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Invoking Torah, Minnesota Jews mobilize against ICE operations
(JTA) — The Hebrews’ flight from Egypt is on a lot of Jewish minds right now, as the annual cycle of Torah readings has reached the Book of Exodus.
But for many Jewish leaders in Minnesota, the ancient story has particular resonance.
With Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descending on the Twin Cities in search of undocumented immigrants and stirring chaos and pushback, the story of Exodus — about a king who tries to thwart the growing number of “foreigners” in his midst, and the leader who seeks to protect them — is inspiring widespread anti-ICE actions.
“As we’re currently reading in the Torah, Moses confronts Pharoah knowing it won’t be easy, and feeling his own doubts about such an act,” Rabbi Aaron Weininger, who leads the Conservative Adath Jeshurun Congregation in the suburb of Minnetonka, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And in doing so, the Israelites enslaved in Egypt are able to get unstuck. They’re able to taste freedom.”
Inspired by such teachings, and frequently invoked Jewish injunctions like “welcoming the stranger,” Jewish groups are signing on to open letters, and synagogues are actively involved in pro‑immigrant actions and advocacy. The Jewish presence at an interfaith anti-ICE rally this week is expected to be substantial.
“Our community members and staff live and work in every corner of society. There are too many stories of lives upended by what the government itself refers to as the ICE surge,” reads an open letter, issued Monday, spearheaded by the Jewish federation and signed by around two dozen Jewish groups.
Jewish groups “are deeply concerned by the current volatile situation throughout the Twin Cities and Minnesota,” according to the letter. Its signatories as of press time include 13 area congregations, ranging from Reform to Modern Orthodox; two Jewish day schools; Minnesota Hillel; the Minnesota JCC; the progressive group Jewish Community Action, and Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Minnesota.
ICE’s presence — which includes masked, heavily armed officers conducting aggressive traffic stops, neighborhood raids and street patrols — has led to a lack of caregivers tending to local Jewish seniors, according to the letter.
It follows an earlier open letter from 49 Minnesota Jewish clergy, distributed on Friday, that describes “grief” and “horror” over ICE “wreaking havoc across our state.”
Quoting Deuteronomy — “Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” — the rabbis and cantors spotlight the “tragic death” of driver Renee Good at the hands of an ICE officer Jan. 7 and include a prayer to “spread a canopy of peace and protection over all those wrongfully targeted by ICE at this moment.”
Both of those letters precipitated what is turning into a larger institutional Jewish pushback to ICE. On Wednesday, leaders of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements issued a joint statement to “condemn, in the strongest terms, the violence with which the Department of Homeland Security is enforcing American immigration law — above all, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as well as in cities and towns across the nation.”
“Our sages taught that the Book of Deuteronomy’s directive, ‘Justice, justice shall you pursue’ (16:20), implies that the law must be enforced through a fair process, and that one should pursue justice whether it would be to one’s advantage or to one’s loss,” the statement reads, with the Jewish leaders further calling on the Justice Department to investigate Good’s death.
Rabbi Jill Avrin, campus lead at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, said it was “unprecedented” for such a wide variety of local Jewish groups to sign onto such messages.
“We have a really diverse Jewish community here, and we felt that this is a moment that is impacting all of us,” Avrin, who helped draft the letters, told JTA.
The multiple open letters are trying to appeal to shared spiritual values as the standoffs between protesters and ICE agents become increasingly fraught. A number of prominent figures — most recently Bruce Springsteen — have compared ICE’s tactics to the Gestapo; at the same time, an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a church service over the weekend has prompted concern and controversy across the interfaith community and led at least one Republican to compare the protesters to Hamas.
Local Jewish leaders say they are not dissuaded from what they view as a Jewish imperative to respond.
“Judaism isn’t about skipping the hard parts,” Weininger said. “It’s about noticing the struggles for centuries that have led us to this point: slavery, persecution, destruction, exile, coming home.”
