As Sukkot and the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks approached, I received separate emails from two different Jewish organizations using what to me was an unfamiliar use of the word “holding.”

The first, from the progressive group New Jewish Narrative, had the subject line “Holding complexity on October 7th.”

The second, from the women’s educational group Svivah, read, “Holding Their Light, Holding Our Loss.”

In each case, I could imagine a synonym that might work just as well, like “offering” or “providing” nuance, or “remembering” their light and “mourning” our loss.

But I trusted both organizations in their use of language, and I’m glad I did. I did some research into the term “holding” and found that it has become widespread among many Jewish writers and activists, usually in therapeutic or comforting contexts.

I also found out that I’m late to the “holding” party, which sort of blew up last year when two Hollywood stars used the expression in a video that went viral.

When the Jewish writers I found used “holding,” the word means something like “to leave room for,” the way a good friend or therapist indulges your feelings without trying to contradict or explain them away.

“How do we talk about October 7th? How do we share everyone’s grief and also hold how isolating and scary it has been?” Svivah wrote, in an email promoting an event marking the two-year anniversary of the Hamas attacks. “ “How do we hold the enormity of the loss — knowing that each and every life lost was a whole world?”

In the most common usage of the term, “holding” is usually followed by “space,” as in this recent message from Hillel International ahead of Sukkot:

This year, as the holiday overlaps with the two-year commemoration of the October 7 attacks, may we enter the sukkah holding space for both joy and grief, honoring the victims and their families while embracing traditions that root us in resilience.

The term “holding space” as it is understood today was popularized by Canadian writer and facilitator Heather Plett in a 2015 blog post. Plett defined it to Psychology Today as “being willing to walk alongside another person in whatever journey they’re on, without judging them, making them feel inadequate, trying to fix them, or trying to impact the outcome.”

Since then, “holding space” has become a common term in therapeutic, coaching and spiritual communities, emphasizing the importance of being present and supportive without interference.

It’s also the definition that launched a thousand memes. Late last year, “Wicked” stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande were being interviewed by journalist Tracey E. Gilchrist, who told Erivo that “people are taking the lyrics of ‘Defying Gravity’ and really holding space with that, and feeling power in that.”

Fans and haters couldn’t get enough of the two stars’ deeply emotional response. I apparently missed the various “holding space” explainers that soon followed. 

The phrase apparently triggered people inclined to dismiss therapy-speak as jargony, cloying or imprecise. 

But despite the mockery, “holding space” has become useful, especially at a time of deep political polarization, and particularly in a Jewish world still reeling from the attacks, the war and a rise in antisemitism. 

When I see rabbis and other Jewish influentials using the term, they are suggesting that people are hungry for settings where they can express their feelings without judgment. That hunger has only increased with the trauma that followed Oct. 7, when many Jews felt isolated and unable to express their grief in public, and wary of airing their political views even in Jewish settings. 

Last year, one year after the attacks, Sarah Sokolic, the co-founder and executive director of Lab/Shul, told JTA how her New York-based congregation planned to negotiate its political divides on the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7.

“We have community members that span the spectrum of Zionist, anti-Zionist, and every nuance in between, and holding nuance and holding space for both … is something that we’ve really leaned into,” Sokolic said. 

Similarly, the Network of Jewish Human Service Agencies is holding a series of monthly online seminars for Jewish professionals called “Holding Space.” In announcing the series over the summer, NJHSA said it was in response to the war in the Middle East, but also to the upheavals surrounding political violence, anti-Israel protests around the country and immigration raids that “are compounding widespread anxiety and fear.”

“[A]mid this turmoil, the demands of leadership, caregiving, and showing up for others remain relentless,” it explained, “That’s why The Network is reaffirming its commitment to holding space for you — to pause, connect, reflect, and support one another.”

In February, after the bodies of hostages Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas were returned to Israel for burial, Rabbi Chaya Bender of Bnai Israel Congregation in Wilmington, Delaware offered her own take on “holding space” as the congregation dealt with its emotions.

