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Inside the auction house driving the rare-book craze in the Orthodox world
(JTA) – Israel Mizrahi joined dozens of fellow connoisseurs of rare Jewish books last December to watch the livestream of Genazym, the hottest auction house in the market. A bookdealer by trade, Mizrahi was also on the phone being paid to advise a wealthy client who had signed up to make bids.
But as the auction proceeded, Mizrahi’s advice had little use. His trigger-happy client didn’t seem to care about established valuations: He ended up paying about $50,000 for a book estimated at half that price. “He just pressed the button and kept on bidding until the bidding was over,” Mizrahi said. “There was no convincing him out of it. He spent nearly $600,000 that day and there was no sense to it.”
Behavior that confounds veterans of the rare Jewish book market has become routine at auctions organized by Genazym.
Mizrahi recalled the sale in 2021 of a Passover Haggadah printed in the 1920s in Vienna. With attractive illustrations of a prominent 19th-century rabbi named Moses Sofer and his family, the book makes for a nice addition to a collection. It also happens to be very common.
“I sell copies for $100, and I have probably sold 150 copies in my life,” said Mizrahi, whose shop in Brooklyn is a mecca for Jewish book lovers. “It sold for about $5,500 at Genazym’s auction. I currently have it on sale still for $100.”
At the highest end of sale prices, a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, commanded $620,000 at a Genazym auction last September, while a copy of Noam Elimelech, a classic rabbinic treatise, printed in 1788, fetched $1.4 million four months later — in both cases at least doubling or tripling what experts thought the items were worth based on past sales of the same texts.
“Genazym has come on like a freight train into the world of Jewish auctions. Some of the prices realized are far beyond what this market has seen before,” said David Wachtel, the former Judaica consultant for Sotheby’s auction house.
Since Genazym’s first auction in 2017, it has sold some 1,900 books, manuscripts and other collectible documents for about $26 million plus commission, roughly $12 million above total starting prices, according to an analysis by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of auction records on Genazym’s website. Genazym has increasingly outperformed the longest-standing Judaica auction firms in New York and Jerusalem.
A page from an illustrated Passover haggadah printed in Vienna in the 1920s. (Courtesy of Genazym)
It’s hard to tell exactly what’s driving the boom because the identity of Genazym’s customers is confidential and few flaunt their collections widely. One of the auction house’s owners, in a rare public comment, ventured that Jewish buyers are craving a connection with their heritage. What’s clear is that at a time when traditional libraries are cutting back on buying Jewish texts, Genazym is tapping into an emerging luxury market among Orthodox Jews — and fueling the rise of religious texts as both a status symbol and investment vehicle in some communities.
“I know the sellers, the customers and everybody involved and there is a new wealthy class of Orthodox Jews that have a limited range of things they can splurge on,” Mizrahi said. “They don’t go to Vegas, they don’t do crazy vacations. They keep kosher. So this is a way that they can splurge and show off.”
Rabbi Pini Dunner, who collects rare Jewish books, said investing in Judaica is likely attractive for some in the Hasidic community, whose religious observance is stricter than that of congregants at his Modern Orthodox synagogue in the Los Angeles area.
“There are people I know here in Beverly Hills who’ve got car collections worth tens of millions of dollars,” Dunner said. “In the Hasidic world that has no currency, just as the wow factor of a Picasso has no currency. An original manuscript or first-edition of the Noam Elimelech has a real wow factor, particularly if you can tell people the book sold for more than a million dollars at a Genazym auction.”
The impression that the Hasidic world has grown wealthier over the last decade or two is widespread and based, at least in part, on the proliferation of luxury products and services tailored for the community in places like Lakewood, New Jersey, and Kiryas Joel, New York. Weddings have become increasingly expensive and elaborate, fine dining options are common, and high-end kosher wine and liquor are more readily available.
“It wasn’t that long ago that sit-down dining was looked down upon or not even available. Now there are a plethora of options,” said Chaim Saiman, a law professor at Villanova University who studies the intersection of commerce and Jewish law. “It’s no secret that $200 bottles of Scotch appear at kiddush clubs all the time. $50 used to be a big deal, then $100 was a big deal, now we are at $200.”
