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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.
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You’re wrong, Ken Paxton: Obviously God is nonbinary
We are living in a time of reactionary masculinism. Roaring back not only against wokeness and MeToo but against half a century of feminism and a century of women’s suffrage, conservative American men have reasserted a hyper-traditionalist, hyper-violent form of masculine dominance, from the UFC matches on the White House lawn to Pete Hegseth’s pastor calling for the repeal of the 19th amendment.
And now, to the Texas Senate race, in which religious progressive Democrat James Talarico is running against the multiply indicted, investigated, and impeached Republican Ken Paxton, who among other things has taken bribes, committed adultery, and barely avoided conviction for securities fraud. Like all Trump wannabes, Paxton peppers his talks with vulgar schoolyard insults, calling Talarico “Low-T” (i.e. low testosterone, not manly enough), ‘Talafreako,’ and, I guess worst of all, a vegan. (Talarico is not a vegan.) Most recently, Paxton’s campaign has ridiculed comments Talarico made in 2021 that “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.”
But for anyone conversant with Jewish theology, this is obvious. Of course, God is nonbinary.
Genesis 1:27 states clearly: “And God created the human in His image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Meaning, both male and female are the ‘image’ (whatever that means) of the Divine. Of course, God has masculine pronouns here, but so do the words for socks, houses and money; Hebrew lacks a non-gendered case (until recent innovations). And just a few verses earlier, in Genesis 1:2, the Spirit of God gets a feminine verb form (merachefet, ‘hovers’). As Talarico put it:
The first two lines of the Bible, the first two lines in Genesis, use two different Hebrew words to describe God. One is the masculine Hebrew noun for divinity. The second is the feminine Hebrew noun for spirit. God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.
More broadly, throughout the Bible, God is referred to in both masculine metaphors — Father, King, etc. — and feminine ones, like a loving Mother (Isaiah) or feminine Wisdom (Proverbs).
Jewish theological and theosophical speculation is even more clear. The philosophical God of Maimonides, for example, is beyond all form, and certainly all gender. The Kabbalistic Godhead, meanwhile, contains aspects (sefirot) that are masculine, feminine, both masculine and feminine, and genders that change depending on the moment. This is not merely abstruse speculation; every Friday night, traditional Jews welcome the Sabbath Queen to their places of worship. Who do you think we’re referring to here?
Indeed, one could say that God is the most nonbinary thing (or non-thing) in the universe, since in many Jewish theologies, God is nondual, beyond all binaries and dualities we humans construct to understand our world. In these conceptions, God is everything (yesh) and nothing (ayin), filling the universe and surrounding it, form and emptiness.
Now, obviously, Ken Paxton is not interested in theology; he’s just scoring political points, and desperately trying to change the subject. And with animus against transgender people rising (due to massive campaigns to lie about them for Republican political gain) he wants us to think that James Talarico’s God is nonbinary like a they/them teenager is nonbinary — i.e., conforming neither to masculine nor feminine gender roles. (In fairness, Talarico made his 2021 comments in the context of a political debate about transgender children and sports, and has lately has walked back the comments, calling them “cringey.”)
But just because Paxton is being cynical doesn’t mean his attacks aren’t harmful. They are at once ignorant and insulting, pathetically wrong and offensively backward.
I don’t mean to whitewash or wokify the often patriarchal Jewish tradition. Again, there are plenty of masculine images of God in Jewish liturgy, tradition, and text — maybe too many. The Biblical God has a bad temper, gets jealous easily and lashes out with violence. God is a Man of War, says Exodus 15:3, which scholars believe to be one of the oldest Biblical sources. And for every Lecha Dodi welcoming the Divine Feminine, there are dozens of blessings of God, the King of the World. Yet ultimately, these are aspects, projections and metaphors of the Divine, not the Divine itself. And just as the Greek and Indian pantheons include multiple manifestations of divinity, Jewish monotheism (and monism) contains within it multiple manifestations of a transcendent God ultimately beyond all myth, explanation, and categorization.
Likewise in the New Testament, which has ample male and female metaphors for the Divine, and ample statements that God transcends gender entirely (e.g. John 4:24). And not just God, but human souls as well; one of the most famous, and impactful, statements in the New Testament is the Apostle Paul’s statement in Galatians 3:28 that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Obviously, Paul doesn’t mean that there is no sex or gender at all, but he does mean that in terms of what matters most (which Paul understands to be the spirit), gender and ethnicity are irrelevant.
If only the Ken Paxtons of the world understood that.
Even if Paxton got the Bible right, however, his theological attacks on James Talarico would still be un-American. In fact, the myths and forms of religion are manifold and various, and in the America that truly is great, we don’t take sides among them. Sacred text and tradition portray many different faces of the Divine, and of course there are many different sacred texts and traditions. None of which should be defamed by a corrupt political hack.
