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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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Happy 166th birthday, Abraham Cahan! Fifth graders write about the Forward founder’s legacy
As America celebrates its 250th birthday on July 4, the Forward celebrates the 166th birthday of its founder and first editor, Abraham Cahan on July 7. The socialist newspaperman founded the Yiddish-language newspaper known then as Forverts in 1897 to help Jewish immigrants navigate life in their new home.
To celebrate, we’re highlighting letters to the editor from fifth graders at Guggenheim Elementary, a public school in Port Washington, New York, who argue that Cahan’s life and encounters with antisemitism in Europe helped shape his life and legacy in America and continue to inspire Americans today to stand up against injustice and hate.
More than 20 students wrote the letters as a class assignment during Jewish American Heritage Month. The Forward selected excerpts from a handful of the submissions.
“A lot of what kids are absorbing today is coming from social media and things that are not necessarily accurate,” said Amanda Bromberg, the parent who created the lesson plan. “So we just wanted to make sure that they were from a young age exposed to positive contributions of Jewish Americans.”
Cahan’s life and legacy
Born in 1860 in Tsarist Russia, Cahan came of age in a society where Jews faced severe restrictions on where they could live, travel, study and work.
“Just imagine, being told you have to live in just one place and you can’t move anywhere else just because you’re Jewish. That would be awful, right?” fifth-grader Maggie wrote. “Well, that’s what Abe went through.”
“Cahan was treated very poorly in his old home,” classmate Eli added. “He didn’t feel safe there.”
Conditions further deteriorated after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Jews were falsely blamed for his murder, triggering a wave of pogroms. Cahan, who had become involved in Russia’s Revolutionary movement as a teenager, came under suspicion. Police raided his home searching for radical literature, prompting Cahan, then 21, to immigrate to the United States.
“His experience in Europe toward Jews was terrible, so when he came to America, that influenced him to change the ways Jews are treated,” fifth-grader Lyla wrote.
Life in New York brought a new set of challenges. Several students noted how Cahan had no ego about learning English, studying the language as an adult among schoolchildren on the Lower East Side.
“He wanted to learn English so bad, so he learned in a classroom with people that were around 14 while he was 22,” classmate Sydney wrote. “This must have been awkward and embarrassing, but he took the only chance he had to learn.”
Cahan then used his knowledge to help other newcomers in the New World. He worked in a cigar rolling factory by day and gave English-language lectures on socialism to fellow immigrants by night.
“Even when he was still learning English, he decided that some people needed more help than he did,” Mayim wrote. “So he took on tutoring them while working day and studying night and somehow finding time to assist people in need of help.”
“He wanted for everyone to get education: old and young, big and small, rich or poor,” Sydney added.
Ask Abraham
In 1897, Cahan founded the Yiddish Forverts. Beyond reporting the news of the day, the paper became a practical how-to guide for life in America. One of its most beloved features was the “Bundle of Letters,” or “Bintel Brief” in Yiddish, an advice column where readers asked for guidance on everything from romance and money troubles to labor disputes.
“Soon he added a section called a ‘bundle of words.’ That made it so readers could ask questions,” student Kaeli wrote. “It worked so well: He helped so many people!”
“He showed people to do things the American way, so that when they came they wouldn’t feel confused or lost,” Mayim wrote.
Cahan’s advice could be blunt. One man wrote that he wanted to marry a woman, but he could not stop fixating on a single flaw: a dimple in her chin.
“The tragedy is not that the girl has a dimple in her chin but that some people have a screw loose in their heads!” he replied.
Other letters reflected harsher realities of immigrant life. One unemployed man wrote that he had “no strength to continue” and pleaded, “Please comrades help me do not let me die this way.”
Cahan answered with characteristic practicality and empathy, directing him to a social services agency, assuring readers “they will not let him starve.”
The Forverts also fought for workers’ rights, boosting labor unions, raising money for striking workers and advocating for workplace safety regulations.