“This past Saturday, I spoke about holding space for horror,” she said in a sermon. “When emotions are so large, and are so raw, the only thing that one can do is to pause and to allow the feelings to flow. In the aftershock of horror, of tremendous loss, it is not the time to act. After the initial shock waves have subsided and grief begins to become true mourning, that is one when can act.”

The second anniversary of the attacks coincides with the first day of Sukkot, a holiday in which Jews move out of their comfortable homes and eat and sleep in temporary booths set up in their backyards, balconies and public spaces. For some, it is a holiday about hospitality — having friends and relatives over for a meal, and even inviting biblical forebears, known as “ushpizin,” to take a symbolic seat at the table. 

On Sukkot, “holding space” is both literal and metaphorical.

On the first day of the holiday, the Hostages Families and Survivors Forum planned to gather in front of the White House in a “Sukkah of Hope.” With talk of a peace agreement in the air, the group announced, “We’ll honor those we lost, hold space for the 48 hostages still in Gaza, and continue the fight to bring them home.”

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The post How ‘holding space’ became a post-Oct. 7 mantra of grief and comfort appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The latest novel by British author Emma Forrest, Father Figure, is arguably the greatest work of Jewish literature in decades—at least, that’s according to The CJN’s opinion editor, Phoebe Maltz Bovy, who gave a glowing review to the new release on Sept. 29.

But across the pond, the book has received a muted reaction. It hasn’t been spotlit in any British book fairs; it’s been largely ignored by domestic literary awards; professional friends who’ve helped promote, and even written forwards for, her past works have largely ignored this one.

What makes this latest book different? It is unmistakably, idiosyncratically Jewish. Combine that with the growing antisemitism that’s erupted in the United Kingdom since Oct. 7—which culminated in a lethal terror attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur—and it’s hard for Forrest not to think her apolitical work of fiction has suffered from her personal cultural identity and a broader political climate.

Forrest joins Maltz Bovy on the latest episode of The Jewish Angle to discuss her novel, along with its deep inception and quiet reception. Forrest describes the real-life inspirations behind her boarding school setting, including her own encounters with Harvey Weinstein how they influenced her characters, before discussing the recent tragedy in Manchester and how her country’s small Jewish community is reacting.

Transcript

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: This is Phoebe Maltz Bovy, and you’re listening to The Jewish Angle, a podcast from The CJN. Very, very Jew. So today we are going to have a little bit of a diversion into the world of fiction. So Emma Forrest, who’s my guest today, is an English author, filmmaker, and most importantly, per her website, podcaster, amazing.  Her latest book, Father Figure, is really the best Jewish novel that has appeared in decades. It’s like something where I’m thinking like the publishing term comp titles, so similar books. I’m thinking like Portnoy’s Complaint or Fear of Flying. Like, it’s that kind of Jewish novel. I want North American readers to know about this because it’s like this is the Jewish novel that I personally have been waiting for. But it’s also set a decade ago and very much of this world. So it doesn’t feel like it’s some sort of historic thing that feels dusty and of another time. It’s very much of this moment. Emma Forrest, welcome to The Jewish Angle.

Emma Forrest: Thank you so much for having me.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So how did you come up with the idea of a story about an—I don’t want to say ordinary, because Gail is not ordinary, but—of an everyday Jewish schoolgirl crossing paths with an oligarchy-type figure?

