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The legacy of Isaac Babel, Russia’s Jewish Hemingway, is dissected in new Chicago play
CHICAGO (JTA) — All writers strive for a good story. How far they will go to find it depends on their ambition, their wherewithal and their sanity.
Isaac Babel, a Russian-Jewish writer who came from a relatively stable, privileged background in Odessa in the late 1800s, would go to war among Cossacks who murdered Jews, make friends with Soviet agents and then cuckold one of them. The reason why Babel constantly put himself in harm’s way may have been simple, according to another writer.
“I think he wanted something to write about,” said Rajiv Joseph, whose play at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, “Describe the Night,” centers on Babel. “He was a young man who had wanted to be a writer but had nothing to write about.”
“Describe the Night” blends three stories from different eras that engage with questions of who controls the truth. The first portrays Babel, the Soviet secret police head Nikolai Yezhov and Yezhov’s wife, Yevgenia, with whom Babel begins an affair. The second follows a young Soviet agent rising through the ranks just before the Berlin Wall falls, and the third dives into a conspiracy behind a 2010 plane crash near Smolensk, Russia.
Babel himself may not rise to the ranks of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky in terms of immediate name recognition in the United States, but the journalist, author and playwright is remembered as one of Russia’s preeminent 20th-century writers. His modernist and bloody tales in “Red Cavalry,” a collection of short stories inspired by his time on the frontlines of the Polish-Soviet War of 1919, vaulted him to the status of a Russian Hemingway. The pithy American war correspondent once expressed his admiration, perhaps even jealousy, of Babel’s writing, saying “Babel’s style is even more concise than mine.”
Like Hemingway, Babel went to war in search of a good story. Combat itself was not the only threat to him: as a Jew, he bore witness to the Cossack cavalry’s antisemitic atrocities. Babel tamped down his Jewish identity while covering the war, though he would feel a sense of isolation in both societies or as his grandson would later describe him “a Jew among the Cossacks, and a Cossack among the Jews.” In his own diary, Babel wrote “Talking to the Jews, I feel kin to them, they think I’m Russian and my soul is laid bare.”
Joseph, who is not Jewish and authored the Pulitzer-nominated play “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” had read “Red Cavalry” years ago but was inspired to write “Describe the Night” after discovering the poetic journal Babel had kept during the war. The title of the play comes directly from the diary, which repeats the word several times in Babel’s own prompts to describe things ranging from kitchens to marketplaces to women to horses. Sometimes Babel successfully answers his own prompts by forcing himself to write, and other times he doesn’t, Joseph said.
Lead actor James Vincent Meredith is also not Jewish and admitted he had concerns about “the choice of casting a black man in the role of a Jewish man living in the world of Russia, the Ukraine and Paris.” He partly found his way to the character by watching the 2015 documentary “Finding Babel,” which follows Babel’s grandson across Russia and Ukraine as he searches for his famous ancestor’s remains.
“I can read Babel’s work (I have), I can travel to Israel (I have, decades ago), I can take Hebrew as an elective in college (I did, not very well), I can read Chaim Potok (I have). But these are at their best, however well intentioned, tourist pursuits for one who is not Jewish,” he said. “I will never come close to knowing the true soul of a Jewish person. Thankfully, Rajiv has created this character that by his design, anyone can inhabit.”
Yasen Peyankov and James Vincent Meredith in a scene from the play about Isaac Babel. (Michael Brosilow)
He added that the play isn’t meant to be historically accurate. “The character of Isaac, as well as others in the play, is meant to be an entry point into a world where the scalpel crafting the ‘truth’ is rarely placed in the hands of those who are adversely affected by it. As a black male and father of a black male in the U.S., I’m certainly cognizant of that world.”
Joseph feels that he and other artists share the instinct Babel had to leave his comfort zone. He wanted to be a writer, but growing up in suburban Cleveland gave him little inspiration. After college, he joined the Peace Corps and spent three years in West Africa.