“Abe helped by speaking up for the rights of immigrants, workers and the poor,” Mallory wrote.
That mix of traditional journalism, practical guidance and social advocacy helped the newspaper build a devoted readership. By the 1920s, the Forverts had become enormously influential, with a daily circulation approaching 300,000 — surpassing that of The New York Times at the time.
Cahan remained the paper’s editor until his death in 1951, at age 91. But the fifth graders saw Cahan’s legacy as one that still endures.
“The Forward is still helping people around the world today,” fifth grader Juliana wrote, “all because of what Abe Cahan taught us.”
Student responses were lightly edited for spelling and grammar.
The post Happy 166th birthday, Abraham Cahan! Fifth graders write about the Forward founder’s legacy appeared first on The Forward.
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How a 198-year-old New Orleans synagogue became one of America’s fastest-growing Jewish communities
NEW ORLEANS — By the time a trumpet player rose from the pews, candy was already flying through the sanctuary.
Children scrambled across the bimah beneath Touro Synagogue’s green-and-gold dome while the crowd clapped to the music and a 13-year-old boy in orange Nike sneakers stood beside his mom before two open Torah scrolls — one for the bar mitzvah boy, the other for his mother, who was 47, a recent convert celebrating her adult bat mitzvah.
By the end of services, congregants carrying guitars, flutes, and tambourines had transformed the sanctuary into something resembling a Mardi Gras second line.
In most American synagogues, this would have felt unusual. At Touro, located along the famous parade route, it felt nearly routine.
Across the country, congregations are shrinking, aging and consolidating. Denominational loyalty is weakening. Younger Jews are less likely to join synagogues at all. But here in New Orleans, Jewish communal life has experienced an unlikely revival.
New Orleans still carries Katrina in its census numbers. The city still has roughly 25% fewer residents than before the storm. Its Black population, while still the majority, has dropped most significantly. Jewish New Orleans, overwhelmingly white, tells a different story. Community leaders say the Jewish population has rebounded to — and perhaps surpassed — pre-Katrina levels.
The revival was driven partly by generational turnover. After the 2005 hurricane, many older New Orleans Jews decided not to return, choosing instead to spend retirement near children and family in cities like Houston and Atlanta. In their place came a younger generation of post-Katrina newcomers — volunteers, nonprofit workers, Tulane University transplants and young families drawn by the chance to help rebuild the city.
But the resurgence cannot be explained by demographics alone. Across the city, Jews describe a deeply interconnected communal ecosystem shaped by catastrophe, collaboration and a distinctly New Orleans instinct for improvisation.
The city’s Jewish institutions increasingly learned to share resources, blur lines between denominations and accommodate the realities of modern Jewish families. Interfaith couples found a warmer welcome. Synagogues that once occupied separate lanes began collaborating more closely. “Denominational boundaries here are very porous,” said Ilana Horwitz, a Tulane University Jewish Studies professor who is writing a book about how the Jewish community survived and rebuilt after Katrina.
At the center of that revival sits Touro Synagogue, a nearly 200-year-old Reform congregation that is defying institutional decline.
In 2019, Touro hired as its spiritual leader Rabbi Katie Bauman, a New Orleans native. She arrived just months before the pandemic would force synagogues across America to reinvent themselves.
At the time, the shul counted roughly 570 families. Today, it is approaching 750. Its religious school has grown from 131 students to 243 in six years. In 2019, the synagogue hosted eight b’nei mitzvah. Nearly 30 b’nai mitzvahs are already scheduled for the 2027-28 school year — so many that synagogue leaders have begun quietly confronting an unfamiliar problem: Are we growing too much?
“We’re not gonna turn people away,” said Kevin Wilkins, the synagogue’s president and the first convert ever to hold the role. “We’re not gonna have a waitlist.”
Two decades after Katrina nearly drowned New Orleans, Touro has become a kind of laboratory for what Jewish communal life can look like after disaster reshapes it.
