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These NYC college students want to kickstart a Jewish arts renaissance
(New York Jewish Week) – On a mild Thursday evening in late March, some 100 people gathered at Kistuné, a hip café and bar in the West Village that’s associated with the French-Japanese “lifestyle brand” of the same name.
Sipping on custom-designed cocktails — like the Refusenik, a Moscow mule with a “resilient mix of vodka, ginger beer and lime” or the Tamar Collinsky, a Tom Collins reimagined and given “very possibly the name of someone you went to summer camp with” — guests mingled, discussing topics as varied as college classes, career choices and their favorite poetry.
Nearly everyone in the room was a Jewish artist or writer; the gathering was to celebrate the launch of “Verklempt!”, a new quarterly print magazine that bills itself as “The Magazine of Jewish Art and Literature.” The 75-page first issue is filled with paintings, photographs, drawings, poetry and fiction solicited from more than 30 Jewish artists around the country.
“We see the Jewish community as a place where people want to engage with fiction and poetry more seriously,” editor-in-chief Yoni Gutenmacher, a 24-year-old creative writing MFA candidate at Brooklyn College, told the crowd, which included two of his brothers and his parents. “This is a personal dream of mine so I’m very happy that it’s real.”
Specialty cocktails were on offer at the launch party of “Verklempt!” (David Gutenmacher)
The aim of “Verklempt!” (Yiddish-English slang for “overcome with emotion”) is to publish and amplify art and literature with a specifically Jewish lens — hopefully in a way that encourages pursuing art as part of a spiritual journey, Gutenmacher explained. A painting of a man praying with tefillin and tallit; a poem about Leopold Bloom, the Jewish anti-hero of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and a collage of the Lubavitcher Rebbe and a drawing of a half-drunk bottle of Kedem grape juice all grace the pages of the first issue, whose theme is, fittingly, “On Creation.”
“I write fiction and I have a whole friend group and community in New York who aren’t Jewish, and if they are, they’re not really interested in religious or communal Jewish life,” Gutenmacher told the New York Jewish Week. “Then I have my Jewish life on the Upper West Side and all my friends from summer camp and school and everything else who are not really interested in engaging with high quality literature and art. At certain points in my life, I felt like I kind of have to choose.”
By working on “Verklempt!” he’s come to understand that those choices shouldn’t have to be so mutually exclusive, he said.
The journal is a project of Havurah (Hebrew for “fellowship”), an organization founded by two Modern Orthodox sophomores at NYU whose lofty but determined vision is to be the “bearer of a new Jewish renaissance” for young Jews in New York, according to their impressively designed website.
Founded by Daniella Messer and Eitan Gutenmacher (Yoni’s younger brother), Havurah aims to create a gathering place, a “kehila (community) of frum Jewish creatives” — both virtual and IRL — where Jewish artists can meet and mingle, make art, perform and share ideas about how all of those endeavors connect them to religious life. One of their goals, according to the “manifesto” on their website, is to “invigorate a generation of young Jews and restore the Jewish artistic impulse.”
While “Verklempt!” has wide-reaching aspirations — the artists they hope to publish can come from anywhere and be of any age — Havurah was founded to appeal to a hyper-specific community: young New York artists who are dedicated to being Jewish and Jews who are dedicated to being artists.
The idea arose during Gutenmacher and Messer’s freshman year of college in the winter of 2022. “I remember going to Israel over winter break, experiencing such an obvious realization that art and creativity is so integral to religious lifestyles,” Eitan Gutemacher, who is studying studio art at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, told the New York Jewish Week. “But [at NYU] for example, in a lot of the artistic programs, if you’re a religious Jew, you are usually the only religious Jew in the classroom, and, more often than not, the only one in the department.”
“Daniella and I wanted to create a community of lively Judaism expressed in any artistic and creative way,” he added.
With funding from the Next Gen Inc., “a start-up style incubator” that’s a project of the World Jewish Congress and World Union of Jewish Students, Havurah pursues their vision through a variety of avenues, including real-life events and performances, such as art fairs, concerts and Torah study conversations held at bars, cafés, apartments and synagogues.
