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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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Aptly titled ‘The Darkest Light’ documentary wrestles with Shlomo Carlebach’s contradictions
One of the most influential rabbis of the last century, someone who brought tens of thousands of disaffected Jews closer to Judaism, who helped create Jewish spirituality as we know it today, and who wrote tunes so familiar that most people think they are hundreds years of old, was also, according to overwhelming evidence, a serial child molester who preyed on teenage girls who idolized him.
This is the impossible truth: that the same human being was a holy soul and a monster, a pioneering feminist and an abuser of girls, a person overflowing with love even for people he met on the street and yet so devoid of empathy that he was able to cause profound harm to dozens of young women and girls.
I am speaking, of course, of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.
This weekend marked the premiere of The Darkest Light, an aptly titled new film about Carlebach’s life, and about the ways his family, followers and community have wrestled with his profoundly contradictory legacy. The moral center of the film is one of Carlebach’s two daughters, Neshama, who was his musical and spiritual heir. It is heartbreaking to watch the many scenes of the two of them together, prior to his death (sudden, of a heart attack, on a plane set to leave LaGuardia Airport in 1994). She is so obviously in love with him, and he with her. If we didn’t know what was coming next, the videos would be achingly sacred and beautiful.
But we do know.
The revelations about Carlebach were first made public in a 1998 article in Lilith magazine, which, as I remember, was like an earthquake in the Jewish spiritual world. There had been whisperings of misconduct for years, but as the film and article emphasize, Carlebach was regarded by many as a saint, possessed of the ruach hakodesh, the holy spirit. And everyone knew that Carlebach was a loving, physical man — he hugged everybody. (I was hugged by him at the Yakar synagogue in Jerusalem in 1993. Charisma is real.) So, maybe some women felt uncomfortable; maybe he even crossed a line now and then. But he did so much good…
Only after his death did several women come forward — not with borderline stories of discomfort but accounts of sexual molestation and abuse. And more women followed.
In the subsequent 30 years, there has been a range of responses to these revelations. Some faithful continue to deny or minimize what Carlebach did. Others have banned Carlebach’s music from performance at synagogue. Wisely, director Simon Mendes does not take a particular stance on these questions, giving airtime to many of them. He even allows Carlebach’s defenders to insist, on camera, that nothing inappropriate ever took place and that theƒ women must be either confused or opportunistic or… something.
But it is Neshama Carlebach who is the film’s protagonist. As she tearfully explains, she was only 19 when her father died. She idolized him, and lost him in an instant. And so when the allegations came out, she stayed silent. How could the man she loved more than anyone in the world — a man also beloved by tens of thousands of devotees — also be such a monster? It was impossible, she relates, to comprehend.
Until the MeToo movement gained prominence in 2017. It was at that time that she, then a 43-year-old woman, realized she had to speak out, which she did in a series of articles and online posts accepting the survivors’ testimony of her father’s abuse. Also inspired by MeToo, many more women came forward with their own stories, and unlike 1998, society in general and the Jewish world in particular were more able to hear them. (Neshama Carlebach has published an essay about the film, which she said “approached an extraordinarily difficult story with compassion, courage and nuance.”)
How to respond? In the film, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of New York’s Central Synagogue describes the painful process of introspection that the synagogue undertook, placing a one-year moratorium on using Carlebach tunes while they discussed internally what to do. (Perhaps surprisingly, the synagogue resumed singing them afterward.) I personally have been part of several such conversations.
While these debates are important and interesting, ultimately The Darkest Light is about the unknowable questions set forth above: how someone could be a spiritual genius and sexual abuser, a saint and among the worst kind of sinner.
There are hints that Carlebach himself wrestled with this dilemma. The film’s title is taken from an improvised homily in which Carlebach says that sometimes evildoers are better than those who claim to be righteous, because darkness never claims to be something it isn’t; it never claims to be light. But imagine, Carlebach continues, when the good turns out to be evil — that is the darkest light, darker even than darkness itself. It’s hard not to hear this as a kind of veiled confession.
The film also sets forth many of the relevant circumstances of Carlebach’s life. His family fled Germany in 1939, right before Hitler stopped Jewish refugees from leaving. One can only imagine the trauma he experienced. Next, Carlebach spent nearly 30 years in Orthodox Jewish environments, especially the Chabad-Lubavitch sect, in which men and women are strictly segregated and men are forbidden from even touching women or hearing their voices in song.
