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This Pennsylvania rabbi fuses liberal Judaism with Hasidic Yiddish
When Americans want to learn Yiddish, they usually sign up for classes at YIVO, the Yiddish Book Center or the Workers Circle. But when someone asks Rabbi Cody Bahir, the newly installed head of a Conservative congregation in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he learned Yiddish, he lists a different set of classrooms: a half-dozen Hasidic communities, from Sanz to Satmar.
So how did a Kentucky-born Christian end up with a black homburg and a Southeast European accent in Yiddish?
Born to a Christian mother and a Jewish father who had converted and become a church deacon, Bahir had trouble with the Trinity from an early age. As a child, he would replace the wording “in Jesus’ name we pray” with “in God’s name we pray,” because he reasoned that “we should pray to the boss.”
One day, Bahir’s father received a letter from his grandmother. She explained that she came from rabbinic stock, but because the family had fallen on hard times, she’d married his secular, well-to-do great-grandfather. She wrote that she felt guilty and heartbroken over her grandson’s lost Jewish heritage.
Moved by the letter, Bahir’s father began exploring Judaism and going to shul — bringing young Cody along. The rabbi there lent Cody a copy of Elie Wiesel’s Souls on Fire. Its Hasidic tales ignited a fascination that would change Bahir’s life.
A Kentucky boy at yeshiva
In the years that followed, Bahir pursued a Jewish education. At the age of nine, he underwent a Conservative conversion. He learned to read basic Hebrew at the Louisville JCC, and attended a traditional community Jewish day school for middle school. But he was soon searching for something more intense.
After an Orthodox conversion at age 14, Bahir left for Skokie, Illinois, to study Talmud and learn rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic at a Modern Orthodox yeshiva. But the environment proved too modern for him. “They had color TVs, they wore T-shirts — I was looking for something ekht khsidish, authentically Hasidic,” Bahir recalls. To really join the Hasidic world, however, Bahir would need not only the Talmudic skills he was swiftly acquiring, but also something else: fluent, spoken Yiddish.
Bahir spent the next few years studying rabbinic texts and Hasidic Yiddish simultaneously. He joined a Hasidic yeshiva in Monsey, NY and found a pair of Yiddish tutors from two different sects.
His textbook was a copy of Torah Berura — the Biblical text with a translation in modern Hasidic Yiddish (or “plain Yiddish, as it’s known in the community,” he remarked), rather than the older translations in so-called “bubbe Yiddish”, written in a more formal, literary style.
When even that immersion wasn’t enough for him, he crossed the Atlantic to study in Tsfat, Israel. Learning with two different tutors again, Bahir was able to get his Yiddish to the point where he could join a “fully Hasidic yeshiva where English wasn’t even allowed.”
Reflecting on his learning, Bahir said it was a “figure it out and absorb it” kind of experience. Given little formal grammar instruction, he was expected to read the Yiddish aloud, using the Hebrew for translation. On top of formal study, there was also the school of what Bahir called “full inculturation,” as he was encouraged by his tutors to visit specific shuls in Me’a She’arim, Jerusalem, where people spoke only Yiddish.
At the end of his two years of immersion, however, Bahir had doubts about his faith and lifestyle. The aspirational view he’d formed of Hasidism, as he’d understood it from books, didn’t align with his everyday reality as an adolescent in a yeshiva. He couldn’t reconcile his expectations with his perception of his peers: “They were Hasidish, but they were still typical teenagers.” A few months shy of 17, he cut off his sidelocks, changed into jeans and a T-shirt, threw his beaver hat over the Verazzano Bridge and returned to Kentucky.
A winding Jewish journey
Bahir’s path back to Yiddish and Yiddishkeit in the years that followed would take many curious twists. After yeshiva, he began a BA at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, but the culture shock after his yeshiva years was “extreme.” A year in, he “became a hippie” and tried to “find himself,” but ultimately decided he would need to do something with his life.
He set his sights on the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, which seemed like “the perfect place for a wandering Jew to land, where you had the opportunity to be as Jewish as you wanted to be, and were encouraged to figure that out.” And, he added, AJU “was culturally a lot closer to Boro Park than Kentucky.”
