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The promised land is… Oklahoma? Inside Tulsa’s campaign to court young Jews
TULSA, Okla. — The house had prairie views, four bedrooms and a pantry large enough to support a small diaspora.
More than 50 people wandered through the kitchen inspecting cabinets, opening drawers and video chatting with relatives back home as if they had stumbled upon a newly discovered continent.
They were not, strictly speaking, house hunters. They were Jews.
They had flown to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the weekend to see whether they could picture a life here, along a stretch of historic Route 66. This is not how most Jewish migration stories begin.
Sunlight spilled across a kitchen island the size of a small boat. In the living room, the ceiling rose two stories high, the kind of architectural flourish meant to make visitors imagine their future lives unfolding beneath it.
Two sisters from Northern California peeked into a walk-in closet, while a family of four from Winnipeg, Canada, stepped into the backyard.
“I have Sylvester Stallone to thank for this,” said a man from Maine, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt that read “Israel – Established 1273 BCE.” He had been watching the Paramount+ television series Tulsa King, the one where Stallone plays a New York mob boss exiled to Oklahoma to start over. Curious about the setting, he opened Zillow.
The home prices did not make sense. The numbers next to the square footage looked like they were missing a comma, maybe two.
He typed a question into Google.
Are there Jews in Tulsa?
The answer, it turned out, was yes. More surprising still: Tulsa was actively trying to recruit them.
Tulsa is not the tumbleweed town many outsiders imagine, but a leafy, art-deco city stretched along the Arkansas River, where oil money once built skyscrapers and philanthropy now builds parks where families gather at sunset.
In the early 20th century, Tulsa was known as the oil capital of the world, its petroleum boom turning a prairie town into one of the richest cities per capita in America. When oil prices collapsed in the 1980s, the economy faltered.
Like many once-booming cities forced to reinvent themselves, Tulsa rebuilt. Today its economy stretches beyond oil into aerospace, technology and finance, and the city supports a surprising range of cultural institutions, including the Tulsa Ballet, Tulsa Symphony Orchestra and the Philbrook Museum of Art.
Over the past several years, its Jewish leaders have hatched an audacious plan. Instead of watching young Jews drift toward the familiar centers of American Judaism — cities like New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago — they are trying to persuade some of them to move in the opposite direction.
The program is called Tulsa Tomorrow. Since 2017, it has flown groups of young Jews to Oklahoma for long weekends — covering airfare, hotels and meals — and then shows them the city: neighborhoods, synagogues, parks, restaurants, jobs opportunities and the people who live here.
It is, in essence, Birthright for the Sooner State.
So far, 144 people have moved through the program; 113 still live here. In a city with fewer than 3,000 Jews, those numbers matter.
Until recently, Tulsa’s most recognizable Jewish exports were the actor-director Tim Blake Nelson and the professional wrestler simply known as Goldberg. The idea that the city might become known instead for importing Jews is a newer development.
Across the country, dozens of small and mid-size Jewish communities are confronting the problem of young Jews leaving for larger cities, institutions shrinking and congregations aging. Tulsa’s unusual experiment — recruiting Jews instead of losing them — has begun attracting attention from Jewish leaders elsewhere who are wondering whether the model might work in their own towns.
In Kansas City, which already runs its own recruitment effort called See KC, a federation representative attended a Tulsa Tomorrow retreat to see what might translate back home.
Brooke Bowles, the CEO of the Birmingham Jewish Community Center, first heard about Tulsa Tomorrow at a conference last fall. Birmingham’s Jewish population has hovered for years between 5,000 and 6,000 people.
“If you’re not growing,” Bowles said, “you’re dying.”
She spoke with Tulsa Tomorrow’s organizers and plans to attend a recruitment weekend herself to see how the program works up close.
But whether the Tulsa model can work elsewhere may hinge on something harder to replicate. Rabbi Lily Kowalski, who served at Tulsa’s Reform congregation during the early years of the Tulsa Tomorrow project, said its success is in part because it was never managed by any single Jewish institution.
“It really has the buy-in and the backing of the entire Jewish community,” she told me. “If it were just one or two groups trying to make it happen, it wouldn’t be as successful as it is.”
An international destination
The program usually holds two recruitment weekends each year with maybe a dozen participants on each. This particular trip, held at the end of February, was unusually large. Fifty-two participants had come, 41 of them from Canada.
For them, Tulsa represented more than opportunity. It promised potential refuge.
Since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, antisemitic incidents across Canada have surged. Jesse Brown, a Canadian Jewish journalist who has been documenting the trend, said the shift has been dramatic. In recent years, synagogues and Jewish schools have faced arson, vandalism, bomb threats and shootings.
But Brown said the sense of unease extends beyond those headline-grabbing incidents. Across parts of Canadian civil society — in schools, unions, hospitals and arts organizations — Jews have reported growing hostility or exclusion.
Brown describes that broader atmosphere as something closer to what he calls a “polite pogrom,” a slow accumulation of insults that have left many Canadian Jews wondering what the future holds.
“My fear is that the next Bondi Beach massacre is going to take place in Canada,” Brown said, referring to the December 2025 Hanukkah attack in Australia that killed 15 people.
Watching fellow Canadian Jews contemplate leaving the country has unsettled him in its own way. “There’s a sadness,” Brown said. “I’m not enthused or compelled by what I see as a re-shtetling.”
For some Canadians, relocating is no longer a hypothetical.
Michael Sachs, 44, arrived in Tulsa last summer from Vancouver, pulling into town just in time for the Fourth of July.
With salt-and-pepper hair and the easy confidence of a salesman who believes in his product, Sachs has quickly become one of the city’s most enthusiastic ambassadors.
In Canada he built a career in Jewish communal life — working with the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jewish National Fund and serving as president of his Orthodox synagogue.
Now Sachs works to recruit new families to Tulsa. “I feel like there’s opportunity everywhere,” he told me, tilting up the brim of his felt cowboy hat.
Part of what pushed his family south was the same set of issues many Canadians on the trip described: antisemitism, soaring housing costs, a sluggish economy and a health care system under strain. But the real difference, Sachs said, has less to do with economics than with possibility.
Tulsa has a population of around 415,000. It’s big enough to matter, but small enough that ideas move quickly. More than once I heard the same sentiment: In Tulsa, you are usually just one phone call away from anyone you need to reach.
Conversations turn into projects. Programs appear where none existed before. The distance between suggestion and action is short.
“There’s a secret sauce here,” Sachs said. “Even I don’t know the recipe. But I’ve tasted it, and I know it exists.”
In larger Jewish cities, Sachs said, communities can feel settled — institutions established, leadership long entrenched. Tulsa still feels different, a place where the future of a Jewish community can be shaped in real time.
Seven months after arriving, Sachs is already putting down roots. His 13-year-old son recently celebrated his bar mitzvah here — a ceremony the family had originally planned to hold back in Vancouver. His wife now teaches at Tulsa’s Jewish elementary school.
