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Indiana University removed its Jewish studies director. His replacement has ignited a firestorm over Israel.
You won’t find professor Mark Roseman on the frontlines of any campus protests or posting his unfiltered political thoughts on social media. His current project, a four-volume history of the Holocaust published by Cambridge University, is unlikely to generate controversy.
Which is why many of his colleagues were baffled when Indiana University’s chancellor broke precedent this summer to remove Roseman as director of the school’s prestigious Jewish studies program and replace him with a junior colleague known as one of Israel’s fiercest defenders on campus.
“If I could have designed a person to be in charge of Jewish studies in a moment like this — it’s fraught, Jews are divided on Israel and antisemitism, everyone has a lot of deeply held feelings — I could barely imagine a better person than Mark,” said Sarah Imhoff, chair of Indiana’s religious studies department.
Roseman’s removal has taken on special significance at a time when universities are under intense pressure to appease both conservative politicians worried about liberal bias and Jewish groups enraged over mounting hostility toward Israel on campus with academics who study Jews and Judaism often caught in the crosshairs.
“Jewish studies is at the precipice of a cliff in America,” said Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish studies at Harvard. “It’s being hijacked by a particular political agenda and somebody has to get ahold of the wheel.”
Indiana replaced Roseman with Günther Jikeli, associate director of the school’s small but influential Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, and a voice in the growing field of antisemitism studies. That new field has become a magnet for donors concerned that existing Jewish and Israel studies programs have not done enough to counter campus antisemitism.
New York University announced a “seven-figure donation” to create a center to study and combat antisemitism shortly after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks two years ago, and other schools including the University of Michigan and Brandeis University have since launched similar programs.
“The goal is to keep institutions and departments like his free of harmful ideology.”
Allon FriedmanPresident of the Jewish American Affairs Committee of Indiana
At Indiana, both supporters and detractors of Jikeli, a German academic whose work has focused on Muslim antisemitism in Europe, believe he is acting as an enforcer of what should legitimately be considered as “Jewish studies.”
After becoming interim director of the Jewish studies program in August, he stripped travel funding from an anti-Zionist graduate student in the program and barred her from using a Zoom avatar that said “Free Palestine,” prompting outcry from some student leaders. That concern only intensified after Jikeli, who is not Jewish, declined to say whether he would allow the department to support any research that was critical of Zionism.
“It’s not a question of academic freedom,” Jikeli told student leaders in a meeting with the humanities dean, according to an audio recording obtained by the Forward. “The question is about what is Jewish studies sponsoring?”
The university itself has remained silent on both Roseman’s removal and Jikeli’s installation as departmental head, and did not respond to multiple questions about why the change was made or to requests for interviews with the officials responsible.
Faculty input is usually weighted heavily when selecting department chairs and program directors. Rick Van Kooten, the humanities dean, acknowledged during a faculty meeting that Imhoff, the chair of the religious studies department, had received more nominations to replace Roseman than Jikeli. Imhoff said Van Kooten claimed that she could not serve as interim director because she was already chair of the religious studies department. Van Kooten did not respond to a request for comment but Imhoff said this is not a university policy.
(Jewish studies is a “program” at IU, meaning its faculty report to home departments like religious studies or English.)
The leadership transition rankled many faculty members, who speculated that it had been sparked by donors who believed that the program was too tolerant of research hostile toward Israel, or was the result of pressure from political leaders — both federal and state — to address campus antisemitism related to protests against Israel.
If outside pressure did cause Jikeli’s installation, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, argued Allon Friedman, a professor of medicine at Indiana University’s Indianapolis campus and the leader of a Jewish advocacy group in the state.
“The goal is to keep institutions and departments like his free of harmful ideology,” Friedman said, speaking in his capacity as president of the Jewish American Affairs Committee of Indiana. “He’s trying to make his department serious again.”
The contested rise of antisemitism studies
Jikeli’s emergence from the small field of antisemitism studies to lead one of the country’s most prominent Jewish studies programs tracks a larger trend in higher education. In the aftermath of the Second Intifada, amid concerns over the climate around Israel on college campuses, Jewish donors turned from a focus on Jewish studies — which has historically had an extremely broad mandate — to create the discipline of Israel studies. But funding for that field has been imperiled by the gap between what many of these philanthropists hoped to create — faculty who could serve as a bulwark against anti-Zionism — and the critical analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that they often delivered.
Centers devoted to antisemitism studies, a relatively new discipline often focused on contemporary issues related to anti-Zionism, began to fill that gap with a more concrete mandate to thwart Israel’s critics, who many Jews, though certainly not all, believe are fostering an antisemitic environment on campus and beyond.
