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Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022
(JTA) — All year long, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports about the deaths of Jewish newsmakers in our community. To close out the year, we wanted to turn our attention to people who may not have been such household names but whose stories deserve to be remembered.
Here, with the help of readers who shared the names of people they are remembering, we recall 18 Jews who shaped their local communities and made a difference in the lives of those close to them. They include rabbis whose impact extended for decades, teachers who inspired generations of students and activists who were working to build a better world. May their memories be a blessing.
Harriet Bograd
A champion of emerging Jewish communities in far-flung places.
Harriet Bograd, center, her husband Ken Klein, left, and daughter Margie on a visit to the Sefwi Wiawso Jewish community in Ghana in an undated photo. (Courtesy Kulanu, Inc)
Harriet Bograd, who as president of the nonprofit Kulanu supported emerging Jewish communities in Africa, Asia and other places far beyond the usual centers of Jewish life, died on Sept. 17 in a Manhattan hospital. She was 79. A Yale-educated lawyer and a stalwart at the West End Synagogue, she was inspired by a visit in 2004 to a remote village in Ghana, where about two dozen families considered themselves Jewish. In the years to come, she and Kulanu would provide support to emerging Jewish communities in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala, the Philippines and more. She once said of her work at Kulanu, “after the Holocaust and the decimation of Jewish communities in Arab lands, the idea [is] that we’re establishing Jewish communities that have their own richness and variety.”
Henry Berg-Brousseau
Transgender activist from Kentucky
Henry Berg-Brousseau (Courtesy Human Rights Campaign)
Henry Berg-Brousseau grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied history, political science and Jewish studies at George Washington University, where he was a founding member of an LGBTQ+ fraternity. He had recently gotten a major promotion at the Human Rights Campaign when he died by suicide in his Arlington, Virginia, home, on Dec. 16 at age 24. “Henry spent his life working to extend grace, compassion and understanding to everyone but especially to the vulnerable and marginalized. This grace, compassion and understanding was not always returned to him,” his mother, the Kentucky state legislator Karen Berg, wrote in a statement that criticized lawmakers who advance anti-LGBTQ views. She added, “He was doing work that was important to him to make the world a more accepting place. At 24 years old. he had finally found a community but that could not undo the brokenness that he already felt.”
Rabbi Simcha Krauss
Orthodox advocate for women’s rights
Rabbi Simcha Krauss speaks at a dinner hosted by Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi in his honor on Feb. 5, 2014. (Courtesy Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi)
Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a leading figure of Modern Orthodox Judaism who was a forceful advocate for women’s rights within Orthodoxy, died Jan. 20 at 85. Krauss’s efforts, which included creating a rabbinical court to support “agunot” — women whose husbands refused to divorce them — frequently earned him scorn from traditionalists within Orthodoxy. But many others saw him as a “gentle giant” who wielded his years of study and experience to fight for women’s rights in Jewish law. Krauss was born in Romania and came to the United States in 1948. Coming from a long line of rabbis, Krauss studied at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, and later studied with the Modern Orthodox luminary Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Krauss led the Young Israel of Hillcrest for 25 years. During his years in Queens, Krauss taught Talmud at Yeshiva University and began to get more involved in issues related to the role of women in Orthodoxy. He moved to Israel in 2005, and in 2014 came back to New York to found the International Beit Din, or religious court, to work on agunot cases. “Some say it is a modern revolution,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “I say that’s the way you should do it.”
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni
A survivor and scholar who teased out the many voices of the Talmud
Survivor and Talmud scholar Rabbi David Weiss Halivni was associated with Columbia University for 35 years. (Chaim Meyersdorf/Wikimedia Commons)
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, the Talmud scholar and Columbia University professor, died June 29 at age 94. A Holocaust survivor and refugee raised in Sighet, Romania, he earned his doctorate and taught for many years at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, until leaving the institution in 1983 over its decision to ordain women rabbis. He later became dean of the rabbinical school of the Union for Traditional Judaism, a movement created by rabbis and scholars who similarly broke with the Conservative movement. In works like his multi-volume opus “Mekorot u’Mesorot,” or “Sources and Traditions,” he galvanized the world of Talmud study by treating Jewish text as a living, mutable conversation across generations, as opposed to a static document. Halivni’s approach to learning was the “corollary to loving the text so much that you just had to understand it to its fullest, whatever tools would enable you to do so,” wrote Rabbi Ethan Tucker in an appreciation.