The people who came after the storm
A Detroit native, Joshua Lichtman came to New Orleans in 2007 after spending time at a Jewish farming and environmental program in Connecticut. Like many people drawn south after Katrina, he was looking for purpose and a chance to help rebuild.
“It was volunteering and adventure,” Lichtman, 51, recalled one Saturday morning after services at Touro
Entire neighborhoods remained scarred by floodwaters. Lichtman spent those early months gutting homes, working in community gardens and helping with legal aid projects. Then he met Davida Finger, who ran the Katrina Clinic at Loyola University, which provided free legal assistance to residents displaced by the hurricane. They got married.
He came to help rebuild the city. Somewhere along the way, the city rebuilt him, too.
Lichtman stayed, helped launch Avodah New Orleans, a Jewish service corps program, and now works in financial planning. Today, he and his wife are raising two children in the city.
His story reflects a broader demographic shift that transformed Jewish New Orleans after Katrina. The Jewish community dropped from about 10,000 people to around 6,500 following the floods. “The Jewish population has been replenished,” said Horwitz, who moved to New Orleans from the Bay Area in 2021, making her both a scholar of the city’s Jewish revival and a participant in it. “But it’s a different configuration of people than there was before.”
Before Katrina, much of Jewish New Orleans was defined by continuity. Many families traced their roots in the city back four or five generations to German-Jewish immigrants who arrived in the 19th century. They attended the same schools, joined the same congregations and often stayed for life.
Reform Judaism, long the dominant expression of Jewish life here, reflected a distinctly Southern tradition — highly assimilated, deeply rooted in local civic affairs and often more connected to New Orleans than to the broader currents of American Judaism.
The community was tightly knit and deeply rooted. Institutional loyalty ran deep. Many worked in law, medicine or family-owned businesses built over generations. As the city’s economy shifted and younger residents left for bigger cities, the Jewish population had already begun slowly shrinking.
The people who arrived after Katrina brought different backgrounds and different reasons for coming. They were volunteers, nonprofit workers, academics, and entrepreneurs drawn not by inheritance but by opportunity — and by the chance to help rebuild.
The transformation was not entirely accidental. In the years after Katrina, the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans launched an incentive program for Jewish newcomers, offering a stipend for moving expenses, discounted tuition at the Jewish day school, and a year of free membership at a synagogue. According to the federation, hundreds of people participated in the program, which ran through 2012, and one in four have stayed.
One of the engines of that growth has been Tulane University, where 25% to 30% of undergraduate students are Jewish, according to local estimates, placing it higher than the University of Pennsylvania (17%), Columbia (16%) and Harvard (10%).
Today, some Jewish families view Tulane as an appealing alternative to more politically polarized campuses. Nicholas Lemann, the New Orleans-born author of Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries, said the university benefits from both New Orleans’ cultural appeal and a campus climate many parents perceive as less contentious than schools on the coasts.
“Kids won’t be exposed to anti-Zionism as at bigger Ivies,” said Lemann, a longtime professor and former dean at Columbia Journalism School. “That’s meaningful to many Jewish parents.”
Tulane functions as a pipeline bringing Jewish students, faculty and young professionals into the city, some of whom ultimately decide to stay.
Yet population alone does not explain the revival. What emerged after Katrina was a different way of organizing Jewish life in New Orleans. The city’s six synagogues and two Chabads routinely promote one another’s programs. Rabbis collaborate across denominational lines. Congregants often belong to more than one synagogue at a time.
Alan Smason, editor of the Crescent City Jewish News — which he founded after the hurricane — said much of that cooperation grew directly out of the storm. “We’ve got a Reform temple that actually lives next door to and partners with an Orthodox synagogue,” he said. “A lot of those traditions came about because of Katrina.”
Smason, a New Orleans native, has spent decades chronicling the city’s Jewish life. The cooperation he sees today would have been harder to imagine before the storm. “Out of the darkness,” he said, “came light.”
