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The hora, the hora! How Jewish wedding music got that way
(JTA) — When my wife and I were planning our wedding, we thought it might be cool to hire a klezmer band. This was during the first wave of the klezmer revival, when groups like The Klezmatics and The Klezmer Conservatory Band were rediscovering the genre of Jewish wedding music popular for centuries in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe.
Of course we also wanted to dance to rock ‘n’ roll and needed musicians who could handle Sinatra for our parents’ benefit, so we went with a more typical wedding band. Modernity won out over tradition.
Or did it? Musician and musicologist Uri Schreter argues that the music heard at American Jewish weddings since the 1950s has become a tradition all its own, especially in the way Old World traditions coexist with contemporary pop. In a dissertation he is writing about the politics of Jewish music in the early postwar period, Schreter argues that American Jewish musical traditions — especially among secularized Conservative and Reform Jews — reflect events happening outside the wedding hall, including the Holocaust, the creation of Israel and the rapid assimilation of American Jews.
That will be the subject of a talk he’ll be giving Monday for YIVO, titled “Yiddish to the Core: Wedding Music and Jewish Identity in Postwar New York City.”
Because it’s June — and because I’m busy planning a wedding for one of my kids one year from now — I wanted to speak to Schreter about Jewish weddings and how they got that way. Our Zoom conversation Wednesday touched on the indestructibility of the hora, the role of musicians as “secular clergy” and why my Ashkenazi parents danced the cha-cha-cha.
Born in Tel Aviv, Schreter is pursuing his PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University. He is a composer, pianist and film editor.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
I was struck by your research because we’re helping to plan a child’s wedding now. It’s the first wedding we’ve planned since our own, and we’re still asking the same questions, like, you’ve got to make sure the band can handle the hora and the Motown set and, I don’t know, “Uptown Funk.” Your research explores when that began — when American Jewish weddings began to combine the traditional and secular cultures.
In the period that I’m talking about, post-World War II America, this is already a fact of life for musicians. A lot of my work is based on interviews with musicians from that period, folks now in their 80s and 90s. The oldest one I have started playing professionally in 1947 or ’48. Popular American music was played at Jewish weddings as early as the 1930s, but it’s a question of proportion — how much the wedding would feature foxtrots and swing and Lindy Hop and other popular dance tunes of the day, and how much of it is going to be klezmer music.
In the postwar period, most of the [non-Orthodox] American Jewish weddings would have featured American pop. For musicians who wanted to be in what they called the “club date” business, they needed to be able to do all these things. And some “offices” — a term they used for a business that books wedding bands — would have specialists that they could call on to do a Jewish wedding.
You’re writing about a period when the Conservative movement becomes the dominant American Jewish denomination. They have one foot in tradition, and the other in modernity. What does a wedding look like in 1958 when they’re building the big suburban synagogues?
The difference is not so much denominational but between the wide spectrum of Orthodoxy and the diverse spectrum of what I describe as “secular.”
Meaning non-Orthodox — Reform, Conservative, etc.?
Right. Only in the sense that they are broadly speaking more secular than the Orthodox. And if so they are going to have, for the most part, one, maybe two sets of Jewish dance music — basically a medley of a few Jewish tunes. You might have a wedding where it could be a quarter of the music or even half would be Jewish music, but this would be for families that have a much stronger degree of attachment to traditional Jewish culture, and primarily Yiddish culture.
There’s a few interrelated elements that shape this. Class is an important thing. For lower class communities in some areas, and I am talking primarily about New York, you’d have communities that are a little bit more secluded, probably speaking more Yiddish at home and hanging out more with other Jewish people from similar backgrounds. So these kinds of communities might have as much as a third or half of the music be Jewish, even though they consider themselves secular. It’s actually very similar to an Orthodox wedding, where you might also have half and half [Jewish and “American” music].
Jews in the higher socioeconomic class might, in general, be more Americanized, and want to project a more mainstream American identity. They might have as little as five minutes of Jewish music, just to mark it that they did this. Still, it’s very important for almost all of them to have those five minutes — because it’s one of the things that makes the wedding Jewish. I interviewed couples that were getting married in the ’50s, and a lot of them told me, “You need to have Jewish dance music for this to be a Jewish wedding.”
