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How a Catholic university amassed a treasure trove of Jewish artifacts from the Bronx
(New York Jewish Week) – A Catholic university may be the unlikeliest place for what may be the largest depository dedicated to the Jewish history of the Bronx.
But at Fordham University — the private, Jesuit institution in the Bronx — decades worth of archival documents and artifacts from the local Jewish community have found a home, thanks to its Jewish studies department.
For the last three years, Fordham has been collecting and cataloging items that detail a once-thriving Jewish community in the Bronx: yearbooks full of Jewish last names, Bar Mitzvah invitations, phonebooks full of Jewish-owned businesses — all the simple transactions that define an era in history.
The archive at Fordham is one of the only physical collections of everyday material from Jewish residents of the borough, according to Magda Teter, the chair of the Center for Jewish Studies at the university, who spearheaded the project.
“It’s not only preserving a piece of New York Jewish history, but also a way of life,” Teter told the New York Jewish Week. “Bringing this voice to the dominant Christian identity of Fordham and teaching about Jews [as a minority] within the dominant cultures is very important.”
A song and dance book in the Fordham University collection features the lyrics for “Hatikvah” and “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and a “Jewish dictionary.” (Julia Gergely)
During the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish life thrived in the Bronx. There were 260 registered synagogues in 1940, and the borough produced some of the biggest Jewish names in show business, fashion, literature and more: designer Ralph Lauren, politician Bella Abzug, novelist E.L. Doctorow, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, Miss America Bess Myerson, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Robert Lefkowitz.
At the community’s peak in 1930, the Bronx was approximately 49% Jewish, according to the borough’s official historian, Lloyd Ultan. South of Tremont Avenue, the number reached 80%. Most of the Jewish Bronx was of Eastern European descent; many were first generation Americans whose parents had immigrated and lived on the Lower East Side, but who could now afford to live in less cramped neighborhoods with more trees and wider streets.
Though there is a strong Jewish community in the neighborhood of Riverdale, most of the Jewish community moved out of the Bronx for the suburbs after World War II when mortgages for white would-be homeowners were being subsidized by the government and Blacks and Latinos were steered to Bronx neighborhoods they couldn’t afford or that the city had chosen to neglect. The Jewish population of the Bronx dropped from 650,000 in 1948 to 45,000 in 2003. Many of the synagogues have been converted for other uses, and the physical legacy of the Jewish community there has begun to erode over time, making an archive all the more necessary.
While Teter was always interested in collecting items from the Jewish Bronx, the archive got an unexpected boost from a member of the public. In the spring of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Fordham hosted a virtual event, “Remnants: Photographs of the Jewish Bronx,” which featured evidence of the area’s faded Jewish history gathered by writer and photographer Julian Voloj. (Voloj is the husband of the New York Jewish Week’s managing editor, Lisa Keys.)
An invitation for the bar mitzvah of Freddie Rothberg, which took place on Oct. 6, 1951 at Beth Hamedrash Hagadol. (Julia Gergely)
In the audience was Ellen Meshnick, who had grown up in New York and now lives in Georgia. Inspired, she offered Fordham a trove of material her parents, Frank and Martha Meshnick, had kept throughout their lives in the Bronx. The boxes included donated yearbooks from Morris High School and Walton High School, songbooks, bar mitzvah invitations, a marriage certificate, receipts for a flower delivery — even a document from the hospital from when she was born — mostly from the 1930s through the 1960s.
The donation significantly bolstered what materials Fordham already had on hand, which included less personal but still unique items like matchbooks from kosher restaurants. Now, Teter is growing the archive through other private donations and occasionally by purchasing materials online — personal family archives, books about Bronx Jewish history, songsheets and the like.
The marriage certificate, or ketubah, recognizing the marriage between Frank Meshnick and Martha Farber on Aug. 23, 1942. The certificate was part of an archive donated to Fordham University by the couple’s daughter Ellen. (Julia Gergely)
“They may not be the most beautiful things, but we are interested in what people actually used and lived with,” Teter said.