And then came the 60s. Carlebach was right in the center of the Summer of Love, founding his House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco in 1967. The film sympathetically describes what that might have been like: Suddenly, all the rules were canceled, and people were making love with one another in public. Carlebach was 42 at the time. He had lived a repressed life for decades, and now all was permitted.
Bob Dylan once wrote, “to live outside the law, you must be honest.”Inside a fixed legal system like traditional Jewish law, the rules are clear — Orthodox sexual abusers still break them, of course, but the boundaries are firmly set. But outside, you’re on your own. And Carlebach seemed to lack the inner resources to draw boundaries and live within them. In Kabbalistic language, he was all hesed, all lovingkindness, without boundary or limit.
That is dangerous. No matter how high the spiritual high may be, it must be accompanied by ethics, empathy, and remembering the humanity of the other. There is no experience of holiness that justifies harming another person, especially in such a grievous way.
I mentioned hugging Carlebach in 1993. While the experience was electrifying, I also remember feeling off — much as I felt in the presence of another eros-drenched, consent-challenged charismatic rabbi in the Jewish Renewal movement of the 2000s. The eros was overflowing, spilling out onto all of us. It was spiritual and sexual and charismatic — and, to me, a little bit nauseating as well. I am all for fusing spirituality and sexuality, and as a gay man, I’m fortunate to have lived a very full sensual life. But in these encounters, part of me wanted to run away. It felt like there was no consent, no boundary, no space.
This is not a specifically Jewish problem. When charismatic spiritual leaders infuse their teaching with erotic energy, there is a risk, it seems to me, that the energy takes over. Ethical considerations, rules of consent, even basic empathy, get drowned in the sea of sacred-sexual flow which is experienced subjectively by the guru. I have no idea what Carlebach was thinking or feeling when he reached under a large Jewish book on his lap to fondle the teenage girl he was “teaching.” But I’m not sure it was so separate from the spiritual-sexual Torah he gave over to legions of adoring fans. Maybe the two sides of Carlebach are less a contradiction than a continuum.
And then there are his most devoted followers, still venerating the smashed idol of Carlebach’s sainthood. One thing The Darkest Light does not explore is that this group of spiritual quasi-hippies overlaps with some of the most extreme religious nationalists in Israel. These are the people whose kids are conducting pogroms in the West Bank. And to be honest, I see a connection. Israel, like Carlebach, offers these spiritual “mad ones” (in Kerouac’s term) the real deal: actual spiritual energy, infused with love and community and holiness. Yet Israel, like Carlebach, also harms a lot of people — often at the hands of Carlebach-singing, weed-smoking ‘hippies’ themselves. In both cases, I see a group of enthusiasts whose very real spiritual ecstasy has blinded them to ethics — or to anything that would destroy their good vibes.
I have felt these vibes myself. I have prayed ecstatically with Hasidim in Jerusalem and on Mount Meron. I have hiked and camped in the nature of the Land of Israel from the Eilat mountains to the finger of the Galilee. Whatever it is, even if it’s just in our imagination, the experience of spiritual ‘energy’ is real. I can appreciate the yearning to keep it pure, holy, and free from defilement.
But that urge, itself, leads to injustice. There is no responsible spirituality without ethics. There is no moral eros without boundary. And if anyone defiled anything, it was Carlebach himself who did so, not his victims or his critics or his family. That truth may be hard to accept, but it is the truth.
In the end, Carlebach was not a god or a demon; he was a deeply beautiful and even more deeply broken human being with capacities for good and evil within him. He only had a lot more of each than most of us. And as another Jewish teacher of mine once told me, the greater the light… the greater the shadow.
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Mamdani orders review of whether New York can arrest Netanyahu when he visits this fall
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has revived one of his most controversial election promises, raising once again the prospect of arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he comes to New York in September for the United Nations General Assembly. It’s a move that legal experts say Mamdani is unlikely to be able to carry out.
In a video interview with The New York Times published Saturday, Mamdani said he ordered a review by the city’s Law Department to consider his options to comply with an International Criminal Court arrest warrant. “Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do. But we won’t be writing our own laws to that end,” Mamdani said, remarks that drew a strong online reaction.
