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Israel’s most dangerous war is with itself
My friend Rabbi Heshy Grossman recently invited me to Jerusalem to meet top Haredi rabbis. Unhappy with my critical writings about the Haredim, this well-meaning true believer hoped to jump-start fruitful dialogue.
So I took the train to Jerusalem, and spent a fascinating day with pleasant and welcoming scholars who left me in even greater despair.
The background: Angst is now dominating Israeli discourse amid a strong feeling among non-Haredi Jews that the country is running out of time to save itself. This can seem related to the Palestinian conflict, or to disputes over authoritarian reforms. But at the end of the day the main issue — for the non-Haredi Jews who are still a majority in the land — is the Haredim.
Concerns used to be about the Haredim — who have always held sway over right-wing coalitions — trying to impose religious strictures, like banning commerce and public transport on the Sabbath, which they have done with varying degrees of success. But the clash has gone far beyond such matters. The wars that began on Oct. 7, 2023 have exposed profound tensions over this large minority evading military service, and the opposition promises to enlist them should it win this fall’s election.
But even that change — heavy lift though it may be — wouldn’t come close to fixing the actual problem.
The Haredi system largely refuses to teach high school boys math, science, English and other non-religious topics. It routes as many men as possible to religious study well into adulthood, for which they expect to receive state stipends rather than pay tuition. With very low male participation in the economy, the community pays minimal taxes and depends on a huge web of ever-expanding welfare. Increasingly, Haredi women do work, but rarely in high-end jobs. The community, which currently makes up about a sixth of the population, is exploding as family sizes approach seven children on average, certainly among the highest for any significant community in the developed world.
This will clearly lead to an economic collapse if nothing changes. On top of that, it does not seem as if the Israeli Haredim can coexist happily with others from a philosophical and cultural standpoint, and the feeling is very much mutual.
‘A sense of separatism’
Heshy drove me all over the city in a whirlwind tour that included the head of the Hebron Yeshiva, one of the most senior rabbis of the Mirer Yeshiva — the world’s largest — the head of a major yeshiva serving mainly youth from the United States, a visiting U.S. Haredi rabbi much involved in the local political scene, and Heshy’s own charming father-in-law, who was the chief rabbi of Atlanta and has long been a beloved columnist for the iconic Mishpacha Magazine.
The tone throughout was cordial, at times warm, somewhat prickly and occasionally intellectual. These were serious men who are easy to like. That made the substance of what they said doubly unsettling.
The first fault line, as expected, was education. My question to the rabbis was straightforward: How can a modern economy function when a large and growing share of its population receives little to no instruction in mathematics, science or “secular” language skills?
Rabbi Moshe Meiselman, who holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was dismissive of the premise. Meiselman, the U.S.-born founder and head of Yeshivat Toras Moshe, described secular studies as an “intellectual game” that he had experienced at the highest levels and found vastly inferior to studying the Torah. He said that Haredi communities from the beginning of the state perceived an aggressive and arrogant stance from the Zionist authorities, who felt “that no intelligent person” would want to be Haredi.
“There is a basic tension in society, and that tension is what created, more than anything else, a sense of separatism within our own environment,” he said.
“Even at the cost of self-harm?” I asked.
“In your view it’s self-harm,” he said. And if the state cut off funding, he added, “we’d simply get money from our people abroad to support us … we will handle it.”
Like the others, he seemed to believe that whatever practical skills are needed for work can be acquired in a year or two. He offered the existence of certain successful Haredi professionals — lawyers, doctors, accountants — as proof. “What relevance does my knowledge of trigonometry have to anyone’s employment? Where does Euclid come in?” he said. “I don’t have to learn to talk with Plato in order to get a profession.”
I was glad to find a more flexible position expressed by Heshy’s father-in-law, Rabbi Emanuel Feldman.
“I’m not sure personally why they should not be able to study physics or chemistry or mathematics,” he said. “I don’t understand why there’s an objection to it.” He argued that this “is not ideological but political and a decision based upon circumstances.” I suggested the circumstances were the Haredi leadership’s preference for a compliant and unquestioning flock. “It’s unfortunate that there is no effective communication and there are elements on both sides who are interested in maintaining a conflict,” he sighed.
Menachem Zupnik, the U.S.-based rabbi, from Passaic, N.J., was also more pragmatic than the Israeli cohort.
