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In her inspired and inspiring history of the Jewish Bund, Molly Crabapple has found her anti-Zionist heroes for our time
Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Labor Bund
By Molly Crabapple
One World, 453 pages, $32
The week of Passover, north Brooklyn bus riders found something unusual at several bus shelters. Swapped out for paid ads were quotes including one translated from a 1938 essay in Tsukunft, a Yiddish literary monthly once published by the Forward Association.
“If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine,” it read, “its spiritual climate will be eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs); and an untiring struggle for the extermination of the language and culture of the non-Hebraized Jews of Palestine. Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow?”
There are pithier anti-Zionist slogans graffitied in Brooklyn, but this quote was from Henryk Erlich, a leader of the Jewish Labor Bund, a staunchly anti-Zionist socialist party founded in Vilna in 1897 that became the most influential political party among prewar Eastern European Jews.
The bus shelter takeover was part of a guerrilla ad campaign for Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Labor Bund, a new book by the artist, activist and writer Molly Crabapple. The campaign, which started the same week the Justice Department sued Harvard University, accusing it of tolerating antisemitism by failing to crack down on anti-Zionist student protesters, also included wheatpasted posters of a model in fishnets holding Crabapple’s book.
The Trump administration and leading American Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee argue that opposing Zionism, defined as Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, is antisemitic; Crabapple’s response is a 400-page Jewish history lesson.
Before World War II, most Jews were not Zionists. Many Orthodox communities felt that forming a Jewish state was heresy, others thought the mass migration of 9 million Jews from a hostile Europe was impractical. The Bund’s opposition to Zionism was not religious or pragmatic; it was ideological. Bundists argued that the future of Jews was linked to all workers, and they should stay and fight repression in Europe, not leave. They called this form of solidarity doikayt, Yiddish for here-ness, as opposed to Zionism’s there-ness.
Crabapple places the Bund, initially an outlawed group in Tsarist Russia, at the center of both the failed 1905 and successful 1917 revolutions. In interwar Poland, as a legal party, it became the most powerful Jewish political movement, even winning seats in municipal elections, and during the Holocaust, Bundists became ghetto fighters and partisans. But the Bund was purged by Stalin, who killed Erlich four years after his Tsukunft essay, and decimated by the Nazis. In postwar America, the Bund was mostly forgotten.
Crabapple, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and an Occupy Wall Street alumna, learned of the Bund through a watercolor by her great-grandfather the artist Sam Rothbort. The painting, set in the Belarusian shtetl of his youth, shows a young woman in a blue dress throwing a rock through a cottage window. The caption reads: “Itka, the Bundist.”
In her 2018 New York Review of Books essay “My Great-Grandfather the Bundist,” Crabapple recounts discovering that Rothbort’s activism in Tsarist Russia forced him to flee to New York in 1904.
Since the publication of her article, Crabapple spent six years learning Yiddish, visited the former centers of Eastern Europe Jewish life, and dug through obscure Yiddish socialist tomes to produce her book. During the same time, Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 and Israel responded by killing over 70,000 in Gaza in attacks which many, including the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, have called a genocide. At the time of this writing, Israel is occupying southern Lebanon and along with the United States is at war with Iran. For the first time, Gallup polls show more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, and an increasing number of younger Jews have rejected Zionism outright and are rediscovering the Bund.
Crabapple’s book is written for this moment. More than translating Bundist theory from Yiddish, she puts it into the language of today’s left. When Julius Martov declared in 1894 “that Jewish workers were oppressed both as workers and as Jews, as a race and a class,” Crabapple explains that he was invoking what the modern-day scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw calls “intersectionality” and was a form of “identity politics.”
To tell the Bund story, Crabapple focuses on a cast of characters including Erlich’s wife, the poet and activist Sophia Dubnow; the militant leader Bernard Goldstein; the famous ghetto smuggler Vladka Meed (nee Feigele Peltel); and her own great-grandfather Sam Rothbort. In some instances, she relies on memoirs; for Rothbort, she interprets the hundreds of paintings and sculptures in her great-aunt’s Brooklyn home and pulls on genealogical threads from her mother’s shoebox of family papers.