In a post to social media on Sunday, Netanyahu’s office dismissed concerns of a possible arrest, calling the ICC a “kangaroo court” and saying that “Mamdani should focus on fixing the damage his policies have caused New York.” In an interview last week, Netanyahu said Mamdani “hates America.”
The United States does not recognize the court’s authority over American citizens or foreign nationals on U.S. soil, and the federal government could likely challenge the legitimacy of such an order.
Mamdani’s statement reflects the tension that has defined his first months in office: balancing the activist politics that propelled him to City Hall with the legal constraints and governing responsibilities of the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
A political gift to Netanyahu
Mamdani’s actions could have unintended consequences abroad.
Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, who has frequently criticized Netanyahu, warned that even a failed attempt to arrest the prime minister would likely strengthen Netanyahu politically in a tough reelection bid, set for Oct. 27.
“Many Israelis are sick of him and hope to vote him out,” Shapiro wrote on X. “The only possible outcome of a fruitless attempt to arrest him in NYC would be to give him a political boost at home. That would be an own goal.”
Recent polls show that Netanyahu, seeking a seventh term in office, is trailing an opposition bloc led by two contenders — former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot.
A confrontation with New York’s outspoken anti-Zionist mayor could allow Netanyahu to cast himself once again as Israel’s defender against international efforts to isolate and punish the country. Netanyahu already labeled Mamdani as someone who “champions” Hamas and “apologizes” for Iran.
That message could resonate even with Israelis who oppose him. American Jewish opinion illustrates the same complexity. While recent polling shows many American Jews view Netanyahu unfavorably, and that Mamdani is more popular with that group, that has not translated into support for an attempt to arrest Israel’s elected leader.
A Honan Strategy Group poll in December found that although 40% of New York City voters believed Mamdani had a moral obligation to uphold international human rights standards by ordering Netanyahu’s arrest, seven in 10 of the 131 Jewish respondents said doing so would damage New York’s global standing.
In the end, Mamdani may be able to avoid acting at all by pointing to the legal opinion that New York City lacks the authority to arrest Netanyahu.
The law is not on Mamdani’s side
The ICC, based in The Hague, issued arrest warrants in Nov. 2024 for Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the Israel-Hamas war. Hamas confirmed in Jan. 2025 that Deif was assassinated in July 2024 by an Israeli strike on Gaza.
But even if Mamdani wanted to enforce the warrant, New York City has little authority to do so.
Because the United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court, the NYPD has no legal authority to arrest Netanyahu based on an ICC warrant. Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio launched a sweeping campaign of sanctions, visa bans and diplomatic pressure to “systematically disable” the ICC “brick by brick.”
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, in a post on X, also pointed to the 1947 U.N. Headquarters Agreement, which requires the United States to allow accredited foreign representatives to attend U.N. meetings, as well as the customary international law doctrine that grants immunity to sitting heads of government traveling on official business. Netanyahu would also arrive in New York under Secret Service protection afforded to foreign leaders.
Even carrying out such an order would appear unlikely.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish, has repeatedly kept a distance from the mayor on Israel-related issues. Her public statements on Israel have been unequivocal. In June, Tisch served as grand marshal of the annual Celebrate Israel Parade, which Mamdani skipped. “I understand that for many of you, having a Jewish police commissioner is deeply comforting,” she told Jewish leaders in May.
Mamdani’s foreign policy reach has already been limited. Last month, the U.S. State Department blocked a planned meeting between Mamdani and Colombian President Gustavo Petro in New York, a fierce Israel critic, who had his visa revoked last fall after he appeared at a pro-Palestinian rally in Manhattan and was attending a UN Security Council session under strict terms. Earlier this month, the Trump administration stopped a meeting between Ana María Archila, Mamdani’s commissioner for international affairs, and Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Why does Mamdani keep talking about it?
While the legal answer is largely settled, the political one is not.
By keeping the question open, Mamdani signals support to the pro-Palestinian movement that fueled his rise, while acknowledging the institutional limits of his office.
Targeting Netanyahu was central to Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. After leading chants of “Netanyahu, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” during a protest in Oct. 2023, Mamdani first pledged to arrest Netanyahu shortly after he declared his candidacy. He later repeated the pledge, including in front of Jewish audiences, arguing that he did not want New York to be a place where leaders accused of war crimes felt welcome.
