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‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war
(JTA) — In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk.
The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal mission: delivering aid to Jews in Sumy.
“There was no time to sleep,” Sherstuk recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently. “All my team members worked the same, 24/7.”
A year later, Sherstuk is still hustling as the Sumy director of Hesed, a network of welfare centers serving needy Jews in the former Soviet bloc. But she has also begun teaching music classes again, too — with performances sometimes held in bomb shelters.
Catch up on all of JTA’s Ukraine war coverage from the last year here.
Sherstuk’s story reflects the ways that Russia’s war on Ukraine has affected Jews in Ukraine and beyond. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands, left even more in peril and fundamentally altered the landscape and population of Ukraine, forcing millions to flee as refugees.
But the war has also mobilized the networks of Jewish aid and welfare groups across Europe, leading to a Jewish organizational response on a massive scale not seen in decades. And Ukrainian Jews who have remained in the country have recalibrated their lives and communities for wartime.
Here are four stories about Jews who stepped in and stepped up to help, and a taste of the on-the-ground situations they found themselves in.
‘I was needed there’
Enrique Ginzburg, second from right, is shown with Ukrainian doctors in Lviv. (Courtesy of Ginzburg)
Since nearly drowning at 23, Dr. Enrique Ginzburg has felt he “had to pay back” for the extra years of life he was granted.
Now 65, the professor of surgery at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine and its trauma division has lent his critical care expertise in Haiti, Argentina, Kurdistan and Iraq, in various emergency situations. But until last year, he had never been to a war zone.
The Cuba native felt drawn to Ukraine because his grandfather is from Kyiv, while his grandmother is from nearby eastern Poland. So early on in the conflict, he called Dr. Aaron Epstein, an old friend and the founder of the nonprofit Global Surgical and Medical Supply Group.
“Get yourself a flak jacket, a helmet, a gas mask and come on over,” Ginzburg said Epstein told him.
He has been to Ukraine twice under the nonprofit’s auspices, last April and July. Ginzburg’s explanation for why he flew across the world to put himself in danger: “I was needed,” he said.
His base was an emergency hospital in Lviv, a city located west enough that it became a major refugee hub. He consulted with front-line Ukrainian physicians, many of them young and inexperienced, and hospital administrators, watching the doctors in action. He also visited patients in hospital wards and helped to treat gunshot wounds and assorted combat injuries.
Ginzburg’s bags were packed with meaningful supplies. Some had been requested by his Ukrainian colleagues for medical use, mostly specialized catheters. But he also brought tefillin, the phylacteries used by Jews in their morning prayers. Ginzburg, who studied in a yeshiva while young but no longer considers himself Orthodox, wrapped them every day while in Ukraine.
Even though Lviv was far from the fighting, he could hear air raid sirens and the explosion of the Russian missiles, sometimes feeling the earth shake. When intelligence reports warned Ginzburg’s medical team of impending missile attacks, they sought refuge in safe houses.
“Today,” he told the Miami Herald last June, “I was calling my life insurance [company] because I have young sons and my wife, so I’m trying to make sure I have good coverage.”
By the end of his trips, Ginzburg lost count of the number of doctors he helped train and the number of patients he saw. “I’m sure it’s hundreds.” He plans to make a third trip sometime this year.
‘This is our new reality’
Karina Sokolowska is the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s activities in Poland. (Courtesy of the JDC)
As the director of the JDC, or the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in Poland, Karina Sokolowska has heard countless harrowing stories over the past year. But one sticks out in her memory.
It involved an elderly Ukrainian couple she met at the Poland-Ukraine border in late spring. The husband was in a wheelchair, and Sokolowska helped push him — back towards Ukraine. They had spent three months in a shelter in Poland but eventually “realized we cannot go looking for jobs, we cannot restart our lives. We are too old,” the woman said.
“If they are to die, they’d rather die back home,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a story of hopelessness. They are so vulnerable.”
Last year, about 8 million Ukrainian refugees made their way to Poland, the bordering country that accepted the most refugees. Early on in the conflict, Sokolowska contacted and visited Jewish communities throughout Poland, investigating the availability of places where the soon-to-be-homeless refugees could be housed. She also traveled to some of the border crossings where the Ukrainians entered, to arrange transportation to venues in Poland and to oversee the conditions in which the refugees would begin their new lives.