Moris Albahari
A remnant of a Ladino-speaking past
Moris Albahari, shown in a documentary about his story called “Saved by Language,” was a pillar of Sarajevo’s Jewish community. (Courtesy of Brian Kirschen)
Moris Albahari was 11 when the Ustaša, Bosnia’s Nazi collaborator force, came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac, the country’s equivalent of Auschwitz. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and David was able to help his son escape from the train. Because Moris knew Ladino, the Jewish language that is mixture of medieval Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages, he was able to speak with the Italian soldier who saved him. Ladino would save him several more times before the end of the war, but afterwards, with most of Sarajevo’s Jews dead or forever dispersed, he spoke the language largely at home. At one point the director of Sarajevo’s airport, Albahari was a leader within Bosnia’s Jewish community. “It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevok,” said Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino in Israel. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members.”
Rachel Brodie
A “master Jewish educator” whose influence was vast
Rachel Brodie (Courtesy of J. The Jewish News of Northern California)
Rachel Brodie was unassuming and humble yet through her work as an educator had a vast influence on the Jewish community in the Bay Area of California, where she lived, and beyond. Brodie was the co-founder Jewish Milestones, an educational resource for Jewish lifecycle ceremonies that launched in 2004 as The Ritualist. She also served as “chief Jewish officer” at the Jewish community Center of San Francisco, a position created just for her, from 2011 to 2016. “To be in Rachel’s presence was to be illuminated by her wit, her laughter, and her fierce and tender heart,” wrote the founders of the Jewish Studio Project in Berkeley, where she had been a senior educator. “To learn with her was to be stimulated, delighted, and transformed.” Brodie, 55, died on April 11 after falling at her home in Berkeley.
Rabbi Steven Sager
“Leader, mentor, poet” in North Carolina and beyond
Rabbi Steven Sager at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, in 2017. (Courtesy Anna Carson DeWitt)
When Rabbi Steven Sager died May 15 at 71 after an extended battle with pancreatic cancer, he was mourned not only by his family and his congregants at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, from which he retired in 2011 after 32 years, but by a rabbinic and Hebrew poetry community spanning the globe. “Steve was a beautiful and deep human being,” the Israeli poet Rivka Miriam wrote. “I generally do not believe in translation, especially translation of poetry. It seems to me that every language has an inner secret that cannot be transposed into another vessel. Yet, when Steve translated my poems I had a different feeling — I felt he entered an inner layer, one that lies beneath any language, a layer carrying a hidden code.”
Nate Geller
Devoted to building stronger Jewish communities
Nate Geller, at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey. A colleague’s daughter made the “Nate” sign, which he took home and hung on his mantel. (Courtesy)
Nate Geller died on Jan. 24 at age 63, after a struggle with leukemia that he faced with characteristic humility, faith and optimism. His death was a blow to his colleagues at 70 Faces Media (JTA’s parent company); to his synagogue community in Teaneck, New Jersey; and to the Jewish communal world to which he had dedicated his life since graduating from the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University in 1983. In the hours after his death, chat rooms and email boxes filled up with loving tributes to Nate, remarkable for their consistency: Friends and colleagues remarked on his gentleness, his passion for Jewish learning, his commitment to Israel, his willingness not just to hear but to listen when a colleague kvelled or kvetched. Most of all, they remembered his devotion to his family: his wife Lyn Light Geller, herself a gentle and passionate force among “Jewish professionals,” his grown children Aliza, Ariana and Koby, Koby’s wife Talia, and their kids, Annaelle and Judah. Said one colleague and fellow congregant, “There is an enormous Nate-shaped void in the world now.”
Hedi Fried
A voice for Holocaust remembrance in Sweden
Holocaust survivor Hedi Fried stands between Sweden’s culture minister and handball player Linnea Claeson during a counterprotest against a neo-Nazi demonstration in Stockholm, Aug. 25, 2018. (Pontus Lundahl/AFP via Getty Images)
Born in 1924 in Sighet, in what was then Hungary and is now Romania, Hedi Fried survived Auschwitz and settled in Sweden, where she became a psychologist and advocate for Holocaust survivors. She created Cafe 84, a salon for survivors in Stockholm, and spoke widely about her experiences during the Holocaust, gathering some of the most common exchanges in “Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust,” published in English in 2019. “Your solidarity was boundless and no question too difficult to answer. You were brave, generous, dedicated and extremely wise,” Christina Gamstorp, the director of Stockholm’s Jewish museum, wrote in a remembrance. “Now your voice has fallen silent but not your message. It lives on in everyone who met you, in your texts, books, films and your belief that man is still good — and that it is possible to build a society free from antisemitism and racism, which threaten our entire existence.” Fried, who had three children, died in November at 98.
