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How Jewish comedy found religion, from Philip Roth to ‘Broad City’
(JTA) — In the 2020 comedy “Shiva Baby,” a 20-something young woman shows up at a house of Jewish mourners and gently offers her condolences. When she finds her mother in the kitchen, they chat about the funeral and the rugelach before the daughter asks, “Mom, who died?”
While “Shiva Baby” explores themes of sexuality and gender, the comedy almost never comes at the expense of Jewish tradition, which is treated seriously by its millennial writer and director Emma Seligman (born in 1995) even as the shiva-goers collide. It’s far cry from the acerbic way an author raised during the Depression like Philip Roth lampooned a Jewish wedding or a baby boomer like Jerry Seinfeld mocked a bris.
These generational differences are explored in Jenny Caplan’s new book, “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials.” A religion scholar, Caplan writes about the way North American Jewish comedy has evolved since World War II, with a focus on how humorists treat Judaism as a religion. Her subjects range from writers and filmmakers who came of age shortly after the war (who viewed Judaism as “a joke at best and an actual danger at worst”) to Generation X and millennials, whose Jewish comedy often recognizes “the power of community, the value of family tradition, and the way that religion can serve as a port in an emotional storm.”
“I see great value in zeroing in on the ways in which Jewish humorists have engaged Jewish practices and their own Jewishness,” Caplan writes. “It tells us something (or perhaps it tells us many somethings) about the relationship between Jews and humor that goes deeper than the mere coincidence that a certain humorist was born into a certain family.”
Caplan is the chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She has a master’s of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and earned a Ph.D. in religion from Syracuse University.
In a conversation last week, we spoke about the Jewishness of Jerry Seinfeld, efforts by young women comics to reclaim the “Jewish American Princess” label, and why she no longer shows Woody Allen movies in her classrooms.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity
[Note: For the purpose of her book and our conversation, this is how Caplan isolates the generations: the Silent Generation (b. 1925-45), the baby boom (1946-65), Generation X (1966-79) and millennials (1980–95).]
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Let me ask how you got into this topic.
Jenny Caplan: I grew up in a family where I was just sort of surrounded by this kind of material. My dad is a comedic actor and director who went to [Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s] Clown College. My degrees were more broadly in American religion, not Jewish studies, but I was really interested in the combination of American religion and popular culture. When I got to Syracuse and it came time to start thinking about my larger project and what I wanted to do, I proposed a dissertation on Jewish humor.
The key to your book is how Jewish humor reflects the Jewish identity and compulsions of four sequential generations. Let’s start with the Silent Generation, which is sandwiched between the generation whose men were old enough to fight in World War II and the baby boomers who were born just after the war.
The hallmark of the Silent Generation is that they were old enough to be aware of the war, but they were mostly too young to serve. Every time I told people what I was writing about, they would say Woody Allen or Philip Roth, two people of roughly the same generation.
In “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials,” Jenny Caplan explores how comics treated religion from the end of World War II to the 21st century. (Courtesy)
The Roth story you focus on is “Eli, the Fanatic” from 1959, about an assimilated Jewish suburb that is embarrassed and sort of freaks out when an Orthodox yeshiva, led by a Holocaust survivor, sets up in town.
Roth spent the first 20 to 30 years of his career dodging the claim of being a self-loathing Jew and bad for the Jews. But the actual social critique of “Eli, the Fanatic” is so sharp. It is about how American Jewish comfort comes at the expense of displaced persons from World War II and at the expense of those for whom Judaism is a real thriving, living religious practice.
That’s an example you offer when you write that the Silent Generation “may have found organized religion to be a dangerous force, but they nevertheless wanted to protect and preserve the Jewish people.” I think that would surprise people in regards to Roth, and maybe to some degree Woody Allen.
Yeah, it surprised me. They really did, I think, share that postwar Jewish sense of insecurity about ongoing Jewish continuity, and that there’s still an existential threat to the ongoing existence of Jews.
I hear that and I think of Woody Allen’s characters, atheists who are often on the lookout for antisemitism. But you don’t focus on Allen as the intellectual nebbish of the movies. You look at his satire of Jewish texts, like his very funny “Hassidic Tales, With a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar” from 1970, which appeared in The New Yorker. It’s a parody of Martin Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim” and sentimental depictions of the shtetl, perhaps like “Fiddler on the Roof.” A reader might think he’s just mocking the tradition, but you think there’s something else going on.
