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Women’s Talmud classes are back on at Yeshiva University after uproar over cancellation
(JTA) — Beginner and intermediate Talmud courses are back on the table for women at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, less than a week after current and former students launched a petition criticizing the classes’ cancellation.
More than 1,400 people, mostly Y.U. faculty, alumni and students, signed the petition, which launched late Wednesday after a dean told the student newspaper in early April that the school would not be hiring any full-time faculty to replace Rabbi Moshe Kahn.
Kahn, who died at 71 in January of lung cancer, was seen as a champion of women’s Talmud studies and taught many of the advanced Talmud courses at Stern College, Y.U.’s women’s division.
“Not hiring a full-time professor dedicated to teaching Talmud at diverse levels will close the pipeline of access to Gemara for all students and ultimately lead to a decline in enrollment in the advanced level course,” said the petition. “The world of Torah study for women as we now know it would indeed be שָׁמֵם [shamem], utterly desolate.”
The petition — whose signers included prominent Talmud teachers, about 30 current and former Y.U. faculty members and students at Modern Orthodox high schools — called on the university to partner with them to endow a teaching position in Kahn’s name.
Now, Y.U. appears ready to do that — though it says it will not wait before resuming Talmud instruction at Stern.
“We have been planning a number of new initiatives,” Stern faculty said in a letter published online Friday and set to be sent to students’ inboxes later this week. “We would be delighted if those who support women’s advanced Torah study and the students, friends and supporters of Rabbi Kahn would endow a Rabbi Moshe Kahn Chair of Talmud Studies for Women. We are also seeking to create a new cohort program of Matmidot Scholars for young women to learn Tanach and Talmud on the highest levels.”
Yeshiva University is the only address in North America for Orthodox women to access advanced, intensive secular and Judaic studies at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The graduate program is the only Orthodox program in North America for women’s Torah learning that culminates with a master’s degree.
The decision not to offer an introductory or intermediate level course in Talmud would have meant that the country’s flagship Modern Orthodox university would significantly reduce its instruction in one of Judaism’s most fundamental texts.
It also would have made Y.U. an outlier in Modern Orthodoxy amid expanding opportunities for women to study Talmud, after centuries during which it was considered the exclusive province of men. In the past few years, a growing number of women have formed asynchronous communities around studying a page of Talmud a day, a practice called daf yomi. The increasing number of programs offering ordination to Orthodox women also place a heavy focus on Talmud study.
Students who learned from Kahn said he had been a vital force for women who wanted to study traditional Jewish texts.
“He said, ‘Any woman who comes to my class is welcome.’ It wasn’t just lip service,” said Tamar Beer Horowitz, who studied with Kahn for five years and helped write the petition. “He genuinely made us all feel welcome.”
But while Kahn’s courses sometimes drew up to 20 students, lower-level Talmud classes sometimes had much smaller rosters, according to students and administrators. Many fell below Stern’s threshold to offer a class, eight students.
“We can continue low enrolled courses for a few semesters to see if the numbers pick up,” Karen Bacon, dean of Stern’s Undergraduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences, told The Commentator, the student newspaper, earlier this month. “When they don’t, we cannot justify the course unless it is a requirement for a particular major.”
Y.U. has made multiple changes to its Jewish studies offerings for both women and men in recent years. In 2021, the school announced that it would end its in-person Hebrew courses indefinitely, offering asynchronous classes online. That year, the undergraduate men’s college also dissolved its Jewish Studies division, combining multiple departments into a Bible, Hebrew and Near Eastern studies department. Before its dissolution, Jewish studies was the largest department at Yeshiva College.
The scaling back has come amid ongoing financial strain for Y.U., which survived a financial crisis more than a decade ago but now faces renewed litigation over its handling of child sex abuse allegations as well as the prospect of curtailed state funding depending on the outcome of a battle over its decision not to recognize an LGBTQ student group.
The changes in course offerings also come amid a national decline in the number of students studying the humanities.
Y.U. appears to be hoping that the conversation spurred by the viral petition could cause more students to choose Talmud classes when registration for the fall opens next week.