Crabapple, whose artwork is in the permanent collection of MoMA and the Rubin Museum, and has posters currently on display at the Poster House, introduces each character with an ink drawing portrait. Her artwork tends to lay bare her political perspective. She renders Donald Trump grotesque, while her sketches of Bundists are more similar to her portraits that glorify leftist icons like Luigi Mangione, the accused assassin of the United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson.
When asked in 2020 on the progressive Jewish podcast Treyf if progressives were engaging with a “romanticized fantasy of the Bund,” she didn’t disagree. “There’s actually a great value to simplified and aesthetic symbols in politics,” she said. “The fantasy of the Bund that I see is a muscly Jewish guy in a newsboy cap saying ‘fuck the Zionists’ with one middle finger while the other hand punches a Nazi.”
Here Where We Live Is Our Country is not a caricature of the Bund, nor a work of fan fiction; it’s a deeply researched portrait, but at its core lies this romantic vision. The Bund ran soup kitchens, sports programs and day camps, and promoted the Yiddish language, but Crabapple is most attracted to their street-fighting militancy. And her narrative can be one-sided. The Erlich quote in the book and on the bus shelter was part of a public debate with his father-in-law, the historian Simon Dubnow. Dubnow’s response goes untold.
But there are plenty of academic texts that dissect 90-year-old political debates. Crabapple’s book is different, and better for it. Here Where We Live Is Our Country reads like an epic novel with the Bundists as its tragic heroes.
Crabapple, as narrator, relates her experiences protesting at the 2011 Occupy Wall Street encampment, canvassing housing projects with the DSA, reporting from the West Bank and Gaza, and traveling through war-torn Ukraine. The personal interjections remind the reader that this is not a dispassionate history. Naomi Klein’s blurb praises the book as “a portal to an irresistible, lost world,” but Crabapple’s goal is not to write an elegy. She calls the Bund’s history a “candle to illuminate the tumultuous present” and hopes her book “serves as a guide to our urgent moment.” She decouples Zionism from Jewishness and shows that anti-Zionism alone is not antisemitic, but she leaves largely unresolved the question of what the Bund’s example demands of us today.
The Bund organized eastern European Jewish workers who lacked basic civil rights. Today’s challenge is less about Jewish empowerment, than it is about how Jews wield power, vis-a-vis the state of Israel and its military. In the book, however, Israel barely appears as an actual place where millions of Jews and Palestinians live. Instead, Israel is seen through the prism of its founding ideology, Zionism — one which pre-war Bundists argued adopted the worst quality of European ethno-nationalism.
As the Erlich quote argues, a Jewish state in Israel was destined to repeat endless cycles of violence and tribalism. In this view, the socialist kibbutzes that seduced leftists like a young Bernie Sanders or the overtures of peace and coexistence by Liberal Zionists like Yitzhak Rabin, are all illusions. For Crabapple, the inescapable reality of Zionism is instead the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu, the violent settlers, and increasingly brutal wars and occupation.
The antidote is the Bundists’ concept of solidarity — where Jews join with the workers of the world but, unlike in Communism, hold on to their Jewish identity. One of the quotes Crabapple returns to several times is from the Socialist Congressman and Bundist ally Meyer London in 1905, where he inverts the story of Exodus: “Are you aware that in Russian Poland, thousands of our Jewish boys and girls are giving their lives for liberty? They pray to God, not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them to free Egypt.”
The quote, like Crabapple’s book, is poetic and noble. It goes against everything I learned in Hebrew School, yet somehow reflects Jewish values in its call to be empathetic to the oppressed, because we “were once a stranger in a strange land.”
Reflecting on a 1938 Erlich speech about the rise of Nazism, where he calls on Polish Jews to stand in solidarity with the same people who had carried out pogroms across their country, Crabapple writes: “This was it. There was only Egypt, the Bund knew, and they were stuck with the Egyptians. They were people first, not Jews or goys.” It is a beautiful and heartbreaking line, knowing what came next.
