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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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A moving but problematic concert for Holocaust Remembrance Day
Barletta, a coastal city in Puglia, Italy, is an unexpected place for a massive archive of concentration camp music. Yet one of its citizens, Francesco Lotoro, has spent decades amassing one of the world’s largest collections of this kind.
On Jan. 27, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Maestro Lotoro led a concert of this music in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Lotoro’s collection includes not only music from the Nazi camps and ghettoes, but also the camps of the USSR and Hirohito’s Japan, and other sites of mass internment.
Amid a linguistically, tonally and thematically diverse array of works performed, six were Yiddish songs, one of which had its American premiere.
On entering the Kennedy Center, I immediately encountered a rather menacing photo of the current president, along with those of his vice president and their wives. I rushed to the ticket window, got my ticket, passed through security, and approached the Eisenhower Theater.
President Eisenhower’s bust gazes down upon visitors as they enter. It occurred to me that this was a fitting mekabl ponim (welcome) for a concert of music written by martyrs and survivors of the Holocaust, given then-General Eisenhower’s prescient campaign to film, document and expose the Nazi camps.
I was torn away from this musing by the ten-minute warning chime — a descending arpeggiated major chord (do-sol-mi-do) — and made my way inside.
Five minutes before the advertised start-time (7:30 PM), the house was still sparsely seated. Given the political fallout from the president’s takeover of the Kennedy Center — I wondered if this concert would be a casualty of the ongoing audience boycott. (Since the concert, the president has announced a two-year closure of the Kennedy Center for renovations.)
At showtime, the house lights were still up, and audience members were still filing in. But when the lights finally dimmed around 7:45, the house was mostly full.
The curtain rose on Lotoro seated at the piano. He performed a wordless lullaby by Polish composer Adam Kopyciński, and without waiting for applause, rose and exited stage right. The co-organizer of the concert, Counter Extremism Project CEO and current UN Ambassador Mark Wallace, then walked on to give introductory remarks.
The Counter Extremism Project (CEP)’s webpage described the concert as “an external rental […] not produced by the Kennedy Center.” Technically true, but CEP is headed by Trump’s UN ambassador, and some of the remarks between pieces, as well as some of the speakers, indicated a partisan agenda. More on that later.
The first song of the night was the tragic Yiddish love song “Friling” (Spring), composed in the Vilna Ghetto by Avrom Brudno with lyrics by Shmerke Kaczerginski. Written after the death of Kaczerginski’s wife Barbara, “Friling” has been recorded by many artists, including the great Chava Alberstein. Lotoro’s rich but never overpowering orchestration, together with baritone Angelo De Leonardis’s expressive interpretation, were a potent combination.
Like Lotoro’s collection, the concert also featured songs written in other camp systems, in other languages, by other peoples. Lotoro has coined the term “concentrationary music” to encompass music composed in any site of mass internment. Friling was followed by several Polish works, a stunning Roma song, and one English-language serenade by an American POW.
The next Yiddish selection was Iber Fremde Vegn (Across Foreign Roads) composed around 1942 by Leibu Levin, who was imprisoned in a Soviet camp for 15 years. After an archival recording of Levin singing the song, with Yiddish lyrics projected above the stage, singer Paolo Candido rendered the lyrics in a crystal-clear Yiddish, accompanied by an appropriately restrained orchestration for a more contemplative song of exile.
Candido’s robust voice, together with expert use of gesture, masterfully conveyed the song’s themes and imagery, though no translations were provided for any of the evening’s songs. It was clear to me, at any rate, that the singers understood what they were singing, despite not being Yiddish speakers. (I later confirmed this with Lotoro.)
Then came Dort In Dem Lager (There In the Camp). I knew two nearly identical versions of this song from 1946 and 1948, but Lotoro worked with a quite different version, recalled half a century later, in 1996.
In my opinion, the 1946 version is the most melodically and lyrically complete, while the one recalled in 1996 collapsed the three verses of the “original” into one. Its rhyme scheme works, but the story it tells has internal inconsistencies. After the concert, I expressed my opinion to Lotoro. “I didn’t use that version at all,” he said of my favored 1946 version. “I completely disregarded it.”
But, as he explained, “I’m not a philologist. I’m a musicologist.” As he put it, the version he chose to arrange and perform “doesn’t cancel the original, philological version.”
Admittedly, the arrangement sung that night by soprano Anna Maria Pansini, accompanied by Lotoro on the piano, is musically the most interesting and complex, because the survivor who recalled it mixed in two lines of a second, unknown song. Lotoro’s spare, intimate arrangement— just piano and voice— counterbalanced the particularly heart-wrenching text and melody. “Sometimes, you have to feel whether a song needs piano or full orchestral accompaniment,” Lotoro told me later in the green room. “It’s important never to exaggerate.”
