Uncategorized
How a curator and a rabbi joined forces to keep a piece of Boston’s Jewish history alive
The most striking artifact in the Judaica collection at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts isn’t from Yemen or Galicia, or any other far-flung Jewish community that’s long since dispersed; it’s from Chelsea, Massachusetts.
The magnificent wooden Torah ark is just shy of 12 feet tall, and until 1999 it was the centerpiece of the Orange Street Synagogue, in Chelsea, a suburb that once teemed with so much Jewish life it earned the nickname ‘Little Jerusalem.’
But with American synagogues now closing at a record pace, the arks and facades and stained glass windows that testified to American Jewry’s dynamism face an unsettled future.
Indeed, to make the short hop from Chelsea to northeast Boston, the MFA’s ark took a rather scenic — even biblical — route. There’s a last-gasp reprieve as destruction looms; an extended stint in a wilderness of sorts (Texas); and a healthy sprinkling of rabbinic wisdom.
All the same, it illuminates an often forgotten chapter in Boston’s Jewish story.
A thriving Jewish enclave
Around the turn of the 20th century, tens of thousands of mostly eastern European Jewish immigrants arrived in Chelsea, transforming a provincial Protestant outpost into a chiefly working-class center of Jewish cultural, religious and economic life. By 1920, it had between 15 and 20 synagogues; a Hebrew School that graduated over 400 people a year; and dozens of clubs and organizations that held their meetings in Yiddish.
One of its more well-known inhabitants was Sam Katz, a Galician immigrant who was, for a time, Massachusetts’ pre-eminent woodcarver. Katz was born in 1884 in Veshnevets, modern Ukraine, and emigrated to the US in 1910. He lived briefly in New York before settling in Greater Boston, where, even though he lacked formal training, he built an estimated 24 synagogue arks during the 1920s and 30s. “These immigrant wood carvers, in general, learned from their father and their grandfather,” said Simona Di Nepi, curator of the MFA’s Judaica collection.
Still, Katz found his own style. “When I see vine leaves and grates and these kinds of lions,” Di Nepi told me, pointing to a pair of gilded lions affixed to either side of the MFA’s ark, “I know that it’s Sam Katz.” Perched on top of the ark is a bald eagle, jostling for position with a Torah crown. Taken together, said Di Nepi, the sculptures are a kind of shorthand for the burgeoning Jewish-American culture Chelsea represented. Indeed, this is one of the gallery’s abiding themes: the various ways artists have combined age-old Jewish iconography with time- and place-specific motifs.
The ark needs a hero
By 1950, Jewish Chelsea had entered a terminal decline. Many of its inhabitants had moved to tonier Boston suburbs like Brookline or Newton, propelled by improving socio-economic mobility, though the construction of the Tobin Bridge between 1947 and 1950 also pushed out some 250 families and effectively split the Jewish community in two. In early 1999, the Orange Street Katz Torah ark closed for a final time, its fate uncertain.
That’s when rabbi David Whiman, a congregational rabbi in nearby Newton, and an avid Judaica collector, stepped in.
Whiman salvaged the ark alongside a small crew of friends. A small screen in the gallery plays grainy footage of Whiman in an oversized white T-shirt, smiling broadly. Though the Orange Street shul pews are empty, and the work laborious, Whiman and his group appear noticeably upbeat. The opportunity to preserve such an invaluable link to Chelsea’s Jewish past is, clearly, a happy one. (Whiman, rabbi emeritus at North Shore Synagogue, did not respond to an inquiry.)
Whiman kept the ark with him as his rabbinical career took him first to Houston, where he stayed for the better part of decade, and, later, to Syosset, Long Island. And then, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he emailed Di Nepi. He had heard the MFA was establishing a permanent Judaica collection. “He initially said, ‘I’m a collector, and you can have anything you want,’” Di Nepi recalled. In 2022, she went to Syosset, and was immediately taken with the ark. “There were other things that I might have been interested in,” she said, “but this was so much a Boston story — a local story.”
