Uncategorized
These Jewish artists are searching for home — at America’s only Catholic historically Black university
(JTA) — The class does not begin with a lecture. Instead, Neta Elkayam stands at the front of the room and sings. Usually in the Moroccan Arabic of her ancestors, rather than her native Hebrew.
The students — most of them Black, most of them American, many of them encountering Jewish culture for the first time — do not ask what the lyrics mean. They listen. They feel something, and it’s the feeling that eventually leads to learning.
“Seeing me perform live reveals a common ground, the desire we all share to understand our origins, a search for the lost voices of our ancestors,” Elkayam said in an interview. “The fact that I am singing not in English but in an African language resonates with the students and helps propel them on their own quest.”
The scene has become familiar at Xavier University of Louisiana, the nation’s only Catholic historically Black university, where Elkayam and her partner in life and art, Amit Hai Cohen, have spent the past two years as visiting artists and instructors. Their course, an immersive, multidisciplinary exploration of music, memory, diaspora and interfaith exchange, grew out of an initiative to increase understanding between the Black and Jewish communities. It is now one of the most sought-after electives on campus, recommended by students by word of mouth.
It is an unlikely setting for two Israeli artists whose work has been shaped by Morocco, Jerusalem, Marseille and Paris, and whose creative lives have long resisted fixed categories. Yet Xavier has become a place where their music, pedagogy and personal histories suddenly make sense together.
It is also the place where they now face a crossroads.
After two years of teaching, performing and building cultural bridges in New Orleans, the private funding that brought them to Xavier has ended. The university wants them to stay. But whether they can remains uncertain, a predicament reflecting a wider strain on the institution itself.
Xavier University is facing significant financial uncertainty, underscored by recent layoffs even as it received a major gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott that offered partial relief. At the same time, moves by the Trump administration to cut or reshape federal higher-education programs have disrupted key funding streams the university relies on, adding to the instability.
For Elkayam and Cohen, who have spent their careers moving along what they call the “Jerusalem-Morocco axis,” the question is no longer how to live between places, but whether that in-between can become a home.
Long before New Orleans entered the picture, Elkayam and Cohen were already artists of transit and connection.
Elkayam, 45, rose to prominence in Israel, Europe and Morocco for her reinterpretations of North African Jewish music, not as preservation, but as reinvention. Born in Netivot, on Israel’s geographic and social periphery, she grew up acutely aware of the ruptures many Mizrahi Jews feel: the distance from ancestral languages, sounds and stories. Her work has become a way to address that loss, offering a path back to connection beyond nostalgia.
Drawing on Andalusian, Amazigh (Berber) and Jewish liturgical traditions, she folds in elements of jazz, rock and contemporary performance art. Her sensibility is evident in projects like “Hilula,” a multidisciplinary opera blending drag, Torah study and live music, and “Arénas,” a collaboration built around archival recordings of women from Morocco’s Atlas Mountains who passed through a transit camp in Marseille on their way to Israel.
Cohen, 43, has worked in music, cinema and visual installation, often in collaboration with artists from Morocco. He recently explored memory and ritual across Judaism, Christianity and Islam through a ceiling installation for the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem weaving together the elements from all three faiths.
Together, the couple built ambitious, research-driven projects that blurred the line between scholarship and performance. Their collaborators included towering figures of North African Jewish music — among them the Algerian pianist Maurice El Médioni — as well as Moroccan Muslim artists and Gnawa masters.
“We’re not interested in freezing the past,” Cohen said. “We’re interested in what happens when you improvise inside it.”
That ethos drew the attention of scholars such as Chris Silver, a professor at McGill University who studies North African music and Jewish-Muslim history. Silver describes their approach as not merely performing an inherited repertoire, but actively shaping how the past is understood and carried forward.
“As a scholar focused on the relationship of music to history, I marvel at what sometimes feels like their historiographical approach, in which their music builds on a well-known and lesser-known past, is in dialogue with the contemporary, and is future-oriented, contributing to and shaping the sounds of the possible and what may yet be,” Silver said.
