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On one foot: Five essential things to know about Abraham Joshua Heschel on his 50th yahrzeit
(JTA) — Last week marked the 50th yahrzeit — or Hebrew anniversary — of the death of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), the theologian, scholar, philosopher, Holocaust survivor and modern-day prophet who was long associated with the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary but whose embrace of “radical amazement” wasn’t contained by any movement or denomination. Monday is also Martin Luther King Jr. Day: The rabbi and the minister have often been linked thanks to Heschel’s civil rights activism and iconic photographs of them in the front lines of the march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery on March 21, 1965. (See below for events tied to the legacies of both men.)
I confess that Heschel’s lavish, epigrammatic prose and devotion to the living reality of God didn’t speak to a buttoned-down skeptic like me. I might quote his book “The Sabbath,” a lovely articulation of how Shabbat forms an island in time, but I’m more comfortable discussing Heschel’s political views, like his opposition to the Vietnam War, than his ideas on God and humankind.
I suspect others are similarly intimidated by Heschel, and could use a gentle onramp. For help I turned to Rabbi Shai Held, author of “Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence” (2015) and the president and dean at Hadar, the nondenominational yeshiva. I challenged Held to name five works, articles, films or other media that would help people appreciate who Heschel was and why he remains celebrated.
“I fell in love with Heschel as as a teenager, because I felt he both articulated intuitions about the world that I had but didn’t remotely have language for, and he also was the first person I had heard articulate a vision of what Judaism thought that the good life could look like,” Held told me. “As a day school grad I felt I knew a lot of stuff about Judaism, but if you asked me ‘what is Judaism about and what is it for,’ I would have had no idea what to say. And Heschel gave me that narrative. It was a story that spoke to my mind and my heart at the same time. It was like asking me to become something in the world and that was incredibly moving to me.”
Here are five great ways to access Heschel, with comments by Rabbi Held. I plan to make this an ongoing series of introductions to Jewish thinkers, writers and artists who are making news or are particularly relevant to the current Jewish conversation. If there is someone you’d like to see discussed, drop me a line at asc@jewishweek.org.
(For Rabbi Held’s own introduction to Heschel, see his video, “Why Amazement Matters.”)
“The Sabbath,” (1951)
(In this slim volume, Heschel describes the Sabbath as a “palace in time,” and an opportunity for spiritual communion with the potential to help shape how its observers live the other six days of the week.)
“The number of people I have met in my travels, who tell me about how that book opened them up to spirituality, is staggering. Two things about that book are very moving. One is, at a time when American Judaism was about integration and success, Heschel launched this dramatic insistence that Judaism was about the life of the spirit. I think it landed like a bomb for a lot of American Jews. It was totally revolutionary to them. One of the ways that the book has resonated and continues to resonate is that Heschel is rebelling against a culture of technology, and wants to place a stake in the ground for the value of appreciation and gratitude. One of my favorite sentences in all of Heschel is that ‘Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.’ That line is from ‘God in Search of Man,’ but I think ‘The Sabbath’ is about Shabbat as a practice of appreciation.
“I also think that people had internalized the Christian, anti-Jewish idea that Christianity was about inwardness and spirituality and Judaism wasn’t. Heschel responds: We gave the world the gift of Sabbath which is about living in the presence of God.”
“God in Search of Man,” part 1 (1955)
(Held calls Heschel’s companion volume to his earlier work “Man Is Not Alone” a “beautiful evocation of what wonder and gratitude look like.”)
“This is Heschel as a phenomenologist: What is it like to have a sense that our lives are not something that we earned and that part of the religious life is to repay this extraordinary gift? He needs to write in a poetic mode, in part, because he’s trying to evoke in his readers a sense of gratitude, a sense of indebtedness, a sense of obligation. What I tried to do in my book is to [delete] sort of argue that amidst all that poetry, there’s an argument: Wonder is what opens the door to obligation. Wonder is about reawakening a sense that all of us, just by the nature of being human, have an intuition that we’re obligated to something and someone.”
“The Prophets,” 1962
(Heschel provides compact profiles of seven biblical prophets and attempts to understand the phenomenon of prophecy in general. Held recommends starting with the chapter titled, “The Theology of Pathos.”)