In addition to the physical journal, the organization’s high-design web site publishes essays, interviews, criticism, reviews and Torah commentaries, as well as “Sessions” for musicians, which are professionally mixed video tapings of live music performances similar to NPR’s “Tiny Desk Concerts.”
“When Eitan and Daniella approached us and told us about Havurah, we knew instantly they would be a great fit for our incubator,” Yoni Hammerman, senior manager of the NextGen, told the New York Jewish Week via email. “Their work, to build a university student-run art community, perfectly aligns with NextGen’s mission of amplifying and supporting the voice and the work of Jewish student leaders.”
The Havurah staff — all eight of them are volunteers — believe that their offerings are the first time people who are both deeply involved in their Jewish communities and in their artistic pursuits have had a definable place to gather and collaborate that celebrate both.
“It’s so simple that you’d think it would already exist,” said Yosef Itzkowitz, a 24-year-old artist and poet who has three drawings in the first edition of “Verklempt!” “Jews love writing and art, and love talking about writing and art,” so why not make it happen?” Itzkowitz got involved, he said, after Eitan Gutenmacher reached out via Instagram.
Of course, similar initiatives have and do exist — for example, the fiction journal JewishFiction.net publishes original and in translation work from Jewish writers around the globe, while CANVAS matches emerging Jewish multimedia artists with funders and grants. The Jewish Book Council puts out their literary journal “Paper Brigade” with art, interviews, essays and fiction, once a year.
On Tuesday, the inaugural Jewish Writers’ Initiative Digital Storytellers Lab showcased works by creators taking part in an eight-month fellowship supported by the Maimonides Fund. The work shown at Manhattan’s Rubin Museum included animation for Jewish kids, pop songs about women in the Bible and a podcast about the gay Jewish dating scene in Los Angeles.
According to Yona Verwer, founder of the Jewish Arts Salon — “a global network for Jewish visual art” that does regular programming in New York — while what the group is doing may not be “new,” one of the most exciting things about Havurah is how young its members are and how dedicated they are to the cause.
“Being geared specifically towards people in their 20s” attracts people who have to be “very enthusiastic and very into it,” Verwer said.
“It’s interesting to see this immense interest in Jewish arts” from younger generations, added Verwer, who started the salon in 2008 and now serves as an advisor for Havurah. “When I started the salon, it was something that a lot of people were not interested in. Things have really changed over the years and it’s great to see people so dedicated.”
Yoni Gutenmacher reads a poem at the launch party of “Verklempt!”, March 30, 2023. (David Gutenmacher)
As of now, contributors are unpaid, though there are hopes that the cover price of “Verklempt!” ($10) may help change that. “There’s a lot of places I see where you submit completely unpaid and it is completely not worth my time,” said Kim Kyne, a 32-year-old painter and sculptor from Los Angeles whose painting was in the first edition of the journal.
“What felt different about this is it feels like everyone’s all in it together,” she added. “Yoni and his brother are super humble and super young. What was really attractive to me about it is being connected with all these other Jewish artists in a way that I haven’t been before.”
Messer and the Gutenmacher brothers understand that the media and literary magazine worlds are very crowded spaces, especially in New York. But for now, they are embracing the heimish vibe and say they’ve seen, first-hand, just how many Jewish artists were looking for a space exactly like this. Submissions are already arriving for the next edition of “Verklempt!”, which is set to be published this summer, and according to Gutenmacher, he doesn’t recognize any of the names — meaning no repeats of last time, and no friends submitting as a favor.
“Of course, there are Jewish artists all over the world. But it feels different because it has more of a modern take and the younger feel,” Kyne said. “It feels like the beginning of a movement.”
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The post These NYC college students want to kickstart a Jewish arts renaissance appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The note Netanyahu would never write
George H.W. Bush left the Oval Office on January 20, 1993, after losing his bid for reelection to Bill Clinton. On the desk, he left his successor a handwritten note wishing him well with obvious sincerity and ending with an expression of democratic grace: “Your success now is our country’s success.”
