There is a familiar feeling I get these days when I hear about the supposedly unraveling relationship between New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the city’s Jews. It is the same feeling I remember from the early days of the campus encampments protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, when a certain media narrative of out-of-control friction and my own lived experience felt as though they were taking place on different planets.

I remember reading alarming reports about campuses becoming hotbeds of violent division in late 2023. Jewish students, some pundits said, were allegedly under siege at every moment. Then I went to a nearby campus myself. What I saw was not a utopia. It was not an environment free of tension, politics, anger, confusion or pain. But nor was it a match for the apocalyptic portrait being painted over and over again in public discourse.

I saw young people trying, awkwardly and imperfectly, to navigate one of the hardest issues imaginable. I saw some Jewish students wearing watermelon kippahs, and others reciting Birkat Hamazon after a meal. I saw kaffiyehs and Free Palestine posters. I saw disagreement and activism, but also, on all sides, earnest engagement.

Multiple realities can exist simultaneously. I did not visit every campus in the United States, andI know there were genuinely frightening incidents in some places. But the disconnect between what I was repeatedly told I should be seeing and what I actually witnessed left me asking a question I still cannot shake: What does our community lose by constantly buying into a narrative of inevitable Jewish peril and division?

I find myself asking the same question now, as some New York City Jews accuse Mamdani of abandoning our community — as hundreds did during a Tuesday protest  — and the New York media obsessively problematizes the relationship between Gracie Mansion and New York’s Jewish community.

Last week, I attended Mamdani’s Shavuot gathering honoring Ruth Messinger, an event that sparked yet another media furor over Mamdani’s relationship with his Jewish constituents, after some leaders boycotted the gathering. What much coverage missed: the event felt exactly like every other official Jewish gathering I have ever attended. There were rabbis, nonprofit leaders, Israeli and American Jewish activists, funders, organizers, old friends, awkward networking moments, mediocre wine, decent bagels and small talk.

And there was, above all, the deep sense of a genuine relationship. When the mayor roared “chag sameach!” into the room, smiling broadly, it did not feel performative to many of us because many of us actually know him. Personally. Through him showing up in Jewish spaces across New York over these past few years.

I have run into Mamdani on Yom Kippur. At Oct. 7 vigils. At Passover events. And looking around that room, it seemed many others shared that experience.

Why is our experience treated as somehow less significant when it comes to assessing how Mamdani stands with the Jewish community?

Why are we hearing so much more about the Jews who object to Mamdani’s policies than the many of us who embrace them? Last week’s gathering included progressive Jews, anti-occupation Jews, Israeli expats, liberal rabbis, artists, nonprofit workers, old-school establishment figures and more. Are our reasons for joyfully engaging with Mamdani so much less interesting than the boycotters’ reasons for questioning him?

Again, I am not suggesting antisemitism is fictional. It is real. It is rising. I have experienced it both online and offline.

Nor am I arguing that all criticism of Mamdani is inherently cynical or bad-faith. Politicians should be scrutinized.

But there is a meaningful difference between scrutiny and popularizing an incomplete narrative. And increasingly, it feels as though parts of our media ecosystem have become invested in telling a story about Jews and public life that leaves very little room for complexity, coexistence, contradiction or ordinary human interaction.

A story in which Jews are perpetually under threat from everyone around them. A story in which Muslim politicians and Jewish communities are naturally destined for conflict. A story in which any evidence to the contrary must be minimized, reframed or treated as suspicious.

It’s true that at least one poll shows that a majority of New York City Jews remain skeptical about Mamdani. But it’s also true that those views have in part been shaped by breathless coverage that neglects to engage with how much Mamdani’s viewpoint actually reflects that of many American Jews. After all, almost 40% of American Jews believe Israel committed a genocide in Gaza. Is a mayor who has opened the door to those viewpoints — when those of us who hold them have often been excluded from official spaces — neglecting the Jewish community, or just engaging with it in a different way?

I left Gracie Mansion last week wondering whether some people have become so attached to the performance of Jewish communal crisis that moments of genuine civic warmth now feel almost threatening to the narrative itself. I wondered that again, reading about Tuesday’s protest. Mamdani has spent years intentionally building relationships inside Jewish New York; I saw them on display last week, in a way that felt profound and meaningful.

Actual coexistence isn’t just possible; it’s happening. Why not tell that story, rather than endlessly forecast an inevitable fracture?

The post Mamdani has made ample efforts for Jews. How come no one is telling that story? appeared first on The Forward.