Where the new wealth is coming from is not totally clear. Limited survey and U.S. Census data suggests that Orthodox Jews feel crunched by costs associated with practicing religion and that there are large pockets of poverty among them, particularly in Hasidic communities, according to Mark Trencher, the founder of Nishma Research, a nonprofit dedicated to studying the Orthodox Jewish community. The prevalence of large families also means that generational wealth can be harder to accrue for Orthodox Jews.
But there have always been high earners whose philanthropy has buttressed their communities, Trencher noted. “There are a lot of people in that community that are very successful in their businesses and they have large amounts of wealth,” he said. “Those people generally are huge donors to charities. From a financial perspective, those communities are probably doing much better than you would expect them to.”
Many of those high earners make their money through entrepreneurship rather than professional success in the white-collar world. Many nursing home chains — an industry valued at an estimated $171 billion and where growth is expected — have Orthodox owners. Amazon has also created new opportunities for Orthodox businessmen. Orthodox landlords, meanwhile, have benefited from skyrocketing real estate prices in places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
A page from a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, which fetched $620,000 at a Genazym auction. (Courtesy of Genazym).
Recent reporting in The New York Times about the Hasidic education system has provided a window into another stream of revenue for private businesses in the community. Entrepreneurs in the community have responded to the increased availability of government funding for special education in New York in recent years by establishing companies to service Hasidic schools, with the government footing the bill. In one example highlighted by the Times, a married Hasidic couple opened such a business in 2014 when they were 21 and 19 years old; in 2022, their company received more than $38 million in government funding.
The owners of another set of companies providing services to Hasidic schools appear to have used their windfall to purchase rare books through Genazym. The owners were indicted in January for allegedly billing the government for more than $1 million in childcare services that they never provided and otherwise defrauding the government out of more than $2.8 million.
Prosecutors are seeking to have the alleged fraudsters forfeit seven books and other documents as listed in a federal indictment. They include manuscripts with a rabbinic signature and rare books of blessing and Jewish law, all of which match items listed on Genazym auctions, where they sold for a total of about $274,000.
Buying Jewish texts at auction can seem like a savvy investment for buyers seeking to safeguard or grow their wealth. Before Genazym launched, a typical Genazym buyer might have invested in U.S. Treasury bills or the stock market, according to Wachtel, the former Sotheby’s consultant.
“I think Genazym has been able to convince people that this is a good vehicle for establishing and growing wealth,” he said. “That also dovetails with your ability to, let’s face it, show off. Somebody comes to your house, you can show them a first-edition Shulchan Aruch. But you’re not going to say, hey, come look at my T-bills.”
The auction house’s tactics appear tailor-made for this growing market. Its motto is “Own your heritage,” and it’s printed on the catalogs the company distributes through popular Orthodox magazines like Ami or Mishpacha or podcasts, places where people with no prior interest in books might encounter the hype. The catalogs also appear in synagogues in heavily Hasidic areas like Brooklyn or Lakewood, but without the prices printed on them so as not to violate a Jewish prohibition against discussing financial matters on Shabbat.
The descriptions in the catalogs emphasize any links that exist between the items for sale and notable rabbis from history, especially figures who established rabbinic dynasties that continue to exist today and who are revered by yeshiva-educated Orthodox Jews. The link might be a signature of a rabbi in a ledger from an old fundraising tour that took place 200 years ago. Or it might be that an important rabbi owned the book in question or even prayed out of it. Like a pair of pants of a prominent Israeli rabbi that drew widespread attention when they briefly went up for auction last month, these texts are seen by some as conferring holiness onto those who possess them. By virtue of their pedigree, these artifacts might even be seen as a segula, or Jewish protective charm.
In its promotional materials and live auctions, Genazym also uses more colloquial and hyperbolic language to describe its items than traditional auction houses, which tend to stick to the kind of terminology used by academic scholars.
“Genazym found a formula to make books and manuscripts really exciting for the layperson, especially in the Orthodox community,” said Yoel Finkelman, a former curator of the Judaica Collection at the National Library of Israel. “They are not using the vocabulary of experts, they’re using plain ordinary language, like ‘very old’ or ‘very rare.’ No one at Sotheby’s would ever refer even to a thousand-year-old book that way.”