But I admit, while I’m pluralistic as to religious worldviews, I do think some are better than others. And James Talarico has a compelling vision for an engaged Christianity that is justice-driven, heartfelt, and, to my mind, the rightful legacy of a certain rabbi who overturned the moneylenders’ tables in the Temple in Jerusalem. Even if you disagree with his political or religious positions, see what you think:
This is what religion should be for: the pursuit of justice, the cultivation of kindness, the commitment to not turn our back on the stranger, the marginalized, or the destitute. This is the God that inspired Jews throughout our history, whether we were activists or prisoners, volunteers at a hevra kadisha or teachers in a school, rabbis or homemakers. It is the source of compassion that can be discovered (or, if you prefer, invented) whenever the heart is broken. And as Talarico says, this God is the opposite of domination.
Amen.
The post You’re wrong, Ken Paxton: Obviously God is nonbinary appeared first on The Forward.
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Slovenia’s last Jewish institution endures through desecration and decay
On a Saturday morning last July, Robert Baruh Waltl watched two processions converge on central Ljubljana. From one direction, near the river, came a column of neo-Nazis chanting nationalist slogans chanting “Long live Slovenia.” From the other came pro-Palestinian marchers singing “from the river to the sea”.
The city, he notes drily, is very small. “You could see both demonstrations at the same time,” he told me over a video call from his office. “Far right from one side, far left from the other.”
In Slovenia, this is what the view looks like from the only Jewish institution in the country.
The Jewish Cultural Center Ljubljana, which Waltl has directed since its founding in 2013, is overextended by design and necessity. In the absence of a synagogue elsewhere, it functions as one. It is also a cultural center, a museum, and, increasingly, a one-man operation.
“If I’m not in Ljubljana,” Waltl says, “there is no one to even open the door.” For more than a decade, the center has run almost entirely on donations, German embassy micro-grants, and cross-subsidies from Waltl’s adjacent performance space, the Mini Theater. The Slovenian government has never provided stable funding. Applications to the Ministry of Culture go unanswered. “They tell us the Festival of Tolerance is the most important anti-racism event in Slovenia,” Waltl says, speaking of an open event organized by him and the community, “and we don’t receive a single euro for it.”
Waltl did not grow up Jewish. He was born near the Austrian border and moved to Ljubljana as a young man to study theater. Then came a letter from the local Jewish community: did he know that his grandmother had been Jewish? He didn’t. He began attending events, cautiously at first. A trip to Israel changed things. He started reading, learning Hebrew and collecting Judaica. Eventually, he underwent a formal conversion — a giyur — at a liberal congregation in Frankfurt. “I said, OK, now I’m so deep,” he recalls. “I will never feel truly Jewish if I don’t take this last step.”
The community he joined had only barely survived the 20th century. Before the Second World War, Slovenia’s largest Jewish population lived in the Prekmurje region in the northeast. Most were deported to Auschwitz after 1941; roughly 90% were killed. In Ljubljana itself, Jews had been expelled in 1515, and the postwar communist Yugoslav government did nothing to restore their memory: cemeteries and schools were destroyed or simply left to ruin. By the time Waltl arrived, the standard answer when Ljubljana tour guides were asked about Jewish history was blunt: no Jews after 1515. “They didn’t know anything about the Holocaust,” he says. “Nothing about anything.”
His response was methodical. He installed the first memorial plaque on the site of Ljubljana’s medieval synagogue. In 2014, at a gathering of young Jewish leaders in Berlin, he met Gunter Demnig, the German artist behind the Stolpersteine project, and brought the initiative home. Today, Ljubljana and surrounding cities have 68 stumbling stones and one large stone commemorating 150 Jewish refugees expelled from Croatia who sheltered in Ljubljana. He co-founded the Festival of Tolerance with Branko Lustig, the Auschwitz survivor and double Oscar-winning producer of Schindler’s List and Gladiator, born in Osijek, Croatia, who brought early credibility and international reach to the project before his death.
For years, the center also served as a functioning synagogue, anchored by a wave of Israeli tourism. After the Jewish congregation of Slovenia lost its premises in 2014 and moved into Waltl’s building, the arrangement found its footing through sheer numbers. According to Walt 50,000 to 60,000 Israeli tourists visited Slovenia each summer and many of these came to services organized by a Chabad rabbi from Trieste, Ariel Hadad. Then COVID hit. The tourists vanished. So did the rabbi. The pandemic forced a theological rethinking: Waltl discovered liberal Judaism through the Central Synagogue of New York’s online programming and began working with a rabbi from Luxembourg, who now visits several times a year alongside a rabbi from Vienna. When there is money to bring them, they come.
Oct. 7 transformed the center’s situation entirely. On November 6, 2023, someone painted a large swastika equated with a Star of David on the center’s front door. The Jewish graveyard was desecrated during the Festival of Tolerance. When Waltl attempted to screen footage from the Hamas attack for the city’s diplomatic corps, hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside and tried to set the doors on fire. The screening was cancelled. There is no Israeli embassy in Slovenia, and no other address for the anger. “In their eyes, we represent Israel,” Waltl says. “We represent everything bad happening in the Middle East.”