It is hard to imagine a sentence further removed from Benjamin Netanyahu’s conception of political power. When Naftali Bennett replaced him as prime minister in 2021, Bennett arrived at the traditional handover expecting a serious transfer of responsibility for a country facing Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and other threats.
In an interview this weekend with Israel’s Channel 12, Bennett said he cleared his day, and was shocked when Netanyahu gave him about 30 minutes, volunteered little, asked to keep living in the prime minister’s residence and for state funding for his wife’s car, and otherwise was eager to end the encounter.
The contrast goes far beyond manners. Netanyahu treats political defeat as something closer to dispossession, and those who threaten his hold on power as enemies whose legitimacy must be destroyed. Bennett said Netanyahu had warned him before the new government was sworn in that if he went ahead with it, he would deploy “all the heavy artillery” to brand him a traitor. Bennett says Netanyahu, whom he called an “anarchist,” kept his word, via a “poison machine” – a sophisticated social media influence operation featuring mass Whatsapp groups and bot accounts amplifying talking points – such as the theory, now popular on the right, that the Shin Bet helped Hamas attack Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in order to harm Netanyahu.
Five years later, the target has changed: It is former military chief Gadi Eisenkot. The method has not.
Eisenkot is now Netanyahu’s most dangerous electoral challenger, an extraordinary target for such a campaign. Eisenkot spent four decades in the IDF and rose to its chief of staff. After the Hamas attacks, he joined Netanyahu’s war cabinet for a few months, despite their political disagreements. His son Gal was killed fighting in Gaza in December 2023, and two nephews were killed during military operations in Gaza. Yet even Israel’s increasingly brutal politics seem unable to leave room for a measure of respect.
Instead, Eisenkot is portrayed as dangerous, weak and somehow beyond the bounds of acceptable government. His military record itself becomes evidence against him. His willingness to construct a governing majority that might depend on an Arab party – something that is essential for the societal health of Israel, whose population is 20 percent Arab – is presented as something inherently disqualifying. The objective is larger than defeating his arguments. It is to make his accession to power appear intolerable.
From smear campaign to security risk
I was reminded of this Sunday while appearing on television with Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who spied for Israel, spent some 30 years in an American prison, and now hopes to enter Israeli politics. Pollard, who over the weekend endorsed a splinter right-wing party and seemingly hopes to parlay that into a Knesset seat or other position, comes at Netanyahu from the ultra-nationalist far-right, but essentially supports him. He explained that he could never support a government headed by Eisenkot because Eisenkot had weakened the IDF as chief of staff.
There is an obvious problem with that argument. Eisenkot served as the IDF chief of staff from 2015 to 2019. Netanyahu was prime minister throughout his tenure. If Eisenkot presided over the degradation of the Israeli military, Netanyahu presided over Eisenkot. It is utter nonsense, but that is how the poison machine works. Responsibility flows away from Netanyahu while culpability attaches itself to whoever threatens him. Institutions that Netanyahu himself headed somehow become the failures of his opponents.
Now this has collided with a matter of security for candidates.
Eisenkot’s campaign says threats against him – from the rabble whipped up by Netanyahu – are increasing as the election approaches, and he has requested state protection. The Shin Bet in recent days declined to provide an armed security detail, although it will provide intelligence assistance.
That decision is astonishing in a country whose domestic security service once failed catastrophically in preventing the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin – after months in which he was called a traitor, a murderer and a Nazi by a campaign of agitation presided over by the young Netanyahu.
The lesson Israel drew was supposed to be permanent: when serious political incitement converges with a credible physical threat, the state errs on the side of protecting its leaders.
The contrast becomes almost grotesque when one considers whom the state does protect. Netanyahu’s son Yair who has lived in Miami for years, receives Shin Bet protection there. Yair, who is 35, avoided military service and has made himself a regular participant in the same poisonous political media ecosystem that serves his father, especially by attacking his opponents on X. The Netanyahu family successfully pressed to have responsibility for his security transferred to the Shin Bet, over the agency’s objections.
