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
A new Hebrew press in Berlin argues that Israel doesn’t own the language
(JTA) — Dory Manor and Moshe Sakal, who run a press for Hebrew literature in Berlin, are often asked if their business is Israeli.
The partners in life and publishing come from Israel, though they have lived in Berlin and Paris for the better part of two decades. But they say their publishing house, Altneuland, is neither Israeli nor European. Instead, they sought to create a home for Hebrew literature from around the world — open to Israeli writers, but free from Israeli state funding.
Altneuland is the first non-religious Hebrew publishing house to set up outside of Israel since the state was established. Manor and Sakal founded the press in 2024, and this fall, Altneuland will launch in the United States.
“I believe that the Hebrew language is not only a national language,” said Manor, the editor-in-chief. “Hebrew has always been a global language, and even modern Hebrew has been an international language — mostly European, but not only — before the creation of the State of Israel.”
Manor and Sakal have expanded their mission from Hebrew literature to publishing Jewish authors across languages, including German, French, Russian and Yiddish. The U.S. launch will include an original English-language book by Ruth Margalit, along with English translations of Hebrew novels by Noa Yedlin and Itamar Orlev.
Altneuland is also the German publisher of “The Future is Peace,” a New York Times bestseller by Israeli Maoz Inon, whose kibbutznik parents were killed on Oct. 7, 2023, and Palestinian Aziz Abu Sarah, whose brother died in 1990 after being tortured in an Israeli prison.
In a time when thousands of authors and publishers globally have pledged to boycott Israeli institutions over what they identify as a genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza, Manor and Sakal say that Altneuland is not a boycott. They work with writers who live in Israel and sell to Israeli bookstores. Establishing a Berlin-based publishing house made them ineligible for Israeli public funding so they could avoid the fraught question of accepting support from the government.
Sakal, the publisher, acknowledged that Israel was a center for Hebrew and Jewish literature, but said it doesn’t have to be the only center. “We are not replacing it,” he said. “We are doing something else.”
Altneuland allows the founders to work with Israelis while staying apart from the Israeli Ministry of Culture, which provides funding for Israel’s publishing industry, largely through literary awards.
In January, the ministry canceled its annual culture prizes. Culture Minister Miki Zohar, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, cited the political bent of the prizes and said their cancellation was owed to the organizers “clearly ignoring artists whose opinions are held by most of the country.” The cuts came shortly after Zohar launched an alternative state film award ceremony, cutting funds to the Ophir Awards — Israel’s equivalent of the Oscars — after it awarded best film to “The Sea,” about a Palestinian boy in the West Bank who attempts to go to Tel Aviv and see the sea.
Israel’s literary world, which pays poorly and lacks broad recognition, depends heavily on state-sponsored prizes.
“This government is, for me, an enemy of Israel and not Israel itself,” said Manor. “So no, I’m not boycotting anyone, but I don’t want to deal with the current Israeli government. I do want to deal with Israeli readers, with Israeli writers.”
Those writers share many of Manor and Sakal’s political views. The founders’ goal is to make Altneuland a home for Jewish authors with a liberal outlook — especially those who feel pressured by rising nationalism, whether in Israel or elsewhere.
Margalit, a Tel Aviv-based journalist, will publish a collection of her political and cultural profiles in Israel through a collaboration between Altneuland and Pushkin Press. Her book, “In the Belly of the Whale: Portraits from a Fractured Israel,” is coming out in September.
Margalit said she was drawn to Manor and Sakal’s “humanist spirit,” along with their ability to publish the book simultaneously in English, Hebrew and German.
“At a time when so many people are quick to jump to labels or cancellations, it was bracing to find thoughtful partners who were similarly aggrieved about the political situation as I was,” she said.
Arad’s Hebrew novel, “Our Lady of Kazan,” will be published in German by Altneuland as “Kinderwunsch” in July. Arad, an Israeli-born writer, has lived in California for over 20 years and authored 12 books of Hebrew fiction. One Haaretz reviewer summed her up as “the finest living author writing in Hebrew” who was “in exile in the U.S.”
Arad’s books, often featured on bestseller lists in Israel, tend to deal with Israelis living abroad. The theme fits into the global perspective of Altneuland, targeting readers who are curious about crossing national boundaries.
“I’ve been thrilled to see that Israeli readers are willing — even eager — to read stories about Israeli expatriates,” said Arad. “The experience of living outside Israel, whether temporarily for work or study or on a more permanent basis, has become a central theme in Hebrew literature.”
Altneuland takes its tongue-in-cheek name from Theodor Herzl’s 1902 novel, literally meaning “old new land.” The founder of political Zionism envisioned a utopic, multicultural Jewish state where Jews and Arabs lived peacefully together.