Like many cities in the American heartland, Tulsa has long been treated as somewhere people pass over. But increasingly, some Jews are beginning to look down.
The relocation playbook
Tulsa is not the first Jewish community to try this. Every few years, a synagogue or federation decides to solve Jewish demography the way a small town might try to lure a Kia factory: with incentives.
In 2009, a hotel magnate in Dothan, Alabama, offered up to $50,000 to Jewish families willing to relocate to the town’s shrinking Reform congregation. Eleven families came. Seven eventually left.
In 2022, an Orthodox synagogue in White Oak, Pennsylvania — a fading mill town outside Pittsburgh — offered $100,000 to anyone willing to move there. Three families arrived. The program is now paused.
There have been modest successes.
After Hurricane Katrina, the Jewish community of New Orleans offered stipends for moving expenses, discounted day-school tuition and a year of free membership to a synagogue and the JCC. Hundreds took part before the program ended in 2012. About a quarter stayed.
Tulsa took a different tactic.
Tulsa Tomorrow is the brainchild of local businessman David Finer, who started the program along with a few of his friends. Instead of paying people to move, the community invites them to visit and rolls out the red carpet. What Tulsa lacked, he believed, wasn’t Jewish life. It was awareness.
“Tulsa is a hidden gem,” Finer, 69, told me one morning over breakfast at Chimera Cafe in the Tulsa Arts District, a block away from museums dedicated to Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. “When people come here, they’re shocked at how nice it is.”
Tulsa also has something working in its favor that many places its size do not. “It is, per capita, one of the most philanthropic cities in the country,” said Rebekah Kantor-Wunsch, Tulsa Tomorrow’s executive director and its sole employee.
The city is home to several major Jewish foundations — including the Schusterman Family Philanthropies, the Zarrow Family Foundation and the George Kaiser Family Foundation — all of which have helped shape large parts of Tulsa’s civic life through their giving. Kaiser, a lifelong Tulsan whose parents fled Nazi Germany, was the main donor to the Gathering Place, a 66-acre park along the Arkansas River that opened in 2018 — a lush stretch of tree-lined lawns, playgrounds and winding paths. It cost $465 million to build; Kaiser gave $350 million of that, the largest private gift to a public park in the United States.
Some participants discover another local incentive while they’re visiting. Tulsa Remote, also funded primarily by the Kaiser foundation, offers remote workers $10,000, a local business mentor and three years of free coworking space if they relocate to the city.
More than 4,000 people have taken that offer. Most have stayed.
The city’s philanthropic culture explains why Tulsa’s Jewish community is punching far above its weight, said Rabbi Yehuda Weg, the local Chabad rabbi. “Tulsa,” he said, “is money looking for a problem.”
The cousin theory
Just how broad that community backing runs became visible inside the downtown Bank of Oklahoma Center, a 19,000-seat arena where the Tulsa Oilers minor-league hockey team was hosting its first-ever Jewish Heritage Night.
The players wore special edition blue-and-white jerseys with a large Star of David across the chest. Fans could buy them, too. A few had already made their way to people in the stands, including Rabbi Daniel Kaiman, who had pulled one over his shirt.
From the bleachers, he watched the players circle the ice.
Kaiman, 41, moved to Tulsa in 2013 from Los Angeles and leads Congregation B’nai Emunah. It was founded in 1916 as Orthodox and is now denominationally ambiguous. (Squint long enough and it looks Conservative-adjacent.) Today it has about 520 member households, making it the largest synagogue in Oklahoma.
“No one moves to Tulsa for the weather,” Kaiman said loudly, over the roar of the crowd, referring to the humid summers and occasional tornado. “No one moves to Tulsa for the scenery. You move to Tulsa for the opportunity.”
Unlike places like Dothan or White Oak — towns that once boomed and then hollowed out — Tulsa is still growing. “It’s easier to build a life here,” Kaiman said.
The synagogue he leads occupies an entire city block and operates like a small ecosystem.
There is a preschool. A five-day-a-week after-school program picks children up from public schools and keeps them until early evening, offering Hebrew, piano and tumbling classes. About half the students are not Jewish.
Then there are the projects that extend beyond the synagogue’s traditional role: a bakery that employs people recovering from mental illness, a pop-up Jewish deli that raises money for social programs, and a refugee resettlement program run in partnership with HIAS.
The synagogue also houses a mikvah. Jews from across the region — sometimes driving for hours from Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri — come to use it.
Kaiman likes to explain the community this way. “Imagine you move somewhere and you have a cousin there,” he said. “We’re the cousin.”
Sitting beside him in the bleachers was Rabbi Batsheva Appel, the interim rabbi of Tulsa’s Reform congregation, Temple Israel. She arrived last summer from Boise, Idaho.
Temple Israel, founded in 1914, has about 300 member households and is currently rebuilding its synagogue campus after tearing down its longtime building. Groundbreaking on a new structure is set for the weekend after Passover.
In the meantime, her congregation meets elsewhere. Friday night services take place in the federation auditorium or sometimes in the lobby of the Jewish museum beneath a Tiffany stained-glass window depicting the binding of Isaac. Religious classes meet at the Jewish day school.
It is, in other words, a congregation temporarily without a building but not without momentum.
Appel said she had seen programs like Tulsa Tomorrow proposed before in other cities. “Frequently this kind of idea would come up, and then nothing ever happened,” she said. “So to see it come to fruition and to see how effective it has been is pretty amazing.”
On the ice below them, the Oilers scored a goal.
Kaiman watched for a moment, then returned to a metaphor he often uses to describe Jewish life in the city. Tulsa, he said, is like a whetstone (the stone used to sharpen a knife).
“The Jew is the knife,” he said. “And Tulsa sharpens you.”
Orthodox limits
When the first period of the hockey game ended, people drifted toward the arena’s concourse, where the smell of popcorn hung in the air.
Near one of the entrances, Weg, the Tulsa Chabad rabbi, and his wife, Etel, sat behind a folding table covered with Purim flyers and a tray of hamantaschen. The holiday was two days away.
They handed the triangular pastries to anyone who slowed down long enough to take one — including a few confused spectators who seemed unsure why a rabbi had materialized next to the nacho stand.
Weg, 65, wore a suit and tie and a black kippah perched on his head. With his long white beard and easy smile, he looked like a slimmer Santa Claus.
Weg arrived in Tulsa in 1987 as a young Chabad emissary. Today, three of his children serve as Chabad rabbis in communities of their own across America.
The Tulsa Tomorrow program, he said, makes sense for many Jews considering a move. “It allows people to see the Jewish landscape and the Jewish possibilities of Tulsa,” he said.
But he was careful not to oversell it. For Orthodox families, the infrastructure still has limits. Jewish schooling in Tulsa only runs through elementary grades, and keeping kosher requires some improvisation.
