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How a 198-year-old New Orleans synagogue became one of America’s fastest-growing Jewish communities
NEW ORLEANS — By the time a trumpet player rose from the pews, candy was already flying through the sanctuary.
Children scrambled across the bimah beneath Touro Synagogue’s green-and-gold dome while the crowd clapped to the music and a 13-year-old boy in orange Nike sneakers stood beside his mom before two open Torah scrolls — one for the bar mitzvah boy, the other for his mother, who was 47, a recent convert celebrating her adult bat mitzvah.
By the end of services, congregants carrying guitars, flutes, and tambourines had transformed the sanctuary into something resembling a Mardi Gras second line.
In most American synagogues, this would have felt unusual. At Touro, located along the famous parade route, it felt nearly routine.
Across the country, congregations are shrinking, aging and consolidating. Denominational loyalty is weakening. Younger Jews are less likely to join synagogues at all. But here in New Orleans, Jewish communal life has experienced an unlikely revival.
New Orleans still carries Katrina in its census numbers. The city still has roughly 25% fewer residents than before the storm. Its Black population, while still the majority, has dropped most significantly. Jewish New Orleans, overwhelmingly white, tells a different story. Community leaders say the Jewish population has rebounded to — and perhaps surpassed — pre-Katrina levels.
The revival was driven partly by generational turnover. After the 2005 hurricane, many older New Orleans Jews decided not to return, choosing instead to spend retirement near children and family in cities like Houston and Atlanta. In their place came a younger generation of post-Katrina newcomers — volunteers, nonprofit workers, Tulane University transplants and young families drawn by the chance to help rebuild the city.
But the resurgence cannot be explained by demographics alone. Across the city, Jews describe a deeply interconnected communal ecosystem shaped by catastrophe, collaboration and a distinctly New Orleans instinct for improvisation.
The city’s Jewish institutions increasingly learned to share resources, blur lines between denominations and accommodate the realities of modern Jewish families. Interfaith couples found a warmer welcome. Synagogues that once occupied separate lanes began collaborating more closely. “Denominational boundaries here are very porous,” said Ilana Horwitz, a Tulane University Jewish Studies professor who is writing a book about how the Jewish community survived and rebuilt after Katrina.
At the center of that revival sits Touro Synagogue, a nearly 200-year-old Reform congregation that is defying institutional decline.
In 2019, Touro hired as its spiritual leader Rabbi Katie Bauman, a New Orleans native. She arrived just months before the pandemic would force synagogues across America to reinvent themselves.
At the time, the shul counted roughly 570 families. Today, it is approaching 750. Its religious school has grown from 131 students to 243 in six years. In 2019, the synagogue hosted eight b’nei mitzvah. Nearly 30 b’nai mitzvahs are already scheduled for the 2027-28 school year — so many that synagogue leaders have begun quietly confronting an unfamiliar problem: Are we growing too much?
“We’re not gonna turn people away,” said Kevin Wilkins, the synagogue’s president and the first convert ever to hold the role. “We’re not gonna have a waitlist.”
Two decades after Katrina nearly drowned New Orleans, Touro has become a kind of laboratory for what Jewish communal life can look like after disaster reshapes it.
The people who came after the storm
A Detroit native, Joshua Lichtman came to New Orleans in 2007 after spending time at a Jewish farming and environmental program in Connecticut. Like many people drawn south after Katrina, he was looking for purpose and a chance to help rebuild.
“It was volunteering and adventure,” Lichtman, 51, recalled one Saturday morning after services at Touro
Entire neighborhoods remained scarred by floodwaters. Lichtman spent those early months gutting homes, working in community gardens and helping with legal aid projects. Then he met Davida Finger, who ran the Katrina Clinic at Loyola University, which provided free legal assistance to residents displaced by the hurricane. They got married.
He came to help rebuild the city. Somewhere along the way, the city rebuilt him, too.
Lichtman stayed, helped launch Avodah New Orleans, a Jewish service corps program, and now works in financial planning. Today, he and his wife are raising two children in the city.
His story reflects a broader demographic shift that transformed Jewish New Orleans after Katrina. The Jewish community dropped from about 10,000 people to around 6,500 following the floods. “The Jewish population has been replenished,” said Horwitz, who moved to New Orleans from the Bay Area in 2021, making her both a scholar of the city’s Jewish revival and a participant in it. “But it’s a different configuration of people than there was before.”
