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Mamdani appoints Phylisa Wisdom, progressive Jewish leader, to run Office to Combat Antisemitism
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has picked Phylisa Wisdom, the executive director of the progressive New York Jewish Agenda, to lead the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism. This announcement comes as the city grapples with a sharp rise in antisemitic attacks and as the Mamdani administration faces scrutiny from the Jewish community following a divisive election that turned, in part, on Mamdani’s positions on Israel.
Wisdom, 39, has aligned herself with some of the positions Mamdani has taken on countering antisemitism, including opposition to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic. Mamdani has thus far declined to say how his administration will define antisemitism when determining which cases to investigate or pursue. Wisdom has also called for more sympathy towards Palestinians, and in November 2023, Wisdom’s organization, under her leadership, spearheaded a statement by liberal Jewish elected officials calling for a bilateral ceasefire in Gaza.
In her new role, Wisdom will serve as Mamdani’s point person to the Jewish community. Her appointment is another signal that Mamdani’s anti-Zionist posture will continue to factor importantly into his leadership of the city, which is home to the largest concentration of Jews outside Israel. Her challenge will be facilitating dialogue with people who hold widely diverging viewpoints, without overriding a mayor whose positions on Israel are deeply held and long-standing.
Wisdom told Jewish Insider last month that Mamdani’s pledge to tackle the scourge of antisemitism “will require a comprehensive strategy” with input from the diversity of New York’s Jewish community.
The office’s current executive director, Moshe Davis, is a holdover of the Adams administration.
Josh Binderman, a political strategist who handled Jewish outreach during the mayoral campaign and transition, will continue in a leadership role under the agency headed by Wisdom, a City Hall spokesperson said. Binderman was Mamdani’s informal Jewish liaison in the opening days of the new administration. He worked with both allies of the mayor and leaders of mainstream Jewish organizations who are unsettled by Mamdani.
Mamdani’s first month
The appointment comes as antisemitic incidents continue to account for a majority of reported hate crimes in New York City. According to the New York City Police Department, antisemitic incidents made up 57% of all hate crimes reported in 2025. The trend continued into the new year: NYPD data show that more than half of all hate crime incidents reported in January were targeted at Jews or Jewish spaces, including a rabbi who was verbally harassed and assaulted, and swastika graffiti that, two days in a row, appeared at a playground frequented by Orthodox families in the Borough Park neighborhood in Brooklyn.
More recently, Mamdani drew praise from Jewish leaders for his rapid and forceful response to the attempted car attack at Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters.
Mamdani said the office, established by former Mayor Eric Adams last year through an executive order, will pursue his commitment to addressing rising acts of hate against Jews. The office is tasked with monitoring antisemitic incidents, coordinating city agencies, engaging with Jewish communities across the city and advising the mayor on policy responses to antisemitism and related hate crimes. Mamdani opted to keep the office open while revoking, as one of his first acts in office, executive orders tied to antisemitism.
Mamdani faced a rocky first month in navigating Jewish communal concerns. His Day One move to repeal the adoption of the controversial IHRA definition, which the office to combat antisemitism pursued as a framework for investigating hate crimes, prompted swift backlash from mainstream Jewish organizations. A week later, he was criticized for his response to protests outside Park East Synagogue. City Hall quietly engaged Jewish leaders to defuse tensions, but Mamdani’s eventual statement that “chants in support of a terrorist organization have no place in our city” came later than many had hoped and was viewed by critics as restrained and overly cautious.
Last week, City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who is Jewish, announced a new task force dedicated to combating antisemitism; its co-chairs said the group would take a more assertive legislative role in addressing rising concerns among Jewish New Yorkers. One of its co-chairs is Inna Vernikov, a Republican and Mamdani critic, which could set up potential tension between the City Council and the mayor’s office over how to respond to the rise in antisemitism.