Emma Forrest: Because when I moved back to—I lived in America for a long time. So I lived in California, I lived in New York. I was away for 20 years. And my mom’s American, and when I came back to the UK, I walked past my old school, which was a private girls’ school that I had had a bursary scholarship to, and it looked completely different. And I called my sister and said, what happened to—I’m not gonna name the school—what happened to it? And she said, hadn’t you heard?  And then she named an oligarch, whose name you would know, and said he started sending his daughter there, and he’s bought all the buildings that surround the school, and he’s put an armed guard on the gate of the school. And I was like, oh, my God, this is a novel. Because if I had been there at 16, I would, knowing myself at that age, have tried to inveigle my way into his life via his child, obviously.   And I’ve always had a real interest and soft spot in any book or film, any piece of art that uses the archetype of the stranger who arrives and disrupts an entire family’s life. A novel I really love in that vein is The Accidental by Ali Smith. And a film that’s incredibly important to me, and actually I keep finding now from quite a few novelists, is Teorema by Pasolini, which I guess is Teorema in Italian by Pasolini starring Terence Stamp, who recently died. And it’s about a stranger who arrives and makes love to each member of the family and drives each of them crazy. And you don’t know if he’s God or the devil. And then he leaves.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So I should say listeners have not maybe necessarily yet read Father Figure. They should go do that. Gail is this teenage girl who encounters, via the child, the teenage child of Ezra Levy. She, you know, encounters this oligarch-type guy, but she also brings out something to do with his Jewishness in him in this complicated kind of psychosexual way that’s hard to… like, I can’t describe it. I mean, I just want to talk a little bit about Ezra. Just because the Western canon is full of men like that, right? These, the Jew, you know, how did you decide to take somebody like that and make him, like, a man?

Emma Forrest: I looked up how many of us there are here. It is tiny. It’s like 250,000 Jews in the United Kingdom, 4 million Muslims in the United Kingdom. We’re microscopic. So hyper-aware. Probably the way people were when Summer of Sam happened. Like where you find out David Berkowitz is Jewish and you’re like, for Frigg’s sake, like, this is not helpful.  So there kept being these British figures through my childhood of whom I was very aware, who just felt profoundly unhelpful, like Robert Maxwell, Philip Green, who owned Topshop. There’s a very famous figure here, I don’t know if he translates there, called Sir Alan Sugar, who owned one of the big football—I think he did, was chairman of Tottenham Football Club. And these just like awful sort of Nazi caricatures of Jewish billionaire, like hideous Jewish billionaires.   And the only comfort I’ve had recently is the only person who looks remotely like them. I noticed, and this really struck me, is Mohammed Hadid, the father of Bella and Gigi Hadid. If you want to tap into the idea that we come from the same place. Right. You know, the only one who’s presented such an archetypal, like, gross Nazi figure as those men is him. And so humanizing. All the Jewish men I know are so benign and beta, so the idea of like an alpha Jewish male is anathema for me anyway. Pretty much the men closest in my life were my dad and, I don’t know if you know, the great investigative journalist John Ronson, who wrote The Psychopath Test and The Men Who Stare at Goats. I grew up with him. So those are the two guys I knew, and they’re very, very gentle.   So I’m fascinated by, what if a Jewish man was tough? I’m like, what? What are you talking—how could that be? You know, the Israeli Cabinet would disprove that image. But yeah, it certainly. I grew up with this very sort of beta idea of the Jewish male. So I think that’s why I wanted to know what are the layers and the ribbons and the flavors? Insights. Someone who presents as very alpha but whose main vulnerability is wanting to be part of the British establishment.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I just—the girls’ school stuff. I went to a girls’ school in Manhattan when I was quite young and it all just—it felt just so beautifully described. I mean, the stuff about everybody having at least a bit of an eating disorder seemed pretty true. But also—but I wanted to ask you—so Dar is Gail’s mother in the book. She and Gail are both such full characters and it’s such a realistic mother-daughter relationship. I especially like the part where Dar thinks she’s going to help out by getting Gail invited to a party, and it just turns out she’s read everything wrong.

Emma Forrest: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So talk a little bit about how you write the mother-daughter, getting both sides so…

Emma Forrest: Well, I guess because I’ve been both. You know, I’m a single mom, and my daughter’s coming into the cusp of adolescence. I always write about the things that are scaring me in order to make them safe. And it usually works. And there was just an incredibly bad decision when my sister and I were kids that we would be moved from the state school, which in Canada. Is that public school?

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: You know, public school, yeah.

Emma Forrest: Right. Where we would be moved from a state school by my grandfather, who was able to afford to put us in a private primary school, which I guess is—What do you call it when you’re little? When you’re like, elementary school? 8, 9, 10. Elementary.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I’m probably getting it wrong, but yeah, go on. Yeah.