The ark bore the scars of nearly 20 years in storage. “All the attached pieces were in a box,” Di Nepi said. “And the wood had marks all over it.” Over six months, the MFA’s Conservation department, led by Christine Storti, restored the ark’s original flourishes: On top, an eagle and a torah crown; just below, two golden lions and three Magen Davids; and, in the middle, two gilded hands of Kohanim clasped together in prayer. Di Nepi then placed the renovated ark on a bimah-esque plinth, where it remains today, resplendent in the dim gallery light.
For every rescued Torah ark, however, are dozens that couldn’t overcome the demographic and cultural changes that have reshaped American Judaism during the past half-century. “There used to be a high demand for Torah arks,” Di Nepi said. “But now, we have the inverse situation, where there is mass demand for finding homes for arks that are closing.”
The Sam Katz ark is therefore a monument to a community that’s largely slipped from view. Yet there’s one fragment of Jewish Chelsea that’s proved remarkably durable. The glass light bulb Katz hung from the ark more than a century ago still works, Di Nepi told me, though she and Storti opted against displaying it, given its obvious fragility, and commissioned a replica. I am nevertheless consoled by the thought that somewhere in the Museum of Fine Arts’ storage there’s a tiny piece of Jewish Chelsea, waiting to shine again.
The post How a curator and a rabbi joined forces to keep a piece of Boston’s Jewish history alive appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood
A star-studded new movie set in a Soviet prison is coming out in November. James Franco and Rob Lowe anchor the cast of Confession, playing a brutal prison guard and an imprisoned dissident professor, and a disheveled Nick Nolte appears as a fellow prisoner.
These actors were once huge gets, and their names could convey legitimacy to a project. Nolte and Franco both have received Academy Award nominations. Lowe was a member of the Brat Pack, and was a regular on The West Wing.
Confession, written by Ben Shapiro and produced by the rightwing tabloid-esque news site The Daily Wire, is not the expected fare for actors with that kind of name recognition; Shapiro’s screenwriting aspirations have been the target of ridicule for years.
Nevertheless, this isn’t the only Daily Wire production getting big names; Danny Trejo signed onto a pro-ICE movie about Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, and Jonathan Majors led Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels earlier this year.
Each one of these actors has been, in some way, canceled or in career doldrums so may have been more open to working with The Daily Wire. And some have claimed that they did not know who Shapiro was, or what his politics were; Trejo’s son, Gilbert, said his 82-year-old father did not endorse ICE and was misled about the movie before he signed his contract.
Movie studios have struggled through the pandemic and the streaming era, both of which have tanked box office receipts, leaving the field open for movies from offbeat production studios. In addition to The Daily Wire, there has been a whole ream of Christian movies attempting to shift the stereotype of bible movies — that they’re preachy, low-budget straight-to-TV affairs with cardboard acting — to something more prestigious, or at least profitable.
The Christian company Angel Studios has been placing screenings of the half philo-semitic, half-antisemitic Jesus TV series The Chosen in movie theaters across the country, produced the right-wing hit The Sound of Freedom and is pumping out faith-based movies like the animated King of Kings Christmas story and David, a kiddie movie about the biblical king. Recently, Pinnacle Peak Pictures, another faith-based production company, premiered Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, another bible movie that was notable enough to merit a review in The New York Times. (Though admittedly it wasn’t a particularly positive one.)
For decades, Hollywood, and the media industry at large, has been associated with liberalism, progressive politics and diversity. (This is part of why conservative conspiracy theorists often insist that Jews control the media.) Even when conservatives are in power, satirical movies have poked fun at the ruling class — Team America: World Police spoofed George W. Bush’s foreign policy, while M*A*S*H critiqued Richard Nixon. During the current Trump administration, we’ve seen One Battle After Another lambasting immigration policies and rising white nationalism, Eddington on misinformation and populism, and The Apprentice depicting Trump directly.
But a rising number of higher-budget, bigger releases from the right wing, whether The Daily Wire’s conservative political parables or the Christian fables, are bringing a new kind of messaging — about the importance of God and country, about gender roles, about about the centrality of Jesus to the U.S. — to the American movie-going public.
This is no accident. A group of powerful conservative Christians, many of whom worked on Project 2025, are proponents of the Seven Mountains Mandate, a blueprint for Christian nationalism that instructs Christians to gain influence and control over the “seven mountains” of society — which include media, entertainment and the arts. The Mandate is part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a decentralized evangelical movement embraced by millions of Americans.
