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Rabbi Mayer Moskowitz z”l, on Hasidic life in pre-war Czernowitz
[The following is an English version of the original Yiddish article, which you can read here.]
Rabbi Mayer Moskowitz, a beloved longtime educator at the Ramaz School in New York and the Hebrew-immersive Camp Massad, and author of the book A Memoir of Sanctity, has passed away.
In 2010, I interviewed Rabbi Moskowitz to learn what the Hasidic community was like in the city where he was born and raised — Czernowitz (Chernivtsi), then part of Romania, and today Ukraine.
Most contemporary scholars of East European Jewish history focus on prewar Czernowitz as a hub of intellectual and cultural Jewish life; as the location of the first Yiddish conference in 1908; as the milieu where the poet Itsik Manger and fabulist Eliezer Shteynbarg produced their greatest work.
But as the oldest child of the Shotzer Rebbe — Avrohom Chaim Moskowitz, Mayer Moskowitz had a very different perspective of the city, describing it as a center of five Hasidic dynasties and a vibrant Orthodox Jewish community.
I met Rabbi Moskowitz through my son, Gedaliah Ejdelman, who was a student in his class on halacha (Jewish law) at Ramaz Upper School. The following anecdote gives you an idea of the kind of person Rabbi Moskowitz was:
On the day before the final exam, one student asked if he could write his answers in English rather than Hebrew. Half-jokingly, the rabbi told the students that they could respond in any language they wished.
Gedaliah raised his hand and asked if he could write in Yiddish. “Sure,” Rabbi Moskowitz said. So Gedaliah did, citing Rashi and other commentators in mame-loshen. Moskowitz was so delighted by the Yiddish responses that he shared them with his colleagues.
When I met with Rabbi Moskowitz in his Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan, I asked him what life was like in Czernowitz. He told me he was born in 1927, a son — in fact, the only son — of the Shotzer Rebbe, Avrohom Chaim Moskowitz. He explained that Czernowitz had no less than five Hasidic dynasties. Besides his father, there was the Boyaner Rebbe; the Nadvorner Rebbe; the Zalischiker Rebbe and the Kitover Rebbe.
“All the Rebbes were related because the marriages of their children were arranged solely with other rabbinical families in Czernowitz,” he said.
Every Rebbe had his own court of Hasidim but there were marked differences between the Rebbe and his worshippers. The former wore beards and peyes (Yiddish for sidelocks) and donned a shtreimel for the Sabbath and holidays, while their worshippers, seeing themselves as “modern Jews,” were clean-shaven and came to services wearing a tsilinder (top hat) and tailcoat.
“I myself had little peyes,” Rabbi Moskowitz said.
His family lived in the same building as his father’s shul. His mother, Alte Sheyndl, was a daughter of the Pidayetser Rebbe, so she wore a sheitel. But, like the other rebishe kinder (Rebbe’s children), she was apparently influenced by the cosmopolitan character of the city. In contrast to her husband who spoke Yiddish with their children, the Rebbetzin spoke German. She went to the theater, read secular Yiddish poetry and shook men’s hands. On Mother’s Day, little Mayer would bring her a bouquet of flowers and on New Year’s Eve the Rebbetzin and the other daughters of rabbinical families threw a party.
“On New Year’s Eve they came to our apartment on the second floor, elegantly dressed, ate and spent many hours together,” Rabbi Moskowitz said. “Although they didn’t drink any alcohol, the daughters-in-law of the Bayoner Rebbe smoked thin cigarettes.”
Rabbi Moskowitz recalled his first day in cheder at the age of three: “My parents never walked together in public but on that day they dressed me in completely new shorts, shoes and a talis-kotn.” The latter is the traditional four-cornered fringed garment that Orthodox men and boys wear under their shirt.
His parents walked him, hand-in-hand, to the cheder. When they arrived, his father wrapped him in a tallis and carried him inside. On the table, little Mayer saw the diminutive of his name, ‘Mayerl,’ written with large golden letters.
The teacher asked him to repeat each Hebrew letter and its corresponding sound. Every time little Mayer correctly repeated it — “Komets alef ‘o’ … komets beyz ‘bo’ — a honey cookie dropped onto the table in front of him.
