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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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The post The hora, the hora! How Jewish wedding music got that way appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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She helped rescue the Torahs from their burning synagogue. A year later, Pasadena’s mishkan is thriving.
PASADENA — A year after fire reduced the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center to ash, Cantor Ruth Berman Harris stands in the rain on the empty lot where it once stood. Beneath her boots, the ground is slick; above her, the San Gabriel Mountains fade into fog — the inverse of the dry, wind-driven night when flames tore through this block.
As smoke filled the building, and ash began falling in the parking lot one year ago, Berman searched for her husband through the darkness, calling out to make sure the Torahs were being carried out. Joined by the synagogue’s president and custodian, they worked quickly, loading the 13 scrolls into two cars as the fire, a beast consuming Los Angeles, roared closer. By night’s end, the building was destroyed, the flames claiming it all.
Over the past year, the synagogue has been doing the work of recovery in plain sight and in borrowed space. It has not seen a collapse in membership; as many families have joined since the fire as in the year before it. The calendar has remained full. In 2025, the shul celebrated 25 bar and bat mitzvahs — one nearly every other week — even as services moved to a church chapel across town. And as the community continues to grieve what was lost, leaders are already imagining a rebuilt synagogue designed to better reflect how the congregation lives and gathers now.
For Berman, 55, that rhythm felt familiar.
She grew up in Buenos Aires and lived through two acts of mass violence that targeted the Jewish community there — the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center, which killed 85 people, including friends of hers. In those moments, she was the one making sandwiches for rescue workers, helping others absorb shock.
The Eaton Fire that razed Pasadena was different.
“What surprised me,” she said, “was how loving and caring and strong and vibrant a community can be in the midst of tragedy. There was no doubt that we were going to be OK.”
Over the past year, she has watched people return to Jewish life who had once drifted away from it — not out of fear, but out of need.
“It surprised me how relevant a Jewish community can be in times of crisis,” she said. “I knew it from books. I had never experienced it.”
Some losses, she knows, cannot be replaced. On her office walls hung artwork painted by her mother. On her desk, a constant presence was a prayer book she had studied from since cantorial school, filled with notes, highlights, and the handwriting of her teachers.
“I can buy another siddur,” she said. “But I can’t replicate their writing.”
She speaks plainly about the trauma. Nightmares. Compartmentalization. What she calls a lockbox she has learned to keep sealed so she can continue doing her job. Only recently, she said, has she begun to feel steady enough to open it — helped by the arrival of a permanent rabbi, and by the knowledge that the community is no longer just surviving.
A temporary sanctuary
Shabbat arrives inside a side chapel at the First United Methodist Church, where the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center has been gathering since the fire.
During Sukkot, the church opened its courtyard for a sukkah. Shul congregants found themselves explaining the holiday — its temporary walls, its invitation to dwell with uncertainty — to church members who stopped to ask questions. What might once have been an accommodation became, instead, a point of exchange: Jewish ritual practiced openly, and neighbors eager to understand it.
The chapel feels like a sanctuary in its own right. There are no crosses on the walls. The space is rectangular and airy, with wood arches vaulting toward the ceiling like the hull of an inverted ship. Gold-rimmed stained-glass windows run the length of the room on both sides. One of them, inexplicably, bears a purple menorah.
Only small details reveal the building’s Christian life: a New Century Hymnal tucked into the back of each pew, a Bible containing both the Old and New Testaments, a small tithing envelope resting beside it.
About 100 people fill the pews on Saturday morning. At the front of the chapel, Berman and Rabbi Joshua Ratner lead services alongside a bat mitzvah girl, while a guitarist and mandolin player keep the room humming.
The portable ark behind them has an unlikely backstory. It was crafted decades ago by a Los Angeles pediatrician (and father of Forward reporter Louis Keene) who had built it for his own shul which, at the time, was temporarily meeting at a Baptist church.
In recent years, the ark sat unused in the doctor’s garage. After the January 2025 wildfires, the family donated it to Pasadena — carried in and out of the church chapel each week, suddenly suited to a congregation without a permanent home.