“Heschel makes the most eloquent case I think any Jew has ever made since the prophets for a God who cares, a God who is stirred to the core of God’s being by human suffering and especially human suffering that stems from oppression. It’s Heschel’s attempt to reclaim the God of the Bible from what he saw as the ravages of abstract philosophy that reduces God to an idea. God is not an idea. God is someone who cares about us. God has a name. There’s this amazing speech he gives to Jewish educators somewhere where he says, ‘I was invited to a conference to talk about my idea of God and I responded to them and said, ‘I don’t have an idea of God, I have God’ — Hakadosh baruch hu [the Holy one, blessed be God] who makes a claim on my life.”
“Religion and Race,” 1963
(On Jan. 14, 1963, Heschel gave the speech “Religion and Race” at a conference of the same name in Chicago, where he became close to King.)
“First of all, you see how Heschel’s theology and his activism are so entirely interwoven: The God who loves the downtrodden, the God who loves widows and orphans, is the God who requires us to stand up and fight for civil rights. It’s also extraordinarily beautiful, in that it combines really interesting biblical interpretation with [theological depth and profound] moral passion. Part of what Heschel and King meant to each other is that each one of them saw the other as a kind of living proof that God had not abandoned the downtrodden — and King was very important to Heschel in the context of the theology of of the Shoah: Martin Luther King embodies the reality that God has not abandoned the world. He really believed Martin Luther King was channeling God, nothing less than that.”
The NBC Interview (1972)
(Shortly before he died at age 65, Heschel recorded an interview with broadcaster Carl Stern. It aired on Dec. 10, 1972, on NBC-TV as an episode of “The Eternal Light,” the long-running religion and ethics show produced in conjunction with the Jewish Theological Seminary.)
“He makes this incredibly beautiful statement about telling kids to live their life as if it were a work of art. Which is just amazing — so beautiful and so simple. And there’s also this really interesting moment where Carl Stern asks him if he’s a prophet and he says, ‘You know, I cannot accept such a compliment. I am not a prophet. I am a child of prophets. But indeed the Talmud says all Israel are the children of prophets.’ I just love that combination of humility and elevatedness. That interview [offers a powerful glimpse of him as a human being, and not just a bunch of words on a page. You see a real person]. is also what makes him actually a human being and not just a bunch of words on a page. You see a real person.”
On Monday, Jan. 16 at 7 p.m. ET, Shai Held will join Arnold Eisen, chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day conversation reflecting on Heschel’s life, thought and legacy. (Register here for Zoom link.) That same night, at 8 p.m. ET, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah will commemorate Heschel’s 50th yahrzeit with a discussion with his daughter, Susannah Heschel, the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. (Register here.)
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YiddishPOP can bring more diversity to American Jewish education
Every Sunday morning, a group of families in Stockholm, Sweden, meets in a local school to create handicrafts, do gymnastics — and learn Yiddish.
Katka Mazurczak, the instructor of this grassroots group called The Yiddish Club, told me that the families seem to really enjoy the weekly Yiddish immersion. One of the resources she uses is YiddishPOP, a free online animated and game-based learning tool that features short episodes about a young teenager named Nomi, her robot sidekick Moby and her friends.
I’ve known about YiddishPOP for years and often share its videos with my grandchildren. The episodes cover topics that are familiar and easy for children to relate to. In one, a friend of Nomi’s finally scores a basket. In another, Nomi and Moby laugh as they look at their comical reflections in funhouse mirrors.
Each story is accompanied by a video clip presenting the new vocabulary and grammar, interactive games and a multiple choice quiz.
“Children love YiddishPOP,” said Mazurczak, who also uses the program when teaching kids in more formal school settings like the Stockholm Jewish Hillel School, known as Hillelskolan. “It has captivating graphics, clear speech and the movie goes at a good pace. Some episodes are really funny and kids laugh out loud.”
Part of the appeal of YiddishPOP, particularly for beginners, lies in Moby’s slapstick antics. I too find myself laughing during those scenes.
In a time when seeking diversity has become a main focus in schools across America, Jewish educators might want to consider introducing young students to the multi-faceted language and culture of Ashkenazic Jewry, using a contemporary language learning tool like YiddishPOP.
Teaching the Yiddish language through animation and interactive games helps it come alive for children, depicting it as a natural, even cool way to express Jewish identity, rather than stereotypically sending the language to the dustbin of history.