“That was a real life-changing event for me that opened my world and opened my mind,” Joseph said. “Not nearly as traumatic as traveling with the cavalry through Poland in 1920, but the same impulse to break out of your norms.”
Yet Joseph believes Babel’s desires went beyond pushing boundaries and into a deep, pathological need to associate with danger.
“The thing I find really interesting about Babel, both through his writing and through his personal life, is this inexorable draw towards danger and filth,” Joseph said, adding that Babel would hang out in taverns with Soviet soldiers, members of the secret police and executioners like Yezhov. “He was already treading on such thin ice. So he had a recklessness, you could call it a death wish if you want.”
Meredith was also stunned by the writer’s intense flirtations with danger.
“Why get that close to the flame? That to me is one of the things that really appealed to me about this guy,” Meredith said. “I tend to play it safe, as safe as an actor can play it, but I see this guy who had these kinds of desires, he had this quest to make this amazing art as far as his stories and I just I’m just so attracted to that.”
Joseph said he saw some parallels between Babel’s story and the exodus of some of his artistic peers in Russia, who have fled to Europe. In his time, Babel was seen as subversive by nature, existing as a Jewish man in early Soviet Russia. His relished writing about prostitutes and mobsters, transforming underworld characters into urban legends. His 1935 political play “Maria” was canceled during rehearsals and by 1939, Soviet police arrested him and confiscated his writing. Throughout the 1940s, his works disappeared from circulation. Though some believed Babel had spent time throughout that decade in a prison camp, the government had executed him in 1940.
“In the 1930s and ‘40s, I think if you are a Jewish creative writer, you’re automatically subversive,” Joseph said. He noted one pivotal scene where Nikolai Yezhov labels Babel as such because his writing portrays Russia as gloomy rather than inspiring.
“If you’re telling the truth, you are subversive,” Joseph added. “So I think that pretty much any creative writer worth his or her weight would be considered subversive at that moment.”
“Describe the Night” runs until April 9 at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago.
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Israel’s Ethiopian asylum seekers fight deportation efforts
(JTA) — This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
TEL AVIV – When Endalkew Yemani Tesma fled Ethiopia in 2005, he did not know what awaited him on the way to Israel, nor that once he arrived, he would spend nearly two decades without permanent status.
He passed through Sudan, then Libya, then Sudan again, and reached Israel in 2008 by way of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. There, Yemani Tesma said, he was held captive and abused by Bedouin traffickers, treatment that refugee rights organizations in Israel have documented extensively among those who crossed the same route.
After claiming asylum due to civil unrest in his home country, Yemani Tesma was given a 2(a)5 visa, the renewable permit that lets asylum seekers stay while their claims are pending. He settled in Jerusalem, married a fellow Ethiopian asylum seeker and started a family. His children have grown up in Israeli schools and, by every measure that matters to them, as Israelis. Although they are not Jewish, their first language is Hebrew, and they learned Israeli history alongside Jewish traditions and holidays.
Yemani Tesma works at a hummus restaurant in Jerusalem, the kind of job he described as paying the bills and supporting his six children, but nothing beyond that. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ate there once, Yemani Tesma recounted, “And he didn’t even try to deport me.”
But Yemani Tesma and his family are still in danger. A High Court decision last December allowed their group protection to be revoked. After years of feeling that they had found an oasis of safety, the family now faces the possibility of deportation. To prevent that from happening, a Jewish organization originally founded to help Jews fleeing Eastern European pogroms is taking the Israeli government to court.
Few given refugee status
Israel’s asylum approval rate is roughly 0.1%, or about five people a year, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
It’s so low that Sigal Rozen, the public policy coordinator at the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, an Israeli NGO she helped found in 1998, can name those whose applications have been approved by first and last name. In the European Union, by comparison, 39% of asylum decisions in 2025 were approvals.
She claimed that the bureaucracy, and the deferral of decisions on some files for years, is deliberate. “They want to make life as difficult as possible, so that people give up and leave,” she asserted.