By the time the children began singing in Yiddish on their own at a playground in Rio de Janeiro, Sonia Kramer realized something important had changed.

The songs were not part of a formal lesson. No teacher had prompted them. The children — classmates from a Jewish day school — simply started singing melodies they had learned in workshops organized by Viver com Yiddish (“Living for Yiddish”), the educational and cultural initiative Kramer founded a decade ago.

“For me, that was the moment the language felt truly alive,” she said. “Maybe later they will forget some of it. Maybe not. But at that moment, the songs became part of their memory.”

In Brazil, where Yiddish disappeared from Jewish day schools by the early 2000s (they used to teach the language once or twice a week), such moments are rare enough to feel historic.

Kramer, an emeritus professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and a daughter of an Auschwitz survivor from Ostrowiec, Poland, doesn’t describe what’s happening as a “revival.” The word feels too grand for Rio’s context. There are no Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods anymore, no immersion schools, no daily life conducted in the language.

Something else, though, is emerging: a cultural rediscovery led through music, literature and children’s education. Yiddish is circulating again — at shows, at parties, in university classrooms. It’s not yet a revival, but Yiddish is undeniably alive.

“We skipped a generation,” Kramer said. “The immigrants wanted their children to learn Portuguese. Yiddish reminded many people of sorrow and survival. But now we are beginning to value what was created in that language — the literature, the songs, the poetry, the theater, the cinema.”

A spark that grew into a program

The roots of Viver com Yiddish reach back to 2016, when Kramer attended the annual Yiddish immersion retreat, Yiddish Vokh.

“For the first time in my life, I was in a place where 150 people were speaking and singing in Yiddish — every day, all week,” she recalled. “Not as nostalgia. As a language that is alive.” One day at the event, an educator familiar with Kramer’s work in childhood education encouraged her to create Yiddish workshops for children in Brazil.

Back in Rio, Kramer approached several progressive Jewish schools with a proposal: Not traditional language instruction, but cultural workshops built around shmuesn (daily conversation), Yiddish songs, stories, games and children’s literature. One school, Escola Eliezer Max, agreed to join the project.

Today, the initiative encompasses university classes, research projects, a musical ensemble and workshops that reach 400 to 500 children annually.

Some of the educators came through those university courses. Alice Fucs began studying Yiddish through Kramer’s courses at PUC-Rio and has taught in the children’s workshops ever since.

“I started studying Yiddish in 2020 and soon realized I would never stop,” she said. “It connected me with my family’s past and opened up a new and amazing world. The workshops with the children are both a chance to pass on what I’ve already learned and a chance to learn more every month.”

Teaching has its own challenges. “Some of the children find it hard to grasp a language that isn’t tied to a country,” Fucs said. “We bring in contemporary Yiddish work to try to build that bridge.”

The workshops run once a month, preschool through fifth grade — far from enough to create fluency. But fluency isn’t the immediate goal.

“Our first objective was to create an emotional memory,” she said. “Positive feelings connected to Yiddish.”

 

Teaching a language that “disappeared”

A couple of years ago, one encounter crystallized the challenge: During a workshop, a 10-year-old boy told the teachers that learning Yiddish was pointless.

“My parents told me not to pay attention to this,” he said. “The language disappeared from the world.”

The comment deeply affected the workshop educators who decided to respond not with argument, but with evidence.

A month later, they returned carrying a large bag of Yiddish children’s books; many bilingual.

The children protested immediately.

“But we can’t read Yiddish,” they told her.

“You can read some of it,” Kramer replied.

Kramer showed them Yiddish interviews produced by the Yiddish Book Center and Yiddish music clips performed abroad, explaining that the language is alive in many countries. The children seemed impressed.

For Kramer, moments like this counter a familiar misconception: that Yiddish belongs only to the past, or that it was merely a “dialect.”

“People still say that it’s not really a language, then you have to explain: No, it has literature, poetry, theater, philosophy. It developed across centuries.”

 

Growing seeds through music and stories

The workshops at Eliezer Max begin with four-year-olds. Meeting only once a month, teaching grammar isn’t the goal. Instead, the project meets children where they already are: in songs and stories. Before launching the workshops, Kramer noticed that Yiddish songs had virtually vanished from Rio’s Jewish schools. “In my childhood, Yiddish music was everywhere,” she said. “And suddenly there was nothing.”

So the workshops focus on repertoire: songs, stories, emotional connection. Teachers explain who wrote the lyrics, introducing children to Yiddish poets and writers. “What is extraordinary in Yiddish culture,” Kramer said, “is how deeply literature lives inside the music.”