He’s not mocking the tradition as much as he’s mocking a sort of consumerist approach to the tradition. There was this sort of very superficial attachment to Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim.” Allen’s satire is not a critique of the traditions of Judaism, it’s a critique of the way that people latch onto things like the Kabbalah and these new English translations of Hasidic stories without any real depth of thought or intellect. Intellectual hypocrisy seems to be a common theme in his movies and in his writing. It’s really a critique of organized religion, and it’s a critique of institutions, and it’s a critique of the power of institutions. But it’s not a critique of the concept of religion.
The idea of making fun of the wise men and their gullible followers reminds me of the folk tales of Chelm, which feature rabbis and other Jewish leaders who use Jewish logic to come to illogical conclusions.
Yes.
You write that the baby boomers are sort of a transition between the Silent Generation and a later generation: They were the teenagers of the counterculture, and warned about the dangers of empty religion, but also came to consider religion and tradition as valuable. But before you get there, you have a 1977 “Saturday Night Live” skit in which a bris is performed in the back seat of a luxury car, and the rabbi who performs it is portrayed as what you call an absolute sellout.
Exactly. You know: Institutional religion is empty and it’s hollow, it’s dangerous and it’s seductive.
Jerry Seinfeld, born in 1954, is seen as an icon of Jewish humor, but to me is an example of someone who never depicts religion as a positive thing. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
“Seinfeld” is more a show about New York than it is necessarily a show about anything Jewish. The New York of Seinfeld is very similar to the New York of Woody Allen, peopled almost entirely by white, middle-class, attractive folks. It’s a sort of Upper West Side myopia.
But there’s the bris episode, aired in 1993, and written by Larry Charles. Unless you are really interested in the medium, you may not know much about Larry Charles, because he stays behind the camera. But he also goes on to do things like direct Bill Maher’s anti-religion documentary “Religulous,” and there’s a real strong case for him as having very negative feelings about organized religion which feels like a holdover from the Silent Generation. And so in that episode you have Kramer as the Larry Charles stand-in, just opining about the barbaric nature of the circumcision and trying to save this poor baby from being mutilated.
The few references to actual Judaism in “Seinfeld” are squirmy. I am thinking of the 1995 episode in which a buffoon of a rabbi blurts out Elaine’s secrets on a TV show. That was written by Larry David, another boomer, whose follow-up series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” is similarly known for its irreverence toward Judaism. But you say David can also surprise you with a kind of empathy for religion.
For the most part, he’s classic, old school, anti-organized religion. There’s the Palestinian Chicken episode where the Jews are rabidly protesting the existence of a Palestinian-run chicken restaurant near a Jewish deli, and where his friend Funkhouser won’t play golf on Shabbos until Larry gets permission by bribing the rabbi with the Palestinian chicken. There, rabbis are ridiculous and can be bought and religion is hollow and this is all terrible.
But then there’s this bat mitzvah montage where for one moment in the entire run of this show, Larry seems happy and in a healthy relationship and fulfilled and enjoying life.
That’s where he falls in love with Loretta Black during a bat mitzvah and imagines a happy future with her.
It’s so startling: It is the most human we ever see Larry over the run of the show, and I believe that was the season finale for the 2007 season. It was much more in line with what we’ve been seeing from a lot of younger comedians at that point, which was religion as an anchor in a good way — not to pull you down but to keep you grounded.
So for Generation X, as you write, Judaism serves “real, emotional, or psychological purpose for the practitioners.”
I wouldn’t actually call it respect but religion is an idea that’s not just something to be mocked and relegated to the dustbin. I’m not saying that Generation X is necessarily more religious, but they see real power and value in tradition and in certain kinds of family experiences. So, a huge amount of the humor can still come at the expense of your Jewish mother or your Jewish grandmother, but the family can also be the thing that is keeping you grounded, and frequently through some sort of religious ritual.
Who exemplifies that?
