me. “There are legitimate and long-standing concerns about preserving open space, water quality, traffic that you’d see in any community that was encountering very rapid growth from new folks of any kind.”
Will Skyview retain its unique political and communal character as its properties turn over? Will it continue to be the kind of place where Wally Glickman and his fellow Skyview poet Brian Kates post their poetry on trees along a pathway in the woods?
“This is still a genuine community. I don’t really see that ending,” said Kates, who won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing when he worked at the New York Daily News. “I think it’s something more than politics. It’s an ethos of people helping each other, of being kind to each other, a kind and caring community.”
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American music producer Justin Goldner at work on a Yiddish album
How many Yiddish rock stars do you know?
Maybe more than you think.
If you watched the Grammy Awards back in 2018, you might have seen one of them, Justin Goldner, accompany Ben Platt as he sang “Somewhere” from the Broadway musical West Side Story.
A multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, bass, mandolin, ukulele, and lute, Goldner has worked with an all-star array of artists as a session musician and producer, including Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Ricky Martin and Macy Gray. Goldner also appeared on Broadway and in Madison Square Garden, performed with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and recorded music for Disney’s live-action Snow White.
Goldner is no stranger to the spotlight, but for his latest project, he stepped away from the roaring arenas of pop stardom to inhabit a more intimate space: a dive into Yiddish culture. His work in progress, Songs of Longing and Belonging (Vi shturem a benken in Yiddish), sets Yiddish poetry to music, creating tracks that sound refreshingly contemporary even as they plumb the Yiddish literary archives for inspiration.
By the end of the project — which is being supported by a fellowship from the Jewish Writers Institute — the songs will comprise an entire album. Goldner estimates the full album will appear next spring. For now, he has been releasing them one at a time on YouTube under his Yiddish moniker, Reb Tsudek.
Like many younger people interested in Yiddish today, Goldner didn’t grow up with the language. Although Judaism was part of his upbringing in suburban Philadelphia, it was not a central part of his identity. “I grew up in what I would imagine is a pretty typical Reform family,” Goldner said when I spoke with him. “I had a bar mitzvah. I went to Jewish summer camp. But in retrospect, my memory of my Jewish upbringing was a little bit like: ‘Here’s Judaism. Don’t get too close to it.’”
If he had anything resembling religious commitment, it was to music, specifically the guitar, an instrument he took up at 13. “Relatively quickly it became an all consuming pursuit,” he recalled. “In high school, I barely did anything else. I was a very obsessive listener and wanted to devour as much music as possible.” After graduating high school, he earned a degree in music from NYU.
Goldner said he began to think differently about his Jewish heritage when he saw how his friends related to their own cultural backgrounds. “The thing that sort of primed the pump for me was getting into Greek and Spanish and Arabic and other languages and cultures,” he said. “I just found that so engaging. I was really inspired by my friends and colleagues who come from these backgrounds and carry their culture and their heritage with them, but they’re not living in the past.”
That epiphany, combined with the experience of getting to know a great-aunt with dementia who increasingly reverted to her native Yiddish, led Goldner to purchase a copy of College Yiddish, the classic textbook by Uriel Weinreich. For many years, Yiddish was a linguistic passion that he nurtured privately. Now it has become central to the evolution of his musical career.
The Yiddish title of Goldner’s project — Vi shturem a benken — comes from “Dos lid fun a meydl” (The Song of a Girl), a poem by Anna Margolin, a 20th-century Yiddish poet who immigrated to the United States from Lithuania in 1906. Previously unfamiliar with her work, Goldner was drawn to the “intensity” of Margolin’s lyric, which he translated for me as “it rocks me like a storm, this yearning.”
“I feel like she, as a writer, leaps off the page,” Goldner told me. “The intensity of wanting to do something or be something and not even knowing what, but just feeling like you can’t hold yourself back.”
Featuring vocalists Temma Schaechter and Ben Abraham, Goldner’s version of “The Song of a Girl” reveals another facet of Songs of Longing and Belonging: its blending of heritage languages and diasporic experiences. Besides Yiddish and English, “The Song of a Girl” also includes lyrics in Indonesian, one of the languages spoken by Abraham’s parents.
Future songs will take a similar approach. For example, “Meyerkepl” ( Seashell), based on a poem by the Yiddish writer Yehoash, will include words by Cuban poet José Marti. “I’ve been fascinated by Cuban music for a very long time,” Goldner said. “My wife’s family is Cuban. I was struck by how this sense of exile, of diaspora, of being far away from something or someone that we construe as home, manifested with these two very different authors in very similar imagery.”