Mamdani also expressed reservations about legislation proposed by Menin to create a 100-foot buffer zone around synagogues and other houses of worship. “I wouldn’t sign any legislation that we find to be outside of the bounds of the law,” he said. However, he broadly supports the Council’s five-point plan to combat antisemitism, including $1.25 million in funding for the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the creation of a city hotline to report antisemitic incidents, he said.
Who is Phylisa Wisdom?
Born and raised in San Diego, California, she grew up in the Reform movement, actively engaged in NFTY, and learned advocacy through the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center under Rabbi David Saperstein. Wisdom is a member of Park Slope’s Congregation Beth Elohim, where Mamdani addressed the congregation while running for mayor.
Wisdom’s positions and past work drew scrutiny from some Orthodox leaders as rumors of her possible appointment began to circulate recently. She previously served as director of government affairs for Yaffed, a pro–secular education group that scrutinized private yeshivas in Brooklyn over inadequate secular education.
In 2023, Wisdom was tapped as head of the New York Jewish Agenda, a progressive advocacy group formed in 2020 to be a voice for liberal Jews in New York. On a recent webinar, Wisdom described her group’s mission as advocating, organizing and convening “liberal Jewish New Yorkers to impact policy, politics and communal discourse.”
The group criticized Adams’ Jewish advisory council in 2023 because it overrepresented the Orthodox community and men.
On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, NYJA — whose founders include Rep. Jerry Nadler and former City Comptroller Brad Lander, both of whom describe themselves as liberal Zionists — has backed a two-state solution and called for a rights-based and humane approach toward Palestinians living under occupation. It is listed as a member of the Progressive Israel Network. In public statements and on social media, Wisdom has criticized Israeli settlement expansion while also stressing the security and safety of Israelis. Under her predecessor, Matt Nosanchuk, the group advocated for missions to Israel to learn firsthand about the conflict from Israelis and Palestinians. (Mamdani has said he would not continue the tradition of mayoral visits to the Jewish state.)
“We believe that legitimate criticism of policies of the government of Israel is not inherently antisemitic, and those who weaponize it only undermine our efforts and put us in harm’s way,” Wisdom wrote in an op-ed during the mayoral election. “While it is not necessarily antisemitic to criticize Israel, there are those who are antisemitic who use criticism of Israel as a mask for their antisemitism.”
Wisdom was a member of Mamdani’s inaugural committee and hosted him at a Hanukkah celebration for the leadership of the liberal Jewish group. In his remarks at the Hanukkah event, Mamdani said he associates himself with NYJA in “the bringing together of people” on critical issues.
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75 artifacts tell the fitful, inspiring, unfinished story of Jews in America
In May 1818, Mordecai Manuel Noah, a prominent Jew of his time and a member of the Madison administration, delivered a discourse on Jewish history on the occasion of a synagogue consecration. One man read Noah’s words with interest, and took pen to paper to say so.
“Your sect by its sufferings has furnished a remarkable proof of the universal spirit of religious intolerance,” the correspondent noted, in elegant cursive. “Our laws have applied the only antidote to this vice, protecting our religious, as they do our civil, rights by putting them all on equal footing. But more remains to be done, for although we are free by the law, we are not so in practice.”
The letter’s author was Thomas Jefferson. 200 years later, there’s still work to do.
The Jefferson letter is one of 75 objects on view at All We Have Standing Between Us: 250 Years of Jews and American Democracy, the American Jewish Historical Society’s new exhibit at the Center for Jewish History. Arranged in chronological order, from the outbreak of the Revolution to the tiki torches of Charlottesville, the survey takes stock of the at times harmonious but very often discordant, relationship between American Jews and the country, and among themselves.
“One of the throughlines is that for 250 years, American Jews have certainly not been a monolithic community in terms of how they’ve approached key issues,” said Gavriel Rosenfeld, president for the Center for Jewish History.
