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How Yiddish authors made a new world writing for children
An intrepid puppy who marches for labor rights. A 6-year-old girl who sews herself a locomotive to carry her away from her daily chores. A Jewish boy who would be Pope.
These stories, written in Yiddish, are all entertaining and whimsical, and like so much writing for young people, may be seen as less than serious. But they were also composed as part of a larger communal project that was widely regarded as urgent. Beginning in the late 19th century, Jewish thinkers outlined the need for a children’s literature in the vernacular as a way to shape the future.
As Miriam Udel writes in her new book, Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature, these authors sought to “write a better world into being in a distinctively Yiddish key.”
Arriving at a time of competing nationalisms — communism and the socialism of the Jewish Labor Bund on one side, Zionism on the other — Yiddish writing for children began in Eastern Europe. It then spread to New York and, with the migration of Jews, Latin America.
Udel’s book is structured around the evolution of the canon, that, after the Holocaust, reexamined its purpose, pushing for literacy and what she calls the “rhythms of Jewish time.”
The writers responsible for Yiddish literature came from various political stripes. Some were educators and academics and others first made their names with stories for adults. Their work ranged from naturalist accounts of a Bund sanatorium to mythic tales of travelers on the Sabbath. Yet within nearly every story a theme of social justice rings through.
Udel, the compiler and translator of the Yiddish children’s story treasury Honey on the Page and the force behind a hit puppet show based on Chaver Paver’s stories of Labzik the communist puppy, researched nearly 1,000 works for the book.
“The overarching goal is to create literature that is going to make its readers want to joyfully and affirmatively choose Jewish identity,” Udel said of Yiddish children’s literature after the Holocaust. “This is an idea that I see us kind of rediscovering now.”
I spoke with Udel, an associate professor of Yiddish language, literature and culture at Emory University, about how this literature developed and changed to meet the times, and why Sholem Aleichem, for all his talent, had “no game” writing for kids. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I think a lot of people might be surprised that the first Yiddish children’s stories can be dated, and that it’s only really back to 1889. Why did it take so long to develop?
Children’s literature is very much a function of changing ideas about what childhood is and what children need. For a really long time, differences in age were much less important than differences in gender. Instead of boys and girls, we really had proto-men and proto-women. It’s really only when we’re starting to get these modern ideas about childhood as a protracted period, as a time for education and leisure [that this emerges]. We had an ideal of education for Jewish boys since time immemorial, but the idea that both boys and girls would have this time available that could be filled with the activity of reading, that was really new, and that was a product of economic changes, as much as cultural and educational developments,
It was also wrapped up in these nationalist movements that were emerging, the secular nationalist movement for Jews that produced the Yiddish school system. What were the cultural changes there and how did they lead to this literature?
By the turn of the 20th century, we have a pretty well-fleshed-out modern idea of what childhood is and what children are. Their job is to become educated, and there is a delay before we expect them to take up the burdens of adulthood, and at the same time, there are a lot of different nation-building projects underway. We can look to Mandatory Palestine as it prepares itself to become the State of Israel, and the way that Hebrew children’s literature is created out of whole cloth for helping to define who would be the citizens of this new Jewish state. We can also look to the Soviet Union. The revolution is going to remake humanity, and so it’s an efficient shortcut to start with the very young who could be imagined as a blank slate onto which you can write the story of your new state and your new citizenry. In the case of Yiddish, there are some of those cultural nationalist impulses, but it’s complicated because it bumps up against the reality that Yiddish really never comes close to being the language of a conventional nation state. And so instead of Yiddish being recruited into a conventional nation-building or state-building project, Yiddish gets recruited into what I call “worldmaking,” which is a project of creating symbolic polities and structures that children are going to be able to inhabit in, and through, their encounter with Yiddish.
The bulk of this genre is coming from mostly secular writers, but you note a lot of the stories seem to involve Shabbat and stories of the cheder. Why did these secular Jewish writers gravitate towards content that was in some way religious?