“I really thought it was falling from the heavens,” Rabbi Moskowitz said. “As it says in Proverbs: ‘Pleasant words are as a honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.’”
When he was five, Mayer began learning khumesh, the Bible. “It was shabbos afternoon. My relatives, family friends and all five Rebbes came. They lifted me onto the table. I was wearing a brown velvet suit. Each grandfather gave me a golden watch with a little chain and attached it to my suit. Then they asked me: ‘What are you learning in khumesh now?’”
After the quiz was over, the guests began dancing and singing, eating cake and fruit. All the Rebbes wore shtreimels as they sat at tables surrounded by their Hasidim and handed out shirayim — remnants of the blessed food that a Rebbe would give his followers, who believed they would receive a spiritual blessing by eating it. Mayer sat between his grandfathers.
Every morning Mayer went to cheder and three afternoons a week he attended a Zionist Hebrew-language school. In 1936, at the age of ten, he was sent to the city of Vizhnitz (today — Vyzhnytsia, Ukraine) to learn in the yeshiva of the Vizhnitzer Rebbe. He came home only four times a year: on the shabbos of Hanukkah, Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot.
Rabbi Moskowitz remembers Sukkot in Czernowitz: “All year, men and women ate together but not on Sukkot. My mother blessed the holiday candles, came into the sukkah for kiddush and hamotzi but then went back into the house where she ate in the company of the other women in the family.”
The sukkah was large. His father’s Hasidim would gather around their Rebbe’s tish (table) on the second night of Sukkot for the all-night celebration called simkhas-beis-hashoeivah. About 150 men would squeeze into the sukkah. But contrary to tradition, no one slept in it. “It was cold and a bit dangerous,” Rabbi Moskowitz said.
The Shotzer Rebbe’s house also served as an inn for rebbes from surrounding towns, when they needed to come to Chernovitz to see a doctor. Simple Jews, who leased land from non-Jewish noblemen would also come to the inn to see their rebbes. “They were common people, wore workboots and would bring fruit from their fields as a gift for the Rebbe,” he explained.
Many times, impoverished Jews would come to his father’s door asking for money. “One of them, called Fishele, used to say ‘I love you’ to my mother. She was indeed a beautiful woman. So my family would invite him in and feed him the same food we were eating.”
In describing these simple everyday events of his childhood in Czernowitz, Rabbi Moskowitz did a true mitzvah: He enabled us to see the city not only as a magnet for Yiddish writers and cultural activists, but also as a large, thriving Hasidic community.
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The Jewish friendship that let David Hockney experience ‘dangerous perfection’
Think of the British painter David Hockney, who died Thursday at 88, and you think of color. 1967’s “A Bigger Splash,” almost certainly his most famous work, is a study in blue so profound that it’s nearly synesthetic: The pool is such a saturated cool that you can feel the water lap your feet, and the sky so rich with California sunlight that your shoulders burn. When Hockney turned more toward landscapes in later years, trees came in every color of the rainbow — here a pink trunk, there a purple — and roads were streaked salmon and teal.
Which makes it stranger that one of the works of his that I find most evocative has no color at all. It’s a 1975 pen and ink drawing of the American Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj, one of Hockney’s dearest friends, sitting on a bench outside an art school in Vienna.
Kitaj, head propped in his hand, looks out toward the left side of the page. His face is the lone area of detail in a scene thrown together with brisk, expressive lines. There is a sense of place around him, but that place is in the act of disappearing. As the scene spreads to the right and lower edges of the page — the areas that would fall outside Kitaj’s line of sight — it ceases to exist. Kitaj’s bench is slatted, rounded and real, but the bench abutting it is depicted in a few brief strokes. The buildings and street are sketched with light attention within what seems to be Kitaj’s periphery line, and are nonexistent beyond it.
The picture is a study of a man in deep focus. Hockney draws Kitaj’s head — and by inference, everything within it — as real and lifelike. But beyond the scope of Kitaj’s vision — the material the world presents him, possibly to be made into art — Hockney shows his surroundings as being valuable only as perspective lines, helping to situate the subject in space.
