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Move over Thomas Edison, this deli savant is the Garden State’s newest inventor
First, in 1876, Thomas Edison opened up his “invention factory” in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Then, in 1941, Alexander Graham Bell’s Bell Labs moved its headquarters to Murray Hill at the northern end of the state.
In 2021, another wide-eyed tinkerer set up shop in Jersey City, though his inventions would be molded out of rye, wheat and cured beef, not aluminum and tungsten.
The maverick’s name is Jason Stahl, a 48-year-old father with a career in publishing. He operates his food business under the name Hank Schwartz’s Delicatessen and Appetizing, cooking out of a ghost kitchen in Jersey City. And he does things with smoked fish that would make your bubbe blush.
Take his “Smoked Salmon Tartare,” for example. He mixes up capers, lemon, dill,and Dijon mustard so their breezy tartness lightens the Baltic smoke of nova. The pink concoction is a revelation, balancing out the fish’s brininess so that a diner would be tempted to eat an entire half-pound of the stuff in one sitting.
I speak from experience. I first tried Stahl’s cooking at Jersey City’s Riverview Farmer’s Market last fall, where he slings mind-bending, Jew-ish sandwiches, tartare, whitefish salad, olives, and various other noshes on a biweekly basis.
On a sunny day at the Farmer’s Market, a steady stream of customers poured in. One customer, a middle-aged man, asked about Stahl’s brisket sandwiches — Stahl had made shredded brisket and mixed it with horseradish mayonnaise to make a pulled meat sandwich, then layered it with caramelized onion jam.
Stahl was sold out. “Curse you,” the customer exclaimed.
From home cook to deli master
At the market, Stahl spoke softly to the people who came to his booth, greeting customers by their first names and chatting with boys about their favorite sports teams. His gentle cadence and warm smile bely what he says is an anxious disposition that his wife, and his cooking, help to temper.
Stahl says that, until recently, he had been more of a weekend warrior than a professional cook. “I’m not going to pretend I have this amazing culinary background, right?” he said. “I came into this more with a passion, and I’m learning.”
Still, he has hovered close to the restaurant world for a while. He has worked in media for decades, sometimes in food-adjacent roles (most recently as Food Editor at 1-800-Flowers.com). Stahl’s wife, Theresa Gambacourt, manages restaurants and writes cookbooks for a living.
Stahl learned to cook in part from studying cookbooks he got for free as a media professional. In his early days out of college, “I was always experimenting,” he recalled. “I messed up a whole bunch.”
Theresa showed him the tricks she picked up in restaurants, like using infused fats to make a confit. He uses that technique in his zaatar olives, which are submerged in a citrus garlic confit that adds a layer of refreshing depth to the Mediterranean staple.
Over time, his cooking became more and more elaborate. His wife asked the chef at Del Posto, a since-closed Italian fine dining stalwart, if Stahl could stage there; the chef agreed, and Stahl spent every Sunday evening for a year learning the ins-and-outs of the kitchen — including how to cure gravlax and slice meat.
Italy figures heavily in Stahl’s modern deli. His chopped liver, for example, is made with chopped capers and braised with red wine (he makes a mushroom version for those who fear chicken parts).
In around 2019, Theresa gave him Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli for his birthday, and the book planted an idea in his head: “What if we did this?” Stahl asked Theresa about the deli business.
What, she replied, would an amateur cook be able to contribute to such an endeavor?
“I can clean,” he recalls replying. “I’m really good at cleaning.”
Several years later, after the COVID-19 pandemic, he started selling pickles at Riggs Company Provisions, a vendor at the farmer’s market, and Riverview Wines, a nearby wine shop. Today, his pickles encompass classic dill pickles brightened with dried mint, spicy pickles spiked with habanero and Aleppo peppers (the latter a nod to Jewish communities in the Middle East), and sour green tomatoes with dill and celery seeds.
In 2023, the farmer’s market invited him to become a vendor, and he’s been selling there ever since. His repertoire has expanded beyond pickles to include such dishes as chopped liver, homemade sodas, and cured meat and fish sandwiches — all tweaked with the flair of a mad scientist.
Hank Schwartz’s gets its name from fictional characters that Stahl and Gambacourt made up years ago: Hank and Margaret Schwartz, two herrings who escape from a deli and go on adventures around New York City. In this imaginary world, Hank and Margaret hang out with their herring friends, like Charlie Goldberg, a bus driver, and the Crances, a bumbling couple.