For Flo Low, the founder of Bamah, the nonprofit that brought the couple to Xavier University two years ago, the future Silver describes crystallized in a single moment.
Low, an American Jew who has lived in Israel, first saw Elkayam perform in Jerusalem in 2018, at an outdoor concert beneath the walls of the Old City. She expected virtuosity. What she did not expect, she said, was what happened next.
“Neta started singing in Moroccan Arabic,” Low recalled, “and thousands of people in the audience were singing along with her. Her music is allowing so many people in the Jewish world to reconnect with their Jewish roots through their music.”
For Low, who had been working to build cultural exchange programs between Israeli artists and American institutions, the scene was revelatory.
“I knew at that moment that I wanted to bring Neta and her partner Amit to the United States,” Low said. “If they could inspire me and thousands of others in a single performance, I could only imagine what they might do with a full semester, or even a full academic year, with students.”
Still, it would take several years, and an unexpected chain of events in New Orleans, before the partnership materialized.
The road to Xavier began with Kanye West, the musician who now goes by Ye.
In late 2022, as antisemitic rhetoric surged into mainstream discourse — fueled in part by Ye’s public outbursts — students at Xavier were finding themselves caught in a confusing digital and social crossfire.
“My freshman honors students were hearing a lot of people in their lives say that ‘Kanye has a point,’ and they wanted to know, as students at a historically Black university, ‘What is our response?’” recalled Shearon Roberts, a professor and associate dean at Xavier. “They realized: we don’t actually know Jewish people. Many students had never met a Jew at all.”
Roberts saw an opportunity for a different kind of education. “How about we start there?” she told them.
A small group of Xavier students launched an initiative that set out to address antisemitism and anti-Black racism together, rather than as separate problems.
They partnered with local Jewish organizations and faculty mentors, built relationships with students at nearby Tulane University, known for its high concentrations of Jewish students, and began hosting dialogues that emphasized shared histories of exclusion and violence — alongside the tensions and misunderstandings between the two communities. The students designed workshops, social media campaigns and campus events focused on media literacy and the warning signs of radicalization.
“We wanted to tackle that problem in our community,” Aarinii Parms-Green, one of the Xavier students, who graduated last month. “We saw it rising with Kanye West, Whoopi Goldberg, Kyrie Irving and other figures saying things like, ‘Black people are the real Jews’ or ‘Jews people control the media.’”
Parms-Green said the students were inspired by the history of Jewish-Black solidarity, from the civil rights movement to the Jewish academics fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s who found refuge at HBCUs.
Their project eventually won a national Department of Homeland Security award for innovative anti-extremism programming. (The federal program behind the award was shut down by the Trump administration earlier this year.)
The win led to a trip to Israel for the students and when they returned they wanted to sustain the connection, especially to Israel’s racially and ethnically diverse culture.
“The project started as a way to give back, to bring Black and Jewish students together and counter hate, and it just took off,” Parms-Green said.
After the attacks of Oct. 7, the work felt only more urgent.
“Instead of rushing to blame, people on campus asked questions,” Parms-Green said. “They wanted context. We didn’t see protests — there was more curiosity than anything.”
While it’s true that Xavier has not been a central hotspot of campus unrest around the war in Gaza, the atmosphere has not been entirely tranquil either. In June 2024, administrators canceled a commencement address by United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield after students organized a petition and raised objections over her role in U.S. policy backing Israel in the Gaza war.
Still, just as the Xavier students were looking for ways to engage with Israelis, Elkayam and Cohen were searching for a way to stay abroad, wary of returning to a country in turmoil.
They had landed in Morocco two days before Oct. 7, planning on little more than a week of concerts and screenings. The documentary they were showing, directed by a local Muslim filmmaker and titled “In Your Eyes I See My Country,” follows the two as they travel through Morocco, searching for traces of the Jewish world their families left behind, a world that once numbered about a quarter million people and has dwindled to only a few thousand.
On Oct. 6, they gathered to celebrate at Hachkar’s home with a mostly Muslim circle of friends where they recited the Jewish blessing over wine that marks the start of the Sabbath, and sang, and shared stories late into the night. The next morning, they woke to the news.