Before Katrina, much of Jewish New Orleans was defined by continuity. Many families traced their roots in the city back four or five generations to German-Jewish immigrants who arrived in the 19th century. They attended the same schools, joined the same congregations and often stayed for life.
Reform Judaism, long the dominant expression of Jewish life here, reflected a distinctly Southern tradition — highly assimilated, deeply rooted in local civic affairs and often more connected to New Orleans than to the broader currents of American Judaism.
The community was tightly knit and deeply rooted. Institutional loyalty ran deep. Many worked in law, medicine or family-owned businesses built over generations. As the city’s economy shifted and younger residents left for bigger cities, the Jewish population had already begun slowly shrinking.
The people who arrived after Katrina brought different backgrounds and different reasons for coming. They were volunteers, nonprofit workers, academics, and entrepreneurs drawn not by inheritance but by opportunity — and by the chance to help rebuild.
The transformation was not entirely accidental. In the years after Katrina, the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans launched an incentive program for Jewish newcomers, offering a stipend for moving expenses, discounted tuition at the Jewish day school, and a year of free membership at a synagogue. According to the federation, hundreds of people participated in the program, which ran through 2012, and one in four have stayed.
One of the engines of that growth has been Tulane University, where 25% to 30% of undergraduate students are Jewish, according to local estimates, placing it higher than the University of Pennsylvania (17%), Columbia (16%) and Harvard (10%).
Today, some Jewish families view Tulane as an appealing alternative to more politically polarized campuses. Nicholas Lemann, the New Orleans-born author of Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries, said the university benefits from both New Orleans’ cultural appeal and a campus climate many parents perceive as less contentious than schools on the coasts.
“Kids won’t be exposed to anti-Zionism as at bigger Ivies,” said Lemann, a longtime professor and former dean at Columbia Journalism School. “That’s meaningful to many Jewish parents.”
Tulane functions as a pipeline bringing Jewish students, faculty and young professionals into the city, some of whom ultimately decide to stay.
Yet population alone does not explain the revival. What emerged after Katrina was a different way of organizing Jewish life in New Orleans. The city’s six synagogues and two Chabads routinely promote one another’s programs. Rabbis collaborate across denominational lines. Congregants often belong to more than one synagogue at a time.
Alan Smason, editor of the Crescent City Jewish News — which he founded after the hurricane — said much of that cooperation grew directly out of the storm. “We’ve got a Reform temple that actually lives next door to and partners with an Orthodox synagogue,” he said. “A lot of those traditions came about because of Katrina.”
Smason, a New Orleans native, has spent decades chronicling the city’s Jewish life. The cooperation he sees today would have been harder to imagine before the storm. “Out of the darkness,” he said, “came light.”
A different city
The community that emerged after Katrina was different. The result was a community that became more fluid and, in some ways, more open to experimentation than the one that preceded it. New Orleans has always been a city comfortable with reinvention.
On a humid afternoon, tour guide Roni Bossin led me through the French Quarter, pointing out traces of Jewish history hidden in plain sight.
There was the former factory where Joseph Haspel is credited with inventing the seersucker suit. There was Sam Zemurray — the Jewish immigrant known as “Sam the Banana Man” — who built a fruit empire from New Orleans. There was the Holocaust memorial overlooking the Mississippi River and the legacy of Judah Touro, the philanthropist whose name still adorns a hospital as well as the synagogue.
Jewish history here is less a chapter than a thread — stitched through the city’s commerce, politics, philanthropy and folklore. “Jews were woven into the story of New Orleans from the beginning,” said Bossin, a transplant from Israel.
Isaac Monsanto, the first Jewish settler in New Orleans for whom historical records exist, arrived in 1757. By 1828, local Jews had established a congregation that would eventually become Touro Synagogue.
But if Jewish New Orleans has deep roots, it has also changed dramatically. Lemann said the city he visits today feels markedly different from the one where he grew up. When he was young, many Jewish families had lived in New Orleans for generations. His father was born in the city. His grandfather was born in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. Local identity was often inherited.
Today, he said, the community includes far more newcomers. “The various elements of Jewish New Orleans have come together more,” Lemann said.