Emma Forrest: He paid for us to go to elementary school privately, and we were the only Jews. And there was one black kid who I think was the son of the Nigerian diplomat to England. And my sister’s class was okay. My class was really anti-Semitic. And they were so young. They were like 8, 9, 10. It was coming from the parents, which you figure out, but also explicitly, they would say. My mother says it was actually the school that Catherine and William, the now King—almost King—ended up sending their kids to. In my class, Winston Churchill’s great-granddaughter was in my class with me. One of Lady Diana’s bridesmaids was in the class.

It was the wrong place for us, and it really scarred me. I remember there was a particular bully who was the daughter of a Greek shipping magnate. She would do all this stuff about, you know, “Don’t you feel bad for killing Christ?” And she would call me the N-word. Someone has to really want to say the N-word to say it to someone who, like, has curly hair and that’s it. It took, honestly, until I was in my mid-20s and one day just sitting on a bus and thinking, hang on. On the ethnic scale from, like, Nubian to Swedish, Greek and Jew fall in the same place. So what? This wasn’t even appropriate bullying. This is just crazy.  I think I realized quite late how deeply ingrained that period and that mistake of sending us there was—of trying to make us sit alongside the British Establishment. With my daughter, I’ve gone completely the other way. She’s only been in state schools. In public schools, they’re completely mixed. They’re heavily Muslim and Jewish. Her local school—because we’re in North London—and it’s been night and day.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: That’s interesting. I have so much to say on this. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. I also went to a school of that sort until high school, from when I was 5 to when I was 13. I don’t think it was quite the same in terms of Jewishness as it would have been in England. But it wasn’t entirely different. I did hear the “Jews killed Jesus” thing.  I remember thinking that to be attractive, you had to basically look like Claudia Schiffer. I was shocked when I went to college in Chicago that women who looked like me were not considered repulsive for not looking like Claudia Schiffer. Men who had grown up around women who looked like that found women who looked like me exotic in a good way. It was a very confusing time.  There are a couple of connections to Father Figure that I want to talk about. There’s this one amazing moment where Gail is in a police car with a man, and it feels like you’re in this very modern novel, where people are from marginalized identity groups. There’s a gay man who’s been picked up for public sex, and he says he wouldn’t, though, with George Michael. And why is that?

Emma Forrest: He’s too far.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: It’s just like this amazing punchline. I was thinking about that when you were talking about the Greek shipping magnate.

Emma Forrest: You’ve mentioned your writing, and you’re completely right. It was absolutely significant that George Michael actually talks about his Jewishness on Desert Island Discs, finding out fairly late that his mother was Jewish. It explains to me a great deal about what we love about George Michael. Despite his very traditionally macho, almost Tom of Finland look, this anxiety, he has a vulnerability to his work, like a neurosis.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah.

Emma Forrest: I found it very moving to realize that someone I love that much had realized that about himself. He’s there for a reason.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: The scene that is going to be like anybody who’s doing any kind of Jewish Book Awards—not that you shouldn’t get the Mainstream Book Awards too, but the Jewish Book Awards, specifically—is that scene in the Anne Frank House.

Emma Forrest: Yeah.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Are you familiar with the Seinfeld, Schindler’s List make-out?

Emma Forrest: Yeah. I took my daughter to Anne Frank House, and I didn’t know if I had the courage to write this down. So I wrote it down in a sort of satirical way in the book. I was struck by what a lovely place it was with a lovely view and light, if it wasn’t being used for what it’s been used for. The shiksa stepmother verbalizes that she wants to make an offer on it. But as you walk through it single file, you can’t really tell what’s going on with the people behind or in front of you. I thought this would be a really good place to have an illicit touch.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I found the kiss aspect very subversive. It subverts two different tropes: the Jewish man aroused by the shiksiness of a non-Jewish woman, which you get in things like Woody Allen, Philip Roth, Seinfeld. It’s old and hasn’t gone anywhere. There’s also the 19th-century trope where a non-Jewish man is going for the exoticness of a Jewish woman. This subverts both, and it’s another part where Ezra is saying that a certain type of man would find Gael attractive, but he doesn’t. He’s telling himself, yeah, this is a pretty big one to drop.