A different city
The community that emerged after Katrina was different. The result was a community that became more fluid and, in some ways, more open to experimentation than the one that preceded it. New Orleans has always been a city comfortable with reinvention.
On a humid afternoon, tour guide Roni Bossin led me through the French Quarter, pointing out traces of Jewish history hidden in plain sight.
There was the former factory where Joseph Haspel is credited with inventing the seersucker suit. There was Sam Zemurray — the Jewish immigrant known as “Sam the Banana Man” — who built a fruit empire from New Orleans. There was the Holocaust memorial overlooking the Mississippi River and the legacy of Judah Touro, the philanthropist whose name still adorns a hospital as well as the synagogue.
Jewish history here is less a chapter than a thread — stitched through the city’s commerce, politics, philanthropy and folklore. “Jews were woven into the story of New Orleans from the beginning,” said Bossin, a transplant from Israel.
Isaac Monsanto, the first Jewish settler in New Orleans for whom historical records exist, arrived in 1757. By 1828, local Jews had established a congregation that would eventually become Touro Synagogue.
But if Jewish New Orleans has deep roots, it has also changed dramatically. Lemann said the city he visits today feels markedly different from the one where he grew up. When he was young, many Jewish families had lived in New Orleans for generations. His father was born in the city. His grandfather was born in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. Local identity was often inherited.
Today, he said, the community includes far more newcomers. “The various elements of Jewish New Orleans have come together more,” Lemann said.
That history helps explain why Touro feels distinctly New Orleans. Unlike many American synagogues built on sprawling suburban campuses, the city presses right up against the sanctuary walls. The building sits along St. Charles Avenue with no parking lot separating it from the sidewalk. Streetcars rumble past. Mardi Gras floats pass the front doors. During carnival season, members gather there to watch parades together. The congregation builds viewing stands for children with disabilities. Families tailgate on synagogue grounds.
For Rabbi Lily Kowalski, an associate rabbi who joined the shul last year, one of her first Mardi Gras experiences at Touro came during Shabbat services. The congregation was praying when the parade began rolling past outside.
“There was something both ironic and beautiful,” she recalled.
Eventually, the clergy made a practical decision: They would skip a few songs from the end of the service. “The parade has started,” Kowalski remembered thinking. “We need to go outside and see the parade.”
On JazzFest weekend, Touro hosts a special musical Shabbat service that has become one of the congregation’s signature events for the past three decades. “We do love to party,” said Rabbi Bauman. “But it’s a symbol of how proud we are to be here.”
For generations, New Orleans has thrived by blending traditions rather than policing boundaries. Jazz emerged from that cultural mixing. So did much of the city’s cuisine, language and civic culture. Many congregants see Touro as a Jewish expression of the same instinct — a congregation more interested in bringing people together than sorting them into categories.
The open tent
The weekly pamphlet handed out to worshippers carries a simple message across the top: Touro synagogue welcomes all.
For Abby Gaunt, those words proved more than a slogan.
Raised Catholic in New York City, Gaunt had long felt drawn to Judaism. She married a Jewish man, sent her two children to Jewish schools and immersed herself in Jewish communal life. But she never felt the desire to convert.
Then came the 2018 Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh. As she read about the victims, one detail stopped her. Two of the people murdered that day — brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal — had Fragile X syndrome, the same genetic condition as her son, Mack.
The story felt personal. When schools struggled to accommodate Mack’s learning differences, Gaunt said New Orleans’ Jewish community had stepped forward to embrace him. The local Jewish day school accepted him when others would not. Congregants welcomed him. Families rallied around him.
“It just felt like they took you as you are,” Gaunt said of Touro. “There’s no asterisk.”
The experience led her to begin studying for conversion. This spring, she celebrated the culmination of that journey standing beside Mack. Mother and son shared the bimah. They recited prayers together. Each read from a Torah scroll — his for a bar mitzvah, hers for an adult bat mitzvah.