A gallivanting, social fish is the perfect mascot for a cook whose relationships and wanderlust drive his cooking.
Take, for example, Stahl’s smoked salmon candy. Though readers in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest might be familiar with the salty-sweet treat, it has not yet taken off in the Northeast. In the Alaskan version, chunks of salmon are brined in brown sugar and salt before being smoked and glazed. Stahl has added dill to his in the past, and the week I tried it, he had rubbed in pastrami spices. The pink chunks were solid and slightly chewy — like firm gumdrops — and redolent of peppercorns, brown sugar and smoke: the type of addictive candy that the children of hipsters might clamor for in a 21st century deli.
‘This is a true story’
Stahl grew up on Staten Island eating sandwiches at both Jewish and Italian delis.
When I asked him how far a dish can veer from Jewish tradition while still being considered “Jewish,” he compared Hank Schwartz’s to the TV show Fargo, which starts with the line “This is a true story.”
Stahl once interviewed the series’ showrunner, Noah Hawley, who told him that in each episode, a single detail is pulled from a true story — for example, a news article about a dramatic car crash.
“In a way, like, I’m doing the same thing,” Stahl said — one Jewish element anchors each dish on his menu; the rest is up for his own interpretation.
During Super Bowl weekend, when the Seattle Seahawks played the New England Patriots, Stahl came up with a sandwich for each team. “The Seattle” consisted of citrus-cured gravlax (a Scandinavian relative of Jewish lox), scallion cream cheese and pickled cucumbers on pumpernickel with a teriyaki glaze, the latter a nod to Seattle’s Japanese community and its role in popularizing teriyaki sauce. “The New England” was Stahl’s take on a lobster roll — swapping in whitefish for treyf.
Stahl now holds a residency two days a week at the Cliff, a cafe in the same Jersey Heights neighborhood he has been plying with smoked fish and meats for the past few years. The pop-up helps him try out running a brick-and-mortar restaurant while he looks for investors and business partners to help him do just that. Surrounded by exposed brick and artwork, he slaps together irreverent sandwich combinations in front of customers. I tried the Schwartzøbrød, a cousin of the everyman Danish brown bread sandwich. Stahl makes his with a butter infused with lime, lemon and orange zest that glides through the heady flavor of cured salmon.
If there’s one element of the Jewish deli that Stahl seeks to maintain, it’s the deli’s status as a community hub. “In these times that we’re living in, people need more comfort. I feel like a Jewish deli is really needed,” he told me, as is “the warmth of a bowl of matzo ball soup. People just find comfort, they find nostalgia.” He recalled with fondness how the week before, the restaurant buzzed with customers enjoying his food and locked in conversation, rarely looking at their phones.
Stahl’s tight-knit community might be the perfect place for Jewish culinary innovation, for the same reasons that Menlo Park and Murray Hill served Edison and the company of Graham Bell. Proximity to New York affords you rare privileges — ethnic diversity and access to the titans of the Jewish-American deli, in Stahl’s case. But so, too, does distance. The sprawling brick buildings and saltbox houses of Jersey City offer cooks a little more room to breathe and try new things.
“Here, it’s less about the luxury” or “pretentiousness,” Stahl said. “It’s more about the care and the presentation of the food, right? They want to just offer the best dishes possible.”
The post Move over Thomas Edison, this deli savant is the Garden State’s newest inventor appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel just quadrupled its PR budget to $730M. Experts say it won’t work.
(JTA) — Israel is betting nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars that it can talk its way out of a reputation crisis.
Lawmakers in Jerusalem approved a 2026 national budget last month that includes roughly $730 million for public diplomacy — the broad category known in Hebrew as hasbara — more than four times the $150 million they allocated the year before. That earlier sum was itself about 20 times what Israel had spent on such efforts before the war in Gaza broke out in 2023.
The unprecedented expenditure comes as survey after survey show declining support for Israel in the United States, its most important ally. A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month found 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, up seven points in a single year, with only 37% viewing it favorably.
Most striking for a country long accustomed to bipartisan American support: 57% of Republicans under 50 hold negative views of Israel. Support has cratered among the religiously unaffiliated, Black Protestants and Catholics. Among American Jews, support has slipped below two-thirds.