“You can get chicken, you can get meat — not every cut of meat, but quite a few,” he said, extolling the virtues of the local Trader Joe’s. “Enough to live on.”
Still, Weg argued that Tulsa offers something many larger Jewish communities do not: the feeling that every person counts, and is counted on. “In Atlanta or Dallas, you can get lost,” he said. “Here, everybody is engaged.”
He gestured toward the concourse to take in the totality of the moment, with hockey fans passing beneath Jewish banners while a rabbi handed out Purim cookies. Scenes like this, he suggested, capture something about the city. In Tulsa, Jewish life may be smaller. But it is hard to miss.
‘A Bell Labs for Jewish life’
The recruitment weekend eventually shifted from hockey arenas and real estate tours to what may be the most important piece of Tulsa’s Jewish infrastructure: the Zarrow Jewish Community Campus.
It’s vast, at 15 acres and 77,000 square feet.
The campus is deliberately multigenerational, and nearly every major Jewish institution in the city lives here — including the Jewish Community Center, the federation offices, the Mizel Jewish Community Day School, the Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art and Zarrow Pointe, a senior living complex with more than 400 residents.
Among them is the 90-year-old grandmother of Isabella Silberg, 28, a Tulsa native who now serves as the federation’s director of development. Between the preschool and the retirement community, Silberg said, “this campus caters from baby to bubbe.”
Her fiancé, Shane Ross, 29, first visited on a Tulsa Tomorrow recruitment trip in 2023. He has since moved to town.
Walk through the midtown campus and something becomes clear almost immediately: The people running the place are young. The federation board chair is in his 30s. The museum curator is in her early 30s. The development director, public affairs director and several federation staff members are all under 35.
“I’m the old guy around here at 41,” joked Joe Roberts, who runs Jewish Tulsa, the umbrella organization overseeing the city’s federation, JCC and Jewish museum.
Roberts looks less like an executive than someone you might expect to find behind the bar at a downtown brewery — bald, thick beard, jeans and a tight black T-shirt stamped with the words Zionist Weightlifting Club, a brand he started himself.
He works out every day in the gym inside the JCC. “Our claim to fame,” he said, “is that we’re the cleanest gym in Tulsa.”
Roberts was born in Dayton, Ohio, and spent a decade in politics — even running for Congress at 26 — before pivoting into Jewish communal work. He worked at federations in Boston, Los Angeles and Columbus, did pro-Israel advocacy in Washington, D.C., and later ran a federation in Ontario.
Then Oct. 7 changed his trajectory. At the time, Roberts was living near Toronto, working as a public-affairs consultant and writing columns about antisemitism and Israel. The threats that followed, he said, forced him and his wife to reconsider where they wanted to raise their two young sons.
Around that time he heard about Tulsa Tomorrow. He came out of curiosity. Instead, he left with a job. Roberts now sees Tulsa as something larger than a recruitment program. “I want us to be a Bell Labs for Jewish life,” he said.
The stakes extend far beyond Oklahoma. “If we want a national Jewish future,” Roberts said, “we need a national Jewish present.”
‘A big fish’
Marisol Karcs, her curly dark hair clipped back, ambled through the campus with the quiet curiosity of someone who spends her days studying language and stories.
Karcs, 28, is finishing a creative writing MFA at Iowa State University. She had traveled to Tulsa with her younger sister Morgan, 25, who works in climate policy for a local government in California.
They had come to help Marisol think about her future. Her fiancée grew up Jewish in Tulsa. Now the couple is trying to decide whether to build a life here.
Karcs moves easily through corners of Jewish culture that would seem to rarely intersect with Oklahoma. She has studied Yiddish, attended the klezmer festival KlezKanada, taken language courses at the Yiddish Book Center and spent time around the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Her dream, she told me, might be to start a Tulsa Yiddish club — which, as far as she knew, did not yet exist.
In a large city, she said, that might be one niche among many. Here, it might actually matter.
“You’re a big fish in a small pond,” she said, the kind of place where a single idea can ripple through an entire community. “Everyone knows each other. People take care of each other. You don’t really leave people behind.”
In a place this size, she said, one person can build what the community becomes.
Places like Austin and Nashville were once like this — smaller cities where young people arrived early and helped shape what came next. Tulsa, she said, still feels like that kind of place.
Karcs paused outside the Jewish art museum, which also houses a Holocaust education center. Oklahoma now requires Holocaust education in public schools beginning in middle school, making the museum a regular destination for student field trips.
Standing in the quiet gallery, it was easy to see the argument Tulsa’s Jewish leaders were making.
For someone like Karcs, that kind of density carries a particular appeal. If her sister moves here, Morgan said, she would likely follow. Their parents might not be far behind.
“We’re a really tight-knit family,” Morgan said.
For now, the decision remains open. Karcs and her fiancée are weighing graduate school offers and thinking about what it would mean to build a queer Jewish life in a politically conservative state.
But Tulsa, she said, has surprised her.
“There are vibrant communities here that you wouldn’t expect when you hear ‘Oklahoma.’”
A new generation
Across town, another Jewish gathering was underway. This one involved a crime.
Sort of.
Several dozen young Jewish Tulsans, mostly in their 20s and 30s, had gathered in a hotel ballroom for a Shabbat dinner that doubled as a Purim-themed murder mystery.
The room looked like a costume party collided with a synagogue social hall, with a script that required both alibis and blessings. An astronaut mingled with a Renaissance noble. Kentucky Derby socialites in elaborate wide-brimmed hats chatted with a 1960s hippie. At least one gnome wandered through the crowd. Between courses, guests interrogated suspects in the whodunit plot while shaking groggers.
Among the participants was Jacob Parra, the federation’s director of public affairs, wearing denim farmer overalls and holding a red plastic cup.
Parra, 25, spends his days meeting with lawmakers, city leaders and policymakers on issues affecting Tulsa’s Jewish community. Before joining the federation, he worked on dozens of political campaigns.
“I think it speaks to the energy of the community,” Parra told me. “Many cities say they want to hear from younger people. But when push comes to shove, they’re not getting seats on boards.”
The jaunty Shabbat gathering teased the promise of community Rayna Franco, 38, had hoped Tulsa might deliver.
Franco, an advertising professional from Manhattan with long dark hair and tortoise cat-eye glasses, had arrived with three single friends — another New Yorker, one from Cleveland and a digital nomad currently working from Mexico City.
They moved through the weekend together, the four of them conversing in the easy shorthand of women who had spent years navigating big cities.
They represented a different slice of the cohort than many of the couples and young families touring houses: urban and unattached. Moving to Tulsa would mean leaving behind the dense web of family, friends and institutions that make Jewish life in places like New York feel almost automatic.
But what struck Franco about Tulsa’s Jewish community was the opposite dynamic. “In New York, you’re the norm,” she said. “There are Jews everywhere.”