That history helps explain why Touro feels distinctly New Orleans. Unlike many American synagogues built on sprawling suburban campuses, the city presses right up against the sanctuary walls. The building sits along St. Charles Avenue with no parking lot separating it from the sidewalk. Streetcars rumble past. Mardi Gras floats pass the front doors. During carnival season, members gather there to watch parades together. The congregation builds viewing stands for children with disabilities. Families tailgate on synagogue grounds.
For Rabbi Lily Kowalski, an associate rabbi who joined the shul last year, one of her first Mardi Gras experiences at Touro came during Shabbat services. The congregation was praying when the parade began rolling past outside.
“There was something both ironic and beautiful,” she recalled.
Eventually, the clergy made a practical decision: They would skip a few songs from the end of the service. “The parade has started,” Kowalski remembered thinking. “We need to go outside and see the parade.”
On JazzFest weekend, Touro hosts a special musical Shabbat service that has become one of the congregation’s signature events for the past three decades. “We do love to party,” said Rabbi Bauman. “But it’s a symbol of how proud we are to be here.”
For generations, New Orleans has thrived by blending traditions rather than policing boundaries. Jazz emerged from that cultural mixing. So did much of the city’s cuisine, language and civic culture. Many congregants see Touro as a Jewish expression of the same instinct — a congregation more interested in bringing people together than sorting them into categories.
The open tent
The weekly pamphlet handed out to worshippers carries a simple message across the top: Touro synagogue welcomes all.
For Abby Gaunt, those words proved more than a slogan.
Raised Catholic in New York City, Gaunt had long felt drawn to Judaism. She married a Jewish man, sent her two children to Jewish schools and immersed herself in Jewish communal life. But she never felt the desire to convert.
Then came the 2018 Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh. As she read about the victims, one detail stopped her. Two of the people murdered that day — brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal — had Fragile X syndrome, the same genetic condition as her son, Mack.
The story felt personal. When schools struggled to accommodate Mack’s learning differences, Gaunt said New Orleans’ Jewish community had stepped forward to embrace him. The local Jewish day school accepted him when others would not. Congregants welcomed him. Families rallied around him.
“It just felt like they took you as you are,” Gaunt said of Touro. “There’s no asterisk.”
The experience led her to begin studying for conversion. This spring, she celebrated the culmination of that journey standing beside Mack. Mother and son shared the bimah. They recited prayers together. Each read from a Torah scroll — his for a bar mitzvah, hers for an adult bat mitzvah.
For Touro, it was a fitting image. The congregation’s growth has been fueled by newcomers and young families, and by an expansive understanding of who belongs. Its membership includes interfaith families, former Orthodox Jews, lifelong Reform Jews, converts and a growing number of congregants who arrived from a local Conservative synagogue.
Rather than asking newcomers to conform to a single model of Jewish life, synagogue leaders have increasingly adapted the institution around the people walking through the doors. “We’re not just saying we’re an open tent,” said Beth Shapiro Lavin, Touro’s executive vice president, and the congregation’s next president beginning in 2027. “We mean it.”
In a city rebuilt by people who arrived from somewhere else, belonging has become one of Touro’s defining values.
When Lavin joined Touro’s board in 2022, the congregation was already growing. She now finds herself thinking less about survival than succession. Touro will celebrate its 200th anniversary in 2028, during her presidency. Around the same time, her own daughter will celebrate her bat mitzvah in the sanctuary where Lavin herself grew up.
“It’s a really exciting time,” said Lavin, who moved back home after Katrina.
The questions facing Touro are different from those confronting many American synagogues. The congregation worships beneath a dome completed in 1909. Memorial plaques line the sanctuary walls, some honoring congregants who died in the 1800s. The names on the walls grow older every year. The children running beneath them do not.
Growth has created a new set of questions for synagogue leaders. “What is the right size?” Lavin asked.
Part of the answer, she believes, lies in making participation as easy as possible for young families. More than a decade ago, Touro eliminated mandatory membership dues, replacing them with a voluntary giving model.
The experiment worked. This year, Lavin said, roughly two-thirds of donors increased their contributions. Some quadrupled them. “The model only works when we all give what we can,” she said.
The payoff is visible throughout the building. Parents linger after services. Teenagers tutor younger students in Hebrew school. Congregants volunteer to coach b’nai mitzvah speeches. Children who once sat on the sanctuary floor receiving blessings from clergy eventually return as youth group leaders and religious school teachers.