The approach follows a similar pattern Mamdani confronted with a politically charged issue earlier this year. As anti-Jewish incidents continue to make up a majority of reported hate crimes, the city considered placing buffer zones around houses of worship, spurred in part by a November protest outside the Park East Synagogue that included antisemitic slogans.
After expressing reservations about the legislation, Mamdani referred the bill to the city’s Law Department before ultimately allowing it to become law without his signature, only after the City Council passed it with a veto-proof majority.
Mamdani vetoed a companion bill that would potentially limit pro-Palestinian demonstrations, particularly on campuses. (The council later passed a modified version, and the state passed a 50-foot buffer zone bill that equally applies to all community centers and schools being used for services, education and religious observance across the state.)
Mamdani’s real test
Whether Mamdani’s careful balancing act satisfies either side may become clear when Netanyahu arrives in New York this September.
While the mayor cannot dictate U.S. foreign policy or enforce ICC warrants, City Hall still plays an important role in coordinating logistics, demonstrations and municipal services during the annual gathering of world leaders.
Mamdani can influence how unwelcoming New York feels to the Israeli leader.
The Israeli prime minister’s appearance at the United Nations is expected to draw massive demonstrations, putting City Hall’s handling of protests and policing under intense scrutiny.
History suggests that symbolism matters.
In 1995, Mayor Rudy Giuliani triggered a diplomatic dispute after ejecting Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat from a United Nations anniversary concert at Lincoln Center. President Bill Clinton, protesting the move, invited the Palestinian leader to a White House reception.
For all the attention given to Netanyahu’s return to New York, he may not arrive alone. During a White House meeting last year, Netanyahu laughed off the threat as “silly” and quipped that he might travel to New York “with President Trump.” Trump responded: “I’ll get him out.”
Now, that exchange may prove to have been less a joke than a preview of where the real power lies.
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A Jewish couple fell in love with rural Oklahoma. Then they built a cemetery there.
Linda Fitzerman did not want her children making burial decisions through tears.
For years, she and her husband, Todd Boone Fitzerman, told each other they needed to settle the question. They were not interested in cremation. They wanted a traditional Jewish burial. And they did not want their children, someday, to face the cost and pressure of deciding where that burial should take place.
“They just need to show up and cry,” Linda said. “They don’t need the additional pain of having to make financial decisions.”
The answer, when it came, was not one they had expected. They created a small Jewish burial ground in Sulphur, Oklahoma, a city of about 5,000 people in the Bible Belt, near the ranch the Fitzermans bought during the pandemic and had come to love.
At Oak Lawn Cemetery, a city-owned burial ground with green grass, rolling terrain and ponds, the Fitzermans purchased a group of plots to create a circular family burial section. Four corner pillars crowned with Stars of David mark the site. Beneath the grass, the pillars are connected by buried rebar, creating a distinct boundary around the section. Linda designed the stainless steel Stars of David, which a friend welded into place.
Nearby, five young trees are taking root: two Chinese pistache trees and three Autumn Blaze maples. The Fitzermans planted them with the city’s permission and have been carefully tending them for the past year, using large water barrels to help them through the early seasons.
“We are babysitting them for at least two years,” Linda said.
The burial section was dedicated in 2025. Todd’s brother, Rabbi Marc Boone Fitzerman of Tulsa, advised them on how to create a designated Jewish space within a public cemetery. Psalms and other prayers were recited at the site. There was no minyan, Todd said, but “spiritually we are there.”
To the Fitzermans’ knowledge, no other Jew is buried in Oak Lawn Cemetery.
A pandemic, and a plan
The cemetery project grew out of a life they did not plan to build in Oklahoma. Todd, 67, and Linda, 65, are both from the Detroit area and were raised in Conservative families. They met in Dallas when their children were young and have been married for 24 years. Dallas remains home. The couple still runs a business there, Local Oven, a gluten-free baking company.
But during the long uncertainty of the COVID pandemic, they began thinking about land.
“We felt so bottled up, and we wanted to get out,” Linda said.
