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Hadar Institute to open California outpost, bringing its egalitarian Jewish learning to the West Coast
(JTA) — The Hadar Institute, an egalitarian Jewish educational institution, has announced that it will open a branch in California, the latest stage in the New York City-based organization’s international expansion.
The organization has tapped the former associate rabbi of Ikar, a nondenominational synagogue and community in Los Angeles, to lead the venture, which will be based jointly in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Hadar was founded in 2006 and, since 2021, has launched branches in Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C., and opened a permanent space in Jerusalem. Its rapid growth comes at a time of flourishing informal Jewish education initiatives while formal centers of Jewish study, rabbinical schools, are shrinking.
Los Angeles is home to two denominational rabbinical schools: the Reform Hebrew Union College, which recently went from three campuses to two, and the Conservative Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies. Ziegler recently sold its 35-acre campus, shortened its program and slashed tuition in an attempt to attract more students.
Hadar West Coast, as the California initiative is called, will have a different focus: partnering with Jewish community educators and leaders in both cities to provide programming for locals. That could mean a day of learning in conjunction with a synagogue or Jewish community center, or a specific event that Hadar organizes itself at the behest of community members.
“I see, all the time, people who are hungry for more learning, for some kind of guide or path or direction for exploring their own Jewish tradition, and really not knowing where to go next,” said Rabbi David Kasher, who will be leading Hadar West Coast. “We have some great rabbinical schools in Los Angeles. There are some great Jewish schools and institutions, that kind of higher learning. But there isn’t necessarily an obvious place to go to just begin that journey if you’re an adult and a spark is lit in you.”
Educating both lay leaders and people who work in Jewish settings has historically been the mission of Hadar, which sees more than 29,000 people annually participate in its in-person and online events and learning opportunities. Those range from a months-long intensive fellowship to seminars and individual classes. Its first class of rabbis will graduate in June — the culmination of an ordination program begun in 2019.
Kasher feels that his background and experience suit him to his new role, in which he will travel regularly from his home in Los Angeles to Hadar’s programs in the Bay Area, where he grew up. Kasher’s father came from a Hasidic family and he describes his mother as a “California hippie.”
“I feel the power of both of those worlds and they were both a part of me,” Kasher told JTA over the phone from a cabin his grandfather built in a forest in Northern California’s Mendocino County. “I’m hoping to play with both of those spirits and to try and find some kind of fusion between them.”
Kasher was ordained at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a liberal Orthodox rabbinical school, and now said he no longer identifies in denominational terms but is an observant Jew. He has taught courses at a range of yeshivas and institutions of Jewish learning, including many that don’t affiliate with a major denomination — such as Pardes, Svara, the Hartman Institute and the Academy for Jewish Religion. He has also taught at HUC. He was an associate rabbi at Ikar from 2018 until last month and will continue to teach there occasionally through Hadar, according to a message sent to members.
“The West Coast has, historically, sort of a frontier mentality,” Kasher said. “It’s a little bit more experimental and creative and kind of willing to play with boundaries and I think that it’s really important for Jewish life out here to be infused with those values.”
What that will mean in practice is as yet unclear. Both Kasher and Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, Hadar’s CEO, hope to let the communities Hadar is serving take the lead in determining the direction of programs and classes.
“This opportunity will allow him to focus all of his energies on educating and really building the meaningful, practicing egalitarian Jewish life that Hadar represents,” Kaunfer said. “The idea is to have David understand the needs of the local community and serve them through the teaching that he will do.”
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Why Bad Bunny’s halftime show delighted New York Jews of a certain age
Since last month, a TikTok has been floating around, showing arthritic Latino grandmas and grandpas hearing Bad Bunny for the first time, courtesy their bemused grandchildren. On the reel, he samples “Un Verano en Nueva York,” a 50-year-old salsa song about New York City — or “Nueva Yol,” as Bad Bunny calls his update in his echt Puerto Rican accent. He sang “Nueva Yol” at the Super Bowl halftime show. The original dates from the 1970s, when the old folks were young and lithe and out on the town. On TikTok, when they listen to the new version, they perk up, and then they dance, as the kids look on, bemused and delighted.
I imagine that something similar happened to countless aging Jewish salsa music freaks like myself when they saw the halftime show. I’m 75 now, and I got up and danced, remembering those years during Jimmy Carter’s presidency when I donned high heels and tight skirts to dance away my Saturdays nights at venues like Casino 14 — catorce, it was pronounced — on 14th Street right by Union Square. I’d had a Jewish boyfriend whose mom, a Bell telephone operator, had danced mambo in the 1950s and taught her son the moves. He taught me the cha-cha and rhumba; other friends my age, many of them Jews, loved the music too and knew the steps and clubbed along with me. All this seemed no more remarkable to us than knowing how to say the prayer over the bread on Friday nights.