To that end, visitors can see Shearith Israel’s hazzan Gershom Mendes Seixas’ patriot prayer for the Continental Congress and, a vitrine or two away, a sampler from the loyalist Hendricks family of Psalm 78, whose words were associated with a pro-monarchist sentiment.
Most Jews lived in the Union at the outbreak of the Civil War, but currency with Judah Benjamin’s face, from the Confederate Secretary’s own collection, is proof of just how embedded Southern Jews were in their communities. A telegram nearby, denouncing General Grant’s wartime expulsion order for the Jews of Kentucky, shows how tenuous Jewish belonging was.
The story was never only one of brother against brother. Moving into the 20th Century, with wall text addressing the Gilded Age, we see how American Jews confronted the revival of the Klan and the “Cross of Gold” populism of William Jennings Bryan with the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe. (An explanation of Woodrow Wilson’s veto of a literacy test for immigrants is displayed, as is a scroll inviting well-heeled Jews to a Purim benefit for new arrivals.)
The Anti-Defamation League, a copy of whose founding charter is on display, was formed after the conviction of Leo Frank. But by the 1950s, with the Red Scare gathering storm clouds, the ADL Bulletin dismissed the claim that the Rosenberg trial was animated by antisemitism.
“This is the latest propaganda tactic with which the Communist Party hopes to bludgeon the Jewish community to its support,” Oliver Pilat wrote in March 1952.
Fissures in the community continued with the Civil Rights Movement.
That Jews played an outsized role in the push for Black equality — attested to by Ben Shahn’s lithographs of James Chaney and Northern Jews Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — is contextualized with the objections of their Southern coreligionists, who feared the blowback of their neighbors.
Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, and Midge Decter savaged it in Commentary. The so-called culture wars that dominate our discourse today are nothing new.
Among the more recent acquisitions are former U.S. Representative Steve Israel’s handwritten notes on a Sept. 13, 2001 FEMA briefing, marking the start of a new American reality. But one is struck by how much remains the same.
A signed photo of Nita Lowey shaking hands with Barack Obama — a Jewish congresswoman and a Black president— was unthinkable in the days of Jefferson and Noah, but their dynamic was not dissimilar from those two men. The intolerance Jefferson wrote about has not abated, only shifted its focus. A Time report on the Unite the Right Rally tells the tale.
The exhibit stops short of the pandemic, Oct. 7 and the emerging rifts among American Jews and their neighbors. That history is still in progress.
“Longer than there’s been a country, there have been Jews,” said Gemma Birnbaum, executive director of the AJHS. At first it was only 23 off the boat to New Amsterdam, she said, but the Jewish story has always been a part of the American one.
Birnbaum and Rosenfeld want visitors to recognize continuities in the unfinished American Revolution, both the progress and the work that remains. Sometimes, this means reassuring visitors. One thing they’re asked a lot: “Does it ever get better?”
“What is better?” Birnbaum asks. “There are times when things are really difficult, and there are times when things feel a little less difficult. And if you can take inspiration from that — to me, I find it grounding.”
The American Jewish Historical Society’s exhibit All We Have Standing Between Us: 250 Years of Jews and American Democracy is on view at the Center for Jewish History through Dec. 31, 2026.
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Diary of a Jewish ghetto refugee, written in a pigsty
אין דער װעלט פֿון ייִדיש איז בערל כּהנס נאָמען גוט באַקאַנט צוליב זײַנע היסטאָרישע און ביבליאָגראַפֿישע שטודיעס, צװישן זײ — דער צוגאָב־באַנד צו דעם „לעקסיקאָן פֿון דער נײַער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור“ און „ייִדישע שטעט, שטעטלעך און דאָרפֿישע ייִשובים אין ליטע ביז 1918“.