Rabbi Sy Dresner
The “most arrested rabbi in America”
Rabbi Martin Freedman, right, and Rabbi Israel Dresner,center, are taken to the Tallahassee city building where they were charged with unlawful assembly after they and 10 other “Freedom Riders” were arrested attempting to eat at the Tallahassee airport in June 1961. (Getty Photos)
Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner, who demonstrated with Martin Luther King Jr. and was sometimes called the “most arrested rabbi in America,” died Jan. 13. He was 92. A Freedom Rider in the 1960s, Dresner built a career as a social justice-oriented Reform rabbi who was active in the fight against the Vietnam War and was a vocal opponent of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dresner was born on the Lower East Side in 1929 to an Orthodox family and grew up in Brooklyn, where his father ran a delicatessen. He attended yeshivas as a child but went on to become a Reform rabbi after serving in the Korean War and working on a kibbutz in Israel. “We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria,” he said after an arrest in 1964 outside a segregated motel in St. Augustine, Florida. “We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.”
Eli Evans
‘Poet laureate of Southern Jews’
Eli Evans, seen here in a picture from a trip to Israel in the 1970s, was “equally at home in New York.” (Courtesy Josh Evans)
Born in 1936 in Durham, North Carolina, where his father would become the first Jewish mayor and his mother the founder of Hadassah’s first chapter in the South, Eli Evans remained tied to his native home despite spending his adult life in New York City, where he was a prominent grant-maker whose giving fueled the creation of “Sesame Street” in both the United States and Israel. He wrote several memoirs about Southern Jews and also included the South in his philanthropy, which he pursued at multiple foundations according to an activist philosophy that helped launch the Children’s Defense Fund, seeded the South with Black lawyers who became local civil rights leaders and built ties between Israeli and Egyptian scientists after their countries made peace in 1979. “Eli was a Southern gentleman who interacted with the Jewish establishment and strengthened American Jewish life, without losing his Southern Jewish soul,” said Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history Jonathan Sarna. “It was a privilege to have known him.” Evans died July 26 in Manhattan of complications of COVID-19, after a period of declining health.
Sheryl Grossman
A lifelong advocate for people with disabilities
Sheryl Grossman was a Jewish disability activist. (Screenshot from 2021 JDAIM Interview Series at Towson University)
Sheryl Grossman stood small, at just 4’3″ and 48 pounds, but in the world of Jewish disability advocacy she loomed large, as both the founder of a Facebook group for people living with Bloom’s Syndrome and as a board member of Yad Hachazakah, the Jewish Disability Empowerment Center. She died March 28 at age 46, the result of a Bloom’s Syndrome-linked cancer. “I don’t think anyone will ever know just how much work Sheryl did during the pandemic to help Jewish communities support their most vulnerable neighbors who were in the hospital or isolated at home with COVID,” said Shoshana Finkel, a law student who met Grossman when she was an intern at the American Association of People with Disabilities. “She didn’t feel the need to share her accomplishments; that was never what the work was about for her.”
Dara Goldman
A professor of Spanish and Jewish studies in her prime
Dara Goldman was a professor of Spanish and Jewish studies at the University of Illinois. (Courtesy U of I)
Dara Goldman was preparing for graduation at the University of Illinois, where she was a professor of Spanish and chair of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, and for the American Jewish Historical Society conference, when she died May 13 of a heart attack. She was 51. A graduate of Columbia and Emory universities, Goldman produced scholarship so diverse that she was affiliated with eight units within the University of Illinois; most recently, she was researching Jewish cultural production in Cuba, where she brought resources for the Jewish community during her research trips, and co-edited a volume on 21st-century Jewish writing. “With her characteristic wit, she would often joke that she was a Jewish woman who took a wrong turn at diaspora,” said a remembrance published by the university. “But jokes aside, she could be at the same time a Jewish woman from New Jersey and an adopted daughter of Puerto Rico and Cuba, two cultures that she knew intimately and loved very deeply. … The echoes of her inimitable, hearty laughter will resonate within our halls for a long time.”