“We are pleased to share that Rabbi David Nachbar, an esteemed member of our Torah faculty, will be teaching a number of Rabbi Kahn’s classes,” the letter to students said. “We hope that recent discussions will inspire stronger enrollment, especially in our Talmud classes.”
But more than just offering courses will be needed. Some Stern College students and graduates say scheduling roadblocks can make it difficult to enroll in Talmud classes, even when there is interest.
Multiple Stern students said that, given the school’s schedule, registering for Talmud meant they would have had to enroll in two classes that met at the same time — making it impossible to complete the required coursework. Meanwhile, on the men’s campus, which offers more scheduling options for Talmud courses, the same conflicts do not occur, they said. Rabbi Ezra Schwartz, a leader in the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, was installed Monday morning as the men’s division’s full-time chair of Talmud and Jewish law.
“The claim that there’s no interest is — personally, I don’t think it’s true,” said Beer Horowitz, who is the founder of Bnot Sinai, an intensive women’s text study program in New York.
But she said even if there were low interest, canceling classes isn’t the best option, she said.
“I think that there may be dips in and rises in interest over time, but there’s also different things that cause that and we have to look critically at those,” she said. “You need to have that consistent offering to get it back to that place where it’s big and it’s popular and people are doing it.”
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Germany has found the culprit behind a deadly antisemitic arson fire. It still hasn’t learned its lesson.
The only way out of the Jewish old-age home at Reichenbachstrasse 27 in Munich ran through a four-story wooden stairwell. On the evening of Feb. 13, 1970, someone soaked that stairwell with gasoline and set it on fire.
It became a chimney. Flames and smoke raced upward, cutting off the residents above. Firefighters rescued many of the roughly 30 people inside, but seven Jewish residents aged 59 to 71, died. 15 people were injured, four seriously. All seven victims had survived Nazi persecution. Auschwitz had been liberated just 25 years earlier.
For 56 years, no one could identify the culprit.
In August, the Munich General Prosecutor’s Office announced that it now believes a right-wing extremist started the fire. Earlier this year, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel identified him as Bernd V., providing only his first name and last initial in accordance with German privacy laws. Der Spiegel also ran a black and white police photo of the suspect. It shows a man with a broad forehead, deep-set eyes and weak chin, wearing an unsmiling, withdrawn expression. The caption read, “Raised with Love for the Führer.”
Bernd V. was 25 at the time of the arson attack and died in 2020. His death means there will be no trial, though prosecutors say the evidence now points clearly to his responsibility. They found no reliable evidence of accomplices.
After his death, a woman contacted authorities and told the police that Bernd V. and two other men had been involved in a botched burglary at a jewelry store close to the Jewish community center on the night of the attack. Bernd V. ranted to his accomplices that the Jews had everything while Germans like him had nothing and verbally threatened to set Jews on fire. Roughly 15 minutes later, the building at Reichenbachstrasse 27 was ablaze.
In April 2025, investigators in Munich reopened the case, which had been closed in 2017 for lack of evidence. Old acquaintances of Bernd V, including relatives of the woman who had provided the new statement and who corroborated her account, remembered a man with a deep hatred of Jews who was obsessed with Hitler. He played records of the Führer’s speeches and practiced shooting around Berchtesgaden, where Hitler once had an idyllic residence. As a juvenile, Bernd V. had been sentenced for blowing up two telephone booths.
More strikingly, he was not a new suspect in the arson case. A former cellmate from one of Bernd V.’s prison stints in the early 1970s told investigators that Bernd V. had boasted to him of carrying out the Reichenbachstrasse attack and described details that, according to prosecutors, were not publicly known. Prosecutors questioned Bernd V. in 1972; he denied involvement, and the case against him was dropped two years later for lack of evidence.
The Reichenbachstrasse fire changed Jewish life in Germany — and the long uncertainty about its perpetrator helped shape a comforting German story about the sources of postwar antisemitism.