This tragic solidarity is presented as a point of inspiration, but how? The 2023 Jewish Voices for Peace cease-fire protest that filled Grand Central Terminal is offered as an example of Bundist-like solidarity in action, but Crabapple, who has supported a cultural boycott of Israel, stops short of prescribing what this anti-Zionism should mean today.
Vast numbers of Jews, including Bundists, did leave Egypt and cross into Israel — not not because of ideology or religion, but because of history. American labor leader David Dubinsky, who is featured in the book, was exiled to Siberia by the Tsar and escaped to New York, where he co-founded the Jewish Labor Committee in 1934, providing Bundists critical support during the Holocaust.
In his memoirs, Dubinsky recalls telling David Ben-Gurion after the war, “even though I am sympathetic to the creation of Israel, I am not a Zionist.” He then spent decades steering American labor to support Israel financially and politically.
Crabapple also includes Vladka Meed, the celebrated ghetto smuggler, drawing on her memoir Both Sides of the Wall, the proceeds of whose English edition were donated to the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum in Israel, where Meed led groups of Americans on educational trips.
The historian David Slucki in his 2012 book, The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945, finds that over time the Bund came to terms with the state of Israel; the Bund’s World Coordinating Committee accepted it as an important Jewish community, but not the sole political and cultural center, and eventually advocated a two-state solution.
It’s hard to imagine the Bund simply “Standing with Israel” today. But nearly half of Americans under 30 describe Hamas as a militant resistance group rather than a terrorist organization, and anti-Zionism has been taken up by far right antisemites. Crabapple doesn’t spell out what the Bundist response would be today; she leaves that to the reader. What she does is resurrect a buried political tradition in a way her Bundist heroes would appreciate: not just in book form, but in the streets for everyday Brooklyn bus riders.
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As the Bible and the news from the Strait of Hormuz tells us, our world is in dire straits
The most important traffic reports these days usually come from the Strait of Hormuz.
“Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz dropped significantly over the weekend, The New York Times reported, “as a four-day exchange of attacks between Iran and the United States left some shipowners deciding it was too risky to transit.”
What’s going on with the Strait of Hormuz affects gas prices, stock prices, Americans’ moods — and the world economy.
But what does “strait” mean, anyway?
The word has been with us for a long time, and intriguingly, it appears in many famous translations of the Torah. It also pops up in translations of the New Testament.
“Strait” comes from the Latin for “strict.” It first appeared in English in the 14th century, when, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it referred to clothing — “a garment, etc.: Tight-fitting, narrow.”
Over time, the meaning changed a bit, but it always had something to do with narrowness. From 1561 to 1725, it meant: “Of bonds, a knot: Tightly drawn.”
As the centuries passed, it attracted the attention of poets.
”It matters not how strait the gate,” wrote William Ernest Henley in his poem “Invictus.” “How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”
It turns out that Henley was kind of into the subject of what words meant.
“The poet, who was one of the leading slang lexicographers of his day, saw the gates of heaven as strait — tight, narrow, difficult to get through,” the late great language columnist William Safire observed in 1984, when he wrote a column on “strait” and “straits.”
Maybe Henley had the New Testament in mind, too.
Matthew 7:13 in The King James Bible advises: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.”
Today, according to Merriam-Webster, “strait” means “a comparatively narrow passageway connecting two large bodies of water — often used in plural but singular in construction.”
Henley, the poet, was using an archaic meaning — a narrow passage, without water.
In contemporary English, “strait” also has a secondary meaning — “a situation of perplexity or distress — often used in plural,” according to Merriam-Webster, but also according to anyone who has used the phrase “dire straits,” including, one would presume, the band Dire Straits.
Both physical and emotional space
“Strait” describes both a physical space — for example, a body of water — and an emotional space, like “dire straits.”
Perhaps that dual meaning is why the word “strait” appears in translations of the Torah. In the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation, the Hebrew word tzar, or “narrow,” is translated as “strait.”
Consider 1 Samuel, 13:6, in the JPS translation from 1917:
“When the men of Israel saw that they were in a strait — for the people were distressed — then the people did hide themselves in caves, and in thickets, and in rocks, and in holds, and in pits.”