Yaakov Shalev
A beloved family man whose story was Israel’s
Yaakov Shalev, seated third from right, helped organize Iraqi Jews’ exodus to Israel. (Courtesy Asaf Shalev)
“When I arrived for a visit with family in Israel in my early twenties, my septum piercing outraged nearly everyone at our Shabbat morning gathering. Even my younger cousins badgered me to remove it. It took my elderly grandfather, Yaakov Shalev, to quiet everyone down and declare that I am his same beloved grandson, with or without the piercing.
“Calm, open-minded, steadfast, Saba Yaakov, as we called him, passed away peacefully in February at age 92 in Holon, with his five children at his side. He spent his last few hours listening to the melodies of his youth in Baghdad, the music of giants such as Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, and Fairuz.
“Saba Yaakov helped organize the exodus of Iraqi Jewry to Israel in 1950 and then enlisted in the Israeli military as an airplane mechanic. He taught himself how to build houses and became a successful contractor in the 1960s. But he soon decided the stress was too much and opened a shop in south Tel Aviv where he fabricated canvases for Israeli artists and framed their paintings. He kept the shop running for more than 40 years, going to work every day until he was in his eighties.” — Asaf Elia-Shalev, JTA reporter
Trude Feldman
A journalist who specialized in Yom Kippur interviews
Trude Feldman interviews Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1978. (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)
The daughter of a rabbinical family, Trude Feldman launched her career covering the 1961 trial of Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she put her training as a Hebrew teacher to use by teaching the language to the Nazi’s lawyer. (She also taught Hebrew to famed converts Sammy Davis Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor, and to Paul Newman on the set of “Exodus.”) But it was in her coverage of American presidents that Feldman truly made her mark, becoming famous for scoring presidential exit interviews and Yom Kippur interviews, which she would pitch as an opportunity for redemption. That’s what got her the first interview with Bill Clinton after he copped in 1998 to yes, having sex with that woman. The mainstream media mocked her for her softballs — “Saturday Night Live” once did so in a sketch — but those close to her understood their value. “The joke, however, was on everyone else,” her nephew, Rabbi Daniel Feldman, wrote in a remembrance. “Paired with her signature persistence, her style more often elicited not puff but profundity, more sincerity than sugar. The unique access she earned — baffling to some, understood to the astute, acknowledged by all — yielded memorable results.”
Harlene Winnick Appelman
A revolutionary leader in Jewish education
Harlene Winnick Appelman in an undated photo provided by the Covenant Foundation.
Born in upstate New York, Harlene Appelman’s career in Jewish education took off in 1982 when she became the director of family life education at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. There, she pioneered interactive Jewish learning, bringing children out of dry frontal settings into a more tactile experience of Judaism. After joining the board of the Covenant Foundation, which funds and promotes Jewish education, in 1994, she became its director in 2005 and held that role until 2021, allowing her to influence a generation of Jewish educators. Many of them mourned her death at 75 on Aug. 18; the cause was cancer. “I am one of an entire congregation of Jewish educational leaders who Harlene mentored, supported, prodded and constructively critiqued, promoted, and made feel special,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, in an online remembrance. “I hope that in her memory, I will find ever new ways to help more Jewish rabbis and educators feel seen, heard, capable, and motivated.” This month, the Covenant Foundation initiated a new prize, in Jewish family education, in Appelman’s honor.
Tom Tugend
An indefatigable journalist
Tom Tugend in his Los Angeles home, Aug. 3, 2021. (Jacob Gurvis)
Tom Tugend was 13 when he and his family left their home in Berlin in 1939. He was 97 when he died Dec. 7 in Los Angeles, where he had lived for most of his life. In the intervening decades, he fought in the U.S. Army and the Israel Defense Forces; covered Jewish news for a wide array of publications, including JTA; and enjoyed 66 years of marriage during which he and his wife raised three daughters. “His authenticity came through to anyone who knew him,” said one of them, the journalist Alina Tugend. “He was a hero to many people.”