Bernhard Purin, the founding director of Munich’s Jewish Museum, has called the attack, quite simply, “the rupture.” Purin, who died in 2024, explained in a 2020 interview that before Feb. 13, 1970, people entered Jewish community centers much as they entered Christian ones. Afterward came police cars, cameras and heightened security, including metal detectors. Jews in Germany drew the bleak conclusion that they could only live under protection.
That security regime has become so routine here that it passes for normal. Police officers and Israeli security stand guard outside synagogues and Jewish schools. Visitors pass barriers and identity checks before entering institutions devoted to worship, education and community.
Permanent security presence has an unintended consequence: It marks official Jewish life as something fundamentally separate from ordinary life. A synagogue behind police barriers may be safer, but that fortification tells Jews and non-Jews alike that Jewish institutions are a world apart.
The attack also has another legacy. Because nobody knew who committed it, the crime gradually became evidence in a wider argument about left-wing antisemitism. In 1969, German left-wing radicals planted a bomb that failed to detonate at the Jewish community center in West Berlin on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Parts of the revolutionary left embraced an anti-Zionism that could turn antisemitic. The Red Army Faction later celebrated the Palestinian terrorists who murdered 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972; German left-wing terrorists subsequently collaborated with Palestinian militants at Entebbe.
But the history of left-wing antisemitism gradually absorbed a crime for which no such attribution had been proved. It fed into the narrative that, as the political scientist Yascha Mounk put in his 2014 book Stranger in My Own Country, “since 1945, the Germans who have committed the most radical attacks on Jews were not right-wing radicals.” Many Germans found it psychologically convenient to believe that the Reichenbachstrasse victims had died at the hands of German antifascists rather than neo-Nazis.
The generation of 1968 performed an indispensable service by forcing West Germany to confront questions its parents had largely evaded: What had Germans done under Hitler? Why had former Nazis returned to positions of authority? What did Auschwitz demand of the generations that followed?
The discovery that some of those self-proclaimed antifascists themselves became antisemites produced a terrible historical irony. It also offered Germans a way to relocate antisemitism. The Jew-haters were now the rebellious children, the revolutionary leftists, the Palestinians and not necessarily the political descendants of the very people who had murdered Europe’s Jews.
Mounk himself called the radical left’s projection of fascism onto Jews and Israel a “psychological coping mechanism.” The apparent solution of the Munich case suggests a parallel mechanism in postwar Germany: antisemitism has often been easiest to recognize when it belongs to somebody else.
Today, that somebody else is frequently Muslim.
At the reopening of the Reichenbachstrasse synagogue last September, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz explicitly acknowledged that antisemitism “was never gone” from the Federal Republic. But within minutes he turned to immigrants, arguing that Germany had ignored the fact that a “considerable” number came from countries where antisemitism was effectively state doctrine. Months earlier, he had told Fox News that Germany suffered from “a kind of imported antisemitism.”
Since Oct. 7, 2023, Jews in Germany have faced alarming hostility connected to Israel and Gaza, including from Islamist and radical anti-Zionist milieus. But that’s only part of the story. Germany’s principal civil-society monitoring network for antisemitism, RIAS, recorded 8,725 antisemitic incidents in 2025. It linked 807 of them to right-wing extremism, the highest number in that category since nationwide monitoring began. And Germany now has a far-right party of enormous electoral strength whose leading figures have repeatedly tested the boundaries of the country’s postwar taboos.
That party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), is currently polling around 41% in Saxony-Anhalt ahead of next month’s state election. One of its most prominent politicians, Björn Höcke, has twice been convicted for using the banned slogan of Hitler’s SA.
Fifty-six years after seven Jews died in a burning building, prosecutors now believe the likeliest perpetrator was a German neo-Nazi whose fanatical hatred had been visible for years. That finding comes too late to punish him. It does not come too late to unsettle the story Germans have often told themselves about the crime.
And the other legacy of that night remains all around us. The rupture of 1970 has never fully healed. German Jews still worship, study and gather behind cameras, guards and police barricades: constant reminders that Jewish life here is somehow separate.