Composer and pianist Uri Schreter is pursuing his PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University. (Nicole Loeb)
When I was growing up in the 1970s at a suburban Reform synagogue on Long Island, klezmer was never spoken about. I don’t know any parents who owned klezmer albums. Then when I got married a decade later, it was in the middle of the klezmer revival. Am I right about that? Were the ’50s and ’60s fallow periods for klezmer?
You’re definitely right. Up until the mid-1920s, you still have waves of immigration coming from Eastern Europe. So you still have new people feeding this desire for the traditional culture. But as immigration stops and people basically tried to become American, the tides shift away from traditional klezmer.
The other important thing that happens in the period that I’m looking at is both a negative rejection of klezmer and a positive attraction to other new things. Klezmer becomes associated with immigrant culture, so people who are trying to be American don’t want to be associated with it. It also becomes associated with the Holocaust, which is very problematic. Anything sounding Yiddish becomes associated for some people with tragedy.
At the same time, and very much related to this, there’s the rise of Israeli popular culture, and especially Israeli folk songs. A really strong symbol of this is in the summer of 1950, when the Weavers record a song called “Tzena, Tzena,” a Hebrew Israeli song written in the 1940s which becomes a massive hit in America — it’s like number two in the Billboard charts for about 10 weeks. Israeli culture becomes this symbol of hope and the future and a new society that’s inspiring. This is all in very stark contrast to what klezmer represents for people. And a lot of the composers of Israeli folk song of its first decades had this very clearly stated ideology that they’re moving away from Ashkenazi musical traditions and Yiddish.
So the Jewish set at a wedding becomes an Israeli set.
At a typical Conservative wedding in the 1950s and ’60s, you might hear 10 minutes of Jewish music. The first one would be “Hava Nagila,” then they went to “Tzena, Tzena,” then they would do a song called “Artza Alinu,” which is today not very well known, and then “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem.” They are songs that are perceived to be Israeli folk songs, even though if you actually look at their origins, it’s a lot murkier than that. Like two of the songs I just mentioned are actually Hasidic songs that received Hebrew words in pre-state Palestine. Another probably comes from some sort of German, non-Jewish composer in 1900, but is in Hebrew and is perceived to be a representation of Israeli culture.
But even when the repertoire already represents a shift towards what’s easier to digest for American Jewry, the arrangements and the instruments and the musical ornamentation are essentially klezmer. The musicians I spoke to said they did this because they felt that this is the only way that it would actually sound Jewish.
That is to say, to be “Jewish” the music had to gesture towards Ashkenazi and Yiddish, even if it were Israeli and Hebrew. As if Jews wanted to distance themselves from Eastern Europe — but only so far.
Someone like Dave Tarras or the Epstein Brothers, musicians who were really at the forefront of klezmer in New York at the time, were really focused on bringing it closer to Ashkenazi traditions. Ashkenazi Jewish weddings in America are not the totality of Jewish weddings in America, and Israeli music itself is made up of all these different traditions — North African, Middle Eastern, Turkish, Greek — but in effect most of the really popular songs of the time were composed by Ashkenazi composers. Even “Hava Nagila” is based on a melody from the Sadigura Hasidic sect in Eastern Europe.
Of course, if you’re a klezmer musician you’re allergic to “Hava Nagila.”
Then-Vice President Joe Biden dances the hora with his daughter Ashley at her wedding to Howard Krein in Wilmington, Delaware on June 2, 2012. (White House/David Lienemann)
You spoke earlier about Latin music, which seemed to become a Jewish thing in the 1950s and ’60s — I know a few scholars have focused on Jews and Latinos and how Latin musical genres like the mambo and cha-cha-cha became popular in the Catskill Mountain resorts and at Jewish weddings.
Latin music is not exclusively a Jewish thing, but it’s part of American popular culture by the late 40s. But Jews are very eagerly adopting it for sure. In the Catskills, you would often have two separate bands that alternated every evening. One is a Latin band, one is a generic American band playing everything else. And part of that is American Jews wanting to become American. And how do you become American? By doing what Americans do: by appropriating “exotic” cultures, in this case Latin. This is a way of being American.
Jews and Chinese food would be another example.