According to Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority, 1,334 asylum applications from Ethiopian citizens are currently pending. And Ethiopians are just a sliver of the asylum-seeking population. Roughly 30,000 asylum seekers live in Israel, a country of just over 10 million people. Most of those asylum seekers are Eritrean and Sudanese who crossed the Sinai before Israel completed its border fence with Egypt in 2013.
Eritreans still hold group protection that shields them from deportation, because Israel accepts that conditions in the country are too dangerous for them to return, and most Sudanese have obtained status through the courts, as Israel does not have official diplomatic relations with Khartoum and cannot deport them there. Ethiopians have no such shield.
Israel had granted group protection to Ethiopian nationals in light of the civil war between the Ethiopian armed forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front back in November of 2021. In January 2024, Israel’s then-Interior Minister Moshe Arbel withdrew it, citing advice that the security situation in Ethiopia was sufficiently stable for nationals to return. Arbel declined to be interviewed for this story.
In December 2025, the High Court upheld that decision, rejecting an appeal by the Hotline, HIAS Israel and the Aid Organization for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Israel. The three-judge panel gave them four months to prepare to leave.
The Population and Immigration Authority has since begun pulling individual case files — some untouched for years — to the front of the queue in order to reject them, telling asylum seekers to leave the country or risk deportation.
Ethiopians whose claims have been rejected can now be detained if they come to a government office for any reason, Shahar Mandil, policy advocate at the Forum of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Organizations in Israel, said. Some do not know they have been rejected, as notices were sent to email addresses they no longer use or to lawyers who no longer represent them.
“A decision on an asylum application is delivered through the contact channels provided by the asylum seeker,” the Population and Immigration Authority told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It is the asylum seeker’s responsibility to keep those contact details updated,” adding that every asylum seeker whose application is rejected is asked to leave the country.
The Population and Immigration Authority’s position is that conditions in Ethiopia no longer justify group protection, and that asylum seekers can return to the country’s capital of Addis Ababa even if other areas remain unstable.
Under international refugee law, a state can reject a claim of asylum by arguing that the applicant could move somewhere safer within their own country (known as an internal flight alternative). But that argument carries a requirement, said Nimrod Avigal, director of legal aid at HIAS Israel: “You need to show that this specific person can actually move within the country.”
Yordanos, who declined to give her last name for fear of deportation, said it was not possible to go elsewhere in Ethiopia. “We can’t move from one place to another,” she explained. “Any police checkpoint can stop you, depending on who you are and where you’re from.” When it comes to Addis Ababa, she continued, “Even if it were safe, it’s not possible. You can’t bring 130 million people to live in Addis,” referring to the entire population of Ethiopia.
Yordanos reached Israel in 2022 after securing a visa for a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, another route that many Ethiopian asylum seekers described taking to JTA. She and her husband hold advanced degrees and once ran a business that took them to more than 11 countries. In Israel, she cleans houses.
Israel historically backed refugee rights
On Sept. 22, the district court in Tel Aviv will hear a case seeking a new way to prevent the deportation of non-Jewish Ethiopians currently in Israel. A petition from HIAS Israel argues that the government has never created a mechanism for asylum seekers to claim protection from deportation under the principle of non-refoulement, which bars states from returning people to countries where they face danger.
HIAS was founded in 1881 as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, to help Jews fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire. It spent the following century assisting Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms and the Holocaust. As Jewish migration slowed in the 2000s, the organization expanded its work to non-Jewish refugees, including Syrians, Afghans, Ukrainians and Somalis, dropping “Hebrew” from its name in 2014. Its Israel branch now represents non-Jewish asylum seekers, with the government of the Jewish state as the defendant.
Israel was among the first countries to ratify the 1951 Refugee Convention, and Israeli jurists helped write it, including Jacob Robinson, a Lithuanian-born legal adviser to Israel’s UN delegation who was a central figure in its drafting. The treaty’s cardinal principle is non-refoulement, that no state may return a person to a country where they face serious danger. Israeli courts operate on what Anat Ben-Dor, a clinical instructor at Tel Aviv University’s Refugee Rights Clinic who is currently handling several Ethiopian cases, called an interpretive presumption: “Unless there is clear contradictory legislation, the government should be assumed to abide by international law.”