On social media, the Hebrew word “hasbara” has become a dismissive shorthand for pro-Israel advocacy, indicating how widely known Israel’s uphill efforts to shape its image have become.
Congress is increasingly reflecting this drop in public support. Earlier this month, 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voted to block a $295 million sale of Caterpillar bulldozers to Israel, and 36 voted to block a sale of 1,000-pound bombs, representing the strongest congressional rebuke of U.S. military aid to Israel on record.
Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, says the country is engaged in a global war for hearts and minds and it must spend accordingly.
“We had a major breakthrough this year, but we must as a country invest much much more,” Sa’ar said in December as the government entered budget deliberations. “It should be like investing in jets, bombs and missile interceptors. In the face of what’s arrayed against us and what’s invested against us, it’s far from enough. This is an existential issue.”
Alongside the budget, Sa’ar won approval for a dedicated public diplomacy unit inside the Foreign Ministry, headed by a director equivalent in rank to the ministry’s top political official — a structural consolidation meant to end years of scattered hasbara work across rival ministries.
Public filings, Knesset testimony and Israeli business reporting show where a portion of the 2025 allocation went.
A $50 million international social-media ad buy was split across Google, YouTube, X and Outbrain. Roughly $40 million went to hosting 400 foreign delegations — lawmakers, pastors, influencers, university presidents. A “media war room” was erected to monitor 250 outlets and 10,000 daily Israel-related items.
The Foreign Ministry also signed a $1.5-million-a-month contract with former Trump campaign strategist Brad Parscale’s firm to deploy AI tools against antisemitism online, a $4.1 million campaign aimed at evangelical churches, and the “Esther Project,” a paid influencer network running up to $900,000 through a PR firm called Bridges Partners.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry did not respond to repeated requests for interviews and comment.
Defending the approach, Consul General Israel Bachar, Jerusalem’s top diplomat in Los Angeles since 2023, said in an interview that most of the money so far had gone into social media and delegations. His post oversees seven Western states and one of the largest Israeli expatriate populations in the world.
“We flew a lot of delegations to the country — whether it’s pastors, whether it’s politicians, universities,” Bachar said. “Everyone who returns from the country understands better and is more supportive. But you have to fly out a lot of people.”
A veteran Israeli political strategist before his consular appointment, Bachar argued the anti-Israel shift in the United States is not primarily a messaging failure. He pointed instead to “sociological changes in America that have nothing to do with us” that are “being used against us.”
He called the situation a complex problem with “no silver bullet,” and said he favors additional spending on what he called “productions” in the United States — sitcoms, documentaries, feature films that touch on Israeli themes — alongside the ad buys and influencer work.
Ask the people who study public diplomacy for a living whether any of this will work, and the answer is, overwhelmingly, skeptical.
Their central objection is that no amount of messaging can outrun entrenched rejection by its target audiences of Israel’s armed response to conflicts with its neighbors.
“My position is that history shows all the money in the world won’t help if the policy is wrong,” said Nicholas Cull, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California and one of the founders of the study of public diplomacy. “The U.S. discovered that in Vietnam when its own Cold War public diplomacy budget peaked.”
Cull coined the term “reputational security” to describe the argument Sa’ar is implicitly making — that a country’s standing is itself a strategic asset worth serious investment.
“It means protecting the country both by accentuating positive images and by eliminating negative realities,” Cull said. “I suspect that the government of Israel will be unable to sell its solutions to the world when so many of its own people dispute the validity of those solutions, and where the domestic consensus is wide of the international understanding of realities on the ground.”
The polling tells a similar story, according to a scholar who has been tracking it longer than almost anyone else.
“There has been a paradigmatic shift that has taken place in America about Israel,” said Shibley Telhami, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, who has surveyed American and Arab attitudes toward Israel for decades. “I have been tracing shifts, particularly among Democrats, for a decade and a half. I have never seen a shift like the one we’ve seen.”
Born in Israel to an Arab family, Telhami was long a two-state advocate operating within the American foreign policy mainstream before moving considerably leftward in recent years.
He described a new “Gaza generation” — a majority of young Americans who, his polling shows, now see Israel as committing genocide and who see the United States as implicated in it.
Telhami said the moment reminded him of a previous episode. He served on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy in 2005, when Washington tried to spend its way out of the reputational damage of the Iraq War with campaigns aimed at Muslim audiences.