Rabbis have been active in local mobilizing against ICE. They attended a community vigil for Good; Weininger discussed the issue during his Shabbat sermon. He also helped draft the rabbinical open letter, and this week is one of around 80 to 90 rabbis — many others from out of town — planning to attend an interfaith march in Minneapolis with more than 600 clergy present. Around 50 of the rabbis expected to attend are part of T’ruah, a Jewish social justice network, which mobilized after local clergy put out the request.
“What’s scary is that lawful actions are being targeted,” Weininger said about the situation on the ground. “We’re talking about protest and prayer and taking action in community, and even those modes of engagement are under attack.”
Recalling how Minneapolis Jews similarly mobilized in 2020 to protest George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, the rabbi described “a real sense of civil society here, and I think that is true of the Jewish clergy community in how people care for one another.”
Rabbis also spoke out at a Tuesday interfaith press conference denouncing ICE and outlining plans for this week’s march. “As people of faith, as leaders of faith communities, we are called to say, ‘Enough. Not on our watch,’” Rabbi Tamar Magill-Grimm, who leads the Conservative Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, said while standing next to a local imam.
Some Jewish groups across the country have raised concern about ICE’s activities for months, with some synagogues posting signs identifying themselves as houses of worship that agents do not have authority to enter. Rabbis affiliated with T’ruah have participated in “ICE watch” actions in other cities.
But Minnesota’s Jews have now witnessed firsthand the effects of a sustained, targeted ICE presence on their community. Local synagogues have hosted “upstander” training seminars for congregants to learn how to react in the face of an ICE encounter. For many congregants, the experience has pushed them to action — but it’s also invoked an eerie sensation, bringing echoes of a dangerous past.
“As a Jewish parent in Minneapolis, history feels too close right now,” one Twin Cities resident told Daci Platt, a fellow Minnesotan who works at Kveller, a JTA sister publication. “The sense of safety we usually rely on feels shakier than it ever has.”
Jewish community organizations are particularly concerned about the threat the ICE raids, which have focused primarily on non-white Twin Cities residents, pose to a caregiving workforce largely composed of immigrants.
“Jewish seniors are not having their basic needs met because their caregivers are too afraid to come to work,” says the letter spearheaded by the federation.
Amy Weiss, CEO of Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Minnesota, told JTA that ICE has also affected her organization’s ability to serve its nonsectarian clients more generally. Much of their own staff are from immigrant communities, and Weiss worries about drawing attention to them by sending them out into the field to help clients.
“People are afraid to go to work. They’re afraid to leave their homes,” Weiss said. “I don’t see this as political. When you look at our mission, to support people in need, then this is very basic. These are the very basic needs of the community.”
The open letter also notes that there are Jews “who are immigrants themselves, have family members who are immigrants, or could be reasonably perceived to be immigrants. Many of these people are scared to leave their homes out of fear of being arrested and deported.”
The federation-backed letter is careful not to deride all law enforcement. It states, “We affirm our commitment to the rule of law, the lawful implementation of statutes, and the thousands of law enforcement officers charged with keeping us safe, whose efforts we deeply appreciate.”
Avrin, too, praised local law enforcement, whom she called “amazing” and “not the same thing as the ICE agents who are here on the ground.” She also noted that not all of the Jewish communal leaders shared the specific goals of this week’s march, which other Jewish leaders helped plan. The march’s demands include “ICE must leave Minnesota immediately” and “ICE should be investigated for human and Constitutional violations of Americans and our neighbors.”
“This moment is a moment that calls for coalition,” she said. “We are acknowledging and naming that we might be showing up with people whom we don’t actually agree with their broader platform.”
That discomfort has also arisen in some of the language of the opposition. As ICE protests in Minnesota attract growing national attention, comparisons to Nazis and the Gestapo have also grown. Avrin said the JCRC discourages such rhetoric
During a concert in New Jersey last weekend, Springsteen decried “heavily armed, masked federal troops invading an American city and using Gestapo tactics against our fellow citizens.” He then repeated a catchphrase popularized by Jacob Frey, Minneapolis’s Jewish mayor: “ICE should get the f–k out of Minneapolis.” (On Tuesday, Frey, along with other state officials, was subpoenaed by the Justice Department for alleged obstruction of immigration agents. Some of his critics have called attention to his Jewish identity.)