Beyond denominations
A few years ago, a group of families from Shir Chadash, New Orleans’ Conservative synagogue, found themselves searching for a new spiritual home. Some were drawn by Rabbi Bauman’s charismatic leadership. Others were looking for a congregation in the city rather than the suburbs. Many already had friends at Touro.
What they weren’t looking for was a typical Reform service.
“We really appreciate Touro’s big tent approach,” said Ben Horwitz (no relation to Ilana), who helped found a lay-led group that now meets twice a month — once in a community member’s home and once in Touro’s library. “We should be able to serve this community writ large.”
Known as the Chavurat Or’Leans, it offers a more traditional style prayer experience while remaining fully part of the larger congregation. On some weekends, 30 to 50 people attend when it meets at Touro. The synagogue provides space, children’s programming and logistical support.
“It has been a win-win situation,” Horwitz said.
The arrangement reflects a broader philosophy taking hold at Touro. Rather than asking congregants to fit neatly into denominational categories, the synagogue increasingly tries to meet people where they are.
When Horwitz and his wife, Ellie Streiffer, began planning their son’s bar mitzvah, they wanted a traditional, egalitarian service. Touro not only accommodated the request, but provided rabbinic support to help their son prepare.
Other families have made similar choices. “We’re trying to push boundaries,” Bauman said. “People are looking for community more than a particular movement.”
The same flexibility that led Bauman to accommodate different religious traditions has also helped it navigate other forms of difference. Touro’s political diversity is unusual in an era when many religious communities have become more ideologically homogeneous. New Orleans itself remains a blue enclave in a deeply red state.
Bauman said she has watched congregants repeatedly choose community over agreement. “Especially in the last two years, which have been so challenging and so politically divisive,” she said, “people want to be together more than they want to be right.”
A problem most synagogues would envy
Part of the congregation’s growth coincided with Bauman’s arrival. She became senior rabbi in 2019, just months before the pandemic upended American religious life.
While congregations around the country migrated online, Bauman took much of Touro outdoors. Youth groups met camp-style in parks and courtyards. Families gathered under oak trees. Children who might have disappeared into screens continued seeing one another face-to-face.
“We just never did the Zoom thing,” for youth and teen education programs, Bauman said. Looking back, she believes that decision accelerated the congregation’s growth by strengthening relationships at a moment when many institutions were struggling to maintain them.
The growth has been so pronounced that last year Touro hired a third full-time rabbi for the first time in its history. Rabbi Kowalski arrived in the summer of 2025 from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to serve as associate rabbi and education director.
Sitting in her office one afternoon beneath a hand-painted sign reading “Welcome Rabbi Kowalski,” she described the job as both “inspiring and daunting.”
On Sunday mornings and Wednesday afternoons, the synagogue hums with activity. Religious school classes fill nearly every available room. Parents attend adult education programs while their children study Hebrew. Choir rehearsals meet at the same time.
The building was designed to hold memory. It is now straining to hold momentum. “We’re using every nook of the building,” Kowalski said.
For generations, the challenge facing American synagogues was how to attract young families. At Touro, the question has become something else entirely: How do you keep growing without losing the intimacy that made people want to join in the first place?
The second tablets
For Bauman, the synagogue’s revival begins much earlier than Touro’s recent growth.
At the joint mother-son b’nai mitzvah, Bauman’s sermon focused on one of Judaism’s oldest stories of rupture and repair. In that week’s Torah portion, Moses descends Mount Sinai carrying the Ten Commandments, only to smash the stone tablets after discovering the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf below. Eventually, God commands him to climb the mountain again and carve a second set.
The first tablets, Bauman told the congregation, belonged to a world that was orderly and unbroken. The second set came afterward. “The first tablets are simple and clear,” she said. “But life is messier than that.”
In post-Katrina New Orleans, the metaphor hardly felt abstract. Rebuilding was never supposed to mean restoration.
Horwitz, the Tulane professor, sees echoes of biblical stories throughout New Orleans’ experience after the hurricane. Her forthcoming book traces the community’s journey through themes of flood, exile, wilderness and return.
Horwitz, whose own family arrived in the United States as Soviet Jewish refugees in the late 1980s, argues that what endured after Katrina was the community itself — not as a collection of buildings, but as a web of relationships that helped people find one another again. “It’s fundamental,” Horwitz said. “Jewish communities are there for you in a moment of crisis.”