אָבער זײַן ערשט בוך איז געװען דער חורבן־טאָגבוך „אַ ייִד אין װאַלד“, װאָס איז אַרױס אין ניו־יאָרק אין 1955. דאָ דערצײלט כּהן װעגן צען חדשים אונטער דער דײַטשישער אָקופּאַציע פֿון ליטע צװישן אָקטאָבער 1943 און אױגוסט 1944. די דאָזיקע צײַט האָט ער, אין אײנעם מיט זיבן אַנדערע פּליטים פֿונעם קאָװנער געטאָ, פֿאַרבראַכט אין אַ באַהעלטעניש טיף אין ליטװישע װעלדער.
איצט, העכער װי 70 יאָר נאָך דער פּובליקאַציע פֿון דעם ייִדישן טאָגבוך, איז עס סוף־כּל־סוף אַרױס אױף ענגליש מיטן טיטל, „אַ ייִד אין וואַלד: זײַטלעך פֿון אַ טאָגבוך“.
פֿאַר דער מלחמה איז כּהן געװען אַן אַקטיװער לינקער ציוניסט און האָט געשריבן פֿאַר קאָװנער ייִדישע צײַטונגען. װען די דײַטשן האָבן פֿאַרכאַפּט די שטאָט, האָט ער זיך געפֿונען אינעם געטאָ אין דער ייִדישער פֿאָרשטאָט סלאַבאָדקע.
„אין דער צװײטער העלפֿט פֿון 1943 זײַנען די אילוזיעס פֿון די פֿאַרשפּאָרטע ייִדן אין סלאַבאָדקער געטאָ אַריבערצולעבן היטלערן געװאָרן אַלץ שװאַכער.“ אַזױ הײבט כּהן אָן די דערצײלונג װעגן זײַן ראַטעװען זיך פֿונעם חורבן.
כּהן, זײַן פֿרױ ראַיע און איר שװעסטער נחמה זײַנען אַנטלאָפֿן פֿונעם געטאָ מיט דער הילף פֿון אַ ליטװישן פּױער טאַדעוש. ער האָט זײ פֿאַרבאַהאַלטן אינעם חזיר־שטאַל בײַ זײַן שטוב אין אַ װײַטן דערפֿל אין מיטן װאַלד.
אין זײַנע נאָטיצן האָט כּהן פֿאַרפֿיקסירט פּרטים פֿון זײער טאָג־טעגלעכן לעבן מיט אַלע דאגות, אַנגסטן און האָפֿענונגען. ער האָט אױך געפּרוּװט צו באַזיניקן דאָס, װאָס עס קומט פֿאָר מיט זײ און מיט אַנדערע ייִדן, כאָטש קײן פֿאַרלאָזלעכע ידיעות פֿון דער ברײטערער װעלט האָט ער ניט געקענט קריגן.
פֿאַרװאָס האָט אַן עלטערער ליטװינער באַשלאָסן צו ראַטעװען ייִדן? טאַדעוש האָט דערקלערט: „איך טו עס ניט דערפֿאַר, װאָס איך װיל פֿאַרדינען געלט. איך בין שױן אַלט – און דאָס געלט אין דער ערד װעל איך סײַ װי ניט מיטנעמען. איך װיל אָבער, אַז ס׳זאָל ניט פֿאַרגאָסן װערן נאָך אומשולדיק בלוט. װאָלט איך געקענט װאָלט איך געראַטעװעט נאָך ייִדן, קען איך עס ניט, װעל איך באַשיצן די, װעמען איך האָב יאָ געראַטעװעט.“
אינעם טאָגבוך ווײַזט כּהן אַרויס אַ סך דרך־ארץ פֿאַר טאַדעוש און זײַן פֿרױ באַרבאַראַ, װאָס שטעלן אײַן זײער לעבן פֿאַר פֿרעמדע מענטשן. ער פֿרעגט זיך: „װיפֿל ייִדן װאָלטן געווען פֿעיִק אַזױנס צו טאָן?“
יעדע מינוט קען װערן די לעצטע פֿאַר די ייִדישע פּליטים אינעם שטאַל. אָבער כּהן איז געװױר אױך פֿונעם שװערן מצבֿ פֿון די ליטװינער: „פֿון דײַטשן װילן זײ פּטור װערן, אָבער דעם רוס װילן זײ אױך ניט האָבן.“
די גרעסטע סכּנה פֿאַר ייִדישע פּליטים קומט טאַקע ניט פֿון די דײַטשן, װאָס באַװײַזן זיך זעלטן אין יענע טיף־באַגראָבענע מקומות, נאָר פֿון די שכנישע פּױערים און פֿון די ליטװישע פּאַרטיזאַנער, װאָס הרגענען ייִדן.