Later she would help with, among other things: arranging legal advice for the people who arrived with few identification documents; lining up medical care and drugs; finding them short- and long-term housing; connecting them to psychological counseling; providing kosher meals; and even caring for the refugees’ pets (“dogs and cats with no documents”).
According to JDC statistics, the organization “provided essential supplies and care” to 43,000 Jews in Ukraine and “aided 22,000+ people” there with “winter survival needs … more than double the amount served in previous years.” The welfare organization also claimed to provide “life-saving services” to more than 40,000 refugees in Poland, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and other European locations. It also helped evacuate about 13,000 Jews from Ukraine. (Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen recently said 15,000 Ukrainian Jews in total have immigrated to Israel since the start of the war.)
Karina Sokolowska, JDC director for Poland and Scandinavia sits in her office down the hall from a hotline room, in early March 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
At the height of the refugee flood, Sokolowska said her monthly JDC budget ballooned to more than what she previously spent in an entire year. Her office went from having a few employees to over 20. The amount of sleep she got decreased in tandem; she started taking sleeping pills to get rest when she could.
“This is our new reality” in Poland, she says of the JDC work with Ukrainian refugees. “This is our life now.”
Sokolowska, the granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors, became active in Jewish life during college, when a classmate heard her pronouncing some German words with a Yiddish accent and persuaded her to lead the Polish Union of Jewish Students. As JDC director for Scandinavian countries in addition to Poland, she typically organizes educational conferences and helps Jewish families learn about traditions they had not learned while growing up in the communist era.
Today, her sense of optimism has been ground down.
“Everything changed when war came to Ukraine — there is less hope,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a totally new everything. Every aspect of our life changed. Our hope for this to be over soon is going down, down, down. Nothing will change.”
‘It could [have been] me’
Tom and Darlynn Fellman volunteered in Krakow in October 2022. (Courtesy of Tom Fellman)
Sometime in the late 1890s, Harry Fellman, about 20 years old, left his home in Ukraine. According to family legend, he was a sharpshooter in the Ukrainian army and was about to be sent into active combat. Instead, he emigrated to the United States and settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where he became a peddler.
His grandson Tom Fellman — whose middle name is Harry — doesn’t know all the 120-year-old details, but he knows that he is grateful that Harry Fellman decided to leave Ukraine when he did.
“It could [have been] me, if my grandparents had not left when they did,” said Fellman, a successful real estate developer and philanthropist in Omaha.
In October, at 78 years old, Fellman made the reverse trip across the Atlantic to pitch in to the relief effort. He also wanted to pay what he sees as a debt to the memory of his late grandfather and to help the current generation of Ukrainian Jews.
He and his wife Darlynn served as volunteers for a week at the Krakow Jewish community center, joining hundreds (possibly thousands) of volunteers from overseas who have gone to Poland and the other nations in the region over the last year to participate in humanitarian programs on behalf of the millions of Ukrainian refugees. Fellman worked nine hours a day with a half-dozen fellow foreign volunteers in the basement of the community center, transferring the contents of “big, big” sacks of items like potatoes and sugar into small containers to be distributed to refugees in the building’s first-floor food pantry. His wife spent her time in an art therapy program that was set up for the refugee mothers and children to raise their spirits.
Fellman is “not particularly religious” but supports “anything Jewish.” In 1986, he accompanied a rescue mission plane of Soviet Jews headed to Israel. “It was the most rewarding experience of my life,” he recalled.
Fellman says he plans to return to Poland, in June, for the JCC’s annual fundraising bike ride from Auschwitz to Krakow.
What did his friends think of his septuagenarian volunteer stint? “They thought it was cool,” he said. “But none of them are going too.”
‘Everything was a risk’
Elizaveta Sherstuk runs a branch of Hesed, a network of welfare centers, in Sumy, Ukraine. (Courtesy of Sherstuk)
Sherstuk’s parents would have sent their daughter to a Jewish school in her early years if they had had the option. But Jewish education was not permitted In Sumy during the final years of communist rule in the Soviet republic. Sherstuk was exposed to Jewish life only at home.
