(New York Jewish Week) — A new Jewish tradition has taken hold at a private, non-Jewish school in Manhattan.

On a recent Friday, about 240 students, parents and educators from the Town School, located on the Upper East Side, stayed late to eat matzah ball soup, recite blessings over challah and candles, and sing Hebrew songs.

It was the third time in as many years that the school had held a Shabbat celebration, and more than half of the students and parents in attendance weren’t Jewish.

“I think there is a real enthusiasm and excitement for families who are not Jewish to come into their first Shabbat or learn more about it again,” said Pierangelo Rossi, the Town School’s director of equity and community action.

Originally from Peru, Rossi is not Jewish. His first Shabbat experience ever was at the Town School in 2024, after Jewish parents organized a gathering in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

For years, the school had special “affinity groups” and spaces for students and parents of color, for “white anti-racist” students, and for queer students and their allies. The attack, and the surge of antisemitism that followed, spurred Jewish students and parents to work with the school to create their own.

While the Town School does not collect information about students’ religion, officials estimate that at least a quarter of the student body is Jewish.

“After Oct. 7, we knew — and it became clear to all of us — that our Jewish community was looking for that sense of affirmation in a way they hadn’t before,” said Head of School Doug Brophy.

Brophy, who has led the Town School since 2018, understood how they felt. He is also vice president of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side.

Affinity groups have emerged as a hot-button issue in the debate over DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion. While their proponents say the groups give minority and marginalized populations desperately needed spaces of their own, critics of DEI say the groups can reinforce divisions and inappropriately inject progressive ideologies into schools and other institutions.

Jewish “anti-woke” advocates have particularly criticized the affinity group framework for too often forcing Jewish students into a binary framework about race and privilege that does not recognize the complexity of Jewish identity.

At the same time, tensions amid the aftermath of Oct. 7 roiled some New York City private schools. The head of one elite private school stepped down last summer after members of the school community clashed over identity, antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Gaza war.

At the Town School, officials and parents say, those tensions have been absent. Instead, the entire school community has embraced the Shabbat celebrations alongside the other special events held to honor students’ traditions, such as a lion parade on the school’s block to mark Lunar New Year and a Persian New Year observance led by parents.

“Whether it’s coming from a vulnerability or a difference, it’s [about] wanting to be part of something bigger than yourself, and not just our Jewish families and colleagues feeling a sense of identity, but everyone else developing a greater sense of empathy,” Brophy said.

The Town School is not the only non-Jewish private school in the city to hold Shabbat celebrations in recent years: Riverdale Country Day School in the Bronx says 700 people attended its November 2024 gathering. But it has committed to annual gatherings, which are growing in attendance.

That first Shabbat in 2024 was led by Rabbi Bradley Solmsen from the Conservative Park Avenue Synagogue; in 2025, by Rabbi Rena Rifkin from Stephen Wise; and this year, by Ana Turkienicz, an educator from the Upper West Side’s Rodeph Sholom School and the Pelham Jewish Center.

“For me, it was really a very different context where you have non-Jews that are interested in learning about what is it that Jews do and are open,” Turkienicz said. “And it was beautiful.”

To create an educational plan that was still engaging for children of all ages, she narrowed the focus of the event to two words: “Shabbat” and “shalom,” meaning “Sabbath” and “peace.”

“I need to use vocabulary, and I need to work with the room only, with those with concepts that are universal,” Turkienicz added. “And there is a lot. There’s a lot in ‘Shabbat’ and ‘shalom’ that are universal.”

She taught the guests the songs “Bim Bam” and “Salaam” — the latter being the Arabic word for “shalom” — and recited the blessings over the candles and challah, and the younger children decorated placemats, while the older children hung out with their classmates.

14-year-old Daniel Rybak stuck around near the school after his last class of the day got out so he could attend the after-school Shabbat service for his second time.

Rybak, whose mother is Catholic and whose father is Jewish, has attended the Town School for nine years.

“Just talking about the greater world at this point, with all the troubles in the Levant, with Israel and Gaza, as well as just the general sense, I suppose, that things are getting a little more violent around the world — it’s just a nice thing that brings people back to that sense of, ‘Hey, we’re here, we’re family, we’re OK, we’re getting through this,’” Rybak said. “It just shows that even throughout all that that’s happened everywhere, there’s still pockets of community and of real hope.”