אָבער די מיאוסטע פּאַרשױנען אינעם בוך זײַנען ניט קײן דײַטשן און ניט קײן ליטװינער, נאָר צװײ מיטגלידער פֿון זײער גרופּע — דער „אַמאָליקער פּריץ“ און זײַן פֿרױ. פֿאַר דער מלחמה האָט דער דאָזיקער ייִד געפֿירט געשעפֿטן אין דער געגנט און איצט האַלט ער, אַז די אָרטיקע פּױערים זײַנען אים מחויבֿ צו העלפֿן.
זײַן אַני־מאמין איז געװען „כּל־זמן מע לעבט, דאַרף מען מאַכן געשעפֿטן.“ און ער האָט טאַקע געװאָלט באַקומען רװח אַפֿילו פֿון די פּליטים אינעם אײגענעם שטאַל.
אָבער װאָרעם זײ האָבן ניט געהאַט מיט װאָס צו באַצאָלן, האָט זיך דער פּריץ ניט געטײלט מיט זײ מיטן עסן, װאָס ער האָט געקױפֿט בײַ די פּױערים: „די אַמאָליקע ייִדישע פּריצים עסן פֿאַר אונזערע אױגן פֿלײש און אַלדאָס גוטס – און מיר זיצן און חלומען װעגן אַ שטיקל טרוקן ברױט“, פֿאַרשרײַבט כּהן אינעם טאָגבוך.
אַפֿילו אין יענע ביטערע באַדינגונגען האָט כּהן אָפּגעהיט אַן אײגנאַרטיקן חוש פֿון הומאָר. דאָס קומט פֿאָר למשל אין זײַנע שילדערונגען פֿון די באַציִונגען צװישן ייִדן און דעם חזיר: „אונדזער אײנציקער ׳ניט־ייִדישער׳ שכן אין שײַער איז – דער חזיריוק. אַזױ װי מע קען דאָך ניט פֿיר און צװאַנציק שעה אין מעת־לעת טראַכטן װעגן טױט – קוקט מען גאָר אָפֿט אױפֿן קלײנעם חזיר. די עקלדיקסטע באַשעפֿעניש פֿאַר אַ ייִד […] װאַקסט ברוך־השם פֿון טאָג [צו טאָג].“
מאַקס ראָזענפֿעלדס ענגלישע איבערזעצונג פֿונעם טאָגבוך איז גאַנץ פּינקטלעך און פֿליסיק, אָבער זי גיט ניט איבער דעם אײגנאַרטיקן טעם פֿון כּהנס פּראָזע.
אָט איז אַ משל: אײן טאָג אַנטלױפֿט דער חזיר פֿונעם שטאַל און ייִדן מוזן זיך יאָגן נאָך אים כּדי צו ברענגען אים צוריק. כּהן באַשרײַבט דאָס בזה הלשון: „מיר פֿירן דעם דבֿר־אחר צו זײַן מקום־מקלט“. אָבער אױף ענגליש קלינגט דאָס פּשוט: „we are taking him back to the barn“. דאָ איז ניטאָ קײן שפּור פֿון כּהנס איראָניע, װאָס שטאַמט פֿון זײַן שפּיל מיט לשון־קדוש.