James Loeffler, the Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University, who studies the Jewish role in building the postwar human rights system, said the people who wrote those rules would not recognize what Israel is doing now. Robinson and his contemporaries “were committed to non-refoulement. They would have seen that as the cardinal principle above all and would be gravely disappointed by a situation in which Israel is sending thousands of people back to a country where they still face serious peril,” Loeffler said.
Not everyone sees the low asylum recognition rate as a failure, however. Yonatan Jakubowicz, founder and executive director of the Israeli Immigration Policy Center, which advocates for tighter immigration controls, argues that Israel has struck a deliberate balance between “maximum compliance with the principle of non-refoulement” and restricting long-term settlement and the “pull factor” it creates for mass migration.
Israel, he notes, is the only developed country with a land and sea border with Africa, apart from the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, into which roughly 70,000 people crossed from Morocco in a matter of days last month, prompting an emergency EU meeting.
Israel’s granting permanent residence to Ethiopians, Eritreans and Sudanese “could collapse its immigration policies, triggering a massive influx of illegal and mixed migration” over the Egyptian fence or by sea, “followed by a wave of family reunification requests.”
The route he described has been effectively closed for more than a decade; crossings from the Sinai all but stopped after the border fence went up. Most Ethiopians reached Israel by other means – on tourist or work visas or, like Yordanos, on visas for religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem – and applied for asylum after arriving.
Jakubowicz’s arguments are echoed elsewhere in the Western world. Earlier this month, a U.S. district judge cleared the way for the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopians, after the Department of Homeland Security announced in December that conditions in Ethiopia “no longer pose a serious threat to the personal safety of returning Ethiopian nationals.” The language is nearly identical to the advice Israel’s former interior minister, Arbel, cited in Jerusalem two years earlier.
Mola, who asked to be identified by his first name only as he still has family in Ethiopia and also fears deportation, worries that Israel will follow the U.S. lead and step up deportations of Ethiopian asylum seekers ahead of the national elections scheduled for Oct. 27 as a campaign victory for the right-wing coalition now in power.
“Every time there’s an election, asylum seekers suddenly become a target,” said Mandil of the Forum of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Organizations. “Because there are many groups, in many parts of the Israeli public, and it’s both the coalition and the opposition that make promises, trying to convince people to vote for them if only they can take care of this situation.”
In addition to repeating common tropes in the developed world tying migrants to theft and violence, Israelis who support cracking down on immigration often invoke another argument: demography. They worry that letting asylum seekers stay permanently in Israel would erode the Jewish majority of the Jewish state.
“The logic is, if we allow groups of non-Jewish people to stay here, they could, God forbid, marry Israelis, and that threatens Jewishness, the Jewish majority,” Mandil said. Loeffler traces the same anxiety to Israel’s unresolved conflict with the Palestinians. Non-Palestinian refugees, he said, have “absolutely gotten caught up in that struggle,” because Israeli leaders resist any move they fear “might open up more opportunities for Palestinians to make legal claims.”
Sivan Carmel, country director of HIAS Israel, calls the numbers argument a non-starter. “Israel has a population of about 10 million, this is 50,000, 60,000 people. It doesn’t make a dent in the demography of the country,” she said.
A clock that keeps ticking
The children of asylum seekers have long been a focus of civil society organizations working on their behalf. They argue that the state should treat them as cases separate from their parents and that even if Israel tries to deport the parents, the children are a different question. Mandil has spent years making that case in the Knesset.
“How can they be asylum seekers when 94% of them were born in Israel?” she said. Asked whether they speak Hebrew, she answered: “Completely. Better than I do.” Yet they are classified, she noted, not as asylum seekers but as infiltrators. “How can you be an infiltrator when you were born in Israel?”