Judah Samet
A two-time survivor of antisemitic terror
Judah Samet stands next to his portrait, part of Luigi Toscano’s “Lest We Forget” project at the University of Pittsburgh in 2019. (Photo by Hector Corante, courtesy of Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh)
Judah Samet became a national face of Pittsburgh’s 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting because he survived: He had been running late that day, so was not inside the building when 11 of his fellow congregants were murdered. Months later, he was President Donald Trump’s guest to the State of the Union address. The experience was both very different Samet’s childhood in Hungary, where he was born in February 1938, and in some ways similar. As a young child, Samet was forced by the Nazis from his home and shipped with his family first to a labor camp in Austria and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After a stop in Israel, he moved to Pittsburgh in the 1950s, ultimately joining his father-in-law’s jewelry business there and remaining a committed community member until his death at 84 on Sept. 27.
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The boycott of Israel is increasingly targeting individuals
As Israel’s international pariah status grows, the movement intended to boycott and isolate the country is starting to target individual Israelis — including many with little or no connection to Israel’s actions, and in some cases those who are aligned with its international critics.
Organizers of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which seeks to isolate Israel, have focused on organizations and companies that they contend support the Israeli state, whether or not they are located in Israel, while cautioning that “it does not call for or condone boycotts of individuals because of their Israeli or Jewish origin.”
But that doesn’t stop it from happening.
Nadav Lapid, an Israeli filmmaker and dissident living in France, was the latest victim of this trend. But it has also hit Israeli celebrities who have posted perfunctory statements of solidarity with the country, Israeli musicians with no controversial statements and Israeli chefs operating restaurants in the United States. Israelis have been assaulted for speaking Hebrew abroad, and Israelis studying at American universities have reported being ostracized by classmates.
R.F. Kuang, an American author, even faced backlash from fans for including an Israeli character in her latest novel.
Sometimes the Israelis who face opprobrium are genuine advocates for the country. Others are just Israelis who have expressed warm feelings toward their homeland. Deni Avdija, a star forward on the Portland Trail Blazers, is a prime example of this. He has not shared his political views about Israel or its actions in Gaza, once wrote “Am Yisrael Chai” on his sneakers and wrapped himself in an Israeli flag courtside after Oct. 7.
“I obviously stand for my country, because that’s where I’m from,” he told the Athletic. “I don’t really get into politics, because it’s not my job.”
He scoffed at “all this hate” from fans who act “like I’m deciding things in the world.”
***
The justification for this kind of targeting varies, but it centers on a few key arguments. One is a misunderstanding of the boycott movement and its demands. An Israeli Harvard graduate student recounted a classmate who requested not to work with the Israeli student because “they had pro-Palestinian politics that required them to avoid normal relations, such as collaborating on a school group project, with an Israeli.”
This is not what the BDS movement classifies as “normalization,” which it describes as Israelis and Arabs sharing a public platform together.
Other arguments for shunning Israelis raise thornier issues.
Two major claims center on the premise that Israeli Jews are uniquely complicit in their country’s human rights abuses. If you believe that Israel is a settler colony operating under an apartheid regime, then the country’s Jewish citizens are benefiting from this dynamic in ways that, say, Russian or Chinese citizens do not inherently benefit from their own government’s problematic actions.
And, more tangibly, Israel’s policy of mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces means that most of its Jewish citizens serve in the military — helping the government maintain its policies toward the Palestinians regardless of their personal political views.
This can be distilled into a neat story of collective guilt — Israelis are all settlers on stolen land, and none of them are true civilians because they are either future or former soldiers — that was used by some extremists to justify Hamas attacking Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 and is used more casually to hound Israelis in the diaspora.
Some Israeli celebrities are sympathetic to those who expect answers from them about their stance on Gaza. “For many people to have me say something about that publicly is really important, like, ‘OK you’re from Israel what do you think about that?’” Noga Erez, one of Israel’s most popular musicians who has played multiple international tours, told the Associated Press two years ago.
But Erez has declined to share her own views, instead expressing a vague desire for peace.
This may be partly due to the social cost that Israelis can pay at home for speaking out abroad. Five years ago, Erez told a British magazine that “BDS did an important job in putting the spotlight on the situation” but that she hoped the movement would shift to “discourse and connection.”
After an outcry in Israel — where supporting the boycott movement is illegal — Erez hastened to insist that “I love Israel and do not support any kind of boycott of my people and my country.”
The incident underscored the relatively scant room in Israel for dissent over how the country treats Palestinians.
While Israeli Jews express plenty of disdain for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, only the tiniest fraction (1%) agree with the core contentions of anti-Zionist activists abroad that the country should be replaced with a Palestinian or binational state. And 82% support expelling the population of Gaza, while 76% agree that “there are no innocent people in Gaza.”