My favorite example is the 2009 Jonathan Tropper novel, “This Is Where I Leave You.” I’m so disappointed that the film adaptation of that sucked a lot of the Jewish identity out of the story, so let’s stick with the novel. In that book, where a family gathers for their father’s shiva, the characters are horrible people in a dysfunctional family writ large. They lie to each other. They backstab each other. But in scene where the protagonist Judd describes standing up on the bimah [in synagogue] to say Kaddish [the Mourner’s Prayer] after the death of his father, and the way he talks about this emotional catharsis that comes from saying the words and hearing the congregation say the words — it’s a startling moment of clarity in a book where these characters are otherwise just truly reprehensible.
Adam Sandler was born in 1966, the first year of Generation X, and his “Chanukah Song” seems like such a touchstone for his generation and the ones that follow. It’s not about religious Judaism, but in listing Jewish celebrities, it’s a statement of ethnic pride that Roth or Woody Allen couldn’t imagine.
It’s the reclamation of Jewish identity as something great and cool and fun and hip and wonderful and absolutely not to be ashamed of.
From left, Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson and Seth Green in an episode of “Broad City” parodying Birthright Israel. (Screenshot from Comedy Central)
Which brings us to “Broad City,” which aired between 2014 and 2019. It’s about two 20-something Jewish women in New York who, in the case of Ilana Glazer’s character, anyway, are almost giddy about being Jewish and embrace it just as they embrace their sexuality: as just liberating. Ilana even upends the Jewish mother cliche by loving her mother to death.
That’s the episode with Ilana at her grandmother’s shiva, which also has the B plot where Ilana and her mother are shopping for underground illegal handbags. They spend most of the episode snarking at each other and fighting with each other and her mother’s a nag and Ilana is a bumbling idiot. But at the moment that the cops show up, and try to nab them for having all of these illegal knockoff handbags, the two of them are a team. They are an absolute unit of destructive force against these hapless police officers.
I think all of your examples of younger comics are women, who have always had fraught relationships with Jewish humor, both as practitioners and as the target of jokes. You write about “The JAP Battle” rap from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which both leans into the stereotype of the Jewish-American Princess — spoiled, acquisitive, “hard as nails” — and tries to reclaim it without the misogyny.
Rachel Bloom’s character Rebecca in “Girlfriend” self-identifies as a JAP, but she doesn’t actually fit the category. It’s her mother, Naomi, who truly is the Philip Roth, “Marjorie Morningstar,” Herman Wouk model of a JAP. So Bloom is kind of using the term, but you can’t repurpose the term when the original is still there.
So as an alternative, I offer up a new term: the Modern Ashkenazi American Woman. It’s very New York, it’s very East Coast, it’s very particular to a type of upbringing and community that in the 1950s and ’60s would have been almost exclusively Conservative Jews, and then may have become a bit more Reform as we’ve gotten into the ’90s and 2000s. They went to the JCC. They probably went to Jewish summer camp.
But even that doesn’t even really speak to the American sense of what Jewish is anymore, because American Jews have become increasingly racially and culturally diverse.
There is also something that’s happening historically with Generation X, and that’s the distance from the two major Jewish events of the 20th century, which is the Holocaust and the creation of Israel.
The Silent Generation and baby boomers still had a lingering sense of existential dread — the sense that we’re not so far removed from an attempted total annihilation of Jews. Gen X and millennials are so far removed from the Holocaust that they don’t feel that same fear.
But the real battleground we’re seeing in contemporary American Judaism is about the relationship to Israel. For baby boomers and even for some older members of Gen X, there’s still a sense that you can criticize Israel, but at the end of the day, it’s your duty to ultimately support Israel’s right to exist. And I think millennials and Zoomers [Gen Z] are much more comfortable with the idea of Israel being illegitimate.
Have you seen that in comedy?
I certainly think you can see the leading edge of that in some millennial stuff. The “Jews on a Plane” episode of “Broad City” is an absolute excoriation of Birthright Israel, and does not seem particularly interested in softening its punches about the whole idea of Jews going to Israel. I think we can see a trend in that direction, where younger American Jewish comedians do not see that as punching down.
You’re teaching a class on Jewish humor. What do your undergraduates find funny? Now that Woody Allen is better known for having married his adoptive daughter and for the molestation allegations brought by another adoptive daughter, do they look at his classic films and ask, “Why are you teaching us this guy?”