With two young children and a single suitcase, they faced a choice.
“We quickly understood the insanity that was coming to Israel and decided to stay,” Cohen said.
Their outlook proved to be a premonition of how many Israelis would come to feel over the next two years, as more than 69,000 residents left Israel in 2025 alone, contributing to sustained negative migration and one of the largest modern spikes in emigration from the country.
For Elkayam and Cohen, the decision was about preserving relationships and the ability to think, mourn and speak honestly, especially given how unpopular their left-wing views have become in Israel after Oct. 7.
“It might sound weird but we felt safer in a sense in Morocco, to be among our friends and accepted with our complexities, where we can talk about different narratives at once.” Cohen said. “In Israel, inside the family, you can’t always speak freely. I don’t want to fight with my dad about politics. I am not going to let it happen.”
After three months, living in friends’ homes and watching events unfold from a painful distance, Bamah brought the couple to Xavier University.
At Xavier, Elkayam and Cohen were not treated like visiting artists passing through. They were, as Roberts, their host and champion on campus, put it, “part of the university’s extended family.”
“They are a model for what it looks like to have members of the Jewish diaspora — Israeli citizens, artists, educators — serve, teach and mentor at a historically Black university,” she said. “And they’ve always led with their artistry first. When you connect with people through art, through beauty, everything opens up in a different way.”
Roberts continued, “If I brought someone who was like a Jewish studies expert or political or sociology expert, and they’re lecturing to these students about complex issues connected to Jewish identity, African American identity, Jewish or African diasporic identities, it might get lost in translation. But when Neta and Amit say, ‘All right, grab an instrument. Let’s sing, let’s improvise,’ they’re all speaking one language, even though they don’t speak the same language.”
The warm embrace the couple has found at Xavier, including from Muslim faculty, comes at a moment when many Israeli academics report feeling the opposite: isolated, targeted, and professionally vulnerable on American campuses amid the Gaza war.
For Roberts, it’s no surprise that a historically Black university would be different. HBCUs, she says, know how to practice inclusion because they were founded as an answer to racial exclusion. “By nature, we welcome before we turn away,” she said.
At the same time, Elkayam and Cohen’s particular outlook and style have helped them avoid the kinds of conflicts and tensions Israelis have faced at other universities. By their own account and that of supporters like Roberts, their work is deeply political, but because they communicate through their art, it is harder to flatten them into a caricature or cast them as political adversaries.
Their success at navigating an era prone to strife isn’t confined to Xavier or New Orleans.
In August, Elkayam and Cohen traveled to Flint, Michigan, where they appeared on stage with their New Orleans band alongside musicians from the National Arab Orchestra, in a concert co-presented by Bamah and the Flint Jewish Federation.
Titled “Songs of Our Mothers,” the program represented a rare collaboration in a moment when Israeli artists often face boycotts. The evening unfolded quietly, without protest and without political interference.
At Xavier, each semester culminates in a public showcase of student work, where projects ranging from short films to musical performances and research presentations are shared with classmates, faculty and community members.
“One student told me he would have never been able to voice how I feel on an artistic level with the class,” Parms-Green said. “He left that class feeling more confident, his ability to kind of just put himself out there.”
For all their travel, Elkayam and Cohen have begun to lay down something like roots in New Orleans. They built a band with local musicians, adapting their repertoire of Moroccan Jewish songs to the rhythms of the city, letting brass and jazz sensibilities seep into the arrangements. They were struck by how New Orleans’ second-line parades echoed Morocco’s street rituals, where music spills into public space and celebration becomes something the whole neighborhood moves through together.
“It’s like when I went to Morocco for the first time and was totally shocked,” Elkayam said. “You see music inside people’s homes, art inside people’s homes. Suddenly all the hierarchies in your head collapse — what’s ‘folklore,’ what’s ‘high art,’ what’s ‘low.’ We came back from Morocco as different people, it blew our minds. And it’s the same here, discovering America — the non-stereotypical America, the one they don’t market to you.”