And by the way, in a similar vein, it also becomes very popular to dance to Israeli folk songs. A lot of people are taking lessons. A lot of people are going to their Jewish Y to learn Israeli folk dance.
I’ve been to Jewish weddings where the “Jewish set” feels very perfunctory — you know, dance a hora or two long enough to lift the couple on chairs and then let’s get to the Motown. Or the Black Eyed Peas because they were smart enough to include the words “Mazel Tov!” in the lyrics to “I Gotta Feeling.”
So that’s why we always hear that song! I will say though, even when the Jewish music appears superficial, it does have this deeper layer of meaning. It’s very interesting how, despite all these changes, and despite the secularization process of American Jewish weddings, the music still connects people to their Jewishness. These pieces of music are so meshed with other religious components. Of course, most people see this as secular. But a lot of people connect to their Jewish identity through elements such as Jewish music, Jewish food, certain Jewish customs that are easier to accommodate in your secular lifestyle, and the music specifically has this kind of flexibility, this fluidity between the sacred and the profane.
That’s beautiful. It sort of makes the musicians secular clergy.
It’s interesting that you say that. In his history of klezmer, Walter Zev Feldman refers to the klezmer — the word itself means “musician” — as a kind of a liminal character, an interstitial character between the secular and the mundane. The music is not liturgical, but when the klezmer or the band is playing, it is an interval woven with all these other religious components and things that have ritual meaning.
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Tony nominee Mark Rosenblatt’s ‘Giant’ journey began with Menachem Begin
The seed for Giant was planted almost 35 years ago when a 14-year old Mark Rosenblatt and his friend were tasked with presenting the week’s news to a school assembly.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had just died and Rosenblatt assumed that they should mark the passing of a hero. His friend, a Muslim, equally assumed that everyone would understand that Begin was a terrorist. Fast forward from London’s St. Paul’s School in March 1992 to May 2026 in New York, and Rosenblatt is nominated for a Tony for best new play for his run of Giant on Broadway. The play, which he wrote about an episode in the life of children’s book author Roald Dahl when he criticized Israel and espoused a pernicious antisemitism, deals with differences in perspectives on the Jewish state, and the limits of reasonable opinions.
When I spoke to him on Zoom from London, Rosenblatt and I negotiated our own small differences before we discussed the larger geopolitical issues that the play raises. Soup (Rosenblatt) or tea? Leeds (me) or London? Masorti or Conservative (is there a difference)? But the very ease of triangulating our positions within U.K. Jewry and finding out the first tranche of mutual friends, is just proof of the minuscule size of the community. At barely more than quarter of a million, the Jews of Britain are a minority comprising only about 0.5% of the population and while we don’t all know each other, there’s only ever small pools of people the same rough age and prepared to publicly avow their Jewishness.
That’s why when Dahl (John Lithgow, nominated for a Tony for lead actor) complains that he never saw any Jews fighting for Britain with him in the war, it’s a smack-my-head moment for British Jews. Rosenblatt is giving voice to Dahl’s own quote to reporter Michael Coren, where he rehearses a well-trodden slander. British Jews disproportionately served in the war — actually doubly disproportionately in the RAF where Dahl did his military service — but because there are fewer Jews in the world than residents of Tokyo City (and fewer in England than the population of Bournemouth), it’s still statistically highly unlikely that Dahl would have served with one. And, if he did, Rosenblatt pointed out to me, why would that person have revealed his ethnicity to Dahl or others in a society so riddled with antisemitism?
Rosenblatt grew up, like many British Jews of our generation — he’s 48 years old, I’m 55 — with Israel as a potential holiday destination and a promise of ultimate safety: an odd amalgam of Mediterranean resort and escape from the return of the Nazis. The promise of safe refuge in a hostile world was especially meaningful for him growing up as a grandchild of a Holocaust survivor — many family members of his maternal grandmother were murdered by the Nazis.
“That narrative of sanctuary was strong,” he told me. Thinking about Israel as an alternative homeland from the home of his birth sounded unthinkable at the time, but stabbings in Manchester and London, fire-bombed synagogues, and destroyed Jewish ambulances have shaken British Jews since Giant began its run at the Music Box Theatre in March. And, of course, Israel was a topic upon which otherwise similar folks’ worldviews could diverge.