Everybody, no matter how secular they felt, had to deal with a question of, “What is the significance of the Jewish past?” “What is the significance of the language that has been handed down to us as a mother tongue?” And “How can this shared, collective past in some way shape the future?” Some of them don’t deal with the past — everything is very forward-looking, and that’s where we actually tend to see a lot of girl protagonists. The future is female for Yiddish children’s literature. Whereas we see our cheder stories, our school tales with boy protagonists that orient themselves toward the past, and sometimes we see authors digging into a very deep, rich kind of Jewish past in order to pull up something that they think will be of use now and tomorrow.
That’s what happens with a subgenre that I write about the Sabbatarian tale, that describes somebody observing a very traditional, even Halachically-informed Sabbath under vulnerable circumstances, where maybe it wouldn’t even make sense for them to choose the immobility and all of the ways that the Sabbath grounds you in a negative sense, they are nevertheless choosing to uphold the Sabbath and finding that it grounds them in a positive sense. There’s a convergence point between the very traditional idea of a regular cessation of labor every seven days and the most cutting-edge socialist thinking about the worker being able to reclaim time from the boss and say, “1/7 of my time doesn’t belong to you.”
There are some sort of bold-faced names showing up and trying their hand at this literature. We have Sholem Aleichem trying his best. What do you make of the writers that are maybe more familiar to us and their efforts, and who are some writers that we might not know about who stand out?
Across Jewish literatures, several decades into the 20th century, there’s a sense of almost civic duty to try your hand at writing something for children, and some of them are terrible. One of my favorite Yiddish authors for adults, Yisroel Rabon, writes this super weird novella that I wrote about at length in my first book, Never Better! It’s violent and disturbing and terrible, and I would never put it before children in my life. And then we get someone like Sholem Aleichem, who wrote so brilliantly about childhood and child characters from the perspective of adulthood, but really had no game when it came to addressing living, breathing children. And he was such a bold name that they tried to retrofit his stories to appeal to children. It became canonical because he’s Sholem Aleichem. And then you get someone like Isaac Basevis Singer, who’s really already made quite a name for himself as a novelist and a writer for adults. And [Elizabeth Shub], the daughter of a legendary children’s editor of the Kinder-zhurnal, who becomes an English language children’s book editor as her career, goes and recruits Isaac Bashevis Singer to write for children.
And he didn’t know how to do it. He had to really kind of stumble his way into some kind of address to children. So he started out trying to write rhyming poetry, because he thought that’s how you talk to children, literarily, and it was stilted and it was terrible. And she told him, “Itsik, go back to the drawing board.” He kind of cracked the code and figured out his formula, and he started producing these really heartwarming tales of the old country, and he was able to pour a sense of hopefulness and decency that he only half believed in for adults into these children’s stories.
Then as this enterprise of writing for children in Yiddish and publishing arms gets going, it becomes professionalized, and it becomes the province of both professional educators and also people whose whole career is write for children, or who wrote somewhat for adults, but also somewhat for children. And then we start to get figures like Zina Rabinowitz, who’s one of my favorites. Last year I did this project, 5785 where I published a new Yiddish children’s holiday tale before each one of the holidays that ran in the Forward. And one of my go-to authors was Zina Rabinowitz. She’s writing in the 1950s, but she really understood how to address kids, and it was a very smooth process to translate her, and her psychological intuitions about children and childhood were very much in keeping with our own.
A large part of it for the Americas was how to communicate about the Holocaust. Part of the approach was stories of resistance or metaphors — the life of a tear shed by a boy who was deported. Can you talk about how they tackled that?
One of the really important figures in thinking about this and kind of theorizing what to do was Yudel Mark. He’s publishing articles in 1941 and 1943 and 1947 reflecting on what they did and how they did. And he says “We may have sinned against child psychology.” So there’s an awareness that there is a field devoted to children’s wellbeing, and that field has made everyone aware of children’s vulnerability, and that it was worth overriding that concern in order to let Yiddish-speaking Jewish children know what was happening to their cousins and how to go on and live their own Jewish lives in light and in spite of what had happened to European Jewish children.
Something that comes up as a theme — there’s tzedekah for a poor person on Purim, even in the first story — is building empathy for readers.
