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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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Let my people grow: Jewish online cannabis retailer braces for new federal law to take effect
For the past several years, Jewish cannabis company Tokin’ Jew has offered a little something to take the edge off just about every Jewish occasion.
High Holidays have you feeling stressed? Try “High, Honey,” the company’s THC-infused honey stick. Passover Seder dragging on a little too long? An edible called “4 Cups,” the first officially certified kosher-for-Passover THC gummy, will help get you through it.
Now the company that brought the world cannabis-infused chocolate Hanukkah gelt and THC-laced hamantaschen is facing a decidedly less festive future. In a couple months, the products responsible for the majority of its business will no longer be legal due to a change in federal law.
And it’s not just Tokin’ Jew. The new restrictions, set to take effect in December, threaten to upend a multibillion dollar e-commerce industry that has flourished for nearly a decade.
For co-founders Ben Kraim and Will Cohen, who have spent years building a business around the unlikely intersection of Judaism and cannabis, the change threatens to undo much of their lives’ work.
“It’s not easy being a Jewish weed brand, Kraim told the Forward. “Our brand is incredibly niche, so the prospect of losing access to the customer base we worked hard to build up is especially upsetting.”
What began as a humble meme account has grown into a thriving online operation, selling everything from novelty Judaica gifts and smoking accessories to kosher-certified edibles with clever names like “Apple of My Chai” and “Guava Nagila.”
The company has also cultivated a devoted community, bringing together observant and secular Jews, along with cannabis enthusiasts of all backgrounds, through a shared appreciation for Jewish humor and high-quality kush.
Now, Tokin’ Jew Flower, the division of their company, which Kraim said accounts for approximately 60 to 70 percent of sales, faces an uncertain future.
The legal foundations for Tokin’ Jew dates back to the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized products containing no more than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC by dry weight. That provision created an opening for companies to manufacture and ship hemp and hemp-derived products, including THC gummies, across certain state lines without needing to abide by the state-by-state licensing systems governing recreational marijuana use.
A booming industry followed. But Kraim acknowledges that the relatively lax federal regulations created opportunities for “bad actors” to sell questionable products.
“I think everybody in this industry knew things were a little too good to be true,” he said.
What he and many others expected, however, was tighter rules, not the effective elimination of their business model.
“We all thought eventually the federal government was going to create more regulation in this space,” he said, adding that he would have welcomed stronger oversight.
“We like to joke that it’s our Jewish guilt that keeps us from selling a subquality product. But we absolutely support stricter regulation – something that would have been entirely feasible.”
Instead, another provision tucked into the federal spending bill signed by President Trump in November 2025 dramatically narrowed the definition of legal hemp. Under the new rules, finished products containing more than 0.4 milligrams per container of total THC and similarly intoxicating cannabinoids will no longer qualify as federally legal hemp.
The restrictions were originally scheduled to go into effect November 2026, but Congress granted a brief extension that pushed the deadline back to December 11.
According to Kraim, it is not only companies like theirs that will be affected. Growers, manufacturers, packaging businesses and warehouses may have to shut down altogether.
“These are people’s entire livelihoods that they now have to just set ablaze,” Kraim said.
“At least we have this brand that can take many shapes and can live on in so many other ways,” he said. “But if you’re a hemp farmer, you are in big trouble.”
The news comes just as Tokin’ Jew has been experiencing explosive growth. According to Kraim, the company now has approximately 250,000 followers across social media platforms, with its Instagram content reaching between 18 million and 22 million people monthly. Orders have roughly tripled over the past year.
But the founders’ relationship with their customers goes beyond sales.
From the beginning, Kraim, who was raised modern Orthodox, and Cohen, who was raised in a Reform community, viewed their company as a way to connect Jews to their identity through humor, particularly those who may feel alienated from more traditional expressions of Judaism.
That same sense of community was on full display when they announced the impending restrictions.
“We were flooded with comments and DMs and emails,” Kraim said, describing messages of sympathy, appreciation and personal testimonials about the company’s products.
What struck him most were the offers of assistance.
“We got tons of messages from people willing to offer a hand,” he said. “‘How can I help? My uncle owns a dispensary. Let’s protest.’ People just coming in hot, trying to help in any way that they can, which is just so beautiful and so Jewish.”