Genazym’s unique approach extends to the delivery of items to buyers. A traditional buyer in the rare Jewish book market, like Michelle Margolis, Columbia University’s Jewish studies librarian, might only care that the book they bought is safely delivered. But with Genazym, the books come wrapped in a proper clamshell and velvet bag. “I rolled my eyes when my delivery arrived, but at the same time that’s a lot of investment,” Margolis said, adding that many other auction houses have been cutting costs, for example, by doing away with their customary printed catalogs.
Jacob Djmal, who lives in Brooklyn, has dabbled in Judaica collecting for many years, an interest he picked up from his grandfather. He remembers suddenly seeing Genazym’s advertising everywhere. “They started reaching out to you in every way possible, finding a demographic that wasn’t aware before. Every Genazym auction I have people texting me — ‘Did you hear about this? Did you hear about that?’ — as if something is happening that had never happened before.”
Sometimes, that is true. A breakout moment came during the December auction, when Genazym cleared $4.4 million in sales, about $2.6 million above total starting prices.
“If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on Earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for at least twice [the estimated amount],” a major British book collector living in France said on his anonymous Twitter account, which has around 110,000 followers, in December.
If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for *at least* twice estimate…. 1/https://t.co/iAC4sQudIz pic.twitter.com/eeunjqWzAs
— Incunabula (@incunabula) December 13, 2022
It remains to be seen whether Genazym can challenge Sotheby’s Judaica division as the destination for sellers with the rarest and most valuable books. Last year, a medieval prayer book sold for $8.3 million at Sotheby’s and this year, the New York auction house is accepting bids for the oldest known copy of the Hebrew Bible, which is expected to fetch as much as $50 million.
But Djmal considers especially remarkable about Genazym is not just the high prices but also the way in which rare books have caught on among Orthodox youth as something cool. “My son and his friends in yeshiva are talking about these items,” Djmal said. “These books represent rabbis they have heard about from a young age.”
The team behind Genazym’s success is led by three brothers from the Stefansky family who live in Jerusalem and New York. Before starting an auction house they worked for many years as private dealers in the rare book market. Their names, Chaim, Moshe and Bezalel, rarely appear anywhere and they almost never grant interviews. Chaim Stefansky made an exception for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and requested that this article not put him in the spotlight nor portray Genazym’s success as a product of his business acumen.
Stefansky said Genazym has tapped into a universal and deep-seated desire of people to strengthen their identities by connecting with the past. The Jewish community, he said, has been poorly served by an emphasis on historical and even current persecution.
“Always, we are victimized and we cry,” Stefansky said. “What we have in common maybe is that your grandmother and my grandmother were sharing the same bed in Auschwitz. Give me something positive of my past to be proud of. Your heritage has not only sorrow but also a happy, rich, and huge intellectual tradition. So Genazym comes and tells people about their heritage. It’s yours. It belongs to you.”
He said the same thing can be done with any ethnic or religious group.
“If you go to the Irish community and press the right buttons in terms of what you know that every Irish person is extremely proud of, I think you’ll be very successful,” Stefansky said.
He rejected the impression that Genazym’s buyers come primarily from the ranks of the nouveau riche in the Hasidic world.
“It’s coming from all sections,” Stefansky said. “People will say that there’s a lot of fresh money in the market. But we also have very good old money. We have institutions. And, also, the regular man. Mostly, the regular man, who never knew he could have access to any of this.”
One of the only customers who agreed to be identified and interviewed for this article is Rick Probstein, who says he’s spent more than $100,000 at the company’s auctions. He can’t remember when he started seeing Genazym catalogs but he had never collected Judaica before, which is perhaps surprising given that he’s an Orthodox Jew who’s been working in the collectibles business since he was a child trading baseball cards.
Today, at 53, Probstein is one of the largest sellers of sports collectibles in the world, operating through a dedicated account on eBay. “I run a humongous business — I am doing something like $160 million a year,” he said of his sales volume.
Probstein, who lives in Passaic, New Jersey, had long felt a pang of guilt about the lack of Jewish content in his collection. “I collect things but what do I have of my own heritage?” he recalled thinking to himself. “So when I started getting the catalogs, I said, ‘I gotta be a good Jew.’ I started bidding on things and I got really into it.”