The single most frequently occurring theme across all the varieties of Yiddish children’s literature, is the persistence of wealth inequality and the need to redress it in some way. The prescriptions for what to do or what to focus on in redressing wealth inequality really vary, particularly by political stripe. This is where we can sort of dig down and see where an author situated themselves on the ideological spectrum. And so we have Kadia Molodosky writing a beautiful story “The Beggar and the Baker,” about the traditional value of giving tzedakah, of charitable giving as a matter of justice and as a matter of pre-paying a debt that you don’t even know exists yet, because that’s what the baker does. He gives challah every week to all the beggars, including one with radiant eyes. And when the bakery burns down and the baker is left destitute, along comes the beggar of all of those years whose fortune has changed, and he’s come precisely to pay back and discharge the debt.
And we have other stories that speak in the language of tzedakah. We have a story of a little boy’s political awakening, realizing that as a kind of well-off, middle-class kid with everything that he needs, there’s a whole economy and political order that’s been created to make sure that he has down feathers in his pillow and wool to be sewn into the suit that he wears, and leather for the shoes that he wears, and that other creatures have suffered and died, and that other human beings are working at hard jobs, like the washer woman, so that he can have nice things. So there’s his coming into political awareness.
And then, going further out on the left, we get a story about the birds of the forest who organized politically to liberate the urban birds who are dwelling in cages. And the story really walks its child reader through the mechanics of labor organization and collective action. And so everyone wants to fix wealth inequality, but people have really different ideas about how to do it and what to emphasize.
The state of this literature now is mainly from the Hasidic world. Do they read any of these, these old secular writers and their Shabbat stories? I know the orthography is different.
It’s not like there’s a kosher version of Kadia Molodowsky or Isaac Bashevis Singer. There is, instead, just alternate content that originates in that community. There might be Yiddish children’s versions of midrashic stories, stories from rabbinic literature, that got an update in the 1910s or the 1920s and those same stories have formed the basis of materials for contemporary Hasidic children. But that would be sort of incidental. One thing that I did see, and actually my favorite of the contemporary Hasidic children’s books that I own, is a graphic novelization of a Rebbe Nakhman story about a wise man and a fool, and the production values are really high. The illustrations are great, and who doesn’t love a graphic novel?
What does the future of the genre look like for non-Hasidic Yiddish readers, a growing cohort having kids now.
One of the ways that I got into this research area is that I was looking for children’s materials that originated in Yiddish, not necessarily something that’s been translated into Yiddish or translated for pedagogical purposes, that would be simple enough that my students could productively read it in the second semester. And I thought, “Is there any children’s literature?” And so now I get emails all the time from people who are using Honey on the Page to locate children’s literature, which they are then using to further their Yiddish education. I think that some of these stories really want to exist in new forms, and as picture books and as graphic novels. I actually just got the go ahead from the peer reviewer on my translation of Labzik, which SUNY is going to publish in August. All 12 Labzik stories. And I think Labzik is desperately eager to become a graphic novel. And I think Labzik wants to be animated. The puppet film was so successful. I think there’s a lot more where that came from.
I do think that it’s a time of renaissance, and that children’s literature is such an exciting frontier, because it’s a way to build interest from and grant access from a very young age. It’s something that multiple generations can share with each other with great pleasure and profit. And then, for the people who do make the leap into studying Yiddish, whether it’s through Duolingo or a class, it gives them a way to progress with their language study, so it can do all of these different things for us that feel like they have a lot of currency right now.
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I was born after 9/11. I still carry the memories of that day.
Earlier this week, I was talking with my mother over the phone about her experience on 9/11. She walked me through the familiar parts — how she was in our Upper West Side apartment when she learned about the attacks from a relative, how she went to the garage to get the car so they could drive to a friend’s house upstate once she realized the attacks were acts of terror. There were still hijacked planes in the air, and she worried New York City might be targeted again. Then, she said, “This part is going to make me cry.”
I hadn’t remembered what came next, but suddenly it came back to me. “Oh no, me too,” I said.
