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She represents the ‘worst of the worst.’ Now Judy Clarke is leading the defense in Pittsburgh synagogue massacre trial.
PITTSBURGH (Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle via JTA) — When Judy Clarke delivered her opening statement to the jury that will determine the fate of the man charged with committing the massacre in the Tree of Life synagogue building, she did not deny that her client was responsible.
In fact, she sympathized with the victims and their families.
Clarke, 71, began her address by acknowledging the horror of Oct. 27, 2018, and its aftermath.
“The tragedy that brings us together today,” she said in a soft-spoken yet confident voice, is “almost incomprehensible. It’s inexcusable. … Eleven lives were taken, others shattered. The loss that occurred is immeasurable.”
She told the jury there was “no disagreement, no doubt” about the identity of the perpetrator. It was “the man seated at that table,” she said, indicating her client. “He shot every person he saw and, in the process, injured others in their sacred spaces.”
Clarke was appointed to Robert Bowers’ defense team in December 2018, after he requested the counsel of a federal public defender specializing in death penalty cases. He faces 63 criminal counts related to his attack on congregations Dor Hadash, New Light and Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha. Many of the charges carry the death penalty.
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As the trial proceeds, Clarke won’t try to convince the jury her client isn’t guilty. A “win” for her defense team will be for the defendant to avoid a death sentence and instead have him remain in prison for the rest of his life.
Clarke has vast experience defending those whom some call “the worst of the worst.” Her roster of past clients includes Susan Smith, who murdered her two young sons by drowning them in a lake in South Carolina; Theodore Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber; Buford Furrow, a white supremacist who opened fire in a Jewish community center outside of Los Angeles in 1999; Eric Rudolph, who planted a bomb in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a perpetrator of the Boston Marathon bombing.
Except for Tsarnaev — whose case is under appeal — Clarke succeeded in avoiding a death sentence for all her clients, either by negotiating a plea deal or by convincing the jury that mitigating factors, such as a mental illness, precluded imposition of the ultimate punishment.
Clarke’s team tried to negotiate a deal for a life sentence for Bowers in exchange for a guilty plea but was unsuccessful. Four and a half years after the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history, the three-week jury selection process commenced on April 24 and testimony began on May 30.
“This is not a straightforward murder case,” Clarke told the jury in her opening statement. The federal charges — which include obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death — must be proved by showing the defendant had the requisite intent to commit those particular crimes, she said.
She acknowledged that her client’s actions on Oct. 27, 2018, were “reprehensible” and “misguided” and recounted his virulent social media postings and other rantings about Jews. But she also portrayed him as “quiet” and “socially awkward, a man with few friends.” He didn’t live on his own until he was 44, she said, and his family saw him as someone “more likely to commit suicide than kill others.”
It’s clear that Clarke is appalled by her client’s actions. It’s also clear that she is determined to see that his rights are protected and that the judge and the jury faithfully apply the rule of law.
“Judy is one of the best lawyers I’ve ever known,” said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angles and a former federal prosecutor. “She works insanely hard. She spends the time with the clients that she needs to. She doesn’t believe in the death penalty, and she’s devoted herself to representing people who are, you know — ‘the Voyage of the Damned’ is what she would say.”
Levenson, who has known Clarke for three decades, described her as “honest” and “very humble.”
“She doesn’t stand against the victims,” Levenson stressed. “I think she actually feels very much for the tragedy that occurred. But she has a job to do, which is to try to save her client’s life. And she does it with integrity.”
The two met during the Unabomber case, when Clarke was representing Kaczynski and Levenson was a legal commentator for CBS. Kaczynski at first resisted a plea deal sentencing him to life in prison because he did not want to admit to mental health issues.
Defense attorney Judy Clarke, at right, responds to questions at a press conference after the trial of Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski was delayed in Sacramento, California, Jan. 8, 1998.(Rich Pedroncelli/AFP via Getty Images)
“She had a very difficult client, one that I think a lot of people would just sort of throw up their hands and say, ‘What can I do?’” Levenson recalled. “And she was able to get him to agree to that plea, which probably saved his life.”
Ted Kaczynski’s brother, David Kaczynski, praised Clarke for her ability to see humanity, even in those who have committed unspeakable atrocities.
