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‘Married to the Mob,’ but under a chuppah: A new memoir details a Jewish family’s crime ties
(New York Jewish Week) — The Geiks weren’t your typical Bronx working-class Jewish family.
One brother ran a mob-protected trucking company in Manhattan’s Garment District. Another brother, an NYPD detective, chauffeured organized crime couriers around the city with illicit cash. Their kid sister visited a Las Vegas casino where the tween was set up with a couple of slot machines in a private room.
And a close family friend was sent up the river for killing a notorious Jewish gangster.
Meet the family whose close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz,” a memoir just published by Alan Geik.
Dutch Schultz was the mob name of Arthur Flegenheimer, the Jewish bootlegger and numbers racket kingpin who left this mortal coil in October 1935 at the Palace Chop House in Newark. The triggermen were two Jews, members of the organized crime group Murder Inc. Mendy Weiss and Charles “Bug” Workman, the Uncle Charlie of the memoir’s title, did the hit.
Workman, who reportedly killed more than 20 people before pleading guilty to the murder of Dutch Schultz, was not a blood relative of author Alan Geik. But Workman grew up with Geik’s father on the Lower East Side and was so close to the Geik family he was considered an uncle. The author was in his 20s when he first met Workman, after the hitman was released from a New Jersey prison in 1964.
“I would never think of calling him anything but Uncle Charlie,” said Geik, 80, a retired TV producer and radio host who lives in Las Vegas.
In addition to diving deep into Workman’s story, the book also explores how Jewish mobsters and their hangers-on fought antisemitism, beat up Nazis and helped a fledgling Israel acquire arms for its War of Independence.
“These were people, from the first generation of Jews in America, who fought back against antisemitism in the streets,” Geik said. “Their parents fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe. They were not going to let it happen again and they didn’t.”
Geik’s book joins a crowded shelf of histories and memoirs of the Jewish mob, including “But He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters,” by Robert A. Rockaway, and “Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams,” by Rich Cohen. Like those books, Geik’s family history provides a sort of reverse image of typical Jewish immigrant stories: Instead of scrapping their way up from New York’s Jewish enclaves into retail and the professions, Geik’s family joined a criminal counterculture.
Alan Geik’s family’s close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in a just-published memoir, “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz.” (Sonador Publishing)
Books such as Geik’s “really put a personal experience to this whole world that we all know about, the world of New York mobsters,” said Larry Henry, author of a monthly column for the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. “The public’s appetite for mob stories is insatiable.”
“Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz” describes a tangled family tree ripe with, well, rotten apples. Geik’s father, Lou, was not actually in the mob but did reap benefits from his ties with organized crime, Alan concedes. Lou Geik was one of several individuals who delivered mob cash to Workman’s family over 23 years.
“Uncle Charlie felt indebted to my father,” said Geik.
The author’s father is cited as a source for many of the anecdotes included in the memoir. Geik said that while his father’s business relied on mob protection, Lou Geik didn’t have “that extra whatever-it-took to be a really hardened criminal” — a trait, he said, his own older brother Bernard also lacked.
“My brother always wanted to be a gangland figure,” said Alan Geik. “So, instead my brother became a policeman.”
An ultimately very corrupt policeman. Bernard Geik joined the force in 1962 and resigned in 1971 after serving in the notorious Special Investigative Unit, which, as depicted in the book and the motion picture “Prince of the City,” devolved into an extortion ring. After resigning from the NYPD, Bernard Geik was arrested for bribery and bribe-taking in 1974. He reportedly pleaded guilty but served no time.
The disgraced detective went to work at his father’s trucking company. According to the author, his brother was one of the detectives provided by a supervisor to drive their Uncle George and other mobsters around town when they were transporting mob money in New York.
Uncle George Gordon was a real uncle. Gordon is allegedly one of the gangsters the actor George Raft modeled himself after for his roles in 1930s and ’40s crime melodramas. For decades, beginning at a casino and speakeasy near the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan, Gordon had a big hand in organized crime’s gambling operations, supervising enterprises in Florida, the Midwest, Las Vegas and Havana.
Alan Geik isn’t the only keeper of his family’s convoluted story. His sister Iris has her own memories of growing up mob-adjacent, such as when she and her parents were Gordon’s guests at the Stardust Hotel in Vegas when the mob was running its casino and skimming cash from the profits. Gordon wanted Lou Geik to work there.