Alvin Rosenfeld (no relation), who founded the Jewish studies program at Indiana in 1972, helped pioneer this new response to Israel’s critics. He created the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism in 2009 with a focus on radical Islam and left-wing hostility toward Israel; Jikeli came to the school in 2019 to serve as associate director of the institute.
“The hostility that calls itself anti-Zionism is not a dispassionate affair at all, and since Oct. 7 it has become really very fiercely, fiercely antisemitic,” Rosenfeld said in an interview. “We’re doing our best to root out its manifestations.”
Other schools have adopted similar approaches since Oct. 7, some of which appear more focused on advocacy than traditional academic study. At Emory University, Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar and former State Department antisemitism envoy, is preparing to launch an institute that she said “will be focused on policy.” It will continue her efforts to promote the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which classifies most anti-Zionism as a form of discrimination.
At the University of Washington, a new “faculty initiative” called Bridges for Change is meant to fight antisemitism. It is being run by Janet Baseman, a public health professor at the school who previously chaired its antisemitism task force. The only Jewish studies professor on that committee had stepped down before it issued its final report out of frustration that its conclusions seemed preordained.
Brandeis University, which was the first college to arrest student protesters following Oct. 7 after its then-president labeled them Hamas supporters, launched a President’s Initiative on Antisemitism, while New York University and the University of Michigan have both created more traditional academic centers to study antisemitism.
Rosenfeld has been a fundraising powerhouse at Indiana, first for the Jewish studies program and then for his antisemitism institute. Some faculty members said they believed that donors including Betsy Borns, whose father endowed the Borns Jewish Studies Program at IU, had expressed displeasure with research in the program that was critical of Israel in the months before Roseman was replaced. Borns did not respond to a request for comment.
Roseman, who ran the Jewish studies program at Indiana for eight of the last 12 years before he was forced to step down, said he could not discuss specific conversations with donors but had observed that overall pressure on what professors researched and taught had increased.
“Donors are becoming more demanding of advocacy,” he said. “There used to be a kind of trust in academic freedom and the integrity of academic work, and that’s disappearing.”
Should Jewish studies defend Jews?
After Jikeli’s early actions as interim director — removing Sabina Ali, the graduate student, from a Zoom meeting and revoking her grant funding — sparked questions from faculty and student leaders, two of Jikeli’s European colleagues responded by sending letters of support to Indiana’s administration arguing that anti-Zionist research had no place in Jewish studies.
Olaf Glöckner, a professor at the University of Potsdam, argued that Jewish studies was not “a neutral platform for any and all political positions about Jews.”
Lars Rensmann, who teaches at the University of Passau, wrote that the paper Ali had received the grant to present, which referred to Israel as a “settler-colonial nation-state,” was itself antisemitic because it denied “the citizenship rights of Israeli Jews by defaming them, without any historical foundation, as ‘settler colonialists.’”
“No university can be obliged to fund such propaganda,” wrote Rensmann.
“There are Jews and Jews.”
Alvin RosenfeldDirector of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University
Notably, even Jikeli’s strongest defenders at Indiana have shied away from making similar arguments. Rosenfeld signed a petition defending Jikeli’s leadership as interim director. But he rejected the notion that anti-Zionist scholarship, which has a long tradition among Jewish thinkers, was inherently outside the bounds of Jewish studies.
“Anything and everything that touches on the Jewish experience in a serious way is deserving of study,” Rosenfeld said in an interview. “There’s nothing that is off bounds, nothing that we shouldn’t study.” Instead, he argued, the quality of Ali’s research was flawed and therefore undeserving of funding.
Rosenfeld wasn’t concerned that Jikeli, Glöcker and Rensmann — none of whom are Jewish — were seeking to limit what Ali should be allowed to research. Though Ali’s family is both Jewish and Muslim, and she identifies as part of both communities, Rosenfeld doesn’t believe that gives her any more authority than Jikeli to ascertain what belongs in a Jewish studies department.
“I don’t know what ‘identifies as Jewish,’ means,” said Rosenfeld. “You’re a Jew, we’re Jews — we share even the same last name — but there are Jews and Jews.”
On one side of this dividing line are Jews like Rosenfeld himself, he explained, who are, like him, “absolutely convinced” that there was no “Jewish future worthy of the name without the State of Israel.”
And on the other side, Rosenfeld said, are the sizable share of Jews that had supported New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and all that he seemed to represent — anti-Zionism, or at a minimum the belief that nonsectarian concerns should be prioritized over Jewish solidarity.
Questions over who counts as Jewish
As the government has sought to crack down on antisemitism since Oct. 7, the question of which Jews represent the community — and which deserve protection — has intensified. Well before the tempest began within Jewish studies, this was a live debate at Indiana University, which has the sixth-highest number of undergraduate Jewish students in the country.
Doug Carter, superintendent of the state police, said his officers broke up a tent encampment on campus last year because of speech that was “encouraging the death of the Jewish people globally.”