Teter said that while the American Jewish Historical Society in Manhattan does collect the types of quotidian and personal items that American Jews kept with them in the last few centuries, they don’t have much that uniquely focuses on Jewish life in the Bronx.
The entire collection is part of a greater effort by Teter, the Jewish studies department and the librarians at Fordham to increase awareness about Judaism and Jewish people. “I will not hide that I think it’s an important way to fight antisemitism — to teach Jewish history and Jewish culture in all its colors and in all its experiences,” she said. “It enriches the students’ appreciation and understanding of Jewish life beyond how Jews are usually portrayed.”
The Jewish studies department at Fordham is relatively new: The college began offering a Jewish studies minor in 2016, and opened the department in 2017. At the time, the highlight of the library’s archives was the Rosenblatt Holocaust collection, which was funded by an alumnus. Since 1992, the library has amassed over 11,000 titles, videos and artifacts on the Holocaust, according to librarian Linda Loschiavo.
When Teter arrived, Loschiavo worked with her to bring in historical Passover haggadahs from all over the world. Fordham now possesses two Italian haggadahs from the 1660s, as well as Jewish artifacts from unexpected places, like playbills from Jewish Bollywood.
Last month the university opened the Henry S. Miller Judaica Research Room on the fourth floor of the campus’ main library — named for Fordham’s first Jewish student, who graduated in 1968. Miller, a leader of a financial restructuring firm, is now a trustee of the college.
Fordham President Tania Tetlow described herself jokingly as “a wannabe Jew” at the room’s unveiling. “I’ve understood how deeply intertwined Judaism and Catholicism are,” she said, “and the connections we have of the deep intellectualism of both faiths, of the desire to study text and the interpretation of text going back for thousands of years, of the love of ritual — and the central place of food and guilt!”
The former Jacob Schiff Center on Valentine Avenue. (Julian Voloj)
“At the moment, we envision that the research room will be a space for exhibitions that would foster the curatorial skills of our students and that will bring Jewish art and artists to campus,” Teter said. “We would now be able to display their art and combine the exhibitions with some items from the Judaica collection.”
The research room is currently displaying Voloj’s Bronx photographs, along with some of the recently acquired local archival materials, curated by sophomore Reyna Stovall, who is interning in Fordham’s Jewish studies department this semester.
“It is really, really rewarding,” said Stovall, who is Jewish. Stovall became involved in the Jewish studies department because of her interest in Holocaust studies, but as she began her internship, she was excited to work on the archives cataloging the once thriving Jewish history of the Bronx.
The yearbook photo of Frank Meshnick (bottom right), who graduated from Morris High School in Morrisania in 1931. (Julia Gergely)
“It’s pretty amazing that they have the collection to begin with,” she added. “It really shows Fordham’s commitment to diversity and inclusivity that they’re willing to take on this massive collection of Judaica, even though that’s not the religion that the school was founded on.”
Teter estimates there are about 300 Jews among the school’s 15,000 undergrads. As a result, the Center for Jewish Studies and the research room offers students from all backgrounds the opportunity to learn more about Judaism — as well as marginalized communities in general, and connect their stories to their own lives.
“Our identity grew to showcase Jewish studies at the intersection and in conversation with other fields and areas of study,” Teter explained.
The Center’s goal, she added, is “to make students, faculty and the public realize that studying Jews is not just for Jews, and that they can learn so much about the areas of their own concern and interest by studying Jews.”
“Something magical happens when you give students the opportunity to work with historical artifacts, and really touch history,” Teter said. “That’s what I think inspired the director of the library to devote that space to that kind of research and to that kind of student experience.”
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The post How a Catholic university amassed a treasure trove of Jewish artifacts from the Bronx appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Muslim and Sephardic Jewish college students are connecting over shared heritage
Joseph Pool, a senior at Rollins College in Florida, grew up hearing his Moroccan-born grandparents describe Mimouna, a traditional Moroccan Jewish celebration marking the return to eating chametz after Passover. Because Jewish families had cleared their homes of chametz for the holiday, Muslim neighbors would bring over fresh flour, butter, and milk, and together they would enjoy a chametz-filled meal.