Tzar has both a literal descriptive meaning and a figurative emotional meaning. Sure, as an adjective, it means narrow, such as in the famous song about the entire world being “a narrow bridge” — gesher tzar me’od.
But as ki tzar lo in Samuel 1 6:13 demonstrates, it can also refer to a tough circumstance, a strait. Similarly, perhaps, in contemporary Hebrew, someone might say, tzar li, or “I am saddened.”
These multiple meanings might lead a person to the hazardous question of whether one should say the “Strait of Hormuz” in the singular, or “Straits of Hormuz” in the plural.
That was what fascinated Safire in 1984. Today, his take feels like a postcard from another time — but it’s also soothing in this moment of, well, dire straits:
“My advice,”Safire wrote. “Go with the familiar; follow your ear. If you’re happy with the Straits of Gibraltar or Magellan, use the final s; if the place name is new to you, let the gazetteer crowd have its way.”
“Hormuz is unfamiliar to most Americans, and the Strait of Hormuz is therefore the name I would use, going along with Gary Hart and the stylebooks,” Safire continued. “But retain the singular sense: ‘The Straits of Gibraltar’ is a passage.’ ‘’The Strait of Hormuz’ is the next Quemoy and Matsu.”
I liked being distracted for a moment from Iran and Trump with the mention of “Gary Hart.”
That nostalgia reminded me that today’s Strait of Hormuz news cycle, about a traffic jam for the fuel and food we need to live, is about both a location and a feeling.
Sure, the waterway may be physically open, or, at least of this writing, effectively closed because of fear, but its status has other meanings too — like whether the Iranian regime actually won this war, and whether that narrow space is also a symbol of future peril.
And in those multiple meanings, strait echoes the Biblical tzar —narrow, yes, but also dangerous.
In Hebrew and in English, narrowness, perilousness and sadness frequently go together, indicating a world or a situation that must be navigated carefully. Perhaps a word like strait — a little bit singular, a little bit plural — captures it all.
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Mamdani says ‘I can’t tell you I support’ Israel as a Jewish state
(JTA) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he could not endorse states that privilege one religion over another, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, during a one-on-one interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday.
“Democratic Socialists of America now says they no longer favor a two-state solution. “Is that the way you see it as well? Karl asked in the interview, which came days after Mamdani’s endorsed Democratic socialist candidates for Congress swept their New York Democratic primaries.
Among them, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier campaigned on platforms that included opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel and support for Palestinian rights.
Mamdani replied to Karl: “The way I see it is equal rights for all people. And I think that that’s the truth for Israel. It’s the truth for any country in the world.”
When pressed by Karl that Israel is in fact a Jewish state and “that’s in the charter, that’s the way it is now,” Mamdani said he has consistently stated he supports “the state of Israel as a state with equal rights.”
However, he added, “I believe that any state that privileges one religion over the other is one that I can’t tell you I support, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.”
The backlash to Mamdani’s comments was quick. In a statement Sunday, Ambassador Ofir Akunis, Consul General of Israel in New York, said, “Mamdani, we do not need your recognition of the Jewish state. If you knew a little history, instead of spending all day inciting and spreading hatred, you would know that Israel’s Declaration of Independence guaranteed full equality for all its citizens. That has been the reality since the day our state was established.”
Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, posted on X, “Mamdani is either willfully ignorant or maliciously mendacious,” adding that “Israel has no official state religion.”
He also stated that there are multiple countries for which Islam is the state religion, with additional Muslim-majority countries declaring Islam as the state religion in their constitutions.
Karl also asked Mamdani about his broader views on Israel, which became a prominent issue during the New York Democratic primaries, particularly among candidates who support Israel and continued U.S. military aid.
Mamdani said voters made it clear that “they were tired of tens of billions of dollars being spent in our taxpayer dollars to violate international law to kill thousands of civilians.”
He added that currently “Palestine is described as if there is a ceasefire,” but more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed during it. He said New Yorkers want to “follow international law, to believe in the humanity for all.”
Karl also pressed the mayor on the Poetica coffee shop incident in Brooklyn last week, where staff refused to take New York Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman’s money for a coffee purchase, calling him a “genocide enabler” because he supports Israel.