Once Probstein got started, the Stefansky brothers began checking in on him, providing concierge service and cultivating him as a client.
“This is a boutique run by a Jewish family with a personal touch,” Probstein said “They call me on the phone, saying, ‘Rick, did you get the catalog? What did you think? Here are some items that you could really like.’”
Bidding on Genayzm items is not purely sentimental for Probstein. “I’m putting real money into it because I think that from an investment standpoint, it has a lot of upside,” he said.
Still, the items he buys tend to have personal significance.
“I am partial to items relating to the Chofetz Chaim,” Probstein said, referring to the rabbi and Jewish scholar Yisrael Meir Kagan, who died in 1933. Probstein’s oldest son is named Yisrael Meir in his honor. The Chofetz Chaim also appeals to Probstein because of his writings about lashon hara, the prohibition in Jewish law against speaking evil of people. “I think that speech is important and he’s sort of the embodiment of that,” Probstein said.
Genazym has sold six letters and a handwritten blessing signed or written by the Chofetz Chaim at prices ranging from about $16,000 to $68,000.
Ever since Probstein started collecting Judaica, these items have served as a draw for family and friends visiting his home.
“People in my community that come over for kiddush [refreshments after Shabbat service] know that I have this stuff and they always want to see it,” Probstein said. “Nobody ever looks at my sports memorabilia collection because it’s in my office but my Judaica stuff is in my house. They look at the letters and talk about the historical context. People love it.”
The revelation that so many Jews appear fascinated with their own history and want to engage with scholarly tradition comes at a time when many Jewish libraries have been struggling.
The library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, which has the most comprehensive and significant collection of Jewish books outside of Israel, has seen its footprint downsized amid budget cuts at the Conservative movement seminary. Also under financial pressure, American Jewish University was forced to sell its Bel Air campus in Los Angeles, which housed a library. Hebrew Union College, meanwhile, opted to end its Reform rabbinical training program in Cincinnati and even though the campus library has survived the cuts, financial uncertainty remains.
Genazym’s populist approach might hold lessons for Jewish institutions and university libraries with significant Judaica collections that hope to engage the public around books.
“The lesson is to lay off the snobbery a little bit,” said Finkelman, the former Judaica curator at the National Library of Israel, which is slated to reopen in a new and more accessible space later this year. “The goal of public institutions is to enable preservation but also to enable public access and public education. There are great stories in books and archives.”
Finkleman said he has encountered sneering reactions to the way Genazym promotes books, and they are similar to the response in the United States when the pop star Lizzo played a crystal flute that belonged to James Madison on stage at the Library of Congress.
“There are echoes of the same thing here,” he said. “Get out of the snobby ivory tower and realize you are preserving history for people.”
—
The post Inside the auction house driving the rare-book craze in the Orthodox world appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Young Jews aren’t disengaging, they’re finding Jewish meaning in different ways than their parents and grandparents did
The Jewish community for years has worried about young adults drifting away. It’s true that people in their 20s and 30s are less likely to go to synagogue regularly or belong to a congregation or other Jewish communal institutions, which can make it look like young adults are disengaging from Jewish life.
But new research suggests that many of them aren’t abandoning Jewish life at all. They’re practicing it at home with friends and family, often through food, culture, and meaningful conversation. This development speaks to a broader evolution that will shape the Jewish future. While young adults still crave Jewish meaning, identity, and belonging, they increasingly expect to find them in ways and places different from their parents and grandparents.
The Jim Joseph Foundation recently commissioned Project Prism, a study of more than 2,000 Jewish Americans ages 22 to 40 in 49 states over 40 weeks, conducted in partnership with Sense Worldwide, and with NORC at the University of Chicago. The research included a nationally representative survey alongside qualitative and cultural research, and included many people whose lives rarely, if ever, intersect with Jewish institutions.
What we found complicates the conventional story about religious disengagement. Three out of four Jewish young adults say they do something Jewish regularly. But 45% of all respondents say their Jewish participation occurs exclusively in informal settings. That includes celebrating Jewish holidays with friends and family, engaging in Jewish cooking and food traditions, and discussing Jewish topics or current events with people close to them. Others express their Jewish identity through music, books, humor, and media, or by observing Jewish rituals and traditions at home.