Amid rising campus tensions after October 7, Pool decided to host a Mimouna event of his own at Rollins College, and Muslim students showed up in droves.
“I spent years sleeping over at my grandparents’ house and hearing stories about the connection Muslims and Jews shared in Morocco,” Pool said. Seeing Muslim classmates embrace the celebration, he recalled thinking: “Wow, this is still the case today. There is still this connection ability here.”
At a moment when Jewish-Muslim tensions have intensified on campuses nationwide, some Sephardic and Muslim students say shared cultural heritage, rather than formal interfaith programming, is opening unexpected space for connection.
SAMi (Sephardic American Mizrahi Initiative) hosts Sephardic cultural programming on 16 college campuses across the country, including Persian music karaoke nights, hamsa painting events, and Mimouna celebrations. According to Manashe Khaimov, SAMi’s founder and CEO, roughly 10% of the 6,000 students the organization has engaged are Muslim.
The events are not intended to be spaces for interfaith dialogue, and that is a big part of their appeal. “Students don’t want to show up to an interfaith event unless [they’re] interested in political dialogue,” said Khaimov. Rather, students who are just looking for a place to engage with their culture show up to listen to the kind of music they grew up with, eat familiar foods, and hear Arabic or Farsi spoken.
For many Muslim students, SAMi events “smell the way it smells at home” as opposed to many Jewish spaces on college campuses that can feel “foreign” or “alienating,” said Khaimov. “For most of the Muslim students,” he said, “this is the first time even walking into Hillel spaces.”
Emily Nisimov, a Bukharian student from Queens College who organized Sephardic heritage events on her campus with SAMi, said, “The point of the events originally was to spread love and intimacy between Jewish students.” To her surprise, Muslim students started showing up. “Maybe they did just come for the food,” she said, “but the fact is that they stayed and they interacted with us and they tried to find a middle ground, which I was really impressed and shocked by.”
These connections are not limited to organized programming. Across campuses, Muslim students say friendships with Sephardic and Mizrahi peers have reshaped their understanding of Judaism, and Jewish students say the friendships have changed them, too.
Ali Mohsin Bozdar, a Muslim student at Springfield College who met Sephardic students through Interfaith America’s BRAID fellowship, said, “Jewish people from Middle Eastern backgrounds — most of the culture is similar. The food, the music, the language. I found that really fascinating,” he said. “It automatically binds you.”
Yishmael Columna, a Moroccan Jewish student and SAMi organizer at Florida International University, said the exchange has been mutual. “After Oct. 7”, he said, “it’s easy to give in to hate.” But getting to know Muslim peers complicated that instinct. “I wouldn’t be able to form opinions on many things as well as I do now if I didn’t have these conversations with them,” he said.
Sofia Houir, a Moroccan Muslim senior at Columbia University, said she had never met a Jewish person before attending college. Forming close friendships with Sephardic students on Columbia’s campus changed that. “Having friends who are Middle Eastern Jews definitely made Judaism more personal to me,” she said. “You can read about Judaism, you can study it, but talking to friends about how they grew up made me realize that, regardless of our religion, we’re all North African or Middle Eastern.”
Sofia formed a particularly close bond with an Iraqi Israeli student, Orpaz Zamir, during her time at Columbia, which she says deeply influenced her decision to travel to Israel for the first time. “Orpaz played a huge role in me going to Israel, just because I’m super close to him. And I really, really wanted to discover his culture, and to discover his country,” she said.
But that decision came with consequences.
Sofia said that her friendships with Jewish and Israeli students as well as her decision to travel to Israel caused peers in the Muslim and Arab communities on campus to stop speaking to her.
“I had some heated arguments with people who basically argued with me as if I was representing the Israeli government,” she said. “The frustrating thing was that they never had a conversation with me about it. They just presumed that me going was me validating Netanyahu’s politics or betraying the Palestinians.”
Nisimov said campus tensions at Queens College, part of New York City’s public university system, have not disappeared simply because of a heightened awareness of shared culture.