“She has a really good heart, a really good intention,” David Kaczynski said. “I think she really cares about her clients. I think she has a kind of unconditional commitment to their humanity. And, of course, that meant a lot to me, because as much as I deplore what my brother did in harming people, I love him. He’s my brother.”
“So it’s a very fine line to walk, representing the client who has clearly got some serious personal problem,” he continued. “Ted was quite a loner. He was very shy. He had a very difficult time connecting with anybody. And in this very difficult situation, Judy was able to be there for him, and I think that was really meaningful for Ted, that he had some support, some human connection at this time of crisis in his life.”
David Kaczynski has followed Clarke’s career and continues to be impressed with her “professionalism and sense of humility.”
“I think the legal profession is trained to be strictly analytical and adversarial,” he said. “And she somehow works within this environment in a way that preserves her humanity as she’s trying to make people aware of the humanity of someone whose very right to exist is in question.”
Some question whether a person who has committed a heinous crime deserves a zealous defense. Levenson insists they do.
Our judicial system is “best served” when capital defendants are provided with a high-caliber defense, Levenson said, because “it’s in these situations where people are so emotionally invested that we can get it wrong.”
In addition to being a former prosecutor, Levenson created the Loyola Project for the Innocent, which works to get those who are serving sentences for crimes they did not commit out of prison.
Defense attorney Judy Clarke, seen here in Pittsburgh in 2023, is representing the man accused of murdering 11 Jews during Shabbat services in Pittsburgh in 2018. (Screenshot from KDKA report)
“I’ve seen firsthand that there are far too many lawyers who just immediately assume that their client’s not only guilty but should get the most severe punishment — that there’s nothing to be said on their client’s behalf,” Levenson said. “And you and I both know there’s a lot more to any given case, and that even people who do terrible crimes have other aspects of their lives that the justice system should consider.”
“In our system, we are supposed to consider each case, each individual, the facts, and not only determine whether someone’s guilty but what should happen to them,” she continued. “And that works well. When you have a lawyer who’s just going through the motions — and the one thing you can say about Judy is she doesn’t just go through the motions — I think the public can have more confidence in the verdict. As long as that lawyer is acting honestly and with integrity, it’s so much better to have that zealous advocate.”
The massacre at the Tree of Life building “was just a terrible, terrible, terrible tragedy,” said Levenson, who is Jewish. Clarke “will do her best to keep the case in perspective. In other words, focus not on big messages, but on this individual and any mitigating factors for this individual.”
Jon B. Gould, dean of the School of Social Ecology at the University of California-Irvine, has researched attorneys who specialize in death penalty cases. In 2019, along with Maya Pagni Barak, he published “Capital Defense: Inside the Lives of America’s Death Penalty Lawyers,” a book based on extensive interviews, providing insight into the reasons someone would willingly represent a person who has committed an egregious crime.
“They are an unusual kind of lawyer,” Gould said. “They’re actually an unusual kind of person because for many of these cases, they are representing what is sometimes said to be ‘the worst of the worst.’”
There are a variety of motivating factors for capital defense work, Gould said. Some of these lawyers are strongly opposed to state-sanctioned killing. For others, he said, “it is the excitement of the most complicated kind of law.”
Other death penalty specialists take the cases for “professional prestige,” and some do it for the money because capital defense lawyers get paid more than regular defense lawyers, Gould said. Some take the cases for religious reasons.
“Now, that’s all in the larger context of none of these lawyers looks at the facts of the case and thinks it’s anything other than a horrific tragedy,” Gould stressed. “I also found that for many of them, they are entirely sympathetic to the family members of the victims. They don’t look at these cases and think, no big deal. They look at these cases and think that’s something horrible that happened to the victim’s family, but they also look at the defendant and think, as one of them said to me, ‘No one gets to this place of being the defendant without having something horrible having happened to them earlier in life.’”
Death penalty cases are “really, really, really hard on defense lawyers,” Gould added. “It’s really distressing work. The evidence that they have to pore through is horrific. Many of them have PTSD.”
While many people “look at defense lawyers and think there must be something wrong with them,” Gould said it’s essential to remember “that they are fulfilling a very important function in the criminal justice system that none of us would ever want to have to do.”