Jeremy Boreing, the director of many Daily Wire movies — though he has since left the company — said on a podcast hosted by businessman Patrick Bet-David that “It had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture” as a way of proving that “there is a future where conservatives aren’t losing. There’s a future where we have political power and cultural power.”
Cultural power, of course, requires more than just a lot of movies; they have to be well-done, or at least appear to be. Previous Daily Wire productions, as well as other right-wing, MAGA movie ventures, have been hacky. Lady Ballers, about an unsuccessful men’s basketball team pretending to be women so they can dominate the league, was an unsubtle, unfunny and ultimately unwatchable spoof of transgender athletes. And even plenty of higher-budget attempts, like Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, can still fall victim to wooden acting and writing.
But now, with the financial success of movies like The Sound of Freedom and biblical parables like The Chosen, bigger stars are being drawn to projects like the Daily Wire’s lineup of pro-ICE, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ movies. With those bigger stars may come new audiences who might not have watched a Christian movie or Daily Wire project otherwise. And where there is money and viewers, mainstream Hollywood will go, too, no matter how progressive people expect the industry to be. We’ve already gotten a biblical epic from Amazon Prime, with The House of David, and there are likely to be many more to come.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Cecil DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was the biggest movie in town.
The post Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons
If there was something off about the logo the Atlanta Falcons unveiled on social media Wednesday, whoever runs their accounts did, uh, not see it.
Behind the black falcon graphic that began appearing on the football team’s helmets in the 1960s was a new background — a flag of red, tan, black and white vertical stripes. To thousands of people who responded to the logo, it looked distinctly German — in a 1930s kind of way.
“The Atlanta Falcons are preparing to invade Poland,” one fan wrote.
A day after its posting, the new profile picture had unleashed a deluge of Nazi memes in the 4,000-plus replies on X. One picture swapped in the logo for Nazi flags in the background of a historical photo of a Hitler rally. Another edited the Falcon claw to look like a Nazi salute.
Others depicted Hitler in a Falcons cap, references to Inglourious Basterds and the Battle of the Bulge and a World War II joke invoking a blown lead in Super Bowl LI.
“Falcons were up 28-3 at Dunkirk,” that tweet read.
The Falcons’ snafu enters a small but growing catalogue of Reich-coded brand mixups. Who can forget the German national soccer team’s ‘44’ soccer jerseys? There was also the swastika-emblazoned Hallmark gift wrap; the accidental Hitler mugs; and (for my money) the worst of the bunch, Zara’s concentration camp uniform shirt.
All of those have been addressed; so far, the Falcons’ has not. We’ve reached out to them for comment.
The post ‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Netanyahu’s Torah exemption pledge highlights election stakes
Sometimes a statement can contain multitudes, or at least provide a crystallizing moment in an election campaign. So it was when Benjamin Netanyahu, while criticizing the detention of about 40 Haredi draft evaders by military police at Ben-Gurion Airport this week, declared in a radio interview: “We need to protect the world of the Torah … But whoever doesn’t study must serve in the military.”
Netanyahu was effectively saying that yeshiva study should continue to be, as it has been under an informal arrangement, a free pass out of military service – and he went on to repeat a pledge to turn this into law. It is a position opposed by the overwhelming majority of Israelis.
The statement came amid such a calamitous two-week stretch for Netanyahu’s campaign leading up to the Oct. 27 election that it has some people joking that agents of the opposition might have infiltrated Likud headquarters and taken charge.
In a tragicomic episode, one of Netanyahu’s chief propagandists called leading opposition candidate Gadi Eisenkot – a former military chief who is of Moroccan Jewish background – a “monkey” who is under the control of Ashkenazi elites.
Yinon Magal, who has described himself as a vessel for Netanyahu’s messaging, made the comments on Channel 14, the pro-Netanyahu propaganda TV channel where he is the leading host. He later filmed himself explaining that the simian reference, in Israel’s mafia parlance, merely refers to a junior criminal who is a puppet of more heavyweight mafiosi. His clarification did little to stem the tide of criticism.
As Netanyahu awkwardly tried to distance himself, he also charged that opposition figures had used racist slurs, referring to a recent podcast interview with businesswoman Galia Albin in which she said his supporters are Mizrahis who plan to vote for him mindlessly.