In Tulsa, she noticed something different. “The people here opt to actively create opportunities for community,” she said.
She compared it to expat culture. When Americans live abroad, she explained, they tend to seek one another out. They form tight circles precisely because they are far from home.
Being Jewish in Tulsa, she said, felt similar.
“In New York City, it’s easy to not give living Jewishly a second thought,” she said. “But the effort that the Jewish Tulsans are putting in is purposeful, visible and admirable.”
‘Tulsa is a refuge’
The room filled quickly. Name tags appeared. Business cards began changing hands. Tulsa’s Jewish future, at least for the next two hours, was being negotiated over coffee and folding chairs.
Around a dozen local professionals had gathered at a downtown coworking space to make their case for life, and work, in Tulsa: a recruiter with open jobs, a real estate developer, a startup founder building AI companies, a banker ready to help newcomers open accounts and a tax consultant who specializes in helping Canadians move their businesses to the United States.
The message was simple: If the participants decided to relocate, Tulsa already had a path waiting.
“You’re not going to get routed through some random call center,” said Jared Goldfarb, a local banker whose Jewish family has lived in Tulsa for generations. “You can text me anytime.”
Then the mayor of Tulsa walked in.
Monroe Nichols, 42, is the first Black mayor in the city’s history, a milestone that carries particular weight here. Tulsa still lives in the shadow of the 1921 massacre that destroyed the prosperous Black neighborhood known as Greenwood, once called Black Wall Street.
Nichols arrived in a blue blazer, Oxford shirt and jeans. A former state representative, he greeted participants like a host welcoming guests into his home.
“We are so excited to have you in this community,” he told the group. “More excited when you move to this community.”
Then he made a point that seemed to resonate deeply with the crowd. “As a Black man in America,” Nichols said, “I can identify with some of the hate that you all have felt.”
For several of the Canadians in the room, the moment felt striking. Since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, some told me they had watched their own political leaders respond to antisemitic incidents with little more than statements of “thoughts and prayers.”
Here was a mayor doing something different: telling them plainly that he wanted them in his city.
“If you’re looking for a place where you can contribute,” Nichols said, “you’ve found that place.”
Then he used a word that carried particular weight in a room full of Jews — especially Jews who had traveled here because they were no longer sure where they belonged.
“Tulsa,” he said, “is a refuge.”
Afterward he lingered to shake hands, pose for photos and continue the conversation. For many in the Tulsa Tomorrow cohort, it was the kind of public welcome they had not heard from their own elected officials in years.
The next move
Participants on this Tulsa Tomorrow trip had created a WhatsApp group to introduce themselves before traveling. After the weekend ended, the chat continued with photos from the retreat and messages about what might come next.
Then the tone shifted.
Within a week of the trip to Tulsa, Toronto saw shootings at three synagogues. No one was injured, but the attacks — yet again — rattled Canada’s Jewish community.
One of the Canadians dropped a news link into the group chat. Another reminder, the message read, of what Jews are facing in cities across Canada. It was a reminder of why the question of where Jewish life takes place, and how it is sustained, feels newly urgent.
Tulsa, for some, had begun to feel like more than a curiosity. It suggested the possibility of building Jewish life somewhere that still felt open — a place where a community might be shaped, rather than simply inherited.
Some cities feel finished — their skylines built, their hierarchies set, their patterns long established. Tulsa still feels like a city becoming something. That sense of possibility is the wager at the heart of Tulsa Tomorrow.
A few weeks after the trip, the group chat was still active. People shared house listings. Compared notes. Asked practical questions about schools, jobs, synagogues.
The question was no longer whether there were Jews in Tulsa.
It was whether they might soon be among them.
The post The promised land is… Oklahoma? Inside Tulsa’s campaign to court young Jews appeared first on The Forward.
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A pair of Jewish businessmen gave the Lakers their name. Now another Jewish duo is buying the team.
Back when the National Basketball Association was little more than a startup, two Jewish businessmen named Benjamin Berger and Morris Chalfen bought the worst team in the sport, the Detroit Gems, for $15,000. They relocated the franchise to Minneapolis and gave it a name that nodded to state geography.
Eighty years later, the Lakers are a global brand, have won 17 championships and play in Los Angeles — and for the first time since Berger and Chalfen sold, a Jewish duo will take the reins. Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger are buying a majority stake in the team, ESPN reported Wednesday. They’ll be paying a tad more than Berger did in the 1940s —the Lakers were valued at $12.5 billion in the sale.
It’s been a busy summer for Kushner, a real estate scion married to supermodel Karlie Kloss; his brother Jared is a former Trump administration fixture. A company backed by his VC firm, Thrive Capital, tried to buy a stake in the World Cup last month, causing an international backlash that may yet lead to the resignation of FIFA president Gianni Infantino. (That subsidiary, Thrive Eternal, also owns a stake in the San Francisco Giants.)
Kushner and Iger were reportedly angling to buy an expansion NBA franchise in Las Vegas before pivoting to the Lakers.
“As lifelong NBA fans, we are deeply honored for the opportunity to become stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the most iconic sports franchises in the world,” Kushner and Iger said in a statement to ESPN.
Kushner is now tasked with restoring the Lakers to “Showtime” glory — perhaps with Kloss courtside in the seat once held by an earlier model-turned-owner, Jeanie Buss.
He comes from a family well-acquainted with the tabloids. His brother, Jared, is married to Ivanka Trump and serves as a White House advisor. Their father, Charles Kushner, made billions in real estate development before he was sent to prison for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering. (Trump later pardoned him, and today Kushner serves as the U.S. ambassador to France.)
The sale comes 14 months after Buss sold the Lakers to Mark Walter, the head of a private equity firm and a co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Walter, who bought the team at a $10 billion valuation, is currently facing federal and SEC investigations into insurance companies tied to his broader business operations.
It was not publicly known that the Lakers were for sale, and ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne reported Wednesday that Kushner and Iger — who had previously been bidding for an expansion NBA team in Las Vegas — approached Walter with an offer he couldn’t refuse.
The sale would make the Lakers the 14th NBA team out of 30 with Jewish principal owners. The league was founded by Jewish businessmen in the 1940s.
The newcomers will inherit a roster in transition following the departure of LeBron James, who at 41 is a few months older than Kushner, the youngest majority owner in the NBA.
Behind James and Luka Dončić, the Lakers finished with the fourth-best record in the Western Conference last season and were eliminated in the second round of the playoffs. James signed with the Philadelphia 76ers this offseason in free agency.