This year, the Shabbat gathering took on added meaning for some attendees as some of New York’s Jews feel increasingly alienated or afraid following the election of Zohran Mamdani, a longtime and staunch critic of Israel, to the mayor’s office.

“The whole time I was thinking: 20 blocks north from here, there is a new mayor that we don’t know what [he’s] going to be for the Jewish community in New York,” Turkienicz said. “Twenty blocks south of his mansion, we have a private, non-Jewish school doing a Kabbalat Shabbat.”

Katy Williamson, a Jewish parent who helped organize the last two Town School Shabbats and attended this year’s, said she was “really blown away by the sense of community” and surprised by how many people attended.

“I read the news. Obviously, we live in New York City. I’m very aware of what’s going on outside of this, just in the world right now,” she said. “There was just this really warm feeling. … So many people from the school community joined and wanted to be a part of it.”

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(JTA) — A disagreement over how to define the sources of rising antisemitism in Europe escalated into a public clash this week between two prominent Jewish leaders, with tech billionaire Elon Musk intervening to back the U.S. government’s antisemitism envoy over a prominent European rabbi. 

The dispute centers on remarks made Wednesday at the World Economic Forum by Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Conference of European Rabbis, during a panel discussion on antisemitism, extremism and social cohesion.

Responding to a question about the surge of antisemitism in Germany and beyond, Goldschmidt said the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel had triggered a dramatic global rise in antisemitic incidents, including what he described as organized and state-sponsored activity on university campuses and in public spaces.

Goldschmidt then linked broader political developments in Europe to immigration-related anxieties.

“I think the rise of the extreme right in many European countries is a response to the insecurity felt by the so-called old Europeans regarding the new immigrants who came from the Middle East,” he said.

He went on to argue that combating antisemitism and Islamophobia together was in the shared interest of Jewish and Muslim communities, pointing to past interfaith initiatives he said had helped promote social cohesion.

Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, publicly criticized Goldschmidt’s remarks on X, calling them a misreading of the drivers of contemporary antisemitism in Europe. The intervention marked one of Kaploun’s first major public statements since his Senate confirmation in December.

“Blaming ‘old Europe’ for the present surge in antisemitism is disgraceful,” Kaploun wrote, arguing instead that mass migration has played a significant role in recent antisemitic violence and threats to Jewish safety.

“I am proud to serve in an administration that understands that mass migration is a huge driver of antisemitism,” Kaploun wrote. “It creates dramatic social changes and threatens the safety of all citizens. This administration, led by President Trump and Secretary Rubio, recognizes and confronts today’s challenges with clarity. Mass migration itself threatens the safety of Jews and all communities.”

Musk, the owner of X, amplified Kaploun’s critique by reposting his comments and replying, “Exactly. Thank you for speaking up,” a move that quickly broadened the dispute beyond Jewish communal circles.

Goldschmidt responded within hours, rejecting the characterization of his remarks and saying they had been taken out of context. He said he did not blame European culture for antisemitism and reiterated that he views antisemitism as stemming from multiple ideological sources, including the far right, the far left and radical Islamist violence.

“I never blamed ‘old Europe’ for the current rise in antisemitism,” Goldschmidt wrote, adding that his Davos comments were intended to explain political reactions to immigration, not to excuse antisemitic attacks.

The exchange highlights a growing divide among Jewish leaders over how to frame antisemitism amid polarized debates about immigration, integration and public safety — debates that have increasingly spilled into partisan politics in the United States.

Kaploun’s emphasis on migration echoes language used by Vice President JD Vance, who said in December that reducing immigration was “the single most significant thing” the United States could do to curb antisemitism, while dismissing claims of rising antisemitic sentiment within the Republican Party.

The dispute also reflects longstanding institutional tensions. Kaploun is affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, which has grown into a dominant force in Jewish communal life in Russia and parts of Europe. Goldschmidt, a former chief rabbi of Moscow who left Russia after refusing to endorse the war in Ukraine, represents a European rabbinic establishment that has at times clashed with Chabad over authority and representation.

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I write about a lot of Jewish movies and TV across a big range — shows that examine different valences of Jewish identity, like Long Story Short, or that explore Hasidic life, like Shtisel. But there’s one common genre that ticks me off: The dire warning.

This is a common form of Jewishly-inflected media that crosses my desk. Maybe it’s a Holocaust movie or TV show. Maybe it’s about modern antisemitism. Maybe it’s about neo-Nazis. But the intent of all of them is clear, namely, to warn the public about the rise of extremist ideology. “We should all be very worried!” they scream at the audiences. “Nazis are everywhere!”

