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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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She was elected the first Jewish president of the Catholic Biblical Association. Then came the hate.
When Amy-Jill Levine was elected president of the Catholic Biblical Association earlier this month, she faced vicious backlash.
Those who opposed her election couldn’t exactly point to a lack of qualifications. Levine has written dozens of books on the New Testament, taught a New Testament course at the prestigious Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, served on the editorial board of Catholic Biblical Quarterly and spoken privately with Pope Francis three times.
Instead, her critics fixated on one trait they apparently consider disqualifying: She’s Jewish.
“Your Zionist ass doesn’t belong in our religion. Keep yourself to the Talmud and keep eating babies. STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM CHRISTIANITY,” someone wrote in an email to Levine, which she shared with the Forward.
Levine’s Facebook page was bombarded with so much hate that she asked her daughter to moderate the comments. Online critics called Levine “anti-Christian,” denounced her as “Zionist,” and attacked her efforts to push back against antisemitic interpretations of the Bible.
On its face, a Jew at the helm of a professional association devoted to the study of Christian scripture might seem odd. After all, the Catholic Bible Association, unlike some other academic associations for the study of scripture, promotes study of the Bible “within a context of faith,” and most of the association’s presidents in its 90-year history have been priests. Levine attends an Orthodox Jewish synagogue.
Some more even-keeled critics of Levine’s presidency focused on this argument. “At some point, we have to ask: what is the word ‘Catholic’ actually doing?” Mark Lambert, co-host of the podcast Catholic Unscripted, posted to X.
Levine, meanwhile, argues that the Catholic Biblical Association is a professional society, not a church. People of all faiths are eligible for membership, as long as they hold an advanced degree in biblical studies.
“An academic society, like a hospital, museum or university, is not the same thing as being a member of the clergy,” Levine wrote in an email to the Forward.
In fact, while Levine is the first Jewish president of the Catholic Biblical Association, she is not the first non-Catholic. Several Protestants have served in the role, according to chair of the executive board Gregory Sterling.
Levine was nominated by a committee and then ran unopposed for the presidency, Sterling said. It is an unpaid, one-year position.
“She was not elected because she is Jewish, but because she is an exceptional scholar and has played a very important role in Catholic-Jewish dialogue,” Sterling and the association’s executive director, Archie Wright, wrote in a joint statement. “The vitriol of some of the comments only reinforces the need to address the problem of Anti-Semitism.”
Several Catholic clergy also wrote letters of support for Levine amid the pushback.
Levine, for her part, said she has “no interest in undermining the Church.” The 70-year-old grew up in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, in a predominantly Portuguese Roman Catholic neighborhood, where she would occasionally go to Mass with her friends.
She preferred Mass to synagogue because “there were snacks, except you got the snacks in the church during the service, and you got the snacks in synagogue after the service,” she joked in an August interview on Nashville Public Radio.
Levine recalled that when she was 7 years old, a classmate told her she had killed Jesus — an accusation the elementary schooler had picked up from her priest. Levine, confused, went to her mother, who assured her that “God was doing just fine.”
That incident inspired Levine to attend Catholic catechism classes as a child, in addition to Hebrew School.
She went on to get a PhD in religion from Duke University and teach at Vanderbilt University as a professor of both the New Testament and Jewish Studies. Much of her scholarly work revolves around the Jewish context of Jesus and dispelling what she sees as antisemitic misinterpretations of the Bible.
“We do not need to make Judaism look bad in order to make Jesus look good,” Levine posted on Facebook after she was elected.
Catholic-Jewish relations
Sixty years ago, Levine’s election “would have been an astonishing thought,” said Philip Cunningham, director of the Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
Though the Catholic church has a long history of antisemitism— including violent conversion efforts and teaching the theological belief that Jews were condemned by God — that has all changed in recent decades.
In the 1960s, Pope John XXIII took on the task of modernizing the Church, convening the Second Vatican Council to produce a theological document reconsidering many teachings and practices. The resulting document, often referred to as Vatican II, is perhaps most famous for allowing priests to host Mass in the local vernacular language of their parish instead of Latin. But it also changed Catholicism’s teachings about Jews.