“Our conclusion was, it’s the policy, stupid,” he said. “Yes, you can do a lot with public diplomacy, and there are strategies that could help on the margins. But they’re only going to affect a small percentage, because the bulk of the impressions on issues that people care about are shaped by the actual policies, not how well you sell those policies.”
Many Israelis believe the country has simply never told its story well enough, and that with enough money and the right platforms, it can. But the conventional wisdom that Israel has not been active on the frontiers of public diplomacy simply isn’t true, according to Ilan Manor, a senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University who has long studied the Foreign Ministry’s online presence.
Israel was one of the first countries in the world to build a global digital-diplomacy operation, Manor said. Before Oct. 7, he said, its accounts reached roughly a billion people, a scale rivaled only by the United States.
“The problem is not that we lack infrastructure. The problem is not that we lack skill,” Manor said. “The problem is that people don’t believe the state anymore. And that’s a much, much deeper problem that no amount of money is going to repair.”
He calls it a credibility gap, borrowing the term American reporters used for Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam-era statements. “If you’re not a credible spokesperson, if you’re not a credible state, it doesn’t matter how good your message is,” Manor said. “It doesn’t matter how viral it might get. It doesn’t matter how many likes you get.”
The credibility problem is now compounding itself. As disclosures have revealed Israeli contracts with influencers, shell websites, and AI-driven campaigns, pro-Israel posts on American social media routinely draw comments accusing the poster of being a paid foreign agent, whether they are or not.
Similar concerns come from inside the pro-Israel branding world. Joanna Landau, founder of the Tel Aviv–based Israel branding nonprofit Vibe Israel, has spent more than a decade flying international influencers to Israel on lifestyle-focused trips. She said she was not available for an interview but has laid out her views in a recent series of essays on her Substack, “Reputation Nation.”
Landau called the 2026 allocation “a long overdue course correction” but warned that structural failures would swallow the money. “Israel’s narrative has no single strategic owner,” she wrote, noting that messaging responsibility is scattered across the Foreign Ministry, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Diaspora Affairs Ministry, the Government Press Office and the IDF.
According to the government’s own announcements, she added, most of the new funding is slated for “tactical activity” — “the same tools Israel has relied on for years, only now with many more zeros.” Her conclusion: “A large budget poured into a broken system produces scale, not strategy.”
The spending does vault Israel into the same league as some of the world’s largest public diplomacy operations, according to Landau.
Exact comparisons are hard to make, and there are no widely accepted figures for what different countries spend on public diplomacy — the work is scattered across culture ministries, state broadcasters, foreign affairs budgets, and intelligence agencies, often without a single label.
Germany, for example, funds Deutsche Welle, its international broadcaster, and the Goethe-Institut, its global network of cultural centers, at hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but both operate independently of the government. Britain spends around $450 million on the BBC World Service and millions more on international scholarships, also at arm’s length from direct messaging. The United States allocates an estimated $2.3 billion through State Department programs and the U.S. Agency for Global Media. China’s public diplomacy spending has topped $10 billion. Qatar has built Al Jazeera into a global network through state funding whose full scope is not publicly disclosed.
Israel, a country of roughly 10 million people, is now set to spend on its global image at a scale normally associated with much larger countries.
It may be too late, according to one Israeli scholar who has argued for two decades that Israel chronically underinvests in public diplomacy.
Eytan Gilboa, a professor of international communication at Bar-Ilan University, said he welcomes both the larger sum and its consolidation inside the Foreign Ministry, which he said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had deliberately “dried up” in favor of rival ministries.
But Gilboa agrees the current moment may be beyond repair.
“This is the worst crisis in Israel’s image abroad,” he said. “In the past, we have seen criticism of Israeli policy. Since Oct. 7, we have seen a rejection of Israel’s right to exist.” He argued that Israel has lost a generation of Americans, calling it “highly dangerous, because these people are going to be the next politicians, elites, journalists.”
“Perhaps $730 million is not enough,” Gilboa said. “You have to establish a mechanism, a system that would systematically address all the challenges. I am quite pessimistic.”
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A synagogue helped Palestinians raise money for Gaza — and found common ground over falafel
(JTA) — Six months after first sitting down with Dr. David Hasan for a meal, Rabbi Daniel Greyber returned to the table on Tuesday — this time bringing congregants from his synagogue to support Hasan’s work helping children in Gaza.