“That doesn’t mean that any of us is unsympathetic to the victims,” he emphasized. “No one deserves what’s happened in any of these cases. But if we do believe in the rule of law, then there needs to be capital defense lawyers. And we need to respect the work they’re doing because that’s what it means to live in a system of rule of law and not simply a system where we simply execute people in the town square without the opportunity to have a defense.”
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial by the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and the Pittsburgh Union Progress in a collaboration supported by funding from the Pittsburgh Media Partnership. It is reprinted with permission.
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Can this suburban kibbutz and civil rights trailblazer maintain its identity in the 21st Century?
POMONA, NY— The Skyview Acres Cooperative is located about 30 miles north of New York City. Think of it as a suburban kibbutz.
“One felt like they had many parents,” recalled Carol Bowman, a professor of education at Ramapo College who grew up in this close-knit housing development in leafy Rockland County. “When I was growing up I could just walk into any of the houses where I had friends.”
“It was just a giant united family,” said Jo Simons, a retired piano teacher whose parents taught music and organized community singing events at Skyview.
Skyview was created in the aftermath of World War II as an intentionally integrated community. Quakers figured prominently in its creation. The land for Skyview was purchased in January 1947 with loans totaling $16,500 from two Quakers, who were strangers to the founding families and to each other. The loans came with terms that could’ve come from the Hebrew Free Loan Society: They were interest-free and simply said, “Pay us back when you can.”
The founding families scraped together the rest of the $29,500 purchase price. Today, Skyview consists of 115 acres and about four dozen homes. Most of them have at least two acres of land.
About a third of the original 45 or 46 families at Skyview were Jewish, according to Naomi Kleinberg, a retired editor and children’s book author, whose parents were among the original families who cleared land to build homes, make roads and create a swimming pond here. Key residents who played pivotal roles in Skyview’s evolution as a progressive bastion and a caring community included Jo’s father, Edward Simons, who founded what is now the Rockland Conservatory of Music, and Irving Wolfe, a political organizer for whom the cooperative’s ball field is named.
At the community’s recent 80th anniversary celebration, Wally Glickman recited an original poem. Skyview, he wrote, is a “ magic island in suburbia.”
‘My father wanted nothing more than to live in the woods’
Jack and Lena Kleinberg were among four Jewish couples who came to Skyview together from the Lower East Side. Back in the city their social lives revolved around the University Settlement House on Eldridge Street.
They raised a son and three daughters at Skyview. The son, Joseph, remains in the family home where he makes a living as a beekeeper and vegetable farmer.
“My father wanted nothing more than to live in the woods,” Naomi Kleinberg told me.
Jack Kleinberg was a World War II veteran who considered himself an atheist but was “adamantly, proudly, belligerently Jewish,” she said.
His maternal uncle’s entire family perished in Poland during the Holocaust and Kleinberg resolved that his family would know how to defend itself, so he taught them how to shoot revolvers and rifles.
“My father said he would never allow his family to be led like sheep to the slaughter, like in Europe,” Naomi Kleinberg said.
Her parents grew up on the Lower East Side amidst much misery and poverty. That experience prompted her late mother, who was raised in an observant Sephardic household on Orchard Street, to work as a social justice activist. In the 1930’s, Lena Kleinberg campaigned on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys, the Black men wrongfully charged with the rape of white women in Alabama. During the 1940’s, Lena worked for the establishment of the Jewish state, volunteering with the American League for a Free Palestine. During the Cold War, she demonstrated at missile sites near Skyview and, in more recent years, stood vigil at a local abortion clinic, to counter anti-abortion protesters intimidating patients.
“All this involvement in social justice, making tikkun olam, it’s so Jewish,” Naomi told me.
‘Can you imagine how dangerous that was in the ’40’s?’
Although there were seders and Hanukkah parties held at the cooperative, Kleinberg remembers only two Skyview families who attended synagogue regularly.
The other families had “Jewish upbringings, Jewish identities,” Kleinberg said, “but not a Jewish existence.”