The Jewish New Orleans that emerged after Katrina is not identical to the one that existed before the storm. Many of the people are different. So are the ways they have learned to build community.
But perhaps that is what Bauman meant when she spoke about the second tablets. The first version was lost. The second pair, which carried the Jewish people through the wilderness, was the one that endured.
The post How a 198-year-old New Orleans synagogue became one of America’s fastest-growing Jewish communities appeared first on The Forward.
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The first synagogue inside a U.S. prison reopens — no conviction required
As prisons go, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia was unusually luxurious. For one, it had flush toilets — beating out even the White House in making the upgrade, museum exhibit developer Beth Tinker told me on a recent tour.
But if plumbing reflected the penitentiary’s commitment to prisoners’ physical well-being, its biggest innovation was more spiritual. Eastern State housed the first synagogue inside a U.S. prison, complete with a Torah ark and ner tamid, or eternal light. That restored sanctuary — a short walk from gangster Al Capone’s former cell — is now newly open to the public in a museum exhibit, Freedom through Faith: Judaism at Eastern State and Beyond.
“It’s a place really of humanity, when you’re not getting a lot of humanity in this space,” Tinker said.
The synagogue, founded in 1922, hosted holiday celebrations and weekly Shabbat services. Outside volunteers brought in kosher meats. A circus performer visited and provided entertainment. After a prisoner gave birth to a baby boy, they brought in a mohel and held a bris.
Compare that level of institutional support with modern-day prisons, where there are often multifaith chapels, but a separate, dedicated space for a synagogue is rare, according to Rabbi Joseph Kolakowski, the first full-time Jewish chaplain in the history of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.
The exhibit comes on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling that makes it more difficult for prisoners to obtain a remedy when their religious rights are violated. Last month, the Court ruled that a Rastafarian man, Damon Landor, could not sue prison guards for monetary damages after they forcibly shaved off his dreadlocks, which he kept as part of his faith. When he entered the prison, Landor carried with him a copy of a 2017 court decision that required the Louisiana Department of Corrections to honor Rastafarian religious practices — which a guard threw in the trash, according to court records.
But while Landor couldn’t sue the guard, the Supreme Court did agree that Landor’s rights had been violated. His case led the Louisiana Department of Corrections to update its prisoner grooming policy to prevent similar violations.
Eastern State, meanwhile, was accommodating Jewish religious practice decades before those legal protections existed, Tinker said.
“That’s part of what makes this synagogue and this Jewish congregation so amazing, is because they didn’t have to do it, legally,” Tinker said. “It was able to not just sort of secretly start up, but thrive.”
The synagogue’s history
Eastern State didn’t exactly start as a model of restorative justice. Opened in 1829, the state-funded prison pioneered solitary confinement in the U.S., with the idea that solitude would force prisoners to reflect on their sins and find redemption.
That philosophy shaped the prison’s design. A wagon-wheel shaped, panopticon-esque layout allowed for centralized surveillance of prisoners. Skylights in each cell represented the “Eye of God,” suggesting to prisoners that they were always being watched. Cells were attached to small outdoor exercise yards, enclosed by high walls to discourage communication between prisoners. Guards placed hoods over prisoners’ heads whenever they left their cells to prevent them from seeing each other.
But overcrowding made isolation difficult to enforce, so Eastern State abandoned solitary confinement in 1913. That same year, Jewish prisoners gathered to pray for the first time together in the prison’s emergency hospital.
The idea for a more official synagogue came from the top: Alfred Fleisher, the Jewish president of the prison’s board of trustees, advocated for the construction of a sanctuary, partly over concerns that Jewish prisoners would be pressured to convert to Christianity, according to Tinker.
In 1922, prisoners and outside volunteers built the ornate sanctuary. Lights in the shape of menorahs surrounded the ark, and a gold Star of David was affixed to the ceiling next to a skylight.
“It was a chance for the Jewish congregants to have a space that really resonated with their religion, and was a little fancier than the rest of the prison,” Tinker said. “It has sort of the gravitas that you might really find in a synagogue.”
Most of the congregants were serving time for petty crimes, Tinker said, and their stays at Eastern State lasted no more than a few years. For instance, Sydney Bleecher, a prisoner and congregant at Eastern State, was serving time after pleading guilty to stealing 542 suits and overcoats from a store. But for many congregants, the synagogue’s impact lasted beyond the lengths of their prison sentences.