After October 7, she said, “A lot of claims were made that we should go back to where we came from.” “We tried to explain to them — just like you, we came from the same spot — but they didn’t want to listen.”
Even so, she said, her personal friendships have endured outside the realm of discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “My Muslim friend and I, we’re not really on the political level of conversation,” she said. “But we have plenty of conversations about our cultures and our religions and the differences and similarities.”
Rethinking Jewish Whiteness
For some students, these relationships have also challenged assumptions about Jewish identity and, thus, the tenor of political conversations.
Mian Muhammad Abdul Hamid, a Muslim student from Syracuse University, told the Forward that he “thinks the majority” of Muslim students on his college campus believe Jews only come from Europe. “When people think Jewish, the first thing that pops up is European.”
Bozdar agreed. “When I met these people, it confirmed for me that there are Jews from the Middle East,” he said. “Until you meet people, nothing is for sure.”
Columna recalled participating in a tabling event about Israel shortly after Oct. 7, when a Muslim student approached him to talk. The two later became friends. Weeks later, Columna asked why he had approached him rather than the other nearby Jewish students.
“He told me, ‘I decided to talk to you because, in contrast to the Ashkenazi Jews nearby, you were the only one who looked brown,” Columna said.
“I feel that sometimes the reason why these conversations do not work is because Muslim students don’t feel that Jews are even part of the Middle East,” said Columna. “Once you break that wall, and you find a common ground,” he said, “it becomes a more productive conversation.”
Zamir, an Iraqi Jewish student at Columbia University, described a similar experience. Though initially nervous about enrolling amid campus tensions, he said, “I never felt I was being attacked for my views.”
A Muslim friend later told him it was because he was seen as “from the region.”
“If you are Mizrahi,” Zamir said, “Muslim students respect what you say a bit more because if you’re from the region, you’re entitled to be there.”
But that dynamic also raises uncomfortable questions about which Jewish students are seen as having legitimate perspectives on campus.
“There’s this extreme position that Ashkenazi Jews shouldn’t be there or shouldn’t have this view because they’re ‘colonizers,’ but you’re okay because you’re part of the region,” he said.
“Unfortunately, this is the case, but it also makes my interactions with them easier,” he added.
While several students said their conversations about their shared background remain at the cultural level rather than getting political, Pool believes shared meals can create space for conversations that lean on these shared identities.
“If you share a meal with someone, you start with something in common,” he said. “You have the same food, maybe then you have the same family tradition of how to cook this food. And then suddenly, when you’re talking about politics, you can talk about just a political issue versus it being your entire identity.”
The post Muslim and Sephardic Jewish college students are connecting over shared heritage appeared first on The Forward.
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The one Jewish value everyone should hold dear in the age of AI
As friends, relatives and even colleagues dive headlong into our AI future, I’ve been stuck nervously on the platform’s edge. I’m not a skeptic of technology by nature, but by experience. I’ve watched too many shiny new toys come along, promising to make society smarter or better connected, only to become superspreaders of confusion, alienation and disenfranchisement.
So when you tell me a machine can summarize any book, draw any picture or write any email, my first thought is going to be, What could possibly go wrong?
This, too, was the reaction of the Haredi rabbis who declared a communal fast over AI last month.
“If at the push of a button, I can get a hold of a d’var torah for my Shabbos meal from AI, to us, that’s a problem,” a Haredi leader told me at the time. “No, no — I want you to open the book and read it and come up with a question and come up with an answer. That’s part of what’s holy about learning Torah. It’s not just end result. It’s the process.”
Curious about their logic, I spent some time tracking down Lakewood’s gedolim to learn more. This was no straightforward task — I found it easier to get a hold of their wives than the great rabbis themselves. Even at dinner hour, these titans of Torah study were still in the beit midrash. But eventually I got through to three — thanks to my cousin Jeffrey, who knew a rav who knew a rav — and that was fortunate, because I came away with the Jewish skeleton key to our brave new world.