Mamdani said while he has “political disagreements” with Goldman (who lost his seat to Mamdani-backed Brad Lander), “I do believe that that’s a response that goes beyond that.”
And when asked about rising antisemitism in New York City, the mayor said that while Jews are a minority of the city’s population, they constitute a majority of victims of the hate crimes committed in the city. ”That’s something that’s unacceptable,” he said.
Akunis said, however, that “The surge in antisemitism across the United States, and particularly in New York, is the result of ignorance and a lack of knowledge, combined with a fundamental hatred of the Jewish people.”
He added, “I once again warn that Mamdani’s inflammatory rhetoric will end in very serious and violent acts against Jewish and Israeli communities throughout the city.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In North Carolina, a memorial project will honor Martin Luther King and Holocaust victims
(JTA) — Two people lean down from an abstract version of a rail car. Their outstretched hands reach towards a family gathered around the car’s opening. The adults on the ground reach back, either to get help stepping into the car or to say good-bye.
That’s one side of the artist rendering of what will be a Holocaust monument. On the other side, train tracks lead to the entrance of the Nazis’ largest death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. A message across the top reads, “They were here. We remember.”
The sculpture by artists David Wilson and Stephen Hayes, called “In Transit: The Weight of Absence,” is emotional on its own. But what makes the project planned for Charlotte, North Carolina, especially noteworthy is what will be alongside it.
Charlotte is the planned home for what its organizers believe is the first memorial plaza in the United States to both honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and remember the Holocaust in the same space. The Circle of Humanity: Monuments for Unity and Remembrance in Marshall Park will feature the 8-foot bronze statue of King currently in the park plus the new Holocaust monument.
Linking the two will be paved walkways, educational reflections and digital resources on the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement and the combined history of African Americans and Jews in the U.S. School and tour groups will take part in interactive educational experiences.
To those who might wonder why these monuments belong together, Rabbi Ya’aqov Walker points to a common inheritance. “You could just describe it plainly: white supremacy in continental Europe and white supremacy in the southeastern United States,” said Walker, who is Black and serves on the project’s education committee.
The groups also share deep resilience and desire for change, he said, which led to a significant Jewish presence in the civil rights movement in the United States 20 years after the Holocaust.
“It was very prescient in their minds, from King to any major civil rights leader who was committed to nonviolence, to study and learn what the Jewish experience was, and to build relationships with rabbis as fellow spiritual leaders,” said Walker, who co-leads the Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance.
The new monument will replace a small one dedicated in 1979 that’s hidden in overgrown foliage. Project partners include the Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance, Mecklenburg County, Queens University of Charlotte, the Stan Greenspon Holocaust Education Center, and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg branch of the NAACP.
After a national search for artists that yielded 57 design proposals, a review committee narrowed the choices to eight finalists. Wilson and Hayes, who are Black and live in Durham, North Carolina, were one of two teams asked to submit their concepts. Though they had never designed a sculpture based on a Jewish theme, they were compelled by its juxtaposition to the King monument, “creating a broader dialogue about injustice, courage and the consequences of hatred,” Wilson told county commissioners during a recent public meeting.
David Wilson, left, and Stephen Hayes are the designers of “In Transit: The Weight of Absence,” the winning design for the Circle of Humanity memorial in Charlotte’s Marshall Park. (Courtesy Circle of Humanity)
Their presentation moved Commissioner Leigh Altman, who is white, to reveal that her great-grandparents and many of their children were murdered in the Holocaust. About 25 to 30 Holocaust survivors live in the Charlotte area today.
“This shared partnership for me is a reminder across one of history’s worst genocides and the worst legacy of what America has done wrong, and brought it together to find a commonality, which was a failed obligation to recognize the humanity of others and to fight for it,” she said.
The second finalist team, Miriam Gusevich and Sal Pirrone from Washington, D.C., envisioned an abstract sculpture with thousands of silver circles to represent those killed by the Nazis. The proposed structure opened to a skylight in the shape of a Star of David. Members of Gusevich’s family died in the Holocaust.