For a year now, the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center has lived this way. “It’s a mishkan,” Ratner said. “A traveling tabernacle.”
As the service continues, Ratner delivers the sermon. He began the job in August, months after the fire, at a moment when the synagogue no longer had a building to offer him — only a congregation in flux.
Ratner, 50, spent his early career as a lawyer before pivoting to the pulpit. He applied for the Pasadena job before the fire, drawn by what he had heard about the community. When the building was destroyed, he thought the search would be called off.
“I assumed that would be the end of it,” he said.
Instead, synagogue leaders doubled down. They wanted a rabbi not after recovery, but in the middle of it.
When Ratner visited Pasadena after the fire, he was struck by what he found. Hundreds of people filled Friday night and Shabbat morning services — not out of obligation, but solidarity.
The community, Ratner sensed, was grieving, but not frozen. “There’s no doubt or existential fear,” he said. “While we’re still mourning what we lost, we’re already morphing into the future.”
Since his arrival, the momentum has held. “Every week almost feels new,” Ratner said. “Like a simcha.”
A family without a home
For some of the shul families, the losses were not only communal.
In neighboring Altadena, Heather Sandoval Feng and her husband, Oscar, stand on the front steps of what used to be their home. The fire left behind a pile of rubble and a concrete staircase leading nowhere.
Three weeks after the fire destroyed their house, their daughter Hannah became a bat mitzvah.
Like the congregation itself, the family was displaced. They moved in with Heather’s parents nearby. Life became provisional — borrowed bedrooms, borrowed routines, borrowed time. And yet Hannah’s bat mitzvah went ahead as planned, held in the church chapel where the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center now gathers each Shabbat.
“There was something strangely comforting about that,” Heather said. “The synagogue had lost its home. We had lost ours. We were going through it together.”
Oscar described the year as one long exercise in adjustment — learning how to live without the assumption of permanence. “We’ve had to be a little nomadic,” he said, looking over as their son, Noah, 10, played in the dirt where his bedroom once stood.
The bat mitzvah ceremony became a life lesson — not just about Torah, but about continuity without certainty. “It turned into a teachable moment,” Oscar said.
What sustained them, both parents said, was the congregation’s steadiness. Tutors kept showing up. Shabbat kept coming. People checked in — not performatively, but persistently. The synagogue did not treat their family as a separate tragedy. It folded them into its own.
“There was never a question of whether things would still happen,” Heather said. “The answer was always: Of course they will.”
Holding steady and looking ahead
In the months after the fire, synagogue leaders worried about what displacement might do to membership. Instead of a drop-off, the numbers told a different story. Since the fire, the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center has welcomed 49 new families — roughly the same number it added the year before. A handful of families have moved away, some because of the fire itself, but overall membership has remained remarkably consistent, hovering around 430 families.
An added bonus: Some relatives who flew in from out of town for bar and bat mitzvahs found themselves so moved by the congregation that they later joined it themselves.
What surprised Melissa Levy, the synagogue’s executive director, was not just the endurance, but the momentum behind it. Families kept calling. Local Jews who were not members wanted to now join the congregation.
“It’s amazing,” she said, “but it’s also a testament to how strong this community already was.”
That strength has been built over more than a century.
Founded in 1921 as Temple B’nai Israel, the congregation moved onto its current property in 1941, a campus of Mission Revival–style buildings arranged in a U-shape — a midcentury synagogue just beyond the urban sprawl of Los Angeles that had expanded over decades to include classrooms, playgrounds, and a social hall. At one point, it even had a swimming pool. During World War II, the synagogue hosted USO-style dances for servicemen stationed nearby.
Members have included NASA engineers, Caltech professors, and those who built their dreams among the stars. “I used to joke that growing up in Pasadena, our shul had doctors, lawyers and rocket scientists,” said Rabbi Alex Weisz, whose family has been members for generations.
As Jewish demographics shifted, the congregation absorbed others — merging with Shomrei Emunah and later Shaarei Torah — eventually becoming the singular Conservative synagogue serving the western San Gabriel Valley.