In other words, a young adult who rarely sets foot in a synagogue or other Jewish institution may still consider Judaism a meaningful part of their life. They aren’t abandoning Judaism; they’re simply engaging in it in places and ways that are comfortable for them, reflect the home-based component of Jewish ritual, and bring them meaning.
What communities can do
The research is the starting point for understanding how young adults navigate life. For example, many Jewish young adults feel that they have a strong sense of purpose or direction in their lives, but a much smaller percentage say that being Jewish plays a strong role in creating that sense of purpose. Instead, they draw meaning from helping others, personal growth, their careers, and family. So rather than wondering why young adults are not going to existing Jewish spaces, families and community leaders might ask how Jewish tradition can deepen the things they already find meaningful. Helping a neighbor, caring for family, sharing a meal, and contributing to one’s community are deeply embedded in our teachings and rituals. Thankfully, our community has many existing organizations committed to these experiences. There is more work to do to help young adults find and connect with these existing offerings, and our community should also strive to design new, innovative offerings that don’t yet exist.
At the same time, the research shows that participation alone isn’t enough to create positive outcomes. When a young adult feels a sense of belonging, an experience is much more likely to have a lasting positive impact. Immersive and socially intensive experiences are especially effective. As people are increasingly worried about loneliness and social isolation, it’s important to recognize that simply getting people through the door cannot be the end goal. We need to think about how we help them build relationships and feel a part of something bigger once they arrive.
We also need to remember that these immersive experiences, as powerful as they are, attract only a minority of Jewish young adults. The vast majority are engaging on their own or in smaller groups. For Jewish families and organizations seeking to reach them, the research offers some practical guidance.
Young adults say Jewish experiences would be more appealing if they were more cultural and less religious, offered low-pressure opportunities to participate without a major commitment, fit their schedules, and allowed them to engage alongside people they already know. That could mean a casual Shabbat dinner, a Jewish cultural event that welcomes friends and family, or a gathering where participants can explore Jewish identity without feeling judged or pressured to participate in a particular way. These approaches recognize that young adults are navigating busy schedules, competing demands, and a polarized environment, while still seeking connection and meaning.
At their best, Jewish communities and institutions can provide exactly what these young adults are looking for — relationships, opportunities for meaning, and places where they feel part of something larger than themselves. But doing so may require thinking differently about how and where Jewish life happens. A generation that celebrates a holiday around a friend’s dinner table, talks about Jewish identity with family, and seeks community outside traditional institutions is constructing Jewish life differently than previous generations did, and can still create a meaningful Jewish life.
Rather than expecting young adults to come to them, Jewish organizations can help support the experiences young adults are already creating, whether by providing resources for home-based celebrations, partnering with informal groups, or making existing programs more flexible and welcoming.
Our community can continue offering the powerful immersive experiences that resonate with some while also embracing the more informal expressions of Jewish life that resonate with many others. In doing so, we can help more young adults experience Judaism as a meaningful part of their lives — wherever and however they choose to engage.
The post Young Jews aren’t disengaging, they’re finding Jewish meaning in different ways than their parents and grandparents did appeared first on The Forward.
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Kristallnacht survivor calls on German police to stand firm against hate
(JTA) — One of the last surviving Jewish witnesses of Kristallnacht told German police leaders they have an “enormous responsibility” to learn the lessons of the past.
George Shefi, 94, this week returned to the city of his birth to share his story with senior law enforcement representatives from Germany, the United States, and other European countries at the city’s New Synagogue, a target of the Nazi-spurred mobs on Kristallnacht. The event held Thursday, titled “Not on Our Watch: Operationalizing Never Again,” marked the 88th anniversary of the pogrom.
“I have come here at this time to say that Germany’s responsibility to preserve the memory of the Holocaust is eternal,” Shefi told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview before the event. He does not believe today’s generations of Germans are “guilty of what happened,” but nonetheless said they “have an enormous responsibility and a duty to learn from the past to ensure that it never happens again.”
Shefi was almost seven when the Nazis unleashed violent pogroms across Germany on the night of Nov. 9, 1938, in which the Berlin synagogue that housed his school was burned to the ground.
Months later, his mother sent him alone to safety in Britain on the Kindertransport. He would never see her or her sister again. They were murdered at Auschwitz.