According to Iris, Gordon posted a guard outside a private room in which she had been ensconced with a couple of slot machines. The 13-year-old was “mesmerized” by the slot machines. Her mother was initially unaware of what was going on.
“Uncle Charlie” Workman, seen in 1941, pled guilty to the 1935 murder of mobster Dutch Schultz and was given a life sentence. (NYPD)
“I was having a blast,” Iris Geik said. “I’ll never forget when the door flung open and my itty-bitty mother came in with a big guard behind her. She immediately made me stop [playing with the slot machine] and give back the money I had won.”
Iris Geik, now a privacy lawyer in the Boston area, has written hundreds of pages of her own memoir about the wives and girlfriends of the Jewish gangsters, tentatively titled, “The View From the Women’s Table.”
“Their lives were complex but they were also heimische Jewish women,” she said, using the Yiddish word for cozy and familiar. She and her father eloped because they were a mixed couple: Her mother Reba was a Sephardic Jew and her father was Ashkenazi.
Geik remembered that as a child she noticed a newspaper article about a family friend being arrested. She said, “Mom! Mom! Look, we’re famous.” To which her mother replied, “That’s infamous, dear.”
Geik said that on several occasions her mother observed: “There are no second-generation Jewish mobsters. Jews don’t make gangsters out of their children.”
Reba Geik had been involved in caring for two of Iris’ aunts who lived in Brooklyn while they were dying. Those acts of kindness had a profound impact on Uncle George, the casino supervisor.
After the aunts passed away, Gordon always stood when Reba entered a room, Iris said. “My mother was very honored by that because he was such a big shot.”
Throughout her life, Reba Geik remained close to Sylvia Lorber, a friend from her teenage years. Lorber was the only mob mistress her mother would spend time with, said Iris. Lorber was the paramour of two Jewish gangsters: Benny Kassop, the brother of Murder, Inc. gunman Sammy Kassop, and Sam “Red” Levine, an observant Jew who wore a kippah under his fedora. Levine won the affection of Lorber while the Kassop brothers were in Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in Ossining, New York.
“Sylvia was a hell of a lot of fun but my mother worried about her,” Iris said. “Sylvia told me her stories, which were kind of glamorous when she was young but sad when she was older.” After spending 20 years with Levine, Lorber couldn’t attend his funeral. Sylvia Lorber stopped talking to Reba Geik in her last years.
Jewish gangsters do, on occasion, display some altruism in Alan Geik’s memoir. Take Moe Dalitz, the head of the Cleveland Syndicate. He was a major bootlegger during Prohibition whose flotillas of illegal liquor on the Great Lakes came to be known as The Little Jewish Navy. His family ran legitimate laundry businesses in Boston and Detroit. Too old to be drafted during World War II, he enlisted at the age of 42 and was commissioned as a lieutenant. Dalitz ran the military laundry service on New York’s Governor’s Island — but declined to bunk in the island’s barracks, opting instead to stay at a swanky hotel overlooking Central Park.
Then there was Johnny Eder, a major source for Geik’s narrative. Eder was part of the Lower East Side teenage crime crew that included Uncle Charlie and Uncle George. As an adult he was a major fence for stolen jewelry and always had a bag of stolen rings on him. Eder also had many connections at City Hall and in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.
According to Geik’s account, Eder was the mob’s representative to the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary force in Palestine. Eder arranged meetings in the noisy kitchen of the Copacabana, a mob hangout, between Haganah agents and mobsters and others described as “former wartime U.S. intelligence agents” working to secure weapons for Israel’s War of Independence. (The late Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s longtime mayor, would tell a story about passing cash to an intermediary at the Copacabana, who brought the money to an Irish sea caption with a ship full of munitions bound for the Holy Land. The bagman, according to Kollek, was Frank Sinatra.)
Author Alan Geik’s father-in-law, Lou Lenart, left, and other fighter pilots in front of Avia-S-199 plane. Lenart was part of the group of men transporting surplus fighter planes and other weapons to the Holy Land for use in the War of Independence. (Courtesy of Boaz Dvir)
Alan Geik has a very personal connection to the creation of the Jewish state. His late wife Nina was the daughter of Lou Lenart, a World War II fighter pilot who served in the U.S. Marines. Geik’s memoir details how the elder Lenart was part of the group of men transporting surplus fighter planes and other weapons to Palestine for use in Israel’s War of Independence. Lenart’s story was featured in Nancy Spielberg’s 2014 documentary “Above and Beyond,” about the creation of the Israeli air force.