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Hitler’s favorite composer Richard Wagner found early inspiration in a Jewish artist’s music
BAYREUTH, GERMANY — Midway through the second act of the Bayreuth Festival’s new production of Rienzi, a miniature Richard Wagner takes command of the Festspielhaus. A child painted gold and wearing the composer’s familiar velvet cap and facial hair bursts onstage and presides over a manic pageant of the ten operas that have made up Bayreuth’s repertoire for the past 150 years. Minnesingers and Meistersingers collide; mythical and medieval heroes jostle for position; the medieval Wartburg castle of Tannhäuser turns into the boxy East German automobile that shared its name. The whole sequence, chaotic yet tightly choreographed, has a high-camp exuberance.
Over the past decades, Bayreuth has become surprisingly good at critiquing and even poking fun at itself. The Norwegian director Stefan Herheim’s landmark 2008 Parsifal turned Wagner’s mystical final opera into a galloping history of Germany and the festival that had grown up around it. Nine years later, Barrie Kosky, the first Jewish director to work on the Green Hill, set Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg partly inside Wagner’s own home and partly in the courtroom of the Nuremberg trials.
Founded by Wagner in 1876 as the ideal theater for his own works, Bayreuth is marking its 150th anniversary this summer with its very first staging of Rienzi. The festival had originally hoped to also perform its full repertoire of canonical Wagner works. Financial limitations forced it to abandon that plan.
Rienzi was Wagner’s third completed opera and his first great success when it premiered in Dresden in 1842, yet it belongs to the period of his career that Bayreuth has traditionally treated as the composer’s prehistory. The opera, a rarity nowadays, also feeds directly into several histories that the festival has spent decades learning how to discuss: Wagner’s enormous artistic debt to the German-Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer; Wagner’s rabid antisemitism; Adolf Hitler’s fascination with Wagner; and the Wagner family’s own embrace of German nationalism and Nazism.
Rienzi, der letzte der Tribunen (Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes) takes its story from an 1835 historical novel by the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Its hero, Cola di Rienzo, was a 14th-century Roman notary and man of letters who tried to break the power of the city’s feuding aristocratic families and establish a republican government. During Wagner’s lifetime, Rienzi remained his most popular opera.
This summer on the Green Hill, the sparkling and rousingly triumphant music of Rienzi itself kept pointing away from Bayreuth and toward Paris. Giacomo Meyerbeer, born Jakob Liebmann Meyer Beer into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin in 1791, became the dominant composer of French grand opéra and one of the most internationally successful musicians of the 19th century. His Robert le diable and Les Huguenots showed what opera could achieve when intimate drama, huge public scenes, chorus, orchestra and stage technology were coordinated on an unprecedented scale. There is an old joke that Rienzi is Meyerbeer’s best opera. The young Wagner would not necessarily have taken that as an insult.
In 1837, the 24-year-old Wagner wrote to Meyerbeer that the older composer’s works had given his ideas about dramatic music a “new direction.” He praised Meyerbeer for mastering the strengths of the Italian and French schools and combining them into an art with international reach. “Goethe is dead — but he was no musician; there is nobody left but you,” Wagner wrote Meyerbeer in 1840. When the young composer arrived in Paris poor, obscure and desperately ambitious, Meyerbeer supported him, wrote recommendations on his behalf and praised music from Rienzi. In one letter, Wagner told Meyerbeer that he wept when he thought of “the man who is everything to me” and that working and striving “for you, and you alone” gave meaning to his efforts.
The musical indebtedness ran deeper than the patronage. Wagner later acknowledged that grand opéra, with its huge scenic and musical resources, had been his model for Rienzi. His ambition, he wrote, was “not simply to imitate it” but to surpass it through an extraordinary expenditure of means: five acts, five large finales, hymns, processions and what he called the “musical clash of arms.” Those techniques did not disappear when Wagner later repudiated grand opéra. He absorbed and transformed them in “mature” works like Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and Götterdämmerung, the final installment of the Ring cycle, which might be said to be the grand opéra par excellence.
That artistic debt increasingly tormented him. When Robert Schumann remarked in 1843 that Der fliegende Holländer “smacked of Meyerbeer,” Wagner responded with extraordinary defensiveness, insisting that the faintest Meyerbeerian odor would threaten his creative identity while conceding in the same letter that he remained personally indebted to the elder composer. After an attempt to staged Rienzi in Berlin in 1847 ran aground, Wagner’s resentment acquired a paranoid cast: he persuaded himself that the Jewish composer exercised secret control over the press and court circles that had disappointed him, despite the considerable evidence of Meyerbeer’s efforts to assist him.
The anxiety Wagner seemed to feel about Meyerbeer’s influence never fully disappeared. In 1872, eight years after Meyerbeer’s death, Wagner’s wife Cosima recorded a dream in which her husband was “walking arm in arm with Meyerbeer” and Meyerbeer had “smoothed for him the paths to fame.” She immediately connected it with another dream that repeatedly troubled Wagner: Money due to him had failed to arrive and he was unable to pay his rent.
Wagner’s antisemitism cannot be reduced to wounded professional vanity. It drew on larger currents of German nationalism and anti-Jewish thought and became, over the ensuing decades, one of the ugliest and most persistent elements in his worldview. Meyerbeer nevertheless became central to how Wagner articulated it. The cosmopolitan art Wagner had once admired could now be recoded as rootless; theatrical brilliance became superficiality; international success became commercial calculation. In the infamous 1850 essay “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (“Judaism in Music”), Wagner denied Jews the capacity for authentic artistic creation. In “Oper und Drama” (“Opera and Drama”), Meyerbeer became his supreme example of a composer who manufactured “effects without causes.”
The accusation is comically revealing when heard alongside Rienzi, one of the most unabashedly effect-hungry scores ever composed, especially in Bayreuth’s gargantuan performing version. This points to why Rienzi sits so uneasily inside the later Wagner myth: The prophet of a regenerated German art first made his name with a gigantic cosmopolitan entertainment modeled on a genre perfected in Paris by a Jewish composer.
Rienzi’s most consequential 20th-century admirer was Adolf Hitler. August Kubizek, a boyhood friend of Hitler’s, claimed in his memoir that Hitler emerged from a performance of Rienzi in 1905 in a state of near ecstasy and later told him, “In that hour it began,” retrospectively lending the performance in Linz a prophetic quality. What had begun that evening was a political vocation modeled on the populist tribune who rose from obscurity by promising national renewal.
Early on, Hitler adopted Rienzi’s rousing overture for his political meetings in Munich; it later became a ritual element of the Nazi Party rallies at Nuremberg. For his 50th birthday in 1939, Hitler received Wagner’s autographed manuscript of Rienzi. Now lost, it was presumably in the Führerbunker when Hitler committed suicide to escape capture from the advancing Soviet troops.
I don’t think one need describe any of this as an “abuse” of Wagner. Music does not arrive with instructions for use. The Nazi embrace of Rienzi belongs to the opera’s reception history just as Meyerbeer belongs to its compositional history. Hitler recognized something in Rienzi’s transformation of political aspiration into mass spectacle that answered to his own imagination. That does not make Wagner responsible for Hitler; nor does it require us to pretend that the attraction was based on a misunderstanding.