While she waited for my father to come back uptown from his office in the Financial District, she stopped inside a fire station across from the garage. Inside was a lone firefighter, who’d stayed behind to man the station while the rest of his company was inside the towers. He was watching the news on television, and my mom stood next to him, watching too, when the towers fell.
“We just lost so many men,” he said.
I wasn’t there when it happened; I wasn’t even alive. But I’d heard this story before, I’d walked dozens of times past that same fire station, which now has a plaque commemorating the seven firefighters who died on 9/11. Hearing the story again on the phone, I found myself walking down the streets of Washington D.C., bawling.
I’m 23, born a year-and-a-half after 9/11. Most Americans my age learned about the attacks in school, as history. I’m part of the 16% who learned through family or friends.
The discovery happened by accident, when I was in kindergarten. My mom and I were in a children’s store on the Upper West Side, when we started flipping through a picture book about the history of New York City. Most of the book was unremarkable, but the end was unexpected: a scene of the smoldering twin towers.
I forget what exactly happened next, but here’s what I do remember: My mom was upset that the shop hadn’t provided a warning about the book’s end, and I was confused about why she was upset. I was five, too young to understand the image and never one to let a question go unanswered; I must have pestered her until she offered up an explanation.
She hadn’t been prepared to tell me about terrorism. She’d been evading the topic for some time, telling half-truths to avoid it. When I’d ask her why we had to take our shoes off in line at the airport, she’d just say it was to make sure no one had anything dangerous, leaving out the part about how a man had tried to get on a flight with bombs hidden in his shoes.
“9/11 is a huge thing for a parent to have to tell a kid about,” my mom told me this week. “You were a happy kid, and I didn’t want you to get scared or traumatized.”
The events, and impacts, of that day slowly unfolded for me as the years passed. I learned that my father had watched from Battery Park as the South Tower fell; he ran westward as plumes of smoke billowed toward him. I learned that my parents had friends who’d died in the towers, one of whom was the father of a boy I grew up with. I remember going to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum when it opened in 2014, feeling sick as I watched footage of people jumping out of the towers.
The New York Times recently interviewed dozens of Gen Z Americans about 9/11. I was struck by how disconnected many felt from the event. “It’s hard to feel sad about something that you don’t remember,” said Annika Heegaard, a 25-year-old now living in New York.
But for me, 9/11 doesn’t feel quite so far away. By now I’ve lived through other mass casualty events, like the Parkland shooting and the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. But 9/11 is the only tragedy that my family members had such a direct connection to. “It was devastating,” my mom said.
I think the reason I can remember the exact moment I found out about 9/11 is because it changed my view of the world. I remember being almost unable to comprehend that anyone would do what the hijackers did. I wasn’t, as my mom feared, traumatized by learning about the attacks; I didn’t fear for my safety each day. But the knowledge was in some ways a loss of innocence — a discovery that people could do awful things and that the world wasn’t as safe a place as I had assumed.
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The DSA’s latest win was not about Israel — and it hurts the Jewish community to insist it was
When Democratic socialist David Morales defeated the incumbent mayor of Providence, Brett Smiley, in a historic primary win this week in Rhode Island, the election quickly became part of a narrative that has been coalescing around progressive political wins in the last year — the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, Abdul El-Sayed’s primary win in Michigan, the sweep of DSA-backed candidates in New York City’s recent primaries. The idea is that this race was all about Israel — that it turned on a struggle between Zionists and pro-Palestinian activists.
A Jewish Telegraphic Agency story on Morales’s win features a quote from the founder of the Rhode Island-Israel Collaborative that Morales’s campaign was “fueled by pro-Palestinians and Israeli haters.” The founder of the far-right Rhode Island Coalition for Israel called some of Morales’ stances “anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.” Jewish Insider published a story the day before the primary headlined, “Antisemitism roils Providence mayoral race.” The Times of Israel’s story on the election is titled, “Jewish mayor of Providence loses Democratic primary to anti-Israel challenger.” (Smiley converted to Judaism in 2024, and made a controversial visit to Israel in 2025.)