Last year, they brought to New Orleans one of the figures who helped unlock their Moroccan heritage: Reuven Abergel, a founder of Israel’s Black Panthers.
The movement, started by Mizrahi Jews in the 1970s, intentionally borrowed its name and tactics from the American Black Panther Party to protest the systemic discrimination and domination of Israeli society by Ashkenazi elites. A longtime mentor and friend to Elkayam and Cogen, Abergel met with the students at Xavier, creating a bridge between two distinct histories of marginalization and resistance. Cohen filmed the visit for an ongoing documentary about Abergel’s life, capturing the moment where the “Jerusalem-Morocco axis” met the American South.
Cohen also helped create a digital exhibition marking 100 years of The Louisiana Weekly, the city’s historic Black newspaper, helping research its archives and design the site. The work pulled him into the civic memory of the place, into conversations about race, migration and culture that felt familiar and new at once.
At home, the process has been quieter and more complicated. In our conversation, Elkayam described feeling like an immigrant for the first time, even as her children, almost without noticing, were becoming New Orleanians. They now speak mostly English to their parents. They know the songs, the parades, the small neighborhood rituals. “They’re really from here,” she said. “They grew up inside the parades. For them, this is how you celebrate.”
The couple are also seeing transformation in themselves. The war, the distance, the months in Morocco and now New Orleans have left them feeling untethered from the national identities they had once inhabited. They miss Jerusalem and the community that formed around them there. They also recognize the relief in being in a place where they are not required to perform loyalty, and where it is possible to hold grief and criticism in the same breath.
“We don’t feel Israeli in the rooted sense of the word,” Cohen said. “What matters to us now is not the place, it’s the people.”
They have begun to think of themselves as Jews in the diaspora — not as a temporary condition but as a way of moving through the world.
What happens next is unclear. They are currently in the United States on J-1 visiting scholar visas sponsored by Xavier University, but the university cannot offer enough funding to hire them as full-time instructors. Without outside support to replace the now-expired Bamah grant, they risk losing their visas and their right to stay in the country.
For now, they keep teaching, composing and building relationships, unsure how long New Orleans will remain home.
“I really feel like a Jewish migrant right now, in the most basic sense of the word,” Cohen said.
Elkayam offered a caveat. She has come to see their time abroad as a fragile privilege — a brief chance to heal while others, especially Mizrahim without the means to leave, remain stuck.
Grateful yet uneasy, she misses the heavy responsibility she once carried in Jerusalem: showing up for her community, helping hold its history, telling stories that might otherwise disappear. From New Orleans, she allows herself to rest, even as she knows the future is uncertain.
“Maybe, God willing, we’ll be able to continue here,” she said, “because yeah, I don’t always miss that role.”
The post These Jewish artists are searching for home — at America’s only Catholic historically Black university appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Evan Gershkovich’s prison memoir begins with a Soviet Jewish exodus
A few days after Russian security agents arrested Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on a trip in March 2023, his lawyers showed him a slip of paper with messages from home. He was being held alone, in what Russian prisons call “quarantine:” two weeks without a cellmate before joining the general population. His eyes went straight to the note from his mother.
Soon he would start getting kosher food, Ella Milman wrote, and then added: “If you come home with sidelocks, I’ll understand.”
It was a joke, and a very Jewish one. Gershkovich grew up in a secular family of Soviet émigrés, where being Jewish had more to do with family history and dark humor than with religious practice. His mother was ribbing him that a few weeks of kosher prison food might send him home looking like a yeshiva boy.
Sitting across from the investigator building his espionage case, Gershkovich grinned. His mother, he realized, still had her sense of humor, and that was exactly what he needed.
The kosher food wasn’t a joke. That night, with Passover days away, a local rabbi sent him stacks of matzo.
The scene appears in This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story, Gershkovich’s memoir of his arrest, his 16 months behind bars and his release in the most elaborate U.S.-Russia prisoner swap since the Cold War. The book was published Tuesday.