The connection between the Führer and the Wagner Festival, however, is a different story altogether. After Wagner’s death in 1883, his widow Cosima helped turn the festival into a center of völkisch nationalism and antisemitism. Winifred Wagner, the composer’s English-born daughter-in-law, directed the festival from 1930 to 1944 and became one of Hitler’s closest friends. The relationship between Nazism and Bayreuth was not a hostile takeover of an innocent artistic institution. As I wrote in these pages in 2013, Bayreuth supported Hitler before Hitler supported Bayreuth.
After World War II, the festival answered this inheritance principally through aesthetics. When Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner — the composer’s grandsons — reopened Bayreuth in 1951, Wieland’s stripped-down, abstract productions decisively broke with the representational style associated with the Nazi period. But the brothers also asked visitors to refrain from political discussion on the Festival Hill: “Here, art is what counts.”
The morning of this year’s Rienzi premiere, the German-Jewish public intellectual Michel Friedman stood inside the Festspielhaus and quoted that appeal in a speech devoted to Wagner’s antisemitism and Bayreuth’s history.
Before Friedman spoke, the Russian-Jewish maestro Semyon Bychkov conducted Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll” alongside chamber music by Gustav Mahler and Pavel Haas, the Czech Jewish composer murdered at Auschwitz. The festival has also made the open-air Silenced Voices memorial to Jewish artists excluded and persecuted at Bayreuth a permanent feature of the Green Hill. (First unveiled in 2012, it could definitely use a facelift.)
Bayreuth has approached this outlier with the characteristic fussiness of an institution that considers itself the standard bearer of Wagner. There is no definitive Rienzi and so the festival has assembled its own new performing version from the earliest available materials and later revisions. The result contains roughly four hours of music inside an evening that runs six hours with its two long intervals. Rienzi resembles its successors in sheer length, if in nothing else.
The last time I saw a live Rienzi was 16 years ago at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Back then, the director Philipp Stölzl compressed the opera to about three hours and presented Rienzi’s rise and fall as an explicit Hitler-Mussolini parable. As a commentary on the work’s reception history, it was anything but subtle.
Bayreuth’s production, directed by Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka, is less literal but also less involving. Their Rome is a gray contemporary or near-future political landscape dominated by election campaigns, polling, smartphones and screens. The production had a strong visual grammar and some remarkably assured tableaux (including the riotous act two ballet), but it didn’t seem particularly interested in telling a story.
Virtually nobody at Bayreuth or anywhere else can be expected to know the intricacies of this plot in advance, which made the festival’s refusal to provide surtitles unusually exasperating. With Tristan und Isolde or Parsifal, performed before an audience that often knows the texts intimately, dispensing with projected translations can enhance concentration. But Rienzi is an obscure opera being performed in an unfamiliar version, and the staging itself rarely clarified the action. Eventually I stopped worrying about it. Another chorus arrived, another political faction reversed itself, another steely declaration climbed toward a climax. Rienzi is prodigiously good at generating excitement and considerably less good at persuading you that one excitement necessarily leads to the next.
In interviews, Nathalie Stutzmann, the French conductor helming the production, has stressed Rienzi’s affinities with Bellini and the Italian bel canto tradition. The Festival Orchestra sounded phenomenal: brilliant without becoming merely blaring and surprisingly lyrical beneath all the military and ceremonial pomp.
The Festival Chorus, which bears much of the opera’s weight, produced one immense wave of sound after another. The Austrian heldentenor Andreas Schager sounded as though he were born to sing Rienzi, which is an insane thing to say about anyone. His seemingly inexhaustible voice and effortless buoyancy suited the character’s mixture of exhortation, certitude and growing desperation.
Their audience responded with the decorum of a mausoleum. This audience can sit through a climax that would bring almost any Italian or French opera house to its feet with the stillness of a congregation awaiting further instructions. (Whenever I tentatively tried to applaud an aria in the silence that followed a full cadence, I was immediately shushed.)
No one needs Rienzi to become a permanent Bayreuth fixture. 150 years since the first Bayreuth Festival, it’s enough that it has punched a hole in the repertory. The Salzburg Easter Festival, which is currently building a new Ring with Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic, plans to interrupt Wagner in 2028 with Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. Bayreuth might profit from similar encounters: With Meyerbeer and the other composers who fed Wagner’s imagination, or perhaps with composers whose music later found itself excluded from the German tradition in the name of ideas that flourished on the Green Hill. The sepulchral Festspielhaus could stand a little “luft von anderem Planeten” (“air from other planets”), to quote a Stefan George poem that Schoenberg set to music.
Listening to Rienzi at Bayreuth makes audible something the Wagner cult spent generations trying not to hear. Beneath the composer who would announce a new German art stands the cosmopolitan operatic world he learned from; behind the antisemite who made Meyerbeer a symbol of artistic falseness stands the desperate young composer who begged for Meyerbeer’s help and absorbed his example. 150 years after Bayreuth opened, their new Rienzi reminds us that Meyerbeer was inside Wagner’s music all along.
The post Hitler’s favorite composer Richard Wagner found early inspiration in a Jewish artist’s music appeared first on The Forward.
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How a monument to a Jewish Confederate ended up in a storage unit, next to a vacuum cleaner
Behind an orange roll-up door at a self-storage facility in New Orleans, sits a vacuum cleaner, some lighting gear and a cardboard box.
Inside the box is a Confederate monument, one of the strangest Jewish heirlooms in America.
It is granite, four and a half feet tall, 1,600 pounds and shaped like a thick tombstone. It lies on its side on a crushed wooden pallet because it can no longer stand up. A third of it once sat underground, and when Charlotte, North Carolina, chipped it out of a sidewalk in the summer of 2020, the buried end came out ragged. It carries a few gouges where a protester swung a hammer. Until the city scrubbed it, it also carried three letters in black spray paint: BLM.
“There it sits to this day,” said Kenneth Hoffman, executive director of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, half a mile away in New Orleans, “and possibly will sit forever.”
The stone is one of the last left standing — or, more precisely, lying down — from a century-long campaign in which American Jews built monuments across the South to Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederacy’s Jewish secretary of state, because, for a time, he represented their own acceptance in the South. The monument’s fall tells the story of what changed — not just about Benjamin, but about the Jews who once celebrated him.
Its journey from a Charlotte sidewalk to a New Orleans storage unit involves a Yiddish-speaking ex-convict, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an antisemitic banker, two Polish-born rabbis, a dollar bill pulled from a stranger’s wallet, and a retired lawyer whose wife descends from the man who once hid Benjamin from the Union Army.
What nobody has figured out is what to do with it.
The brains of the Confederacy
Benjamin was a New Orleans lawyer, a sugar planter who owned 140 enslaved people, and a U.S. senator from Louisiana. When the South seceded, Confederate President Jefferson Davis made Benjamin attorney general, then secretary of war, then secretary of state. The two men worked side by side as much as 10 hours a day. Benjamin’s face was engraved on the Confederate $2 bill, likely the only paper money issued in America to feature a Jewish person.