And the entitlement extends into the future. Netanyahu, like other former prime ministers, is set to receive lifelong Shin Bet protection. But a ministerial committee has approved extraordinary post-premiership protection for the Netanyahu family: Sara Netanyahu for as long as her husband is alive, and their sons for at least five years. The state can therefore find the resources and justification to protect a prime minister’s adult son living in Miami during a devastating war, and to plan years of protection for the family after Netanyahu leaves office, while the man currently leading many polls to replace Netanyahu is told to make do without an armed state security detail.
Bennett has issued an even more chilling warning. He says the relentless campaign against Eisenkot and other opposition figures could persuade someone that these politicians are monsters who must be stopped by violence. Bennett himself receives protection as a former prime minister.
The man making the decision at the Shin Bet is David Zini, perhaps the most politically controversial director in the agency’s history. He was a senior officer whose reputation as a far-right firebrand stopped his advancement in the military, and his appointment generated fears that Netanyahu was seeking a loyalist to lead an institution that must serve the state rather than the prime minister. That distinction goes to the heart of Israel’s present crisis.
The lesson Netanyahu still hasn’t learned
A democracy depends on people in power understanding that the state and the government are different things. The Shin Bet serves Israel. The IDF serves Israel. The civil service serves Israel. The prime minister serves Israel. Political opponents remain Israelis, and an opposition leader who may soon become prime minister deserves protection based on the threat against him rather than his usefulness to the incumbent.
Of course, Netanyahu’s entire “judicial reform” effort, which tore Israeli society apart in 2023 before the Hamas attack, was animated by the illiberal and fundamentally anti-democratic proposition that the elected government should be largely unchecked.
The Bush note seems almost quaint from Israel today, but its message is anything but sentimental. Bush understood that Clinton’s safety, legitimacy and success had become matters of national interest because America was more important than George Bush. The 30-minute handover to Bennett and the security controversy surrounding Eisenkot belong to the same story because both reveal what happens when a leader has difficulty separating the interests of the country from his own political survival.
There is an irony here that Israelis should appreciate. Netanyahu has always seemed, in some ways, Israel’s most American politician. He spent his formative years in the United States, lived in the Philadelphia area, studied at MIT and speaks beautiful American English. Yet in his behavior, Netanyahu has almost become anti-American; there is nothing in him that the Founding Fathers could admire.
There is, of course, a final irony. It would be misleading in 2026 to pretend that George H.W. Bush’s conception of political succession describes the current occupant of the White House. President Donald Trump and Netanyahu have far more in common with each other on this score than either has with Bush.
Israel, like the United States, desperately needs a return to the standards and ethics of the past, when the leader’s success actually was the country’s success.
The post The note Netanyahu would never write appeared first on The Forward.
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UK threatens sanctions after Israel opens bids for E1 settler homes
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – The United Kingdom threatened to sanction Israelis involved in West Bank settlement expansion after the Jewish state’s Lands Authority opened bids for 1,234 homes in the largely underdeveloped E1 section of the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim.
Construction in E1 “would cut across the heart of Palestine and risks separating the West Bank from East Jerusalem, which would endanger the viability of a two-state solution,” the British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said in a special statement he posted on X on Thursday.
Targeted sanctions, Miliband wrote, would be part of a series of measures his government would take. His office also summoned Israel’s charge d’Affaires Thursday to demand a closure of the bidding process, which first opened on Tuesday, and a withdrawal of the construction project altogether.
“Britain will not stand back and accept the destruction of the two-state solution,” he wrote. Miliband has held his position for a month and is part of the new leadership Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham appointed when he took office in July.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar attacked Miliband on X, stating that Britain’s “decision to damage the relationship between our countries is deeply unfortunate.”
He said that the U.K. government’s “systematic policy of blaming only Israel while ignoring Palestinian extremism has already contributed to a massive wave of antisemitic hatred and attacks against the British Jewish community.”
The Jewish people have the same right to “live throughout the Land of Israel” just as the British people have a right to live anywhere in the U.K., Sa’ar wrote.
Plans to expand the built-up area of Ma’aleh Adumim settlement by constructing some 3,400 housing units on a largely underdeveloped hilltop within the city’s boundaries have been in place since 1994 when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister.