The Jewish love affair with Latin music began back in the 1950s and, since then, Jews have played it as musicians, produced it as record company owners, and DJed it in clubs and on the radio. Scholars have tried to explain the affinity, and why it has been such a comfortable fit for both ethnic groups. Some speculate that the music of both cultures tends to minor scales. Others point out that, as Jewish neighborhoods such as East Harlem were transitioning in the 1950s to Puerto Rican enclaves, the two groups lived side by side. (Working-class Jews even shared factory spaces with Puerto Rican laborers, especially in the garment industry.)
And there was the Borscht Belt. Starting in the 1950s, the big hotels typically maintained two house bands: one for mainstream pop, and the other for all Latin — the tummlers taught mambo lessons around the swimming pool. By the 1930s, Puerto Rico had been thoroughly colonized by the U.S. and was thoroughly poverty stricken. A vast exit began to the mainland: Puerto Ricans, after all, were American citizens. Many moved to the Bronx. By the 1960s, many of the kids had grown up to be musicians. Some had big bands and a big-band sound. They played regular gigs at places like Kutscher’s in the Catskills. You can still hear Tito Puente in 1959 playing “Grossinger’s Cha Cha Cha.”
Some of the musicians were Jews — for example, Larry Harlow, a classically trained pianist whose grandfather was a cantor and father a Latin music bandleader in the Catskills. Harlow’s actual family name was Kahn; his nickname among musicians and audiences was “El Judio Maravilloso,” the Marvelous Jew. His cousin Lewis Kahn was a salsa violinist and trombonist who’d studied at Julliard; he was “El Segundo Judio Maravilloso.” Once, I gave Lewis a lift back to his hotel post-concert, after I saw him shambling down the street alone. Painfully shy and bespectacled, he seemed more like a member of the Frankfurt School than someone in a band with matching suits and screaming brass.
My foreign language in high school had been Spanish. My conversational skills were good but still stilted. I didn’t get better — didn’t pick up the rhythms and slang and everyday spoken beauty of the language until the 1970s. I began listening then, over and over and over, to my growing collection of LPs from the salsa label Fania, copying the words and learning how they mashed together. Based in New York City, Fania even had a fan magazine. New York also had the annual Puerto Rican parade, and I vividly recall running into impromptu conga circles on street corners, where young people sang not just in Spanish but also in Lucumi, the deeply spiritual language of the Afro-Caribbean Yoruba and Santeria religions. They’d picked up the words from the same records I listened to. Their devotion to the musical aspects of their heritage reminded me of my fascination with cantorial music, which was also available on vintage LPs and even on low-watt radio in Brooklyn.
Twenty-five years ago I went to Columbia one summer to study Yiddish. In class I learned that Molly Picon had sung in Yiddish in the 1940s on the Forward-owned radio station WEVD. Her show was followed by one in Spanish with mambo bands like La Sonora Matancera. How many Jews kept listening after the Picon program signed off? Were Sholem Aleichem and Uriel Weinreich the salseros of their own culture? I got bat mitzvahed at age 71 at a shul in Brooklyn. I had kosher food at the after-party. And we danced to a mambo band, led by Benjamin Lapidus, a fellow synagogue member.
Bad Bunny’s “Nueva Yol” couldn’t be more New York. It talks about going to Bear Mountain in the summer. About the Yankees and the Mets. The 4th of July. About Willie Colon, the beloved salsa trumpeter from the Bronx who ran (unsuccessfully) for Congress in 1994 and for Public Advocate in 2001.
Bad Bunny’s halftime performance of “Nueva Yol” also celebrated a Brooklyn matriarch named Maria Antonia Cay, aka Toñita. She runs an intimate social club for Puerto Ricans in Williamsburg where she cooks traditional food, serves it, and tends bar at age 85. She made a cameo appearance at halftime, as Bad Bunny sang lyrics about conflict and anxiety, featuring his signature tic, the phrase “Uuy, uuy!” Go forward in the mouth just a bit and you’re at Yiddish “Oy oy!” At one point he jumped into a joyful mosh pit of dancers. They hoisted him up and paraded him around. It could have been the reception, in any borough, of any Jewish wedding.
There’s a lot of talk these days about Diaspora Jews versus Israel Jews. It’s a topic that’s been fraught for years and inspires endless discussion. There’s not so much talk about Diaspora Puerto Ricans: the people who settled and struggled here decades ago and whose lives became cultural cross-over when Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein — all Jews — created West Side Story. Today, the New York boroughs, with about a million Jews, constitute the biggest Jewish city in the world after Tel Aviv. And New York City has more Puerto Ricans than San Juan. Bad Bunny’s halftime show reminded us of our shared diaspora. It did so as our bodies grooved, even if they were geriatric bodies grooving slower than before.