Her parents infused her with a Jewish identity, she said, and her grandparents used to talk and sing songs in Yiddish. That inspired Sherstuk’s first career as a singer and a music teacher, during which she founded Aviv and took it on tour throughout the region singing traditional Jewish songs. Later, she became the director of Sumy’s branch of the JDC-funded Hesed network.
Sumy, an industrial city with a population of 300,000 before the war situated only 30 miles from the Russian border, was one of Russia’s first targets. In the days before the pending invasion, Sherstuk stockpiled food, which was certain to become scarce in case of war, and arranged bus transportation to safer parts of the country for hundreds of vulnerable civilians, mostly the elderly and disabled. The bus plan fell through for safety issues.
As the bombing started, it became dangerous for members of the local 1,000-member Jewish community, many of them elderly, to venture outside of their apartments. Sherstuk, working out of a bomb shelter, assisted by a Hesed network of volunteers, coordinated food and medicine deliveries.
The situation grew more dire, and she coordinated the Jewish community’s participation in a brief humanitarian corridor evacuation of vulnerable civilians that the Russians permitted. She communicated with Sumy residents mostly by smartphones provided by the JDC — the Russian attacks had cut the landlines — and accompanied the busloads of Sumy Jews to western Ukraine. Some of them eventually moved on to Israel, Germany, or other nearby countries, she said.
Sherstuk stayed in western Ukraine for a while (“The humanitarian corridors are only for one-way trips,” she noted), moving from place to place, keeping in touch with the Jews of Sumy and waiting for Ukraine’s army to make the trip back safe. But Sumy, like many Ukrainian cities, has come under frequent Russian rocket attack.
“Everything was a risk,” she said. “We were following whatever our hearts told us to do. We had to save people. I was the one who had to do it.”
Last May, Sherstuk was among 12 men and women (and the sole one from the Diaspora) who lit a torch at the start of Israel’s Independence Day in a government ceremony on Mount Herzl. During two weeks in Israel, she spent some time with members of her family, and held a series of meetings with JDC officials, government ministers and donors. “It was not a vacation,” she said.
After going back to Sumy, at the suggestions of her choral group members and fellow Sumy residents, she organized concerts in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian — some in person, some in a bomb shelter in the city’s central square, some online. She has now resumed her music classes, too, and it has all boosted morale. “I [teach] all the time,” she said.
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The post ‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘Long overdue’: Henry Ford home to confront his antisemitism
(JTA) — DEARBORN – The bust of Henry Ford looked on sternly as hundreds of Jewish professionals flooded his pool room.
The visiting Jews admired the views of the Rouge River from Ford’s windows and strolled through his immaculately maintained garden. They studied a mock-up for a Navajo rug in his basement woven with a particular pattern — one that appeared to resemble a Nazi swastika.
The staff at Fair Lane, the historic Dearborn home of Henry and his wife Clara, welcomed the Jewish educators, historians and museum staff. Why they did soon became clear during a panel discussion in that pool room. When the home reopens to the public in June 2027, after a 17-year closure for restoration, staff will teach visitors about Ford’s antisemitism.
This facet of the pioneering industrialist’s life was hardly incidental. The onetime richest man in America published venomous conspiracy theories in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, for years. Hitler was a professed admirer, and Nazi Germany awarded him a medal.
Leaders of Jewish groups greeted the news that the home would address Ford’s antisemitism with optimism.
“We applaud Fair Lane’s commitment to addressing Henry Ford’s antisemitism publicly,” Catherine Cangany, CEO of the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement. “This history happened, it caused harm, and it continues to have consequences we all must confront.”
Cangany, who has research expertise on the Dearborn Independent, sat on the June panel with Fair Lane’s curators but is not involved in the antisemitism initiative itself. Local Jewish groups including hers have been pushing for Ford’s enterprises to acknowledge his antisemitism for years.
“The reckoning is long overdue, and we all will be better for it,” she said.
The curators did not broach specifics of their plan with their Jewish audience in June. For the rest of the summer, as Fair Lane proceeded with its renovations, most of the Detroit area’s Jewish leaders were kept in the dark.