The story of how Jewish gangsters used some violent muscle against Nazi sympathizers in New York has been told before in historical accounts, but one episode in Geik’s memoir is particularly dramatic. A pair of Jews attended a Bund rally at Camp Siegfried on Long Island, a summer camp that taught Nazi ideology, and were offered a ride back to the city by a Nazi sympathizer who they ended up beating senseless in Brooklyn.
Alan Geik was not really hungry when he met Meyer Lansky at a Central Park hotel in the late 1950s. The gangster asked the 15-year-old nephew of George Gordon if he wanted a pastrami sandwich. Geik declined. Then Lansky, who struck Geik as an “older Jewish man who I knew was really powerful,” suggested that they split one. It was an offer that Geik did not refuse.
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The post ‘Married to the Mob,’ but under a chuppah: A new memoir details a Jewish family’s crime ties appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The 7 political stories Jews will be watching in 2026
This year brought sweeping change in national politics, in the U.S.-Israel relationship and in New York, the city with the largest Jewish population.
At the Forward, we closely tracked the transition to President Trump’s second term and profiled his cabinet selections and controversial nominees and appointees who trafficked in antisemitism or had ties to white nationalists and expressed admiration for Nazis. We covered the president’s crackdown on the pro-Palestinian campus protests that defined 2024 and the weaponization of antisemitism that led to multimillion dollar settlements with Ivy League universities, including Columbia and Cornell.
We provided exclusive, on-the-ground reporting on the battle for the Jewish vote in the competitive New York City mayoral race. We conducted the first Jewish-media interview with Zohran Mamdani as his campaign began gaining traction, even while he was still polling a distant second in the Democratic primary. We also had inside access to the outgoing Eric Adams administration and its effort to counter rising antisemitism, and had the only local reporter accompanying Adams on his farewell trip to Israel.
Here are the seven political stories we’ll be watching most closely in 2026 that will shape American politics and the Jewish community in the U.S. and abroad.
Zohran Mamdani’s New York City
Mamdani will be sworn into office at midnight on Jan. 1, 2026 as the city’s first Muslim mayor. The swearing-in will be followed by an inauguration ceremony that day at a yet-undisclosed location.
He will immediately face a series of tests on the promises and priorities that carried him through the historic campaign at a moment when the city’s Jewish community remains divided over his stance on Israel. Mamdani’s mixed response to the protest outside the Park East Synagogue, which featured anti-Israel and antisemitic slogans last month, is likely to come under fresh scrutiny as his term begins. Mamdani has remained mum on whether he’d support new legislation that would create a buffer zone outside houses of worship to protect congregants from targeted protests.
Mamdani will also have to decide whether to rescind a recent executive order by Adams barring city agencies from participating in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions efforts. He will also determine the fate of the recently-created mayor’s office to combat antisemitism, which has pursued a measure adopting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic. And he will need to decide whether to continue the New York City–Israel Economic Council, an initiative to strengthen economic ties with the Jewish state.
He will file top City Hall and government positions, including the potential appointments of his senior Jewish advisers.
Last month, Mamdani announced he’ll reappoint Jessica Tisch, the Jewish NYC police commissioner, as head of the police department he promised to reform.
The battle for the Jewish vote in the governor’s race
Mamdani’s first months in office and his legislative agenda will also shape the New York governor’s race.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, running for reelection for another full term, endorsed Mamdani in the general election after remaining neutral during the primary. She has signaled reservations about several key Mamdani priorities, like universal free buses, which will need the state’s approval, and has also distanced herself from Mamdani on Israel.
Hochul’s embrace of Mamdani could bolster her standing in the Democratic primary, where she faces a left-wing challenge from her lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado, who is married to a Jewish woman.
But it could also complicate her outreach to Jewish voters in the general election. Bruce Blakeman, the first Jewish executive of Nassau County on Long Island, and Rep. Elise Stefanik, an upstate congresswoman who has made the fight against antisemitism on college campuses central to her congressional brand, are competing in a GOP primary to challenge Hochul. In 2022, former Rep. Lee Zeldin came within five percentage points of winning the governor’s race, powered by strong Jewish support.
Who will win Jerry Nadler’s seat?
After serving 17 terms in Congress, Rep. Jerry Nadler, co-chair of the Congressional Jewish Caucus, is set to retire to pave the way for generational change, a race that will be closely watched locally and across the nation.