This is part of what happens when you have two ethnic or national groups engaged in a century of often vicious violent conflict. Seventy-one percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza recently ranked the humanity of Israeli Jews at a flat zero on a scale of one to 100.
But the point is that if you’re opposed to Israel’s existence on political grounds, the odds are quite high that you’re also diametrically opposed to the political views of most Israelis — something that is not true when it comes to American Jews.
That is a key distinction because even if one believes that Israel is an apartheid state that committed genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, it should still be easy to avoid harassing American Jews with no connection to the conflict.
But almost all Israelis have a bona fide connection, meaning that whether you find it problematic to demand answers from Israelis likely depends on your view of the conflict itself.
If you accept, for example, that the IDF has committed repeated war crimes and is otherwise oppressing Palestinians, then the objections from Palestinian students at Columbia and other universities to being in class with Israeli veterans may sound reasonable.
On the other hand, if you understand the IDF to be the world’s most moral army that sought to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza, then any objection to working with Israeli veterans would smack of absurdity and perhaps antisemitism.
At the same time, the kneejerk tendency to assume that any Israeli is an enemy, solely based on their place of birth, can quickly slip into dangerous territory.
Lapid, the filmmaker, is perhaps the most absurd case of this. He has lived in self-imposed exile in France since 2021 and has accused his own government of “genocidal” actions but was nevertheless was by French activists after a film festival in Marseille named him to its panel of judges.
His supposed crime? Accepting funding from the Israel Film Fund for his movie Yes, a biting satire whose protagonist is recruited by a billionaire to write an anthem celebrating the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza after the European Union’s cultural fund turned him down because they thought the film was too anti-Israel. This prompted 10 filmmakers to pull their projects from the festival.
“What exactly do they want? That I stop making films? Should I leave France,” Lapid asked Le Monde.
For many of Israel’s supporters, Lapid’s experience is proof that the demonstrators don’t make any distinctions between Israelis like Lapid — a longtime thorn in the government’s side — and a celebrity like Gal Gadot, the Wonder Woman actress who has said she wants to “help obtain worldwide support” for Israel.
“Nadav Lapid doesn’t understand that Israel’s haters don’t differentiate between us, no matter how much he tries to curry favor with them,” Miki Zohar, Israel’s culture minister, wrote on X. “He will always be, to them, a Jew from Israel.”
But Lapid himself, who bowed out of the festival voluntarily rather than fighting the boycott directly, found himself reassured by two letters of solidarity from hundreds of French film industry leaders.
“Whatever crimes their state may commit,” the first letter argued, “no one can be reduced to a passport.”
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Rank Islamophobia in Congress is a crisis for American Jews
A growing caucus in the House of Representatives is targeting Muslims, and American Jews should be deeply concerned.
The Sharia-Free America Caucus, established in December, now boasts more than 60 members, all of whom are Republican. In announcing its establishment, one of its founders, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, warned that, “from Texas to every state in this constitutional republic, instances of Sharia adherents masquerading as ‘refugees’ — and in many cases, sleeper cells connected to terrorist organizations — are threatening the American way of life.”
His language was reminiscent of past xenophobic claims made about Irish and Jewish immigrants flooding the country with, respectively, Catholicism and communism. And the fact that the caucus has expanded in influence speaks to the continued radicalization of the Republican Party and the growing threat of American Christian nationalism. The attacks on our Muslim neighbors from the party in power call for Jews to stand up in defense of the value of religious pluralism in the United States.
American Muslims are the right’s immediate targets. But Muslims and Jews both stand to lose if the U.S. becomes an even less liberal and more strictly Christian nation than it is today.
A fictional threat
No one should dismiss the Sharia-Free America Caucus as a flash in the pan. Its membership includes a member of the Republican House leadership, Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who has said that “Sharia is completely incompatible with the American way of life and threatens the very fabric of our society.”
The caucus has introduced a number of pieces of legislation to combat the fictional threat of Sharia law, prompting a public letter signed by 119 Democrats demanding the House leadership not allow a vote on these ridiculous bills.
The Democrats are right to be drawing attention to this appalling demonstration of rank bigotry by dozens of Republican members of Congress. It should go without saying that there is no threat of Sharia law supplanting secular American law. Such talk is nothing but the crude fantasy of demagogues.
Instead, the caucus is twisting ordinary religious practices to demonize millions of Americans.