More than two months after the conference, top staffers Austin Eighmey and Hannah McCready sat down with JTA in Ford’s library to outline their educational plans in more detail.
Surrounded by replicas of books on German race science that helped to inform Ford’s attitude toward Jews, they explained that they viewed discussions of antisemitism as core to the revitalized Fair Lane’s statement of purpose. Such information would sit, they said, alongside other unflattering aspects of Ford’s character, such as his union-busting activities.
“Our mission is to illuminate the lives and legacy of Henry and Clara Ford,” Eighmey, senior director of historic resources, said. Part of that legacy, he said, was noting that “he was an ignorant man, fed a lot of poor information that he himself sought out.”
“It’s our job to tell a more full picture and give people a lens with which to view history,” added McCready, the site’s director of interpretation and education.
In the Detroit area, where Ford’s name still looms large nearly 80 years after his death, such a commitment is notable. In 2023 the former president of the Ford Foundation, the family’s charitable arm, acknowledged and condemned its namesake’s antisemitism. Other local institutions devoted to historic purveyors of antisemitism have reckoned with their own legacies in recent years, including the church founded by demagogic “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin.
But as Ford the man continues to be heavily mythologized today, by new generations of entrepreneurs and gearheads — and white supremacists — the physical museums and educational institutions in the region that bear Ford’s name and have connections to his family largely have not broached his antisemitism.
Those include The Henry Ford, a museum built around his personal collections; Greenfield Village, a historic reenactment village that includes a restoration of the mogul’s childhood home; and the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant, a Detroit heritage site where Ford’s Model Ts were built.
For a long time Fair Lane, too, didn’t touch the subject. After Ford’s widow Clara died in 1950, the property was turned over to the Ford Motor Company, which brokered a deal with the University of Michigan to build a Dearborn satellite campus on the site.
For decades the university offered tours of the grounds on a largely volunteer basis, also using it as an events space. The house has been closed to visitors since 2010, as the team undertook an extensive restoration project with an eye toward reopening for the public.
Eighmey said the plan to teach about antisemitism had been the goal since the restoration’s early days. The staff met with representatives from the Zekelman Holocaust Center, the state’s flagship Holocaust museum, to discuss how such a project would look.
“They were straightforward about Henry Ford’s antisemitism and hope that it will be incorporated into the interpretive narrative where appropriate but, at the same time, they respectfully acknowledged many of Henry Ford’s strengths and expressed a deep regard for Fair Lane’s stories, physical spaces, and current restoration work,” reads one executive summary of the focus group that a consultant shared with JTA.
A spokesperson for the Zekelman declined to comment to JTA for this article.
Local controversies in the interim called such educational commitments into question. In 2019 the city of Dearborn — where the Ford Motor Company is the largest employer — quashed a planned historical magazine that would have discussed Ford’s antisemitism, tied to the 100th anniversary of his acquisition of the Dearborn Independent.
In what Eighmey today refers to as “the whole fiasco here in Dearborn,” the city’s then-mayor, John “Jack” O’Reilly, fired the magazine’s editor, prompting outcry. O’Reilly died last year. His son, Devon O’Reilly, now serves as Fair Lane’s CEO.
Despite this history, the younger O’Reilly is supportive of the plan to teach Ford’s antisemitism on the site, the curators said. “We have not talked about his personal life, really, and his familial connections at all,” Eighmey said of O’Reilly.
The team has developed talking points about Ford’s antisemitism as part of their “non-negotiables,” museum terminology for facets of history that every visitor will encounter. Donna Braden, a museums consultant who formerly worked with The Henry Ford and who is Jewish herself, was hired to give her feedback on the plan and drafted her own proposed “non-negotiables” for the subject.
“Explaining the true story of Henry Ford’s antisemitism to non-Jewish people will help them understand why it is so important to the Jewish community,” Braden told the Fair Lane team in a report on their efforts.
In a summary she shared with JTA, Braden also advised the team to “be aware of many people who are unaware of Henry Ford’s antisemitism, and it will surprise them.”
Braden drew from “The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century,” an acclaimed 2006 biography by Steven Watts. Unlike other Ford biographers before him, Watts tackled his subject’s antisemitism head-on. His approach would later find surprising admirers within the Ford dynasty, leading to him presenting on the subject in 2018 to a room full of The Henry Ford staff and Ford family members.