For Touro, it was a fitting image. The congregation’s growth has been fueled by newcomers and young families, and by an expansive understanding of who belongs. Its membership includes interfaith families, former Orthodox Jews, lifelong Reform Jews, converts and a growing number of congregants who arrived from a local Conservative synagogue.
Rather than asking newcomers to conform to a single model of Jewish life, synagogue leaders have increasingly adapted the institution around the people walking through the doors. “We’re not just saying we’re an open tent,” said Beth Shapiro Lavin, Touro’s executive vice president, and the congregation’s next president beginning in 2027. “We mean it.”
In a city rebuilt by people who arrived from somewhere else, belonging has become one of Touro’s defining values.
When Lavin joined Touro’s board in 2022, the congregation was already growing. She now finds herself thinking less about survival than succession. Touro will celebrate its 200th anniversary in 2028, during her presidency. Around the same time, her own daughter will celebrate her bat mitzvah in the sanctuary where Lavin herself grew up.
“It’s a really exciting time,” said Lavin, who moved back home after Katrina.
The questions facing Touro are different from those confronting many American synagogues. The congregation worships beneath a dome completed in 1909. Memorial plaques line the sanctuary walls, some honoring congregants who died in the 1800s. The names on the walls grow older every year. The children running beneath them do not.
Growth has created a new set of questions for synagogue leaders. “What is the right size?” Lavin asked.
Part of the answer, she believes, lies in making participation as easy as possible for young families. More than a decade ago, Touro eliminated mandatory membership dues, replacing them with a voluntary giving model.
The experiment worked. This year, Lavin said, roughly two-thirds of donors increased their contributions. Some quadrupled them. “The model only works when we all give what we can,” she said.
The payoff is visible throughout the building. Parents linger after services. Teenagers tutor younger students in Hebrew school. Congregants volunteer to coach b’nai mitzvah speeches. Children who once sat on the sanctuary floor receiving blessings from clergy eventually return as youth group leaders and religious school teachers.
Beyond denominations
A few years ago, a group of families from Shir Chadash, New Orleans’ Conservative synagogue, found themselves searching for a new spiritual home. Some were drawn by Rabbi Bauman’s charismatic leadership. Others were looking for a congregation in the city rather than the suburbs. Many already had friends at Touro.
What they weren’t looking for was a typical Reform service.
“We really appreciate Touro’s big tent approach,” said Ben Horwitz (no relation to Ilana), who helped found a lay-led group that now meets twice a month — once in a community member’s home and once in Touro’s library. “We should be able to serve this community writ large.”
Known as the Chavurat Or’Leans, it offers a more traditional style prayer experience while remaining fully part of the larger congregation. On some weekends, 30 to 50 people attend when it meets at Touro. The synagogue provides space, children’s programming and logistical support.
“It has been a win-win situation,” Horwitz said.
The arrangement reflects a broader philosophy taking hold at Touro. Rather than asking congregants to fit neatly into denominational categories, the synagogue increasingly tries to meet people where they are.
When Horwitz and his wife, Ellie Streiffer, began planning their son’s bar mitzvah, they wanted a traditional, egalitarian service. Touro not only accommodated the request, but provided rabbinic support to help their son prepare.
Other families have made similar choices. “We’re trying to push boundaries,” Bauman said. “People are looking for community more than a particular movement.”
The same flexibility that led Bauman to accommodate different religious traditions has also helped it navigate other forms of difference. Touro’s political diversity is unusual in an era when many religious communities have become more ideologically homogeneous. New Orleans itself remains a blue enclave in a deeply red state.
Bauman said she has watched congregants repeatedly choose community over agreement. “Especially in the last two years, which have been so challenging and so politically divisive,” she said, “people want to be together more than they want to be right.”
A problem most synagogues would envy
Part of the congregation’s growth coincided with Bauman’s arrival. She became senior rabbi in 2019, just months before the pandemic upended American religious life.