He dismissed a public radio reporter who told him that Jewish students had been active in the protests, including holding a Passover Seder at the encampment, and that they had not heard antisemitic comments. “That’s not correct,” Carter said. “Go on to the next question because I saw it with my own two eyes.”
And after a student accused him of bias against Israel, Ben Robinson, a history professor who is Jewish, became one of the first faculty members disciplined under a new Indiana law that mandates “intellectual diversity” at state universities. Robinson said the university has opened a new investigation into him based on allegations that he engaged in antisemitism during a lecture about genocide claims against Israel.
“If you’re an anti-Zionist Jew,” Robinson said, “you’re not sufficiently Jewish for the people who are making these decisions.”
None of the 20 people I spoke with for this story understood why Roseman had been removed as director, and I did not hear any criticism of his leadership. But these disciplinary incidents and crackdowns had created a simmering tension by the time Roseman said Jikeli called him to announce that he’d lost the confidence of Indiana’s top leadership and that Jikeli himself had been offered Roseman’s job.
Jikeli said in an email that did not say he would be replacing Roseman. “To be absolutely clear: there was no pre-arrangement, and I was appointed following faculty consultation,” he said.
In addition to his scholarship on antisemitism, Jikeli has made a name as a prominent academic defender of Israel and its supporters on campus. He organized a “Rally Against Hamas Propaganda” at IU last year during the pro-Palestinian encampment, and in an interview a few weeks before he took over the Jewish studies program Jikeli lamented that, “Jewish students are often outnumbered and lack the institutional or financial backing their adversaries enjoy.”
(While Jewish services like Hillel and pro-Israel advocacy organizations have significantly more funding than pro-Palestinian groups, some of Israel’s supporters believe that universities themselves are systematically biased against Jews, and that Iran or Qatar are secretly funding campus demonstrations agaisnt Israel.)
“Many administrators are reluctant to confront faculty or radical groups for fear of backlash,” Jikeli said in the interview. The solution could come “in the form of public scrutiny, funding consequences, or legal obligations.”
Jikeli’s power to address campus antisemitism along these lines is limited as interim director of the Jewish studies program, but he was quick to assert it.
A Zoom expulsion and a grant revoked
Sabina Ali, a fifth-year doctoral student doing a minor in Jewish studies, said in an interview with the Forward that she first crossed paths with Jikeli while participating in the encampment. Ali said she was standing in a protective circle around a group of Muslim students while they prayed when Jikeli approached the group and started photographing them.
“I just asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ and he just started rambling about how Islam is such a sexist religion and why are these men praying without women,” Ali recalled.
Jikeli said in an interview that he often passed the encampment on his way home but did not recall the incident Ali described. “I recall that there were some prayers,” he said. “I don’t think I said that Islam is a sexist religion.”
In a follow-up email, he said: “I did not, and would not, describe Islam as a sexist religion. Islamism, as an ideological movement advocating the application of sharia law, does contain misogynistic elements — but that is a distinct discussion.”
Jikeli first raised concerns last fall that Ali’s profile picture on Zoom — the image that is displayed when a user turns off their camera — was creating a hostile learning environment. The image is a mashup of three distinct items: the Palestinian flag, a drawing of a woman wearing a keffiyeh around her head and the words “free Palestine.”
Roseman, who was director at the time, said he brought Jikeli’s complaint to the university’s student conduct office, which determined it qualified as free speech. “I was simply following guidance from the college,” Roseman said. “Whether some people didn’t like it or not, I didn’t feel like I had much choice.”
Jikeli disagreed. When Ali showed up virtually to a hybrid September workshop this fall to celebrate the release of a new book by Imhoff, the religious studies chair, Jikeli announced to the room that her profile image was creating an unsafe environment.
“A Jewish studies graduate student sitting next to me pointed out that Jikeli might be the only one who was bothered,” Constance Furey, a religious studies professor, wrote in an email to university administrators. “Without further comment or explanation, JIkeli then announced that he had removed the student.”
Twenty of the 24 people present for the workshop then left and reconvened in a new room, where Ali was allowed to participate. But Jikeli defended himself to everyone in the program later that day in an email describing the avatar as “an image of a Palestinian terrorist.”
“Political slogans or provocative images of any kind have no place in our academic settings,” Jikeli wrote.
He followed up directly with Ali, proposing that they meet with a mediator to “clear the air.” She instead asked for a public apology and Jikeli’s resignation as interim director.
A few days later, Jikeli wrote to Ali again, this time to say that he was unilaterally rejecting a travel grant approved by the Jewish studies funding committee for her to present at a national religious studies conference.