For the first time I’m not including Woody Allen. I had shown “Crimes and Misdemeanors” for years because I think it’s his most theological film. I think it’s a great film. And then a couple years ago, I backed off, because some students were responding that it was hard to look at him with all the baggage. He’s still coming up in conversation because you can’t really talk about the people who came after him without talking about him, but for the first time I’m not having them actually watch or read any of his stuff.
They have found things funny that I didn’t expect them to, and they have not found things funny that I would have thought they would. They laughed their way through “Yidl mitn fidl,” the 1936 Yiddish musical starring Molly Picon. I also thought they’d enjoy the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup” and they did not laugh once. Some of that is the fact that Groucho’s delivery is just so fast.
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A craven attempt to undermine the IDF — from one of Netanyahu’s top allies
For your weekly reminder of what is wrong in Israel, consider the bizarre spectacle that unfolded this weekend as Defense Minister Israel Katz announced during a Sunday television interview that he was replacing Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, commander of the IDF’s Central Command, which in effect controls the combustible West Bank.
What was remarkable is: Katz does not have the authority to fire Bluth. The government can fire the military chief, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, but he appoints his senior staff, including Bluth.
Zamir immediately said he had not been consulted and that no such decision had been made. Within hours, the Israel Defense Forces issued an extraordinary statement confirming that Bluth was not, in fact, being replaced, and reminding the defense minister that he has no authority to replace him in the manner he had described. Zamir later added that no senior generals would be replaced until 2027, after the October election.
It was an embarrassing spectacle. And it affirmed that, amid an escalating crisis in the West Bank and fears among Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition of defeat in forthcoming elections, the Israeli government is flailing.
Katz is running in the imminent Likud Party primary, hoping to secure a good shot at a Knesset seat in the Oct. 27 election. Bluth is unpopular in the party for being perceived as even mildly critical of Jewish terrorists in the West Bank. Bluth said recently that violent settlers, in addition to doing “damage to Israel’s good name and legitimacy,” are also harming “our fundamental mission, which is thwarting terror and protecting residents.”
Katz, in claiming to be firing Bluth, told Channel 14 — which functions primarily as an echo chamber for the governing coalition — that Bluth had acted contrary to his “explicit policy” regarding a particular violent Jewish settler. His real message was to coalition voters, a suggestion that he will fight for settlers in the West Bank to have even more impunity than they already do.
After all, no one familiar with the situation in the West Bank would accuse the Israeli military of conducting an especially vigorous campaign against Jewish extremist violence there. If anything, the opposite criticism has dominated for years.
Especially since the latest Netanyahu government took office, in late 2022, attacks by radical settlers against Palestinian civilians and their property have risen sharply.
Palestinian civilians have died at the hands of extremist settlers during this period, while many more have suffered injuries, intimidation and repeated attacks on their livelihoods. At least 18 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank so far this year — more than the entire number killed in all of 2025. Entire communities have abandoned grazing areas and farmland after years of relentless harassment.
Villages have been assaulted; homes and vehicles torched; olive groves destroyed; and livestock stolen or killed. No settlers have been convicted in the deaths. The overwhelming majority of investigations are quietly closed. Whatever one thinks about the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and even factoring in the continued reality of Palestinian terrorism, this is a profound failure of the rule of law that weakens Israel’s moral standing and hands its enemies an endless supply of propaganda.
Despite Bluth’s recent criticism, the army has clearly failed to intervene decisively when attacks unfold before its soldiers. It’s allowed civilian lawlessness to become normalized in the occupied areas. Whatever operational constraints commanders may face, the cumulative impression has been one of insufficient urgency and insufficient enforcement. It is therefore difficult to argue that the IDF has somehow been excessively harsh toward violent settlers.
Unless you’re a Likud voter.
Katz’s behavior is a reflection of the fact that the party’s activist base has changed profoundly over the past decade. Now, political advancement within the party depends not upon demonstrating administrative competence or strategic judgment, but rather upon proving one’s willingness to confront the institutions that many on the Israeli right now regard as enemies from within.