For the most part, religious tradition was supplanted by political activism. Skyview residents attended seminal civil rights marches in Washington, brought medicine to Cuba, demonstrated against the Vietnam War and went to Nicaragua to aid the Sandinista regime. To this day, residents demonstrate regularly against the Trump administration at an intersection in Nanuet that has long served as Rockland’s town square for political protest.
A handful of key political activists lived at Skyview during the 1960s. Among them were Conrad Lynn, the Black civil rights attorney who defended Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown and one of the Puerto Rican nationalists who carried out the attack on the U.S. House of Representatives in 1954; George Houser, a co-founder of both the Congress of Racial Equality and the American Committee on Africa; and Alfred Hassler, a Methodist minister who served as executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the interfaith peace and justice group. Lynn, Hassler and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin went on a freedom ride down south in 1947.
“They did that in the 40’s, not in the 60’s,” noted the poet Wally Glickman. “Can you imagine how dangerous that was in the 40’s?”
Skyview has also been home to some prominent entertainers, including Krishna Das, a globe-trotting Jewish performer of Hindu devotional music. The late Steven Hill, born Solomon Krakovsky, had starring roles in the TV shows Mission: Impossible and Law & Order. Hill left Skyview after becoming an observant Jew and moved to nearby Monsey. Eliot Asinof, who wrote for such classic western TV shows as Maverick and Wagon Train and authored the nonfiction account of the Chicago “Black Sox” World Series scandal in 1919, Eight Men Out, rented a home at Skyview during summers in the 1950’s and 60’s. And two founding members of the Grammy-nominated jazz fusion group Spyro Gyra currently live at Skyview.
But no one in showbiz had quite the run as Ed Simons, who was said to be the oldest working conductor in the country when he wielded a baton at the age of 100. The maestro’s career included performing in the military band that accompanied President Harry Truman to the Potsdam Peace Conference in the Summer of 1945 and conducting pit orchestras for eight Broadway musicals, including My Fair Lady.
Edmund Gordon, a Black psychologist who was one of the architects of the federal Head Start program, is still professionally active at the age of 105. He treads water in the indoor pool at his Skyview home.
Several people I spoke with offered the same quip to comment on the longevity of the cooperative’s residents: “There must be something in the water.”
‘I was the first Skyview baby’
Some of the children who lived at Skyview Acres inherited their parents’ political sympathies. In the 1950’s, several Skyview kids refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or participate in the “duck and cover” drills held during the Cold War to prepare students for a nuclear attack. In 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign set up a tent city dubbed Resurrection City on the National Mall in Washington D.C., some teenagers at Skyview erected their own Insurrection City in the woods. And, no matter how liberal and left-leaning the cooperative’s grown-ups may have been, young people skinny dipping in Skyview’s man-made pond upset some of the adults.
Several people who grew up at Skyview and are now in their 70s or 80s, recall attending the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” in 1963 where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Skyview’s roughly four dozen households filled two buses for the march. That year, Skyview block party attended by some 400 Rockland County residents raised money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The contribution elicited a signed thank-you letter from Dr. King, then SCLC’s president.
And many of the Skyview kids carried on the good works of their parents.
Two of Edmund Gordon’s children are tenured college professors. Ted Gordon teaches Black Studies at the University of Texas. Jessica Gordon Nembhard teaches political economy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Then there is Laura Hassler, the daughter of Skyview co-founder Alfred Hassler, a conscientious objector during World War II and the man responsible for introducing Martin Luther King Jr. to the Vietnamese monk Thich Nnat Hanh in 1966, a connection credited with influencing King’s opposition to the Vietnam War.
“I was the first Skyview baby,” Laura Hassler told me during a phone interview. “I wear it with pride.“
Hassler started the Netherlands-based non-profit Musicians Without Borders. She recalled kids at school calling the Skyview students hippies and communists. One oral history of the cooperative recounted a local hardware store that refused to service Skyview because its residents were “commies.
Some of the Skyview residents had, in fact, been members of the Communist Party earlier in their lives. Conrad Lynn was active in the party during the 1920’s and 30’s. Irving Wolfe was also a member. Wolfe, whose Honda sedan bore a VIVA CHE license plate, defied the U.S. embargo against Cuba 16 times to bring humanitarian aid to the island. In the 1980’s, he served on a construction brigade in Nicaragua.