Ethiopian asylum-seeking parents who spoke with JTA described a particular kind of parenting, shielding their children from what their lack of status would eventually cost them, while preparing them for the moment they turned 18 and found out.
Yemani Tesma likened it to a “a clock that keeps ticking. I know the alarm will ring, and I have to decide what to do by the time it does.”
Eventually, the time came.
When his son turned 16, his classmates began preparing for the military draft. His son, however, was left out. No call-up notice, no aptitude test, none of the photographs with families at the recruitment office. So he asked his father why.
“It is because you are not Israeli, and cannot become Israeli,” his father told him. His son shut his bedroom door, Yemani Tesma said, and did not open it for a day.
Israel, like most countries outside the Americas, does not grant citizenship on the basis of birth alone. A child’s status is derivative of a parent’s, said Ben-Dor of the Refugee Rights Clinic. Courts will occasionally make exceptions – for a child with a disability, or one whose integration into Israeli society is exceptional, say – but the government, she said, is wary of any principle suggesting that being born in Israel could confer legal status.
Ben-Dor is representing two Tigrayan mothers of children with special needs whose humanitarian applications cannot be considered at all because the Interior Ministry demands Ethiopian passports the women do not have in order to process their claims.
In early 2012, then-interior minister Eli Yishai lifted collective protection for South Sudanese nationals, clearing the way to deport 1,500 people. The first flight left Tel Aviv for Juba on June 17 of that year, in an operation the government called “Returning Home.” Civil war broke out the following year.
“Children who had studied in Israeli schools found themselves drawing water from wells in South Sudan,” HIAS Israel’s Avigal said. “These are Hebrew-speaking children.”
Why did we come here?
Most asylum seekers in Israel hold a 2(a)5 visa. “It’s a specific visa whose only function is to say you can’t be deported,” said Mandil. The visa is stamped “This permit is not a work permit.” Asylum seekers are able to work, however, because the state promised the High Court it would not fine their employers.
“Every right, every basic right, every social service, we have to fight for,” Mandil said. “They aren’t eligible for anything, not a driver’s license, not the ability to leave the country and come back, not health insurance, not higher education. Certain professions are closed to them because they have no status.”
That has left many Ethiopian asylum seekers in a cycle of poverty in the country where they sought refuge. Now, with a deportation deadline already behind them, 18 years after Yemani Tesma arrived and raised a family here, some are asking why they came at all.
Mola is a community leader and translator and spends his unpaid hours helping asylum seekers file petitions with the Interior Ministry.
“When I am not doing my backbreaking work,” he told JTA, “I do all I can to help asylum seekers fill out paperwork.” He once worked as a project coordinator and Amharic translator at the Canadian Embassy in Israel.
“Anyone who has had the option or ability to leave Israel for a third country has done so. Everyone who is left here has nowhere else to go,” he said.
In the aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, it seemed there might be an opening for the Ethiopian asylum seekers to cement their place in Israel.
As Israel’s largely foreign agricultural workforce was evacuated and Palestinian work permits were suspended, some of the people the Interior Ministry is now preparing to deport went to farms along the Gaza border to pick fruit.
Members of the Ethiopian asylum-seeking community bought supplies at supermarkets and delivered them to Israeli soldiers, Mola said.
Multiple busloads of asylum seekers traveled to farms in the envelope to harvest crops that would otherwise have rotted. None of them were paid. “After Oct. 7, we saw asylum seekers volunteering to assist people in the south, distributing food, volunteering in agriculture. I’ve seen it with my clients, and I’ve seen it with groups of asylum seekers,” Avigal, of HIAS, said.
Three months later, the Interior Ministry revoked their protection from deportation.
Asked whether any of this had left him bitter toward Israel, one Ethiopian asylum seeker, who asked not to be named for fear of deportation, rejected the premise. “I don’t hate,” he said. “Bless Israel.”
Told that someone else in his position might feel differently, he answered, “No. What we hate is the decision.”
