As a New York City voter, I’m preparing to cast my ballot in the upcoming mayoral election. But as a congregational rabbi and now the head of the largest Jewish movement in North America, I’ve never told congregants for whom they should vote.

I won’t start now, despite the Trump administration’s misguided efforts to weaken the Johnson Amendment, the longstanding rule that bars congregations and their leaders from endorsing or opposing candidates from the pulpit. Keeping partisan politics out of our politically diverse congregations feels more essential than ever in today’s polarized climate.

I respect rabbinic colleagues who have added their names to the letter “A Rabbinic Call to Action: Defending the Jewish Future” — as more than 1,100 from across the country have now done. Similarly, I respect colleagues who have principled reasons for not signing on. The fact is that there is more than one way for rabbis to express moral clarity and to speak about urgent issues facing our community.

Addressing moral issues has always been part of the art of preaching sermons.  And as always, clergy can do this during campaign season without crossing the line into electioneering.

As a rabbi, I am deeply committed to living Jewish values and looking at contemporary issues through the prism of Jewish tradition and values. Matters of Jewish safety and security are of paramount importance to me, especially now with rising incidents of antisemitism. Following the Anti-Defamation League’s report of a record-breaking 976 antisemitic incidents in New York City in 2024, the highest count in any U.S. city last year, this year has also seen an alarming increase in antisemitism including harassment, vandalism and physical violence.

Given these increasing threats to our community, we need a mayor who will work tirelessly to protect us.  This includes making sure that the NYPD continues to provide extra protection for our community on Jewish holidays and at other moments of Jewish gathering.

I can attest that Zohran Mamdani is not lacking in empathy for the Jewish community’s anxiety over regular threats to our safety. In public interviews and in a personal meeting, I’ve heard him pledge to protect the Jewish community. But his many comments about the intersection of antisemitism and anti-Zionism — issues that are not synonymous but do overlap — have been problematic.

Expressing criticism of the Israeli government’s policies is not foreign to me or to many other ardent Zionists. However, denying Israel’s right to exist as both a Jewish and democratic state crosses the line from criticism of Israeli policy to a rejection of Israel and the 3,000-year-old identification of Judaism with Israel as the Jewish people’s homeland. And in an atmosphere where Israel is regularly and harshly demonized, Jewish safety is threatened.

Mamdani has been consistent in saying that he believes Israel has a right to exist as a state of all its citizens, but not as a Jewish state. This argument might sound tidy in a seminar; in the real world it is cause for grave concern. Given centuries of global antisemitism — from age-old accusations of deicide to the Inquisition to the Holocaust to Oct. 7 — as well as the many wars and terrorist attacks emanating from Israel’s neighbors over the last seven decades, the “one-state” solution Mamdani espouses would put the lives of the 7 million Israeli Jews at great risk and end Israel’s identity as the Jewish people’s homeland.

While this is a moment when our vulnerable Jewish community is rightfully lifting up the needs and dangers before us, our tradition forbids us from ignoring the many other compelling areas of vital concern for the Jewish community. Primary among them is addressing the many threats to the core pillars of our democracy that have given Jews the rights and freedoms that have allowed us to flourish in America and in New York City. These are the very pillars that promise hope for groups facing discrimination, barriers, and threats to their safety and well-being. Those priorities also include the moral responsibility to reverse the ever-widening gap between rich and poor New Yorkers.

Judaism has never been about caring only for our own community or just personal piety but rather, as the prophet Isaiah reminds us, a societal commitment to:

To let the oppressed go free;
To break off every yoke.
It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to clothe him,
And not to ignore your own kin.”
— Isaiah 58:6-7

And when we are considering whom to elect as leaders, a candidate who has been morally compromised should not easily collect our votes.  As I have questioned what Mamdani might do based on his statements, so too I question what Andrew Cuomo might do in light of past findings of his pattern of harassment, as documented in the New York Attorney General’s 2021 report. According to Psalm 15, a person of moral character is someone:

whose tongue is not given to evil;
who has never done harm to his fellow,
or borne reproach for [his acts toward] his neighbor;
who has never lent money at interest,
or accepted a bribe against the innocent. (Psalm 15:3, 5)

If you think the choice for mayor is simple, I respectfully suggest that you are not paying attention.  I implore our Jewish community and all New Yorkers to carefully consider the many urgent issues our city faces before casting your vote. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

—
The post Anyone saying Jews face a simple choice in the NYC mayoral election is not paying attention appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

There are plenty of funny lines in Coexistence, My Ass! but make no mistake, this is not a comedy. As director Amber Fares follows Israeli comedian and peace activist Noam Shuster Eliassi from her excited 2019 arrival at Harvard on a stand-up and peace-building fellowship (who knew such a thing existed?!) through escalating political and pandemic problems to her anguish at the war in Gaza, the documentary is nothing less than a tragedy.