He was known as “the brains of the Confederacy” — a phrase that started as an insult, the old canard of the Jewish puppet master, a way of pinning the Civil War’s loss on the one Jew in the cabinet. He married a Catholic woman, never joined a synagogue and was not a practicing Jew, but none of that mattered. A senator from Ohio sneered that Benjamin was an “Israelite with Egyptian principles.”
When the Confederacy collapsed, Benjamin ran. He disguised himself as a Frenchman who spoke no English, hid in a Florida swamp and slipped out to sea. He made it to London, reinvented himself as a barrister, and died wealthy and free in Paris in 1884, never having answered for any of his past.
That flight is why there are so few monuments to him. Davis went to prison. The generals surrendered and lived out their lives in the South. Benjamin escaped and never came back.
“Some considered Judah Benjamin a kind of traitor,” said Jonathan Sarna, the noted Brandeis University historian of American Jewry.
So the Lost Cause never fully claimed him. Southern Jews claimed him instead.
‘Judah P. Benjamin Nite’
The commemoration campaign that followed has been reconstructed largely by David Weinfeld, an assistant professor at Rowan University who is working on a book called Southern Jews and the Lost Cause. It was indifferent to geography.
Jewish war veterans presented a Benjamin portrait to Atlanta Mayor William Hartsfield in 1954 for the city’s collection of “Confederate Heroes and Statesmen.” Weinfeld found that Alabama’s B’nai B’rith opened its 1962 state convention with a dinner-dance called “Judah P. Benjamin Nite,” and offered to fund a monument at the state capitol honoring him as “a son of the Jewish people.”
Alabama didn’t have a strong connection to Benjamin, which was precisely the appeal there. He “provided a means for southern Jews to prove their southernness regardless of what former Confederate state they resided in,” writes Weinfeld.
Sarna puts the calculation more starkly. Jewish safety in the South depended on being counted as white, and Southern Jews understood the alternative.
“Why did they want to be white?” he asked. “Because the alternative was to be Black.”
The stakes weren’t abstract. In the years around those celebrations, synagogues across the South were bombed and set on fire, and rabbis who backed integration were punished for it. “There were people whose response was, ‘If we want to continue to be here in the South, this is the price we have to pay,’” Sarna said.
It was a bargain, mostly unspoken: stay loyal to the white South and you will be well treated. Many Southern Jews upheld their end of it. Plenty, Sarna said, “had prejudices not different from those of their non-Jewish counterparts.”
The United Daughters of the Confederacy embraced Benjamin right back. “They understood that celebrating a Jew made the Confederacy look tolerant,” Weinfeld told a room of scholars at the American Jewish Historical Society’s conference this June in Cleveland.
The Daughters chartered a Judah P. Benjamin chapter in Bradenton, Florida, in 1914, and after World War I began sponsoring Benjamin markers across the South.
In 1924, the Daughters bought Belle Chasse, Benjamin’s old Louisiana plantation, and a New Orleans rabbi spoke at the dedication, consecrating the house to “the impulse of patriotism.” The next year they bought the Gamble Plantation in Ellenton, Florida, where Benjamin is said to have hidden from Union troops, and gave it to the state. It remains a state park officially named the Judah P. Benjamin Confederate Memorial. With B’nai B’rith’s support, the UDC raised a monument in Sarasota in 1942 — pink Georgia marble, crowned with a bronze sundial — and another in Fayetteville in 1944.
The Sarasota dedication came six weeks after Pearl Harbor, and the Birmingham News found in it a wartime moral. Honoring Benjamin was fitting “especially so right now, when the United States is at war with totalitarian forces whose ringleader, Nazi Germany, proclaims and practices racial and religious intolerance,” the paper wrote. The monument was “in a way a part of the answer of the South, the land of the Confederacy, to Adolf Hitler’s assault upon those freedoms which Southerners and all Americans hold dear.”
It was a memorial to a slaveholding Confederate, offered as the South’s rebuttal to Hitler.
The Charlotte fiasco
In Charlotte, the arrangement broke down in public.
According to Weinfeld’s extensive research, the local UDC chapter was preparing to host the 1948 state convention and wanted a marker for the spot where Benjamin sheltered for a week in April 1865, in the home of a Jewish merchant named Abraham Weill. The chapter’s historian, Josephine Yarbrough, needed money. She wrote to Harry Golden.
Weinfeld has traced what happened next through Golden’s own account and contemporaneous records.
Golden was about the least Confederate man in North Carolina. Born in what is now Ukraine, raised on the Lower East Side, he had served federal prison time for mail fraud before reinventing himself in Charlotte as publisher of the one-man newspaper the Carolina Israelite.
Golden would go on to become a best-selling humorist and an ally of Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement. But in 1948, he called Benjamin “one of the greatest Jews America has ever produced.” He signed up the city’s two synagogues, Temple Israel and Temple Beth El, which agreed to buy the granite and present it to the Daughters as a gift.
Then came the letter.
A non-Jewish New York banker with Charlotte in-laws warned UDC members across the state that the Daughters were being used for Jewish propaganda. Charlotte’s so-called good Jews, he wrote, were “good only because they are as yet unrevealed.”
That was all it took. The local Daughters voted to yank their name off the stone, then went to the city council to stop the marker from being erected. They argued it would block passengers boarding city buses. The state and national organizations overruled them, and both synagogues voted to press on.
On Oct. 1, 1948, police blocked off South Tryon Street for the unveiling. The mayor came. A Presbyterian minister delivered the keynote. And the Jewish blessings came from two rabbis — Aaron Tofield of Temple Israel and Philip Frankel of Temple Beth El — both born in Poland. Three years after the Holocaust ended, two immigrant rabbis from the old country stood on a Southern sidewalk and consecrated a monument to the Confederacy.
Hidden in plain sight
The stone did what stones do. It stood there.
Charlotte changed around it — the streetcars, then the skyscrapers, then the FedEx store it eventually fronted. The inscription was right there for anyone who bothered to crouch down and read it. You could ship a package, grab a coffee and walk right past a monument to the Confederate secretary of state.
Charlotte’s Jewish community never forgot, exactly. During her years in Beth El’s pulpit, which ran from 1998 to 2016, Rabbi Judith Schindler used the marker to teach the congregation’s teenagers about Jews in the Confederacy.
In August 2017, white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and a counterprotester was killed. Soon after, Beth El’s board voted unanimously to push Charlotte to move the marker somewhere else — or find some other use for it. The answer was the same every time: North Carolina law barred removing Confederate monuments unless they were relocated somewhere equally prominent.
Then, in June 2020, artists painted a “Black Lives Matter” street mural along South Tryon, directly in front of the stone. The monument looked out over the M in “Matter.”