To be caught thinking is a vulnerable experience. To have someone restore your sense of your own physical self is a shock. By sketching Kitaj in his moment of remove, Hockney gave a renowned and somewhat glamorous friendship a sense of life. And he gave a sense of life, too, to the thing that made his own art so attractive: the impression of a rare and gorgeous intensity of vision, one that could draw a viewer’s attention so completely that it seemed what was on the canvas was the only real thing on earth.
In his drawing of Kitaj, the line is blurred between his subject’s concentration and his own. Is it really that Kitaj is so immersed in the act of seeing — or that Hockney is, his gaze so rapt upon his friend as to make him able to capture, briefly, what it was like to see through Kitaj’s eyes?
From the first days of their friendship at the Royal College of Art, Hockney and Kitaj existed on two planes for one another: human and artistic. As each worked to find the right way to reflect their own humanity in their art, their concepts of both themselves and their work influenced one another. “I was painting about my Jews and my books and Hockney was just coming out of the closet, so I said paint that,” Kitaj once said. And another time: “He switched to his gay culture as I began on my Jewish culture in its first forms.”
When Kitaj married the painter Sandra Fisher in 1983 — after Hockney introduced them in the 1970s — Hockney was his best man. “Those orthodox Rabbis had never seen such a gang under the chuppa,” Hockney told 032c magazine in 2025. At that moment, he said, “life for me had reached a dangerous perfection.”
A “dangerous perfection.” What did that mean? I see a glimpse of the answer in Hockney’s drawing of Kitaj — a sense of connection so complete as to threaten the boundaries of selfhood. At Kitaj’s wedding, Hockney experienced that threat as a kind of transcendence: Look, how wonderful being alive among other people can be. The experience captured in his drawing of Kitaj is different, but related. It’s that of a kind of looking, and seeing, that briefly gives total knowledge.
That kind of completeness is one of the aims of friendship, and also of art. There will be much to miss about Hockney, an artist who was easy to love. But the rare experience of absolute immersion that his best work gave its viewers may have made, out of all he accomplished, the biggest splash.
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Aristotle, Jewish ethics and the vexing case of Graham Platner
In last Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Maine, nearly three quarters of voters decided that Graham Platner — Iraq War veteran, oysterman, Reddit misogynist and SS tattoo bearer — was their best hope to defeat the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, come November. While the result was wildly cheered by his supporters, other Democrats and independents were left deeply uneasy.
There are good reasons, philosophical no less than political, for this disquiet. For some Democrats, the winning approach to the election is not necessarily one that leads to victory, but instead one that leads from virtue.
Much attention has been given to the political issues raised by Platner’s candidacy. His embrace of economic populism and excoriation of our country’s oligarchy, his denunciation of forever wars and defense of the common man were and remain compelling stances. That Platner speaks his own mind, and does so simply but rarely simplistically, rather than from a script bolted together by handlers, is clearly a plus as well.
But the matter of his character also raises a serious ethical issue not just for Platner, but also for those who voted for him this spring and plan to do so again this fall. It is less a matter of achieving a good result, than of affirming the good itself.
Moral philosophy comes in three flavors: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. For reasons of space, let’s focus on the first and last. As the name suggests, consequentialism focuses not on the means but instead on the ends. But this does not mean, as some think, that any end can justify any means. Instead, philosophical consequentialists argue that acts must be judged by a simple measure: seeking the greatest good at the least moral cost.
For a hypothetical example, say I have a student who is floundering in one of my classes. They are doing their best, but for various reasons their best will probably not help them avoid a failing grade. Afraid to disappoint or depress the student, I allow them to continue in the class. Consequently, the student sinks rather than swims by semester’s end. Or, instead, I can sit down with the student earlier in the semester and suggest that they withdraw today and try again a later day when they are better prepared. The result is the least cruel and most good: some suffering in the short term rather than greater suffering in the long run.
Yet, consequentialism can be complicated. Consider the election of John Fetterman to the Senate in 2022. Faced by the prospect of voting for the Republican candidate, Democrats and independents gave Fetterman the winning margin despite a stroke he suffered during the campaign, one that raised serious questions about his capacity to hold the office. For reasons that are hard to parse, Fetterman has since broken with his fellow Democrats on several vital issues.