While congregations around the country migrated online, Bauman took much of Touro outdoors. Youth groups met camp-style in parks and courtyards. Families gathered under oak trees. Children who might have disappeared into screens continued seeing one another face-to-face.
“We just never did the Zoom thing,” for youth and teen education programs, Bauman said. Looking back, she believes that decision accelerated the congregation’s growth by strengthening relationships at a moment when many institutions were struggling to maintain them.
The growth has been so pronounced that last year Touro hired a third full-time rabbi for the first time in its history. Rabbi Kowalski arrived in the summer of 2025 from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to serve as associate rabbi and education director.
Sitting in her office one afternoon beneath a hand-painted sign reading “Welcome Rabbi Kowalski,” she described the job as both “inspiring and daunting.”
On Sunday mornings and Wednesday afternoons, the synagogue hums with activity. Religious school classes fill nearly every available room. Parents attend adult education programs while their children study Hebrew. Choir rehearsals meet at the same time.
The building was designed to hold memory. It is now straining to hold momentum. “We’re using every nook of the building,” Kowalski said.
For generations, the challenge facing American synagogues was how to attract young families. At Touro, the question has become something else entirely: How do you keep growing without losing the intimacy that made people want to join in the first place?
The second tablets
For Bauman, the synagogue’s revival begins much earlier than Touro’s recent growth.
At the joint mother-son b’nai mitzvah, Bauman’s sermon focused on one of Judaism’s oldest stories of rupture and repair. In that week’s Torah portion, Moses descends Mount Sinai carrying the Ten Commandments, only to smash the stone tablets after discovering the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf below. Eventually, God commands him to climb the mountain again and carve a second set.
The first tablets, Bauman told the congregation, belonged to a world that was orderly and unbroken. The second set came afterward. “The first tablets are simple and clear,” she said. “But life is messier than that.”
In post-Katrina New Orleans, the metaphor hardly felt abstract. Rebuilding was never supposed to mean restoration.
Horwitz, the Tulane professor, sees echoes of biblical stories throughout New Orleans’ experience after the hurricane. Her forthcoming book traces the community’s journey through themes of flood, exile, wilderness and return.
Horwitz, whose own family arrived in the United States as Soviet Jewish refugees in the late 1980s, argues that what endured after Katrina was the community itself — not as a collection of buildings, but as a web of relationships that helped people find one another again. “It’s fundamental,” Horwitz said. “Jewish communities are there for you in a moment of crisis.”
The Jewish New Orleans that emerged after Katrina is not identical to the one that existed before the storm. Many of the people are different. So are the ways they have learned to build community.
But perhaps that is what Bauman meant when she spoke about the second tablets. The first version was lost. The second pair, which carried the Jewish people through the wilderness, was the one that endured.
The post How a 198-year-old New Orleans synagogue became one of America’s fastest-growing Jewish communities appeared first on The Forward.
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How to stop worrying about the Democratic Socialists of America
The question of why three candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America bested more mainstream Democrats in congressional primaries in New York and Colorado last month is being answered by pundits, not pollsters.
There have been no exhaustive exit polls to explain why, in Colorado, Melat Kiros unseated incumbent Democrat Diana DeGette and New York voters chose Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez — not to mention DSA victories in a slew of state races.
But there is an exhausting panic.
American Jews are worried that the often virulent anti-Israel positions these candidates take show that opposition to Israel is now a litmus test for political viability in the Democratic Party, that describing Israel as “genocidal” and “apartheid” is the ante for any blue candidate.
Given the nature of some of these races, it certainly looks that way. In Colorado, the policy differences between DeGette and Kiros were negligible. DeGette has one of the most progressive voting records in Congress. But she took AIPAC money and paid for it.
And her opponent Kiros wasn’t just critical of Israel’s government’s policies. She, like many other DSA candidates, blamed Israel for the Oct. 7 attacks. Avila Chevalier attended the Oct. 8, 2023, DSA-promoted rally that celebrated the attacks.