Jikeli’s email to Ali did not provide a reason for the unusual move but he told the Forward that it “did not meet our academic standards and falls outside the scope of Jewish Studies.” Those who rushed to his defense focused on the subject of Ali’s research: “Weaponizing Indigeneity: Zionist Public Discourses on Possessing Palestine.”
Blending politics and scholarship
Though Jikeli said in an email that he does not engage in advocacy, he blended political stances with his academic work before becoming interim program director, writing op-eds and giving interviews about opposition to Israel on college campuses.
Bryce Greene, a PhD student at Indiana who was a leader of the protests against the war in Gaza, tried to sign up last year for an undergraduate course Jikeli taught on Israel and social media. But, he said, the professor suggested that the two instead meet for weekly independent study sessions.
Jikeli proposed that Greene would receive credit for the meetings, but they disagreed on how much the independent study would be worth and eventually decided to proceed on an informal basis.
Greene described cordial meetings where they would debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and send each other readings. But the relationship eventually broke down when Greene accused Jikeli of “Holocaust denial” for rejecting the claim that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
Still, Greene was taken aback a few months later when a friend sent him a flyer for a lecture Jikeli was delivering to the Virginia Psychoanalytic Society called “In the Mind of a Pro-Hamas Student,” which the description said was based on “a semester-long dialogue with a pro-Hamas campus activist.”
“It was pretty obvious that he was trying to talk about me,” Greene said. After complaining to the chairs of Jewish studies and German studies, where Jikeli is based, Greene said he believed the talk switched to focus on public social media posts from other college students.
Jikeli told Greene in an email following the event that it was based on discussions with “some other people” during the encampments and shared his presentation slides from the event with the Forward. They do not focus on individual students.
What many people don’t understand is that the use of #Hamas slogans, such as #FromTheRiverToTheSea, #Palestine will be free” is an endorsement of the ongoing #terrorism against all #Israelis and #Jews – as demonstrated by the horrific #massacre of #civilians on #10/7.
— Gunther Jikeli (@GJikeli) October 27, 2023
Jikeli’s willingness to mix his political beliefs about Israel and antisemitism with his academic responsibilities came up again during an October meeting with Rick Van Kooten, the humanities dean, and a group of Jewish studies graduate students concerned about Jikeli’s actions as interim director.
As part of his defense for removing Ali from the Zoom meeting, Jikeli told the group that he had printed out a copy of her Zoom avatar and used it for an assignment in one of his undergraduate courses. He had asked students to respond to a series of questions about the image, including: “Imagine this image displayed constantly on Zoom during hybrid workshops with students and professors. How would its persistent presence affect your focus, comfort, and sense of belonging in that educational space?”
The responses demonstrated that “students feel very uncomfortable in that scenario,” Jikeli said during the meeting, and so he was justified in banning such imagery. He said in an emailed statement that “this was a pedagogical exercise about classroom environment” and “not a personal attack on any individual student.”
When Van Kooten said that he was required to uphold an Indiana state law that mandated freedom of expression for college students, Jikeli warned that individuals he had spoken with around the country might file a federal civil rights complaint against the university if Ali was allowed to display the image.
“I want you to hear this now,” Jikeli told Van Kooten, according to an audio recording of the meeting. “People will consider it a Title VI violation if this is going on — I will not tolerate this.”
Lamentations over a divided program
Van Kooten ultimately ruled that if Jikeli wanted to create a policy about Zoom images for the program he should get it approved by the faculty, and that he would need to provide a specific justification for revoking grants that had been approved by the funding committee.
(Ali’s travel to the religious conference is now being paid for with other university grants.)
But despite the modest stabilizing effect of Van Kooten’s intervention, Daniel Reischer, a leader of the Jewish Studies Graduate Student Association, said that the rapid series of controversies had taken a toll on the program. Some students who had been considering studying at Indiana are reconsidering, he said. After Jikeli declined to say whether he would allow funding for any scholarship that was critical of Zionism, graduate students from around the country are wondering whether their research will be welcome at the annual Jewish studies conference that the association sponsors.
“There’s just a lot of uncertainty and a lot of fear,” Reischer said in an interview.
Jikeli said in an email that he was “firmly committed to free, open, and respectful dialogue.”
“Criticism — including of Zionism — is part of legitimate academic inquiry,” Jikeli wrote. “Defamation and unsubstantiated claims are not.”
“We could have embraced a program that says, ‘You can do your best scholarship here no matter what your politics are’ — but we haven’t been able to do that.”
Sarah ImhoffChair of the Religious Studies Department at Indiana University
Not everyone is critical of Jikeli’s leadership. Joanna Martin, another officer of the graduate student group, said she’s had positive interactions with Jikeli and that he supported bringing a prominent scholar of Nigerian Jewry — the subject of Martin’s doctoral thesis — to campus after becoming program director.
“He’s definitely making some waves,” Martin said. “But I don’t think he’s going to start overruling anything and everything.”