Most of the coverage is about the prison. But Jewish history runs through the book from its first pages. Gershkovich’s great-grandfather was arrested during Stalin’s purges and vanished. His mother was laughed out of a journalism school application once the clerk saw her passport. And when he moved to Moscow as a young reporter, a Russian coworker needled him with an old stereotype about Jews and money.
The family that left
Gershkovich was born in New Jersey in 1991, two months before the Soviet Union fell apart. His parents had come over in 1979. Thousands of Soviet Jews were leaving at the time, helped by a U.S. law that linked trade with Moscow to whether its citizens were allowed to emigrate.
His mother flew out of Leningrad with her mother and ended up in Detroit. His father’s family came from Odessa and settled in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn neighborhood people call Little Odessa. In those years, his father later joked, Soviet Jews who ran into each other on the street skipped the hellos and just asked where the other was going.
For his father’s side, the decision was easy. Gershkovich’s great-grandfather was arrested in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s purges, and never seen again. His grandfather Mark spent years moving from city to city, afraid of being targeted next, and later dreaded the day his own son would be drafted into the Soviet army.
A Jew on paper
Gershkovich’s mother, Ella, was born in 1957, a few years after the “doctors’ plot,” a Stalin-era campaign that accused Jewish physicians of conspiring to kill Soviet leaders. One of the doctors caught up in it had been a neighbor in her family’s communal apartment.
Her father had wanted to name her Etya, after his late sister. Worried that an obviously Jewish name would draw attention, her mother pushed for Ella instead. It didn’t matter. The family name Milman gave her away, and Soviet passports listed each citizen’s ethnicity. Hers said “Jew.”
Ella dreamed of becoming a writer. When she applied to the journalism department at Leningrad State University, the woman taking her application glanced at her passport and laughed. She studied shipbuilding instead, listened to the Rolling Stones, and heard rumors that the Kremlin planned to deport Jews to Birobidzhan, a remote Soviet region near the Chinese border that had apparently been set up as a Jewish homeland.
When she finally emigrated to America at 22, she sewed a pair of gold earrings from her late father into her skirt’s waistband to get them past customs. Once the plane took off, she couldn’t stop laughing and crying.
A generation later, her son became the journalist she wasn’t allowed to be, and then a prisoner of the state that had turned her away.
Ella and her husand settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where Gershkovich and his sister spent Saturday mornings with a Russian tutor, and holidays meant trips to the Russian groceries and Uzbek grills of Brighton Beach. Gershkovich came to think of himself as Jewish-Russian-American. Russia’s war in Ukraine later forced him to ask why that label had never included Ukraine, given that his father’s family came from Odessa.
The empty chair
In 2017, Gershkovich moved to Moscow to report for The Moscow Times. On one of his first days, he asked a colleague when staff got paid. She laughed and told him his Odessan roots were showing, a jab about Jews and money that served as his introduction to Russian workplace culture.
On a later trip to Odessa, he visited a Jewish museum that displayed a 1953 Soviet propaganda article from the doctors’ plot era. It claimed that the Joint, the New York-based Jewish relief organization, was a front for American intelligence. Gershkovich recalls thinking that Moscow was getting paranoid again, while hoping things hadn’t gotten that bad. A few years later, Russia accused him of spying for the United States.
Gershkovich’s arrest came a week before Passover. That spring, many American Jews left an empty seat for him at their Seders, and activists later sent him letters for Rosh Hashanah. Both gestures deliberately echoed the movement to free Soviet Jewry, the same campaign that had helped free his parents. Natan Sharansky, the most famous Soviet Jewish dissident, who was himself released in a 1986 prisoner swap, advocated publicly for his release.
In July 2024, two weeks after a Russian court sentenced Gershkovich to 16 years in a maximum-security prison, he was freed in a prisoner exchange in Ankara, Turkey. Jewish groups celebrated, and the Orthodox Union posted the traditional blessing thanking God for freeing captives.
His great-grandfather was taken in 1937 and never came home. Eighty-seven years later, his great-grandson did.