The approach resonates. The school coordinator now includes Yiddish songs at school events, alongside the Portuguese, Hebrew, and English repertoire. Music teachers prepare children to perform them; families hear the music at holiday celebrations; classroom teachers incorporate elements into broader cultural programming.

Sometimes the songs travel home. “Is there a greater fargenign (joy) than receiving a video of my 12-year-old granddaughter and 9-year-old grandson spontaneously singing Tumbalalaika before bed?” said Sonia Tucherman, grandmother of two children in the workshops. “It was a seed planted by my grandparents, and I see it bearing fruit in my grandchildren.”

Still, the program’s reach has clear limits. Yiddish isn’t part of the school’s curriculum — the workshops sit alongside it, not within it. They end at fifth grade, which means older children often drift from the songs they once knew. And one meeting a month, said Kramer, isn’t enough to anchor a language.

 

Building something to last

For all that it has built, Viver com Yiddish still rests on a fragile structure.

Most of the educators and musicians involved work multiple jobs. Much of the organizational labor — translating materials, adapting books, preparing lessons — falls to volunteers. Kramer herself works largely as a volunteer, but that arrangement isn’t sustainable for the younger teachers and musicians who built the project into what it is.

Viver com Yiddish’s current fundraising campaign aims to train a new generation of Yiddish educators and create paid positions to coordinate educational materials and programming.

“You cannot sustain this on passion alone,” Kramer said. “We have to train the next generation, and give the people already doing this work the conditions to continue.”

“We’re trying to bring back a language and a culture considered lost by our generation, and pass it to another generation,” she said. “That feels deeply Jewish to me: taking something from the past and carrying it into the future.”

The post Why children in Rio de Janeiro are singing in Yiddish appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — A huge fire broke out Tuesday morning at the Kosher Kingdom supermarket in Golders Green, London’s heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Firefighters were still working to put out the blaze six hours later.

Metropolitan Police posted on X that officers were called to the scene on Golders Green Road around 7 a.m. by the London Fire Brigade. “Officers responded and are at the scene assisting firefighters with road closures and evacuations,” said police.

London Fire Brigade Assistant Commissioner Craig Carter provided an update on the scene at 12:30 p.m., saying that 15 engines and around 100 firefighters “have been tackling the fire at its height, which has affected a ground floor shop and a storage area to the rear, which has partially collapsed.”

He noted that the flats above were not affected but residents were evacuated as a precaution.

“Our specialist Fire Investigators, in conjunction with the Metropolitan Police Service, have worked at pace to establish that the circumstances of the fire are not believed to be suspicious and investigations on the cause and origin of the fire are ongoing,” Carter added.

The news that Kosher Kingdom did not appear to be deliberately targeted comes as a relief to Jewish residents, who have been on edge for months amid a string of attacks. The blaze broke out in the same area where four Hatzola ambulances were torched in March, two Jewish men were stabbed in April and a Jewish man said he was attacked for speaking Hebrew this month.

Rochel Cohen, who lives near the supermarket, is among those whose street has been cordoned off. Her first thought was the incident was another antisemitic attack, she told JTA in a phone interview.

Cohen said she looked out the window around 7 a.m. and saw “just huge plumes of black smoke and we heard all the sirens. And the police have roped off all our roads again.”

That “again,” Cohen said, was because it was the third time in two months that her family had witnessed “crime scenes in our neighborhood.”

“The ambulance fire was just on the next street from us and the stabbing situation was 100 meters down the road from us,” she said.

Prior to the fire department’s update, speculation spread on social media that the fire was electrical, potentially caused by faulty freezers. London has seen an unprecedented heatwave over the last several days, with temperatures soaring over 90 degrees.

Cohen said two of her family members previously worked at Kosher Kingdom. They believed from the outset that there was an electrical fire in the freezers “because it’s exactly from the roof footage that we saw where those freezers are located,” she said.

Nonetheless, another incident in the neighborhood has left her shaken. “It’s just a bit of a nightmare, really,” she said. “It’s all these incidents adding up, and it makes it quite scary, this climate of fear we’re currently in. It’s really oppressive.”

Cohen said she has been traveling to jury service the last several weeks about 10 miles from Golders Green in Wood Green, which has a higher than average crime rate.

“I actually felt safer there than I do walking the street here in Golders Green because I’m constantly turning around, checking what’s going on,” she said. “It’s not a nice feeling.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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