“Circle of Humanity” organizers held 12 community feedback sessions, including at synagogues, a Black church and Johnson C. Smith University, a historically Black university. About 850 community members participated. More than 100 completed written surveys on their preferences. Ultimately, a majority favored the rail car image. At one session, participants audibly gasped when “In Transit” was revealed.
It’s yet to be determined which materials will be used to render the piece. Options range from cast and fabricated metal to large-scale 3-D printing. What likely won’t change is the sculpture’s bronze hue and structure.
“The skin tones can be interpreted in many ways, and it looks very similar to an auction block” used in the trafficking of enslaved people, Walker noted. He recalled that during a feedback session at a Black church, some church members teared up to see the reminder of family separation.
Urban Design Partners in collaboration with Groundworks Studio will develop the plaza, in a design called “Woven Histories.” Potential elements include a stone walkway with a plaid design. The plaid pays tribute to the dress that civil rights pioneer Dorothy Counts-Scoggins wore on the day in 1957 when she faced down an angry white mob to become the first Black student to attend a segregated high school in Charlotte.
The plaza will include benches and may incorporate decorative stone books. Like the monument design, the concept is still open to changes based on additional community feedback. The planned budget is just under $1 million, including a $100,000 endowment for programming and maintenance. If fundraising efforts are successful and the timeline stays on track, the plaza is scheduled to open in May 2027.
Marshall Park has particular resonance as the setting. It is part of the former Brooklyn, a Black neighborhood razed in the 1960s in the name of urban renewal. More recently, Marshall Park has been a familiar site for protests and political demonstrations.
The idea for the innovative combination began with a discussion between Rev. Corine Mack, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg NACCP, and Rabbi Judy Schindler, Sklut professor of Jewish studies at Queens University of Charlotte and executive director of Spill the Honey, a national non-profit which produces arts and educational materials intended to empower the Black-Jewish alliance to combat racism and antisemitism.
The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. memorial statue in Charlotte’s Marshall Park, created by renowned sculptor Selma Burke, was dedicated on April 5, 1980. (Courtesy Arrowmount School of Arts and Crafts)
“It all came out of the same conversation, looking at the Civil Rights movement, looking at the rise in racial slurs and antisemitism, and just really understanding that we have to do something to elevate the importance of not only our cultures, but what love would look like in this country,” Mack said. “I thought it was important that we went back to the root of the civil rights movement, which was us collaborating.”
She acknowledges a few phone calls from members of Charlotte’s Black community who expressed concern about the collaboration in light of the war and political divides opened after the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Others were unclear about the benefits of bringing the two histories together. But no vocal opposition has emerged to the project. Organizers say on-site education about the history of Black-Jewish ties in America is essential.
Charlotte has its own claims to this history. Humorist and social critic Harry Golden lived in the city and published his commentaries in The Carolina Israelite, a newspaper whose subscribers included Congressional members and well-known writers. In “The Vertical Negro Plan” in 1956, he pointedly noted that whites seemed to have no trouble standing next to Black Americans. It was only when Black people wanted to sit “that the fur begins to fly.” His tongue-in-cheek solution? Remove the seats at schools and lunch counters.
In 1971, attorney Adam Stein, father of N.C. Gov. Josh Stein, was part of the legal team who argued Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education before the Supreme Court. The case began the era of busing for school integration nationwide. Busing for that purpose officially ended in Charlotte in 2002, when the Supreme Court declined to take up a challenge to lower-court ruling recognizing local schools as adequately desegregated .
Now, supporters hope the Circle of Humanity will be a catalyst for Black-Jewish collaborations in other cities. Schindler, named after a great-aunt who was killed during the Holocaust, wants the gathering spot to be a place not only for remembrance, but for inspiration and beginnings.
“It’s really important to me that we bring joy to this work,” she said, envisioning the opening ceremony filled with klezmer music as well as both soul food and Jewish noshes. She cautions against “letting those to seek to harm us control our thoughts and our struggles and our fears. We need to celebrate our culture and who we are with pride and joy, so I pray that this will be a centerpiece for cultural celebration of all sorts.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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