Ed Simons, the conductor, was suspected of communist sympathies and called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1958 where he was successfully represented by a lawyer from Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians.
‘Still a genuine community’
Skyview is located about six miles north of the burgeoning ultra-Orthodox community of Monsey. New Square, another Haredi hamlet, is even closer. Those communities have a pressing need for more housing. Many current Skyview residents told me they are reluctant to speak publicly about the threat posed by new housing development, fearing that their efforts to limit development might be interpreted as antisemitism.
A number of Skyview residents have been active in the NAACP, which has been battling the East Ramapo school board run by Orthodox Jews who tend not to send their children to public schools. Test scores, graduation rates and other data indicate that the school district, once the best in New York State, is now among the worst, according to Oscar Cohen, a Jewish NAACP activist and retired school administrator who lives nearby. A 2026-2027 U.S. News & World Report ranking of high schools noted that Ramapo High School had proficiency rates in math and English of 18% and 44% respectively.
Skyview residents are particularly concerned about the future of a 75-acre forested parcel known as the Stryker property that borders Skyview to the south, according to Anna Friedberg, a lawyer who serves as president of the Skyview’s board. Friedberg noted that the property’s development could impact traffic in the area, as well as the local watershed, which includes a stream that feeds Skyview’s pond and the west branch of the Hackensack River, a source of water for Nyack and Northern New Jersey.
“There have been some plans by the town to suggest that they would develop that entire property,” she told me at the cooperative’s annual Winter Doldrums party in March. “There is a tremendous population boon in this area and so there’s significant pressure to find more housing for folks.”
The Stryker property was purchased with a public bond approved by residents of the Town of Ramapo that earmarked the land for open space and low-income, clustered housing for first responders. But the town subsequently commissioned a planning study that cited a religious campus as one potential use of the Stryker property. Michael Specht, the Ramapo town supervisor, wrote in an email, “There are no plans at this time to develop the Stryker property or use it as a religious campus.”
“I would take anything that the town says with a grain of salt,” said Bob Trostle, a retired builder who grew up in Skyview and now lives just outside its border. “We’ve learned that the hard way, especially concerning development planning, zoning, and things like that.”
In 2015, the Skyview Acres Land Trust was created to preserve the cooperative’s greenery. Membership in the trust is voluntary but once a homeowner joins, subsequent owners of that home can’t add more buildings to their property or clear-cut trees. The trust is headed by Paul Nagin, a longtime Skyview resident who now lives in Connecticut. Nagin not only continues to be involved in the land trust but is still active in the Spring Valley NAACP, which has been in court fighting the East Ramapo school district.
“As far as I’m concerned, the Stryker property is a sword of Damocles hanging over Skyview,” Nagin told me. “It’s going to be an ongoing issue for sure.”
Skyview is “a pretty blue dot in the middle of a reddish part of Rockland County,” according to Robin Shapiro, a Skyview resident who describes himself as a checkbook Democrat active in J Street. He sees the concerns over housing development in the area as “a special case of NIMBYism with an overlay of religion and politics.”
“I don’t think that you can explain the opposition to development plans as antisemitic,” he told me. “There are legitimate and long-standing concerns about preserving open space, water quality, traffic that you’d see in any community that was encountering very rapid growth from new folks of any kind.”
Will Skyview retain its unique political and communal character as its properties turn over? Will it continue to be the kind of place where Wally Glickman and his fellow Skyview poet Brian Kates post their poetry on trees along a pathway in the woods?
“This is still a genuine community. I don’t really see that ending,” said Kates, who won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing when he worked at the New York Daily News. “I think it’s something more than politics. It’s an ethos of people helping each other, of being kind to each other, a kind and caring community.”
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American music producer Justin Goldner at work on a Yiddish album
How many Yiddish rock stars do you know?
Maybe more than you think.
If you watched the Grammy Awards back in 2018, you might have seen one of them, Justin Goldner, accompany Ben Platt as he sang “Somewhere” from the Broadway musical West Side Story.
A multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, bass, mandolin, ukulele, and lute, Goldner has worked with an all-star array of artists as a session musician and producer, including Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Ricky Martin and Macy Gray. Goldner also appeared on Broadway and in Madison Square Garden, performed with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and recorded music for Disney’s live-action Snow White.