“When we finally decided to call our press Altneuland, it was because our Alteuland, an ‘old new land,’ is a land without territories. It is the Hebrew language,” said Manor.
Berlin is a thriving hub for up to 30,000 Israeli expatriates. Among them is a growing community of writers and intellectuals, including some who left Israel out of frustration and anger at their government.
Manor and Sakal see another reason for making Berlin their home base. They view Altneuland as a continuation of Schocken Verlag, a Jewish publishing house in Berlin that improbably persisted through the 1930s. Schocken Verlag was a cultural lifeline for Jews under Hitler’s regime, publishing books by Franz Kafka, Heinrich Heine, Rabbi Leo Baeck and Shmuel Yosef Agnon, a founding father of modern Hebrew literature.
In 1939, the publishing house was finally forced to shutter and moved to British Mandate Palestine. The reestablished Schocken Books lives on today as part of Penguin Random House. But Manor and Sakal said their project aligns with the original Schocken Verlag — the one destroyed by Nazism.
“What we find in both models is the possibility of a Jewish cultural space that is cosmopolitan, multilingual, humanist, non-national, and not dependent on a single territory,” said Sakal.
Altneuland has faced skepticism, particularly from Israel. Publisher and editor Oded Carmeli said in Haaretz, “The truth is that there aren’t enough Hebrew readers outside of Israel to support a publishing house – not even a bookstore, not even a shelf in a bookstore – and even if there were enough readers, no store in Berlin or Madrid would maintain such a shelf, for fear of repercussions.”
The Altneuland duo said their risky proposition is working out so far. Most of their Hebrew readers remain in Israel, where they are printing books in the thousands and going into second printings on select titles. But they are also cultivating a readership in Germany, where they print smaller special runs of Hebrew-language editions.
Naomi Firestone-Teeter, the CEO of the Jewish Book Council, said that Altneuland has emerged as pressure mounts on Jewish authors from the right and the left through “book bans, boycotts and cancellations.” (The council itself was recently criticized by dozens of Jewish authors for a “bias toward centering Israeli and Zionist voices.”)
“In this moment, we see their effort to build another home for Hebrew literature and Israeli voices as a meaningful contribution to the Jewish literary landscape,” said Firestone-Teeter.
Altneuland’s books in German and English are the fruit of collaborations with Pushkin Press and New Vessel Press. Manor said they were “positively surprised” when they began talks about working with publishers in Europe and North America. Those conversations began in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, and continued against the backdrop of a rising international chorus that has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. So far, no one has boycotted them.
“Usually we had interesting talks, very open talks with people who understood, in most cases, the nuances between our being a Hebrew publishing house and Israel as a state, Israel as a regime,” said Manor. “This is something that we could not predict when we created Altneuland.”
The post A new Hebrew press in Berlin argues that Israel doesn’t own the language appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Jewish library and Chabad near Buenos Aires attacked, Argentine Jewish advocates say
(JTA) — Counterterrorism officials in Buenos Aires are investigating after a Jewish library and a Chabad center in a suburb in the Argentine capital were attacked last week.
On Thursday night, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the Israeli Literary Center and Max Nordau Library in La Plata, according to a statement published Friday by the center’s board of directors. Multiple individuals “threw a blunt object filled with fuel at the front of the library, breaking windows and causing material damage,” the board said, noting that the device did not ignite and no one was injured.
The library, a secular educational center founded in 1912 that promotes Argentine Jewish culture, said it is reinforcing security measures in light of the attack.
On Sunday, the Chabad of La Plata was also attacked, according to DAIA, the Argentine Jewish community group, which condemned both attacks. DAIA, which first reported the Chabad attack, did not describe the nature of the attack beyond reporting no injuries.
“We are deeply concerned about the recurrence and the short timeframe of these incidents,” DAIA said in a statement.
The Ministry of Security of the Province of Buenos Aires and the Complex Crimes and Counterterrorism Unit of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police are investigating both attacks.
La Plata’s Jewish population numbers about 2,000, and its Chabad center has existed for more than 25 years. Argentina as a whole is home to the sixth-largest Jewish community in the world and the largest in Latin America, mostly centered in Buenos Aires.
“These acts of violence threaten democratic coexistence and the values of respect and pluralism that we defend our neighbors,” La Plata Mayor Julio Alak said. “We will not allow hatred and intolerance to have a place in our city.”
Argentina is the site of some of the deadliest attacks on Jewish institutions in modern history. A 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires killed 29 people, while a 1994 attack on the AMIA Jewish community center left more than 80 people dead. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, a pro-Israel and philosemitic economist, has advanced efforts to hold Hezbollah and Iran responsible for their alleged role in the attacks after years of foot-dragging by prior leaders.