The challenge is not only to safeguard Jewish life, but to stop treating permanent protection as its natural condition. That requires Germany to confront antisemitism wherever it appears, including on a resurgent far right whose danger is easier to minimize when attention is fixed elsewhere.
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Emil Kalin wins Mendele Prize for Yiddish Literature 2026
דער תּּל-אָבֿיבֿער שטאָטראַט האָט די וואָך אַנאָנסירט, אַז דער ייִדישער שרײַבער עמיל קאַלין האָט זוכה געווען צו באַקומען דעם מענדעלע-פּּריז פֿאַר ייִדישער ליטעראַטור. דעם פּרײַז טיילט די שטאָט אויס יעדע פֿיר יאָר פֿאַר בעלעטריסטיק, ליטעראַטור־קריטיק אָדער אַנדערע בײַטראָגן צו דער ייִדיש־ליטעראַטור.
דעם פּריז האָט מען אים געגעבן אין שײַכות מיט זײַן לעצטן ראָמאַן, „צוזאַמענבראָך“ (2025), וועגן אַ געוועזענעם חרדישן ייִד פֿון ירושלים, וואָס פֿאַרלאָזט זײַן פֿרוי און קינד און לאָזט זיך גיין אויף אַ קאָמפּליצירטן גײַסטיקן דרך. דאָס בוך איז דערשינען אין פֿאַרלאַג ייִדיש-בראַנזשע און לייוויק-פֿאַרלאַג, מיט דער שטיצע פֿון דער „נאַציאָנאַלער אינסטאַנץ פֿאַר ייִדישער קולטור“. מע קאָן עס קויפן דורך leyvik.org.
נישט לאַנג נאָך דער פּובליקאַציע פֿונעם ראָמאַן האָט דער פֿאָרווערטס־רעצענזענט מיכאל קרוטיקאָוו געשריבן וועגן דעם בוך, און בפֿרט וועגן דעם הויפּט־פּערסאָנאַזש, הערש, אַזוי:
קאַלין שילדערט סײַ מענטשן און סײַ לאַנדשאַפֿטן אָן קײן שום באַפּוצונג. ער איז אַ מײַסטער פֿון מעטאַפֿאָרישן אימאַזש, װאָס שאַפֿט אַ געהעריקע שטימונג. די שטאָט תּל־אָבֿיבֿ איז אַ מין לעבעדיקע, פֿיבערדיקע חיה, װאָס כאַפּט הערשן פֿעסט אַרום „מיט בײדע שװיציקע הענט.“ די אױטאָבוסן זײַנען „אומגעלומפּערטע יבשה־שיפֿן, װאָס שנײַדן זיך קױם דורך אַ װעג אין דער ברױזנדיקער באַװעגונג.“ ער אַנטלױפֿט קײן ירושלים מיט אַ האָפֿענונג, „אַז ירושלים װעט מיך דערהײבן מיט זיך, אָבער דאָס פֿאַרקערטע איז געשען: ירושלים האָט מיך דערנידערט, אַראָפּגעשלעפּט מיט זיך אין בלאָטע.״
די דרײַ ריכטער פֿונעם פּריז־קאָמיטעט — דבֿ־בער קאָטלערמאַן, דניאל גלאַי און נירה תּובֿל — האָבן געזאָגט, אַז קאַלינס בוך איז נישט בלויז זייער גוט געשריבן, נאָר איז אויך איינער פֿון די גאָר ווייניק מאָדערנע ראָמאַנען אויף ייִדיש, וואָס באַהאַנדלען טעמעס פֿון דער הײַנטיקער ישׂראלדיקער געזעלשאַפֿט.
אַחוץ „צוזאַמענבראָך“ האָט קאַלין אַרויסגעגעבן צוויי אַנדערע ראָמאַנען, און הײַיאָר וועט דערשײַנען זײַן פֿערטער. די אויסטיילונג וועט פֿאָרקומען דעם 1טן דעצעמבער 2026 אין עינבֿ-זאַל, וווּ עס וועט אויך בײַזײַן דער תּל-אָבֿיבֿער בירגער-מײַסטער רון חולדאי.