Meanwhile, the panic among mainstream Democrats is that primary voters are putting forth candidates who will get clobbered in general elections. In a May New York Times/Siena poll, 47% of Democrats said they want the party to move center, while 28% said the party should move to the left.
That means while DSA candidates may win in what some have called “cobalt blue,” or deeply Democratic districts, with a high number of young, white, educated voters, in crucial swing districts a DSA candidate will take the party down with them.
Israel, demonized
However the general election turns out, primary results show that among not all but a significant group of Democratic voters, two brands have become toxic: Israel and the Democratic Party.
Type “Gaza” into TikTok, scroll for five minutes, and it’s easy to understand at least one reason why. The carnage Israel has wrought in Gaza plays on a visceral loop on social media. Israel as the aggressive colonialist oppressor is a given in much of academia. And Israel’s own actions at the hands of its most right-wing government in history — well, not helpful.
DSA’s official platform on Israel — the first foreign policy position on its site — calls for an end to economic and military aid to Israel and “national sovereignty for the Palestinian people.”
Its best-known members, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have helped popularize the notion that funds spent by the U.S. to arm Israel could instead have been used to fund domestic programs, such as health care for all. On this point the DSA reflects the position of a plurality of American voters: Only 24% support maintaining current levels of aid, while 40% oppose it, according to an Economist/YouGov poll.
But other DSA candidates don’t criticize Israel; they demonize it, and they hesitate to condemn terror even when it attacks Americans. Kiros unapologetically appeared at a rally condemning Israel and refused to call the 2025 firebomb attack on peaceful Jewish marchers in Boulder an antisemitic act.
We are long past the post-Oct. 7 period when anti-Israel activists were challenged to condemn Hamas. For these candidates, pro-Palestinian means pro-Hamas.
“Militant anti-Zionism became a wedge that the group’s more radical activists used to drive away critics of authoritarianism on the left,” wrote Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic.
The other tarnished brand is the Democratic Party itself. At a time when President Donald Trump is sending ICE agents and troops into American cities, jacking tariffs, making billions of dollars in office and conducting full-scale wars without congressional approval, sitting Democrats look feckless. Even the most moderate Democrats — much less non-MAGA Republicans and independents — can see how Democrats have failed to build housing or address affordability. One way to punish the mainstream is to vote for the extremes.
The DSA’s Zionist founder
All of this is especially ironic considering the history of the DSA, whose founder, Michael Harrington, was both a Zionist and a pragmatic if radical political thinker.
Harrington founded the DSA in 1982 to create a movement for social change free from authoritarian pro-Stalinist groups. He was, in the words of the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., America’s “only responsible radical.”
And yes, the founder of the DSA identified as a Zionist.
In a 1975 interview with a Jewish journalist, Harrington, who died in 1989, said, “I support Israel as an internationalist. Israel is a democratic country whose people are passionately defending its self-determination.”
After the United Nations voted to condemn Zionism as racism, Harrington wrote, “If one preposterously charges that Zionism is racist, then so are all nationalisms which joined to condemn it at the U.N. And that is to drain the concept of racism of any serious meaning.”
Clearly, Harrington has left the building. After Sanders’ presidential campaign inspired a membership surge a decade ago, the current national DSA swelled with more radical membership, including from struggling far-left and communist groups.
“Having dismantled the guardrails that Harrington built to exclude communists,” wrote Chait, “the group established new guardrails to exclude anybody opposed to Israel’s destruction.”
DSA’s first iteration included Jewish activists who worked toward coexistence and a two-state solution, wrote Jo-Ann Mort, a DSA cofounder. Now, she wrote, “its socialism is more concerned with ‘anti-imperialism’ than the democratic socialism that inspired the founders.”
Extremism feeds extremism
The Jewish fears that a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty will lead to pogroms in Manhattan have not been realized. But after Ocasio-Cortez, another DSA candidate, drew the wrath of the group for initially supporting defensive weapons transfers to Israel, she has now come out against them.