The song’s most powerful line is its last: Hot shoyn rakhmones, gotenyu. (Have mercy already, dear God.) Presumably, few attendees understood the Yiddish, but the anguish expressed in the song was still palpable.
Next came a US premiere: a song from Birkenau entitled In Oyshvitser Flamen (In The Flames of Auschwitz), also sung by Pansini.
The accompaniment was instrumentally richer, but still appropriately understated. One particularly devastating verse translates to:
On holy Motzei Shabbos at night / When we bless the Creator of fire’s lights / Pieces of flesh / Fall from me / Oh, when I / when I recall / How Jews burned / In the flames of Auschwitz.
Closing out the evening was a nearly-lost Yiddish song sung by actor and director Jack Garfein, Tsi Iz Mayn Harts Keyn Harts Fun Keyn Mentshn? (Is My Heart the Heart of a Human?) Archival footage of Garfein singing the song for Lotoro — the only source for the song, because the boy who composed it was killed shortly after Garfein heard him sing it— was shown prior to De Leonardis’ performance. The first two lines translate to:
Is my heart the heart of a human being? / Do I have the right to live, or not?
Garfein’s voice is faint, but the melody is clearly in a minor key, and deeply melancholy. In Lotoro’s interpretation, however, the melody was in a major key, and his orchestration made the song into an expression of hope rather than a lament of its anonymous composer’s dehumanization by the Nazis. The music was beautiful and uplifting, but emotionally dissonant with the words. There are uplifting Yiddish songs from the WWII period, but Tsi Iz Mayn Harts isn’t among them.
For an encore, all three singers performed a rousing rendition of Der Shtrasdenhofer Hymn, a Yiddish march song from the Strasdenhof forced labor camp. The rather ironic lyrics, however, bitterly complain about the camp, where “one must march and sing.” The singers clapped to the beat, and the audience clapped along too, apparently unaware of how inappropriate it was to do so.
When I asked Lotoro, a Jew by choice, how he works with Yiddish lyrics, he said he’d never had much difficulty with Yiddish due to its similarity to German, but that he’d also had significant help with the Yiddish from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s music curator Bret Werb, and from others. He also shared that the three singers, with whom he’s worked for many years, did philological research of their own, spending significant time working with the Yiddish, Polish, and Roma texts before rehearsals. “They don’t get the score two days before, or something like that,” he told me. “I send it to them months in advance.”
Many of the introductory remarks between songs focused on voices being recovered, unsilenced, given new life. But neither lyrics nor song titles were made comprehensible to the largely anglophone American audience. What good is being heard without being understood?
Music may be the universal language, but its vocabulary is small.
Many of the evening’s remarks by non-survivor presenters focused on extremism in the abstract without any mention of far-right nationalism, or of other genocides. An Iranian dissident spoke movingly of the Iranian government’s brutal repression of her people and its sponsorship of anti-Jewish terrorism. A Cuban-American former Republican congresswoman spoke of fleeing a communist dictatorship as a child. Yet not one word was said about China’s ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs of East Turkestan. At an event organized by Trump’s UN Ambassador, this omission could not be an oversight.
It almost seemed as if there were two programs occupying the same stage that evening: one about human dignity in the face of unimaginable brutalization and mass-murder, and another about the particular extremist political ideologies that this administration has made its enemies.
For his part, Maestro Lotoro — a rather self-effacing man — didn’t say a word during the concert. He allowed the music to speak for itself, though much was lost in non-translation.
Lotoro is far from the only collector or interpreter of Holocaust music, and he has been working with “concentrationary” music longer than I have been alive. Besides, much of this precious heritage is widely accessible online. So, if I believe an interpretation misses the mark here or there, someone else can put forth another one more “faithful” to the original material.
“The real goal,” Lotoro told me, “is for all this music to go into circulation around the world.” Thanks to Lotoro’s prolific and artistically top-notch recordings— including a 24-volume album— that seems likely.
The post A moving but problematic concert for Holocaust Remembrance Day appeared first on The Forward.
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HIAS shuts Vienna office that aided generations of refugees after Trump pulls funding
(JTA) — Since the end of World War II, Vienna has functioned as an Ellis Island for Jewish refugees from Europe and the Middle East, a place where survivors, dissidents and religious minorities arrived with little more than documents and hope, and departed toward new lives.
That role has come to an end: HIAS is shutting down its Vienna operations and laying off dozens of employees who worked there, following the Trump administration’s decision to halt the U.S. refugee program and terminate the federal grant that funded the Resettlement Support Center in Austria, which HIAS had operated for more than 25 years.