“It is not easy to find words that can say what we feel about you,” Bleecher wrote in a 1948 letter to Joseph Paull, one of the synagogue’s most devoted volunteers. “You have done so much for us that we are far and away indebted to you. Maybe we can repay in part by becoming decent citizens and, like you and your wife, reach out a hand to those who need help.”
The synagogue was also unusually integrated with the outside community. Fleisher attended every service at the synagogue until his death in 1928. Sabato Morais, the spiritual leader at Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, simultaneously served as a chaplain at Eastern State.
All that support occurred despite the prison’s small Jewish population, which never rose above 80 in a prison that held roughly 1,800 people in the 1930s.
Yet according to Tinker, the synagogue never faced much pushback from people of other faiths.
“When they started it, it’s also World War I, World War II, and all that antisemitism that’s happening,” Tinker said. “It could have easily gone another direction.”
Jewish life behind bars
Most prisons today hold Jewish services in multi-faith chapels rather than separate Jewish sanctuaries — a practical arrangement that allows facilities to accommodate prisoners of many faiths in a shared space.
After Eastern State closed in 1971, its successor, Graterford Prison, also featured a dedicated synagogue. But after Graterford closed in 2018, its replacement, SCI Phoenix, opened with a multifaith chapel instead.
Today, Kolakowski, chaplaincy program director at the State Correctional Institute at Waymart, Pa., conducts services in a multifaith chapel or, when it’s occupied, a classroom shared with Jehovah’s Witnesses.
There, he leads regular services and holiday celebrations, including Passover seders and Hanukkah candle-lightings. During Sukkot, he hosts services in a makeshift sukkah.
“It’s meaningful to every inmate that practices a religious tradition,” Kolakowski said. “I remember one inmate in particular — he expressed how much he appreciated having the opportunity to have the lulav.”
But accommodating religious practice inside a prison often requires balancing spiritual needs with security concerns. When Kolakowski advocated for a Sikh prisoner to be able to wear a turban, for example, prison officials had to consider that the traditional head covering could be used to hide contraband, he said. Kolakowski ultimately got the item approved by suggesting a small turban with less fabric.
Modern-day prisons are legally required to accommodate prisoners’ religious practices unless they can demonstrate a compelling reason not to, such as a risk to staff or other prisoners’ safety. How those accommodations are carried out, however, can vary from prison to prison.
In 2023, for example, Jewish inmate Riley Benjamin sued the D.C. Department of Corrections after officials required him to produce outside proof of his Judaism before providing him with kosher meals. The jail later agreed to change its policy.
“Today, it’s really prison by prison, warden by warden, how they are defining religious freedom,” Tinker said. “One thing those laws really do is they sort of let the prison decide and the staff decide what it means to a certain extent.”
Still, there have been some successors to the Eastern State synagogue — including at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, where Rabbi Irving Koslowe convinced the prison administration to let him convert a basement storage room into an exclusively Jewish place of worship in 1959.
Koslowe died in 2000. But his great grandson, Benjamin Koslowe, visited the prison years later and wrote about the experience for Yeshiva University’s student newspaper.
In an interview with the Forward, Koslowe recalled one of his great-grandfather’s favorite jokes: “They’re the only synagogue that hopes that they don’t have a quorum.”
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I’m a left-leaning Zionist Jew in Maine. I still can’t make sense of the Graham Platner mess
It’s a very strange time to be a left-leaning Zionist Jew in America. It’s an even weirder time to be a left-leaning Zionist Jew in Maine.
Graham Platner, who suspended his ill-fated Senate campaign last week, electrified my friends and neighbors with his grave, light-blue-collar eloquence. He got them excited to vote for someone — not just against President Donald Trump and Sen. Susan Collins. In a state known for delivering temperate and sagacious senators, including George Mitchell, Olympia Snowe and Angus King, Platner brought a fire and passion that more befit our times.
Part of his appeal, and what allowed Mainers to slalom past so many red flags, was the aura of brave truth-teller he cultivated. He seemed unafraid to name our true enemies: billionaires, mega-corporations, Republicans, corporate Democrats, and yes, AIPAC.