The faith-based protests suffered a distraction when anti-ICE protesters disrupted a St. Paul church service. The protesters, including Black Lives Matter Minnesota, claimed that one of its pastors also works as a local ICE field office leader. The Trump administration has announced an investigation into the protest, which officials said could amount to a violation of a federal law permitting free access to any worship site.
Following the protest, Cities Church in Minnesota issued a statement saying the protesters “accosted members of our congregation, frightened children, and created a scene marked by intimidation and threat. Such conduct is shameful, unlawful, and will not be tolerated.”
The statement added, “Invading a church service to disrupt the worship of Jesus — or any other act of worship — is protected by neither the Christian Scriptures nor the laws of this nation.” A founding pastor of the church has ties to Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defense secretary.
One Republican, Rep. Will Self of Texas, said the protesters — who had livestreamed themselves from inside the church — reminded him of Hamas livestreaming on Oct. 7.
“When you livestream something, you want it to cause terror in the population,” Self told the far-right TV network Newsmax. “So when they livestreamed it, I compare them to Hamas, who livestreamed the attack in Israel that killed thousands of people.”
American Jewish leaders, for whom the freedom of worship in America has long been a key policy plank, say they disagree such a protest in a house of worship. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, who heads T’ruah, told JTA her organization “would not organize a protest of a church.”
The local JCRC also criticized the church protest, which comes in the aftermath of recent pro-Hamas synagogue protests in New York that were widely condemned by Jewish and progressive leaders alike.
“That is something we are absolutely opposed to. We would never encourage people to disrupt a worship service. That is not aligned with our values in any way,” Avrin said. “In my opinion it doesn’t reflect the broader efforts that are happening on the ground. That’s going to happen any time you have a large movement.”
Jews in that movement are focusing on injunctions drawn from the Bible. Speaking at New Birth, a historically Black Baptist church in Georgia with links to the family of Martin Luther King Jr., Georgia Democrat Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, gave a biblically inflected anti-ICE message.
“How can it be that masked federal agents set up checkpoints in American cities, demand papers, rip Americans from their cars, and throw them to the ground? Kill? Kill? With apparent license from the very top,” Ossoff told the congregation. “There’s a wickedness to the program. I don’t know, Pastor, where it is in scripture that it says ‘deny care to the sick, take from those with the least to give to those with the most, violate the house of worship to hunt down the refugee.’ Where in the scripture are those lessons taught?”
Ossoff, who is defending his seat in a tight reelection campaign, added that he and the church’s pastor had been “texting” about the Exodus journey of Moses, and how he used his staff to rally the Israelites.
In the face of the groundswell in Minnesota, President Donald Trump again forcefully rebuked the protesters and defended ICE.
“They’re apprehending murderers and drug dealers and a lot of bad people,” the president said of the agents during a press conference to mark one year of his second term.
Holding up images he said were of immigrant criminals apprehended by ICE, including one who he claimed was connected to Hezbollah, Trump asked the White House press pool, “Why don’t you talk about that more?… Do you want to live with these people?”
The president also referenced the church protest. “I have such respect for that pastor. He was so calm. He was so nice. He was just accosted,” Trump said of the clergyman whose sermon was interrupted. (He was not the pastor the protesters were targeting.) “What they did in that church was horrible.”
Trump, too, has been a mobilizing force for Jews in Minnesota. Following the president’s derogatory comments last month about the Somali population in the state — which Trump said justified the ICE raids — many local Jewish leaders had held coalition meetings with interfaith partners.
For some in the room at the time, Avrin recalled, it was the first time they had come face-to-face with these partners since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel and the start of the war in Gaza, which frayed many Jewish-liberal coalitions when other communal groups denounced Israel and “Zionists.”
Such partners had “stopped speaking to us, basically,” she said.
But for the Jewish leaders in the room, the Talmudic imperative to love the stranger overcame lingering uncertainty about reconfiguring these coalitions: “We can’t walk away from that just because we’ve been hurt,” she said.
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Germany could criminalize denying Israel’s right to exist. Could the U.S. follow?