Another graduate student, who did not want to be named mounting a more forceful defense of Jikeli, said that the Jewish studies program has been divided over Israel for years, and many people were determined to oppose Jikeli’s leadership before he had done anything as interim director.
“Gunther came in believing that people were already against him,” the student said, noting that several members of the program had boycotted his welcome dinner.
Jikeli, who told me the school had asked him not to discuss his leadership of the program, has seemed ready to consolidate power and aggressively defend his leadership. In addition to the letters from Nelson, the former AAUP president, and his European colleagues, Jikeli shared a petition with the Forward signed by several dozen Jewish studies professors from the U.S., Europe and Israel defending how he handled the situation with Ali.
Imhoff, the religious studies chair, said that shortly after becoming interim director Jikeli removed her without explanation from serving on the Jewish studies program’s graduate affairs committee and from another committee helping to revise the undergraduate curriculum.
“We did not need to do this to ourselves,” Imhoff said. “We could have embraced a program that says, ‘You can do your best scholarship here no matter what your politics are’ — but we haven’t been able to do that.”
Jikeli said he had not removed Imhoff from any committees but rather that committee membership expires at the end semester.
Rosenfeld, the program’s 87-year-old founder, seemed conflicted when we spoke. He had helped build Indiana into a powerhouse of Jewish studies, helping to launch the careers of scholars across the political spectrum.
He rejected the claim by Friedman, the medical school professor and Jewish activist, that the Jewish studies program had fallen into crisis under previous leadership. He also doesn’t believe that Jikeli was brought in to serve as the “hatchet man” for school officials interested in more overt support for Israel.
But he also understands that the program he created as a junior professor 53 years ago is under duress.
“I would like to see us recover from the bad spell that we’re in right now and reassert ourselves as a leading Jewish studies program with a lot of integrity,” Rosenfeld said.
Jikeli’s term as interim head of Jewish studies is expected to last about a year, at which point the administration will either make him the program’s permanent leader or name a new director.
But regardless of what happens in Bloomington, the growing divide between funders and Jewish scholars — and between scholars and some of their students — is intersecting with unprecedented political pressure on universities in a manner that seems certain to permanently transform the academy.
The post Indiana University removed its Jewish studies director. His replacement has ignited a firestorm over Israel. appeared first on The Forward.
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A retired judge needed four Torahs rescued from Indiana. So he called his rabbi. And his dentist.
Early on a Sunday morning in July a dentist pointed his black Toyota Sequoia south out of the Chicago suburbs, a rented box trailer swaying behind the hitch. In Champaign, Illinois, a rabbi who had spent the night at his mother’s house pulled onto the highway heading east. Their rendezvous: a century-old synagogue in Terre Haute, Indiana. Their mission: get the Torahs out.
Before the day was over, the operation would involve four Torah scrolls, a pair of towering brass menorahs, more than 100 boxes of books, one electric piano and — because even sacred missions deserve a victory lap — a round of golf.
The orders came from Arizona, where a 79-year-old retired judge, recovering from surgery, was running the operation by phone.
That would be Jerry Orbach, who splits his time between Scottsdale and Chicago and has made a second career of rescuing the remnants of shuls from across America. The walls of his Illinois shul, Northbrook Community Synagogue — where he serves as executive vice president — glow with stained glass he has salvaged from seven shuttered congregations across the Midwest.
So when Michael Brown, executive director of the Indiana Jewish Historical Society, called to say that the United Hebrew Congregation in Terre Haute had sold its building — and needed homes for nearly everything inside — Orbach knew exactly what to do, even if he couldn’t do it himself.
“We can’t get rid of Torahs,” he said. “We have to preserve them.”
He couldn’t make the trip. But he had a crew.
The crew
The whole operation was an in-house affair: all four men belong to Northbrook Community Synagogue. Orbach’s regulars are Dr. Michael Farr, 49, a dentist, and Farr’s best friend Jordan Ripstein, the shul’s gabbai and a violin maker who studied theoretical physics in college. The two have history. They once drove through the night to Kingston, New York, to rescue stained glass from a closing synagogue, smoking cigars and talking about life and music the whole way.
Last September, they hauled back 14 crates from the shuttered Beth Achim synagogue in Southfield, Michigan — towering 13-foot stained glass panels that now wait in the Northbrook basement for their next home.
But Ripstein was out of town. So Orbach turned to his bullpen and pulled out a rabbi.
Aaron Braun, 43, has led Northbrook Community Synagogue since it was founded in 2012 as a merger of three congregations — which makes him, in a sense, a professional preserver of shuls that might otherwise have disappeared. He is also long accustomed to his congregant’s obsession. “Everybody goes along with my meshugas,” Orbach said, using the Yiddish word for craziness. “I’m an old man, so they indulge me.”