“The biggest problem,” he said, “is that nobody goes to work and has a profession… many, many issues are the outgrowth of the fact that they believe that everybody has to sit and learn Torah all the time.” But even he rejected the idea that external pressure — including cutting subsidies and restructuring incentives — would change behavior. “All you’re going to do is cause more hatred.”
Rabbi Shlomo Spitzer, who preferred that I not mention his affiliation, explained the indifference to practical outcomes this way: From the Haredi perspective, Torah and mitzvot are the organizing principles of life. Everything else a person does — work, eating, recreation — is secondary: “these are means, not ends.”
I asked: “When you describe unwavering commitment to Torah, doesn’t that risk becoming fanaticism?”
“What is fanaticism? That is a serious question,” he argued, explaining that following the Torah “to the end” means accepting it literally. “But societies change,” I said. “Values evolve. Why shouldn’t religious frameworks adapt?” His answer was that there are foundations that must be regarded as absolute.
Military tensions
The issue of military service brings the divide between secular and Haredi priorities into the sharpest relief for most Israelis. Here, too, the argument is about identity.
Again and again, the concern surfaced that exposure to the army would erode the religious character of Haredi young men. The fear was personal, and almost visceral. It is not without foundation: Many Israelis would love to have more of the Haredim join mainstream society — and indeed, exposure to that society is well understood as a trigger for leaving Haredi life.
Rabbi Chaim Yitzhak Kaplan, the dean of students at Hebron Yeshiva, put it plainly: “There’s no way that a young man… is going to go in for two, three years in the army and come out the same Haredi.” Moreover, he noted that the specific ages in question — late teens and early twenties — are precisely when he needs youth to be studying, lest they go astray.
It was clear he was sharing a genuinely felt defense of a way of life, not speaking out of cowardice or selfishness.
“Our nation is about learning,” Kaplan said, describing Torah study as the defining activity of Jewish existence. Once that premise is accepted, the hierarchy of obligations shifts. But the truth is that most secular Israelis cannot in honesty accept this idea. Many don’t ascribe much importance to religion as a vocation. It is one of many things that might be important to a person, but seems imbalanced to insist must be important to a country. So the Haredi argument becomes a little like someone telling you they cannot serve in the military because they must become a pilot, plumber, poet or mathematician, and do nothing else, ever. “Very nice,” many Israelis would say, “I’ll see you in the army.”
Kaplan did concede that at some point in the future Haredim may have to either agree to serve or leave the country. Meiselman was more strident, saying, in effect, that sages were more valuable than soldiers. “Wars in the world are caused by people not being sufficiently Jewish, religious. … if the Jews were here, acting as they’re supposed to act, then there would be no more war, ” he said. Then the Arab world would not be as antagonist.”
I asked: “Do you think Hitler carried out the Holocaust because the Jews were insufficiently religious?” Exactly, he replied, to my despair. I told him this is the language of an irreconcilable cultural war. “I’m a very honest person,” he replied, quite calmly.
Joy, and denial
In general, there is a pleasingly cerebral atmosphere of learning and debate in these institutions. Study can go on, Kaplan noted proudly, well into the night. The Mirer Yeshiva especially positively teems with boys, many from the U.S., who clearly care deeply about the culture they’re preserving. The entire Mea Shearim neighborhood seems designed to serve that yeshiva, with nary a business visible that is not somehow involved — whether that be the kosher eateries or bookstore full of young men reading and debating in a joyous scene for which I could not recall a secular equivalent.
It was an appealing environment in a strange way, and I understood the desire to preserve it. I proposed to some of those I met that the conflict might remain manageable, enabling that preservation, if the community that was at such loggerheads with society were stable in size.
This line of argument is an awkward and delicate business, as it’s not normally advisable to advise others on reproduction. But it’s also the heart of the matter — and Heshy, for one, knows it, frequently bragging, with eyes twinkling, that his side is “winning.”
“Why don’t you go fight with all the people in Tel Aviv that they should get rid of their dogs and they should have five children?” asked Rabbi Zupnick. My points — that the explosive growth of a welfare-dependent sector risks collapsing the very economy it depends on to sustain it — went unacknowledged.
The theological problem
It was when the conversation moved from policy into theology that things got especially hopeless.