Rather than realizing the greater good, some Pennsylvania voters may now realize their reasoning was misplaced.
This brings us to virtue ethics, which is now enjoying a second wind among moral philosophers. Inspired by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, virtue ethicists are less concerned with actions than they are with character. As the philosopher Todd May writes in his book The Decent Life, the key question for consequentialists (and deontologists) is “How should I act?” But for those who promote virtue ethics, the question is “How should I live?”
By this, they mean what Aristotle seems to have meant: how can we live a happy or flourishing life? The answer is by living that life in accord with virtue.
Simply put, virtues are those traits of character — think bravery and constancy, sagacity and generosity—crucial to human flourishing. And to flourish as humans requires a deep disposition to see and feel, choose and respond to the world and others in ways that align with those virtues. In the words of the late Alasdair MacIntyre, the philosopher who reintroduced virtue ethics to modern readers, “The exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man.”
Inevitably, just as with the other ethical theories, there are problems with virtue ethics. But there are also advantages, principally that it seeks to build character rather than build a calculus of the highest good. This brings us back to Graham Platner. What is at issue with his campaign is not just the character of the candidate, but the character of the nation we wish to realize. The unavoidable question is not whether the ends justifies the means, but whether the means justifies the end—in this case, a nation dedicated not to winning a Senate majority, but to one dedicated to reversing the waning of virtue. Even if this means giving Susan Collins 6 more years.
Modern Jewish thinkers find ties between pagan and Jewish ethics. Yonatan Brafman, who teaches at the Jewish Theological Seminary, points to fascinating parallels between the writings of Aristotle and the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides. The latter, Brafman suggests, sought various ways to encourage the practice of generosity. “Fulfilling the commandment of matanot le-’evyonim (gifts to the poor) and even prioritizing it over other commandments both expresses and fosters the virtue of generosity,” Brafman writes. “Moreover, in Maimonides’ view, this virtue is central to human flourishing. Generosity enables an individual to achieve divine joy.”
Of course, the exercise of generosity should apply to Platner, a man who insists that he has changed. Come November, we will learn whether this is true for our nation. As for Platner, who insists he has changed, it may take much longer for all of us to know.
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What does it say that Gwyneth Paltrow is advertising luxury Israeli real estate?
What does Gwyneth Paltrow have to do with a new luxury apartment building in Tel Aviv suburb Herzliya?
Not much, it seems, judging from a new ad that dropped this week. It features Paltrow going on a morning jog in the city — New York City, that is. She wakes up, voices some pat complaints about why “mornings have to be so early” and how her “coffee needs a coffee,” before she heads to Central Park. She comes home, showers, then asks her driver to take her to 51 Park.
Her driver asks if she means New York. “Herzliya, Israel,” she clarifies, smiling into the camera, as though the black SUV can drive across the ocean.
The ad makes so little sense that my first instinct was to think that it must be some sort of AI rendition of Paltrow. But a LinkedIn post about the project, from Gabi Attal, the CEO of the ad agency Why Worry, which made it, says that they did indeed shoot the ad in real life, in New York City, and that Paltrow is the face of the ad campaign behind a luxury apartment building called 51Park in Herzliya.
51Park is the name — though seemingly not the address — of an enormous new apartment complex that does not appear to exist yet; the website for the building is written in future tense. In renderings, two 51-story glossy towers, with — depending on which part of the website you read — either 636 or 733 apartments total, shine over a park. The neighborhood, it promises, is about to become the beating heart of Herzliya, bounded by highways, the light rail and Herzliya Park.
Paltrow, who is Jewish, has hawked a lot of weird products in her time — vagina-scented candles, anyone? And in some ways, the luxury building makes sense as a product for the actress, who has often flaunted her wealthy lifestyle. But everything else about the 51Park campaign places it back into Paltrow’s stranger offerings.
First off, of course, is the simple setting of the ad, which is nowhere near the apartment building Paltrow is lending her face to.