The New Synagogue, like many others across Germany, was set on fire that night, but it was not completely destroyed thanks to the bravery of Wilhelm Krützfeld, the head of the local police precinct, who called the fire brigade. One of the few Germans to stand up to the violent antisemitism on Kristallnacht, his memory was honored at the event on Thursday night.
The event was an initiative of the International March of the Living, in collaboration with several other partners including Germany’s largest police trade union. It is part of a wider international educational program which sends senior police representatives on the annual march in Poland to deepen their understanding of the Holocaust and protect global Jewish communities.
Shefi, who immigrated to Israel in 1949, has shared his personal story with more than 12,000 German students over the past two decades and also spent years volunteering with the Israeli police. Last year he received Germany’s Federal Order of Merit for his commitment to Holocaust education.
“There is special significance in giving my testimony before them [the police] in the very synagogue that was saved from burning on Kristallnacht thanks to a police officer who did the right thing. He was a human being. He did not stand by, and he did not allow the flames of hatred to spread,” Shefi told JTA.
“I call on police officers in Germany to learn from him and draw inspiration from his courageous act,” he said. “If he could act that way under Nazi rule, police officers today must also act and refuse to stand by in the face of hatred.”
Shefi recalled the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht in an onstage interview with Revital Yakin Krakovksy, the March of the Living Israel CEO. He said that when he woke up the following day, his mother told him there was no school but gave no explanation.
It was only three days later that he saw the result of the carnage. He recalled seeing the remains of a vandalized hat shop close to his house.
“The windows were broken,” he said. “Glass was everywhere. Hats were thrown around, and half of them were probably stolen. That’s one picture I’ll never forget.”
He also recalled antisemitic graffiti daubed on the side of a store belonging to a Jewish man and his Christian wife. “The Nazis didn’t break their store, but on the sidewalk they wrote in big letters: ‘This store belongs to a Jewish pig who is married to a German swine.’” He said that while someone tried to clean up the abuse, dozens of people stood around “yelling and screaming.”
A day before the event, Shefi returned to the area where he was brought up to see the stolpersteine, memorial stones, laid for his mother and aunt. Last month a town in Germany voted to ban the stones, something which Shefi said had to be “fought tooth and nail.”
“That’s the way things start,” he said. “You start out with a law which looks very mild and very quickly grows, and people have to wake up to it. If you want to keep this country democratic, you have to start immediately to fight against such situations.”
Stressing the importance of the stones, which have become a feature of remembrance in Germany and other countries that had been occupied by the Nazis, he said: “That’s the only symbol we have that there was a Jewish community here, and they always will be if the police protect that right.”
The event came at a time of heightened antisemitism globally. According to a new report published by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Fighting Antisemitism, 244 incidents targeting synagogues, Chabad centers and worshipers in their vicinity were documented across 34 countries between Oct. 7, 2023, and Oct. 21, 2026.
Phyllis Greenberg Heideman, the president of the International March of the Living, told JTA that remembering Kristallnacht is important because it was a “critical warning sign of what was to come”.
“Had the world acted to stop the violence and persecution at that time, the devastating consequences might have been different. We do not see Kristallnacht merely as a lesson in history, but as a reminder and a warning about antisemitism today,” she said.
“This year, we chose to hold the event in Berlin, where the pogrom took place, in a synagogue that survived thanks to the courage and humanity of one police officer, Wilhelm Krützfeld, who prevented the mob from setting it on fire,” Heideman said. “Our message to the senior police officials attending this event is clear: learn from his example. Do not stand by in the face of antisemitism and hatred. Do what is right, and protect those who need your protection.”
Jochen Kopelke, the federal chairman of the German Police Union (GdP) and president of the European Federation of Police Unions, lit a torch dedicated to combating antisemitism at this year’s march in April.
“The Federal Republic of Germany bears immense guilt,” he said. “It cannot absolve itself of that guilt, now or ever. Our enduring obligation is to remember the unimaginable atrocities of the Holocaust.
“In view of the alarming increase in antisemitic acts in Germany, I feel compelled, as a citizen, as a democrat, as a trade unionist, as a police officer and, above all, as a human being, to use every means at my disposal to confront the terrible, deeply troubling and unmistakable rise of homegrown German antisemitism,” Kopelke said
Paul Goldenberg, who served as a police officer in New Jersey for more than 25 years, heads up the “Operationalizing Never Again” initiative.