Braun didn’t need convincing. “The chance to give Torahs a new home and see them brought back to life and used is one of the holiest endeavors we can pursue,” he said.
The extraction
The congregation they came to help is the oldest in Indiana still in continuous operation. This year, the United Hebrew Congregation celebrated 175 years in Terre Haute — a city whose Jewish community peaked at more than 1,000 people in the late 1940s, when Jewish families owned some 45 local businesses, including three of the four downtown department stores.
Today, the city’s Jewish population is estimated at just under 100. The Reform congregation, down to 45 member families, sold its building in mid-July. “We had to sell in order to continue operating,” said Scott Skillman, its immediate past president. The new owners have said they plan to use the building, known for its cavernous sanctuary and sweeping stained glass windows, as a wedding venue.
It is a familiar story across the state. Wendy Soltz, a Ball State University historian who led the Indiana Synagogue Mapping Project, has documented 66 purpose-built synagogues in Indiana dating back to 1865. Twenty-four have already been demolished.
The Terre Haute building held what the congregation couldn’t take to its smaller new locale. Nearly all of it was in the basement, down seven steps from a side door: four steps, a 90-degree turn, then three more. Farr worked a two-wheel dolly up and down that turn for more than two hours, stacking some 150 boxes of books in the trailer alongside two podiums and a pair of cast-brass menorahs, each more than six feet tall and about 150 pounds.
“We were a pretty sweaty mess,” Braun said.
When the crew opened the ark they found the four scrolls bare. In the tumult of moving out, the mantles had come off; someone had fashioned ropes of felt around them instead. “Not even gartelekh,” Braun said, referring to the sashes that traditionally bind a Torah.
The scrolls, the crew decided, would not ride in the trailer with the boxes. Braun laid them down across the back seat of his SUV and covered them with tallitot, the prayer shawls tucked around them so they couldn’t shift — “even, God forbid, in an accident,” he said. A Torah is the rare object Jews treat like a person: You stand when it passes. You kiss it as it goes by. If one is dropped, the whole congregation fasts. Braun drove north with four of them sleeping in his back seat.
Braun, examining what he could, was impressed by their condition: the calligraphy of at least three of the four looked to be in fairly good shape. The fourth scroll is a mystery: written in a slanted, old-fashioned hand, its lines ragged. “It’s not even full justified,” he said. “It’s wild.”
The getaway
The trailer was full. The Torahs were secure. And one more passenger had joined the convoy: a Yamaha Clavinova electric piano the Terre Haute congregation no longer needed, destined for Braun’s mother’s house in Champaign.
Which is how the getaway came to include a detour. The two men dropped off the piano, then headed to the golf course where Braun grew up playing and got in 18 holes.
“Dr. Farr played some of the best golf I’ve ever seen him play,” the rabbi said.
Farr, a beginner, doesn’t dispute it. “I had a good round. I definitely played better than I normally play,” he said. “Probably by virtue of the fact that we saved four Torahs that day.”
At some point a crop duster buzzed low over their cars — “a not unusual reality of downstate Illinois,” Braun said. Nobody flinched. It had been that kind of day.
Farr rolled back into the Northbrook parking lot around 10 p.m., where the synagogue’s president, Ben Resnick, was waiting in the dark to help unload. The boxes went into the social hall, stacked against the wall. The next morning, Farr was back at his dental practice — “the yank and pull,” as he calls it.
The social hall, though, is only a way station. The items aren’t necessarily staying at Northbrook; the congregation is a holding ground while Orbach hunts for their next home. He plans to call Nik Jakobs, the Jewish farmer building a synagogue in a two-acre cornfield in rural Illinois, about two hours west, to see if he wants any of the pieces for his sanctuary. He also will contact the Jewish Community Legacy Project, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that helps find homes for sacred objects from downsizing and closing congregations.
The sorting has already begun. Brown hopes any documents or photographs in the boxes will go to the Indiana Jewish Historical Society’s archives. A scribe is coming to examine the four scrolls and determine what repairs they need before they can be read from again.
Brown, who set the whole thing in motion with a phone call, sees it as “one of the few small happy threads from a sad story of Jewish decline in the crossroads of America.” He calls Orbach “an unsung Midwestern Jewish hero.”
Back in Terre Haute, the congregation is still holding services every Friday night, in space rented from a Unitarian church — a sanctuary with no crosses and, as it happens, a few Stars of David. “It’s not a closing,” Skillman said. “It’s just a shrinking of our footprint.”
And in Northbrook, four Torahs rest in the social hall. Orbach turns 80 in September. His crew is waiting for the next call.
The post A retired judge needed four Torahs rescued from Indiana. So he called his rabbi. And his dentist. appeared first on The Forward.