Others began stocking up, taking advantage of the products’ long shelf lives. The company is even considering producing its popular kosher-for-Passover gummies early so customers can buy them before the ban takes effect.
For customers who rely on the products for more than recreation, but relief, Kraim worries about what will happen when home delivery is no longer an option.
He described phoning one of their biggest customers only to discover an elderly Jewish woman on the other end of the line. She told the team how much she relied on their products and how convenient home delivery was, particularly because multiple ailments and limited mobility made it difficult for her to get to a dispensary.
“We were tearing up by the end of the call,” Kraim recalled.
Gabrielle G, a Tokin’ Jew customer since 2024, who declined to give her last name, called the news “truly devastating for the Jewish stoner community.”
“Their Advent calendars were a highlight of my Jewish holidays,” she told the Forward. “I hope they find a solution because TJ feels like family.”
Regardless, TokinJew.com will continue selling accessories, apparel, home goods and Judaica, with plans to expand its offerings.
They’re also planning a gradual move into licensed dispensaries, beginning in New York and eventually New Jersey. But that involves developing separate production, distribution and regulatory requirements for each state, a daunting prospect for a company that spent years developing its national online operation.
“But us Jews are the masters of the pivot,” he pointed out. “We historically have troubles thrown our way, and we always have to figure out our next step.”
For a company whose product line is largely inspired by the Jewish calendar, the date of the new bill feels particularly poignant: The new restrictions are scheduled to take effect on December 11, the evening Jews around the world light the eighth and final Hanukkah candle, commemorating the miracle of a single day’s supply of oil burning for eight.
“We have our plan A, B and C,” Kraim said. “One of which is praying for a Hanukkah miracle.”
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Trump antisemitism official to visit Michigan synagogue weeks before midterms, backed by ZOA
(JTA) — DETROIT – The Trump administration’s antisemitism czar will speak to a Michigan synagogue on Wednesday for a Justice Department event that also doubles as a fundraiser for the state’s chapter of the Zionist Organization of America.
Leo Terrell, who chairs the administration’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, is attending on behalf of the department. The Justice Department touted the event on its website with a link to a ZOA registration page that solicits donations to become an event co-sponsor.
Federal ethics regulations restrict fundraising by government employees and prohibit the use of government property for unauthorized purposes, though they allow authorized official fundraising and certain official speeches at fundraising events.
Terrell is visiting Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, a Detroit suburb; the synagogue is also listed as a co-sponsor. Other co-sponsors include a local Jewish high school, Mothers Against College Antisemitism and pro-Israel advocacy groups.
It comes weeks before the midterm elections, in which rhetoric on Israel and Jewish safety from the state’s Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has put local Jews on edge.
The Justice Department is billing the event as the first stop on Terrell’s “American Tour Against Hate,” adding, “All faiths and backgrounds welcome.” Terrell will be in conversation with Mort Klein, national head of ZOA, a usual stalwart Trump supporter who has broken with the president at times on Iran policy.
On its registration page for the event, ZOA Michigan notes that it “brings the Department of Justice directly into dialogue with Michigan’s Jewish community.”
ZOA Michigan also alluded to current tensions between the state’s Jewish community and El-Sayed.
“Antisemitism is reaching across Michigan — in schools, in public spaces, and among political candidates,” the event page reads. “Confronting it requires our community to stand together.”
The ZOA is a hawkish pro-Israel organization that backs the West Bank settlement movement and Israeli right wing government policies. In the U.S., it has also endorsed some of Trump’s restrictive immigration policies.
Federal tax law prohibits tax-exempt houses of worship from supporting or opposing political candidates, but Trump has sought to loosen the restrictions.
Rabbi Aaron Starr, of Shaarey Zedek, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Conservative congregation’s co-sponsoring of the event should not imply that it was endorsing one candidate over another.
“We are looking forward to working with anybody and everybody who wants to combat hate, whether that hate is antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, racism or any other form of hate,” Starr said. He added that the congregation would soon welcome Jewish Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin for a veteran’s Shabbat.
Starr said the synagogue became a sponsor because it had been approached by ZOA to serve as an event host. “We’re mostly just serving as a venue for the event,” he said, adding that he personally would not be there.
Terrell did not return a JTA request for comment on the event. But he has promoted it extensively on social media and had hinted at the talk, and the ZOA partnership, in a previous email he sent to JTA reporters.