The post Why Bad Bunny’s halftime show delighted New York Jews of a certain age appeared first on The Forward.
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Dutch Arrest 15 Suspected of Spreading Islamic State Propaganda on TikTok
Islamic State slogans painted along the walls of the tunnel was used by Islamic State militants as an underground training camp in the hillside overlooking Mosul, Iraq, March 4, 2017. Photo: via Reuters Connect.
Fifteen people were arrested in the Netherlands on Tuesday on suspicion of spreading propaganda for Islamic State on TikTok and trying to persuade people to commit terrorist attacks, Dutch prosecutors said.
The arrests were triggered by a TikTok account that spread large amounts of IS propaganda with Dutch subtitles, the prosecutors said.
The TikTok posts, some with more than 100,000 views, encouraged people to join Islamic State and glorified becoming a martyr for the violent Islamist group, they said.
Thirteen of the suspects are Syrian, and four have Dutch nationality, prosecutors said, implying that some were dual nationals. Four are minors.
The suspects, aged 16 to 53, were detained in raids across the Netherlands, following the arrest last month of a person who the prosecutors said was the main suspect.
TikTok is owned by China’s Bytedance.
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US Used Mobile Launchers for Missiles at Qatar Base as Iran Tensions Rose, Satellite Pictures Show
Satellite image shows F-15E, A-10 Thunderbolt, and C-130 Hercules at the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, in Al Azraq, Jordan, Feb. 2, 2026. Photo: 2026 PLANET LABS PBC/Handout via REUTERS
US forces in Qatar‘s al-Udeid, the biggest US base in the Middle East, put missiles into truck launchers as tensions with Iran ratcheted up since January, analysis of satellite images showed, meaning they could be moved more quickly.
The decision to keep the Patriot missiles in mobile trucks rather than semi-static launcher stations — meaning they could rapidly deploy to strike or be moved defensively in case of an Iranian attack — shows how risks heightened as frictions grew.
US President Donald Trump has threatened to bomb Iran over its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, its backing for allied terrorist groups in the Middle East, and crushing of internal dissent, though talks to avert a war continue.
There are also US bases in Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Turkey, and on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards have warned that in case of strikes on Iranian territory, they could retaliate against any US base.
A comparison of satellite photographs in early February with those taken in January shows a recent build-up of aircraft and other military equipment across the region, said William Goodhind, a forensic imagery analyst with Contested Ground.
At al-Udeid, the Patriot missiles were visible parked mounted into M983 Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Trucks (HEMTT) at the start of February, Goodhind said.
“The decision to do so gives the Patriots much greater mobility, meaning they can be moved to an alternative site or repositioned with greater speed,” he said.
It was not clear on Tuesday whether the missiles were still in the HEMTTs.
A spokesperson for the Pentagon was not immediately available for comment.
Iran says it has replenished its missile stocks after two weeks of conflict last summer when Israel bombed its nuclear facilities and some other military targets, a campaign that the United States joined late on.
Iran has underground missile complexes near Tehran, as well as at Kermanshah, Semnan and near the Gulf coast.
The Iranian naval drone carrier IRIS Shahid Bagheri was visible in satellite photographs on Jan. 27 at sea some 5 km from Bandar Abbas. It was also visible near Bandar Abbas on February 10.
Here are changes at US Middle East bases observed in satellite pictures:
AL-UDEID, QATAR:
Images from February 1 showed an RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft, three C-130 Hercules aircraft, 18 KC 135 Stratotankers, and seven C-17s. On Jan. 17 there had been 14 Stratotankers and two C-17s.
Up to 10 MIM-104 Patriot air defense systems were parked in HEMTTs.
MUWAFFAQ, JORDAN:
Images from Feb. 2 of one location in Muwaffaq showed 17 F15-E strike aircraft, 8 A-10 Thunderbolt aircraft, four C-130s, and four unidentified helicopters. Images from Jan. 16 were low resolution and it was not possible to identify all aircraft there.
Feb. 2 images of a second location in Muwaffaq showed a C-17 and a C-130, as well as four EA-18G Growler electronic warfare aircraft. Pictures of that location on Jan. 25 had not shown any aircraft.
OTHER BASES:
At Prince Sultan base in Saudi Arabia, images on Feb. 2 showed a C-5 Galaxy and a C-17 aircraft. Images on Dec. 6 showed five aircraft that appeared to be C-130s.
Satellite images from Feb. 6 showed seven more aircraft than had been observed on Jan. 31 at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
Images taken on Jan. 25 and Feb. 10 showed an increase in aircraft at Dukhan base in Oman.