דער חורבן־היסטאָריקער יצחק ארד האָט אָפּגעשאַצט, אַז בערך 25,000 ייִדן זײַנען אַנטלאָפֿן פֿון די געטאָס אין װעלדער בעתן חורבן. אַרום 15,000 פֿון זײ האָבן זיך צוגעשטאַנען צו די סאָװעטישע פּאַרטיזאַנער, בעת 10,000 האָבן געפּרוּװט איבערלעבן אין קלײנע גרופּקעס, אָפֿט מאָל מיט דער הילף פֿון ניט־ייִדישע פּױערים.
די גענױע צאָל פֿון די, װאָס האָבן זיך געראַטעװעט אונטער אַזעלכע ביטערע און געפֿערלרכע באַדינגונגען, װעט מען קײן מאָל ניט װיסן, זאָגט ארד. װאָס איז יאָ זיכער, איז אַז זײער צאָל איז געװען אַ סך קלענער אײדער די צאָל פֿון די, װעמען עס האָט זיך אײַגעגעבן צו אַנטלױפֿן פֿון די געטאָס.
כּהנס טאָגבוך איז ניט נאָר אַ ביז גאָר װיכטיקער היסטאָרישער מקור װעגן דער דאָזיקער דערפֿאַרונג, אָבער אױך אַ מערקװירדיקער מענטשלעכער דאָקומענט און אַ פֿאַרכאַפּנדיקע לעקטור דערצו.
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Dr. Bronner’s soap mixes Israeli and Palestinian olive oil — and dodges product boycotts
When members of Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop’s voted earlier this year to boycott Israeli products, among the items to instantly disappear from shelves was bottled olive oil made by Sindyanna of Galilee, an Arab-Jewish nonprofit cooperative.
But that same olive oil is still sold at the coop — and at retailers around the world. That’s because Sindyanna is a supplier for Dr. Bronner’s, the hippie, all-natural “All-One” soap company with a cult following in the conscious consumer crowd, immediately recognizable by colorful packaging blanketed in tiny white lettering promoting health and spiritual healing. (“Absolute cleanliness is Godliness!”)
David Bronner, the CEO, or “Cosmic Engagement Officer,” in the company’s parlance, is no stranger to advocacy on behalf of Palestinians, even as they have built a business operation with a substantial presence in Israel. (Bronner uses he/they pronouns.)
Bronner understood U.S. boycott activists’ desire to send a message on behalf of Palestinians — but questioned a ban so sweeping it caught an Arab-Jewish peace project in its net.
“Obviously, Sindyanna should not be part of that. That’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” Bronner said in an interview with the Forward. “But unfortunately, understandable with how things are going.”
While most companies have avoided wading into the Israel-Hamas war at almost any cost, Dr. Bronner’s has taken the opposite approach, one that resonates with the All-One philosophy of shared humanity and coexistence.
“In all we do, let us be generous, fair & loving to Spaceship Earth and all its inhabitants,” the label declares. “For we’re ALL-ONE OR NONE!”
On Monday, the company ratcheted up the message with social media posts promoting a special edition “Land of Canaan” label that urges “PROMOTE PEACE IN PALESTINE!” and is available exclusively at screenings of a documentary by that name about olive growers.
Citing the U.S. Freedom Riders, the post declares: “We call on all Jewish Americans and Israelis of conscience to acknowledge and confront the Jewish supremacy and lust for Palestinian land within Israel, and to not deny the reality of what lies at the center of Israeli power, politics, and policy.”
Bronner’s stance in support of the Israeli and West Bank olive industry while condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinians takes a path that diverges from the boycott movement even as it is far to the left of most Israeli public opinion — one that Bronner acknowledges may not hold.
The company condemns Israeli occupation of the West Bank while insisting on the depth of Jewish ties to the land, buys from farmers on both sides of the Green Line, and sympathizes with boycotts even as it declines to join them.