Shuster Eliassi leapt to fame in early 2019 with “Dubai Dubai,”a song of “peace and love” in the wake of the Abraham Accords which celebrated Arabs (“especially when they are 4000 miles away”). It was satire, in Arabic, on Israeli television (Shuster Eliassi also speaks Farsi). She was poking fun at Israel’s peace with UAE’s millionaires while both sides ignored “those who suffered the Nakba.” She properly went viral across the region, though, when she jokingly proposed marriage to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on an Arabic-language program of the Israeli news channel i24. Arabic news outlets and social media were not sure what to make of it but Israeli and western news outlets knew that the furor and fluster were newsworthy.

Shuster Eliassi notes in Coexistence that her movement to comedy vindicated her decision to move away from more serious peace-building. ”20 years of peace activism, I influence 20 people. One joke about dictators, 20 million people saw it!” If she wanted to achieve her dream of peace in the Middle East, maybe she was right to use the power of social media to amplify her gift of making people laugh.

Filmed over five of the bleakest years for believers in democracy and equality in Israel, Coexistence also follows Shuster Eliassi from hope to despair. After COVID, Fares made a short documentary about Shuster Eliassi for the New Yorker – “How One Woman Is Using Comedy To Speak Up About Palestinian Rights.” From that moment of hope though, Benjamin Netanyahu’s anti-democratic push, Oct. 7, and the Israel Gaza War render the 2021 film obsolete.

The title Coexistence, My Ass! changes its significance through the movie. Initially, Shuster Eliassi scoffs at “coexistence” as a risible minimum aim, one so boring it puts her to sleep. By the end of the movie in 2024, when extremists on both sides have succeeded in destroying trust in humanity and any hope for peace, even that low bar seems unattainable. The phrase – also the name of Shuster Eliassi’s standup show — is Coexistence, My Ass! because “coexistence” no longer even seems possible.

As a child of Romanian and Iranian parents in Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salam (Oasis of Peace), Shuster Eliassi grew up in a particular limelight. Set up as a cooperative village where Israeli Jews, Muslims and Christians could live together, the small settlement of about 60 families was a regular stop for American peacebuilding luminaries. The documentary features archival footage of Jane Fonda speaking there in 2002 as well as a young Shuster Eliassi handing flowers to Hillary Clinton in 1998.

When the first IDF soldier from Neve Shalom gets killed, news crews come to the village and end up interviewing Shuster Eliassi, then a grade school student who had known him and looked up to him. Even as a young woman, Shuster Eliassi is able to voice her pain without becoming embroiled in the conflict. Indeed, one of the film’s most compelling arguments for something more than coexistence is her best friend from home Ranin, an Arab. When Shuster Eliassi breaks her leg in an accident, Ranin pushes her wheelchair up a hill. They joke about Arabs and Jews (“How is it that the Arabs always end up serving the Jews?” Ranin asks.) They speak in Hebrew and Arabic, and argue about which language should come first in the name of their home, Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom. They are a visible embodiment of how easy it is to have an Arab-Jewish family, of how coexistence could be the least possible problem.

We see Shuster Eliassi perform in 2018 at East Jerusalem’s 1001 Laughs Palestine Comedy Festival. There she assures the uncertain audience that her set is short, with a joke about the Occupation: “I’m only staying for 7 minutes, not 70 years.” She adds that she stole the joke from the Palestinian-American emcee Amer Zahr.  “But it’s mine now, God promised it to me!” she says. The crowd seems to love it.

Five years later, though, the atmosphere is much more tense. While the troubles had been escalating throughout 2023, Oct. 7 was a rupture, and Shuster Eliassi finds herself stuck between her communities. We see her called to condemn the people who committed the atrocities on Oct. 7 and also to condemn the government that is about to retaliate. She is aghast that there seems to be no time for her to mourn the human lives that were lost.