Days later, somebody spray-painted “BLM” across most of the granite and went at it with a hammer. The granite mostly won. “They probably whacked at it several times,” Hoffman said, “and it really only took out a few chips.”
On June 17 of that year, Temple Israel and Temple Beth El — the same two congregations that had paid for the stone in 1948 — wrote to Charlotte’s mayor, city council and city manager. This time, they demanded the monument be removed.
“We should neither celebrate the Confederacy nor honor the legacy of white supremacy,” they wrote. “The monument does not belong in a place of prominence within our city, just like German cities do not memorialize or erect statues to Nazis.”
A week later, Schindler and Mike Wirth, an artist in her congregation, placed a vinyl wraparound banner over the monument. On it was a quote from Emma Lazarus: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”
City workers then pried the monument out of the sidewalk, “sort of to the relief of everyone,” Hoffman said. The city scrubbed off the spray paint, declared the marker damaged and put it in municipal storage.
Then, hundreds of miles away and north of the Mason-Dixon line, a retired lawyer read a book.
The dollar
Barrett Freedlander was reading a biography of Judah Benjamin when he hit a half-page passage about a monument in Charlotte. He was shocked. He was also, he realized, related to the story.
Freedlander, 84, is a retired Baltimore attorney. His wife, Laura, is the great-great-granddaughter of Abraham Weill — the merchant who sheltered Benjamin, and whose name is misspelled “Abram Weil” on the stone.
“The only reason I cared about it,” he said, “is because of the family connection.”
That connection runs deeper than Benjamin. Richmond was days from falling. Confederate President Davis, worried about the “disorganized bands of troops roving about the country,” put his wife and their four children on a southbound train — and handed her a pistol and “showed me how to load, aim and fire it,” Varina Davis wrote.
When they arrived in Charlotte, the rented house was packed up and nobody in town would help a family everyone assumed would be arrested.
Except one man.
“The agent, Mr. A. Weill, an Israelite, came to meet us there and gave us every assistance in his power,” Varina wrote in her memoir, “and when he found there were no conveniences for cooking, he sent our meals from his own house for several days, refusing, with many cordial words, any offer to reimburse him.”
Freedlander thinks he knows why the Confederate first lady reached for the word “Israelite,” and why a Jewish merchant was the only person in Charlotte willing to take in a family the rest of the city was shunning. “Only the persecuted would appreciate her issues,” he said.
The Weills prospered. Weill helped found the synagogue in Wilmington, North Carolina, where relatives still belong. His granddaughter Laura married Julius Cone, a Greensboro textile tycoon. The family fortune allowed sisters Claribel and Etta Cone to buy the Matisses and Picassos that are the crown of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
So when Freedlander learned the marker had disappeared into municipal storage, he started making calls. A staffer in the mayor’s office said the city had no use for it and was willing to let it go. But the manager of the warehouse where it sat called Freedlander back with a complication: the city couldn’t simply hand over public property. He was obligated to charge for it.
“How much?” Freedlander asked. One dollar. Freedlander offered to send a check. The man said not to bother and paid it himself, out of his own wallet.
Freedlander’s original idea was to put the monument in his own backyard. “My wife didn’t want it,” he said.
A friend mentioned the new Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in New Orleans. Another friend of Freedlander’s, a Baltimore executive whose company hauls computer equipment around the country, priced out the job, got into four figures, then called back and said he’d do it for free. It was history, he said.
Monument vs. museum
The stone arrived in New Orleans via truck in November 2022. It was lowered onto the pavement outside the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience’s offsite storage with a jack lift, and has not moved since.
Hoffman’s first instinct had been to display it. The stone, he realized, tells three tales at once: the Civil War, when Benjamin rose to the Confederate cabinet; 1948, when the two Charlotte synagogues paid for a monument to him; and 2020, when it was defaced during the summer of Black Lives Matter protests.
Last October, when the Southern Jewish Historical Society held its conference in New Orleans, Hoffman and Weinfeld convened a roundtable of historians to figure out what to do with the monument. One idea floated that seemed to gain consensus was to display the marker alongside a light projection restoring the graffiti.
For now, the monument remains in storage. Hoffman said that if and when it goes up, it will be “with its full context. Not like it’s a historical marker.”
Samantha Baskind, an art historian at Cleveland State University, thinks the museum should not wait to display it.
“Yes, originally the statue commemorates Benjamin as a distinguished Jewish American and Confederate statesman,” she said. “But the fact that it was defaced during Black Lives Matter protests makes it acquire a second history. The graffiti isn’t merely vandalism in a conventional sense. It documents a moment when Americans were publicly reevaluating Confederate symbols.”
Which means the object now holds a double meaning: why Benjamin was honored in the 20th century, and why so many people rejected that honor in the 21st.
Baskind knows firsthand the cost of institutional flinching. In 2022, she curated an exhibition of 19th-century Jewish American artists for a gallery at Princeton, including work by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Jewish sculptor who spent part of his career producing Confederate monuments. Baskind, who wrote a book about Ezekiel, had written labels confronting Ezekiel’s Lost Cause loyalties head-on. Late in the process, the venue that was planning on showing the exhibition canceled it.
“It was almost devaluing what your students are capable of thinking about,” Baskind said. “And isn’t that what we do in an educational environment?”
Her verdict on the Charlotte stone is unambiguous. The city should never have cleaned it. “I wouldn’t see it as damage. It’s part of the object’s history.” The graffiti “deserves interpretation and not concealment.”
And the question a museum ought to ask, she said, isn’t whether Benjamin was good or bad. “The more interesting question is: Why did different generations understand him so differently?”
Early in the 20th century, American Jews saw a success story. Today most see a man who helped run a slaveholding rebellion that waged war on other states. “Neither perspective should replace the other,” Baskind said. “A museum explains how and when those shifts occurred.”
Then she offered the distinction she believes the argument comes down to. “A monument exists to honor,” she said. “A museum or gallery exists to explain.”
Visitors to the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience can still find Judah Benjamin there. He’s in a display case in an exhibit about Jews, slavery and the Civil War: two Confederate $2 bills bearing his portrait, one from 1862, one from 1864. Both are blank on the back.
“Which tells you something about the financial solvency of the Confederacy,” Hoffman said. “Save money. Just print it on one side.”
Half a mile away, one of the last monuments American Jews built to the highest-ranking Jew in the Confederacy, and to the standing he seemed to promise them, lies in a cardboard box in the dark, its graffiti scrubbed, its chips intact, waiting for somebody to decide what it means.
Freedlander hopes to take a trip to Wilmington later this month with some of his grandchildren to visit family graves — including that of Abraham Weill, the man who helped a fleeing family when nobody else in town would, and got a monument he never asked for.
“I’m a bystander to all this,” Freedlander said. “I’m just the messenger. But I did want to preserve it.”
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