“By taking a middle position, you’re not making either audience particularly happy, and maybe even making them unhappy because you didn’t side with them,” said Brayden King, a professor of management at Northwestern University who studies boycotts and corporate activism. “There’s no evidence to suggest it’s a winning strategy for a company.”
Dr. Bronner’s is not new to controversy — or the publicity it brings. It has made a business of staking out stances that other corporations have retreated from amid the backlash to DEI under the Trump administration, including a partnership with the ACLU Foundation that put a rainbow Pride label on its soap this June.
If Israel’s far right succeeds in annexing the West Bank, he told the Forward, a South Africa–style global boycott is coming, and “even we’re going to need to think about it.”
For now, though, Bronner is holding his ground in a shrinking middle. In a May 2023 blog post, months before the Hamas attacks, Bronner called Israel’s rule over the West Bank “apartheid.” But Bronner, who visited the Nova festival site and the kibbutzim of the Gaza envelope in February, and who calls the Hamas attacks “horrendous,” also says, “I fully believe that this is the ancestral homeland for Jewish people. But with seven million Israeli Jews and seven million Palestinians between the river and the sea, no one’s going anywhere, and you’re going to figure out how to live together.”
Love and struggle
Bronner is, by any measure, a peacenik, one who has treated the family soap business as an instrument of what the company calls “constructive engagement,” fostering coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, even knowing that a stand for peace would please neither side.
It’s a stance the company can afford. Since the current generation of Bronners took over in 1998, annual revenue has grown from an estimated $4 million to roughly $250 million, all while capping David’s salary at five times that of the lowest-paid full-time employee.
Growing up, Bronner had little interest in joining the family business. He had watched the strain the company’s esoteric philosophy caused in his family. His father, raised largely in foster homes while his grandfather preached universal love, wanted nothing to do with it. Bronner recalled his father on the phone with his grandfather, snapping, “I don’t want to hear that All-One crap,” and hanging up.
Bronner didn’t get it either, until, after college, a series of psychedelic experiences changed their mind. During one, in Amsterdam, he said, he came to a realization, “Oh my gosh, my granddad’s right. All the faith traditions are pointing at this truth.”
He let his father know he was ready to come back to the company, and in the winter of 1996 he visited his grandfather, by then in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s. “I remember combing his hair, letting him know that I fully understood him, and that I was going to dedicate my life to his passion,” Bronner said. His grandfather died months later, on the same day, Bronner noted, that his first child was born.
While Bronner is a fifth-generation soapmaker, he has given the role his own flair, not only swapping the traditional CEO title but making activism a foundational part of the business, from a court fight with the DEA over hemp imports to funding drug policy reform and psychedelic research.
But the activism is less a departure from the family business than a return to its roots, which run through the Holocaust.
In the 1920s and ’30s, the family’s soap could be found in public washrooms across Germany. “My great aunt Lottie would be pointing up at the Zeppelins, like, ‘Our family’s soaps are up there,” Bronner recalled.
The Heilbronners — Emanuel dropped the “Heil” from the family name after emigrating due to its echo of the Nazi salute — were a highly assimilated German Jewish family.
“Like a lot of bourgeois Jews that thought they were going to ride out the madness, [they] stayed until it was too late,” Bronner said.
His great-grandparents both died in the Holocaust, Berthold at Theresienstadt in 1942, and his wife, Franziska, at Auschwitz in 1944.
“My granddad had some kind of mystical break,” Bronner said, “this huge experience of oneness and love at the heart of existence, even in the magnitude of the suffering and the tragedy.”
This is the story behind the label that has captivated customers for decades, thousands of words of moral philosophy crammed into ever-shrinking type. (Emanuel, who went blind in the early 1970s, kept refining the message, Bronner jokes that the family had to admit their label “was designed by a blind man,” and is now in size six font.)
“He urgently felt that in a nuclear-armed world, if we didn’t realize our transcendent unity across religious and ethnic divides, that we’re all children of the same divine source, we’re going to kill ourselves and perish in the next Holocaust,” Bronner said.