Today the center carries a 60,000-euro mortgage taken out for emergency renovations after earthquakes damaged the 500-year-old building, leaving water leaking and unsustainable structural issues. Robert thought that he would receive some sort of financial help from the government to keep this, the only Jewish center in the country, running, but he was unpleasantly surprised to have received none. Since Oct. 7 the relationship with the government soured even more: the prime minister and the president used to show up for Holocaust Remembrance Day and Chanukah festivities, but stopped, says Waltl.
This month, Slovenia changed leadership again, with Israel ally Janez Janša returning as prime minister.
Some other signs of hope: The Rothschild Foundation recently awarded a grant for the country’s first permanent exhibition on Jewish history in Slovenia, set to open this September. The German Embassy contributed 3,000 euros. American tourists — a growing presence — help cover operating costs through summer donations. But the structural problem remains unchanged: roughly 150 Jews, one institution, and a government that adopted the expansive International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which encompasses anti-Israel actions, while declining to fund the sole organization actually sustaining the community.
“If I say I will stop doing this,” Waltl says, “there will be no Jewish life in Slovenia anymore.”
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Volatility, Hit Frequency, and RTP: Why the Number Casinos Advertise Is the Least Useful One
The return to player percentage looks clean as a casino data point. It gives players a neat number, usually around 94% to 97% for many online slots, and that number feels easy to compare. A 96.5% game appears better than a 95.2% game. The problem starts when players treat RTP as a forecast for their next 50 spins or one evening.
You may find the RTP listed on slot pages on a leading online casino in Ontario, but the number only tells part of the story. Two games can share the same RTP and create different sessions: one may return small wins often, while the other may drain a balance before one bonus round changes everything.
The RTP Trap
Return to player (RTP) measures the theoretical share of total wagers a game returns across a very large number of rounds. In plain terms, a 96% RTP slot returns about $96 for every $100 wagered in the long run. That does not mean one player who deposits $100 should expect $96 back.
The trap sits in the word “theoretical.” RTP comes from the game’s math model. It works across huge samples, not personal sessions. A player can finish far above that percentage, far below it, or with nothing left after a short run of poor results.
Is it useless then? No, RTP can still help. It gives a baseline cost of play. Lower-RTP games cost more on average than higher-RTP games. Still, once a game passes a reasonable threshold, the next question matters more: how does it distribute that return?
Hit Frequency: The Number That Shapes Session Feel
Hit frequency tells you how often a game produces a winning outcome. This often misleads players because any win can count. A spin that returns $0.10 on a $1 bet may still count as a hit, even though the player lost $0.90 in real terms.
A game can feel active because symbols connect often, sounds play, and the screen keeps celebrating small returns. The balance may still fall. In many modern slots, “win” does not always mean profit on the spin.
Hit frequency answers one practical question: how much silence can you tolerate? Some players dislike long dry spells. Others accept quieter sessions because they chase bonus rounds or larger payouts.
The educational site Get Gambling Facts gives a useful distinction: RTP concerns the percentage of money returned over time, while hit frequency concerns how often a machine stops on a winning combination.
Volatility: The Risk Label Players Need More Often
Volatility, also called variance, describes how unevenly a game pays. Low-volatility games tend to return smaller amounts more often. High-volatility games hold more value in rare events: bonus rounds, premium symbols, multipliers, or jackpots.
Here is where RTP becomes less useful on its own:
- A 96% low-volatility slot may give modest returns and longer play from the same balance.
- A 96% high-volatility slot may burn through funds quickly unless the player hits a strong feature.
- A progressive jackpot game may look exciting, but it often places more value on rare top prizes.
The same RTP can hide very different risk profiles. Players who ignore volatility often blame the casino or the game when the session follows its math design.
Why the Same RTP Can Feel So Different
Picture two slots with 96% RTP. Slot A pays small wins on many spins, has a modest top prize, and rarely creates dramatic balance swings. Slot B pays less often but offers a large max win and volatile bonus rounds. The advertised return matches, but the experience does not.
Slot A may suit a player who wants a slower bankroll drop and more regular feedback. Slot B suits someone who accepts sharper losses in exchange for a shot at a heavier payout.
A Better Way to Read a Slot Page
Most slot pages give players more clues than they notice. The trick is to read the details together rather than chase the highest percentage.
Start with RTP. If two games look similar, the higher number has better long-term value. Then check volatility. If the game uses terms such as high, very high, or extreme variance, lower your bet size or expect shorter sessions. Next, look at the paytable. A huge max win usually means the game saves a lot of its value for rare outcomes.
A sensible pre-play check looks like this:
- RTP: What is the average long-term return?
- Volatility: How rough can the session become?
- Hit frequency: How often will the game show any wins?
- Paytable: Where does most value sit?
To Conclude
Casinos advertise RTP because it looks objective, tidy, and easy to rank. Players should read it, but they should not give it more authority than it deserves. For long sessions, volatility may matter more than a small RTP difference. For comfort, hit frequency may explain the feel better than the payback rate.