“It was, I must say, quite an experience, because I spoke pretty frankly about all of this,” Watts, an emeritus history professor at the University of Missouri, recalled to JTA about his 2018 talk. “Most of the staff that talked to me about it actually indicated that they were a little relieved, I think, to have this brought out into the open in a fairly frank way.”
The talk, co-presented with the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan, did not lead to change — at least not at The Henry Ford, which has a separate ownership structure from Fair Lane. Today, no mention of Ford’s antisemitism can be found in The Henry Ford’s physical museum space, despite efforts from Braden and others to add such material. Some pages of its website now include some brief words on the subject.
Amid new efforts to push Ford’s family on the subject, Watts returned to Dearborn in 2024, partially to address Fair Lane at Braden’s invitation.
“I hope that they will move forward to bring Henry Ford’s antisemitism to the public,” he said, of both Fair Lane and The Henry Ford. “I got the idea when I was there that they were thinking strongly about a more frank and open approach to all of this, and I guess I would hope that is the approach that they take, and not the ‘sweep it under the rug’ maneuver.”
He told JTA that Ford’s antisemitism became most pronounced in the 1920s, shortly after the height of his business success.
Watts traces Ford’s antisemitism not to any one specific root cause, but rather to a confluence of factors, including the mogul’s economic populism; his failed efforts to send a “Peace Ship” of dignitaries to Europe during World War I, which he came to blame on a “Jewish financial interest in Europe”; and his embrace of conservative cultural signifiers, including square dancing.
“He basically begins to argue that Jews lay behind the corruption of that old-fashioned kind of rural, WASP cultural virtue, that Jews were behind jazz music, Jews were behind Hollywood movies, and that there was a kind of moral degradation that was at work,” Watts said.
Fair Lane has a separate ownership structure from The Henry Ford and Greenfield Village, both of which are largely built around other subjects Ford was passionate about, such as American innovation, rather than the mogul himself. Fair Lane, its curators say, is the natural place for visitors to learn about the Fords’ personal lives and beliefs.
Ford descendants still weigh heavily on Fair Lane’s board — including chair Edsel Ford II, Henry’s great-grandson, whom Eighmey refers to as “the Deuce.”
The family was onboard for this reappraisal, the curators said. Fair Lane’s models in the museum space include Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in Virginia that has taught visitors about his slaveholding; and the Frick museum in Pittsburgh, where industrialist Henry Clay Frick comes under scrutiny for his fierce anti-union stance.
Visitors to Fair Lane, Eighmey promised, will “never leave here thinking, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that big of a deal.’”
The Fair Lane team chose to restore the house to its condition in 1919 — in part because the home was photographed for an architectural magazine that year, allowing the curators to use it as a visual reference.
The date is significant for another reason. 1919 was also the year that Ford acquired the Dearborn Independent, which he would soon use to publish a series of antisemitic conspiracies called “The International Jew” as well as the Russian forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which purported to outline secret Jewish plans for world domination.
Ford would require his dealerships to distribute copies of the paper with every automobile purchase, making the Independent, for a brief time, one of the country’s highest-circulated newspapers. Ford’s role as newspaper publisher was, in Watts’ estimation, the most notorious and seismic way the mogul’s antisemitism manifested in his lifetime.
The choice to reset his home to the year he launched the paper “is further bringing all of this together as a narrative throughline,” McCready said.
After the paper shut down in 1927, owing in part to a libel suit brought against Ford by Jewish attorney and labor activist Aaron Sapiro, Ford — with the help of Jewish community figures — publicly apologized for spreading antisemitism. Around the same time, the celebrated Jewish architect Albert Kahn helped renovate Fair Lane.
The planned 90-minute Fair Lane tour, which is currently being workshopped, touches on the Peace Ship and Ford’s wielding of the Dearborn Independent. McCready described the tour’s intended arc: “He fails with the Peace Ship. He decides that there is a hostile press that’s controlled by financiers that’s against him. He purchases this failing local newspaper and starts getting really obsessed with his image in the media, and we kind of take it from there.”