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Conservative rabbis just told interfaith couples they don’t count — again
Acting improv students learn a fundamental tool called “Yes. . . And.” As you step into a scene, you take what you are given, you don’t ignore it, you don’t try to change it. YES, this is what I have to work with. Then comes the AND: here’s how I build on it.
The guidance issued last week from the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards giving guidance on supporting interfaith families got as far as “Yes,” but dropped the ball on “And.”
The committee’s statement, known as an Omnibus Teshuvah, recommended measures that opened the doors for interfaith families to be included in many life-cycle, religious and communal events — but declined to endorse a measure called for by many families: permitting Conservative rabbis to marry a Jew to someone who is not Jewish.
Let’s start with the “Yes!” The Conservative movement has definitively acknowledged and accepted the reality that many Jewish families are interfaith families. While this has been so for decades, the stated position since 1989 sent them a harsh and strongly disapproving message: “The Conservative movement has been committed to discouraging both the idea and the act of intermarriage.”
The Rabbinical Assembly emphasized its commitment to Jewish law, but included a statement that tolerance might “‘encourage others who are so inclined to intermarry’ without consequence.”
Those consequences were in effect tocut the interfaith couple and family out of Jewish communal life, creating bitterness, pain, and family rupture on the one side, and effectively ensuring that Judaism was diminished on the other.
In fact, one of the anecdotes I often share about why I chose to work with interfaith families and support their decisions is the time that I witnessed a Bat Mitzvah — who was raised in a Jewish home, kept kosher, had respect for Shabbat, and had attended Hebrew School her whole life — stood alone at the Bimah, because her only surviving parent had never converted to Judaism. Instead of being the proud and joyous moment it should have been, she was isolated from her father, the man who had raised her Jewishly and brought her to this milestone. My heart broke for both of them, and my shame of being even partially complicit moved me to examine and change my perspective. In the fullness of time, the RA has realized that creating tsuris at a time of joy is unacceptable. The new guidance explicitly says that that father can stand on the bimah. Mazel tov..
Deserving of equal praise, if not more, is the decision to allow grieving families with Jewish connections avenues to Jewish practices in mourning that provide comfort, strength and faith. This too is progress: A family death is not a time to wag one’s finger and metaphorically tell the mourner that they have to sleep in the bed that they made.
And representing the other end of the life cycle, a rabbi may now congratulate an interfaith family for the birth of a child. Being able to celebrate the advent of a baby into the household should always have been an open avenue of clergy communication, and that it is now is nothing but a positive change.
This turnaround is no small feat and deserves its recognition. The Rabbinical Assembly has identified and addressed many of the strictures and attitudes that previously diminished the enjoyment of a joyous event or added pain for a grief-stricken individual. An interfaith family is no longer subject to “consequences,” to use a term as stated in the 1989 decision — mostly.
All the life-cycle events that interfaith families have struggled with are at long last within the welcome embrace of the Conservative movement, save one: The wedding itself. The fig leaf in the forms of a misheberach (a blessing) by the rabbi either before or after the wedding and the blessing of the home the couple is creating does nothing but call attention to the movement’s disparagement of the creation of interfaith families. The movement is in effect saying: “We are repulsed by your decision to marry outside the strictures of our interpretation of Judaism, but we will not exact revenge upon you for doing so.” Small comfort.
Here is where the “and” can still come in — and where the Conservative movement itself has paved the way for it to happen.
The religious law prohibition against interfaith marriages derives from a verse in Deuteronomy 7:3 “You shall not intermarry with them: do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons.”
This biblical statement has evolved from meaning marriage with the seven nations proscribed in the Torah to general intermarriage.
However, as recently as the 19th century, the renowned scholar Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch noted that the prohibition was based on the presumption that the resulting family would be estranged from the Jewish community. That presumption was based on a self-fulfilling prophecy that an interfaith family would be shunned, and therefore not engage with their community.
The committee of the Rabbinical Assembly fulfills this prophecy as it concludes the new guidance with this hurtful assertion: “The role of Conservative/Masorti clergy on the wedding day remains limited, but that specific day is only one small aspect of the establishment and growth of a family.” Relegating a wedding to be a small aspect to the ‘establishment and growth of a family’ is patently untrue, as evidenced by the great importance society at large, and Jewish society in particular place on this event.
The RA, by sticking with the prohibition against interfaith marriage, is perpetuating the very estrangement that Rav Hirsch posits is the entire motivation for opposing interfaith marriage. Nevertheless, that very foundation, the estrangement from the community, is no longer a barrier unless we want it to be. The Omnibus Teshuvah maps out how an interfaith family can be welcomed into the community and how they can engage in almost every other Jewish life cycle event and communal engagement.
Why then, does the RA persist in condemning the act of interfaith marriage?