In taking up Yiddish as a medium of musical expression, Goldner joins a growing group of artists recording contemporary music in the language, including Daniel Kahn, whose Yiddish versions of classics by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits are ingenuous feats of translation; Isabel Frey, whose 2020 debut album Millennial Bundist repurposes Yiddish labor and protest anthems; and the Bashevis Singers, a Melbourne-based folk band who, like Goldner, frequently turn to Yiddish poetry as a source of musical inspiration.
Meanwhile, independent record labels like Borscht Beat are producing Yiddish music that runs the gamut from traditional to experimental.
This thriving world of Yiddish popular music reflects a larger cultural and linguistic renaissance in which Goldner is a passionate participant. He has attended the Yidish Vokh, an annual week-long retreat for Yiddish speakers in upstate New York, takes online Yiddish classes, and has even developed a Yiddish keyboard app, YidShrift, that aims to bring familiar features like autocorrect and autocomplete to modern Yiddish communication.
Beyond the Yiddish lyrics he sets to music, Goldner has incorporated his affinity for the language into Songs of Longing by including Yiddish interviews with some of his collaborators, emphasizing the currency of Yiddish as a medium of colloquial expression.
While Songs of Longing and Belonging is firmly rooted in Goldner’s engagement with Yiddish language and lyrics, he also believes that the texts he is drawing on speak to shared human experiences.
“I think that there is a longing for connection that is universal and that manifests itself through the concepts and stories of who we are,” he said. That longing often pushes people to ask themselves probing questions of identity like “Who are my people?” or “where is my home?”
“I don’t think that there are ever simple answers,” he said.
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Katie Zacharia’s brief White House stint included a rebuke from the Auschwitz Memorial
Katie Zacharia’s five-day stint as White House Press Secretary ended almost as soon as it began. But before she was fired on Friday, she managed to draw a rebuke from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
The museum’s reprimand came in response to a claim Zacharia posted to X in November 2025, asserting that the abortion pill is “connected to the manufacturer of the deadly gas Zyklon B, used in the World War II concentration camps.”
The supposed connection? A company descended from the conglomerate involved in producing Zyklon B later owned the company that developed the abortion pill, Zacharia intimated in her post.
The official Auschwitz Memorial X account rebuked Zacharia on Monday, calling the argument “a misleading chain of guilt by association.”
Mifepristone, commonly known as the abortion pill, was first synthesized in 1980 — more than three decades after World War II’s end — by Georges Teutsch, a chemist at the French pharmaceutical company Roussel-Uclaf, based on an idea developed by Jewish endocrinologist Étienne-Émile Baulieu.
The tenuous connection to the poison gas used in concentration camps goes something like this: Zyklon B was distributed by a company called Degesch, which was partly owned by the German conglomerate I.G. Farben. After World War II, I.G. Farben was broken up into successor companies, including Hoechst AG, which in 1997 acquired a majority stake in the French company that developed mifepristone.
“A corporate relationship between companies separated by decades is presented as if it proved continuity of products, purposes, or chemical composition,” the Auschwitz Memorial wrote on X. “That is not historical analysis, but the selective combination of unrelated facts to produce a predetermined conclusion.”
Zacharia offered another version of the claim in a June 2025 podcast episode of We the People with Gates Garcia, saying that “the abortion pill has the same chemicals that they used in the exterminant (sic) camps in Nazi Germany.”
Suffice it to say, mifepristone, a steroidal progesterone blocker, is not the same as cyanide. Zacharia, the Auschwitz Memorial wrote, “confuses corporate history with chemical composition.”
After the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, anti-abortion activists have increasingly set their sights on banning the abortion pill nationwide. Prescribing, dispensing, or mailing mifepristone is currently banned in 13 states. In May, the Supreme Court blocked a lower court ruling that would have effectively ended mail delivery and telemedicine prescribing of mifepristone nationwide, including in states where abortion is legal.
Zacharia has framed her opposition to abortion as deeply personal. Zacharia said that, when she met her biological mother at 18, she learned she was “approximately 20, 30 minutes away from being aborted.” A Christian counselor, Zacharia said, convinced her mother to place her for adoption instead.
On the podcast, Zacharia also spoke about her work on the board of the White Rose Resistance, an anti-abortion advocacy group named for the Nazi resistance movement of the same name.
Groups including the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and the Anti-Defamation League have condemned comparisons between abortion and the Holocaust, arguing that they trivialize the Holocaust and exploit its victims’ memory for political ends.
Zacharia has also made Nazi comparisons in other contexts: According to CNN, in September 2022, she reposted a Truth Social post comparing then-President Joe Biden and anti-fascist protesters to Nazis. It included the hashtags #Antifa, #PedoHitler and #WrongSideOfHistory.
The White House Press Office did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment Friday morning, before Zacharia’s firing had been announced.
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