The post Evan Gershkovich’s prison memoir begins with a Soviet Jewish exodus appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
More Michigan Jews sign a petition pressuring El-Sayed on Israel. Will it matter?
(JTA) — ANN ARBOR – The activists on the Zoom supporting Abdul El-Sayed knew they faced an uphill climb when it came to persuading their fellow Jewish Democrats to overcome their concerns about the Michigan Senate candidate and vote for their party’s nominee despite his strong disapproval of Israel.
Two progressive Jews, former Biden administration appointee Sam Bagenstos and Detroit Jews for Justice co-founder Hayley Sakwa, made the Jewish case for the candidate to a sometimes skeptical, sometimes combative crowd of around 30 people on Sunday night.
Sakwa and Bagenstos urged voters to prioritize the chance to put a check on the larger Trump agenda – including heavy immigration crackdowns and the rightward tilt of the federal judiciary – given that the Michigan seat could help determine who controls the legislative chamber.
But their appeal wasn’t enough for several of the people on the call, who less than two days later would sign on to the “Nonnegotiables” petition. Spearheaded by a group of Michigan Jewish clergy, the open letter calls for El-Sayed to moderate his views on Israel and affirm more vocal support for Jews in politics as a condition for earning their votes.
The 17 new names to the petition, shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency ahead of their release on Tuesday morning, include state Rep. Noah Arbit, the founder of the Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus.
Arbit recently gave a speech denouncing antisemitism on the floor of the Michigan House and has been critical of El-Sayed publicly: After progressive Jews recently hosted the candidate for a Rosh Hashanah dinner at their house, the representative accused them of “tokenism.” (Arbit declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.)
Other new names on the list include an elected University of Michigan regent and prominent local attorney, as well as several board members of the Jewish Democratic caucus, which itself is not endorsing a candidate in the race.
Concerns raised on the Sunday night Zoom call included El-Sayed’s opposition to Iron Dome funding for Israel and his earlier campaigning with anti-Israel streamer Hasan Piker, whom he has since distanced himself from. Some said they were worried he could open a door to a more hostile Democratic Party for Jews.
“With Abdul it sort of feels like letting a fox into the henhouse,” one said.
“I refuse to be anyone’s dhimmi,” another wrote in the chat, referring to a term for non-Muslims living under Islamic rule.
Yet any pressure Jewish Democratic critics of El-Sayed hope to place on the candidate are partly balanced out by the work of those such as Sakwa, who along with other Jewish liberals has to date secured 900 signatures pledging to vote for El-Sayed. A competing letter of Jewish voters pledging to back his Republican challenger, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, has picked up 524.
At the same time, the broader Democratic Party has ramped up its efforts to get elected officials in line behind the nominee. The El-Sayed campaign has yet to respond publicly to the “Nonnegotiables,” and with little more than a month to go before Election Day, it might not need to.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned with El-Sayed last week in Detroit, and the liberal-leaning editorial board of the Detroit Free Press, the state’s largest daily newspaper, endorsed the former county health director over the weekend.
The Free Press wrote that its own endorsement was against an “extremist” — referring to Rogers and President Donald Trump — in language that one bloc of Jewish voters also used to refer to their own decision to vote for Rogers over El-Sayed.
In addition, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish and has fiercely criticized El-Sayed for his past comments about Jews and Israel, endorsed and appeared with the candidate on a local liberal podcast hosted by a Jewish woman to project unity.
“There is no choice,” Nessel said.
But the conversation demonstrated that tensions still remain even with many Jewish Democrats who have thrown in their lot with El-Sayed.
“Is there space for a Jewish Zionist like myself?” she asked him. “Is there space for us in the big tent of the Democratic Party?”
“I believe in a big tent,” he answered. “I am committed to having a tent where we march in lock step on the 95% of issues that we agree on.”
But the attorney general, who cited the risk of antisemitic threats as the reason she skipped the party convention earlier this year, wasn’t done.
“The question many of us have is: Are you seeking our votes?” Nessel asked El-Sayed. “Do they matter to you?”