The Manhattan district has one of the largest Jewish electorates in the nation. Jews in the 12th Congressional District account for about 30% of the vote in the Democratic primary. Nadler has, in recent years, campaigned on the need to preserve New York City’s Jewish representation in Congress.
The Jewish candidates vying for the seat include Micah Lasher, Jack Schlossberg, and Cameron Kasky. Assemblymember Alex Bores, whose wife, Darya Moldavskaya, is Jewish, and Councilmember Erik Bottcher are also considered viable candidates. Lasher, a protege of Nadler, has the longtime Jewish congressman’s support. Schlossberg, the grandson of former President John F. Kennedy, has made funding for security measures at synagogues and Jewish institutions a central pillar of his campaign.
Other New York congressional races
There are a few other House races in New York where pro-Israel incumbents are facing challenges from the left. Those primary contests are a crucial test of whether support for Israel and an alliance with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has become a political liability.
Rep. Dan Goldman, the Jewish congressman representing the north of Brooklyn and the Lower Manhattan district since 2023, is being challenged in the primary by Brad Lander, the outgoing city comptroller and former mayoral candidate, who has the backing of Mamdani and other progressive firebrands. For his campaign, Lander hired Morris Katz, a Jewish strategist and ad maker who was behind Mamdani’s successful working-class appeal and inspiring TV commercials. Katz produced Lander’s Mr. Rogers-themed launch video.
Lander, who is also Jewish, has become more vocal about Palestinian rights in recent years. He supported Ben & Jerry’s decision to end sales in the occupied West Bank in 2021 and has regularly attended a weekly rally against the Israeli government’s handling of the war in Gaza. Recently, he acknowledged that he divested from Israel Bonds in 2023, ending the city’s decades-long practice of investing millions in Israeli government debt securities. In his candidacy announcement, Lander slammed Goldman’s support for the war in Gaza and accused him of “doing AIPAC’s bidding,” though the incumbent had early on called for humanitarian pauses and criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership.
Rep. Ritchie Torres, a three-term pro-Israel progressive from the Bronx, is facing three primary challengers, a crowded field that could ultimately make it easier for him to win reelection. Michael Blake, a former state legislator who ran for mayor in the Democratic primary and later endorsed Mamdani, is making attacks on AIPAC central to his campaign, and Dalourny Nemorin, an organizer for the Democratic Socialists of America’s local chapter, is testing the momentum behind newcomer and socialist candidates. Assemblywoman Amanda Septimo, who joined an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel in 2016 and visited Israel again following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, also announced her candidacy. Septimo is considered a member of Mamdani’s inner circle.
Rep. Michael Lawler, a Republican who has been a strong pro-Israel voice since his election in 2022, is expected to face the winner of an eight-person Democratic primary in a tough election cycle for Republicans. Lawler has the support of the growing Hasidic population in Rockland County. The leading candidates in the Democratic primary are Rockland County Legislator Beth Davidson, who is Jewish, and Army veteran Cait Conley.
Michigan Senate race a test for Democrats’ positions on Israel
The Michigan Senate race is shaping up to be one of the clearest tests of the Democratic coalition and of how the party navigates Israel.
The leading candidates in the Democratic primary are Abdul El-Sayed, an Egyptian-American who is seeking to channel the energy of the 2024 Uncommitted movement and build on Mamdani’s surprise success in New York, and Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel Democrat who defeated progressive Jewish Rep. Andy Levin in 2022 with significant help from AIPAC.
The outcome of the contest will offer an early read on whether the left’s anti-establishment momentum can break through in a battleground state, and how much pro-Israel groups retain their influence in Democratic primaries.
The Jewish governors running for reelection
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker are widely expected to win reelection. Their margins, messages and national profile will position both as major figures in the early mix for the 2028 presidential race. Each is navigating the same balancing act that will challenge Democrats with national ambitions: trying to appeal to a base that is growing more critical of Israel while still keeping the trust of Jewish voters and pro-Israel allies.
Shapiro, who was viewed as a potential first Jewish president in 2024, remains on the narrow path he has carved out for himself. He highlights his Jewish identity, support for Israel and bipartisan appeal in all of his public appearances.