Fares, best known for Speed Sisters, her documentary about the first all-female car-racing team of Palestinian drivers in the West Bank, captures the ratcheted-up post-COVID tempo. When Arabs and Jews are stuck, COVID-infected, in “Corona Hotel,” they live happily together, it’s only with the chance of an Arab-Israeli peace that excludes the (Iranians and) Palestinians that Hamas starts serious sabotage. Its rocket attacks, intercepted by the Iron Dome, change the feeling in Israel.

Instead of a country moving slowly towards coexistence and peace, Israeli news shows “Arabs being attacked live on TV.” An aggressive, shirtless, tattooed young Jewish skinhead is shown saying, “We came out to fight the Arabs. To show them they can’t just shoot rockets at us… If need be, we’ll kill them. If need be, we’ll murder them.” The sequence cuts to Jewish Israelis lynching an Arab.

Furthermore, as pro-Democracy, anti-Netanyahu protests continue, the Occupation remains off the agenda. An older man, maybe from her parents’ generation, labels Shuster Eliassi an “enemy” of Israel for calling to end the occupation at a protest against the Israeli government.

Vivian Silver, one of the people killed in the Gaza envelope on Oct. 7, was a lifetime peace activist. She was a friend of my friends and a friend of Shuster Eliassi. At her funeral we see her son talking to Shuster Eliassi. “She didn’t work for peace so that when they come, they’ll spare her,” he says of his mother “She worked so there’d be no reason for them to come.” It’s a position that is no longer tenable.

Ultimately, Coexistence, My Ass! isn’t about solutions, because it’s not naïve enough to pretend that there are any. It isn’t about both sides, although heaven knows there is plenty of blame to go around. It’s about staring with Shuster Eliassi down the line of peace and seeing massive objects fall across it. It’s not cathartic. It’s honest. And sometimes, honesty is the most radical thing a film can offer.

The post In ‘Coexistence, My Ass!’ the anxiety of an Israeli influencer appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — An Egyptian team has entered Gaza to join in the search for the remains of 13 hostages whose bodies have still not been released following the ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.

The ceasefire’s first phase required the release of all hostages, living and dead. Hamas freed all 20 living hostages as required but has released the remains of only 15 of 28 hostages who were killed on Oct. 7, 2023, or subsequently in captivity.

On Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump, who brokered the ceasefire and is applying pressure to maintain it, issued a stern warning to Hamas about freeing the remaining hostages.

“Hamas is going to have to start returning the bodies of the deceased hostages, including two Americans, quickly, or the other Countries involved in this GREAT PEACE will take action,” Trump posted on Truth Social. He did not offer details about which countries would step in or what actions they might take.

The Israelis reportedly believe that Hamas is aware of the locations of the majority of the hostages’ bodies but is slow-walking their release to delay a shift to the deal’s second phase, which would require it to disarm and cede control of Gaza.

Trump acknowledged both concerns in his post, in which he implied a deadline of Monday afternoon for swift action on Hamas’ part.

“Some of the bodies are hard to reach, but others they can return now and, for some reason, they are not. Perhaps it has to do with their disarming, but when I said, ‘Both sides would be treated fairly,’ that only applies if they comply with their obligations,” he wrote. “Let’s see what they do over the next 48 hours. I am watching this very closely.”

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, meanwhile, said on Monday that Israel and the United States should pause efforts to advance the peace plan until the hostages are returned.

“Hamas knows exactly where every one of the deceased hostages is held,” the group said in a statement, adding, “The families urge the Government of Israel, the United States administration, and the mediators not to advance to the next phase of the agreement until Hamas fulfills all of its obligations and returns every hostage to Israel.”

Israel has endorsed the entry of Egyptian forces to locate the hostages but has not accepted an offer from Turkey, which took Hamas’ side in the war, to help.

The 13 remaining hostages include two, Omer Neutra and Itay Chen, who were dual American citizens. They also include Thai and Tanzanian agricultural workers; several older men murdered on Oct. 7; a hostage killed in a failed rescue attempt; and a soldier, Hadar Goldin, whose body has been held by Hamas since 2014.

The post Trump sets deadline for Hamas to release hostages’ bodies as Egyptian team enters Gaza to help appeared first on The Forward.