The railing against AIPAC as the source of all evil made me uncomfortable, even as it’s become normalized. Add in that infamous Nazi tattoo, and the throngs of people cheering his every word, and any Jewish Mainer had a right to feel they were in a strange new wilderness.
On the one hand: How could I vote for someone who I feared might make this country less safe for my Jewish children? On the other: How could I vote for someone who supports Trump, whose policies also makes this country less safe for my children?
I had trouble squaring the fear so many of my Jewish friends felt at Platner’s candidacy with the exultation of my non-Jewish friends. There is a great Maine saying for when you need more information before you commit to a stance: “Hard telling not knowing.”
I didn’t know enough, so I couldn’t tell how much to worry. So I endeavored to speak to the guy about it.
Maine is a small state, and you can actually do that kind of thing. I went to the Passover Seder that Platner’s campaign put on, and I parlayed that into a conversation. I came out of that experience cautiously optimistic that Graham Platner is not an actual Nazi, or even an antisemite. But I was still relieved to see him step back from the race — even though I took no joy in it.
Troubled Jewish bona fides
There were plenty of reasons to have some faith that Platner wouldn’t be as disastrous for Jews as many of my friends feared. I met the lovely Jewish family in whose Bangor home a young Graham shared many a Shabbos dinner. His campaign staff who I met would have set off even the least sensitive Jewdar. He was clearly comfortable at the Seder he hosted, and it clearly was far from his first.
When we spoke on the phone, he talked about the deep love he has for his Israeli family members, including his step-brother: a serious, hawkish Israeli security analyst with Maine roots. That gave him a human connection to the conflict that few Mainers have. He believed he’d spoken out forcefully against antisemitism.
But his language about Israel was reckless, I told him, and I implored him to be more careful. While he knew and loved individual Jews, most Mainers did not: our community in this state is very small. The impact of his insistence that Israel was committing genocide might not match his intent. Criticism of Israel is valid, but the recent increase in its intensity has been paralleled by an increase in attacks on American Jews.
Platner’s response concerned me. He told me that it was the policies of the Netanyahu government that were most responsible for that spike in violent antisemitism — not the people actually trying to kill us. I asked him to use his platform and his unique perspective to move people away from hatred. He repeated that Israel was committing genocide, and that he would continue to speak out against antisemitism.
We ended the call and I thought about Yehuda Amichai’s wise line: “From the place where we are right/ flowers will never grow/ in the spring.”
An aborted story of redemption
Somehow me saying “I told you so” to my friends left saddened and angered by Platner’s withdrawal from the race following an allegation of sexual assault didn’t make them feel better.
And even I wasn’t sure exactly what the “I told you so” would mean. I’d been clear that he wasn’t reliable, that his political vision didn’t make up for a lack of personal judgment or record. But I myself had tried to see my way past those concerns, too. To be quite honest, although it’s probably anathema to say so given the charges against him, I kind of liked the guy as a person. His clunky, tearful exit video hurt to watch.
The story of redemption that Platner and his campaign told was a welcome antidote to the turbocharged version of manhood pushed by so many on the right. That his downfall came from a revelation of an act that felt like the embodiment of how toxic that vision can be only contributes to the overall feeling of brokenness.
Now several other viable candidates with half of the charisma will try to gather all of the energy he created. And I wonder: in these furious, truncated weeks of campaigning — the Democratic party must select a candidate by July 27 — which of them will take the shortcut to the progressive heart by bashing Israel the most? If one says Israel is bad, must the next say it is worse?
It’s for the best — but also alarming — that we’re about to have new insight into how much of Platner’s coalition was built upon this rhetoric. Already Shena Bellows, a top candidate and former head of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine, has hesitatingly taken to using the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza. Who will be next up to take a swing?
What terrifies me about Platner, and many others on the anti-Israel left, is that they seem to be casually playing with a darkness they do not understand. (The same could be said of Platner’s erstwhile Nazi tattoo, if we’re to believe he truly didn’t understand its meaning when he got it.) They risk building a permission structure for hatred of Jews, whether they intend to or not.
I will be looking for the candidate who refuses to add another brick to that structure, although I don’t know if any of them have the courage to abstain.
Meanwhile, ICE just killed an innocent man in Biddeford, Maine in front of his daughter. This madness, too, has to stop. Which madness do we prioritize? And how much of one madness will we accept in order to stop another?