Pritzker, who governs a state with one of the largest Palestinian-American populations in the country, has become one of the most prominent voices of resistance to President Donald Trump. He has repeatedly invoked Nazi Germany in criticizing the administration’s policies and endorsed a Senate push to block U.S. arms sales to Israel to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israeli elections
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will continue to be in the headlines in America. He is expected to spend New Year’s Eve in the United States after yet another meeting with Trump at the Mar-a-Lago resort — the sixth meeting this year — underscoring the unusually close alignment between the two leaders.
Netanyahu is better known to Americans than most world leaders. He is now Israel’s longest-tenured prime minister, having served for more than 18 years as the country’s leader. He grew up in Philadelphia in the early 1960s, attended college and graduate school in Boston, served as Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. in the mid-1980s, and has delivered four speeches to a joint session of Congress.
Following three tumultuous years, Israeli voters are poised to head back to the ballot box sometime in 2026 — depending on how long the coalition government holds onto power amid legislative challenges — for what will effectively be another referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership. A January 2024 poll found that only 15% of Israelis, including 36% of those who had previously voted for his Likud Party, wanted to see Netanyahu stay on as prime minister following the failure to protect Israel on Oct. 7.
But the landscape has shifted dramatically since then.
All living hostages have been freed, and the remains of all those held by Hamas — but for one — have been returned. Hamas and Hezbollah leaders have been killed, and Iran’s nuclear program was set back after the 12-day war earlier this year, and the conflict in Gaza ended on terms jointly shaped by Washington and Jerusalem. Netanyahu, receiving the political backing from Trump, has also requested a pre-conviction pardon from Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Meanwhile, the opposition remains fractured among several would-be successors, complicating a unified challenge to Netanyahu’s rule.
A majority of American Jews hold an unfavorable view of Netanyahu and senior pro-Israel Democrats have called for a leadership change in Israel.
Netanyahu is also expected to visit New York City, at the latest next September when he comes to address the annual United Nations General Assembly, which will test Mamdani’s pledge to order his arrest if he visits Manhattan.
The post The 7 political stories Jews will be watching in 2026 appeared first on The Forward.
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How Eastern Europe’s Jews celebrated a merry ‘nitl’ Christmas
(JTA) — Call me a softie, but I love a traditional Christmas Eve. If you don’t find me eating Chinese food and watching a movie, I might be catching Gotham Comedy Club’s “A Very Jewish Christmas!” show or comedian Joel Chasnoff’s “Christmas for the Jews.” Or I may just stay home, light a fire and listen to “Oy to the World: A Klezmer Christmas” by The Klezmonauts.
If none of that is your idea of traditional, you might want to get a copy of Jordan Chad’s new book, “Christmas in the Yiddish Tradition.”
A multidisciplinary researcher affiliated with the University of Toronto’s Centre for Jewish Studies, Chad offers up the “untold story” of how Yiddish-speaking Jews “celebrated” Christmas — not as the birth of the baby Jesus, heaven forbid. On what they called “Nitl-nacht,” or just plain “Nitl,” Jews cut loose with games and drink and a vacation from Torah studies in ways that ran parallel with what their Christian neighbors were up to.
And if that sounds like a provocation, Chad agrees.
“When I use the term ‘Jews celebrated Christmas,’ what’s really important to understand is that Christmas wasn’t interpreted as a Christian holiday by the Jews,” he said.
The idea of Jews enjoying Christmas Eve also runs counter to the stories Jews told after they left their Yiddish roots behind and encountered the New World. There, memories were shaped and distorted, and nitl was remembered as a night of fear and superstition. The lore holds that Jews stayed inside, locked their doors, avoided Torah study and huddled against the threat of antisemitic violence.
But Chad, 31, a translator with a background in theoretical physics (which makes him a Yiddishist physicist, which is very fun to say), suspected there was more to the story of Jews and Christmas. That hunch led him deep into Yiddish memoirs and folklore.
What he found startled him. Again and again, memoirists writing about 19th- and early 20th-century Eastern Europe wrote of their favorite “holiday”: nitl, commonly understood as a contraction of a Yiddish term meaning “not learning.”
Chad says that the version of Christmas as a season of foreboding is less remembrance than reinvention. Contemporary Yiddish accounts suggest that the holiday was more benign and even playful.
The key, he argues, is that for Jews and Christians alike, Dec. 24 was not so much a specifically Christian observance as a midwinter festival layered with supernatural anxiety, drinking, feasting and folk rituals. Easter was the central Christian holiday — and the actual season when Christians attacked Jews. By contrast, Christmas fell in the darkest season of the year and was marked with topsy-turvy behavior rife with pagan hand-me-downs, including the Christmas tree. Celebrants would suspend ordinary routines, play cards, tell ghost stories and stay awake to ward off malevolent spirits.