Emma Forrest: One of my good friends who I’ve known for decades grew up with Georgina Chapman, who was the wife of Harvey Weinstein. There were times I was around Harvey, and he just had no idea how to interact with me because of my Jewishness. I knew that’s what it was about. He could not make any sense of me. There are slivers of those experiences with Harvey in how I thought Ezra might react to Gail.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I wanted to ask you—Father Figure is not a political book promoting any party or ideology, but it doesn’t shy away from contentious topics. What was it like writing a book that deals so directly with Jewish identity and British Jews’ differing views about Israel in this moment?

Emma Forrest: When you said all the wonderful things about this book, it brought tears to my eyes because this book has been rejected. It’s the first book I’ve written that hasn’t been accepted into any British literary festival. None in England; I did one in Scotland. There’s no foreign translations; it’s not on any of the tables in bookstores. People who blurbed my other books or supported my other books publicly, who aren’t Jewish, have not responded. It’s been very dispiriting.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Do you think it’s just the amount of Jewish content, or is it the fact that it is not taking a side in some unambiguous way?

Emma Forrest: I think people are really scared. One of the great supporters of it is a wonderful writer called Naseiba Yunus, who wrote a great book called Fundamentally a Great Novel.  And she was not just a practicing Muslim but a very seriously practicing Muslim until she sort of moved away from religion entirely. She wrote a novel that’s comedic about being sent to Iraq to de-radicalize ISIS Brides. It is the most brave, amazing book, and she has the bravery and the complexity to have read Father Figure and gone, “I love it.”  And people are scared. I’ve had friends, and these are all people who are not Jewish. I’ve asked, you know, when they’re fundraising for Gaza, “Is it possible to mention the hostages?” Certainly, the one time a famous person mentioned the hostages, they got so many death threats that they were scared, which I understand.  A public figure told me straight, her management said she can’t speak about them because it will damage her career. That’s where we are. People like things to be black and white. If you want to start at a really basic level, the way I try and go in is with all the things you could say legitimately to criticize Israel, and there are a lot of them.  The idea that Palestinians are brown and Israelis are white is crazy. That’s not the truth. I’ve said over and over, publicly on my Instagram, that in my opinion, the reason those hostage posters keep getting ripped down is that when you have 250 faces, you’re going to have to guess that’s a fairly accurate representation of Israeli society.  A couple of them are white or white-passing. Those are brown people because they either come from roots that were always there or they come from the places they were expelled from for being Jews, you know. That completely unanchors them and confuses them, and yeah, it’s been dispiriting but not unexpected, but that doesn’t make it easier.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I think something so interesting in Father Figure is that it’s Gail, the younger person, who is sort of taking the. I don’t want to say pro-Israel position. She’s not pro-settler, but she’s taking more of a…

Emma Forrest: That’s the influence of Hanif Qureshi, who has written a lot in his books about the immigrant experience. The next generation being more conservative than their parents. Also, we all, as much as we love our parents, hate a part of our parents. So you react and are whatever they are not. That’s where that comes from for Gail.  But yeah, I think the archetype of, especially with single parents, the younger generation being more conservative, is fairly accurate, actually.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I just want to talk to you about your reactions to the horrific attack at a Manchester synagogue. And also just to… yeah, what has changed, really, maybe since October 7, 2023, in British Jewish life?