This is the place of confusion that many of us are in. The only answer I have is that it’s hard telling not knowing.
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Bagels are hanging from the trees in Beijing. Is China bagelmaxxing?
I was strolling through a gleaming new mall complex in Beijing beside a couple walking their robot dog when I stumbled upon the bagel tree. Its branches, though bare of leaves, bore giant bagel sculptures, hanging from its boughs on translucent string. In front was a sign proclaiming, “Beigel Tree by New York Bagelous Museum.”
Beigel Tree by New York Bagelous Museum, it turned out, was a new offshoot of the viral New York Bagelous Museum, a growing bagel chain with five shops across three Chinese cities.
The New York Bagelous Museum would seem, at least in name, to be a nod to New York Jewish culture. These days, China isn’t so hot on either of those things. The Chinese government sees America as a country in decline and often points towards visible poverty in major American cities, like New York, as a sign of this. While China used to be nearly free of Jew-hatred, there has seen a rise of antisemitic posts and rhetoric on Chinese social media platforms. The government tightly controls what is posted on these platforms, but there has seemingly not been censorship of antisemitic posts.
In this environment, the proliferation of New York Bagelous Museums was surprising. I’d been living in China for nearly a year pursuing a Masters in Global Affairs, and I couldn’t help but wonder what this new development in Beijing-New York relations was all about. I went to see for myself.
Inside, the shop was decorated less like a New York bagel shop and more like a New England bed and breakfast. Instead of sturdy linoleum, it has hardwood floors. Customers sat on benches with green velvet pillows, noshing on bagels and sipping coffee. The shop’s exposed brick walls are hung with oil paintings, photos of New York City, and one tapestry depicting a famous 1963 photo of John and Jackie Kennedy’s family at Hyannisport. I found myself thinking, wouldn’t a portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg be more appropriate?
Well, yes, but the shop isn’t exactly meant to be a faithful duplicate of a New York bagel shop. The likely inspiration for the store comes not from New York but from Seoul. In 2021, Seoul experienced its own bagel craze when a store called London Bagel Museum opened up, drawing two-hour-plus lines.
The Bagel Museum is, in no way, a museum. Besides the bagel part, the rest of the name is arbitrary. According to a Korea Times article, the store’s name simply “combines the founder’s favorite words.”
Two years later, in 2023, New York Bagelous Museum opened its first location in Shanghai. Like many Chinese companies, it was welcomed into this world with copycat allegations. The two shops are nearly identical, even including the font on the marquee, the interior design and the artwork on the packaging. The main difference is that one features a Union Jack while the other features the Statue of Liberty.
The mission statement on the shop’s page on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media application, says that the founders started the company because they wanted “to create a unique American museum-style bagel shop” and for their customers “to enjoy and feel the atmosphere from the American 50s and 60s.”
Though the menu did feature a lox and cream cheese bagel, the rest of the options were unrecognizable to this New Yorker. The signs were written in both English and Chinese. Some bagels were pre-made sandwiches. One featured sweet red bean paste and a slab of butter. Another was stuffed with cream cheese and topped with sticky syrup and rose petals. The sandwiches were artfully put together, unlike the slapdash constructions you find in New York. Other bagels had fillings rolled into the dough, like the Mexican pepper bagel, stuffed with asiago and salami. My friends and I got these, as well as a blueberry sandwich and chocolate bagel, to try.
Notwithstanding the unorthodox flavors, upon taking a bite, I realized that these were bagels in name only. While they did have some of the chewiness of a bagel, they didn’t have the density or the hard exterior. This is likely because, in making the bagels, New York Bagelous Museum doesn’t boil them, something I learned while watching bakers make them through a window into the kitchen. Besides the shape, there wasn’t much separating the bagels from a bread roll.
At the New York Bagelous Museum, I found few traces of New York, bagels, or museums. But the average Chinese customer probably wouldn’t realize the difference between this shop and the real deal, just like the average American eating Chinese takeout wouldn’t realize the gulf between the Chinese food in America and that in China.
It doesn’t seem like those who visit New York Bagelous museums are all that attracted by New York, much less New York Jewish culture. Instead, judging by the myriad posts from Chinese social media about the shop, it’s merely because the shop is viral. Many reviews mention the bagels, but a lot mention another fact: the shop, with its approximated Americana and absurdly stuffed sandwiches, is a great place in which to take photos.
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