עמיל קאַלין איז געבוירן געוואָרן אין 1982 אין בוקאַרעשט, און האָט מיט זײַן משפּחה עולה געווען קיין ישׂראל אין עלטער פֿון 7 יאָר.
ער האָט פֿאַרענדיקט זײַנע הויכע לימודים אינעם העברעיִשן אוניווערסיטעט אין ירושלים, און האָט לאַנגע יאָרן געאַרבעט אין הײַטעק. הײַנט לערנט ער פּסיכאָלאָגיע אינעם תּל-אָבֿיבֿער אוניווערסיטעט.
קאַלין האָט אויך איבערגעזעצט אויף ייִדיש דאָס דײַטשישע בוך „דער גאַנג פֿון די הינט“, וואָס איז אַרויס דורכן פֿאַרלאַג „אָלניאַנסקי טעקסט“. זײַנע אַנדערע ביכער זײַנען אַרויס דורך די פֿאַרלאַגן „ייִדיש בראַנזשע“ און „ה. לייוויק“.
זײַנע קירצערע ווערק קען מען לייענען אינעם דיגיטאַלישן זשורנאַל „ייִדיש בראַנזשע“, רעדאַקטירט פֿון באָריס סאַנדלער.
אין יאָר 2025 איז ער פֿאַרבעטן געוואָרן אויף אַ טור אין אַכט שטעט אין דײַטשלאַנד, כּדי פֿאָרצושטעלן דאָס בוך „צוזאַמענברוך“.
ער וווינט אין תּל־אָבֿיבֿ מיט זײַן פֿרוי שבֿע כּהן און זייערע דרײַ קינדער.
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Brussels Airlines workers threaten strike over flights to Israel, citing ethical objections
(JTA) — A Belgian union has threatened to strike against Brussels Airlines for compelling staff to work on flights to Israel, saying that anyone with “safety or conscientious objections” should be able to refuse.
ACV Puls, Belgium’s largest trade union, said on Tuesday that the company was breaking previous agreements to rely on volunteers for flights to Tel Aviv. The airline resumed flights to Tel Aviv on August 3, following a five-month pause because of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, and its first flights were operated with volunteers.
“Serious concerns exist among the staff regarding both physical safety and the mental and ethical impact of these flights,” ACV Puls spokesperson Jolinde Defieuw said in a statement. She added that making staffing mandatory was “particularly serious in the context of the ongoing war and the genocide in Gaza.”
ACV Puls, which represents aviation employees including pilots, cabin crews and ground staff in Belgium, said that a strike could follow if Brussels Airlines does not reverse its decision to resume regular staffing. The union argued that flying to Israel could not be deemed sufficiently safe, citing Belgium’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which advises against “all non-essential travel to Israel and Jerusalem.”
They also said that workers should be able to decline the flights for ethical reasons. Those who have “safety or conscientious objections must be able to refuse these flights without financial, professional, or disciplinary consequences,” said the union.
Nico Cardone, a spokesperson for Brussels Airlines, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that safety was the company’s “highest priority, whether we operate with volunteers or not.” He added that the airline was “not a political party” and made decisions about flight operations based on safety and demand.
“We do not engage in political discussions about the governments of certain destinations, and we ask our staff to uphold this same professional standard,” said Cardone.
ACV Puls said the airline was compelling crews to work because it had not found enough volunteers. Cardone disputed that, saying the airline always aimed to return to regular crew scheduling over time.
Along with threatening a strike, the union called on the Belgian government to weigh in. ACV Puls said the government should take a stance on the availability of commercial flights to Israel “despite the ongoing war, the massive civilian casualties, and the serious accusations of war crimes and human rights violations against the Palestinian population.”
Belgium has grown increasingly critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and Israeli settlements in the West Bank since 2023. Earlier this year, Belgium banned aircraft carrying military equipment bound for Israel from crossing its airspace. The government in July approved a ban on goods imported from Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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