That history now informs the future, and what rises in its place will not be a replica of what was lost. The new building will be more intentional: fewer walls, more flexibility, and spaces designed around how congregants actually spend time together now.
Plans call for open gathering areas where parents can linger when their children are in classes — places to work, talk, or simply stay — rather than treating the synagogue as a drop-off point. There will be more glass and fewer corridors, designed to draw the San Gabriel Mountains into view. Outdoor areas are meant not just for overflow, but for prayer and meditation — quiet spaces that look outward, toward the hills that rise behind Pasadena.
“We were fitting a circle into a square,” Levy said. The new building is being imagined as a place where different generations can overlap rather than pass through on separate schedules.
The goal is not grandeur, but usability. A synagogue that can hold worship and study, celebration and stillness — and that reflects a community that has learned, over the past year, how to gather without relying on walls at all.
The scale of what lies ahead is substantial. Rebuilding is expected to cost tens of millions of dollars. Insurance will cover roughly half of that amount — money that was paid out quickly and is already in an account collecting interest — but the rest will need to be raised by the congregation itself. The cost is immense, especially for middle-class Pasadena, but leaders describe it as something to be faced, not feared.
They hope to open the new building by the High Holidays of 2028 — not as a return to what was lost, but as an expression of what the community has become. For now, those plans exist alongside grief. But Jewish life continues — weekly, seasonally, insistently.
Asked what it feels like to stand at the site of the fire a year later, Cantor Berman pauses.
“I don’t really have words for it,” she said.
Rain dots the cracked pavement beneath her feet, darkening the outline of the lot where the synagogue once stood.
After the fire — after the Torahs had been rescued and the building reduced to rubble — she returned to the site and took one small thing that was still standing. Not a ritual object. Not a book. It was the sign from her parking space — Reserved for the Cantor — something ordinary that had marked the rhythm of returning to the same place, day after day.
There were other losses, she said. Some she remembers clearly. Others she does not.
“The things I don’t remember having,” she said, “will haunt me forever.”
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I grew up in Venezuela. Will Maduro’s ouster bring my Jewish community the security we need?
For Venezuelan Jews — inside the country and across the diaspora — the United States’ shocking removal of President Nicolás Maduro from power marks an inflection point in a long and painful chapter marked by vulnerability, fear and exile.
Venezuela was once home to one of Latin America’s most vibrant Jewish communities. I know this because I was raised there. A generation of Jews, including my own grandparents, found refuge from the Holocaust in Venezuela, at a time when many other countries closed their doors.
Venezuela’s relationship with the Jewish people was not only about providing a refuge for Jews following the Holocaust. It was also diplomatic. In November 1947, Venezuela voted in favor of United Nations resolution 181, which supported the creation of independent Jewish and Arab states in Palestine, leading to the creation of the State of Israel. For the Venezuelan Jewish community, this vote has long stood as a point of pride, and an affirmation of belonging.
For decades, Venezuela and Israel had a natural, mutually beneficial diplomatic relationship. For example, in 1961 the two signed a technical agricultural agreement as part of Venezuela’s push to modernize rural development.
High level visits between government officials between the two countries were common. I vividly remember shaking then-foreign minister Shimon Peres’s hand when he visited the Jewish Day School in Caracas in 1995 as part of a state visit. As a high school student, it was exciting to see firsthand how an Israeli statesman carved time out of his agenda to come see my distant country’s Jewish community. And, looking back, that visit underscored how normal and secure Jewish life once felt in Venezuela, in stark contrast to the fear and isolation that would follow years later.
All this began to change after Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999.
Under Chávez, relations with Israel steadily deteriorated, shaped by Chávez’s ideological commitment to global left-wing movements that, as a legacy of the Cold War, aligned themselves with Arab states and framed opposition to Israel as a core political stance. Diplomatic relations between the two nations were formally severed during the 2009 Israel-Hamas confrontation known as Operation Cast Lead.
That wasn’t just a major foreign policy shift; it also marked the onset of a political climate in which Venezuelan Jews felt increasingly exposed. That vulnerability reached a terrifying peak that same year, when armed assailants desecrated the Tiferet Israel synagogue in Caracas, ransacking sacred spaces; destroying religious objects; and scrawling threats and antisemitic slogans on the walls.