“We hope to see everyone there making it clear hate has no place in America a.k.a the greatest country on Earth,” he wrote at the time. He also thanked ZOA Michigan “for their tireless work on bringing our powerful message into reality.”
ZOA Michigan’s executive director, Kobi Erez, told JTA the event was nonpartisan, but added that he was aware of voters planning to switch parties — an allusion to Democrats who are considering voting for Rogers.
“We are not planning to discuss particular candidates or tell anyone how to vote,” Erez said in an email.
“We do encourage people to examine candidates’ records and statements concerning the safety of the Jewish community and consider whether they will take antisemitism seriously,” he said. “We feel that Jewish safety is at stake now more than ever. We know people who, because of these concerns, plan to vote for a party they have never supported before, and we understand their position.”
Erez said that the point of the event was not fundraising. “We are accepting voluntary sponsorships and donations to help cover expenses and support our work, but the purpose of this evening is to confront antisemitism and connect the community with the Department of Justice,” he said.
Frankel Jewish Academy, a private Jewish high school in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield Township, is also listed as a co-sponsor of the Terrell event. Frankel leaders did not return a JTA request for comment.
Terrell, an attorney, former O.J. Simpson supporter and ex-Fox News contributor, is a senior counsel in the Justice Department’s civil rights division. In that role, he oversees antisemitism taskforces that include staffers from the departments of Justice, Education and Health and Human Services.
Terrell’s visit comes as Trump, and Republicans more broadly, see an opening for Michigan in the midterms, in part via the Jewish vote. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance will be campaigning in Michigan in the coming days. During Vance’s previous stop in Michigan, he went after El-Sayed for his reaction to the Temple Israel attack earlier this year.
Hundreds of local Jews have signed a petition pledging to vote for El-Sayed’s GOP opponent, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, over their fears of the Democrat’s “extremism” on Jews and Israel, including El-Sayed’s remarks earlier this year about the attack on Temple Israel in the state. He has since apologized for those comments.
A separate petition — spearheaded by Starr and other rabbis — outlines “non-negotiables” that some Jewish leaders have pushed El-Sayed and other candidates to agree to.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Latin Jews seek belonging and identity in a country where they feel excluded
(JTA) — Ziggy Valdez, a nonbinary Mexican Jew studying to become a rabbi, was born in Illinois and grew up moving around the country as the child of a Navy father, always attached to a Reform synagogue. Valdez, who uses they/them pronouns, has Mexican roots on both sides of the family and has been “physically brown since birth,” but latinidad and Chicano identity weren’t an active part of family life. Their father worked in the Navy, which according to Valdez’ was the biggest barrier between them and the Jewish world. They grew up with Ashkenazi traditions, even when it meant driving an hour from the base where they were stationed at the time to the synagogue.
Valdez went to 10 different schools between preschool and senior year of high school.In many, they often felt excluded. “The kids at school who were also from Mexican families were not Jewish, and at some points in my adolescence, told me I wasn’t actually Mexican because I was Jewish and not Catholic,” Valdez told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “At times, my identity as Mexican felt like a source of shame for my family, Valdez said.”
The family would occasionally spend Christmas Day in Bakersfield, California with Valdez’s abuelo, or grandfather, where he would “cook the best mole ever made, including fresh tortillas.” But other than that they did not participate in Mexican culture.
Valdez heard about Jewtina & Co. (pronounced Jewtina y Co.), a national community of Latin Jews. After moving to Los Angeles two years ago, they joined the educators’ cohort of Jewtina’s Puentes national leadership fellowship, which has alumni across six cohorts, according to Violeta Stolpen, Jewtina & Co.’s Director of Operations.
“We were given the time and space to sit with that miracle of an experience, to be in a room with each other talking about the loneliness of growing up a Latin Jew, and being grateful that, thanks to the Jewtina, we weren’t alone anymore,” Valdez told JTA.
Jewtina & Co. was founded during Latin Heritage month in 2019 by Analucía Lopezrevoredo, a Peruvian Jew who moved to California with her family when she was five years old. A sociologist by training, she grew up surrounded by vibrant Latin and Jewish communities and began calling herself a Jewtina early on.
The idea of Jewtina crystallized in 2018, when she applied for a fellowship focused on global Jewry. “It started with a question I had carried on since childhood: Where do people like me get to be whole?” she told JTA. It is a way for Jewish immigrants from Latin America in the U.S. to express their conflicting and overlapping Jewish and Latinos identities publicly. Its members are mixed-couple children of Latin American descent, Latin immigrants who converted to Judaism, Latin Americans who were adopted into an American family and many more shades of Jewish Latinhood.