That key is the Jewish value of עֲמֵילוּת (ameilut), or toil. As far as Jewish values go, ameilut is an obscure one. It lacks the celebrity swagger of its better-known peers like chesed and tzedakah or the political power of tikkun olam. It was never associated with a biblical matriarch or carved into a golem’s forehead. Yet I believe it is just as crucial. Yes, toiling is a mitzvah. And in the age of AI, ameilut can be a human road map.
The word’s root appears a couple dozen times in the Hebrew Bible — unsurprisingly, it’s a recurring theme in Job — but its salience comes not from the Torah but from commentary on Leviticus 26:3, which establishes ameilut as a sacred endeavor. When God implores Israel to “walk with” the commandments, Rashi, an 11th century rabbi whose commentaries are considered authoritative, reinterpreted this to mean that God wants Jews to be ameilim b’torah — toiling in Torah study. He is reinterpreting God’s command that we walk and move forward to also mean that we should take time to stand still, turn over (and over) the same words to find new meaning and view getting stuck as a sign of progress.
For Haredim — who pronounce it ameilus — the notion that struggle can be its own reward underpins a life spent poring over sefarim in the beit midrash (and missing phone calls from the Jewish press). It follows that ChatGPT, which transforms knowledge from something developed to something consumed, is anathema to their approach. They’ve realized that making learning easy has actually made learning hard.
To be sure, the goals of the Haredi world are not exactly the same as mine. Those communities are famously insular, wary of the internet and especially cognizant of secular society’s pernicious influence. I’m basically the opposite: I love to mix it up (including with Haredi Jews) and am extremely online. A little narishkeit is good for the soul, as far as I can tell.
But I’ve found that ameilut-maxxing translates pretty well to non-religious life, too. It’s an imperative to embrace the challenge. As a notoriously limited chef, I’m now toiling in cookbooks; as a writer, I can cherish the blank page. Reframing the hard part as the good part, then, is a reminder that the toil is actually our divine right. Because ameilut is something AI can’t experience, replicate or understand. It is the very essence of what it means to be alive.
The post The one Jewish value everyone should hold dear in the age of AI appeared first on The Forward.
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Mistrial Declared in Case of Students Charged After Stanford Anti-Israel Protests
FILE PHOTO: A student attends an event at a protest encampment in support of Palestinians at Stanford University during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Stanford, California U.S., April 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
A judge declared a mistrial on Friday in a case of five current and former Stanford University students related to the 2024 pro-Palestinian protests when demonstrators barricaded themselves inside the school president’s office.
Twelve protesters were initially charged last year with felony vandalism, according to prosecutors who said at least one suspect entered the building by breaking a window. Police arrested 13 people on June 5, 2024, in relation to the incident and the university said the building underwent “extensive” damage.
The case was tried in Santa Clara County Superior Court against five defendants charged with felony vandalism and felony conspiracy to trespass. The rest previously accepted plea deals or diversion programs.
The jury was deadlocked. It voted nine to three to convict on the felony charge of vandalism and eight to four to convict on the felony charge to trespass. Jurors failed to reach a verdict after deliberations.
The charges were among the most serious against participants in the 2024 pro-Palestinian protest movement on US colleges in which demonstrators demanded an end to Israel’s war in Gaza and Washington’s support for its ally along with a divestment of funds by their universities from companies supporting Israel.
Prosecutors in the case said the defendants engaged in unlawful property destruction.
“This case is about a group of people who destroyed someone else’s property and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. That is against the law,” Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement, adding he sought a new trial.
Anthony Brass, a lawyer for one of the protesters, told the New York Times his side was not defending lawlessness but “the concept of transparency and ethical investment.”
“This is a win for these young people of conscience and a win for free speech,” Brass said, adding “humanitarian activism has no place in a criminal courtroom.”
Protesters had renamed the building “Dr. Adnan’s Office” after Adnan Al-Bursh, a Palestinian doctor who died in an Israeli prison after months of detention.
Over 3,000 were arrested during the 2024 US pro-Palestinian protest movement, according to media tallies. Some students faced suspension, expulsion and degree revocation.