But this narrative is false: Israel did not play a decisive role in this election. In reality, Morales was laser-focused on affordability, and — like most progressive candidates this year — rarely, if ever, brought up Israel unprompted. Indeed, the defining issue for the Morales campaign was not Israel, but rent stabilization.
Last April, Smiley vetoed legislation passed by Providence’s City Council to cap annual rent hikes at 4%. This ordinance is desperately needed: A recent study found that Providence is the least affordable city for renters in the country. Longtime residents are getting priced out, and essentially everyone who rents — and renters comprise 59% of the households in the city — understands that our trajectory is simply not sustainable.
By vetoing the most significant-ever attempt to bring this crisis under control, Smiley made this a race about a challenger fighting to make Providence affordable and an incumbent prioritizing his corporate donors, who gave Smiley a historically large $1.3 war chest for his campaign. (Morales had less than $300,000, largely from individual donors.)
This issue served as precisely the kind of defining contrast that pro-Israel Super PAC spending became in recent congressional elections elsewhere. Support from AIPAC has provided an impossible-to-obscure contrast to Democratic primary voters in races such as Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, New York’s 10th Congressional District, and Michigan’s Senate primary. But in Providence, the scandal wasn’t AIPAC donors — it was the wealthy developers and corporate landlords who funded Smiley’s campaign.
It is true that Morales criticized Smiley’s active participation in the Combat Antisemitism Movement, a project so Trumpian that the Jewish Federations of North America and Jewish Council for Public Affairs both left the group after it released a video claiming that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are antisemitic. Morales also came out in support of a ballot initiative that would require the City of Providence to divest from the debt of foreign countries “conducting ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide,” as determined by U.S. and international law. Some of Morales’s supporters — and in particular some portion of his army of campaign volunteers — were undoubtedly motivated by an appreciation for Morales’s willingness to take a moral stance. But it simply wasn’t a top five, or even (by my estimation) a top 10 issue in this race.
And I don’t understand the inclination to claim otherwise. Certainly it doesn’t make sense for members of the Israel lobby; after all, having another election be lost due to voters’ anger over a politician’s fealty to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not good for their political project. But more importantly, these allegations — particularly the false claim that this race was somehow “roiled” by antisemitism — are harmful to Rhode Island’s Jewish community as a whole.
Take, for example, the “antisemitism” referenced by Jewish Insider, which consisted, in total, of a few instances in which a Hitler mustache and devil horns were drawn on Smiley’s campaign signs. Of course, defacing political signs is never good, and Morales immediately condemned the vandalism. But as a Jewish former elected official who experienced actual antisemitism over the course of my time in Rhode Island politics, I have to laugh at the idea that this graffiti was antisemitic.
To compare someone to Hitler is basically to say they’re the worst person ever. It’s often a problematic comparison (because almost nobody is actually as evil as Hitler), but it’s not antisemitic to say, in effect, “Hitler was bad, and so is this other guy.” And vandals were drawing devil’s horns on pictures of Smiley years before he converted. In fact, I don’t think the average Providence voter even knows Smiley is Jewish; it’s certainly not an important part of his political identity, given that he literally wasn’t yet Jewish when he first won election to the mayor’s office in 2022, or during his prior run for the seat in 2014.
Antisemitism is a real and growing problem — in our country, and here in Rhode Island. Just a few years ago, dozens of swastika-brandishing neo-Nazis rallied a block from my home. Every time that cynical politicians cry wolf on this threat, they are minimizing its danger in the eyes of most people, making our community less prepared to respond to actual incidents of antisemitism when they occur.
Even worse, when some partisans of Israel claim that everyone who dares to say Israel is committing genocide and apartheid is an antisemite — that is, someone who hates all Jews — the implication is that Israel’s wars and violence against Palestinians are somehow projects undertaken by all Jews, rather than the crimes of a specific far-right government and its supporters. And if you repeat that message often enough, some people are going to start believing it — which certainly does not make me or my young Jewish sons safer.
David Morales ran on a pledge to build a Providence for all. “All” includes members of the Jewish community, many of whom — including myself, and Morales’s campaign manager and field director, to name just a few — are excited to support his vision. It is to no one’s benefit — least of all Providence’s Jews — to try to seed conflict and distrust in what should be a moment of profound hope and possibility for our whole city.