HIAS said the move has left more than 14,000 Iranian religious minorities — including hundreds of Jews and thousands of Baha’i, Christians, Zoroastrians and Sabean Mandaeans — stranded in Iran after having already been vetted and approved for resettlement in the United States. Several hundred Eritrean and other asylum seekers in Israel have also lost their pathway to resettlement following the closure.
“This decision leaves thousands of families in danger, with no pathway to safety,” Beth Oppenheim, HIAS’ chief executive officer, said in a statement.
The Trump administration has said the suspension of the refugee program is necessary because local communities lack the capacity to absorb additional arrivals, citing concerns about assimilation. In an executive order, the White House said refugee admissions should resume only if they align with U.S. national interests and do not compromise public safety, national security or taxpayer resources.
Oppenheim said HIAS continues to advocate for the restoration of refugee admissions and the reopening of lawful pathways for people fleeing religious persecution, and continues to provide services to thousands of refugees and asylum seekers around the world.
“For generations, the United States has stood as a beacon for those fleeing religious oppression, and we will fight to preserve that legacy,” Oppenheim said.
The closure of the Vienna office marks the end of an institution whose history closely mirrors the modern history of Jewish displacement.
Known then as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS began operating in Vienna in the aftermath of World War II, when Austria became a central transit country for Jewish survivors leaving displaced persons camps across Europe. During that period, the organization helped resettle roughly 150,000 Holocaust survivors to communities in the United States, Canada, Australia, South America and later Israel.
Vienna again emerged as a refugee crossroads after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, when thousands of Jews fled Soviet-backed repression and passed through Austria on their way to new homes overseas. In later decades, the city became a key waypoint for Jews leaving the Soviet Union, particularly from the late 1970s through the late 1980s.
During that period, Vienna served as the first stop in what became known as the “Vienna-Rome pipeline,” the migration route used by more than 400,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union as they resettled in the United States and other countries. For U.S.-bound refugees, the Vienna office coordinated case preparation, documentation and interviews with American authorities.
Singer-songwriter Regina Spektor and Google co-founder Sergey Brin are among the many prominent Jews who passed through Austria on their journey from the Soviet Union to the United States.
“If your family arrived in the postwar period, or through the Soviet Jewry movement, HIAS’ office in Vienna may have been their gateway to the United States,” Oppenheim said.
In its modern form, HIAS’ operations in Austria became a U.S.-funded Resettlement Support Center in 2000, operating under contract with the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. One of nine such centers worldwide, the Vienna-based operation focused primarily on Iranian religious minorities and vulnerable asylum seekers in Israel.
Between 2001 and 2025, HIAS said it resettled more than 33,000 people from Iranian religious minority communities to the United States through the Austria center and its suboffices. The work was conducted under the Lautenberg Amendment, a U.S. law first enacted in 1990 to facilitate the resettlement of Jews from the former Soviet Union and later expanded to include persecuted religious minorities from Iran.
Since Trump paused refugee resettlement on his first day in office, no one has entered the United States through the Lautenberg program.
The post HIAS shuts Vienna office that aided generations of refugees after Trump pulls funding appeared first on The Forward.
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Candace Owens and the QAnonization of Anti-Israel Rhetoric
Right-wing political commentator Candace Owens speaks during an event held by national conservative political movement ‘Turning Point’, in Detroit, Michigan, US, June 14, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Rebecca Cook
Candace Owens’ recent viral post conflating Israel, ISIS, the Star of David, paganism, and the abuse of children is not merely wrong or provocative. It is something more revealing — and more dangerous.
Owens claims that “despite Israel’s best efforts to destroy the ancient world in the Middle East — relics still remain and reveal the truth.” She asserts that “the Kiddush cup is the symbol of Judaism,” that the Star of David has “ALWAYS been associated with Canaanite cults and Baal worship,” and that Aleister Crowley and his “occult friends who abuse children utilize this symbol in their ceremonial magic.” She pairs these claims with an image she falsely identifies as a “2nd-century temple in Baalbek, Lebanon,” adds that ISIS “has a knack for destroying ancient Canaanite temples,” and ends with the insinuation: “Who do you think controls ISIS?”
This is not argument. It is an indictment assembled from fragments — misidentified images, decontextualized symbols, and recycled antisemitic tropes — designed to contaminate. The method is deliberate: connect enough charged elements and let the audience complete the accusation without ever having to state it openly.