Those include the courts, civil service gatekeepers, the media, the Shin Bet and, increasingly, the senior command of the IDF, all of which the Israeli right has recast as components of an entrenched liberal establishment supposedly working to frustrate the “will of the people” and the political fortunes of Netanyahu.
That’s an extraordinary transformation, aligned with the rise of the anti-establishment populist right in the United States and Europe. Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Likud’s founder, spent decades battling institutions he believed had treated him unjustly, yet once in office he displayed a reverential respect for the state’s legal and constitutional framework. This, apparently, is a thing of the past.
The post A craven attempt to undermine the IDF — from one of Netanyahu’s top allies appeared first on The Forward.
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Archaeologists uncover treasures of Vilnius’ Great Synagogue as Jews dispute its future
(JTA) — VILNIUS, Lithuania — Archaeologists have uncovered the full floor of Lithuania’s historic Great Synagogue, revealing treasures nearly erased by Nazi and Soviet occupations — and exposing rifts between Lithuanian Jews over how to preserve and interpret what survived.
Locals walking through the center of Vilnius now pass a hole in the ground, a portal to the rich Jewish past of a city once called the “Jerusalem of the North.” For the first time since 1940, they can see the polished, colorful floor and entire prayer platform of the Great Synagogue of Vilna, built in the 17th century, which became one the most important religious, cultural and intellectual hubs for Diaspora Jews.
In Lithuania’s small remaining Jewish community, who number less than 3,000, there is no debate that the site must be preserved. But discussions about how to protect the past — and what to build over it — have triggered pain over one of the last pillars of identity left standing for Lithuanian Jews.
The community’s main representative body plans to build a new Jewish community center over the excavation, where visitors could view the Great Synagogue floor through a glass layer or a basement-level exhibit. Above, the center would celebrate current-day Jewish life through cultural, social and educational events.
Some Orthodox Jews and their supporters oppose that project, saying the synagogue should be rebuilt as a house of worship or preserved as a purely archaeological exhibit. Other residents say the mission of a new building should be broadened beyond Lithuanian Jews, offering a center that promotes tolerance, human rights and understanding of Jewish history among all Lithuanians.
On the eve of World War II, the massive Great Synagogue stood among more than 100 synagogues and Jewish prayer houses in Vilnius, where about 40% of people were Jewish. Over 90% of Lithuanian Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and from 1944 until 1990, Vilnius was remade as the capital of the Soviet Lithuanian Republic. The synagogue was burned and largely destroyed by the Nazis, then razed by the Soviets to build a school in its place.
“This is the place that half the population would have identified their city with,” Jon Seligman, the archaeologist leading the excavation, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “So this city at the moment is missing half its identity, and because it’s such a long time since it happened, they don’t even know they’re missing half their identity.”
The excavation is over a decade in the making. Seligman, an Israel-based archaeologist whose Jewish grandparents lived in Lithuania before World War II, first proposed unearthing the synagogue’s remains in 2013 after a visit to discover his family roots. His team of archaeologists have worked there since 2015, and last year, the former Soviet school building over the site was demolished.
In an accident of history, the synagogue’s main floor was constructed below ground and spared from total erasure.
“When the building was built in the 17th century, part of the restrictions that were placed on the Jewish community was that they were not allowed to build their synagogue higher than any of the churches in the surroundings,” said Seligman. “So to create the internal majesty, if you don’t want to have a low, two-story building, what you do is you drop the floor level one story below ground surface — and that’s what they did.”
The latest installment of Seligman’s project, completed in July, fully exposed this main hall and the bimah, or prayer platform, covered in red, white, green and black geometric designs. Archaeologists also found traces of the Shulhoyf, a busy complex that formed the heartbeat of Jewish life.
Vilnius was a major center of Jewish thought, famed for both its religious tradition and modern secular Jewish culture. It was home to the 18th-century Vilna Gaon, one of the most influential Jewish sages — and also the birthplace of the Jewish Labour Bund, a secular, socialist and anti-Zionist organization. Schools taught literature and the sciences in Yiddish and Hebrew, and Zionists shared ideas alongside anti-Zionists.
Before World War II, the Shulhoyf hosted 12 prayer houses, a bathhouse, kosher butcher stalls, the first public toilets in Vilnius, the prestigious Strashun Library and the first headquarters of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, or YIVO. That institute, now in New York City, continues to preserve the Yiddish language and cultural heritage of Eastern European Jews.