“It didn’t transform me overnight,” Rosenblatt said of his school assembly moment. “But I became aware very quickly that other people thought very, very differently.”
From small beginnings, giant things
The play, Rosenblatt’s first as playwright, didn’t begin with Israel, nor did it begin with Dahl. It began, Rosenblatt said, with the British Labour Party’s antisemitism crisis in the late 2010s — specifically, with the way that conversations about Israel within the party would turn into older, darker and more conspiratorial accusations about Jews.
“I found the medieval nature of some of those stereotypes shocking,” he said of the racist comments that were commonplace and tolerated under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. “The grouping together of millions of people as if we all have innate characteristics.”
But Rosenblatt wasn’t interested in writing a documentary play about the Labour Party. He was a director — indeed, in 1999 he had won the JMK Award for Young Directors, a prestigious early career award whose patrons include Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen. He wasn’t even sure that he wanted to write at all, initially asking one of Britain’s preeminent directors Sir Nicholas Hytner for advice about who he might approach to write the play he was looking for. Rosenblatt wanted a proxy — something that could dramatize the distinction between legitimate political criticism and antisemitic tropes.
That’s when he came across clippings about Dahl, the beloved childhood author who had, in a generally forgotten episode, made and then doubled down on inflammatory remarks about Jews in the aftermath of the 1982 Lebanon War, in the form of a book review and later comments to the press. Perhaps the most egregious quotation, after he suggested Jews as a “race” were responsible for loss of life in Beirut, was the remark that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on [Jews] for no reason.”
The material clicked immediately. Here was a “perfect premise”: a globally-adored writer, in his own home, under pressure to account for what he’d said. The domestic setting allowed Rosenblatt to layer the political with the personal — Dahl’s family life, his grief, his acerbic personality, his ego — until the play, though deeply specific, became less about a single scandal than about the conditions that produce hate speech from people who should know better.
Rosenblatt wrote the play he was looking for. Hytner directed, earning an Olivier nomination and now a nod for a Tony.
Enter the American
One of Rosenblatt’s most consequential decisions about the play was also, in a sense, a mistake. In early drafts, he imagined Dahl’s American publisher, the legendary Robert Gottlieb visiting him alongside his British editor Tom Maschler. It turned out that this would have been anachronistic, since Gottlieb had left Farrar, Straus and Giroux years earlier. But the American presence remained an important intervention. The result is Jessie Stone, an invented Jewish American FSG sales director who arrives in Dahl’s English country house as both emissary and antagonist. She triangulates the discussion, disrupting, by her Americanness, Jewishness, lack of seniority and femininity (she is importantly, too, a mother) what might otherwise have been a locking of antlers between three eminent men. But she is also something more interesting: Rosenblatt’s attempt to imagine the confidence of American Jewishness.
“If you come from the U.K.,” he said, “you’re part of a tiny minority in a culture that doesn’t really know what you are.” Britain has, at most, a few hundred thousand Jews. New York has millions. The difference is not just demographic; it’s psychological.
“In America,” he said, “Jewish life is part of the mainstream fabric. You can speak with confidence about your identity and expect to be understood…. In England, you are thankful if anyone knows anything”
Jessie Stone, played In London and on Broadway by Aya Cash, a Tony nominee for featured actress, embodies that confidence. Where Maschler (Elliot Levey) “dances” — deflecting, accommodating, surviving — Stone confronts. Where he reads the room, she pulps it. The antagonism between Dahl and Stone is explicit and central, but the tension between Stone and Maschler goes beyond the personal and becomes cultural. British Jewish caution meets American Jewish assertion, and they despair of one other.
History rhymes
If Giant has not changed since its West End premiere, its audience certainly has. The play was greenlit on October 5, 2023. Two days later, Hamas attacked Israel. By the time the production opened at the Royal Court a year later, Israel had returned to Lebanon — echoing the very history the play dramatizes. (The past March, which saw an IDF ground invasion of Southern Lebanon, has only made its Broadway tenure more timely.)
“We were concerned the theatre might pull it,” Rosenblatt said of the Royal Court. “They didn’t. They said, ‘We want this play.’”
(The Court was just under new leadership, following a troubled recent history of dubious characterization of Jews.)