Nostra Aetate, the section of Vatican II most famously concerned with Jews, shifted Catholic teachings about other religions enormously; while still maintaining that the Catholic Church is the “one true religion,” it also affirmed that other religions contain a “ray of truth,” a massive theological shift from the belief that any non-Catholic religion was false or even harmful.
Nostra Aetate spends significant time on Jews, specifically, including rejecting the belief that Jews should be held collectively responsible for killing Jesus. The document calls out antisemitism both theologically and politically.
“What happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today,” it reads. “The Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”
Since Vatican II, popes have continued to advance dialogue with Jews, and with members of other religions. And the Church has forcefully rejected antisemitism, continuing to change its teachings on Judaism and Jewishness. That includes removing the term “perfidious Jews” from a Good Friday prayer, updating Catholic school classes on Judaism and even releasing statements acknowledging the legitimacy of Judaism alongside Christianity, placing Jews into a special and elevated relationship with the Church.
“The council set in motion a process of rapprochement between Jews and Catholics that took root particularly effectively in the United States, because the world’s largest Jewish diaspora community lives here and frequently alongside Catholics in cities and suburbs,” Cunningham said.
Levine, too, highlighted the importance of Nostra Aetate to her career, writing in an email that the document’s acceptance of Jews “opened the door for me to work in New Testament studies.”
But not all Catholics embraced the teachings of Vatican II. A diffuse movement often referred to as traditionalist Catholics, or tradcaths, felt that the efforts toward modernization had gone too far. Some tradcath groups simply sought to preserve the rituals of Latin Mass.
Others, however, including the recently excommunicated Society of Saint Pius X, or SSPX, take issue with the council’s teachings, believing that acknowledging the freedom and legitimacy of other religions takes away from the centrality of the Catholic Church’s teachings. In short, if the Catholic Church’s teachings are true, they argue, then no other religion can be legitimate.
The French-language account of SPPX posted to X, calling Levine an “objectively scandalous choice” and denouncing her “relativist interpretation of the texts condemning homosexuality,” as well as the fact that “a person who refuses to recognize Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is placed at the head of an institution that claims to be Catholic.”
Despite the newer Catholic teachings about Judaism, some tradcath groups, as well as individual Catholic influencers such as Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens and Carrie Prejean Boller, have been endorsing antisemitic beliefs including supersessionism and deicide, as well as conspiracy theories about Jewish devil worship or government control. Though the Vatican has chastised these figures and repudiated their stances, they have continued to spread antisemitic dogma, including the belief that Jews hate and seek to oppress Christians and that Kabbalah endorses pedophilia. Many also endorse Christian nationalism, which the Vatican opposes.
This antisemitic subgroup within Catholicism is relatively small, but extremely visible thanks to influencers like Fuentes and Owens with millions of followers, and their understanding of Catholicism spreads to people both inside and outside the church. Their antisemitic version of Catholic ideology, as well as the conspiracy theories they spread, can be seen in some of the hate emails Levine received, such as references to eating babies, a version of the age-old blood libel that Jews used Christian children’s blood to make matzo.
Still, while the antisemitic fringe of the Catholic church is loud, the institutions are stalwart in their support for Vatican II’s acceptance of Judaism.
Levine’s election is an indication “that the changes that Vatican II sought to inspire have been happening,” Cunningham said. “That does not mean that all the issues between Jews and Catholics have been resolved — but at least amongst the much of the leadership in the Catholic community, the old stereotypes and caricatures are recognized for what they are.”
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Northeast Philadelphia says goodbye to its last Jewish deli
(JTA) — PHILADELPHIA — After running the family deli for several decades, Steve Stein says his 83-year-old legs were telling him it was time to call it quits. But it wasn’t only that.
The neighborhood has totally changed since his dad, Mike, first took over the business more than 60 years ago. Back then Northeast Philadelphia was an epicenter of Jewish life, packed with synagogues and other Jewish establishments. Most of them are gone. And now — with the close of Steve Stein’s Famous Deli and Restaurant — the area just lost its last Jewish deli.
But only after an outpouring of affection from longtime customers, who flocked to the place once news spread in the last few weeks. “It’s overwhelming,” Stein said. “The amount of people that came in here in the last 10 days, two weeks. Their comments are very touching. I knew I was liked. I didn’t know I was loved.”
To be sure, several customers told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that they’ll miss Stein, but they also bemoaned the fact there aren’t many Jewish food options left. Certainly none with prices as low as Famous.