So many members of Beth El Synagogue wanted to attend the fundraiser at the Palestinian-owned Mediterranean Deli in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that the Conservative congregation asked them to sign up for shifts.
Between tables piled high with falafel and hummus, the daylong fundraiser offered an uncommon scene at a time when the war in Gaza has often strained relations between Muslim and Jewish communities.
Beth El had previously backed relief efforts for Israel, including raising $175,000 for Magen David Adom after Oct. 7, while also supporting humanitarian aid in Gaza through World Central Kitchen and Israeli-Palestinian dialogue initiatives such as Roots in the West Bank.
But Tuesday’s event marked the first time the congregation had participated in a Palestinian-led fundraiser for Gaza — a rarity for American synagogue communities and a move that Greyber said he’d had to defend to critics.
For the rabbi, the groundwork for the fundraiser was laid last fall, when he met Hasan at a Sukkot dinner hosted by Sophia Chitlik, a Jewish Democratic North Carolina state senator.
At the time, Greyber said he and other local Jewish leaders were “incredibly moved and incredibly impressed” by the work of Hasan, whose nonprofit, The Gaza Children Village, provides food, medical care, education, and trauma support to children in Gaza.
Through his nonprofit, Hasan, a Palestinian-American, has also created schools in the besieged enclave, where he offers a modified curriculum that promotes peace and reconciliation, and an alternative to the anti-Israel education he says has long dominated Gaza’s schools.
“Obviously he has support from so many different places around the world for the project, we wanted to ask ourselves: What could we do locally,” Greyber said.
Shortly after their introduction, Greyber invited Hasan to speak at his synagogue in November. There, Hasan shared that he had sought information about the Israeli hostages while working in hospitals in Gaza in April 2024.
That story carried particular weight at Beth El, where congregants had spent 484 days praying for the release of Keith Siegel, an Israeli hostage whose mother, Gladys Siegel, had long been a central figure in the synagogue community. Keith Siegel was released in January 2025.
As Greyber forged ties with Hasan, so did Jamil Kadoura, the owner of Mediterranean Deli, who spent part of his childhood living in a Palestinian refugee camp after the Six-Day War.
Mediterranean Deli has long been a fixture in the local Jewish community, with the restaurant serving as a caterer for lifecycle events at Beth El for many years. After the restaurant burned down in an accidental fire in July 2023, Beth El posted on Facebook urging its congregants to donate to a relief fund.
“My restaurant delivers Middle Eastern food, so it attracts customers from both sides,” Kadoura said. “I have Israelis that come and eat here. I have all walks of life, and, you know, they seem to like our food and come and eat…I think it’s a good thing, and I hope we would do as much as we can.”
In the lead-up to the fundraiser Tuesday, Greyber praised Kadoura and his restaurant in a social media post, writing, “If there is hope in the world, it is found in places like Mediterranean Deli, Bakery and Catering and people like Jamil Kadoura. I am grateful to God for his friendship and presence in my life and that of my community.”
Kadoura said that he had previously hosted fundraisers at the restaurant, including for Pakistani flood relief and Syrian refugees, adding that his own experience in a refugee camp, where he said he received aid from both Jews and Muslims, shaped his desire to help others in need.
“I feel like people need help, like I needed help when I was in that refugee camp, and when people come and feed us,” Kadoura said. “Jewish and Muslims.”
Kadoura said he approached Hasan with the idea for the fundraiser, which he saw as an opportunity to bring together communities that have often found themselves divided in recent years.
“I said I would like to do a fundraiser for your organization, but what I also like to do is bring the Jews and the Muslims and the Palestinians together, because there’s a lot of Jews and Palestinians in the area that are striving for the same goal — peace and love and an end to all this misery,” Kadoura said.
When Kadoura reached out to Greyber, a longtime friend, for his congregation’s support, Greyber replied that the synagogue would be “honored” to participate.
“I think it’s a powerful and important model, you know, that we don’t let what’s happening across the world tear apart the communities that we are living in,” Greyber said.
He said his community had rallied around Hasan and helped provide a support network for his family in Durham, in part because his work, which has included partnerships with Israeli NGOs, had been “vilified by people who purport to be a pro-Palestinian community.”
Hasan’s work in Gaza began on a medical mission in December 2023, where he saw firsthand the devastation inflicted on children by the rapidly widening war. During that trip, Hasan told the New York Times he performed 20 operations in ten days, often without anesthetics or antiseptics, but that all of his patients eventually died from infections.