What followed was a kind of unintended experiment. Audiences arrived “incredibly genned up,” as Rosenblatt put it — immersed in a contemporary conflict that made the play’s historical argument feel immediate, even urgent. Lines from Dahl that might once have seemed shocking began to sound, in some cases, familiar.
“The more hostility there is towards Israel,” he said, “the more some of those tropes get repeated as if they’re acceptable truths.”
On Broadway, the play has undergone another subtle transformation. In London, the audience encountered Stone as an outsider — an American “alien landing” in a room full of English eccentricity. In New York, the sense of what is familiar totally flips.
“We’re on weird planet England,” Rosenblatt said of the opening scenes, “waiting for the arrival of one of our own.”
That shift of perspective matters because it changes where the audience’s sympathies lie, and what they notice. British viewers, raised with the nuances of class, recognize the delicate choreography of Maschler’s interactions with Dahl — the way he absorbs insult to maintain access and influence. They understand how he treats the insecure public schoolboy that lies behind the arrogant, bigoted celebrity. For Maschler it’s more important to lead this overgrown child to his better self than to mouth some form of banal pseudo-integrity. Better for Dahl to make and sell books successfully while explaining publicly that criticism should be separate from racism, than for Maschler to protect his own ego. American audiences, less attuned to those codes, sometimes read the same behavior as weakness.
Rosenblatt doesn’t dispute the reading; he contextualizes it. “I see it as survival,” he said. Maschler is not failing to stand up for himself; he is choosing when and how to do so. It’s a distinction that may be more legible in a culture where minority status has historically required a certain kind of strategic accommodation.
For all its topical resonance, Giant is not a play about the news cycle. It is, instead, a play about what happens when private prejudice collides with public responsibility — and about how communities argue, internally, about where that line lies.
Rosenblatt resists the idea that he is delivering a message to any particular audience, including the American Jewish readers of the Forward. The play, he suggests, does its work not by instructing but by staging contradiction.
“There are no neat messages,” he said. “Other than that antisemitism is a terrible thing. Beyond that, it’s about complexity and nuance — and inviting people to think.”
That invitation feels at once both modest and radical. In an era of algorithmic certainty and ideological sorting, Giant insists on something messier: that people can be wrong in ways that are revealing, that arguments can be both necessary and insufficient, and that identity — British or American, Jewish or otherwise — is less a fixed position than a set of pressures, constantly negotiated.
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A new Hebrew press in Berlin argues that Israel doesn’t own the language
(JTA) — Dory Manor and Moshe Sakal, who run a press for Hebrew literature in Berlin, are often asked if their business is Israeli.
The partners in life and publishing come from Israel, though they have lived in Berlin and Paris for the better part of two decades. But they say their publishing house, Altneuland, is neither Israeli nor European. Instead, they sought to create a home for Hebrew literature from around the world — open to Israeli writers, but free from Israeli state funding.
Altneuland is the first non-religious Hebrew publishing house to set up outside of Israel since the state was established. Manor and Sakal founded the press in 2024, and this fall, Altneuland will launch in the United States.
“I believe that the Hebrew language is not only a national language,” said Manor, the editor-in-chief. “Hebrew has always been a global language, and even modern Hebrew has been an international language — mostly European, but not only — before the creation of the State of Israel.”
Manor and Sakal have expanded their mission from Hebrew literature to publishing Jewish authors across languages, including German, French, Russian and Yiddish. The U.S. launch will include an original English-language book by Ruth Margalit, along with English translations of Hebrew novels by Noa Yedlin and Itamar Orlev.
Altneuland is also the German publisher of “The Future is Peace,” a New York Times bestseller by Israeli Maoz Inon, whose kibbutznik parents were killed on Oct. 7, 2023, and Palestinian Aziz Abu Sarah, whose brother died in 1990 after being tortured in an Israeli prison.
In a time when thousands of authors and publishers globally have pledged to boycott Israeli institutions over what they identify as a genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza, Manor and Sakal say that Altneuland is not a boycott. They work with writers who live in Israel and sell to Israeli bookstores. Establishing a Berlin-based publishing house made them ineligible for Israeli public funding so they could avoid the fraught question of accepting support from the government.