The label preaches that unity in its own ecstatic register, placing “mason, tent & sandalmaker Hillel, carpenter Jesus, camel-driver Mohammed” side by side among the “hard-working, brave men that built all civilization”
While part of the family fled to the United States, his great aunt Lottie left for Palestine in 1936, at 19, and eventually settled on a kibbutz. Bronner recalled hearing her stories during childhood visits, “Just her story and the kibbutz, forging this incredible life, this radical socialist experiment.”
‘Constructive engagement’
But the miracle of Israel lost its glimmer for Bronner, as it has for many American Jews. A new AP-NORC poll found that only about 4 in 10 younger religious Jewish adults say supporting Israel is highly important to their Jewish identity, compared with about half of their elders.
For Bronner, the first crack came during an early visit to Israel. “I remember, like, wow, there’s all these really old Palestinian towns everywhere,” he recalled. “It was kind of dissonant a little bit.”
Dr. Bronner’s went organic in 2003, and when Bronner went searching online for fair trade suppliers of its olive oil, “the only thing that came up for any of it was Canaan Fair Trade, out of the West Bank, in Palestine,” they recalled. “And I was like, ‘Oh, this is interesting.’”
He decided to lean in, reaching out to Canaan’s founder, Nasser Abufarha, a Palestinian-born anthropologist who had brought the fair trade ethos home from Wisconsin. But first came a debate over how to source olive oil from the West Bank without taking sides. Adam Eidinger, the company’s director of social action, told him they should go “50-50 with oil from Israel.”
“Israel is a first-world country, the fair trade ethos is about the developing world,” Bronner recalled responding. “But we don’t want to look like we’re being anti-Israel about this.”
In classic Dr. Bronner’s fashion, they settled on a middle ground: 90% of the company’s olive oil would come from Palestinian farmers in the West Bank, and 10% from Israel, half from a Jewish family farm, and half from Sindyanna. “So we got Muslim, Jewish, Christian olive oil in the soap,” Bronner said, in true All-One fashion. “Really proud of that.”
But the war in Gaza and the backlash to it, including boycott campaigns aimed at Israeli products and companies operating in West Bank settlements, have put Dr. Bronner’s in a bind of its own design, a company that condemns West Bank occupation, caught up in a boycott of Israel.
Whoever else shares the blame, Bronner puts most of it on Israel’s government, even for the Brooklyn food coop boycott.
“This messianic right wing that’s got the wheel in Israel is a nightmare, and is, I think, to blame for a lot of what’s happening, these kinds of things happening at, like, Park Slope,” he said.
The Park Slope Food Coop, in response to a request for comment from the Forward, noted that Dr. Bronner’s own products remain on its shelves. The boycott, it said, covers only goods made in Israel, not companies that source from it.
PSFC4Palestine, the member group that led the boycott campaign, did not respond to multiple requests for comment on why Dr. Bronner’s products were not included.
Bronner said he is “totally sympathetic to the BDS movement as one strategy,” even as his company has chosen what he calls “constructive engagement” instead.
But if Park Slope’s boycotters find Bronner’s company too entangled with Israel, his Israeli partners have the opposite complaint. His distributors there, he said, were disappointed by his February blog post, which paired a photo of the mailboxes at Kibbutz Nir Oz, marked for residents killed or kidnapped on Oct. 7, with an argument that Israel’s government had weaponized the trauma of that day to accelerate its takeover of the West Bank.
“They thought I could have been a little more empathic on the Israeli side,” Bronner said. Still, he seems to have made his peace with the price of standing in the middle.
“We’re not exactly how all our allies, on either side, would like us to be,” he said. “That’s part of the challenge.”
The post Dr. Bronner’s soap mixes Israeli and Palestinian olive oil — and dodges product boycotts appeared first on The Forward.