The incidents in La Plata come as Jewish institutions around the world are on high alert amid a string of attacks since the start of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran in February. Several synagogues and Israeli outposts in Europe have faced arson attacks that a group seen as tied to Iran have claimed responsibility for staging. No one has been injured in those attacks.
Argentina has also faced homegrown antisemitism scandals. In September, a video of a group of Buenos Aires high school students on a graduation trip chanting “Today we burn Jews” went viral, earning condemnation from Jewish community advocates and even Milei himself. The group, from the private school Escuela Humanos, was traveling with Escuela ORT, a Jewish school.
Following the attacks in La Plata, comments on a local news outlet’s Instagram post about the attack on the local Chabad Sunday were filled with antisemitic tropes, including blood libel and false flag theories. Antisemitism watchdogs say false flag allegations, holding that an operation is staged to look like an attack in order to garner sympathy for the victim or attribute blame to another party, have flourished in recent years against Jews and Israel.
The post Jewish library and Chabad near Buenos Aires attacked, Argentine Jewish advocates say appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Cornell’s Jewish president clashes with students following on-campus debate about Israel
(JTA) — Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff and student protesters are trading accusations after an incident in which protesters surrounded the president’s car following an on-campus debate about Israel.
The protesters, from a group called Students for a Democratic Cornell, released a video appearing to show that President Michael Kotlikoff had backed up into one of them while a protester shouts that the car ran over his foot.
In response, Cornell released its own video depicting what it said was a “harassment and intimidation incident,” its enhanced version of which it said offered “complete footage of the parking lot interactions, instead of clips to support a narrative.” That video shows students surrounding the president’s car as he tries to exit his parking space. After he eventually departs, the students continue to mill around with no obvious indication of injury to any of them.
In a statement of his own, Kotlikoff said that despite being surrounded by protesters who banged on his car windows, he waited until his backup camera showed a clear path before maneuvering out of the spot.
“The behavior I experienced last night is not protest,” Kotlikoff said in his statement, released Friday night. “It is harassment and intimidation, with the direct motive of silencing speech. It has no place in an academic community, no place in a democracy, and can have no place at Cornell.”
In an Instagram post, the protesters rejected Kotlikoff’s claims that they banged on his car and that they had previous records of misconduct on campus. They also reiterated their allegation that he had struck them.
The incident marks a relatively rare example of a clash between a university and pro-Palestinian student protesters two years after the student encampment movement roiled campuses across the United States, including at Cornell. The Ivy League university, like many others, enacted new rules designed to constrain protests that have kept demonstrations at bay amid pressure from the Trump administration to curb what it said was antisemitism among protesters. In November, Cornell agreed to pay $60 million to resolve federal antisemitism allegations.
Kotlikoff became Cornell’s president in early 2025, saying at the time that he was “very comfortable with where Cornell is currently” following “two relatively peaceful semesters” in which there were only isolated incidents that violated university rules around protest. He soon rejected pro-Palestinian students’ demands to cut ties with the Technion university in Israel. But he also urged the campus to foster academic debate around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The event that preceded his clash with students on Thursday represented a striking example of such debate. Sponsored by an ideologically diverse array of groups, including the pro-Israel advocacy groups StandWithUs and the Zionist Organization of America as well as the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which has previously been suspended for violating university rules, the event was the second in a two-part “Israel-Palestine Debate Series.”
The series was organized by the Cornell Political Union according to a format its website says it has long maintained. The format features a lecture by a speaker followed by formal responses from students and an audience debate.
In the first event, held earlier in April, the Israeli historian Benny Morris lectured on the topic “The American-Israeli Alliance Serves America’s Interests.” Morris is a liberal Zionist critic of the Israeli government whose work has included foundational research on the founding of the state arguing that many Arabs were expelled, rather than fled, during the 1948 war.
The second, on Thursday, featured the pro-Palestinian Holocaust historian Norman Finkelstein, who lectured on the topic “Israel Was Not Justified in Its Response to October 7th.” Finkelstein, who has criticized Morris for showing a pro-Israel bias, has compared the plight of the Palestinians to that of Jews during the Holocaust, and Students for Justice in Palestine posted a picture of its members posing with him on Thursday.
Kotlikoff offered introductory remarks at the event, which promoted a no-technology policy designed “out of respect to student[s] who will be given the opportunity to speak openly on a divisive topic.”
The post Cornell’s Jewish president clashes with students following on-campus debate about Israel appeared first on The Forward.