Sakal, the publisher, acknowledged that Israel was a center for Hebrew and Jewish literature, but said it doesn’t have to be the only center. “We are not replacing it,” he said. “We are doing something else.”
Altneuland allows the founders to work with Israelis while staying apart from the Israeli Ministry of Culture, which provides funding for Israel’s publishing industry, largely through literary awards.
In January, the ministry canceled its annual culture prizes. Culture Minister Miki Zohar, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, cited the political bent of the prizes and said their cancellation was owed to the organizers “clearly ignoring artists whose opinions are held by most of the country.” The cuts came shortly after Zohar launched an alternative state film award ceremony, cutting funds to the Ophir Awards — Israel’s equivalent of the Oscars — after it awarded best film to “The Sea,” about a Palestinian boy in the West Bank who attempts to go to Tel Aviv and see the sea.
Israel’s literary world, which pays poorly and lacks broad recognition, depends heavily on state-sponsored prizes.
“This government is, for me, an enemy of Israel and not Israel itself,” said Manor. “So no, I’m not boycotting anyone, but I don’t want to deal with the current Israeli government. I do want to deal with Israeli readers, with Israeli writers.”
Those writers share many of Manor and Sakal’s political views. The founders’ goal is to make Altneuland a home for Jewish authors with a liberal outlook — especially those who feel pressured by rising nationalism, whether in Israel or elsewhere.
Margalit, a Tel Aviv-based journalist, will publish a collection of her political and cultural profiles in Israel through a collaboration between Altneuland and Pushkin Press. Her book, “In the Belly of the Whale: Portraits from a Fractured Israel,” is coming out in September.
Margalit said she was drawn to Manor and Sakal’s “humanist spirit,” along with their ability to publish the book simultaneously in English, Hebrew and German.
“At a time when so many people are quick to jump to labels or cancellations, it was bracing to find thoughtful partners who were similarly aggrieved about the political situation as I was,” she said.
Arad’s Hebrew novel, “Our Lady of Kazan,” will be published in German by Altneuland as “Kinderwunsch” in July. Arad, an Israeli-born writer, has lived in California for over 20 years and authored 12 books of Hebrew fiction. One Haaretz reviewer summed her up as “the finest living author writing in Hebrew” who was “in exile in the U.S.”
Arad’s books, often featured on bestseller lists in Israel, tend to deal with Israelis living abroad. The theme fits into the global perspective of Altneuland, targeting readers who are curious about crossing national boundaries.
“I’ve been thrilled to see that Israeli readers are willing — even eager — to read stories about Israeli expatriates,” said Arad. “The experience of living outside Israel, whether temporarily for work or study or on a more permanent basis, has become a central theme in Hebrew literature.”
Altneuland takes its tongue-in-cheek name from Theodor Herzl’s 1902 novel, literally meaning “old new land.” The founder of political Zionism envisioned a utopic, multicultural Jewish state where Jews and Arabs lived peacefully together.
“When we finally decided to call our press Altneuland, it was because our Alteuland, an ‘old new land,’ is a land without territories. It is the Hebrew language,” said Manor.
Berlin is a thriving hub for up to 30,000 Israeli expatriates. Among them is a growing community of writers and intellectuals, including some who left Israel out of frustration and anger at their government.
Manor and Sakal see another reason for making Berlin their home base. They view Altneuland as a continuation of Schocken Verlag, a Jewish publishing house in Berlin that improbably persisted through the 1930s. Schocken Verlag was a cultural lifeline for Jews under Hitler’s regime, publishing books by Franz Kafka, Heinrich Heine, Rabbi Leo Baeck and Shmuel Yosef Agnon, a founding father of modern Hebrew literature.
In 1939, the publishing house was finally forced to shutter and moved to British Mandate Palestine. The reestablished Schocken Books lives on today as part of Penguin Random House. But Manor and Sakal said their project aligns with the original Schocken Verlag — the one destroyed by Nazism.
“What we find in both models is the possibility of a Jewish cultural space that is cosmopolitan, multilingual, humanist, non-national, and not dependent on a single territory,” said Sakal.
Altneuland has faced skepticism, particularly from Israel. Publisher and editor Oded Carmeli said in Haaretz, “The truth is that there aren’t enough Hebrew readers outside of Israel to support a publishing house – not even a bookstore, not even a shelf in a bookstore – and even if there were enough readers, no store in Berlin or Madrid would maintain such a shelf, for fear of repercussions.”