As Germany considers an unprecedented law that would criminalize denying Israel’s right to exist, American free speech advocates worry the proposal could spark similar efforts in the U.S. to curb Israel-related speech.
The proposed law, which passed Germany’s upper house of parliament last week, would make publicly denying Israel’s right to exist a crime, with a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
“We’ve now seen a trend of what’s been happening in Europe can come over to the United States,” said Kevin Rachlin, vice president of government relations at the Nexus Project, which describes its mission as both fighting antisemitism and protecting free speech.
He said denying Israel’s right to exist can be antisemitic, yes, but not always.
“If we are going that whole step of making it punitive and punishable by law — that’s why we have our First Amendment to protect us from that.”
The bill specifies that the speech would be criminalized only if it would reasonably encourage “a willingness to commit acts of antisemitic violence.”
But not everyone will agree on what that means, said Michel Rosenfeld, a professor of law and comparative democracy at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law. A memo accompanying the bill includes as examples chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” or displaying maps in which Israel is replaced by a Palestinian state.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an American free speech watchdog, has warned that similar laws could come to American soil.
“We can expect similar bills and regulations to pop up across borders,” the foundation said in a statement. “That’s why the First Amendment is so vital — it can act as a bulwark against speech restrictions that have advanced in other nations from doing the same here.”
In the United States, such a law would be a blatant violation of the First Amendment, scholars say. But Germany, where Holocaust denial, Nazi symbols, and even public insults are already criminal offenses, has long drawn the boundaries of protected speech differently.
“Under German law, antisemitic pronouncements amount to hate speech and can be criminalized,” Rosenfeld said. “In the United States, you can say antisemitic things as much as you want. It’s free speech.”
In Germany, supporters of the bill have argued that antisemitism is occurring “openly on our streets” and pointed to the surge in antisemitic incidents post-Oct. 7 as evidence that stronger measures are needed. Just this week, a 65-year-old German man was assaulted and left with life threatening injuries after an argument over an Israeli flag pin he was wearing, according to German authorities.
Those incidents are why Shannon Seban, director of European affairs for the Combat Antisemitism Movement, hopes the German bill will serve as a model.
“Our judicial system needs to evolve in order to adapt to this new reality, and to the fact that you have contemporary forms of antisemitism,” Seban told the Forward. “I hope that plenty of other European countries will now adopt such a law.”
But that prospect worries some Jewish Americans, who argue that prison time for anti-Zionist speech is a bridge too far. Even organizations that have argued anti-Zionism can veer into antisemitism have generally not envisioned such speech as the basis for criminal prosecutions.
“I have a real issue of criminalizing any thought or speech, regardless of what it is,” Rachlin said.
The German context
According to Rosenfeld, the bill should be understood in the context of Germany’s postwar constitutional order. In the aftermath of World War II, the Allied powers outlawed the Nazi Party and banned its symbols as part of the country’s “denazification.” Those restrictions were later incorporated into German law, reflecting the country’s commitment to preventing the reemergence of Nazism.
That history shapes Germany’s relationship with Israel. The two countries maintain what German officials describe as a “special relationship,” borne out of Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust, with Berlin defining Israel’s security as part of its Staatsräson, or reason of state.
“In Germany, the Jewish state and standing for the Jewish state is particularly important in that it’s, if you wish, an inescapable outgrowth of the Nazi period,” Rosenfeld said.
Israel’s Ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, lauded the bill as a signal that “those who deny Israel’s right to exist and spread antisemitic incitement will not get away with it unpunished.”
The legislation may also reflect broader anxieties about Germany’s political trajectory. The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, whose leaders campaigned on belittling Germany’s efforts to atone for the Holocaust, is now the second-largest party in the country’s parliament. A campaign to ban the party as unconstitutional has gained momentum, though faces an uphill battle given the AfD’s popularity.
But even this latest bill to criminalize denying Israel’s right to exist might not pass Germany’s constitutional test.
According to Rosenfeld, whether German courts uphold the proposal will depend in part on how they characterize anti-Zionism. If judges conclude that denying Israel’s right to exist is necessarily antisemitic, they would be more likely to view the restriction as constitutional and a part of Germany’s historic responsibility, he said.