Goldner is no stranger to the spotlight, but for his latest project, he stepped away from the roaring arenas of pop stardom to inhabit a more intimate space: a dive into Yiddish culture. His work in progress, Songs of Longing and Belonging (Vi shturem a benken in Yiddish), sets Yiddish poetry to music, creating tracks that sound refreshingly contemporary even as they plumb the Yiddish literary archives for inspiration.
By the end of the project — which is being supported by a fellowship from the Jewish Writers Institute — the songs will comprise an entire album. Goldner estimates the full album will appear next spring. For now, he has been releasing them one at a time on YouTube under his Yiddish moniker, Reb Tsudek.
Like many younger people interested in Yiddish today, Goldner didn’t grow up with the language. Although Judaism was part of his upbringing in suburban Philadelphia, it was not a central part of his identity. “I grew up in what I would imagine is a pretty typical Reform family,” Goldner said when I spoke with him. “I had a bar mitzvah. I went to Jewish summer camp. But in retrospect, my memory of my Jewish upbringing was a little bit like: ‘Here’s Judaism. Don’t get too close to it.’”
If he had anything resembling religious commitment, it was to music, specifically the guitar, an instrument he took up at 13. “Relatively quickly it became an all consuming pursuit,” he recalled. “In high school, I barely did anything else. I was a very obsessive listener and wanted to devour as much music as possible.” After graduating high school, he earned a degree in music from NYU.
Goldner said he began to think differently about his Jewish heritage when he saw how his friends related to their own cultural backgrounds. “The thing that sort of primed the pump for me was getting into Greek and Spanish and Arabic and other languages and cultures,” he said. “I just found that so engaging. I was really inspired by my friends and colleagues who come from these backgrounds and carry their culture and their heritage with them, but they’re not living in the past.”
That epiphany, combined with the experience of getting to know a great-aunt with dementia who increasingly reverted to her native Yiddish, led Goldner to purchase a copy of College Yiddish, the classic textbook by Uriel Weinreich. For many years, Yiddish was a linguistic passion that he nurtured privately. Now it has become central to the evolution of his musical career.
The Yiddish title of Goldner’s project — Vi shturem a benken — comes from “Dos lid fun a meydl” (The Song of a Girl), a poem by Anna Margolin, a 20th-century Yiddish poet who immigrated to the United States from Lithuania in 1906. Previously unfamiliar with her work, Goldner was drawn to the “intensity” of Margolin’s lyric, which he translated for me as “it rocks me like a storm, this yearning.”
“I feel like she, as a writer, leaps off the page,” Goldner told me. “The intensity of wanting to do something or be something and not even knowing what, but just feeling like you can’t hold yourself back.”
Featuring vocalists Temma Schaechter and Ben Abraham, Goldner’s version of “The Song of a Girl” reveals another facet of Songs of Longing and Belonging: its blending of heritage languages and diasporic experiences. Besides Yiddish and English, “The Song of a Girl” also includes lyrics in Indonesian, one of the languages spoken by Abraham’s parents.
Future songs will take a similar approach. For example, “Meyerkepl” ( Seashell), based on a poem by the Yiddish writer Yehoash, will include words by Cuban poet José Marti. “I’ve been fascinated by Cuban music for a very long time,” Goldner said. “My wife’s family is Cuban. I was struck by how this sense of exile, of diaspora, of being far away from something or someone that we construe as home, manifested with these two very different authors in very similar imagery.”
In taking up Yiddish as a medium of musical expression, Goldner joins a growing group of artists recording contemporary music in the language, including Daniel Kahn, whose Yiddish versions of classics by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits are ingenuous feats of translation; Isabel Frey, whose 2020 debut album Millennial Bundist repurposes Yiddish labor and protest anthems; and the Bashevis Singers, a Melbourne-based folk band who, like Goldner, frequently turn to Yiddish poetry as a source of musical inspiration.
Meanwhile, independent record labels like Borscht Beat are producing Yiddish music that runs the gamut from traditional to experimental.