Emma Forrest: Oh, my God, it’s so much worse. It’s so much worse. Again, a really good friend, and when I say a good friend, I mean people who check in with me, not just on the anniversary of October 7th, like to see how I’m doing, but who’ve been very open that they cannot say anything publicly.  A friend who was like, “Of course I wanted to post something on Instagram after the synagogue attack, like the way you would if it happened to any other group, but I just feel like people decide it means something, and that it would damage my work.” And she’s not wrong.  We were in services, and we all had our phones off, obviously. Then we came out and were told, “Move, move, move. Do not congregate. Keep going.” My daughter was right on the cusp of. She’s 12, so she’s right in the place of, like, “I’ll do what I like.” And she’s like, “Why do I have to move?” And I remember I looked around, I was like, “Because people come to synagogues to kill Jews.”  And then we headed home and turned on the phones, and there it was. Life’s been really bad. When October 7th happened, my kids were just at the end of elementary school. I remember a white Irish family who never spoke to us ever again. Not only did nobody say, “This is awful. Are you okay?” We just wanted that. There was never that beat.  I’m sure this happened in, not just in the UK, everywhere. Everyone in my publishing life, only my book agent is Jewish; no one else is. The woman who started my career, who first published me on October 7th, was on Instagram organizing a fundraiser for Gaza. There just was no beat or moment where she or anyone said, “We’re really sorry this happened. This must be incredibly traumatic.”  There were two British feminist writers who did go out of their way on their Instagram and said, “There is no historical context that makes rape as a tool of war acceptable.” Not another person that I can think of. No other female writer said that.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Do you remember which writers that was?

Emma Forrest: Yeah, I do. And the awful thing is that I want to name them because I’m so grateful to them. I also wonder if me naming them harms their career. It was Terry White, who’s a great writer, and Polly Vernon.  I remember a couple of months after October 7th, I was nominated for a literary prize for the first time. Weirdly, for the first time in my career. It was so exciting. Now, four judges and waiting to see. I didn’t win, but in the process of waiting, I went on the Instagram of one of the four judges.  She was not just posting anti-Israel stuff, which is, you know, par for the course. She was posting, you know, “Israelis are doing this to harvest the organs of Palestinians.” She was posting recipes she would use if Hamas ever came to her house so she could cook them all dinner.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Oh, boy.

Emma Forrest: And that was one of the judges of my work, in which, you know, my Jewishness is always part of the story. I talked to my agent and said, “Is there anything we can do?” And we just kind of, there’s nothing. There’s nothing that can be done.  We didn’t say anything; we didn’t want to be. We get told every single time that we’re playing the victim. All I can say is that there’s a lot of very left-wing, white English people who’ve been terrible, and probably the people who’ve checked in on me the most have been my Muslim friends. They’ve really gone out of their way, so that’s meant something for sure.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: On an upbeat note about your book, is it going to be a movie?

Emma Forrest: So, that’s an interesting thing too. It’s actually, it’s been optioned as a television series by the people who make Slow Horses as a miniseries. That fascinated me because. So the book, when it was optioned, the book hadn’t come out yet. Of all my books, it’s the one that got the most offers. There was a bidding for the screen rights to this book.  I’m fascinated, too, given the experience I then had with publishing it being so different and having no support or feeling like I had no support, even though it got tremendous reviews. I had, you know, The Guardian wrote it was amazing. The author, Jonathan Coe, picked it as his book of the summer.  There was something in it that didn’t actually. The woman I ended up going with was Greek, and she told me that she recognized in the book, like, all the dynamics were stuff she understood and could relate to. I think that’s also true in the United Kingdom, that it kind of doesn’t matter what minority you’re from. Ethnic minorities in Britain recognize a lot of the same stuff, you know, about being here.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, being American and in Canada, and now on paper, Canadian, culturally, probably pretty American. I do sometimes think just that it has nothing to do with. Well, a little to do with my personality, because I’ve chosen to become an opinion writer. But, like, I just. And the whole sort of, like, thing of being evasive, whispery, apologetic about Jewishness—just. I wouldn’t even think to do this. But I don’t think it’s so much about my character. I think it’s more about, like, I grew up in New York City, where this was just not a remarkable thing about me. And in Canada, I see the British way a bit like, it’s a. It’s somewhere in between, maybe.

Emma Forrest: Yeah.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So I know what it is. I more often see it in some British Jews. Like, that’s sort of like what Ezra does of the sort of, like, not wanting to draw too much attention to the Jewish. It’s like, I see it a little bit in Canada, it would be hard for me to imagine it in the States. It’s just not something. It’s not a way of being that really exists in the States.