On the other hand, if a judge understands anti-Zionism as political speech, then the bill would likely be struck down.
“It would be unconstitutional because not only is that a political opinion, but it would single out Israel,” he said. “In other words, to say that the United States should not exist, or that Cuba should not exist and the United States should take it over, that Canada should be the 51st state of the United States — you can say all these things, but you can’t say that Israel should not exist?”
But others don’t see any inconsistency. Seban, a French politician who spoke out against antisemitic comments directed at her during her campaign, maintains she supports free speech as “a fundamental principle of our democracy.”
At the same time, Seban said she doesn’t view the language the bill targets as deserving of legal protection.
“When you would like to erase a country from the map, a country that has been recognized by international organizations and such, it’s no longer free speech. It’s a call to violence. It’s a call to destroy states. It’s a call to erase people,” Seban said. “So there is no free speech anymore.”
‘Non-legally binding’
For years, antisemitism watchdog groups like the Anti-Defamation League have advocated for U.S. states to pass legislation adopting a definition of antisemitism that treats most expressions of anti-Zionism as antisemitic.
But it was always with a caveat: the definition, written by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, would be “non-legally binding.”
In practice, that meant institutions such as schools, branches of government, or law enforcement could use the definition as a training tool or guideline to help identify antisemitism — not for criminal prosecution.
For example, on its website, the ADL says it “does not support the adoption and application of the IHRA Definition in a manner that would create new categories of legally prohibited speech that are subjected to either civil or criminal penalties – something we believe the First Amendment and principles of free speech would prevent.”
The ADL did not respond to the Forward’s question about its stance on the German bill, instead directing the Forward to speak with the Central Council of Jews in Germany, which backs the bill.
“Freedom of expression is a fundamental right of the utmost importance and a vital safeguard of our democracy,” Katharina Glinder of the Central Council of Jews in Germany wrote in a statement to the Forward. “Yet it, too, is subject to legal limits and must yield where human dignity is violated. Anyone who calls for the annihilation of peoples or the destruction of entire nations must not be allowed to hide behind fundamental freedoms with impunity.”
Glinder added that the bill could “serve as a model for other liberal democracies to follow.”
Remko Leemhuis, director of the Berlin office of American Jewish Committee, which also supports the IHRA definition as “non-legally binding,” said in a statement that AJC supports the German bill, “provided it is designed to withstand constitutional scrutiny.”
Meanwhile, the Nexus Project — which wrote an alternative definition of antisemitism that does not classify all anti-Zionism as antisemitism — has argued that lawmakers undermine the premise that IHRA is “non-legally binding” when they codify it in legislation.
Rachlin said Germany’s proposed bill illustrates that slippery slope, calling it the logical next step after the country codified the IHRA definition into law in 2017. He said he wouldn’t be surprised if such a proposal to criminalize anti-Zionism cropped up in the U.S. — though that doesn’t mean it would pass constitutional muster.
“Could this happen at the federal level? Maybe. Could it happen at the state level? I could see that happening,” Rachlin said. “Would it be challenged? Yes.”
Yet Rachlin also acknowledged that his commitment to a more absolutist version of free speech stems from what may be a distinctly American tradition.
“I can hate what you say, but I’ll defend it because you have the right to say it,” Rachlin said. “That’s kind of the American viewpoint on this. In Europe, it’s a very different game.”
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Mamdani isn’t the real resistance against Netanyahu — Israelis are
If you, like so many American Jews this week, are focused on New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s video message urging protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he visits the city in September, you’re missing the real story.
Pay attention, instead, to what is happening thousands of miles away — not in Manhattan, but in Israel, where the latest polls show Netanyahu and his ruling coalition trailing badly.
In New York, it’s the same old story: Israel guilty, Palestinians blameless, nothing in between. In Tel Aviv and Jerisalem, in Nazareth and Eilat, something else is brewing: change, maybe even hope.