“I’ve been going there my whole life, “ said Rebecca Asheuer, who grew up a few miles away from Famous’ current location — its third since the Steins took over the business. “I feel surprise and sadness, because it’s the last one in the Northeast.
“I think the Jewish people are moving out of the city and also the businesses used to be passed down in families. Now with the economy and other stuff, people don’t want to take over the family business anymore,” she said.
Another longtime customer mourned the closing of the deli, but also the disappearance of Jewish life in the area.
“I kind of expected it to go sooner or later,” said Aileen Owens, who remembered going to Famous when the Auspitz family ran over six decades ago. “There’s nobody around. Synagogues and all that stuff, it’s all fading out. They went to the suburbs.”
According to Steve’s account, his father Mike Stein, his brother Arnold and cousin Jack began running the produce concession at the Famous Deli in Philly’s Castor Gardens neighborhood in the late 1950s. Around 1960, they bought the deli from the Auspitz family, which had operated a chain of Philadelphia delis dating to the 1920s.
Steve and his brother Arnie eventually ran the deli together. As Jewish families moved farther into Northeast Philadelphia, the deli moved as well — first to Krewstown Road in the mid-1970s, eventually having two locations there, and then about 14 years ago to its final location at 1619 Grant Ave.
If all goes right, Steve’s 57-year-old son Lee hopes to continue the migration and resurrect the family business in the suburbs. Sort of.
“I’m looking to have a place of my own,” said Lee, who started off as an eight-year-old taking out the trash, but would occasionally try to cut the lox when no one was looking. “I have a lot of experience in this business.
“I call myself multi-talented, not just in the deli business, but in cooking and baking, I would probably downsize and not do fruit and produce like we do here. It’s just not worth, you know, the space for what you’re paying. I would do a similar situation to here. Deli, prepared foods, a little bit of bakery, a small sit down. But what I’ve told the people that come in here, ‘You’ll never, ever see some of this product again. And you’ll probably never, ever see these prices ever again.’”
Still, he wants his new venture to be affordable.
“My father always liked being a people-pleaser,” the younger Stein said. “So he tries to please people with a price. But that price affects you eventually.”
As for Steve, he wishes his son well, but knows it won’t be the same. “Lee wants to try something, but not here,” Stein said.
He added that some remaining establishments in the wider region – “they do 90% restaurant and 10% deli, I do 90% deli and 10% restaurant” – will “benefit from me not being here.”
One former competitor isn’t so sure. “I’m upset another Jewish deli has closed and he’s been in business a long time and certainly has his whole clientele,” said Michael Young, longtime owner of Ben & Irv’s, a deli restaurant in Huntingdon Valley, a suburb about 20 minutes northwest of Famous. “But it’s a different world today; a different area. So I don’t know if it will help us.”
Lee Stein said he actually tried to stay put, but needed a little help.“The real problem is the landlord never took care of the building,” said Lee, who wishes his dad had been more assertive on that front. “I tried to make it work here with them, figuring this would be an easy fix. I asked them for some renovations; to put a new roof on. The roof has several holes in it. When it rains outside, it pours in here. So, I tried to negotiate with them first before I did anything else, but that wasn’t going anywhere.”
JTA’s attempts to reach the landlord for comment were unsuccessful. Regardless, Steve Stein, who was forced to close the deli for a short while last year due to health code issues, says he is ready to turn the page.
The first thing he’ll do once things settle down is get therapy on his aching legs. And he’s excited to have more time to devote to his wife of 61 years, Sheila, along with his children, Lee and Mindy, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. “But I’ll miss my customers. They’re like family.”
Already he’s feeling the difference “It’s devastating,” he said on Aug. 24, the day after the store officially closed, amid a final “blowout sale” to get rid of what little was left. “I’m usually the first one in the store.
“It’s going to be very much missed by me.”
He’s not the only one.
“Nothing lasts forever,” said one customer before heading into Famous one last time. “But it’s very sad.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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For graphic novelist Joann Sfar, drawing after Oct. 7 was a way to put stones on Jewish graves
For many Jews, the morning of Oct. 7 remains seared into memory. In Joann Sfar’s case, it was also the day of his birthday party, which included “as many Muslims as Jews,” he told me. Amidst tragedy, Sfar felt a profound gratitude for life, which seemed especially precious. It was a day of fear and uncertainty, followed by many more over the following months. For Sfar, drawing was the only way out.