“To bring this architectural masterpiece to the Israeli audience, we needed a figure who effortlessly embodies international elegance, a premium lifestyle and uncompromising quality,” Attal wrote in the LinkedIn post about the ad.
No one behind the ad responded to my questions about how Paltrow was selected except the director’s agent, Tal Nathan, who said that he couldn’t comment beyond saying the actress “looks absolutely fantastic.” Still, Paltrow certainly embodies a certain kind of “premium lifestyle” — her lifestyle brand, Goop (tagline: “beauty as wellness”), sells such wealth signifiers as a $425 black tank top and a $55 “sex oil,” and also partners with other luxury brands to market expensive jewelry, clothing, and wellness accessories via Paltrow’s own website as “Gwyneth’s picks.” (These include a $225 “eyelift bioremodeling peptide matrix” and a cream for “mindfulness and intuition.”)
The actress has made her name, at least since her Oscar win in 1999, by defining an ideal of minimalist, luxurious perfection — one with little care for qualities like accessibility, approachability or reality. (She had to pay a fine after Goop sold bespoke jade eggs promising questionable health benefits for one’s “yoni.”) In fact, part of her allure is her lack of those values. Her aesthetic seeks to soar above plebian concerns like pragmatism or cost. Who cares if that $491 pewter cocktail strainer requires regular polishing to maintain its silver sheen? It’s covetable. Similarly, who cares where your luxury building is, the 51Park ad seems to say; the important part is the luxury.
Still, it seems odd to market the building to Israelis via an ad filmed in New York City, in English. Sure, New York might signify wealth and luxury in the international market. But the ad doesn’t highlight the amenities 51Park actually offers, such as proximity to Herzliya Park; it shows Paltrow in a luxury apartment in New York with convenient access to a different, and more famous, park: Central Park.
Instead, it feels as though the ad is directed at Americans, selling the idea that New York City and Herzliya are the same. That’s patently absurd though — even if we were to equate Tel Aviv and NYC, which are really not very similar outside of being their respective countries’ most cosmopolitan cities, Herzliya is neither; it’s a separate, much smaller city. Which means Herzliya is, at best, Hoboken. Perhaps that’s why Paltrow didn’t even bother flying to Israel to film the ad.
Marketing an Israeli home to Americans, however, is a controversial proposition. Over the past couple of years, Israeli companies selling homes and land to Jewish Americans, often at fairs held in synagogues, have been a target for protests. Sure, Herzliya is not in the West Bank. But for an actor to wade into obvious controversy like this, especially when she has a new major project coming up — starring as Belle Burden in an adaptation of the heiress’ best-selling memoir Strangers — is a confusing choice.
The ad was reposted by viral celebrity gossip account PopBase, leading to thousands of retweets and comments accusing her of supporting, as many commenters put it, “gwynocide.” Others said it was tone deaf to market luxury apartment buildings only a few hundred miles from razed apartments in Gaza, and compared her to the Nazi wife who enjoys her garden outside Auschwitz in the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest.
Yet, in the ad, Paltrow seems blissfully unaware of all that, or at least doesn’t betray the slightest political statement. It’s not the first time Paltrow has been impressively out of step with public opinion — for example, saying that being a mother while working on movie sets is harder than being a “regular” working mother who is not extremely wealthy and famous, or that she would rather die than let her child eat a “Cup-a-Soup” and would rather do crack than eat cheese out of a tin.
Paltrow’s serene smile in the ad implies she can just float above the political realities tied to Israel without touching them. The idea that one can move to Israel and live a life indistinguishable from the one you once had on Park Ave in NYC, is fundamentally a political statement, of course; not everyone has that freedom of movement, whether due to financial or political realities. But Paltrow has not responded to criticism online or to journalists reaching out to ask what she meant to say with the ad. Though she voiced support for the hostages after Oct. 7, she hasn’t implied that her ad for 51Park is any kind of statement. In fact, she’s carefully avoided making one.
Instead, Paltrow — as is so often the case with the actress famed for her snobbery — has demonstrated that she is not as interested in Israel, Gaza, the war, or Judaism as she is in the disembodied ideal of luxury. As she once said, she “can’t possibly pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year.” The rest isn’t important; she can ignore it.
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