Owens urges her audience to “wake up” to what she presents as a hidden truth: that Jewish symbols are not Jewish at all; that Judaism is secretly pagan or occult; that Jewish ritual objects are implicated in sinister practices; that Jews or Israel are responsible for the destruction of ancient history; and that shadowy forces tied to Jewish symbolism abuse children. The implications are unmistakable.
What is most striking is the absence of evidence. No archaeology. No primary sources. No theology. No peer-reviewed history. Just insinuation stacked on insinuation, sealed with the conspiratorial refrain to “wake up.”
This is not political criticism. It is ideological collapse.
In modern terms, this is the QAnonization of antisemitism.
There is a reason that Owens’ post contains no factual evidence: it doesn’t exist.
In its place appears the oldest components of conspiratorial antisemitism: secret knowledge reserved for the initiated; symbols stripped of historical context and recast as sinister codes; insinuations of ritual corruption; and the projection of vast, hidden power onto Jews.
This is not “thinking outside the box.” It is backwards thinking. Owens’ move is not modern. It is medieval.
The most revealing element of Owens’ post is not its historical illiteracy, but its moral destination: the insinuation of child abuse.
This is not incidental. It is the endpoint of the narrative. From medieval blood libels to modern conspiracy movements, antisemitism reliably converges on the same accusation. Jews are charged with violating what society holds most sacred because the charge is designed not to persuade, but to obliterate moral resistance.
Once Jews are framed as abusers of children, no counterargument matters. No evidence is sufficient. Debate becomes impossible.
Owens did not stumble into this trope. She arrived precisely where antisemitic narratives always arrive when they run unchecked.
Ancient Israel outlawed child sacrifice when it was widespread across the Near East. It denied divinity to kings, subordinated rulers to law, and insisted that power itself was morally accountable. Human beings were no longer fuel for the gods; every individual life was sacred. To accuse Jews of Baal worship is not confusion. It is inversion — the projection of pagan cruelty onto the civilization that dismantled it.
Furthermore, Owens’ claims about Jewish symbols collapse under even minimal scrutiny.
The Star of David is not an occult emblem. It appears as a Jewish symbol in late antiquity, with archaeological evidence from the synagogue at Capernaum dating to the second century CE, and it recurs throughout late antique and medieval Jewish life. Its adoption reflects Jewish continuity, not pagan borrowing.
The Kiddush cup is a sanctification vessel used to bless wine — on Shabbat and holidays — but it was never the “symbol of Judaism” as Owens’ claims. Its purpose is to mark sacred time, family gatherings, and restraint. There is no historical, textual, or anthropological evidence tying it to anything resembling Owens’ claims or insinuations.
The image Owens presents as a “2nd-century Canaanite temple” at Baalbek is fictitious. Baalbek’s monumental remains — the Temples of Jupiter, Bacchus, and Venus — are Roman imperial constructions from the first to third centuries CE. Baalbek was a Roman city, not a Canaanite cult center.
Owens’ follow-on post fares no better. She points to the historical appearance of a six-pointed star — often called the “Seal of Solomon” — in Moroccan iconography and on some flags and coins in the 19th and early 20th centuries as supposed proof that the symbol is not Jewish.
This is a classic example of conspiracy reasoning masquerading as historical insight.
Yes, the hexagram appeared in Moroccan art and occasionally on flags prior to 1915, when Sultan Yusef formally replaced it with a five-pointed star to distinguish the national flag and emphasize Islamic symbolism. But the hexagram’s presence there proves precisely nothing about Judaism. Geometric symbols migrate across cultures. Their use in Islamic or Christian contexts does not erase their meaning within Jewish civilization — just as the crescent’s appearance outside Islam does not make it non-Islamic.
Owens takes a very limited historical fact, strips it of context, and weaponizes it to imply occult continuity and Jewish corruption.That is not history. It is symbol scavenging in service of a predetermined conclusion.
Archaeology, linguistics, epigraphy, and historical memory all point in the same direction: Jewish civilization emerged in the land of Israel, maintained continuity there for millennia, preserved its language, law, and rituals through exile, and launched a moral revolution that shaped the ethical foundations of the Western and Islamic worlds alike.
When that evidence proves stubborn, opponents do not refine their claims. They abandon the field. Israel is no longer wrong — it is demonic. Jews are no longer mistaken — they are occult.
Antisemitism does not begin with expulsions, pogroms or gas chambers. It begins when lies are repackaged as insight, when conspiracy theories replace scholarship, and when hatred is disguised as revelation.
Candace Owens’ post is not mere controversy. Its popularity — over 1.4 million views as of this writing — is the symptom and proof of how far this intellectual rot has already spread.
And history is unforgiving to societies that mistake intellectual decay for courage — until the consequences arrive in forms no one can plausibly claim to have misunderstood.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.