It was not an isolated act of vandalism. It was a message of hostility and intimidation, received as such by a community that already felt abandoned by the state.
In 2010, Chavez amped up his anti-Israel rhetoric in reaction to that year’s confrontation between the IDF and the Gaza Freedom Flotilla by declaring “maldito sea el Estado de Israel” — “cursed be the State of Israel” — on national television. When Maduro rose to power in 2013, following Chavez’ death, he did not reverse this trajectory. He accelerated it.
Under his rule, anti-Zionism repeatedly crossed into open antisemitism — both in language and in effect. Not long ago, while talking about Israel’s war in Gaza, Maduro claimed he had “real Jewish blood … unlike Israeli Jews” whom he described as “foreigners from Poland,” reviving classic tropes about authenticity, belonging and conspiracy that have long been used to delegitimize Jews and Israel.
After the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, Maduro’s regime openly embraced the “genocide” narrative against Israel. His government even compared Israel to Nazi Germany. The consequences of these statements touched Jews across Venezuela. Synagogues and Jewish institutions were often vandalized and defaced with hateful slogans. The targets were not Israeli diplomats — there were none — but Venezuelan Jews.
That distinction matters. Being Jewish has become more difficult in advanced democracies like the U.S. since the Oct. 7 attack. So imagine what it felt like in a country governed by an authoritarian regime that is openly anti-Zionist and routinely fails to distinguish between Jews and Israelis. The family and friends I still have in Venezuela navigate daily life with quiet caution, finding ways to remain Jewish while staying unnoticed, weighing every decision about when to gather, when to speak, and when silence feels safer.
But most of the Jewish community opted to be part of a wave of more than 8 million Venezuelan migrants — about 20% of the country’s population — who decided to seek a new life in other countries.
Will that wave of departures ebb now that Maduro has been forcibly removed from power by the U.S.? The honest answer is: we don’t know. Two decades of institutionalized hostility have left deep scars. And the early signs about the next era are discouraging. In her first televised addresses, new interim president Delcy Rodriguez — Maduro’s former second-in-command — blamed “Zionist” influences for the U.S. military operation. Old reflexes die hard.
And yet, Venezuelans, including Venezuelan Jews, are cautiously optimistic. Not celebratory. Not naïve. But hopeful that this may finally be the beginning of the end of a cruel dictatorship that devastated an entire nation — economically, socially and morally. If free and fair elections follow — still a significant “if”—Venezuela may have a chance to return to democracy, and with it, to its historical commitment to pluralism and coexistence.
That could also bring an opportunity to rethink Venezuela’s relationship with Israel — not only morally, but also strategically.
Israel could be a natural ally in Venezuela’s reconstruction. It is a global leader in water management, agriculture, health technology, cybersecurity, and energy innovation — precisely the areas in which Venezuela faces acute shortages after years of collapse.The building blocks are already there: Even amid today’s diplomatic wreckage, trade still exists at a small scale — evidence that the bridge can be rebuilt when politics allows it.
In fact, opposition leader (and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner) María Corina Machado has already stated that a democratic Venezuela would reopen its embassy in Israel — in Jerusalem, in fact. That is a clear signal that, in the eyes of at least some influential leaders, antisemitism has no place in the country’s future.
For Venezuelan Jews, this moment is not about geopolitics. It is about whether the country they once called home can again be a place where being Jewish is not a liability.
Hope, for now, is cautious. But after so many years of fear, even cautious hope is something new.
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Jewish New Yorkers say concerns about Mamdani are real, new poll shows. Most other voters say they’re overblown.
A majority of New York City voters believe that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s harsh criticism of Israel is a legitimate policy disagreement and that elected officials should challenge U.S. support for Israel, even if it upsets some voters, a new poll found. Views differ sharply among Jewish New Yorkers.
The Honan Strategy Group survey of 703 voters, conducted from December 4 to 12, found that 55% of non-Jewish respondents say Jewish concerns about feeling threatened by Mamdani’s statements on Israel are an overreaction fueled by politics. By contrast, among the smaller sample of 131 Jewish respondents, 53% say they have reason to feel that way, given Mamdani’s statements and associations.
