Uncategorized
Jewish institutions awaken to climate crisis, with hundreds pledging action
(JTA) — For a decade starting in 2002, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi devoted herself to pro-Israel advocacy. After that, the Jewish philanthropist and activist from Annapolis, Maryland, went all in to fight for disability rights, working in the field for the next decade. Now, Mizrahi is focused on climate change.
“Let me put it this way: In 2021, we donated to one climate organization, and in 2022, we donated to 17 of them,” Mizrahi said, referring to the small charity fund she runs with her husband, tech entrepreneur Victor Mizrahi. This year, the couple made their largest climate-related donation yet, sending a group of nine climate reporters to Israel to meet tech startups working on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Mizrahi and her husband have also begun commercially investing in such startups.
“I was hoping other people would solve it,” she said. “But the pace of the change is not nearly meeting the demand at the moment. I felt that even though I don’t know the subject, I’m just going to have to do it because I have kids and I don’t want this world to fall apart.”
Climate change has long ranked at or near the top of a list of issues concerning Jews in the United States, according to multiple surveys, and Jews have been heavily involved in the wider climate movement. But until recently, the issue had a marginal place on the agendas of Jewish communal organizations, which neglected climate even as the subject took on importance in the activism and policies of other religious communities and in the larger philanthropic world.
Mizrahi’s newfound emphasis on climate is an early example of a larger shift that is underway in Jewish philanthropy, a multibillion-dollar world made up of thousands of individual donors, charitable foundations and nonprofit organizations.
“It’s the beginning of what will become a more widespread focus among Jewish groups,” said Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, the founder and CEO of the Jewish climate group Dayenu. “We’re seeing an awakening to this as a profoundly Jewish issue, and awakening to the role that the Jewish community has to play in addressing the climate crisis.”
Scientists say that decisions regarding carbon emissions made in the next few years will affect life on Earth for thousands of years to come. The most recent warning came in March, when leading global experts with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a new report, stating that “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”
The large Jewish populations living in the coastal United States are vulnerable to extreme storms, sea-level rise, severe heat and other weather disruptions — a situation dramatized in the recent Apple television series “Extrapolations,” in which a rabbi contends with rising sea waters infiltrating his Florida synagogue. Meanwhile, Israel is experiencing a slew of impacts from drought and floods to security threats tied regional climate-related instability.
A flooded road after heavy rainfall in the central Israeli city of Lod, Jan. 16, 2022. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
Israeli officials visit the site where a road collapsed into a large sinkhole at Mineral Beach in the Dead Sea on December 7, 2017. Many facilities and beaches have been closed or shut down in recent years following the increase in sinkholes caused by ever-declining sea levels, as climate change strains the country’s water resources. (Mark Neyman/GPO)
The last few months have seen a flurry of new initiatives aimed at both greening Jewish institutions and directing collective action on climate.
In December, for example, Rosenn’s group published a report calculating that endowments of Jewish organizations, from family foundations to local federations, are invested in the fossil fuel industry to the tune of at least $3 billion. The report launched an ongoing campaign called All Our Might that urges Jewish leaders to withdraw these investments and put the money toward clean energy instead.
Meanwhile, many of the most prominent Jewish organizations in the country — representing local federations, Hillel chapters, summer camps, community centers, day schools and nearly every religious denomination — had already joined a new green coalition organized by another Jewish environmental group and were preparing to unveil pledges to do more in the fight against climate change.
The unveiling of the climate pledges happened in March, under the leadership of Adamah, a nonprofit created through the merger of two stalwarts of Jewish environmentalism, Hazon and the Pearlstone Center.
“Climate and sustainability have not been on the list of priorities for the vast majority of Jewish organizations; this coalition and these climate action plans reflect a deep paradigm shift and culture change moving forward,” Adamah CEO Jakir Mandela said at the time.
The commitments made by members of Adamah’s Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition include sending youth leaders to global climate summits, reducing emissions of buildings and vehicles and lobbying the federal government to pass climate policies.
More than 300 congregations and nonprofits have joined. For Earth Day, Adamah announced a million-dollar fund offering interest-free loans and matching grants to Jewish groups for projects to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
If any single event can be said to mark the debut of the climate issue as a top Jewish communal priority, it is probably the recent annual conference of the Jewish Funders Network, which took place in March in Phoenix, bringing together thousands of donors and charity executives.
For the gathering’s first event, before the formal opening of the conference, a group of participants went on a field trip to downtown Phoenix to learn about the local effects of the climate crisis. Far more people signed up than organizers anticipated, and with about 55 passengers, the tour bus chartered for the occasion reached capacity. Mizrahi, who was among the participants, said the trip was helpful as a networking opportunity for like-minded philanthropists.
“We wanted to expose them to how the existential threats posed by climate change are not long term, but are already here,” Yanklowitz said. “People down in the Zone are dying every summer from heat exhaustion and dehydration.”