“Yes,” the candidate responded. “If you trust that I’ll lead well for the community, even if there’s an issue on which we deeply disagree, then I hope I can earn your vote.” Later, El-Sayed said, “I look forward to working” on the Jewish American Security Act, a bipartisan bill to institute new Jewish security measures, including in synagogues and on college campuses.
“We’ve had an uptick in antisemitism, and it is critical to protect Jewish Americans,” El-Sayed said.
As with Nessel, El-Sayed’s candidacy is pushing other Jewish Democrats to perform a difficult two-step: pushing for the party platform and against Trump, without getting too close to the candidate himself.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America, whose CEO, Halie Soifer, is a Michigan native, is also not endorsing in the race. Yet Soifer told JTA, “Jewish voters will support Democrats in large numbers in the midterms, including in Michigan.” She predicted that Rogers wouldn’t earn more than one-quarter of the Jewish vote.
“Jewish voters recognize that a vote for any Republican in 2026 is a vote for Donald Trump,” Soifer told JTA over text. “We know Jewish voters are a critical component of a winning Democratic coalition.”
Decky Alexander, who chairs the Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus, pointed to consistently high Democratic voting records for Jews in arguing that Jews still matter to the party’s coalition. She also favorably noted the Democratic National Committee’s recent announcement that it would establish a “Jewish American Council,” to convene in 2027.
“We can’t be distilled down to one vote or one idea,” Alexander told JTA.
One part of the state’s Jewish Democratic bloc unlikely to support El-Sayed: members of Temple Israel, the country’s largest Reform congregation. Speaking to the national publication The Free Press last week, several members, including a preschool teacher who was in the building when it was attacked in March, said El-Sayed’s apology for his earlier remarks about the temple was insufficient and that they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for him.
“No thinking Jew could vote for Abdul El-Sayed,” a former temple president told The Free Press.
None of the synagogue’s clergy signed the “Nonnegotiables” letter, or any other Jewish letter circulating about El-Sayed. But one of the temple’s rabbis told congregants in a Kol Nidre sermon that they had a say in drafting it, stating, “Our full participation in American political life is also non-negotiable.”
“No one should have to pass a test about Israel to be welcomed into a coalition on a campus or in a political party,” Rabbi Josh Bennett told his congregation, which had convened in the Temple Israel building for the High Holidays for the first time since the March attack. Rabbi Jen Lader, also of Temple Israel, recently testified before Congress to advocate for the Jewish American Security Act.
As Rogers has looked to win over dissatisfied Jews to his campaign, he has also moved toward El-Sayed on at least one issue tangentially related to Israel: opposition to the war in Iran. Initially a supporter of the war, Rogers in recent days has said he thinks it should “end quickly.”
El-Sayed, meanwhile, has raised eyebrows of his own in recent days. He dithered on denouncing the Iranian regime when urged to by an Iranian Christian college student, and appeared at a Dearborn fundraiser with Osama Siblani, a local Arab-American activist and newspaper publisher who once stated at a rally, “We are not going to be intimidated by staying silent when they say Hamas is a terrorist organization.”
The “Nonnegotiables” petition was launched earlier this month by a group of more than a dozen Michigan Jewish clergy after a series of apologies by El-Sayed to Jewish audiences for past comments he had made about the Temple Israel attack. The candidate needs to do more to earn the community’s confidence, the campaign’s organizers have told JTA.
“A large number of Jews haven’t decided how they will vote,” David Kramer, the caucus’s vice chair and one of the new signers, told JTA about the letter’s potential influence. “I speak to these people every day. Regardless of how they vote, Michigan Jews want and deserve to feel safe and have a seat at the table.”
As the Zoom call wrapped, some of the assembled Jews said they would vote for El-Sayed, even if reluctantly. Alexander of the state’s Jewish Democratic Caucus, who signed the letter supporting him, told the crowd the candidate has nothing to hide, even if they don’t like what he says.