Avigal added, “What we say at HIAS is, we used to help people because they’re Jewish, and now we’re helping people because we’re Jewish.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel’s Ethiopian asylum seekers fight deportation efforts appeared first on The Forward.
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Milo Yiannopoulos, right-wing troll with links to popular antisemitic figures, detained by ICE
(JTA) — Far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, a close associate of Ye, Candace Owens and other past and present promoters of antisemitic conspiracy theories, has been detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers, federal officials announced Friday.
Yiannopoulos, a British citizen who himself has cheered on the Trump administration’s mass deportations, was arrested in New Orleans on Thursday.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Yiannopoulos had entered the U.S. legally in 2019 but “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws.” Yiannopoulos missed an immigration hearing and was issued a final order of removal in July, according to DHS, and will remain in ICE custody “pending removal.”
Jewish MAGA firebrand Laura Loomer, an influential figure in the Trump administration, took credit for the arrest on social media.
In a series of posts on X, Loomer blasted Yiannopoulos for his past internship with former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and his appearances on right-wing commentator Candace Owens’ podcast. Both Greene and Owens are anti-Israel figures who have become critics of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.
“Milo is going to be deported back to the UK where he can live among the Muslims he has recently chosen to embrace,” Loomer wrote. “Today is a great day for America.” Late Friday, Loomer claimed he was “on an airplane back to the UK.”
Yiannopoulos, a former editor at Breitbart News and onetime beacon of the burgeoning alt-right movement, has a long history of inflammatory comments, and has flirted with Holocaust denial while claiming Jewish ancestry. The Anti-Defamation League labeled him as an “alt right apologist” and a “misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, transphobic troll who is extremely good at getting people to pay attention to him.”
His ascension through the conservative movement was abruptly halted in 2017 after appearing to endorse pedophilia in a video. But the commentator bounced back after developing a relationship with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. After Ye began to gain notoriety in 2022 for promoting extreme antisemitic rhetoric, Yiannopoulos joined his long-shot 2024 presidential campaign as chief of staff.
Yiannopoulos also took credit for organizing a dinner in 2022 between Donald Trump, Ye and white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes, which was widely condemned by both parties. At the time, Yiannopoulos said that he organized it “to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most, the people who put him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end.”
More recently, when Ye took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year to apologize for his antisemitism, Yiannopoulos shared the ad on X — a day after he had posted, “The problem with these kamikaze Jews is they aren’t remotely as likable, human or frightening as Japs.”
Yiannopoulos has said that he is Jewish through his maternal grandmother, though he is a practicing Roman Catholic, and refutes claims of being racist or antisemitic.
In 2019, Yiannopoulos told the Los Angeles Jewish Journal that he is a “paid-up Zionist” who would advocate for a Jewish “super-state” in the Middle East. That interview took place in Berlin, the day after an event where Yiannopoulos spoke to members of the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland party.
Two years earlier, Yiannopoulos had rallied against the City University of New York for hosting Linda Sarsour, a promoter of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement against Israel, as a commencement speaker.
In an April 2026 interview with Owens, who herself has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, Yiannopoulos compared the Israeli government to Nazi Germany, and said that “Netanyahu’s Israel will have eclipsed Hitler’s Germany by many, many counts, morally speaking, probably by the numbers, too.”
He said that the Netanyahu administration “has gone so far that they’re now willing to sacrifice their own citizens in order to increase their borders.”
“Where do I remember that from? Uh, could it be the word ‘Lebensraum’?” he said, referring to the key tenet of Nazi ideology that meant conquering more land for the Aryan race to settle. “Could it be a country that did exactly that?”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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These Jews are looking for a ‘runner’s chai’
Ezra Feig begins each Friday the same way: corralling 100 Jews to go on a run in Central Park.
He stands up on a park bench, towering above the crowd. They’re schmoozing and stretching, with impressive energy considering the hour. Around half wear blue shirts and shorts emblazoned with a white Star of David, interlaced with an outline of a runner.
Feig spreads his arms wide and says “Welcome to Nice Jewish Runners.”