Rabbi Spitzer, for example, said scripture allowed no leeway on the matter of the halakhic prescription of capital punishment by stoning for Sabbath violations. When pressed on whether he’d apply it to his own child, he said: “I don’t want to, I have to.” He clarified, though, that the institutional framework required to implement such sanctions is presently absent — for example, there is no Sanhedrin or Jewish Temple.
But then again, if the Haredim end up as the large majority, there will be.
In the car, as we zoomed around Mea Shearim, Heshy tried to explain that the Haredi community and I simply speak different languages, and I had not understood what the learned rabbi meant. “So I shouldn’t take it literally?” I asked, grasping at a straw.
“I didn’t say that,” Heshy snapped.
A modern state depends on a set of shared assumptions: that citizens will be educated in ways that allow them to participate in a complex economy, that they will contribute to collective defense, that public policy will operate within a framework of shared accountability.
What came across very clearly in my listening tour was that a society organized around Torah study operates according to a different set of assumptions: that insulation from external influence is a virtue, that the Torah is the only valuable truth and that no moral or legal framework except what is ordained therein has any meaning.
These two systems can coexist for a time, if the Haredim are in the minority and they are economically supported. If the Haredim become a majority, as is inevitable unless the birth rate comes down fast, that fragile peace will break. Even though demographic predictions must be couched, it seems clear that without change, soon, non-Haredim will start to despair, and many will flee the country.
Correcting the course
Heshy will not be so happy, but the meetings he set up convinced me all the more that radical steps are needed to completely upend the current dynamic. The leaders of Israel’s opposition say they will move to draft the Haredim if they win the upcoming election. They should go much further. Among the steps necessary:
- Impose a secular core curriculum for all religious schools, and completely cut off state funding to any schools in any sector that resist.
- Eliminate most yeshiva stipends, or funds for those who study Torah full-time.The original draft exemption allowed by Israel’s first leader, David Ben-Gurion, allowed for funds for several hundred students, and that’s a number most Israelis could live with.
- Cap the number of child stipends — state funds allocated per child, to help support young families — at three per family. The idea here would be to encourage the birthrate to come down.
- Generously fund adult education and professional training for Haredim, and set up a state authority for absorbing, housing, training and assisting those who want to leave the fold altogether.
Recently, an Israeli news program interviewed a Haredi mother of nine who works to support her husband’s study. She seemed proud of his economic cluelessness since his job was to “keep the flame alive.” She predicted the Haredim will never join the army no matter what. When the exasperated reporter — himself religious but not Haredi — asked whether it was fair that other mothers should spend their days in fear for their sons’ lives as they serve, she replied that she too spends her days in fear of her children becoming secular. She seemed very serious, and not at all apologetic.
Is she an exception? Can this way of thinking be changed? If the answers to these questions are no, we have a national emergency.
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Floyd Mayweather showered cash on Jewish causes — and now he’s suing their ‘Robin Hood’ alleging $175 million got diverted
They made for an odd photo: The diminutive boxing legend with a platinum grin and diamond chain, and the Orthodox macher who sported a black velvet yarmulke.
But when Floyd Mayweather, Jr., appeared in public in recent years — at LA Lakers games, promotional appearances and repeated trips to Israel — he was rarely without his jeweler, friend and business adviser, Jona Rechnitz.
For a few Jewish groups, the partnership was a gold mine.
With Rechnitz in his inner circle, Mayweather donated more than $1 million to Israeli and Jewish institutions that included United Hatzalah, Magen David Adom and Aish. And when Rechnitz and Mayweather traveled to Israel after Oct. 7, they were welcomed as heroes.
Now the relationship has come to a screeching halt with a lawsuit Mayweather filed last week in a Manhattan court, alleging Rechnitz defrauded him of $175 million in jewelry consignment funds, diverted settlement proceeds and unauthorized loans against his properties.
That their relationship collapsed in a big-money dispute did not shock anyone familiar with their histories. Mayweather had a long record of domestic violence incidents, with three separate convictions over the course of a decade, and more recently had allegedly skipped out on money owed. Rechnitz pleaded guilty in 2016 in a high-profile bribery case in New York City, getting a reduced sentence in exchange for cooperation with prosecutors. (Mayweather claims in his suit that Rechnitz, serving as his financial manager, did not initially disclose his criminal past.)