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Jewish and Muslim leaders avoided the hardest interfaith topic for years, and now face a ‘massive fault line’
It’s been a quarter century since a wave of distrust and violence against Muslims swept across America in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. But in some pockets of New York City and across the U.S., Jewish neighbors extended a hand of friendship and an interfaith movement was reborn.
Dialogues turned into dinners. Dinners spawned theatrical collaborations. Collaborations turned out volunteers to feed the homeless and sent interfaith teams to Capitol Hill.
Still, as the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada continued to unfold in the Middle East, even the most promising partnerships avoided the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“We deliberately parked it on the side,” said Daisy Khan, the former executive director of American Society for Muslim Advancement and founder of the Women’s Islamic Initiative. “We called it the elephant in the room that none of us could handle.”
Now, 25 years after the terrorist attacks that inspired a movement, leaders realize that silence was a critical mistake.
As this year’s Jewish High Holidays, a time of remembrance and repentance, begin at sundown on the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, American Jewish leaders are reflecting on mistakes made and words they wish they could take back, confronting rising antisemitism, and along with their longtime Muslim partners, asking: Where do we go from here?
“Rosh Hashanah is known as Yom Hazikaron, the day of remembrance,” said Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El, adding that remembrance usually refers to the hope that God will remember the covenant with the Jewish people. “When you talk about a day of remembrance, you also talk about the experiences that have shaped us into who we are. 9/11 certainly is an experience that has shaped us into who we are. Anyone who lived in New York is forever changed by that day.”
Interfaith bridge-building
On Sept. 11, 2001, Davidson was a young associate rabbi at another Manhattan institution, Central Synagogue. Feeling otherwise helpless that morning as the towers fell, he headed straight to the nearby mosque on 55th Street to assure his Muslim neighbors that they would not be judged by the actions of the terrorists – his instinct born from years of interfaith dialogue already underway.
The same instinct led President George W. Bush to the Islamic Center of Washington D.C., a week later to proclaim, “Islam is peace.” But that perspective did not prevail in all corners.
Prominent evangelical figures condemned Islam as “evil and wicked.” Mosques were set ablaze, and the Justice Department in the three months after the attacks labeled nine murders as “possible hate crimes.” Despite the community’s fear, the term “Islamophobia” was not widely embraced, as if it was a product of Muslims’ imaginations.
“So many American Muslims were experiencing the anxiety that President Bush recognized right away,” Davidson told the Forward. “So 9/11 crystallized for many the importance of the work of interfaith bridge building … We can learn from one another. When the world becomes complicated and your own community is in jeopardy or is being targeted, you realize how valuable it is to have those friendships.”
Those existing friendships and the ground rules that had sustained them laid the foundation for the aftermath of Sept. 11 and propelled many individuals and groups working behind the scenes to publicly counter what seemed to be an anti-Muslim zeitgeist. While the previous approach to interfaith work had been intimate Shabbat dinners, Ramadan iftars, and discussion groups, the new approach involved rallies, live performances and large-scale programs.
On the morning of Sept. 12, Israeli cellist Udi Bar-David called someone with whom he had collaborated a few times – Majid Alsayegh, an Iraqi-born Muslim engineer and architect in Philadelphia. Determined to offer a constructive response, they formed a team and in Spring 2002 launched a nonprofit for creative intercultural exchanges.
“Because of the tensions of Muslim and Jewish, Arabic and Jewish communities, because of the violence, we felt we needed to speak up and do more,” Alsayegh told the Forward, “to help them understand that dialogue in many forms, including music, is much more powerful than shooting each other.”
Seeking to help audiences listen with less anger, more empathy, artists from B’nai Jeshurun, a synagogue on New York’s Upper West Side, teamed up with Methodists and Muslims to present hard truths gathered from more than 100 New Yorkers. The project titled “Same Difference” later became a documentary.