A 35-year-old health care entrepreneur, Feig launched Nice Jewish Runners in the wake of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Three years later, the running group has kept up its pace. Jews from multiple generations, but mostly in their 20s and 30s, continue to feel the group’s pull. For those raised in less observant backgrounds but called to engage more with their Judaism after Oct. 7, the weekly jogs give them a way to do so outside a synagogue.
The group has expanded to at least 19 cities in five countries around the world. And — despite, perhaps even in spite of rising antisemitism — the Nice Jewish Runners still don their Star of David T-shirts, hats, and jewelry.
“It’s pretty simple,” said Zach Woodin, who leads an Atlanta chapter. “You lace up, you pin on a Star of David, you run with other Jews — and for a few miles, the world feels a little less scary.”
Melissa Tucker, who now runs the club’s Chicago chapter, found something in the running club that she hadn’t experienced at other events for young Jews. She liked the group’s ethos and emphasis on building community instead of “you have to do this religious thing.”
Nice Jewish Runners is a passion-project for Feig. He originally intended to have one run, in New York, once a week. It would be a “pre-Shabbat celebration,” as he described it, with coffee and babka afterward.
The group got more traction, partially through its boisterous social media presence, with short-form videos of runners each other with confetti during races or quick on-camera interviews at morning runs. People outside New York City started to notice, and asked if Nice Jewish Runners could come to their city. Chapters sprouted up in cities around the world.
Most chapters draw mostly people in their 20s and 30s, but in Westchester, a suburban county outside of New York City, runners show up pushing their babies in strollers. Others bring their grandchildren.
“One thing I really love about our community is, it’s not another singles club,” Feig told the Forward.
Though the group is also not not a singles club. “I don’t think people are opposed to meeting people romantically in the run club,” chuckled Woodin of Atlanta.
In fact, the New York chapter just had big news on that front. One recent Friday morning, a couple who met during a morning run announced they had gotten engaged, making them the first Nice Jewish Runners to do so.
After the announcement, the runners split up into pace groups, and headed off to circumnavigate the three miles around the park, in their blue Magen David t-shirts.
At a time when being visibly Jewish has become more dangerous, Feig thinks this is more important than ever.
“If we show that we’re afraid, then other Jews around us are also going to be afraid,” he said. “But if we show that, you know, we’re gonna proudly wear our Star of David and be visibly Jewish, it’s gonna inspire other Jews to do the same and not be afraid.”
Tucker of Chicago says that her mother worried about her running along the shore of Lake Michigan with a big Star of David on her chest. But so far, “It hasn’t been a concern,” Tucker said. “Like, Baruch Hashem, nothing has happened. On the lakefront, people have only smiled and giggled at us rather than hate on us.”
The group also hosts special events for the holidays, with some chapters doing monthly Shabbat dinners and annual Hanukkah parties.
Though their shirts typically only get positive responses, there have been some concerns. At major runs, some club members who have draped themselves in Israeli flags have gotten heckled from the sidelines. In one incident, the heckling came from another runner and led to their suspension from New York Road Runners.
Since the 2025 Boulder attack, where a man firebombed a walk in support of Israeli hostages, killing one person and injuring a dozen others, the group has been vigilant about security.
They don’t publicize the location of their meetups on social media. In order to find the locations, would-be participants have to join Heylo, an event management platform, where chapter leaders only accept them once they have approved their identity.
When each run finishes, the Nice Jewish Runners head in a pack toward Breads Bakery. Waiting for them is a jug of iced coffee and freshly-baked babka — a sort of Oneg Shabbat after the weekly running ritual. The newly-engaged couple sponsored the oneg after a recent run. After a few celebratory words and photos, everyone dug in.
“At the end of the day, it’s not just a run,” Feig said. “It’s Jews showing up for each other, wearing a Star of David in public, and starting Shabbat with coffee, babka and zero apologies.”
The post These Jews are looking for a ‘runner’s chai’ appeared first on The Forward.