The two had also been linked to an alleged cryptocurrency pump-and-dump scheme in a case that was dismissed in 2022, and both are named as defendants in separate lawsuits related to an alleged ticket selling scam. (Rechnitz has denied the claims.)
Yet while the going was good, Jewish organizations and causes lined up to take part in their largesse. Now most have gone silent. But those willing to speak out say they have no regrets about the relationship.
“I don’t give a s— if he’s a Robin Hood and he’s stealing from the rich to help the poor — good, let him keep doing it.”
Adina SashOrthodox women’s activist, on Jona Rechnitz
Adina Sash, an Orthodox women’s activist, shared on Instagram a screenshot of an April 2025 message from Mayweather, asking her to contact Rechnitz so they could help her cause. Sash advocates for agunahs, women whose husbands refuse to grant a Jewish divorce, often generating headlines for stunt-driven pressure campaigns against the men.
Sash called Rechnitz a “massive” behind-the-scenes supporter of agunahs, estimating he had donated $250,000 to cover the women’s legal fees.
“I don’t give a s— if he’s a Robin Hood and he’s stealing from the rich to help the poor,” Sash said in an interview. “Good, let him keep doing it.”
Rechnitz, who denied Mayweather’s claims through an attorney, said he was unavailable for a phone interview Wednesday. But in a text message, he said he had brought Mayweather to organizations “involved in holy work.”
“Nobody stood by our side and I asked him to do so for me,” Rechnitz added, “and I also arranged for any out of pocket costs incurred for his trips to Israel such as airfare and hotels.”
Lavish gifts
In the first few days after Oct. 7, Mayweather quickly emerged as a rare ally for the Jewish state. He made public statements defending Israel on social media to his more than 25 million Instagram followers. He sent his private jet, loaded with emergency supplies, to the country less than a week after the attack. And he visited the country at least four times over the next two years, each time accompanied by Rechnitz.
Rechnitz, a real estate scion, had begun working his way into Mayweather’s inner circle after moving to his hometown of Los Angeles in 2017. Rechnitz was coming off a stint in New York that concluded with his sentencing to five months in jail for a bribery scheme involving the city’s then-deputy mayor for public safety and the leader of the New York City correction officers’ union. (The sentence was overturned on appeal in 2023.)
Mayweather was a controversial figure in his own right. In addition to his domestic violence record, he has been ordered by a judge to pay child support, and he is currently being sued based on allegations that he failed to pay rent and the bill for his private jet.
Rechnitz said he was forewarned. “Many people told me not to deal with him and criticized Jewish organizations for honoring him,” Rechnitz said in a text message to the Forward. “People make mistakes and I do not think that anyone can pass judgment without being in the same situation. Like many people, Floyd has his faults.”
The relationship between the two seemed to serve them both: Mayweather was flattered by Jewish leaders willing to look past their bad qualities, and bringing the boxer around helped rehabilitate Rechnitz in the Jewish world. Mayweather’s lawsuit described Rechnitz as his “de-facto” investment manager, real estate advisor, and banking liaison; it did not say how much Rechnitz was paid for those services but said it was a “constructive fiduciary relationship.”
They also made money together, according to one filing against them related to the cryptocurrency EthereumMax. Mayweather promoted the token at a boxing match and a Miami bitcoin conference in 2021. A class action lawsuit against the company alleged that Rechnitz had made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling his tokens after a raft of promotions from celebrities like Mayweather inflated their value. The filing claimed Mayweather was paid $2.5 million to be a “marquee promoter” of the coin. A judge later dismissed the case.
Despite the checkered past of both the boxer and his confidant, Jewish groups received them enthusiastically. United Hatzalah festooned its headquarters with Mayweather banners upon his first post-Oct. 7 visit to Jerusalem, with its president, Eli Beer, donning a Mayweather-branded cap during the visit. Magen David Adom’s American fundraising affiliate presented the boxer with a rhinestone-studded emergency vest.
Aish, an international Orthodox outreach group, bestowed Mayweather with a “Champion For Israel” award, with Mayweather and Aish CEO Rabbi Steven Burg posing for a photograph overlooking the Western Wall.
Mayweather also spoke to students and faculty at Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School, an Orthodox institution in New Jersey, last year, accompanied by Beer and Rechnitz and introduced by head of school Rabbi Eliezer Rubin, who said he was “exhilarated” to have Mayweather there.