Bahir finished his BA at the AJU and then started an MA in Judaic Studies at Hebrew Union College. While still a student in the program, he joined the faculty. Tasked with creating a beit midrash program, Bahir used a Hasidic model he described in these words: “We pop open a sefer, a religious book, we bang our heads against it, we don’t use the dictionaries, we try to make it work.” He felt it was important to teach the students to “chant” the Gemara the same way he’d learned in yeshiva, rather than only to “learn about it.” His students seemed to appreciate this new kind of experience, and the program continued after he left.
When he finished his MA, Bahir felt his old restlessness kick in. He wanted to learn “something different, something newer, to broaden my horizons.” The result: He learned Chinese, did a doctorate involving six years of fieldwork in Taiwan (where he also met his wife, Sonia), and completed a post-doc on Chinese Buddhism at UC Berkeley. Bahir later returned to Jewish education, teaching Jewish studies at The Kehillah School, a high school in Palo Alto and K-8 students at the Tucson Hebrew Academy in Tucson, Arizona.
A new place for Yiddish
Yiddish, which had been such a major element of Bahir’s Jewish journey years before, would also propel him to the next stage in his Yiddishkeit: becoming a rabbi. At the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, Bahir took up Yiddish as his pandemic project. He downloaded some tkhines, Yiddish folk prayers, along with “a dreadful scan” of a Yiddish translation of the Zohar.
When he finally took a YIVO class — the intensive program had gone online for the summer — his own Yiddish was in for a surprise. “In YIVO Yiddish there’s correct, there’s incorrect. But in Hasidic Yiddish,” he noted, “you can make almost anything Yiddish.”
As he returned to the language of his yeshiva days, Bahir also reconnected with his religious side. “The deepest, most transformative spiritual experiences that I’d had in my life — all those happened in Yiddish. Once I started bringing Yiddish back into life, it was like a memory unlocked.”
By 2021, he’d received rabbinic ordination from Mesifta Adath Wolkowisk, an off-campus ordination program for mid-career Jewish professionals. When he saw a job ad for a rabbi in the Taiwan Jewish community, Bahir didn’t hesitate: it was a perfect fit.
In Taiwan, Bahir was eager to introduce “the joy and inclusivity that is the spirit of Hasidus” to his new congregation: “Clapping, singing, banging on the table, a bunch of kavannah,” or intention. The younger crowd at the shul was taken by everything from Rabbi Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev’s Kaddish tune to the music of modern Hasidic stars like Avrom Fried and Beri Weber. One of Bahir’s great successes was acquainting Taiwanese audiences with “Silent Tears,” a Canadian musical project based on the Yiddish testimonies and writings of female Holocaust survivors.
Still, by 2025, Bahir and Sonia were ready for their next adventure. Last summer, Bahir became the new rabbi at the Congregation Brothers of Israel in Newtown, Pennsylvania, and has continued to share his style of “progressive Hasid-ish” Judaism there.
Bahir’s vision of Yiddish remains dynamic: “Yiddish as a language is very emblematic of the Jewish people. It’s gone to so many different places. It collects different words, different phrases, different grammar from all sorts of places, just like we do.” He likes to paraphrase Yiddish sources, such as teachings from the Maggid of Zlotchov, in his sermons.
And these days he’s gearing up to teach Yiddish himself: his prospective class on Hasidic Yiddish will include Rav Nachman stories in the original.
Looking forward, Bahir has high hopes for this Newtown synagogue. Energized by the language’s potential, he believes the shul could very well become a “home for Yiddish in Bucks County.”
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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.
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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.
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California progressive Wahab defeats AIPAC-backed Hernandez in close race
(JTA) — California progressive Aisha Wahab defeated AIPAC-backed moderate Melissa Hernandez in a congressional runoff this week, capping off a contest that had become unexpectedly tight after the pro-Israel lobby entered the fray.
The Associated Press called the race between the Democrats — who were vying to replace a disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell — a full two days after polls closed, when Wahab secured 53.1% of votes to Hernandez’s 46.9%, with 95% of ballots tallied. The gap between them grew by four percentage points from Tuesday evening, when Wahab had held a narrow 51% lead to Hernandez’s 49%.
“We stayed focused on the people, and I will fight for this district that raised me,” Wahab said in a Thursday statement, noting her journey “from foster care to Congress” in her East Bay community.