They first responded to an advertisement for 10 acres near water in Texas. The search widened. Todd’s son suggested that 50 acres would be enough room to shoot on the property. Eventually, Todd found 158 acres outside Davis, Oklahoma, about two hours north of Dallas. They began building a working ranch. Todd’s son keeps cattle there. The Fitzermans now divide their time between Dallas and Oklahoma, spending roughly half the week in each place.
“It is a beautiful ranch,” Linda said. “It’s very calming to be out here, really beautiful, nothing like the city.”
Todd described hearing coyotes at night, watching the cattle roam, and the pleasure of “playing cowboy” for part of the week. Linda said she had not known, when they bought the land in 2021, “how important Oklahoma was going to be.”
“It was never a plan,” she said. “It just sort of evolved.”
Their relationship with the area deepened through the people they met there. Todd and Linda said one local friend, who lives across from Oak Lawn Cemetery and owns a large construction company, helped introduce them around Sulphur when they were new. He had also acquired plots in the cemetery through a trade arrangement for excavation work. Seeing what he had done opened a possibility they had not considered.
For years, Linda said, they had found “nothing intriguing” in Dallas cemeteries. Many Jewish plots cost $7,000 or $8,000. One cemetery with a Jewish section had plots priced around $36,000.
“Why would I spend money like that?” Linda said.
In Sulphur, plots were $300 each. For $4,500 total, they could create a family burial place tailored to them.
“We finally had an opportunity that just presented itself,” Linda said.
The circle layout itself came from her memory. In Michigan, she said, part of her family is buried in an older Jewish cemetery arranged not in straight rows, but in a circular shape.
“I thought that was really nice,” she said. “I liked it.”
So Linda and Todd approached the city and asked whether they could create a Jewish cemetery section in Oak Lawn. The response, they said, was strikingly easy.
“We shared that with the city and they said, ‘Yeah, sure,’” Linda said. “I’ve never seen any place give me the green light on every question.”
The city’s one practical concern was that everything remain level enough for its crews to mow. It allowed the Fitzermans to select the location, a corner where two cemetery roads meet. It also permitted them to plant the trees on easement land beside the plots.
“The city is 100% accepting,” Linda said.
Todd put it similarly. “The city could not have been more accommodating,” he said.
The Fitzermans say their religion has never been a problem. “It is the Baptist Bible Belt,” Linda said. “Everyone here has been so willing to accept us. They are inquisitive and curious. Our religion has not been an issue for anyone.”
Todd said that not everyone in Sulphur knows they are Jewish, “but lots of people know we are Jews.” When Todd’s son held his Jewish wedding on the ranch, he said, many non-Jewish guests had never attended one before. Friends asked questions. Guests wore kippot or cowboy hats. Tallitot belonging to Todd, his father and his son’s other grandfather formed the wedding canopy.
“There were more Jews in Sulphur for my son’s wedding than ever before,” Todd said.
Peace of mind
For Linda, the cemetery’s Jewish symbols were important. She wanted the pillars to be easy to find. More than that, she wanted them to say plainly what the site was.
“When we see the pillars, they reflect what we are doing, which is our religion,” she said. “Nothing is more stately than the Jewish star.”
“Our little decor, to me, sends a really beautiful statement,” she added. “I’ve always been proud to be Jewish. I wouldn’t want to be buried any other way.”
The Fitzermans have tried to spare their children as much uncertainty as possible. They have assigned the burial titles to their children and their children’s partners, while making clear that use of the plots will remain their choice. They have also documented the practical steps to follow when the time comes, including where a body could be prepared for Jewish burial in Dallas or Oklahoma City.
“You don’t think about it until a family member is going through it,” Linda said.
She views the cemetery as a natural extension of family care. “You are always, always part of your family,” she said. “If you want these, they are there for you.”
Todd described the burial ground in similar terms. It offers “peace of mind,” he said: a final resting place in a community they love and want to be part of.
The trees, Linda noted, will eventually grow large. The Chinese pistache trees can grow to over 25 feet with age. The maples, she said, will be especially beautiful in the fall.
They hope it will be many years before the cemetery is needed.
But the question that had lingered for so long has now been answered. Their children will not have to find a plot, compare prices, choose a cemetery, or wonder whether their parents’ burial wishes were honored.
They will only have to come.
And cry.
The post A Jewish couple fell in love with rural Oklahoma. Then they built a cemetery there. appeared first on The Forward.