Jewish groups characterized Mayweather’s support for the Jewish people as authentic and purely motivated. But it was also clear that it was driven by Rechnitz’s ties to the community. At a 2025 gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Jona’s father, Bobby — himself an eminence grise of the pro-Israel lobby — proudly told those gathered at the event that his son was the boxer’s entree into Israel and Jewish affairs. When Mayweather took the mic, he said he saw Bobby as a “father-like figure” and Jona as a brother.
Responding to questions about the lawsuit, United Hatzalah spokesperson Simmy Allen said in a statement Wednesday that the organization would not comment on legal matters between private parties.
“Mr. Mayweather visited United Hatzalah’s headquarters in Jerusalem twice and saw firsthand how United Hatzalah is on the frontlines of emergency medical services in Israel and we are grateful for his support,” Allen wrote. He did not mention Rechnitz.
In an email, Rubin, Kushner’s head of school, said he did not regret welcoming Floyd and that Rechnitz did not facilitate the visit.
“When even influential Jews are remain silent about the malicious and vile attacks against the Jewish people, we need to commend and support people outside of our faith who are standing with us,” Rubin wrote.
He added that the school had no relationship with Rechnitz.
Representatives from Aish and the Republican Jewish Coalition did not respond to questions.
The new allegations
Mayweather’s lawsuit alleges that Rechnitz exploited the boxer’s trust — and his property — to enrich himself.
The bulk of the $175 million claim relates to jewelry belonging to Mayweather that Rechnitz allegedly pawned to a Miami jeweler for $13 million. Mayweather says its real value was closer to $100 million, and that Rechnitz did not have permission to borrow against the assets.
Mayweather also claimed that Rechnitz drew loans totaling tens of millions of dollars on various properties owned by Mayweather entities without his consent, and diverted at least $15 million in funds intended for Mayweather into accounts controlled by co-defendants.
Morris Missry, an attorney for Rechnitz and co-defendants Ayal Frist and Alexander Seligson, said Wednesday in a statement that Mayweather’s claims were “utterly baseless.”
“Mr. Mayweather’s gambling issues, prolific spending habits, monies owed to third party creditors and IRS tax liens and levys, as well as other unseemly behavior will be exposed and we believe that Mr. Mayweather will be the one paying significant damages to our clients,” Missry wrote.
Mayweather’s lawsuit is not the first lodged against Rechnitz since his 2016 plea agreement. In 2023 a judge granted $17.7 million plus interest to a jeweler who said Rechnitz’s checks to him had bounced. Separate lawsuits filed by a former neighbor of Rechnitz’s, Joe Englanoff, alleged that Rechnitz convinced Englanoff to invest $1.4 million in tickets to a Mayweather fight, which Rechnitz promised he could resell at several times the value.
Englanoff, who was renting Rechnitz the house next door, moved to evict him and separately sued Mayweather and Rechnitz for $15 million, citing breach of contract. Rechnitz countersued, saying the property was in worse condition than what Englanoff advertised. Rechnitz said in a text that Englanoff “is a serial litigant whose greed has blinded his ways.” Litigation is ongoing.
Englanoff did not respond to an inquiry.
Some on social media called Mayweather’s Instagram post attacking Rechnitz into question for antisemitism, noting that Mayweather had compared him to vermin and chosen a picture of Rechnitz wearing a yarmulke.
One who appeared to side with Mayweather was Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School teacher Rabbi David Schlusselberg, who said on X that Mayweather had spoken admirably to his students when he visited last year.
“When a Jewish person in his inner circle backstabs him and is being sued for $175 million, it isn’t antisemitic for Floyd Mayweather to post about this,” Schlusselberg wrote on X. “I feel terrible for Floyd Mayweather who has only showed love and support for the Jewish people.”
But Schlusselberg later deleted the post. Though he did not want to say why, he told the Forward he did so after speaking to Rechnitz on the phone.
Sash, the agunah activist, said any sentiment supporting Mayweather for pro-Israel advocacy was naive.
“The only reason he ever stood with Israel is because that’s how Jona puppeteered him,” Sash said. “Floyd is a puppet. Jona was the puppet master.