Although Wahab ended up victorious, the narrow initial margin on Tuesday shocked California’s 14th District, given that she had secured a double-digit lead in preliminary races two months ago.
But in the past few weeks, an unforeseen variable appeared to influence the trajectories of the two campaigns: a massive spending push from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee aimed at turning the tides for Hernandez.
Since the beginning of August alone, AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, and other affiliated groups spent more than $2.5 million on both boosting Hernandez and denigrating Wahab with negative ads and mailers, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
“This was not a landslide for Wahab by any means,” local Democratic strategist Noah Finneburgh, who is not affiliated with either candidate, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“They narrowed the gap for sure,” Finneburgh added, referring to AIPAC. “They spent millions of dollars attacking Wahab very aggressively.”
These attacks, he explained, did not involve Israel and instead focused on divisive issues for the Bay Area, such as public safety and protecting kids.
“Negative advertising with a persuasive message can be very effective,” Finneburgh said.
In her Thursday night statement, Wahab declared that her “district cannot be bought,” describing the race as “one of the ugliest, most expensive elections we’ve ever seen.”
Prior to this influx of cash and related ads, neither AIPAC nor Israel had played a significant role in this short-lived race — which began in April following Swalwell’s resignation over allegations of sexual assault.
When the district held a special primary to seek Swalwell’s replacement on June 16, Wahab and Hernandez finished as the top-two candidates and moved on to this week’s special general runoff election.
California primaries are “nonpartisan” or “top-two” races, in which the two highest ranking candidates move on to the general election, irrespective of their parties. The top-two in this case were both Democrats, like Swalwell, in a district that the Cook Political Report deems solidly blue.
Even though Wahab will now finish the remainder of Swalwell’s term, she will have to compete with Hernandez again in the November general election for a full term that begins on January 3, 2027.
In a June 16 special primary that preceded this week’s runoff, there was still a massive gap between the two candidates, with Wahab accruing 42.8% of the votes, compared to Hernandez’s 16.8%. A separate primary for the November race, which occurred two weeks earlier, placed Wahab at 38.3% and Hernandez at 17.2%.
Wahab, who will be the first Afghan American in Congress, has focused on affordability, civil rights, education and climate change. Her campaign calls for an end to wars and “prolonged occupations” but only specifically calls out U.S. military activity in “Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.”
Though Wahab has been critical of Israel and its operations in Gaza, she has not been as vocal about the issue as many other progressive colleagues nationwide. She responded “yes” when asked if Israel was committing genocide in a primary debate, but she didn’t include Israel or Gaza in her campaign priorities.
During a recent appearance on far-right influencer Hasan Piker’s livestream, Wahab acknowledged that “it’s not a zero-sum game in the Middle East,” adding that “we can care for all people.” She also referenced a resolution she introduced last year in the California legislature, pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza but also condemning Hamas and demanding the release of the hostages.
“We talk about both Palestinians and the Israeli victims there,” Wahab told Piker. “We talk about holding the perpetrators accountable from both sides.”
Asked if she was in favor of “ending all U.S. aid to Israel,” she responded “yes,” while stressing that “humanitarian aid is important to me, too.”
Wahab has earned the backing of multiple labor unions, the California Democratic Party and Our Revolution, the group formed by Sen. Bernie Sanders to advance the progressive movement. The liberal pro-Israel group J Street also recently invested $108,000 in her campaign, according to the FEC. American Priorities, a pro-Palestinian PAC, also spent at least $200,000 on supporting her.
Hernandez has received endorsements from several police and fire unions, as well as Democratic Jewish Reps. Lois Frankel of Florida and Brad Schneider of Illinois.
Come November, Hernandez will gain one additional asset. Due to statewide redistricting, the 14th District will gain about 26,000 new voters from Dublin, where Hernandez previously served as mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
But Finneburgh said he believes that Hernandez has only a minimal chance of winning that race, especially because Wahab will be heading into that election as an incumbent.
He also suggested that if “she plays her card right,” Wahab could even take some endorsements away from Hernandez.
“There’s going to be people who are going to probably move over from the Hernandez camp and back her,” Finneburgh added. “It’s going to be hard to unseat her.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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