Then came leaked comments (made last year) by Haredi Rabbi Dov Lando, leading spiritual leader of the Netanyahu-allied United Torah Judaism party – proclaiming that Zionism had brought disasters upon the Jewish people, that life under Arab rule would have been preferable and that religious Zionist soldiers were being killed because their rabbis taught them “distorted Torah.” Once again, outrage boiled over, and received mostly silence from the Likud.
Donald Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement of Netanyahu might have qualified as good news – but the U.S. president seemed to connect a Bibi reelection to a renewed assault against Iran. That rests on the dubious assumption that Israelis are eager for another few weeks (or more) in bomb shelters.
A punctuation mark arrived a few days later with reports, albeit unverified, that Netanyahu actually had planned to attack Iran earlier this month but was blocked by Trump. Many expected that scenario, which would have been interpreted as a gambit to delay, by dint of national emergency, an election in which he’s badly trailing in credible polls.
Polling is not available on every such twist and turn of the campaign, but decades of studying Israel and a nose to the ground tell me none of this is popular. And there is no question that most Israelis want to end the draft evasion by Haredim. Recent polls put support for that at 85 percent, which essentially means all non-Haredim.
The issue, as I have said before, is easily the most effective axe for the opposition to grind – because the current situation with the Haredim is utterly untenable.
Tens of thousands of Haredi men of military age remain outside the draft system, while soldiers and reservists from other communities carry an increasingly intolerable burden that has ,in many cases, reached hundreds of days a year.
Whether all those registered as yeshiva students genuinely study – a central question for some people – should be beside the point. Why should Torah study confer a privilege unavailable to Israelis studying physics, medicine, engineering or law? Why should one form of education exempt citizens from defending the country while every other form does not?
The consequences of the Haredi parties’ extortion extend far beyond the army. Israel has created an incentive system in which prolonged religious study preserves military exemptions, public subsidies and a way of life often characterized by economic dependence. Many Haredi educational institutions reject the core curriculum essential for participation in a modern workforce, even as the state helps finance them.
This is an extraordinary arrangement for a country whose security depends on its economic strength, and whose economic strength depends on scientific education, technological innovation and a highly skilled workforce.
Demography makes the issue existential. Haredim already account for roughly one-sixth of Israel’s population, and their exceptionally high birth rates – almost seven children per family on average – mean their share will continue to skyrocket. Unless patterns of education, employment and military participation change dramatically, Israel faces the prospect of an ever-smaller proportion of its citizens supporting and defending an ever-larger population.
The danger is compounded by the mobility of the people on whom Israel’s prosperity depends. Engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and physicians have opportunities elsewhere. If enough conclude that the country’s trajectory has become irreversible, the resulting brain drain could be catastrophic.
Earlier this year, my friend Rabbi Hershel Grossman arranged for me to meet senior rabbis associated with the Mir and Hebron yeshivot. They were gracious and pleasant, but strikingly candid about their opposition to compulsory core education, military service and ordinary employment whenever these conflicted with Torah study. More troubling was their confidence that demographic change would eventually give their community decisive political power.
The necessary alternative is a comprehensive overhaul of the incentives governing Haredi education, military service and employment. Every child should receive a core curriculum. Young adults should perform military or meaningful national service, with appropriate accommodations for religious observance. Public funding should encourage economic participation rather than prolonged dependence.
Opposition parties promise various versions of such plans. None of this will be easy, and it will not be accomplished by dialogue alone. But the alternative is a version of national suicide. There is no question that – alongside accountability for Oct. 7 and the demand for an independent state commission of inquiry – the future of Haredi military service, education and economic participation belongs at the center of this election.
So why would Netanyahu effectively say that studying Torah should entitle an able-bodied young man to exemption from military service?
There are several possible explanations for this – and the rest of the parade of seeming political misjudgments.
One might be a calculated strategy of mobilizing the base through fear and resentment rather than persuading the center. This might be useful in various scenarios involving a messy outcome of the election.
The others might be overpowering hubris, a toxic contempt for the public or the myriad other pathologies that often accompany too long a time in power.
The post Netanyahu’s Torah exemption pledge highlights election stakes appeared first on The Forward.