He said its lessons apply not just to German police but also to their colleagues worldwide. Livestreaming of the event was made available to a majority of major police associations across North America.
“It would be a serious mistake for police leaders elsewhere to regard these lessons as Germany’s responsibility alone,” he told JTA. “No country is immune from the politicization of policing, prejudice, or an institutional culture in which people stop questioning improper decisions. As an American police leader and chair of this international delegation, I believe we must bring the same scrutiny to our own institutions that we ask of others.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Kristallnacht survivor calls on German police to stand firm against hate appeared first on The Forward.
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Thousands of students, many Jewish, are joining the Young DSA on campuses across the country. Here’s why.
As early results streamed in on Election Day, many democrats felt hope and excitement, but the night was more complicated for Maria Franzblau, the Jewish 24-year-old co-chair of the Miami chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, who began her foray into socialist politics in the DSA’s youth movement.
In Florida’s Senate race, former state Rep. Angie Nixon, a DSA member, lost narrowly to Republican incumbent Ashley Moody. The state’s voters also approved Amendment 3, a property tax cut that DSA members opposed.
“It was a bit of an emotional roller coaster at first with the Florida results, that quickly gave way to a lot of exuberance and excitement as we saw how the rest of the country had gone,” Franzblau told the Forward.
DSA backed candidates won at least six seats in the House, wins that are expected to grow the organization’s influence within the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.
Franzblau took an interest in socialist politics at an early age, during Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 run for president. When she enrolled in Florida International University in 2020, she knew she wanted to join a political student club; the question was which one. A few months into her first year, she found the Young Democratic Socialists of America.
YDSA is the youth and student wing of the DSA. The organization has grown rapidly in recent months from 1,800 members last year to 5,200 dues-paying members now across 169 chapters, according to YDSA co-chair James Hernández. The largest chapters are based at University of Maryland at College Park, which has one of the largest Jewish student populations; Georgia State University; University of California, Berkeley; University of Oregon; University of Cincinnati and Binghamton University.
Hernández, who uses all pronouns, leads YDSA with their co-chair Mae Bracelin. They credit the increased interest to the “Zohran moment,” the rise of DSA-backed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
What is the YDSA?
YDSA is based primarily on high school and college campuses, though it also has citywide chapters, and you don’t have to be a student to join. It started in the early ‘80s with a small presence at private schools, then interest spiked during Sanders’s first run for the presidency, and by 2020, the organization had grown to more than 130 chapters across the country.
Membership requires paying dues to the DSA, with a “pay what you can” model. The DSA directly funds YDSA, providing chapters with support for flags, buttons, and pamphlets, and the parent group pays the youth organization’s national leaders.
The DSA is a staunchly anti-Zionist organization, and YDSA members who spoke to the Forward said that Palestinian rights issues are core to the movement.
“It’s been so central to us because of how it’s played out on our universities,” Franzblau said. “Questions of safety on campus, questions of academic freedom and free expression, questions of how our universities use our money, all can get viewed or analyzed through this lens of Israel and Palestine.”
Current and former members of YDSA said that affordability, LGBTQ+, labor organizing and reproductive rights issues initially spurred their interest in the organization. Today, YDSA campaigns range from pushing universities to provide free laundry services to forming sanctuary campuses to protect undocumented students from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But current and former members of YDSA who spoke with the Forward said they were also all active in their schools’ pro-Palestinian encampments and campaigns. And that was complicated — because many of them are Jewish.
Jewish involvement in YDSA
The co-chairs said young Jews are active in the movement, and many participated in the pro-Palestinian encampments following Oct. 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza. Bracelin, who attended the University of Oregon and spearheaded the university’s YDSA chapter there, said there is often overlap in its membership and involvement with Jewish Voice for Peace.
“YDSA chapters have become sort of like homes for anti-Zionist Jews on campus who are seeking a community,” Bracelin said.
Franzblau noted that at first, she didn’t feel inclined to involve her Jewish identity in her political activism, but that changed after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and the war in Gaza, when YDSA’s central organizing became focused on the Palestinian cause.