Faina Kukliansky, who has since 2013 chaired the umbrella organization known as the Lithuanian Jewish Community, spearheaded the initiative to construct a community center over the synagogue.
Kukliansky grew up as the child of Holocaust survivors in Lithuania under the Soviets. She said the new space will replace the community’s current headquarters, hosted in a nearby building that is more than a century old and struggles with heating and water system issues.
Kukliansky said the new center will honor both the past and the present of Lithuanian Jews, featuring a YIVO exhibition alongside concerts, social clubs and Jewish learning events. After the Holocaust and decades of Soviet restrictions on Jewish life, those who remain are mostly secular and distant from Jewish traditions. Kukliansky said the center’s construction over the remains of the Great Synagogue will inspire Jews to trace the threads of their heritage.
“It’s very meaningful that in the place where the synagogue rose, Jewish life will be intensive because our Jewish community center is there,” said Kukliansky.
But Kukliansky’s plans have met sharp opponents from other corners of Lithuania’s Jewish world. Among the most vocal is Rabbi Sholom Ber Krinsky, an emissary for the Chabad-Lubavitch Orthodox movement who was born in Boston and has lived in Vilnius since 1994.
Krinsky said that according to Jewish tradition, the Great Synagogue site should not be covered by a building for secular cultural activities, but remain a “living Jewish religious center that continues the learning and the prayer.”
“If a site was used as a synagogue — for centuries, in this case — the holiness retains its holiness, and it’s proper to respect that holiness,” said Krinsky. “A Jewish community center might be nice, but it certainly doesn’t represent the holiness of that site.”
Krinsky has for years demanded more money for Chabad projects, which he says would be used for religious services, Jewish education and social welfare programs. He accuses Kukliansky of monopolizing funds granted to Jews by the Lithuanian government as compensation for property stolen during the Holocaust. The Good Will Foundation, an international body created through the World Jewish Restitution Organization and the Lithuanian Jewish Community, has been authorized to distribute this restitution money.
Since legislation passed by the Lithuanian parliament in 2022, the Good Will Foundation has disbursed about $9 million to compensate individual Holocaust survivors and their heirs for private property claims. Given that most Jewish property was left without any heirs, another $40 million is being allocated to support Jewish communal life — including projects like the new community center.
Krinsky said these funds have not been sufficiently used to nourish religious life. Kukliansky countered that her organization supports the Choral Synagogue, the only synagogue still active in Lithuania, where Krinsky leads the small group of Jews who usually scrape together a minyan — the minimum of 10 people required for public prayers. Compared with other Eastern European communities, Chabad’s footprint is small in Vilnius, where the Vilna Gaon led a tradition of opposing Hasidism that became central to the identity of many Lithuanian Jews.
Kukliansky also claims that Krinsky has refused to provide her with financial reports. His wife, Nechama Dina Krinsky, was indicted for tax fraud in 2023.
Kukliansky faces further criticism from Dovid Katz, an American-born, Vilnius-based scholar of Yiddish and the Holocaust. Katz advocated for rebuilding the Great Synagogue or preserving its remnants as a religious site, which he said would draw Orthodox pilgrims from around the world.
“A synagogue is a religious place, and religious leaders today — and everyday religious Jews — need to be consulted on what’s going to replace the Great Synagogue,” said Katz. “It is a place either for a replacement synagogue or for archeological remains.”
Still other critics say the Jewish representative body has split the site from a broader mission that would attract non-Jewish Lithuanians and Jews from around the world. Anna Avidan, who founded a nonprofit called Jerusalem of the North to celebrate Jewish history in Lithuania, led a conference in 2017 that invited historians, architects and students to discuss the future of a space commemorating the Great Synagogue.
Fragments of a gefilte fish dish and a Passover plate that were found at the Great Synagogue excavation site. (Shira Li Bartov)
Avidan said attendees proposed a cultural center that would host forums about tolerance, drawing international visitors and educating Lithuanians about the Jewish past of their country. She argued it would be “selfish” to build a center exclusively for the Lithuanian Jewish community, since such spaces are closed to the public, partly for security reasons. The proposals emerging from Avidan’s conference were shut down after Kukliansky’s opposition.