One school that has tried out YiddishPOP is the Krieger Schechter Day School in Baltimore, MD. When the school piloted the program with its third-grade class last year, the director of the lower school, Toby Kaplowitz, was impressed.
“Though students had just four sessions, they were truly engaged and walked away with both a sense of the language and an appreciation for its connection to their Jewish learning,” Kaplowitz wrote in an email. Krieger plans to continue using YiddishPOP with these same students, as they transition to fourth grade.
Last year, YiddishPOP began distributing $500 microgrants to help teachers and parents bring the Yiddish program to schools. Dana Yudovich Katz, a teacher at Kehillah High — a supplemental program for students in grades 8–12, run by the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston — was the first recipient. She added YiddishPOP to a course she had initiated with the teens called TAM: A Taste of Yiddish Language and Culture. Tam is Yiddish for “flavor.”
Most of the students came away from using YiddishPOP with a positive feeling towards the language. As one student in Yudovich Katz’s class told her: “The film was good at using the words in a way I could understand because it was just slow enough.”
The YiddishPOP team is now working on teacher materials that will make it easier for people without a background in Yiddish or language teaching to use YiddishPOP. Teachers and school administrators who’d like to apply for a YiddishPOP microgrant can do so here until July 31.
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UK Jewish leaders demand answers after Muslim police group paper calls Zionism a form of hatred
(JTA) — British Jewish groups say they are alarmed about revelations that a fraternal society for Muslim police officers published a policy paper that described Zionism as a form of anti-Muslim hatred and called the Israeli army a “Zionist terrorist group.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews called the paper posted by the National Association of Muslim Police “disturbing” in its presentation of Jewish identity, history and the nature of antisemitism.
“If this is being circulated among officers, it poses a direct challenge to the integrity of policing and it should be withdrawn immediately,” the group said.
NAMP has distanced itself from the report and, in a statement, rejected any allegation that the group “supports Hamas.”
The 39-page paper titled “From Past Prejudices to Present Policies: Confronting anti-Muslim hatred and Promoting Human Rights,” was written by NAMP’s then-vice president, Khaldoun Kabbani, and published in July 2025. It says “Zionism represents one of the manifestations of anti-Muslim hatred”; likens the war in Gaza to the Holocaust; and disputes facts about Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, including that Israeli children were killed.
The Spectator, a right-wing British newspaper, drew attention to the report in a piece published on Friday that said the report illuminated “the disturbing truth about the National Association of Muslim Police.” The group has a formal affiliation with 16 of 43 police departments in the U.K. and says it represents more than 20,000 officers.
Kabbani, a forensics officer, was briefly the chair of the Scottish Muslim Police Association but planned to move abroad after retiring earlier this year, according to a post by the group on LinkedIn.
The revelation of the NAMP report comes at a time of heightened tension over policing in the U.K., amid both a surge in anti-Jewish crimes and a renewed uproar over a December murder that has fueled allegations of “two-tier policing” that treats some victims differently from others. The Spectator referenced the victim, Henry Nowak, in the column about NAMP.
The NAMP report has spurred distress for many British Jews who are on edge amid a string of violent incidents targeting Jewish communities. The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a watchdog group, said its polling shows that 83% of British Jews do not think the police are doing enough to protect them — and that the report suggested their concerns were well founded.
“The people responsible for publishing this extremist screed on the official police.uk web domain are unfit to be police officers and must be immediately investigated by their respective forces’ professional standards departments and dismissed,” Steven Silverman, CAM’s director of investigations and enforcement, said in a statement.
“British Jews have long suffered two-tier policing that sees antisemitic crime go unpunished,” he said, adding that CAM would press the British government “ensure a clear message is being sent. This cannot pass with the document being quietly deleted.”
The report was removed from NAMP’s website over the weekend. The group distanced itself from the report in a statement published on Tuesday, saying that it had removed the report “immediately” after learning about its existence and emphasizing that the author was “no longer associated” with NAMP.
“We understand that the publication of this document has affected several communities, and we regret any concern, discomfort, or misunderstanding it may have caused,” the group said.
It added, “NAMP categorically does not ‘defend’ Hamas or any other proscribed organisation. We condemn all forms of terrorism and extremism.”