“He told me explicitly that his goal was to position Floyd as a representation of someone who supports Israel,” she added. “He knew that it would be monetarily beneficial for Mayweather’s portfolio to align himself that way.”
Rechnitz said he told Sash he was behind Mayweather’s charitable giving to Jewish groups and that his goal was to position Floyd as a supporter of Israel, but denied mentioning any underlying financial motive.
And he added that he was surprised Sash disclosed his involvement in her cause, which he said was supposed to remain confidential. He said he helped agunahs independent of Mayweather, with the assistance of family and friends.
Despite Rechnitz’s overt machinations with regard to his friend and client, Sash saw Rechnitz’s support for agunot as genuine. In one instance, she said, he had offered an agunah’s husband $500,000 to grant a Jewish divorce. (The man did not accept, Sash said.)
What financial benefits Rechnitz believed would accrue to Mayweather from his pro-Israel support was unclear, but Sash — who said she never took money from Rechnitz or Mayweather — speculated it had to do with real estate, a shared area of interest for the two men.
As to the possibility that Rechnitz paid for his support with someone else’s money, Sash said it didn’t matter.
“Even if it were to be proven that that exact money was taken from someone else, good, because the system is so rigged against agunahs,” she said. “If there is someone else willing to do illegal activity to help agunahs, amazing — we need every ounce of help we can get.”
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Inspired by a queer Bundist poet, this Jewish composer set her work to Yiddish music
Composer Avi Fox-Rosen, like many Jews looking for meaningful community outside of religion, found a spiritual home in music.
“I think I was looking for, in some ways, a mentor or somebody in a generation ahead of me who can provide another model for how to be Jewish and work towards peace and intersectional justice,” Avi Fox-Rosen said.
He found queer Bundist poet Irena Klepfisz.
Klepfisz is the daughter of Rose and Michał Klepfisz, organizers of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Michał was killed on the second day of the revolt.
Fox-Rosen recently set to music a poem by Klepfisz, “Di rayze aheym/The journey home.” The Yiddish-English bilingual poem is one of her best known works and has been central to many people who have sought queer, secular and leftist framings for their engagement with Jewish identity. Fox-Rosen is releasing a new original album of the same title on May 30.
“Di rayze aheym” is based on a trip Klepfisz took with her mother to Poland in 1983 around the 40th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It was the first time either of them had been back since World War II.
In an interview with the author, Klepfisz compared today’s clean, well-kept condition of the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw with its appearance during her visit in the ‘80s, when it was overgrown and weathered by time. “It was practically wild,” she said.
“Where ‘Di rayze aheym’ sprang from was that cemetery — there are allusions in the poem to it,” said Klepfisz. The poem contains a total of nine sections, including “Vider a mol/Once again” and “A beys-oylem/A cemetery,” with many of them containing direct translations between English and Yiddish side by side.
Fox-Rosen remembers being drawn to Klepfisz’s work in the time following Oct. 7, as many Jews were finding themselves renegotiating their relationship to Jewish identity. “She has this incredible body of work that explores identity and displacement and diaspora. Also queerness, of course, and this exists alongside her work in prose and activism,” Fox-Rosen said.
Fox-Rosen, the son of Reform Rabbi Karen Fox, comes from Los Angeles. He was not raised with a particularly strong relationship to Yiddish culture. Describing his Jewish schooling, he said that “there was no significant Yiddish content, but a lot of Hebrew content.” He immersed himself in music, Jewish and otherwise, and eventually came to Yiddish music and culture in a roundabout way.
“My first big plan was to be a jazz guitar player, move to New York City and get famous that way. So I moved to New York City and as I worked in the jazz scene, I got to know a lot of Jewish musicians doing meaningful work with Yiddish content,” said Fox-Rosen. Frank London of the Klezmatics, as well as Greg Wall who is often referred to as the “Jazz Rabbi,” are among the musicians Fox-Rosen cites as influential in getting more involved in Yiddish culture.
He was initially drawn more to the secular Yiddish community than the actual Yiddish language or music traditions, he said. “I loved that there was this committed group of secular Jews making really interesting music, that’s what drew me in.”
He went on to become a member of the Yiddish-language rock band Yiddish Princess, alongside Sarah Gordon, Michael Winograd and Yoshie Fruchter.