“We are still working on how to include Jewish history in Lithuanian history,” said Avidan. “Approaching the site as a site of Lithuanian history, that would promote this harmony and understanding.”
At the excavation site, Seligman’s team has dug up pieces of life in the synagogue, which seated about 500 people, with some 500 more squeezing in for High Holidays. The latest artifacts to emerge from the ground include a Passover plate, a dish for gefilte fish, a plaque engraved with the Ten Commandments and several seating plaques with the names of people who donated to the synagogue, assuring their spots inside.
These name plaques left clues about families who vanished from Vilnius. One marked a seat for Gitel Klachek, identified as the “wife of the late Yechezkel, Shamash d’Mata” — the city sexton. Their wealthy, influential family owned several businesses around the Great Synagogue.
On the uncovered synagogue floor and the surrounding Jewish neighborhoods, there walked people who disputed religion, Jewish identity, Zionism and other ideas. “There would have been a large contingent who would have been ultra-Orthodox. There also would have been a large contingent who were completely secular,” said Seligman. “So the city was very, very much a very mixed community.”
The fights over the memory of these ghosts — and over Lithuania’s Jewish identity — echo the disagreements that animated the Jews who once thrived there.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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AIPAC-backed Wesley Bell defeats Cori Bush in Missouri Democratic primary
(JTA) — Missouri incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell registered a resounding victory in Tuesday’s Democratic primary against Cori Bush, a prominent Democratic socialist and ardent critic of Israel.
The Associated Press called the race just an hour after polls closed, at 8:02pm local time. By the time 99% of the vote was counted, Bell had garnered 59.2% to Bush’s 36.9%.
The primary is a déjà vu moment for St. Louis. The same pair of candidates vied just two years ago to represent the state’s 1st Congressional District.
Bell prevailed in 2024 to oust Bush in a clash that was largely defined by a $9 million influx of AIPAC cash in support of Bell. In this rematch, Bush made the American Israel Public Affairs Committee a central issue in her campaign, similar to other Democratic Socialists of America candidates.
“AIPAC has become yet another way for MAGA-donors to divide the Democratic base by meddling in primaries,” Bush told JTA in a written statement prior to the primary. “In St. Louis and across the country, people know that our fight against antisemitism means fighting against the far-right’s effort to divide us.”
Federal Election Commission records show that this time around, AIPAC has invested far less in the race. Through its United Democracy Project super PAC, the pro-Israel lobby has spent in the neighborhood of $3 million on the rematch, with the vast majority targeted at opposing Bush.
In response to Bell’s decisive win on Tuesday, AIPAC posted its congratulations on X: “Our community was proud to support a strong, principled Democratic leader,” the lobby stated.
The Washington, D.C.-based Jewish Democratic Council of America, which had mobilized networks of voters to make phone calls in support of Bell, added their congratulations to the congressman following his victory.
“Rep. Bell is a leader in taking on Trump’s corruption,” the group posted on X. “We look forward to seeing him continue to fight for our Jewish and Democratic values.”
Aside from their conflicting perspectives on Israel, Bell and Bush have much in common. Born in Missouri in the mid-1970s, they are both Black progressive Democrats who entered politics after the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in the city of Ferguson.
Amid protests across Ferguson for police reforms, Bell won a seat on the city council and focused on passing such changes. He went on to become St. Louis County prosecutor in 2018, defeating a 27-year incumbent who had failed to prosecute the officer who had killed Brown.
Bush, meanwhile, became involved in politics by participating in the Ferguson protests. She lost Democratic primaries for the U.S. Senate and House in 2016 and 2018, but then won congressional races in 2020 and 2022. In 2024, however, she lost to Bell by more than 5 percentage points.
The candidates have similar stances on most political issues, prioritizing concerns like reproductive rights, gun violence prevention and the dismantling of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as lowering costs of housing, utilities, healthcare and prescriptions. But they have sharp differences when it comes to Israel, with Bush’s campaign pledging to “stand for justice in Palestine.” Bell, in contrast, has stood steadfast in his support of Israel.
The post AIPAC-backed Wesley Bell defeats Cori Bush in Missouri Democratic primary appeared first on The Forward.