To Life is Sfar’s illustrated journal of his experience after Oct. 7, a reflection of his fierce peace advocacy coupled with a profound connection to Israel. It follows several previous books by Sfar, who is a French Jewish graphic novelist best known for The Rabbi’s Cat. His works touch on his Sephardic heritage, highlighting a history of friendship and brotherhood between Arabs and Jews.
To Life is the English translation of Nous Vivrons, which was published in June 2024 as the first of a three-part series. It was followed by Que Faire Des Juifs? (What To Do with the Jews?), a nearly 600-page graphic novel that chronicles the history of the Jewish people. Sfar concluded the series with Terre de Sang: Le Temps du Désespoir (Land of Blood: The Time of Despair), which shares Palestinian voices and which Sfar describes as the “saddest” volume of the trilogy.
I spoke with Sfar in July after reading To Life, which will be officially released on September 8. At present, the translations of the second and third volumes are not yet scheduled to be published. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Now that you’re expanding To Life’s audience to English speakers, what do you expect non-French audiences to learn? What do you hope that they take from your piece?
What I would really love is a new vision on the Middle East. I’m really surprised how New York has made the Middle East American, using it in the Trump and Mamdani debate, which I have to say has very little interest from Europe. What I would love is for people to see real lives from the Middle East to see how similar people are. I come from a part Ukrainian and part Algerian Jewish family. When I went to Palestinian cities, I was surprised how many Palestinian seniors look like my father, and how many Moroccan Jews from Israel look Palestinian.
These are people who are very similar and who are trapped in a conflict which is older than them. I really would love readers to dig into personal experience, rather than abstractions. I think embracing this region is really putting hope into individuals, because if you start to put faith into narrative, you’re lost.
In your work, you make an interesting distinction between individuals denying each other’s peoplehood on both sides — Israelis saying there was never a Palestine, anti-Zionists saying Israel never existed — and your emphasis on interviews in your piece. Why was it important for you to have such a connection to real humans throughout the process?
It’s a very strange thing to say because there was real tragedy, but it made me happy because I love these people. I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of time in Palestinian and Israeli cities. If you take it from an individual level, I believe in them and I have a hope for them. Something beautiful is that even if they don’t want it, they are interconnected. Their economies are interconnected; no one is going to exterminate anyone. They’ll be there still.
In this region, no one ever talks to me about Zionism. People deal with their everyday issues; they have no idea what’s going to occur in two months. I know people who are smarter than me have a big political essay about this region, but that’s not my job. My job is to do what I love, like an adventure novel, where you go to the place, you meet the people, and you bring back a story.
Were there any illustrations in the book that you found particularly interesting or meaningful?
There are some photographs that are so shocking you cannot see them in the news, and making a drawing makes it more acceptable. One picture that blew me away is the burial of a father who was killed during October 7. His kid is crying on the grave, and there are the small stones you put on Jewish Ashkenazi tombs. This kid is a Jew, but he could be an Arab, and he mourns his father with a stone. I did a very simple drawing, and somehow that’s what war is about. War is not about heroism, it’s not about glory, it’s not about victory, it’s about kids who are going to mourn their fathers or mothers or family.
This reminds me of a quote from the book where you say that your writing “is like putting little rocks on top of Jewish graves.” Are there any moments in the book that you feel are the most important to hear and remember?
In some fields of France today, and especially among artists, it’s almost forbidden to recall October 7 because of the mass murder of Gaza. But my feeling is you need to be able to cry for both. October 7 was the worst murdering of Jews after WWII, and the mass massacre in Gaza is something we shall remember in 100 years. We should be able not only to cry for both, but also to consider the situation as a whole and to say, okay, what’s next? Are we waiting for the next slaughter or can we do better than this?
As an American, I know about the Jewish experience in the U.S. over the past few years, but I didn’t know exactly what was going on in France and the antisemitism there that you described in your book. Can you tell me more about your experience?
I’m more worried about America because for French Jews, we never let people harass us without responding. We still have a very strong connection to the Arab world, so when people try to oppose Jews and Arabs in France, it somehow doesn’t work. I would love to say that in an optimistic way, but there’s also a lot of violence and harassment. The minute a Jewish artist starts to work, there’s a threat of boycott and everyone starts to treat him like a ‘genocidal Zionist.’