“He’s basically stated what he believes,” she said. “And you have to decide if that’s the word for you.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post More Michigan Jews sign a petition pressuring El-Sayed on Israel. Will it matter? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Irish national soccer team won’t shake hands with Israel after win
(JTA) — It only took 25 minutes of play for the Irish national soccer team to build a 3-0 lead over Israel in the countries’ UEFA Nations League B match on Sunday. But there were decades of bad blood that preceded Ireland’s shutout victory in a game dominated more by the geopolitics of the Gaza war than about sports. One soccer writer described it as “arguably one of the most contentious football matches of this century.”
At the match, held in a mostly empty stadium in the neutral site of Debrecen, Hungary, the Irish players wore black armbands and bowed their heads in protest during the Israeli national anthem. There were no pre- or postgame handshakes, and one Irish player declined to participate altogether, citing his “personal belief that the killing of innocent people is wrong.”
Ireland’s soccer federation did not reserve tickets for its fans, and the country’s public broadcaster scaled back its coverage of the game. The teams are set to meet again on Oct. 4 in Serbia, this time with Ireland as the “home” team.
Ireland and Israel have a long history of icy relations. Ireland became the first member of the European Union to call for an independent Palestinian country in 1980, and was among the first of the Western European countries to recognize an official Palestinian state in 2024. Israel closed its embassy in Dublin in response. Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin has rejected claims that his country’s sharp criticism of Israel bleeds into antisemitism.
In the months leading up to Sunday’s match, Ireland’s football governing body faced intense pressure to boycott the match. At a meeting in July, the Football Association of Ireland voted 75-32, with three abstentions, in favor of proceeding with the match, “while acknowledging the strength of feeling regarding support for Palestine.” The motion also noted that a boycott would come with UEFA sanctions, both financial and competitive: In League B matches, mid-tier nations seek to advance to the top division and boost their chances of qualifying for the quadrennial World Cup tournament. The Irish team itself also held a last-minute vote over whether to participate.
Earlier this month, more than 160 Irish athletes and sports figures signed an open letter calling on the national team to pull out of the match. The signatories included former Irish national team head coach Brian Kerr — who had led Ireland to a 2-2 draw against Israel in a 2005 match in Dublin that also took place amid protests.
Former Irish national team star Kevin Kilbane also authored a column in The Irish Times, writing, “Ireland should not play Israel. Not in Dublin, not in Hungary, not in Serbia. Not when Israel is committing genocide.” Israel denies the charge of genocide.
There were also a number of public barbs exchanged between leaders of the two countries and their football associations.
At a press conference last week, Irish coach Heimir Hallgrímsson replied to questions about the match by saying, “We are not playing with genocide, we are playing against genocide. We are playing against Israel; we are not playing with Israel.”
Israel’s football association responded to that comment with a post on X, writing, “We have contributed to the world and humanity in countless fields, earning an impressive number of Nobel Prizes along the way. Unfortunately, we have not yet found a cure for stupidity, ignorance and hypocrisy displayed by the @IrelandFootball team coach. We’re not playing with ignorance, hypocrisy and stupidity. We’re playing against the coach who embodies them.”
That drew a rebuke from Martin, who told reporters, “They are unacceptable remarks and should be withdrawn.”
And on Sunday, the morning of the match, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar posted a lengthy tweet referencing the 1939 Irish squad that gave a Nazi salute before a game against the German national team.
“Almost 90 years have passed. Ireland’s unique talent for finding itself on the wrong side of history remains intact,” Sa’ar wrote. “Back then, they gave the Nazi salute. This time, they stand on the side of Palestinian terrorism. Above the black armbands the Irish players will wear tonight flies the black flag of jihadism.”
After the match, Israeli captain Manor Solomon said the Irish players who bowed their heads during the Israeli anthem “don’t interest me.”
“We have a country 10 times better than theirs, stronger, an amazing country with amazing people,” said Solomon, who plays in the English Championship league. “We are proud to wear the team shirt and to be Israelis. We are proud of our state and of our soldiers. [The Irish] can play all their tricks. We are Israelis and love the country. And that will always be the case.”
The post Irish national soccer team won’t shake hands with Israel after win appeared first on The Forward.