The poll, first shared with the Forward, was conducted via text-to-web and analyzed separately for Jewish and non-Jewish respondents. The overall sample has a reported margin of error of plus or minus 3.7%, while the Jewish subsample has a margin of error of plus or minus 8.6%.
New York City is home to the largest Jewish community outside of Israel. Jewish voters make up an estimated 15% of the electorate. NYPD data shows that antisemitic acts made up 57% of all reported hate crimes citywide in 2025.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist whose strident criticism of Israel deepened rifts within New York City’s Jewish community during the election, spent the months after his surprising Democratic primary victory in direct outreach to clergy and prominent Jews to ease concerns about his record.
But his support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and his refusal to explicitly condemn the “globalize the intifada” slogan used at some pro-Palestinian protests, perceived by many as a call for violence against Jews, fueled backlash. The city’s Jewish voters were divided in the competitive mayoral election. Concern intensified after Mamdani’s mixed response to a demonstration outside Park East Synagogue that included anti-Israel and antisemitic slogans, in which he questioned the use of a sacred place for an event promoting migration to Israel.
Mamdani reignited deep suspicions about what kind of mayor he intends to be within hours of taking office, revoking two executive orders by former Mayor Eric Adams that many Jews felt supported them and Israel. Mamdani insisted that the move was not intentional or targeted at the Jewish community. He said he wanted to begin his administration with a “clean slate,” clearing away measures signed by Adams so he could enact his own agenda that he said would protect Jewish New Yorkers. But that explanation was met by skepticism. The New York Times reported that the revocations were planned well in advance and rolled out in a way that aimed to minimize backlash.
In a rare joint statement, a coalition of mainstream Jewish organizations said they were deeply concerned by Mamdani’s actions. It called for “clear and sustained leadership that demonstrates a serious commitment to confronting antisemitism” and one that ensures that the mayor’s office is not used to advance BDS.
The Honan Strategy Group found that 53% of non-Jewish voters and 47% of Jewish voters think Mamdani’s criticism of Israel reflects legitimate policy disagreements over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, 40% of Jewish voters believe it crosses a line and fuels antisemitism. Similarly, 51% of Jews view Mamdani’s rise as a troubling sign that antisemitism is being normalized, while 61% of non-Jewish voters see it as evidence of healthy debate and diversity. Fifty-four percent of Jewish voters say Mamdani’s positions deepen division and tension.
Pollster Bradley Honan described the positions on Mamdani and Israel as a “temperature gap” between communities in the Mamdani era. “This issue is turning into a defining political fault line in New York City,” he said. “Jewish voters are significantly more likely to say it’s making public antisemitism more acceptable and driving division.”
Mamdani has repeatedly defended his stance on Israel and the administration’s appointments of individuals who share his views. “We must distinguish between antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli government,” Mamdani said during a recent press conference, responding to an ADL report that scrutinized many of his transition team members. He also accepted the resignation of his newly-appointed director of appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, after her past antisemitic posts resurfaced.
Mamdani kept open the recently created mayor’s office to combat antisemitism that pursued the measure he revoked adopting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic. Mamdani also promised to divest from city investments in Israel and pledged to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he comes to New York in compliance with an International Criminal Court warrant.
The poll shows that Jews and non-Jews hold sharply different views on Mamdani’s foreign policy focus. Large majorities of Jewish voters — 71% and 69% respectively — say that speaking out against Israel’s military actions is likely to be viewed as antisemitic and that arresting Netanyahu would harm New York’s global standing. By contrast, 51% of non-Jewish voters say criticism of Israel reflects legitimate policy debate, 53% say it is appropriate for leaders to challenge U.S. support for Israel, and 40% say Mamdani has a moral obligation to uphold international human rights standards by ordering Netanyahu’s arrest.
In his inauguration speech, Mamdani reassured Jewish New Yorkers, “some who view this administration with distrust or disdain,” that he will protect them.
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