The movement itself already has the religious law tools they can use to find a way forward. The arguments the RA used to pave the way for LGTBQ individuals, couples and families to be integrated into Jewish society are equally valid here. The first principle they used was that of Dor dor V’doroshav, that every generation is obligated to interpret the Torah in their terms — in effect, that the accumulated knowledge and experience of Judaism over time has bearing on rabbinical decisions. In terms of interfaith marriage, the accumulated knowledge and experience is demonstrating that interfaith families retain a Jewish identity and desire to remain a part of the community. Intentional interfaith families show dedication and great consideration to incorporating Judaism into their lives, and that this is not a new phenomenon.
In a decision two decades ago embracing LGBTQ Jews, Rabbi Elliot Dorff and colleagues leaned on the concept of human dignity, kavod ha briot, quoting the Talmudic stricture: “So great is human dignity that it supersedes a negative commandment of the Torah.” They point out that living in humiliation violates this idea.
Perhaps most powerfully, we read that homosexual marriage is “understood to be a profound desire by gay and lesbian Jews to sanctify their lives and establish faithful families guided by the light of Torah.” Should that “profound desire” within an interfaith marriage not carry equal weight?
Today, by continuing to deny legitimacy to an interfaith marriage, the RA relegates the couple to a lesser status, belittling them for following their emotional guidance, and denying them their full humanity.
The RA has issued some remarkable guidance in this Omnibus Responsum. YES! The many parents and grandparents who will receive with gratitude the congratulations on the birth of their children, the families who will be allowed to be united at the bimah at a B’Mitzvah, the mourners who will find strength and comfort from clergy during their time of grief — they will all be positively affected by the new permissions and guidance. These are concessions, but important ones.
In spite of the limits of this guidance I hold out hope for the “AND” that is to come. Not just the recognition that interfaith marriages happen, but the inherent truth that they can be a joyful part of the Jewish experience and a positive force in their community.
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Justice Department pledges action on antisemitic hate crimes in New York as it recognizes Ari Halberstam murder as civil rights case
More than 30 years after Ari Halberstam was killed in one of New York’s deadliest antisemitic attacks, the U.S. Justice Department has formally acknowledged that if his murder had happened today, it would be investigated as a federal hate crime and civil rights violation.
At the same time, the Justice Department also pledged that it would be devoting resources to investigating and prosecuting hate crimes across New York as antisemitic attacks continue to climb in New York City.
NYPD statistics released this week show that in the first seven months of 2026, anti-Jewish incidents rose 8.5%, and 57% of the reported hate crimes in the city involved Jewish victims. In addition, anti-Jewish incidents increased 53% in July compared with the same month last year.
Halberstam was 16 when he was murdered in 1994 when Rashid Baz, a Lebanese-born cab driver, opened fire on a van carrying Lubavitcher yeshiva students across the Brooklyn Bridge. Baz was convicted of murder and sentenced to 141 years in prison, where he died in 2023.
Because the attack was not immediately recognized as an act of terrorism and later rejected as part of a conspiracy, Ari’s mother, Devorah Halberstam, for decades fought to have her son’s killing recognized as an antisemitic hate crime and a federal civil rights matter.
“There is no question that if the murder of your son, Ari Halberstam, had occurred today, we would investigate it and seek to prosecute it as a federal hate crime,” wrote former U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton in a letter dated July 23, one of his final acts before becoming director of national intelligence on Monday. The acknowledgment came weeks after Clayton met with Devorah Halberstam, who co-founded the Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn. It expands on remarks Clayton delivered in June at an NYU Law School conference on combating hate crimes. “I have discussed these matters with my successor, Jamie McDonald, and we are fully aligned,” Clayton wrote.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to questions about what specific steps the office is taking under McDonald’s leadership to address the recent increase in antisemitic hate crimes across the city.
Halberstam, who is credited with helping draft New York state’s first anti-terrorism laws and has spent decades facilitating the training of law enforcement officers on combating terrorism and hate crimes, said the letter gives her hope that the federal government remains committed to confronting antisemitic violence.
“With hatred on the rise nationally and internationally, I am deeply concerned about the safety of Jewish New Yorkers,” she said in a statement. “I will continue to fight to ensure that no other mother has to bury her child because of hatred, as I did.”
Earlier this year, Halberstam hosted Mayor Zohran Mamdani at the Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn. Since taking office, Mamdani has come under scrutiny from Jewish leaders over his handling of antisemitism and anti-Israel protests. Some Israeli officials have accused the mayor of fueling antisemitism through his sharp criticism of Israel.
In a statement on Monday, Mamdani called the rise in antisemitic hate crimes “unacceptable” and pointed to an 800% increase in funding for the city’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes. “The work to uproot antisemitism out of this city is one that will continue,” Mamdani said, “ until we see hate crimes come to an end in the city.”
JTA contributed to this report
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