Gadi Eisenkot — the former IDF chief of staff who broke with Netanyahu’s government over the Gaza War — now leads a new party, Yashar. Projections suggest his bloc would win 59 seats if the election were held today, compared to 51 for Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, according to the latest poll,
Eisenkot also beats Netanyahu head-to-head as the preferred prime minister, 43% to 37%.
If Eisenkot joins with Arab parties his coalition would receive 69 seats, substantially more than the 61 seats needed to govern. Though Eisenkot has not said yet whether he would link up with Arab parties, a plurality of Eisenkot’s potential voters (44%) said they would support such a move, in a country where Arab parties have only once been part of a governing coalition.
Eisenkot is no dove. He is someone who has concluded, rightly, that the threats Israel faces include the ones it’s inflicting on itself.
He has vowed to strengthen Israeli democracy and pursue diplomacy with Israel’s neighbors. His party’s platform calls for non-military national service for Arabs, something 75.8% of them favor. His likely coalition partners will include the Democrats, a smaller party expected to win 10 to 11 seats, for whom resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue is a defining issue. “I see the conflict and the continued occupation as the greatest tragedy of our lives,” Emilie Moatti of the Democrats said at a party rally last month. “The most moral and patriotic act is to end it.”
These are the most hopeful winds to blow through Israeli politics in memory, ahead of the Oct. 27 election — the closest Israelis have come to real, structural change in years. Meanwhile, in the United States, it’s Mamdani’s admission that he lacks the power to arrest Netanyahu — and call for the federal government to do so instead — that has captured the media’s attention and consumed American Jews all week. But one of these stories is theater, the other is real.
We’ve let ourselves become consumed by an empty threat from a politician with no power to carry it out, instead of doing everything we can to support those Israelis who actually have the power to change their country.
In this farce, Netanyahu and the anti-Israel movement each need a cartoon version of the other to keep telling their one-sided story.
Imagine if Mamdani used his platform to draw attention to Makom Lekulanu, “A Place for Us All,” the only Arab-Jewish party standing for election. Instead the mayor of the American anti-Israel movement keeps the focus relentlessly on Netanyahu — because a country full of Netanyahus is a much darker story to tell, and a much more useful foil, than the complicated, pluralistic reality the polls actually show.
Netanyahu and his American supporters need Mamdani for the same reason — to paint Israel as besieged and alone, and all of Israel’s critics as clownish and illegitimate. But Netanyahu’s real critics aren’t clowns. They’re serious, Israel-loving Israelis — a former army chief among them — and they are beating him at the polls.
With Netanyahu offering voters more of the same — attacks on the judiciary, fear-mongering over Arab citizens voting and deeper dependence on his religious and far-right partners — a growing number of centrist Israelis have concluded that a Netanyahu win would put Israel’s very future at risk.
“If Netanyahu wins, it’s going to be a significant crisis, maybe a final crisis for many segments of Israeli society,” journalist Nadav Eyal said on the Jonah Platt podcast.
In this context, Mamdani’s theatrics are one more sign of how untethered the American conversation about Israel has become from what’s actually at stake on the ground. American Jews should stop reacting to him and start paying attention to the people with the power to actually change Israel’s future.
They can’t donate to Israeli political parties, but they can support Israeli NGOs that fund get-out-the-vote and voter education campaigns. They can back U.S. nonprofits that help promote better Israeli policies. And they can do the simplest thing of all: talk about this election — online, in shul, at the Shabbat table, anywhere the conversation has gotten stuck on Mamdani, which is everywhere. Doing that will add real dimension to a very stale debate.
New York voters will, in time, vote on whether their mayor’s selective obsession with Israel is making their city a better, more affordable place to live. That’s their business. But anyone who cares about Israelis and Palestinians should put their energy and focus where it really matters: on the people and movements who haven’t been this close to real, positive change in years.
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Why do I work for the “Foe-ward”? I traced my accent’s journey to find out
I began my internship at The Forward in May, just a few weeks after I finished my sophomore year at Duke, where I’m majoring in religion and history. My initial days back in my home city were a whirlwind: dinners at Top Thai; long walks up to the Met; reconnecting with friends. The period also included a still ongoing linguistic journey that has fostered a connection with my great-grandmother.