“I’d been looking for a non-religious way to express Jewishness and find my people, and Irena has largely been one of the people to shape this community,” said Fox-Rosen.
Klepfisz has often referred to herself as a “practicing secular Jew.” She notes the intensely secular values of the Bund in interwar Poland. “The Bundists in interwar Poland didn’t deny their Jewishness; in fact, they emphasized it. But they were also militant secularists. For example, they would insist on meetings on Shabes.”
Not wanting to show up empty-handed when offering Klepfisz to set her poem to music, Fox-Rosen produced a demo of some verses of “Di rayze aheym” set to music.
“I was very flattered,” Klepfisz said. “I thought it was actually a very good choice, because it’s a very minimalist poem, so you don’t have a lot of words to fit. There are a lot of big blank spaces for the music.”
What resulted is an album of art-pop meets klezmer and Yiddish. Fox-Rosen noted influences for him from art-pop musicians Rufus Wainwright as well as Anohni and the Johnsons. Essential for Fox-Rosen in evoking a Yiddish sound are the instrumental contributions of two familiar faces in Yiddish music: klezmer fiddler Alicia Svigals and improvisational pianist Marilyn Lerner. “At times I wanted it to feel like a real fiddle kapelye, which it often does because of Alicia,” said Fox-Rosen. Kapelye is Yiddish for a klezmer band.
“You know, we used to say that Yiddish was ‘on life support,’ but I don’t think that’s true anymore,” Klepfisz said. “There was the revival that popped up in the ‘80s with klezmer music and now I think there’s a much greater appreciation for Yiddish culture.”
“Di rayze aheym/The journey home” is now available for pre-order through Borscht Beat on Bandcamp and will be released on May 30 alongside a concert at Jalopy Theatre in Brooklyn.
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In Israel, an Arab-Jewish youth orchestra builds a new ‘East-West’ sound together
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — A raucous crowd of football fans filled the narrow strip of grass between Tel Aviv’s music center and Bloomfield Stadium, home to the Maccabi and Hapoel Tel Aviv soccer teams. Threading their way through them toward the concert hall was an incongruous procession of young musicians in eveningwear, lugging cases of every shape and size for contrabasses, violins, ouds, cellos and darbukas.
Inside the concert hall, a small audience of friends, siblings, parents and music lovers let out a swell of whoops and claps more in keeping with a soccer game than the polite demeanor usually reserved for orchestras.
The concert was the public culmination of a youth project composed of Jewish and Arab performers run by the Jerusalem Orchestra East & West, known as TJO, the Israeli orchestra led by conductor Tom Cohen that blends Western orchestral music with Middle Eastern, North African and Andalusian traditions. TJO has shared the stage with major Israeli artists including Matti Caspi, Danny Sanderson and Ehud Banai, and is due to perform at the Concordia Summit in New York in September.
The program brings youth orchestras from across the country under TJO’s guidance, training young musicians to carry forward the musical language Cohen has spent years developing. He describes that language as part of an evolving “Israeli sound,” made up of “everything that began with our grandparents in the various diasporas around the world and arrived with them here in waves of immigration.”
It grew out of his own journey from Western classical music into the music of the Maghreb and the Middle East, and “brings together elements from East and West without losing the identity and distinctiveness of either one,” he said.
“We’re creating something new that is greater than the sum of its parts,” Cohen said. Still, he was careful to add that the sound was not his orchestra’s invention, but part of “an evolution, not a revolution that erases what came before it.”
Last week’s concert brought together 80 musicians, ages 9 to 20, from half a dozen youth orchestras around the country, with some ensembles numbering in the dozens and others only a handful. Cohen said the project is meant to train a next generation of musicians who could one day join TJO, named the country’s leading orchestra by the Culture Ministry in 2022, while also sending them out as “ambassadors of its language” in their own work.
“Throughout the process, we placed special emphasis on artistic excellence, direct professional encounters and a connection to the adult orchestra as a mentoring body that sets the path,” he said of the youth project.
Ensemble Sdot, a nine-member group from the Sdot Negev Regional Council in southern Israel whose players mostly wore kippot, took the stage first to perform a reworked song by the late Israeli singer-songwriter Meir Banai. In the audience, waiting for his own performance, Youssef Sarhan, a 9-year-old violinist from Majd al-Krum, an Arab town in northern Israel, bobbed his head along from his seat. He had begun studying a year and a half earlier with Fadel Maana, a veteran violinist in the Arabic tradition from the same town and one of TJO’s senior musicians, who later brought him into the youth orchestra.