Emma Forrest: Well, there’s also, like, you know, I don’t know, off the top of my head, two incredibly rarefied British Jews would be the director Sam Mendes and Stephen Fry. And you wouldn’t. You just. You wouldn’t know that because that they’re Jewish, because what they read as is very upper class, you know, very, very rarefied. So that stuff that. Having an American Jewish mother and an English Jewish father, I always see that divide over and over. My dad was sent to boarding school when he was really little, in order specifically to become less identifiably Jewish.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I could ask you questions about all of this, truly, all day and for weeks and years on end because I have so many things to talk about. It is Hillerford podcast, so I’m going to have to thank you so much for coming on The Jewish Angle. I’m going to have to again recommend Father Figure. And where can people find your work apart from your book?

Emma Forrest: Well, so Canada’s been a good market for me with my memoir, Your Voice in My Head, which came out 10 years ago and has always sold pretty well there. So you can get that. And if you’re ordering from the UK, Father Figure Blackwell’s deliver for free. So I recommend Blackwell’s.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on.

Emma Forrest: Okay, thank you for having me.

Show Notes

Credits

• Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
• Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman
• Music: “Gypsy Waltz” by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

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The post Emma Forrest wrote a seminal Jewish novel—and was quietly ghosted for it appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee for mayor of New York City, is best known for founding the Guardian Angels — and he credits a Jewish group with inspiring the movement.

As a teenager going to high school in Crown Heights, a heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, Sliwa says that he saw a group of men chasing out antisemitic gangs. That group was the Maccabees, founded by Rabbi Samuel Schrage to patrol the streets for crime in the 1960s.

“People leaving shul, running down Kingston towards Empire Boulevard, and these gangbangers were running for their lives,” Sliwa recalled in a 2021 interview with journalist Yitzi Weiner. “I said: ‘Wow, this really works! These guys are not coming back in here messing with the Lubavitchers!’”

That image remained with him until he started the Guardian Angels, a citizen patrol group on New York City subways and streets whose members wear a red beret, in 1979. It would become one of many stories about Jews in Sliwa’s public life, during which he has alternately talked about Jewish communities with admiration and disdain.

The radio host, amateur subway patroller and local celebrity is raising two Jewish sons, wearing his red beret as a kippah at their bar mitzvahs. (He and their mother, Melinda Katz, separated in 2014.) But he has also faced his share of controversies with Jewish communities, including accusations of antisemitism.

Sliwa is highly unlikely to become mayor of the overwhelmingly Democratic city. Since incumbent Mayor Eric Adams dropped out, he is now the lowest-polling candidate, trailing frontrunner Zohran Mamdani and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo by a wide margin. Still, Sliwa has cast himself as a champion for Republicans in the outer boroughs and a sizable minority of disaffected, politically homeless New Yorkers — including Jews who don’t like their other options.

We are breaking down for you what Sliwa has actually said about Jews, antisemitism, Israel and the Gaza war.

Jewish security and antisemitism 

Long before Sliwa’s foray into politics, he worked alongside Jewish patrols such as Shmira and Shomrim, whose unarmed volunteers respond to emergencies in Jewish neighborhoods and assist police. He talks proudly about the Guardian Angels’ efforts to defend Chabad-Lubavitch Jews during the anti-Jewish Crown Heights riots of 1991.

While Sliwa says he would bulk up the NYPD’s personnel as mayor, volunteer groups like these are central to his vision for security — especially in Jewish communities.

“I, unlike any of the candidates, have said Jews must protect themselves,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “If you depend strictly on Gentiles, history is replete with instances where you’re going to be horribly disappointed.” In another recent interview with the Queens Jewish Link, Sliwa said to Jews that he would not be “your Gentile mashiach,” using the Hebrew word for messiah.