The Altneuland duo said their risky proposition is working out so far. Most of their Hebrew readers remain in Israel, where they are printing books in the thousands and going into second printings on select titles. But they are also cultivating a readership in Germany, where they print smaller special runs of Hebrew-language editions.
Naomi Firestone-Teeter, the CEO of the Jewish Book Council, said that Altneuland has emerged as pressure mounts on Jewish authors from the right and the left through “book bans, boycotts and cancellations.” (The council itself was recently criticized by dozens of Jewish authors for a “bias toward centering Israeli and Zionist voices.”)
“In this moment, we see their effort to build another home for Hebrew literature and Israeli voices as a meaningful contribution to the Jewish literary landscape,” said Firestone-Teeter.
Altneuland’s books in German and English are the fruit of collaborations with Pushkin Press and New Vessel Press. Manor said they were “positively surprised” when they began talks about working with publishers in Europe and North America. Those conversations began in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, and continued against the backdrop of a rising international chorus that has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. So far, no one has boycotted them.
“Usually we had interesting talks, very open talks with people who understood, in most cases, the nuances between our being a Hebrew publishing house and Israel as a state, Israel as a regime,” said Manor. “This is something that we could not predict when we created Altneuland.”
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Jewish library and Chabad near Buenos Aires attacked, Argentine Jewish advocates say
(JTA) — Counterterrorism officials in Buenos Aires are investigating after a Jewish library and a Chabad center in a suburb in the Argentine capital were attacked last week.
On Thursday night, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the Israeli Literary Center and Max Nordau Library in La Plata, according to a statement published Friday by the center’s board of directors. Multiple individuals “threw a blunt object filled with fuel at the front of the library, breaking windows and causing material damage,” the board said, noting that the device did not ignite and no one was injured.
The library, a secular educational center founded in 1912 that promotes Argentine Jewish culture, said it is reinforcing security measures in light of the attack.
On Sunday, the Chabad of La Plata was also attacked, according to DAIA, the Argentine Jewish community group, which condemned both attacks. DAIA, which first reported the Chabad attack, did not describe the nature of the attack beyond reporting no injuries.
“We are deeply concerned about the recurrence and the short timeframe of these incidents,” DAIA said in a statement.
The Ministry of Security of the Province of Buenos Aires and the Complex Crimes and Counterterrorism Unit of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police are investigating both attacks.
La Plata’s Jewish population numbers about 2,000, and its Chabad center has existed for more than 25 years. Argentina as a whole is home to the sixth-largest Jewish community in the world and the largest in Latin America, mostly centered in Buenos Aires.
“These acts of violence threaten democratic coexistence and the values of respect and pluralism that we defend our neighbors,” La Plata Mayor Julio Alak said. “We will not allow hatred and intolerance to have a place in our city.”
Argentina is the site of some of the deadliest attacks on Jewish institutions in modern history. A 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires killed 29 people, while a 1994 attack on the AMIA Jewish community center left more than 80 people dead. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, a pro-Israel and philosemitic economist, has advanced efforts to hold Hezbollah and Iran responsible for their alleged role in the attacks after years of foot-dragging by prior leaders.
The incidents in La Plata come as Jewish institutions around the world are on high alert amid a string of attacks since the start of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran in February. Several synagogues and Israeli outposts in Europe have faced arson attacks that a group seen as tied to Iran have claimed responsibility for staging. No one has been injured in those attacks.
Argentina has also faced homegrown antisemitism scandals. In September, a video of a group of Buenos Aires high school students on a graduation trip chanting “Today we burn Jews” went viral, earning condemnation from Jewish community advocates and even Milei himself. The group, from the private school Escuela Humanos, was traveling with Escuela ORT, a Jewish school.
Following the attacks in La Plata, comments on a local news outlet’s Instagram post about the attack on the local Chabad Sunday were filled with antisemitic tropes, including blood libel and false flag theories. Antisemitism watchdogs say false flag allegations, holding that an operation is staged to look like an attack in order to garner sympathy for the victim or attribute blame to another party, have flourished in recent years against Jews and Israel.
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