In Nuremberg, characters observe, in serious tones, that even seemingly normal people can be capable of great evil. Americans, they say, should watch out lest the German hatred arrive on their shores. In shows like A Little Light, about Miep Gies’ heroism in hiding the Frank family, the obvious message is about how everyday people must step up to fight evil Nazis. It’s all painfully heavy-handed.

I agree: We should learn from history, and we should be on alert for rising antisemitism. But this message also gets old. We grow numb to it. If the most effective way to prevent the return of fascism or Nazism was simply telling people “Nazi bad!” then there would never be any issue.

That’s why I was so fascinated when I finally watched One Battle After Another, after it won Best Picture at the Golden Globes and got a slew of Oscar nominations. Much of the movie is in fact a satire of Christian nationalism and its connection to Nazi ideology. And that satirical lens gives it a sharper, and more compelling, take than most of the movies on that topic I’ve covered.

The movie opens with the French 75, a leftist group whose exact commitments are hazy beyond a vague stance for immigration and against The Man. After some politica

l actions — freeing immigrants at a detention center while whooping “Viva la revolución!” — they end up disbanding when a raid goes wrong. The movie picks back up years later with former French 75 explosives expert Pat (DiCaprio) and his now-teenage daughter Charlene (Chase Infiniti), who are living under the assumed identities of Bob and Willa, fearing that an old agent of The Man, Colonel Steven Lockjaw — played to perfection by Sean Penn at his most blusteringly punctilious — might be after them.

As it turns out, he is. See, Lockjaw is trying to join the Christmas Adventurers Club, a group of elite white supremacists and Christian nationalists — each member seems to be part of the billionaire class — dedicated to making the world “safe and pure.” Part of the interview process for Lockjaw involves swearing that he is “American-born by gentile” and never had an interracial relationship. But he has — he had an affair with Willa’s mother, a Black revolutionary member of the French 75. He suspects Willa may be his daughter, not Bob’s, and if she is, she could give away Lockjaw’s past sins to the Christmas Adventurers Club, who already suspect him of being “soft” in his “duty to racial purification.”

Much of the rest of the movie is a slapstick, absurdist chase. Bob, who has spent the last decade smoking weed and impotently lecturing his daughter, barely remembers his days as Pat the explosives expert. He can’t keep up with the new generation of activists, faceplanting into an alley when he tries to join three teens doing parkour across rooftops.

There’s a lot going on — examinations of masculinity in the military industrial complex, ego and political idealism, aging and activism. And, of course, the Christian nationalism and genteel racism woven into our elite institutions.

But One Battle After Another does not make a didactic parallel to the Christian nationalists in our current government; we don’t see a character, for example, brushing off praise for Hitler, as JD Vance did, or pleading for Norway to send us immigrants instead of “shithole countries” like Somalia, as Donald Trump just did. Instead, the Christmas Adventurers Club is simultaneously dizzyingly malevolent and completely ludicrous. Their solemn greeting is, “All hail Saint Nick.” A motherly figure offers banana pancakes to members as they march off to their clubhouse, as though they’re going to an adult Boy Scouts meeting not planning a murder. The secret knock to their underground bunker is tapped to the rhythm of “Jingle Bells.” Their statement of belief feels both true to the core of white supremacy, and completely, obviously unhinged: Members of the club are, they say, “superior to other human beings.”

The power of a movie or a book is that it lets someone explore and inhabit ideas through the story and characters. If you’re so worried that an audience will miss the intended message that you rush to tell them what it is, you end up preventing them from having the chance to really understand what the work is saying, or consider the questions it’s posing and come to their own conclusions. It rushes viewers to the finish line without giving them a chance to engage with the art.

It was a relief to watch One Battle After Another skewer the extremism of its villains, making them palpably freakish instead of just menacingly evil. It’s more effective to undermine an  ideology by making it laughably strange than by scolding anyone who dares to agree with it.

Still, in case you missed the idea that the Christmas Adventurers were neo-Nazis, the end of the movie makes it pretty hard to miss. (Here’s your spoiler alert.) Lockjaw is told he has finally gotten approval to join the club, and is given a corner office. As he kicks his feet up on the desk and proudly leans back in his chair, a hissing noise begins; in fact, the club found out about his crime of interracial sin, and, like any good Nazis, they’re gassing him for it.

After all, there’s really no winning with Nazis.

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