Based on his debrief with the group afterward, Yanklowitz feels the trip left an impact on participants.
“I didn’t hear anyone say, ‘Oh, I’m changing my commitments.’ But I did get the sense that climate change was kind of abstract for many people, and that now it really hit home,” Yanklowitz said.
The rest of the conference featured multiple talks and gatherings dedicated to climate, including on the main stage, and an announcement that Birthright, which offers free trips to Israel for young Jews, was increasing its own climate activism with the help of a new donation.
In an interview, Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and Stephen Bronfman, children of Birthright founder Charles Bronfman, said their $9 million gift is meant to honor their father on the occasion of his 90th birthday, while also bringing Birthright more in line with the values of a new generation that is environmentally-minded.
Birthright organizers will use the funding to develop programming focused on climate that could, for example, expose participants to Israel’s clean tech scene. The money is also intended to help Birthright lower its own carbon footprint, potentially by switching to electric buses or adding more vegetarian meals.
The Bronfmans hope that Birthright’s significant purchasing power in Israeli tourism will nudge the industry toward more ecologically sustainable practices.
“To me, Birthright is like Walmart — everyone wants to do business with them,” Stephen Bronfman said. “They have the power to dictate terms to their service providers and affect the supply chain.”
The widespread interest in climate mobilization among Jewish groups comes after years in which the issue languished outside the mainstream. Rosenn, the head of Dayenu, who has attended about 15 conferences of the Jewish Funder Network, noticed a change this year.
“There used to be half a dozen people at a breakfast before the program talking about climate. And it wasn’t even climate, necessarily — it was the environment writ large,” she said.
The Jewish world is, in many ways, still lagging behind the larger climate movement. Divesting endowment funds from the fossil fuel industry, for example, is seen as a bold step among Jewish groups even though at least 1,590 institutions representing nearly $41 trillion in assets have already publicly committed to doing so, according to a website tracking such pledges. About a third of the groups on the list are defined as faith-based organizations, but only three are Jewish: Kolot Chayeinu, a congregation in Park Slope, Brooklyn; the Reform movement’s pension system; and the American Jewish World Service, a global justice group.
Rabbi Laura Bellows, now Dayenu’s director of spiritual activism and education, waves matzah as she encourages major financial organizations to divest from fossil fuels at a rally in Washington, D.C., April 20, 2022. (Bora Chung | Survival Media Agency / Courtesy of Dayenu)
Adamah’s own climate plan doesn’t include a pledge to divest but only a promise that it will investigate the option of doing so for its endowment and employee retirement funds. Instead, the plan touts the group’s education and advocacy efforts, and focuses on reducing emissions at its retreat centers.
Adamah’s chief climate officer, Risa Alyson Cooper, acknowledged that Jewish community institutions have been “largely absent” from the divestment movement and said her group regards divestment as one of several required tools for addressing the climate crisis.
She said the Jewish community hit a milestone when 12 of the 20 founding members of Adamah’s climate coalition said in their climate plans that they would consider amending their financial practices. That was significant, she said, in light of the organizations’ complex and deliberate governing structures, which can make executing such changes onerous.
“While the Jewish community may have lagged behind in years past, we are catching up quickly,” Cooper said.
Such a shift would mark not only a milestone for Jewish climate activism but also a departure from how the Jewish community has historically done philanthropy, said Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, executive vice president of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.
She said wielding financial holdings for social impact has been a hallmark of advocacy by Christian groups. Last year, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) opted to divest from fossil fuels in light of the climate crisis.
The Jewish community, meanwhile, has tended to act primarily through charitable donations. One of the reasons for the difference, she said, is that the Jewish community is much less centralized with communal assets spread across many endowments, making the actions of any single group relatively less impactful.
“Adamah had done some really important work to change individual behavior and grow people’s connections to the environment, but the bigger piece of bold collective action to fight the climate crisis was missing,” Kahn-Troster said. “The overall community is late to respond to the urgency of the problem. But I do think that the work of these organizations is very significant, so I’m excited to see it.”
Kahn-Troster’s historical view is informed by the legacy of her father, Rabbi Lawrence Troster, an environmental activist who had pushed for communal Jewish action on climate, and by the passion for climate justice displayed by her 15-year-old, Liora Pelavin, a member of the Jewish Youth Climate Movement, an arm of Adamah.
“Finding a meaningful Jewish space to do grassroots-level climate advocacy that many young people are demanding has been really important to Liora,” Kahn-Troster said.
—
The post Jewish institutions awaken to climate crisis, with hundreds pledging action appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
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.”
The post Floyd Mayweather showered cash on Jewish causes — and now he’s suing their ‘Robin Hood’ alleging $175 million got diverted appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
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.
The post Inspired by a queer Bundist poet, this Jewish composer set her work to Yiddish music appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
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.”
The post In Israel, an Arab-Jewish youth orchestra builds a new ‘East-West’ sound together appeared first on The Forward.