Since founding the Gaza Children Village last April, the nonprofit has built six “Academy of Hope,” which provide Palestinian children with daily education, meals, healthcare, and psychosocial support.
But while many nonprofits serving Palestinians affected by the war have faced allegations of ties to Hamas, Hasan has set his work apart through partnerships with Israeli organizations and a stated focus on coexistence, principles that have at times earned him the ire of some Palestinians who say his work is too aligned with the Jewish state.
“I try really hard to stay neutral,” Hasan told the Religion News Service in February. “I do not use any words like ‘war crimes’ or ‘genocide,’ because it’s not my position. I’m not a lawyer. There are courts out there that describe that. I describe events I saw. I show pictures, I don’t use subjective words.”
During his remarks at the restaurant Tuesday evening, Hasan announced that the proceeds would go to children in both Israel and Gaza who had been orphaned by Oct. 7, telling the crowd gathered that his work was motivated by one principle: “Never again for both sides.”
“We led this rehabilitation in Gaza, bridging between Israelis and Gazans, and it started here in Durham,” Hasan told the crowd, according to footage shared with JTA by Greyber. “And your action today — this is one of the very, very, very few events that have people from synagogue, mosque and are getting together and for once, just eating and hanging out. I can’t tell who’s Arabic and who’s Jew.”
Greyber said that Hasan also told attendees that he would be hosting a camp this fall in Italy for both Israeli and Palestinian orphans of the war.
While Greyber said he had received some concerns about the fundraiser from members of the broader Jewish community, as well as his friends in Israel, over the potential that aid would fall into the hands of Hamas, he said he assuaged their concerns by explaining that Hasan had himself been threatened by Hamas, and had worked to keep the terror group far from his operations.
“I understand their concerns, but, you know, in the end, I think this is a project that’s worthy of the Jewish community’s support,” Greyber said. “And one of the things that’s very important is that there are many people in the local Muslim community who are supporting this.”
Indeed, Greyber said that he had received a voicemail on Monday from a local Muslim community member who told him “how moved he was, that our synagogue was supporting this.”
Hasan’s wife, Lauren Hasan, who worked as a trauma surgeon, said that when she arrived at the fundraiser at 6 p.m., it was packed with attendees.
“Honestly, it was by all accounts an incredible success,” Hasan told JTA over text. “There were people from all walks of life: Muslims, Jews, Christians sitting at tables and sharing a meal. And at the end of the day, that is a microcosm of the reality my husband and I want to see.”
For Greyber, his congregation’s support for the fundraiser underscored the complicated reality that many American Jewish communities have grappled with since Oct. 7.
“Like every American Jewish community, the past two and a half years have been excruciating and have torn — have certainly stretched the seams that hold our community together,” Greyber said. “I think we have people who are deeply, deeply committed to Israel and its wellbeing, and we have people who are deeply committed to and carry with them the destruction that has happened to the community in Gaza.”
Addressing those divides, Greyber said his congregation had long approached the conflict “beginning from a place of care and relationship for actual people,” a mindset he said was shaped by the synagogue’s late matriarch, Gladys Siegel.
“Many, many people in our community carry both of those things in their hearts, right? And it’s not one or the other, they carry both,” Greyber said. “And, you know, I’ve done my best to try to keep our hearts big enough and soft enough to carry those concerns.”
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This Jewish feminist has been the NYC’s sanitation department’s official artist for 50 years. A new movie tells her story.
(JTA) — In 1976, deep in New York City’s fiscal crisis, the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles read a review of her conceptual work in the Village Voice. In his review, critic David Bourdon made a radical suggestion inspired by Ukeles’ thesis: What if municipal work, like the Sanitation Department, were conceptual art? Could it get funded by grants, instead of by the city?
Ukeles presented the idea to Sanitation Department commissioner Anthony T. Vaccarello, who invited her to create art for 10,000 sanitation workers. The job would be unpaid. And, it turns out, she would keep it for nearly 50 years and counting.
Now 86, Ukeles is the subject of the documentary film “Maintenance Artist” directed by Jewish filmmaker Toby Perl Freilich, which made its New York theatrical release last week at the IFC Theater in Greenwich Village.