When my friends asked me how I was spending my summer, I was struck by how few of them had heard of the Forward. Initially, I assumed this was because my friends were younger or not Jewish (which was likely the main reason), but I later realized that their confusion was also connected to how I say the paper’s name.
I pronounce “forward” non-rhotically, meaning that I drop the first r so that the word sounds more like Foe-ward. My mom — though born in San Francisco — pronounces the word the same way, and has encountered the same confusion whenever she does. She decided to ask around to find other kindred spirits. My maternal grandmother’s family, we discovered, all pronounced the word the same way: “foe-ward.”
We attribute this to my great-grandmother, whom we call “Bubby Classic.”
My great-grandmother Sadie — my namesake, along with my other maternal great-grandmother — grew up on the Lower East Side. Originally, her family was from Vilna, Lithuania. Her father came to the country at the age of 9 and spoke excellent English, but her mother didn’t speak a word.
My family says that Sadie described her childhood as the happiest period in her life. No one around her was wealthy, but it didn’t matter. Her father was a tailor, which brought in a steady income. As he always said, even if people were poor, they still needed clothes — but he would also donate clothes to those who couldn’t afford them. Sadie had three older brothers, and she told stories about them running after the ice truck together and jumping onto it.
At the time, Jews frequently changed their names to assimilate. Sadie, who wasn’t in love with her name, adopted Syde after the dancer Cyd Charisse. In the last decade of her life, though, she returned to her given name. At one point, she told my family that she didn’t know why she had changed it in the first place.
Sadie was the last member of my maternal family to speak Yiddish, and she spoke with a heavy New York accent; she grew up on “Hestuh” (Hester) Street, as my mom likes to say. When she started a family, Sadie moved out to Long Island, but she brought her children to the Lower East Side every Sunday; my great-uncle and Bubby recall sitting in family members’ apartments, playing with their cousins, eating and talking for hours.
This culture, though, began to fade. My great-uncle Michael tells me that his New York accent was still strong during childhood, but after the family moved to Florida, it softened. Though he still says many words with the accent, he’s been told that he also gained a slight southern twang. Bubby and my grandfather were San Francisco hippies, and she grew up there without a heavy accent, leaving none to pass on to me.
When my family realized how all we pronounced forward, we decided it had to have come from Sadie. We knew “foe-word” wasn’t her exact New York accent, but we thought dropping the “r” must run in the family.
The truth, as I discovered while speaking with linguist David Braun, was that our theory probably wasn’t the most accurate. The New York accent, like Sadie had, is non-rhotic and modifies the pronunciation of “er.” This is typically considered a type of vowel sound, which is stressed in words like her, bird, or person. When it’s unstressed, it is called a schwa and sounds like “uh”: “watuh,” “doctuh,” “fuh-wuhd.” Given that New York was an original colony, these pronunciations were heavily influenced by British speaking patterns, which are similarly non-rhotic.
As time went on, New Yorkers began to pronounce more and more words rhotically, with the accent being rare among newer generations. This was an evolutionary process, which could have resulted in some New Yorkers pronouncing forward as “foe-ward,” but there would also have been those who pronounced the word as “for-wuhd.” In any case, this wouldn’t have been the only word these New Yorkers pronounced non-rhotically: they’d still say caw-nuh instead of corner or regu-luh instead of regular.
My pronunciation of forward — dropping the first r, but not the second — is often interpreted as a phenomenon called dissimilation, which is the process when two similar sounds in a word become less alike. In this case, “r” is used in two back-to-back syllables, and one is dropped to ease pronunciation: “sup-rise” instead of “sur-prise,” “gov-enor” instead of “gov-er-nor,” and of course “foe-ward” instead of “for-ward.” Dissimilation occurs across many regions: unlike the accent, it’s not necessarily tied to New York.
This habit, though I’m not sure where it originated, is more than likely where my family’s pronunciation came from. Still, when I say “foe-ward,” I can’t help but think of my great-grandmother who lived on “Hestuh” Street, and feel connected to the place where she grew up.
How do you pronounce “Forward”? Let us know in this google form.
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