At one point, a Jewish community leader at FIU told Franzblau that the pro-Palestinian groups were using her as a “token Jew.” She was also doxxed after Oct. 7, when someone found out she helped draft a campus ceasefire resolution. These reactions led her to start sharing that she is Jewish when speaking on Palestinian issues, in an effort to show that Jews are not a monolith.
Former YDSA member Gabe Karsh, who has continued as a DSA member since graduating, was also active in Macalester College’s Mac for Palestine and IfNotNow chapters in 2023.
After Oct. 7, Karsh found themselves in the position of mediating between YDSA members and other pro-Palestinian groups on one side, and the school’s Jewish community on the other.
Karsh, who has family in Israel, would talk with pro-Palestinian groups about how “de-emphasization of the hostages” was “problematic.” Talking with those in the Jewish community, Karsh would share why they thought Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza was a genocide that needed to be protested. Though some were “unhappy” with Karsh during this time, they said, the conversations often proved productive.
“Rather than being the ideological bulwark of my side, I found myself much more inclined to try to find a workable solution for everybody,” Karsh said. “I think I still needed that outlet to express my politics and my rage and grief and fear about what was happening in Gaza, and that’s when YDSA and Mac for Palestine became an outlet for that, when doing that work inside of the Jewish community became much more fraught and less appealing.”
Jewish YDSA member Roxy Satowitz, who serves on the organization’s National Coordinating Committee, worked alongside Karsh at Macalester. She pointed to the history of Jewish socialists in the Labor movement, particularly the General Jewish Labour Bund, as something that inspires her work.
Being Jewish, she said, grounds her approach.
“I think knowing your story and knowing your family history is really important as an organizer, because I think the way that human beings communicate is in a narrative, and the way that we learn, like the way that we talk to ourselves, is in a narrative,” she said.
How big is the tent?
Members often describe YDSA as a “big tent organization,” noting that ideological dissension is allowed in the organization, to a point. Hernández noted expulsions from the organization do happen if members drift too far from the core tenets of the movement, but declined to list examples.
Recently, internal disagreements took center stage in New York. Two days before the third anniversary of Oct. 7, multiple New York City YDSA chapters shared a social media post promoting a protest against Mamdani for, in their view, failing the Palestinian cause.
The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America told the student groups to take down the posts and threatened to cut their funding, according to the student groups. The posts disappeared, but multiple chapters later reposted the protest flyer.
The protest, which included numerous other organizations, began outside City Hall and culminated with a march to Union Square, where demonstrators crashed a vigil held by the progressive organization Israelis for Peace, recognizing the victims of both Oct. 7 and the war in Gaza. Mamdani attended the vigil and stood silently as protesters called him a traitor and chanted, “Mamdani, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide.”
The next day, five YDSA chapters shared an online statement accusing the NYC-DSA of trying to stifle their participation in the protest.
“Our commitment is to Palestine, not any elected official,” the statement read. It concluded with the words “Long live the intifada.”
The organization United Jewish Teachers was outraged over the use of the word “intifada,” and took issue with it being shared by a YDSA chapter at New York City’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School. The post has since been deleted by Stuyvesant’s YDSA but remains up on the pages of chapters at Hunter College, Lehman College, City College of New York and The New School.
Hernández said there had been a misunderstanding between NYC-DSA and the YDSA chapters that has since been resolved.
“I don’t necessarily politically agree with the aims of that protest,” Hernández said. “I think that’s a political decision the chapter had the right to make, even if I disagree with it. There’s room for people who are more to the right of even me, and there’s room for people who are more to the left of me.”
For Hernández, the disagreements are part of the give-and-take of fostering a diverse movement, but the divisions are something the DSA at large will have to contend with, especially as it gains power while growing a pipeline from the YDSA. What concessions and compromises — especially on Israel — will it be asked to make by younger, newer members? Will it continue to hold standards that even Mamdani, some believe, can’t reach?
For now, they’re united in celebration.
“In a time when many were losing hope, these victories are a brilliant light,” Hernández said of the midterm elections. “Our task now is to build a movement capable of confronting the institution to deliver on our working-class agenda.”
The post Thousands of students, many Jewish, are joining the Young DSA on campuses across the country. Here’s why. appeared first on The Forward.