I’ve been talking of Palestine for 30 years, doing reporting in Palestinian towns for two years, but somehow it’s not enough. But we really fight back, because violence here is very often. I had a performance in Marseille, and people gathered at the front to prevent me from drawing on stage. Luckily, many people showed up to defend me, because they knew my show was humane, about peace. At some point, it’s because I’m a Jew that pisses them off. But we know it’s a fight, and we’re ready for it.
What were people’s reactions to your book when it first came out in France? I’m especially curious about the non-Jewish and anti-Zionist population, and whether they read your work.
Everything online is hell. In bookstores, it’s heaven. For To Life, it’s been two years of performing in huge bookstores. I also went to all the universities in France which were blocked by the pro-Gaza crowd, like Columbia, but in France I went to talk in front of them and they were very nice talks. The book sold more than 60,000 copies in France, which is huge. It has a very mainstream audience, not just a Jewish audience. When you go to bookstores, people are very okay to talk, and especially when you go to my meetings, it’s okay to disagree. At my meetings, you can be pro-Palestine — you’re welcome. You can be pro-Israel — you’re welcome, and you can know nothing and you’re welcome also.
I’ve been dealing with Arab and Jewish topics for more than 30 years, and I have a huge amount of readers in France. The Arabs and Jews of my age know what they lost, in the real brotherhood and friendship we had fighting against the extreme right party. We have political history together, and many people remember that. I have a lot of hope, but we need to stay vocal.
Since the book was written in 2023, are there any moments that feel surprising or strange for you to read today?
One thing which is really surprising is that October 7 is less than three years ago, and it’s almost as if everyone forgot. Somehow, people have made political use of this slaughter by any means. The historical moment is almost forgotten. If my book is worth something, it is as an immediate report on the immediate aftermath of October 7 on site. I was in the south of Israel, I was with kibbutzniks, I was with the military, I was with Arab people. One thing we risk is to forget what occurred on October 7, and then forget what occurred during the Shoah, because in France today all the memory sites for WWII are being attacked as pro-Israel. So, we need to keep our memory. Without memory, there’ll be no peace.
One moment in your book that I found very powerful was when you parallel a famous image of Jews being shot in the Holocaust to one of two teenagers being killed on October 7. I’d love to hear more about your thoughts connecting October 7 to previous tragedies, especially with how you refer to the events as a pogrom.
In France, most of the people don’t know about the Jewish oppression in the Arab world, how many of us had to leave the Arab countries after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. When October 7 occurred, in many Sephardic families and Jewish families from Israel, it recalled what occurred in many oriental countries. There’s a history of killing Jews in the Arab world, and it’s as if people awake to that. We have memories — nothing is the same — but we have a history. Amongst the things that really terrify me today is the dislocation of the link between Israeli Jews, American Jews, and European Jews. I was sad to see how many young American Jewish readers have no connection at all to Israel. You can criticize Israel, it’s okay, but pretending you have no connection to Israel is a lie to the face of your family.
In your opinion, why do you feel like this is the case for so many American Jews? Is there a way that you feel like this changes?
I would say Israel is also to blame because Israel has taught the diaspora Jews that it should be a constant exchange. You cannot raise a child making him guilty about not being pro-Israel enough. I’m not asking anyone to be pro-Israel — it’s a very dysfunctional country with an extreme right government. But the connection exists through your parents, your grandparents, their history. Pretending there is no connection is a lie. In the Jewish story, every moment a Jew tries to pretend he’s not part of the Jewry is going to be the first to be slaughtered. I’m not an Israeli, but I’m part of this history and I’m really proud to be part of this history.
Throughout the book, you imagine many conversations with your late grandfather, and I was interested in why this was something that felt so connected to you at this time. Why did you want to include this dialogue in your book?
He really raised me, and everything I do or say is considering what my grandfather would have said. He did not believe in any narrative. He was not a nationalist; he would not believe in all the right wing crap about pride, country, anything. It was only about survival. Regarding Europe, he was very pessimistic. He was saying that we’ll have some decades of peace after Auschwitz, and then it’s going to go back to normal Jew hatred. I’m afraid to say he was right.
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