Israel mostly froze those plans under pressure from the international community, including the U.S., with many countries warning that building homes in E1 would harm their diplomatic ties with Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began to advance the project in earnest in 2012 to protest the United Nations General Assembly decision to grant the Palestinians the status of a non-member state and has since pushed the project forward in spurts, particularly during election seasons.
The publication of the bidding process for the homes was first announced on Tuesday and is set to close on Oct. 19, one week shy of the Israeli elections on Oct. 27. Opening the bids is a move that plays well with Netanyahu’s right-wing voter base, which opposes Palestinian statehood and believes that settlements like Ma’aleh Adumim and the E1 area should be annexed into sovereign Israel.
But the move reverberated globally, with the U.K. signing onto a joint condemnation by France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, in which they warned that settlement building in E1 distanced peace and undermined the country’s international standing.
They also reminded businesses who might bid for E1 construction that they could face legal or reputational consequences, given that such companies could be in breach of international law.
Palestinian Authority Vice President Hussein Al-Sheikh said he welcomed the condemnation, explaining on X that such a position “reflects the importance of the international role in confronting settlement activity and safeguarding the two-state solution.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post UK threatens sanctions after Israel opens bids for E1 settler homes appeared first on The Forward.
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Argentina removes federal judge over antisemitic remarks in historic first
(JTA) — An Argentine federal judge was removed from office Tuesday for a series of antisemitic posts on his social media accounts that constituted misconduct incompatible with his role, an impeachment panel ruled.
Alfredo Eugenio López, who headed Federal Court No. 4 in the coastal city of Mar del Plata, was removed by Argentina’s Jury of Impeachment, a special panel composed of judges, lawmakers and lawyers.
It is the first time in Argentina’s history that a judge has been removed over antisemitic remarks.
In López’s social media posts, the judge referred to the Jewish people as “a brood of vipers,” Israel as a “fictitious state” and Argentinian Jews as “foreigners.” He has also used such terms as “Zionist” and “gay” as insults.
According to the panel, the judge committed acts of “discrimination and the denial of equal rights against the Argentine Jewish community. For the purposes of these proceedings, it is particularly significant that, by acting in this manner, he shattered public confidence in his continued fitness to administer justice impartially.”The case reached the panel through Argentina’s Council of the Magistracy, based in Buenos Aires, the constitutional body responsible for the selection and discipline of federal judges.
The first complaint against López was filed in February 2025 by the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas, which is the umbrella organization representing Argentina’s Jewish community. One month later, the Argentine Forum Against Antisemitism also filed a complaint. In July 2025, attorney Yamil Santoro from Apolo Foundation added another one.
In his defense, López argued that his messages were “ subjective and decontextualized interpretations of exchanges on social media, which in no way affect the administration of justice or his impartiality” as a judge. He added that his remarks were unrelated to any pending case and that he had never been recused or removed from any judicial case.
Neither Lopez nor his attorney were immediately available for further comment.
“He was removed because he simply would not stop engaging in hate speech,” jury member Alberto Maques said during a live interview Tuesday on the A24 news channel. “It is absolutely disgraceful for a federal judge to engage in this kind of conduct.”
Maques said there were 15 social media posts that he acknowledged, but more than 50 posts in which he said “outrageous things that are not worth repeating because they truly constituted hate speech.”
“This is not merely an issue of hate speech against the Jewish community. This is someone who lacks common sense,” he added, interviewed by A24 news channel.
Prosecutors in the impeachment proceedings argued that the messages were not isolated political comments but reflected a pattern of hostility toward Jews, Zionism, and the State of Israel.
“No position of authority can shield hatred. This is not a matter of punishing an opinion. It is about sanctioning repeated conduct involving antisemitism, hostility and dehumanization, conduct incompatible with the impartiality, dignity and public trust required of the judiciary,” DAIA said Tuesday in a statement.
“This case sets a precedent: for the first time in more than a century, DAIA initiated proceedings of this nature against a judge. No office is above democracy.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Argentina removes federal judge over antisemitic remarks in historic first appeared first on The Forward.