It does not get into the Sapiro trial, though tour guides will discuss the topic if visitors bring it up. They also don’t plan to discuss the medal Ford received from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s when Hitler publicly expressed admiration for him, noting that it falls nearly two decades after the time period represented by the house’s restoration.
Watts, the Ford historian, told JTA that Ford had suffered two strokes at the time he received the medal, and “was in very bad shape” — possibly impairing his judgment.
“I think Ford’s got a lot to answer for, but I don’t think he was a Nazi,” Watts said. “I think things kind of went off the rails there.” By 1942, Ford was again publicly renouncing antisemitism, calling it “a distinct disservice to our country.”
At the Jewish museums conference, Cangany, the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan CEO, suggested the Fair Lane team should display copies of the Dearborn Independent around the house to demonstrate the effects of Ford’s worldview. That’s not part of the plan, Eighmey said: “It’s not on the site, and it never was.”
But the house does have other eye-catching artifacts. A room in the basement, in keeping with historic specifications, will be outfitted with a Navajo rug stitched with the ancient “whirling logs” symbol, which the Nazis later co-opted as the swastika. Ford had acquired the rug and displayed it in his home beginning in the 1910s, well before the Nazi swastika was popularized.
Maintaining an honest assessment of its founder’s troubling history is a tall order for any museum in modern times. Even Monticello, which Fair Lane held up as a model, has faced right-wing backlash from figures who want the site to minimize discussions of slavery.
Meanwhile, Ford’s legacy continues to shape the modern era as new conservative cultural figures from the business world push similar brands of populism.
In 2022, amid a dispute with the tech mogul Elon Musk over the prevalence of antisemitism on his social network X, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, called Musk “the Henry Ford of our time.”
Greenblatt later apologized for the comparison -– but some commentators noted that it was even more apt than he may have meant. “Twitter is to Musk as The Dearborn Independent was to Ford,” the writer Parker Molloy wrote at the time.
Last month in Dearborn, which today has a large Arab/Muslim community, neo-Nazi activists wearing swastika armbands staged an anti-Muslim rally. Their choice of venue carried historical echoes: They organized outside the Henry Ford Centennial Library.
The Fair Lane team is aware of the modern significance of Ford’s antisemitism, they said.
“Populist movements, they always end up using antisemitism as some sort of way to recruit people to their cause,” Eighmey told JTA. “And it’s a reality that I hope, after people leave their experience here, they do reflect on it and see, ‘Wow, wait a minute. Is this happening right now around me?’”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Jewish artists face a relentless culture war over Israel. Some are building a way around it.
The pop star P!nk went into Rosh Hashanah explaining herself.
After sharing a post calling for rapper Macklemore to be dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour over his pro-Palestinian performances, the Jewish singer faced a backlash of her own. On Friday, she clarified that she supported Palestinian humanity, opposed silencing artists and wanted room to express Jewish fear without being accused of endorsing Israel’s war.
Macklemore, meanwhile, said his criticism of Israel was not directed at Jews. Their exchange captured how quickly an argument about a performance can become a fight over identity — and who gets to define someone else’s.
Nearly three years after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, those fights are becoming part of the ordinary business of culture: promoting a movie, booking a concert, selling a manuscript. And some Jewish artists and executives are responding by building new places to take their work.
Consider Gal Gadot. While promoting her new Prime Video thriller, The Runner, the Israeli actress and former IDF soldier appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last week, where she and Kimmel blew shofars for Rosh Hashanah. “Why platform her?” read a typical comment under the video on social media. Even sharing an episode became a point of contention: A member of MUNA, the musical guest, subsequently said the band’s performance had been prerecorded and that it hadn’t known who else would appear, adding a message supporting Palestinian freedom.
Artists critical of Israel face their own confrontations. Last month, Paramount accused Mark Ruffalo of invoking antisemitic tropes after he attacked the Ellison family’s corporate interests and Oracle’s work with the Israeli military. Ruffalo rejected the accusation, saying he was criticizing executives and government policy. The disputes involve different conduct and different stakes, but they keep returning to the same contested boundary between political criticism and prejudice.