The title refers to Ukeles’ 1969 manifesto, which declared that the everyday activities often relegated to women — cooking, cleaning, changing diapers — were “maintenance art.”
But the movie spans all of Ukeles’ career, looking at her role as the artist-in-residence at the New York City Sanitation Department to her early activism on behalf of Tanzanian independence. The throughline, Ukeles says, has been a belief — rooted in her Jewish identity — that people are more than the roles that society assigns to them.
“As a Jew, I was in love with the notion of freedom,” Ukeles said in an interview. “This message of art as freedom, I felt that’s what I’m about. That’s what I’m for.”
As artist-in-residence, Ukeles plans, stages, and records public works of performance and conceptual art that recognizes the workers of the Sanitation Department. After the piece’s initial staging, photos from the performance might be shown at a museum or gallery.
Despite having been coined New York’s “trash artist” because of her Sanitation Department role, Ukeles does not actually dig in dumpsters or landfills to create her work. But much of her art has mined something else: her Jewish values, as the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi who herself has divided time between New York and Israel.
Some of her pieces have included conceptual and interactive works focusing on Jewish themes and traditions, such as the creation story and the mikvah, or ritual bath.
A 2010 interactive piece “Birthing Tikkun Olam,” for example, invited onlookers to reflect in an installation of glass mirrors, then make a “covenant” to repair the world. Their responses were collected and exchanged for a mirror in the piece, which she staged at the Yeshiva University Museum.
“The site of the art is going to move out into the world, and with it, the acts that you will do,” Ukeles told the university’s newspaper at the time.
Though Ukeles does not consider herself a Jewish artist, because she prefers to avoid being categorized as such, she observes Shabbat — even turning down a stint in the Peace Corps and Friday-night gallery openings to maintain her observance. She lives in Israel, where she advises art students at the Bezalel Academy Academy of Art and Design and attends a “partnership” minyan that aims to widen women’s participation in Orthodox Judaism.
“I have many deep beliefs in great Jewish ideas and commitments,” Ukeles said.
For Freilich, the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors and a descendant of Hasidic dynasties who is herself an observant Jew, Ukeles’ identity was core to why she became so transfixed by the artist that she decided to make a movie about her.
“Her reading of Jewish texts, her reading of Jewish philosophy, of Judaism was profoundly moving to me because it emphasized things like, ‘we’re all created in God’s image’ and and we’re all equally deserving of respect and honor, or that the, the profane is the pathway to the sacred,” Freilich said. “And these are deep, deep kinds of concepts in Judaism that a lot of people aren’t really that familiar with.”
That first piece with DSNY, titled “Touch Sanitation Performance,” spoke to Freilich, who was inspired by a visit to the 2016 retrospective of Ukeles’ work at the Queens Museum.
“I was completely, really blown away,” said Freilich, whose previous documentary works have covered broad swaths of Jewish history, from the partisans of World War II to kibbutz life in Israel.
Ukeles’ works, funded by grants, endowments, fellowships, and commissions, have taken shape in every possible art medium — including performance art and landscape art.
Initially experimenting with paint, she got into trouble while at the Pratt Institute for creating a bulbous multimedia piece with cheesecloth and debris. The school’s administration found it provocative. Her mentor, the abstract expressionist Robert Richenburg, defended Ukeles’ work and ultimately resigned from the school, rather than change his teaching methods at the administration’s request.
“It was a very, very difficult time in my life,” Ukeles said. “I was shocked.”
That controversial piece, titled “Second Binding,” is currently hanging in New York’s Jewish Museum.
Ukeles’ work with the Sanitation Department is perhaps best known for a year-long project from 1979 to 1980, where she sought to shake all 8,500 department workers’ hands. It was documented in a series of photographs.
“They were looked down upon,” Ukeles said. “Not race, not religious, not ethnic, but as a kind of class of maintenance workers and names that people were called.”
Coming up on her 49th year with the New York Sanitation Department, Laderman still has project ideas for the city. She has two projects at Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island — formerly the largest landfill in the world. One of those projects is an ongoing conversion of the landfill into a public park, set to be completed in 2036. The other project is an overlook above the park.
“I now call it ‘intergenerational,’ because it’ll probably take other people to pick it up,” Ukeles said.
“There’s a Jewish source of that notion that the earth is sacred and that we have to redeem the earth when it’s been degraded,” she added. “I don’t know if it will ever finish.”
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