One can imagine a DSA that struggle-sessions Sanders, the man most responsible for its revival, subjecting him to a humiliating show trial for being insufficiently anti-Israel. Far-fetched as that seems, it’s unclear how DSA will address the clear schism between its liberal Zionists and its increasingly hardcore anti-Israel wing.
Meanwhile, the ascendant DSA is a boon to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose own brand of extremism thrives on creating an Israel-against-the-world mentality. On a visit to Israel last month, I found Israelis and the Israeli media obsessed with Mamdani. One woman told me she wouldn’t dare set foot in New York City as long as the putative leader of the DSA was still mayor. Extremism feeds extremism.
And if the DSA specter leads American Jews to think the Republican Party is a safe haven, think again.
Young Republican voters are shifting against Israel in the same way young Democrats are. And just this week, Tucker Carlson, a confidant of the vice president, the right’s most popular media personality and a vicious Israel critic, said, “I officially don’t care about Hamas.”
An Israel-less ‘Promise to America’
Democratic leaders have struggled with ways to recapture the young voters lured away by the DSA.
The group Promise to America, founded earlier this month, asks representatives and candidates to sign on to six “pledges” that seem focus-group-tested to appeal to 18- to 26-year-olds: free speech, “government that works,” fiscal discipline, fair capitalism, just national security and “national renewal.”
“Democrats that hold these values that do well in the party,” Felix Frisch, the group’s 20-year-old founding director, told me in a phone interview. Frisch, who took a leave of absence from the University of Chicago to run the organization, pointed out that two of the pledge’s signers — Rep. Tom Suozzi in New York and Rep. Adam Gray in California’s Central Valley — were the only two Democrats to flip a district that Trump won in the 2024 cycle.
How did he explain the DSA’s success?
“They’re a lot more organized,” he said. “The reason I got so fired up to do this was because we need some organization around our core principles.”
The website, I pointed out, doesn’t mention Israel, which for many young voters is a defining issue. Frisch suggested I speak to the pledge’s signers, which I took to mean: Where Democrats can win, it may be in spite of their support for Israel, not because of it.
Where the DSA lost
Aside from online pledges, what hope is there for moderate Democrats who don’t put Hamas or Israel-bashing first?
I didn’t have to look far for an answer. In my Los Angeles City Council district, CD 11, a charismatic and accomplished DSA candidate, Faizah Malik, challenged incumbent Traci Park. In the early June election, Malik got trounced, 64% to 35%, in a district that teems with the same progressive, white voters who backed winning DSA candidates elsewhere.
The difference? Since taking office in 2022, Park has greatly reduced homeless encampments and, according to the Los Angeles Times, “became the face” of recovery after the Palisades fires. She pushed to bring 2028 Olympic events, Hollywood film shoots like Baywatch, several large affordable housing projects and a much-needed marine mammal recovery station to the area. Nothing sexy — well, except the Baywatch reboot — but noticeable.
Malik didn’t mention Israel or Gaza in her campaign materials, and it’s unclear whether doing so would have helped or hurt her. She did have the backing of Engage Action, the Muslim American lobbying group that considers Israel an occupier of Palestinian lands since 1948.
Park won because her record gave the district’s 284,000 residents plenty of reasons to vote for her, embodying what The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein called “a liberalism that builds.”
The same, by the way, could be said about Brad Lander, a liberal Zionist who beat Rep. Dan Goldman by running to his left on Israel but parted ways with DSA after Oct. 7. While the Israel issue helped tank his opponent, it was Lander’s record of delivering for his constituents as a City Council member and then city comptroller — including pushing through affordable housing initiatives and paid sick leave — that accounted for much of his popularity.
There is as much to learn in where the DSA candidates lost as where they won. When Democrats stand up articulate, social-media-savvy candidates who can galvanize voters around effective solutions to the problems they care about — and then make those solutions happen — they win.
The post How to stop worrying about the Democratic Socialists of America appeared first on The Forward.