Sharia law, like Jewish halacha, is an unsettled body of religious law that has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and debated for centuries. In the U.S., scholars of Islamic law can weigh in on certain kinds of civil cases such as business disputes. This is exactly how batei din operate for many observant Jews: not as structures that replace American law, but as mechanisms that specific communities turn to voluntarily to help decide internal questions.
Just as the establishment of a Halacha-Free America Caucus would be an illegitimate and plainly hateful assault on the dignity of American Jews, so the existence of this caucus is an insulting act of bigotry toward American Muslims. The message being sent to them is clear: You do not belong here, and if you want to stay out of trouble, you can only practice your faith in ways the majority religious group finds acceptable.
A dark American history
These attacks against Muslims are continuous with a strain of illiberalism and xenophobia in the history of the U.S. with which Jews should be familiar. Yes, this country welcomed ships of Eastern European Jewish refugees at Ellis Island; but it also enacted the 1924 Johnson-Reed immigration quotas — which ultimately helped trap Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.
After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, American Muslims faced widespread discrimination in the name of national security — including illegal detainments and unconstitutional invasive police surveillance of communities. Once the terrorism panic subsided, Islamophobia became a standard part of the right-wing playbook.
Perhaps no one has been as brazenly hateful as President Donald Trump, who during his first campaign famously proposed a moratorium on Muslims entering the U.S., which he enacted shortly after assuming office; lied about witnessing thousands of Arab Americans in New Jersey celebrating 9/11; and has in recent years taken to using “Palestinian” as a slur. Right-wing panics over the construction of mosques and even the simple act of Muslims praying in public now occur with shocking regularity.
An alarming outlook for religious minorities
Political conditions have worsened considerably for American Muslims in recent years. Even amidst the hysteria and abuse of power after 9/11, the message of President George W. Bush was rhetorically often one of inclusion.
Such nods to religious freedom are few and far between today. Parts of the right openly portray American Muslims as an enemy fifth column. “Mainstream Muslims have declared war on us,” Rep. Randy Fine of Florida, who is Jewish and has drawn criticism for his Islamophobic rhetoric, declared. “The least we can do is kick them the hell out of America.” Just last week, months after signing a law supposedly banning Sharia from Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said Democrats in his state supported the institution of Sharia. And despite being the target of recent violent attacks, American mosques and Islamic centers are set to be largely excluded from the Department of Homeland Security’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program.
Trump’s administration has claimed to make defending American Jews from antisemitism a top priority. But a governing party that rejects religious pluralism and embraces Islamophobic conspiracy-mongering is not seriously committed to fighting religious hatred. Jews must understand that any “protection” offered on these terms is a poisoned chalice.
Efforts to circumscribe national belonging in the U.S. on religious and racial grounds have never been beneficial to American Jews. In response to the demonization of American Muslims today, Jews should not forget this truth. No minority is safe from the bigotry currently targeting our Muslim neighbors. We must stand up in their defense, and work continuously for a country that belongs to all of us equally.
Abe Silberstein is a doctoral student in the joint program in History and Hebrew & Judaic Studies at New York University
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You’re wrong, Ken Paxton: Obviously God is nonbinary
We are living in a time of reactionary masculinism. Roaring back not only against wokeness and MeToo but against half a century of feminism and a century of women’s suffrage, conservative American men have reasserted a hyper-traditionalist, hyper-violent form of masculine dominance, from the UFC matches on the White House lawn to Pete Hegseth’s pastor calling for the repeal of the 19th amendment.
And now, to the Texas Senate race, in which religious progressive Democrat James Talarico is running against the multiply indicted, investigated, and impeached Republican Ken Paxton, who among other things has taken bribes, committed adultery, and barely avoided conviction for securities fraud. Like all Trump wannabes, Paxton peppers his talks with vulgar schoolyard insults, calling Talarico “Low-T” (i.e. low testosterone, not manly enough), ‘Talafreako,’ and, I guess worst of all, a vegan. (Talarico is not a vegan.) Most recently, Paxton’s campaign has ridiculed comments Talarico made in 2021 that “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.”
But for anyone conversant with Jewish theology, this is obvious. Of course, God is nonbinary.