In the years that followed, connections became more purposeful and direct. In 2008, Rabbi Marc Schneier’s Foundation for Ethnic Understanding launched an annual Weekend of Twinning, which paired scores of synagogues and mosques to explore the parallels and similarities within their traditions. It also enabled them to compare notes about the discrimination each faced as religious minorities and band together to fight the hatred that targeted both.
Khan cherishes the time she spent in synagogues and the friendships she formed there.
“We had such deep ties and such deep relations we weren’t afraid to go to bat for one another,” Khan said. “I think those relationships have even served us to this day.”
‘A massive fault line’
Still, cracks began to show. In 2010, Khan and her husband at the time, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, proposed Cordoba House, a mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan. Modeled after JCCs across the country and named for a city in Spain that once had been a center of peaceful coexistence, the proposed facility would offer prayer space, a wedding venue and a swimming pool.
Opponents focused on the location: two blocks from Ground Zero. Many Jewish leaders endorsed the project. Abe Foxman, longtime leader of the Anti-Defamation League, did not.
“We believe that in this place of tragedy and pain and anguish … if you want to heal, the best way to heal is not to do it in your face.”
Foxman, who died in May, never apologized for his remarks, but his successor Jonathan Greenblatt later acknowledged “we were wrong, plain and simple.”
In 2011, when U.S. Congressman Peter King of New York, then-chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, held hearings on Capitol Hill denouncing the radicalization inside American mosques, Jewish friends showed their support by helping to organize a “Today, I am Muslim too” rally in Times Square.
Those shows of solidarity grew throughout the years. Jewish partners joined crowds at airports to protest the Trump administration’s executive order on immigration. Congregations helped each other pick up the pieces when their houses of worship or sacred sites came under assault. But the tougher conversation, probing where people stood on the Middle East conflict and why, remained largely untouched.
As anyone in interfaith relations or diplomacy of any kind will tell you, constructive conversations are best had before there’s a crisis. That crisis arrived on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, murdering more than 1,200 and taking 250 hostages. The war that followed in Gaza sparked virulent protests on college campuses and in public squares and a spike in antisemitic incidents. It also created a chasm of grief too deep and wide for many partnerships to survive.
“When Gaza happened, it created a massive fault line,” Khan said. “For Jews it reinforced existential fears about Jewish safety. For the Palestinians: ‘It’s our existential thing too. We feel we’re getting wiped out.’”
But because many conversation partners had for years avoided the hardest topic of all, they missed the opportunity to feel the emotional weight carried on both sides and hold that tension. When the grief, trauma and fear of Oct. 7 was thrust upon them, leaders could not adequately navigate the emotional landscape to offer moral clarity or comfort, Khan said.
“We could have called for calm,” she said. “We could’ve said that human loss is terrible. We could’ve said a lot of things that calmed people down. None of that happened. It became very tribal.”
Laboratory phase
Dr. Ari Gordon, director of Muslim Jewish Relations for American Jewish Committee, said while some Muslim partners have walked away from their joint advocacy work, some have stayed in touch. Khan and Alsayegh remain committed and hold out hope that their Muslim peers will return and give it another try.
“Everyone in this space has had the hits they’ve taken after Oct. 7,” Gordon said. “Relationships are a long-term investment. They can take dips and turns, peaks and valleys. On a personal level, as a friend, you have the right to say I want to engage with a person. I don’t want to. As a Jewish community we have a responsibility to keep our doors open.”
But it’s also important to keep the trajectory and time frame in perspective. The transformation of Christian-Jewish relations offers a lesson in that regard.
“The idea that a relationship can be beset by conflict and challenges for centuries and undergo transformation,” he said, “is one that I carry in my mind all the time.”
Gordon calls the past 25 years a “laboratory phase of Muslim-Jewish relations.” The Shabbat dinners, iftars, dialogue groups, coalitions, concerts – they all have fortified a connective tissue between American Muslims and Jews that did not exist 25 years ago.
“That trust may not have been sufficient to meet the stress test of October 7 and the continued war but it was definitely there and it didn’t go away,” he said. “After October 7 we entered a new phase and it’s one where we’re not going to go back to the way it used to be, but build something new.”
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