In publishing, the consequences can be harder to see. Jewish and Israeli authors told The Wall Street Journal that agents had dropped them, editors had sought to remove Jewish or Israeli elements from manuscripts, and overseas publishers had become unwilling to buy their work. Some agents explicitly reject submissions from Zionists.
The picture is uneven: Jewish writers across the political spectrum continue to produce bestsellers, and a rejected manuscript alone cannot establish discrimination. But the accounts have helped spur new businesses.
A wave of new publishers has emerged to give Jewish and Israeli writers a home after agents and editors say mainstream houses have quietly frozen them out since Oct. 7: Neil Blair, best known as J.K. Rowling’s literary agent, launched High Line Publishing Studio last week to publish authors he says have been shut out elsewhere; Canary Publishing opened this month with the same mission; and Meg Keene Books, a new fiction imprint, will publish the American edition of Howard Jacobson’s Howl, which struggled to find a U.S. publisher despite its Booker Prize-winning author.
A similar response is taking shape in Hollywood. Former NBC co-chairman Ben Silverman is among the backers of SHOOQ, a new platform connecting Jewish filmmakers with investors and philanthropists. Its founders say talented storytellers need help finding the funding to get their projects made.
These ventures offer something practical to people exhausted by defending their right to participate: a publisher, a financial introduction, a way to keep working. They also raise a question that will outlast the latest celebrity argument: Can new Jewish cultural institutions help artists reach a wider public, or will an increasingly divided industry leave them speaking mainly to their own?
This essay first appeared in our Forwarding the News morning newsletter. Subscribe here.
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‘We return changed’: Michigan synagogue reopens for Rosh Hashanah six months after a gunman forced them out
Six months after he was injured protecting his synagogue, Danny Phillips helped carry a Torah back into its sanctuary. The security director was still recovering. So was the congregation.
On Friday evening, the Jews of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, returned to celebrate Rosh Hashanah in the sanctuary they had been forced to leave after a gunman attacked their synagogue in March. The Torah scrolls came home to their ark. Familiar prayers filled the room again. And the High Holidays’ ancient invitation to return took on a meaning no one there could have anticipated a year earlier.
“This room holds more than our services; it holds our memories,” Cantor Neil Michaels said in his welcome, recalling the weddings, coming-of-age ceremonies and farewells that had taken place there.
Throughout the service, clergy and congregational leaders spoke openly about what it meant to enter a sacred space where their sense of safety had been shattered. They described gratitude alongside grief, and the effort of caring for others while still struggling themselves. Returning to the building was one step toward learning to feel at home again.
The congregation’s co-presidents, Debra Gordon and Jodi Neff, gave that work a plainspoken expression: “How do you lead others when you are trying to steady yourself?” Gordon asked.
The answer, in the stories shared from the bimah, was that others helped carry the weight.
The prayer books came from other congregations. Temple Israel’s machzors had been destroyed in the attack, and the edition it used was out of print. Synagogues around the country sent replacements. Rabbi Harold Loss told worshippers that the book he picked up bore another congregation’s initials — a small reminder, held in his hands, of the community that had sustained them.
The children had already made their own return. Earlier that week, students came back to the early childhood center and received teddy bears marking the occasion with the Shehecheyanu, the blessing of gratitude for reaching a significant moment. An educator recalled a parent saying that, after six months in which nothing had felt normal, the first day back finally did.
Their neighbors had helped make the journey possible. On the day of the attack, the Chaldean Christian community’s Shenandoah Country Club across the street sheltered children and teachers. The following evening, it hosted the congregation for Shabbat. At the holiday service, Temple Israel’s leaders again thanked those neighbors, along with the staff, first responders and restoration workers who helped sustain and rebuild their community.
Coming home still required protection. The March 12 attacker drove a truck into the synagogue and exchanged gunfire with security personnel while preschoolers were inside. The reopening included additional security measures. Temple Israel’s Rabbi Josh Bennett has also spoken about the emotional and financial difficulty of making a synagogue secure while preserving its welcome — a challenge facing Jewish congregations far beyond Michigan.
Near the end of their remarks, the co-presidents described teshuvah, the season’s work of return, as something that allowed room for everything the congregation had endured.
“We return changed,” Neff said, “but still rooted.”
This essay first appeared in our Forwarding the News morning newsletter. Subscribe here.
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