The patrols that Sliwa views as key to public safety have been subjects of controversy over the years. In 2008, a 20-year-old Black man was beaten by a pair of Shmira patrollers. Another young Black man, Taj Patterson, was brutally attacked by a group of haredi Orthodox men that included members of Shomrim in 2013.

The Guardian Angels, meanwhile, have been criticized for fabricating stunts. In a 1992 interview, Sliwa admitted to manufacturing crimes and injuries for the group’s publicity.

Sliwa told JTA that he wants to introduce students to understanding antisemitism at a young age. As a child himself, he described a fork in the road when he lost an academic award to a Jewish classmate. His uncle suggested the classmate had a deal with their Jewish teacher, but Sliwa’s father corrected him, saying, “‘Curtis, he studied a lot harder than you. Lesson? Study harder.’” Sliwa said this kind of correction should be formally implemented in schools.

“There is no curriculum that addresses the problem of antisemitism,” he said. “Me? I would do it in third and fourth grade.”

Israel and the Gaza war

Israel and its ongoing war in Gaza have loomed large over the mayoral race. Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian advocacy and staunch criticism of Israel shook up New York City politics — and in response, his opponents have proffered the support for Israel that has long been tradition across both parties.

Sliwa talks about his visits to Israel as a thread that connects him to Jewish New Yorkers. During a trip there in 1998, he was offered free rides from bus drivers who mistook him for an Israeli paratrooper with his red beret, he told the Jewish News Syndicate. He applies his theory of Jewish-led security for Jews to Israel, telling The Jewish Press, “Jews have to organize among themselves. That’s why the State of Israel came about.”

He has criticized Mamdani’s views, saying the frontrunner has “no love in his heart for the State of Israel and for Israelis.” Like other candidates, he has rebuked Mamdani for declining to condemn the pro-Palestinian slogan “globalize the intifada” during the primary. (Mamdani has since clarified he does not personally use the language and would “discourage” it because of interpretations that it could incite violence against Jews.)

Sliwa went a step further by extending his attacks to Mamdani’s Jewish supporters. “I would say the Jewish community must look internally,” he said to JNS. “Why are some of our children and grandchildren following this guy and giving him absolution and exemption when he is using the language of an antisemite?”

But Sliwa has also said that he is more focused on his “law and order” platform than foreign policy. In an interview with The Forward, he pointed out that Cuomo’s focus on antisemitism accusations against Mamdani failed during the Democratic primary, which Mamdani roundly won.

And he recently acknowledged the intensity of pro-Palestinian sentiment in New York City, citing a New York Times/Siena poll that found voters are more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israel. In an interview with City & State, he suggested that President Donald Trump could dampen Mamdani’s momentum by brokering peace in the Middle East.

“If he can bring peace to Gaza, he can definitely take one political plank away from Zohran Mamdani, who has used that effectively during the primary and will now use it in the general campaign,” said Sliwa.

Controversies

Sliwa has clashed with Jewish New Yorkers over the years. In a 2018 speech, he described Orthodox Jews as a drag on the tax system and warned suburban residents that they were trying to “take over your community.”

“We’re not talking about poor, impoverished, disabled people who need help. We’re talking about able-bodied men who study Torah and Talmud all day and we subsidize them,” he said in a videotaped meeting in the Hudson Valley. “All they do is make babies like there’s no tomorrow and who’s subsidizing that? We are.”

This speech resurfaced when Sliwa ran for mayor in 2021. He responded with a video in which he did not apologize or disavow his comments, but offered to meet with Orthodox leaders to “resolve our differences.”

“My two youngest sons have been raised Jewish. They need to read this? To say to themselves, my father is an antisemite? Come on, even my worst critics out there would recognize that’s a shanda,” he said in the video.

Despite his offense at being called an “antisemite,” Sliwa sparked backlash again at a 2024 event by saying that antisemitism was innate to “Gentiles.”

“It’s in our DNA,” he said at an event supporting then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in Staten Island. “I also have to hold myself back sometimes. And I have two Jewish children.” He later told JTA that he “used the wrong term” in those remarks, meaning to say that antisemitism was often “fed into the minds” of non-Jews.

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