“Christians were doing this, and so were Jews,” Chad said. “It was common European folk culture.”
Only later, in part as a reaction to the revelry and their own encounter with the New World, did church leaders put the Christ back in Christmas, emphasizing the birth of Jesus. “In Europe, nobody was going to forget about Christianity,” Chad explained. “But in the New World, Jesus’s birth really needed to be the part of Christmas that Christians promoted.”
Once Christmas became more explicitly Christian, Jews distanced themselves. In the process, they retrofitted their own memories.
The ominous folklore about Christmas that was also part of Jewish tradition — for example, that Jesus might visit Jewish homes on Christmas eve to poison their drink with blood — was newly emphasized by Jews, turning a night of fun into a warning about assimilation. Stories about the dangers of Christmas — even when exaggerated — helped reinforce a sense of Jewish distinctiveness in a Christian-majority culture.
“Jewish immigrants weren’t going to tell their children, ‘When we were kids, we had a blast on Christmas Eve,’” Chad said. Instead, they leaned on reinterpretations that cast nitl as a defensive measure — a night too dangerous to study Torah, a holiday marked only by negation.
Chad consistently argues that Yiddish-speaking Jews were not cut off from the wider Christian culture, even if they had different religious structures, calendars and social and material status.
“I’d call it common European folk culture,” he said. “There were enormous differences between Jews and Christians — but when it came to fear of midwinter demons, the love of drinking, or the topsy-turvy atmosphere of Christmas Eve, the folklore overlaps are undeniable.”
Chad also draws a direct line between the “Yiddish” Christmas and the various ways Jews to continue to mark the Yuletide season. In many Hasidic communities, nitl is still a night when Torah study is suspended. If these Orthodox Jews aren’t playing cards or chess, they might be catching up on chores. Meanwhile, those Jewish events on Christmas Eve have become a growth industry, from singles-only “Matzo Balls” to Jewish cabarets to Christmas classics sung in Yiddish.
And then there’s Chinese food and a movie. Chad suggests that only in the late 20th century did Jews begin to reclaim Christmas as a kind of unofficial holiday of their own. By the 1980s, eating at Chinese restaurants — traditionally among the few places open — became a way to distinguish the day without crossing into Christian ritual. (As Darlene Love sang on “Saturday Night Live”: “They can finally see ‘King Kong’ without waiting in line / They can eat in Chinatown and drink their sweet-ass wine.”) What once was avoidance evolved into a playful counter-tradition, a way to be present in the surrounding culture without being absorbed by it.
If the book has a deeper message, it is that Jews have always negotiated Christmas, just in different registers. Sometimes the day has been used to draw lines; sometimes to soften them. It is all part of the ongoing Jewish effort to live distinctly within a world shaped by someone else’s holiday.
What emerges in “Christmas in the Yiddish Tradition” is not a sentimental argument for reviving a lost holiday, nor a polemic against drawing firm boundaries between Us and Them. It’s a reminder that Jewish life in Eastern Europe was far richer, weirder and more porous than memory often allows.
“I hope people understand that Jews didn’t think they were celebrating a Christian holiday,” Chad said. “They were celebrating a midwinter holiday they considered their own.”
He paused, then added with a laugh: “And they had a pretty good time doing it.”
The post How Eastern Europe’s Jews celebrated a merry ‘nitl’ Christmas appeared first on The Forward.
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Hanukkah shooting leaves at least 10 dead at Australia’s most popular beach
A Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach turned deadly on Sunday with reports of at least 10 dead, including a Chabad rabbi, amid rising antisemitism in Australia.
One suspect was killed at the scene and the other was arrested, in what local police are calling a “terror incident.”
“This is an attack on the Jewish community that deeply that pains us,” said Robert Gregory, the chief executive of the Australian Jewish Association.
Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who worked with Chabad of Bondi, was killed in the shooting, Chabad’s media director told The New York Times.
“This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy,” said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian.”
Earlier this month, a group of Jewish leaders from Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States met in Sydney to coordinate responses to rising antisemitism there and internationally.
In recent months, two synagogues have been attacked in Melbourne.
The post Hanukkah shooting leaves at least 10 dead at Australia’s most popular beach appeared first on The Forward.