The document is “deeply troubling,” a spokesperson for the Jewish Leadership Council, which coordinates British Jewish groups, said in a statement.
“This document appears to falsely associate an ideology held by the majority of Jewish people as a threat to Muslims. It also engages in deeply troubling Holocaust inversion and denial of some of the worst atrocities carried out by Hamas on October 7th,” the spokesperson said. “At a time of rising antisemitism including violent attacks on British Jews, this document further threatens community cohesion and police forces should be clear in distancing themselves from it.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said it plans to speak with the “relevant” government and police departments to discover the paper’s provenance, how it’s being used and “how to ensure that the valued relationships of trust between British Jews and the police are not being undermined.”
The Metropolitan Police of London, the largest police department in the U.K. and a formal NAMP affiliate, declined to comment on the report. The department has recently stepped up policing in Jewish communities in an effort to stem antisemitic violence.
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Jacob Reses, Vance’s Jewish chief of staff, to leave administration
(JTA) — Jacob Reses, the Jewish chief of staff to Vice President JD Vance, is leaving the administration at the end of the summer, a source confirmed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Thursday.
Reses, who’s been in his role since Vance and President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, is perhaps the closest Jewish official in Vance’s orbit. He has had a close relationship with the vice president since Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio.
A source familiar with the matter confirmed NBC News’ initial report that Reses informed Vance of his decision months ago, after his wife became pregnant. Vance said in a statement on Thursday that he will “miss him dearly, but he won’t be far, and I plan to keep his counsel close until our paths cross again.” Reses’ plans for his next role are currently unknown.
Vance has recently drawn the ire of some Jewish Republicans who say that he has refused to confront antisemitism on the right, including from former Fox news host Tucker Carlson. (Carlson’s son is also a Vance staffer.) A New York Magazine profile published in March suggested that Reses was on board with Vance’s approach, and revealed that Reses used his private X account to amplify voices calling on Jews to embrace, rather than resist, the Christian nationalist current surging within the GOP.
Reses has been “by my side for my whole career in public life,” Vance said in a statement.
“I can’t imagine having been on this life-changing journey without him,” Vance said. “From day one of my time as a Senator-elect, I could not have asked for a more loyal and discerning advisor and friend as my chief of staff.”
The personal bond between the two men was on display in January, when Vance took part in Reses’ wedding to Rachel Altman at a synagogue in Rockville, Maryland, delivering a Jewish prayer under the chuppah. Chabad of Princeton University, Reses’ alma mater, posted a photo of the couple with the vice president, celebrating the occasion as an expression of Jewish pride.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DTrUKXEDOQE/?img_index=3
That closeness, and Reses’ reported alignment with Vance’s stance on right-wing antisemitism, have not spared Reses from becoming a target of antisemites. In one instance, a white-nationalist website ran an article about him headlined, “Another Nail in the Coffin — Jew Runs J. D. Vance.”
A Jewish Telegraphic Agency profile published in 2024, when Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate, traced Reses’ Jewish identity and his journey from a Democratic-leaning Jewish teenager in southern New Jersey, whose grandfather escaped the Holocaust in Lithuania, to one of the most influential conservatives in Washington. His trajectory included internships for Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, a political conversion at Princeton and stints at the Heritage Foundation and in the office of Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.
On Thursday, Republican leaders and Trump administration officials sang Reses’ praises in statements shared with JTA.
“Jacob Reses has been an invaluable, loyal, and trusted hand to Vice President Vance and President Trump,” said Matt Brooks, CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition. “As a proud Jewish American, whose own family story carries the weight of our people’s history, Jacob brought both conviction and clarity to one of the most consequential roles in Washington.” Brooks added that the RJC has “no doubt he will continue to play a critical role moving forward.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who’s seen as a possible challenger to Vance for the 2028 presidential nomination, said that Reses served Vance and the entire administration “with distinction,” and that he “understands the moment we’re in and he spent every day fighting to deliver results for the President.”
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, said he was proud to have Reses “by my side in negotiating some of the toughest deals for the President.”
“Don’t let Jacob fool you — beneath his kind exterior he’s a killer,” Witkoff said. “It’s been a delight to get to know him through the Vice President, and our foreign adventures from Israel to Pakistan have been historic.”
He added, “We haven’t seen the last of him.”
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