This thriving world of Yiddish popular music reflects a larger cultural and linguistic renaissance in which Goldner is a passionate participant. He has attended the Yidish Vokh, an annual week-long retreat for Yiddish speakers in upstate New York, takes online Yiddish classes, and has even developed a Yiddish keyboard app, YidShrift, that aims to bring familiar features like autocorrect and autocomplete to modern Yiddish communication.
Beyond the Yiddish lyrics he sets to music, Goldner has incorporated his affinity for the language into Songs of Longing by including Yiddish interviews with some of his collaborators, emphasizing the currency of Yiddish as a medium of colloquial expression.
While Songs of Longing and Belonging is firmly rooted in Goldner’s engagement with Yiddish language and lyrics, he also believes that the texts he is drawing on speak to shared human experiences.
“I think that there is a longing for connection that is universal and that manifests itself through the concepts and stories of who we are,” he said. That longing often pushes people to ask themselves probing questions of identity like “Who are my people?” or “where is my home?”
“I don’t think that there are ever simple answers,” he said.
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Katie Zacharia’s brief White House stint included a rebuke from the Auschwitz Memorial
Katie Zacharia’s five-day stint as White House Press Secretary ended almost as soon as it began. But before she was fired on Friday, she managed to draw a rebuke from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
The museum’s reprimand came in response to a claim Zacharia posted to X in November 2025, asserting that the abortion pill is “connected to the manufacturer of the deadly gas Zyklon B, used in the World War II concentration camps.”
The supposed connection? A company descended from the conglomerate involved in producing Zyklon B later owned the company that developed the abortion pill, Zacharia intimated in her post.
The official Auschwitz Memorial X account rebuked Zacharia on Monday, calling the argument “a misleading chain of guilt by association.”
Mifepristone, commonly known as the abortion pill, was first synthesized in 1980 — more than three decades after World War II’s end — by Georges Teutsch, a chemist at the French pharmaceutical company Roussel-Uclaf, based on an idea developed by Jewish endocrinologist Étienne-Émile Baulieu.
The tenuous connection to the poison gas used in concentration camps goes something like this: Zyklon B was distributed by a company called Degesch, which was partly owned by the German conglomerate I.G. Farben. After World War II, I.G. Farben was broken up into successor companies, including Hoechst AG, which in 1997 acquired a majority stake in the French company that developed mifepristone.
“A corporate relationship between companies separated by decades is presented as if it proved continuity of products, purposes, or chemical composition,” the Auschwitz Memorial wrote on X. “That is not historical analysis, but the selective combination of unrelated facts to produce a predetermined conclusion.”
Zacharia offered another version of the claim in a June 2025 podcast episode of We the People with Gates Garcia, saying that “the abortion pill has the same chemicals that they used in the exterminant (sic) camps in Nazi Germany.”
Suffice it to say, mifepristone, a steroidal progesterone blocker, is not the same as cyanide. Zacharia, the Auschwitz Memorial wrote, “confuses corporate history with chemical composition.”
After the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, anti-abortion activists have increasingly set their sights on banning the abortion pill nationwide. Prescribing, dispensing, or mailing mifepristone is currently banned in 13 states. In May, the Supreme Court blocked a lower court ruling that would have effectively ended mail delivery and telemedicine prescribing of mifepristone nationwide, including in states where abortion is legal.
Zacharia has framed her opposition to abortion as deeply personal. Zacharia said that, when she met her biological mother at 18, she learned she was “approximately 20, 30 minutes away from being aborted.” A Christian counselor, Zacharia said, convinced her mother to place her for adoption instead.
On the podcast, Zacharia also spoke about her work on the board of the White Rose Resistance, an anti-abortion advocacy group named for the Nazi resistance movement of the same name.
Groups including the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and the Anti-Defamation League have condemned comparisons between abortion and the Holocaust, arguing that they trivialize the Holocaust and exploit its victims’ memory for political ends.
Zacharia has also made Nazi comparisons in other contexts: According to CNN, in September 2022, she reposted a Truth Social post comparing then-President Joe Biden and anti-fascist protesters to Nazis. It included the hashtags #Antifa, #PedoHitler and #WrongSideOfHistory.
The White House Press Office did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment Friday morning, before Zacharia’s firing had been announced.
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