Genesis 1:27 states clearly: “And God created the human in His image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Meaning, both male and female are the ‘image’ (whatever that means) of the Divine. Of course, God has masculine pronouns here, but so do the words for socks, houses and money; Hebrew lacks a non-gendered case (until recent innovations). And just a few verses earlier, in Genesis 1:2, the Spirit of God gets a feminine verb form (merachefet, ‘hovers’). As Talarico put it:
The first two lines of the Bible, the first two lines in Genesis, use two different Hebrew words to describe God. One is the masculine Hebrew noun for divinity. The second is the feminine Hebrew noun for spirit. God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.
More broadly, throughout the Bible, God is referred to in both masculine metaphors — Father, King, etc. — and feminine ones, like a loving Mother (Isaiah) or feminine Wisdom (Proverbs).
Jewish theological and theosophical speculation is even more clear. The philosophical God of Maimonides, for example, is beyond all form, and certainly all gender. The Kabbalistic Godhead, meanwhile, contains aspects (sefirot) that are masculine, feminine, both masculine and feminine, and genders that change depending on the moment. This is not merely abstruse speculation; every Friday night, traditional Jews welcome the Sabbath Queen to their places of worship. Who do you think we’re referring to here?
Indeed, one could say that God is the most nonbinary thing (or non-thing) in the universe, since in many Jewish theologies, God is nondual, beyond all binaries and dualities we humans construct to understand our world. In these conceptions, God is everything (yesh) and nothing (ayin), filling the universe and surrounding it, form and emptiness.
Now, obviously, Ken Paxton is not interested in theology; he’s just scoring political points, and desperately trying to change the subject. And with animus against transgender people rising (due to massive campaigns to lie about them for Republican political gain) he wants us to think that James Talarico’s God is nonbinary like a they/them teenager is nonbinary — i.e., conforming neither to masculine nor feminine gender roles. (In fairness, Talarico made his 2021 comments in the context of a political debate about transgender children and sports, and has lately has walked back the comments, calling them “cringey.”)
But just because Paxton is being cynical doesn’t mean his attacks aren’t harmful. They are at once ignorant and insulting, pathetically wrong and offensively backward.
I don’t mean to whitewash or wokify the often patriarchal Jewish tradition. Again, there are plenty of masculine images of God in Jewish liturgy, tradition, and text — maybe too many. The Biblical God has a bad temper, gets jealous easily and lashes out with violence. God is a Man of War, says Exodus 15:3, which scholars believe to be one of the oldest Biblical sources. And for every Lecha Dodi welcoming the Divine Feminine, there are dozens of blessings of God, the King of the World. Yet ultimately, these are aspects, projections and metaphors of the Divine, not the Divine itself. And just as the Greek and Indian pantheons include multiple manifestations of divinity, Jewish monotheism (and monism) contains within it multiple manifestations of a transcendent God ultimately beyond all myth, explanation, and categorization.
Likewise in the New Testament, which has ample male and female metaphors for the Divine, and ample statements that God transcends gender entirely (e.g. John 4:24). And not just God, but human souls as well; one of the most famous, and impactful, statements in the New Testament is the Apostle Paul’s statement in Galatians 3:28 that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Obviously, Paul doesn’t mean that there is no sex or gender at all, but he does mean that in terms of what matters most (which Paul understands to be the spirit), gender and ethnicity are irrelevant.
If only the Ken Paxtons of the world understood that.
Even if Paxton got the Bible right, however, his theological attacks on James Talarico would still be un-American. In fact, the myths and forms of religion are manifold and various, and in the America that truly is great, we don’t take sides among them. Sacred text and tradition portray many different faces of the Divine, and of course there are many different sacred texts and traditions. None of which should be defamed by a corrupt political hack.
But I admit, while I’m pluralistic as to religious worldviews, I do think some are better than others. And James Talarico has a compelling vision for an engaged Christianity that is justice-driven, heartfelt, and, to my mind, the rightful legacy of a certain rabbi who overturned the moneylenders’ tables in the Temple in Jerusalem. Even if you disagree with his political or religious positions, see what you think:
This is what religion should be for: the pursuit of justice, the cultivation of kindness, the commitment to not turn our back on the stranger, the marginalized, or the destitute. This is the God that inspired Jews throughout our history, whether we were activists or prisoners, volunteers at a hevra kadisha or teachers in a school, rabbis or homemakers. It is the source of compassion that can be discovered (or, if you prefer, invented) whenever the heart is broken. And as Talarico says, this God is the opposite of domination.
Amen.
The post You’re wrong, Ken Paxton: Obviously God is nonbinary appeared first on The Forward.