Lopezrevoredo calls Jewtina part of a Jewish and Latin diaspora, which comes with its own identity challenges. Latino communities in the U.S. are heavily Catholic, so there is little space in these immigrant enclaves for members of other faiths. Latino Jews feel excluded from Mexican, Peruvian and other communities. But there is also discrimination of Jewtina members from Latin American Jewish communities. U.S.-based demographic categories, such as Latinos and Jews, can create exclusionary identities that do not fit neatly with complex migration paths.
“There is no single Latin Jewish experience” Loperevoredo said, “just as there is no single Jewish one. But one experience we hear again and again is the feeling of having to explain oneself.”
No national study has measured the size or demographic makeup of the Latin Jewish community in the U.S., according to Jewtina & Co.’s Director of Research and Evaluation David McCarty-Caplan, who holds a Ph.D. in social work. The closest estimate comes from “American Jewish Population Estimates 2020: Summary & Highlights,” a 2021 report by Brandeis University’s American Jewish Population Project. It found that about 6% of Jewish adults in the U.S. identify as Hispanic out of 7.6 million.
To make Latin Jews more visible and better understood, McCarty-Caplan is developing a national study of Latin Jewish community and identity in the U.S. The partners are Brandeis University’s Initiative on the Jews of the Americas and its Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, along with Universidad Hebraica in Mexico. He said it will be the first study of its kind.
McCarty-Caplan says he has felt deeply disconnected from his Latino origins and out of place in predominantly white Jewish spaces. He was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and adopted at 3 months old by a white American Jewish family. In 2019, he met founder Lopezrevoredo in a Jews of Color cohort of Bend the Arc’s Selah Leadership Fellowship. That’s where he learned about her work with Jewtina & Co.
“It felt like meeting her, and finding Jewtina was the first time I felt fully seen and valued as a Latino, a Jew, and an adoptee all at once,” he said.
Members of Jewtina & Co. are often a mixture of identities. Founding member and Director of Education Kimberly Dueñas’ mother is an Ashkenazi Jew born and raised in Los Angeles, with family roots in Ukraine and Poland. Her father was born and raised in El Salvador, in a rural farming community. Through his side, she has converso Sephardic Jewish — a convert to Christianity or a descendant thereof — and Indigenous Mesoamerican ancestry. He met Dueñas’ mother at a Passover seder in Orange County, California where Dueñas grew up.
“I know personally what it’s like to feel like I have to choose which identity to lead with,” said Dueñas who facilitates Puentes.
According to director of operations Stolpen, the organization ran 58 programs in 2025, 43 in person and 15 virtual, with 2367 participants. So far in 2026, it has held 47 programs and events with more than 1,200 participants, according to McCarty-Caplan.
The organization faces a harder climate than the one it was born into. When Jewtina & Co. emerged in 2019 and 2020, director of research McCarty-Caplan said there was a surge of support for groups working with multiracial Jewish communities. That support has since receded since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term. Since “the events in Israel-Palestine on Oct. 7th, significant attention and resources have moved away from supporting organizations like Jewtina,” he added, referring to the war launched in 2023 after Hamas raided communities inside Israel.
Oct. 7 also changed things for Jewtina & Co.’s members. “Many Latin Jews have encountered antisemitism in spaces where they once felt cultural or political kinship,” Lopezrevoredo said, “while also entering Jewish spaces where conversations about race, immigration, Latin America or the diversity of Jewish experience can feel constrained.”
Dueñas said one of the organization’s biggest challenges is responding in real time to what its community needs. “We are navigating fear around immigration, ICE raids and deportation within our Latino communities, while also experiencing the rise of antisemitism and the ripple effects of the war in Israel and Palestine within our Jewish communities,” she told JTA.
Jewtina & Co. has responded with spaces for processing, healing and spiritual support, along with mental health resources, rabbinic wisdom and Know Your Rights programming.
“A Jewish family can carry memories of Poland, Syria, Turkey, or Morocco, become deeply Argentine, Mexican, Brazilian, or Cuban over generations, and later become Latino in the United States.” Lopezrevoredo said ”None of those layers cancels the others.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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