Addressing the young musicians from the stage, Cohen said he usually resists the familiar exercise of identifying who came from which community.
“This nonsense of saying who’s from where, it’s so unnecessary,” he said. But the mix was part of what made the music work, he told them, with Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze youth “backstage trading information about Umm Kulthum,” the revered Egyptian singer; maqams, the melodic modes used in Arabic and other Middle Eastern music; and other musical references.
“Even if you’ve never spoken to each other in your lives, when two children sit together on stage, catch each other’s eyes while they’re playing and creating something together, the connection that’s forged there is as deep as family,” Cohen told them.
Cohen, who lives with his family in Brussels, said the years of war had changed his relationship with his work, which had always been his greatest source of joy.
“It’s a feeling I can’t describe, a feeling of being outside of time,” he said by telephone after the concert. “But the last three years took that away from me.”
As an Israeli conductor who plays Arabic music, Cohen said, his international career went quiet amid growing hostility toward Israel abroad, while in Israel it became harder to enjoy performing when, as he put it, “half an hour away, the world is falling apart.”
The youth project offered a way back. Cohen said he found comfort in the connection between musicians “who come from completely different religions, backgrounds and places,” and came to see the orchestra as “a symbol of real hope, not just a professional artistic institution.”
Malak Aboufdaly, a teenage bassoon player from Acre, said that after years of war, she felt a responsibility to give the audience a measure of relief.
“It’s my job to make you feel how I play. Sad or happy,” she said. “But I think it’s really important that we can make people happy after two or three years of war.”
Outside the concert hall, 17-year-old Shoval Hayak, wearing a black evening gown, was being scolded to go back inside. She was excitable and effusive, not long removed from being a regular high school student in Moshav Hosen, near Israel’s northern border. After Oct. 7, her family was evacuated to Tel Aviv, where she threw herself into singing. She joined the youth orchestra framework and later performed with the Israeli hip-hop and funk band Hadag Nahash.
At the concert, she was preparing to sing “Hallelujah” with Nihaya Safadi, a singer and viola player also from Acre, in an arrangement Cohen wrote during the orchestra’s first summer seminar.
“I didn’t believe I could ever be a singer,” she said.
Some of her peers, she said, tried to escape the reality of war and displacement through recreational drugs. Hayak found her escape in music.
“I gave my heart and soul to this project. I got sucked into it more and more,” she said. “I truly believe that if I give my whole heart, all the small details that make everything shine come to the surface. Each time I go on, there are tiny improvements that I’m not even aware of at the time.”
She spoke quickly and warmly about the people around her: her mother, who she called “my support system”; Cohen, who she said had become like a father to her; and her boyfriend Yair, who could not attend because he was observing the Omer, the traditional mourning period between Passover and Shavuot when many observant Jews avoid live music. “Bless his soul, I adore him,” she said.
The same affection extended to the other young musicians she performed with. “They’re the best family I could ever ask for,” she said.
Cohen said watching young musicians like Hayak “become professional and be captivated by the magic of music” is part of what kept him invested in the project, which he took on as a volunteer effort. The next step, he said, is to give the program a larger stage and bring in more students.
The adult orchestra returned to the same East-West language last week in a concert about mixed identity at the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv, with additional performances scheduled elsewhere. The program centered on “matrouz,” Arabic for “interweaving,” a Judeo-Arabic tradition of placing Hebrew lyrics over Arabic melodies billed by the orchestra as the “original Jewish mash-up.”
Its pre-recorded guests included Dana International, the Israeli pop star who became the first transgender singer to win Eurovision in 1998, and Yousef Sweid, the Arab Israeli actor – performers who mirror the orchestra’s interest in what it calls “both/and” identities that can be Arab and Jewish, left-wing and right-wing, religious and secular.
The youth evening ended with all the young musicians together playing “Fatouma,” a Lebanese piece arranged and led by Cohen, who bounced on the balls of his feet, twirled on stage and flashed theatrical expressions at the players as he conducted.
“I was looking for a way back to my happiness and I found it in this world of children,” he said. “When I’m with them and making music, I go back to real, deep joy. Like a child.”
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