Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on October 11, 2021

Liza Behrendt: I looked at [Jewish events at Occupy] as another opportunity to build Occupy, rather than feeling a deep sense of Jewish identity in those spaces. The framing of the movement really flattened and erased identity; I was not particularly aware of any of my identities in the space, as a white person, or a Jewish person, or a queer person. There was a sense that we were all just going with the flow together, which I think did not feel affirming to a lot of people, and probably meant that the movement was less principled and less radical.

Yotam Marom: I definitely noticed that a lot of us in leadership were Jews, disproportionately. It became something I went on to write and talk about: What the fuck is it that all these Jews are on the left and just dont talk about being Jews?

Menachem Cohen (organizer, Occupy Judaism Chicago; rabbi): [In Chicago,] we made an interfaith group, which I think we called the spiritual care committee. We were there to let people know that if they wanted someone to talk to, or some spiritual recharge, we were available. It wasnt, Lets organize as Jews. It was like, Its exciting that were a bunch of Jews here. We took some energy and maybe some pride from it, but we didnt have a bloc.

Juan Carlos Ruiz (pastor, Church of the Good Shepherd; co-founder, New Sanctuary Coalition; organizer, Occupy Sandy): There was a mixed response to us [as religious figures] at Occupy. Because the Bible, the Quran, has always been in the hand of the conqueror, while the other hand has the sword, or the pistol. Some of us began trying to give a sense of historical memory, because the youth, in their fervor of organizing Occupy, did not have it. There is this whole historical memory that is subversive, these traditions that take on that prophetic voice of the marginalized, of the impoverished. So I began to tap into that and say, You guys are a link in this chain of solidarity.

Arthur Waskow (organizer, 1969 Freedom Seder; founder, Shalom Center; rabbi): I went to New York as part of the National Council of Elders, which is made up of veterans of the [social] movements of the 20th century. We got the leaders of Occupy to agree that we would lead a prayer service. Most of those people were totally uninterested in prayer, synagogues, churches. But we created a service that was of its time. There might have been a couple of pages of notes, but certainly there was no printed prayer book. And people loved it. We were astonished.

Daniel Sieradski: I remember there was one communist secularist who was like, Religion has no place in this movement, its a secular movement, you shouldnt be doing this. And I remember a couple of antisemites just straight out being like, Fuck you, get the fuck out of here. They got shouted down and chased out of the park. But apart from that nobody was ever anti what we were doing. It was always, Thank you so much for being here.

Liza Behrendt: I wasnt quite defining myself or my work as anti-Zionist or in solidarity with Palestine at the time, it was much more anti-[Israeli-]occupation. We were on the edge of grasping a critique of colonialism, but I know I wasnt there yet.

I never tried to bring Palestine up in a General Assembly. I dont remember trying to infuse it into any larger strategy in Zuccotti Park, partly because I felt like I didnt have the stamina to try to impact the larger strategy. But me and Carolyn [Klaasen] and others in the JVP chapter saw Occupy as an opportunity to help bring Palestine into the conversation.

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pWhat the Jewish Left Learned From Occupy - Jewish Currents

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Posted By admin on October 9, 2021

(RNS) I never really liked working at archaeological digs in Israel. Too much dust.

Besides, I have my own archaeological dig. Its called my files, and right about now, I am digging through them, trying to discern what to keep and what to discard.

That is how I came across a now-yellowed clipping from Esquire, November 1974. It is a long essay by the author Cynthia Ozick, with the title: All The World Wants the Jews Dead.

Ozick wrote that essay in the wake of the Yom Kippur War. Its subtitle: An overwrought view from the peak of the bottom. The piece is an anguished reflection on what had already become woefully apparent to me that anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism were essentially identical.

Among many prescient quotes, this one: Jewish and Israeli are one and the same thing, and no one, in or out of Israel, ought to pretend differently any more. While that is not demographically true, she was right the terms Israeli and Israel were substitutions and euphemisms for Jews.

It is now 2021, and novelist Dara Horn has published her own set of reflections People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present. Dara mirrors and echos Cynthias literary flair, her focus on Judaism and her suspicions about the Jewish place in the world.

Take a minute to compare the titles of those two works.

Ozick believed the world wanted the Jews dead or, at the very least, that it wanted the Jewish state obliterated.

(Do I believe that? My conclusion is not as bloody as hers. It is fair enough to say that many people in the world want the Jewish state discredited.)

For Horn, it is not that the world wants the Jews dead.

But many in the world are blas about Jewish death, and therefore, find dead or suffering Jews to be the most sympathetic.

Consider a recent reflection by comedian Sarah Silverman. Sarah pleaded with the Squad (whose domestic politics she otherwise admires) not to defund the Iron Dome: Please dont defund the Iron Dome. You know my family lives there People only really like Jews if theyre suffering. Dead Jews get a lot of honor.

From Ozick to Horn to Silverman, the sobering truth: The world can relate to Jews who suffer. To Jews with power, not so much.

But it is not only the world that has a fascination with Jewish suffering. It is the Jews themselves.

For decades, I have been pushing back against what historian Salo Baron called the lachrymose view of Jewish history. Throughout my career, I have noticed it was easier to raise money for Holocaust memorials than for Jewish education, and that more Jews seemed to care about how Jews died than about how Jews live.

Horn has read my mind. She notes that any Jew can name three death camps, but that almost none can name three Yiddish authors the language spoken by over 80 percent of death-camp victims. What, I asked, was the point of caring so much about how people died, if one cared so little about how they lived?

In one essay, she contrasts the turnout at a rally against antisemitism with that of a celebration of the ending of a cycle of Talmud study (that essay contains some of the best descriptions of the world of the Talmud that I have ever read).

Horn makes so many salient points in this book of essays. Let me list for you my major takeaways.

Horn looks at the 2019 attack on the kosher grocery store in Jersey City, quite close to where she lives. There were almost immediate choruses of hemming and hawing, with some observers saying the attack on the Orthodox Jews was really a protest against gentrification.

Never mind that the Orthodox victims were themselves refugees from the gentrification of their old neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Never mind that the murderer did not live in that neighborhood, but rather, almost randomly looked for Jewish locations to attack.

Moreover, even if the murders had been a pushback against gentrification, whence the idea that violence is an appropriate reaction to neighborhood change? She writes:

As the journalist Armin Rosen has pointed out, the apparently murderous rage against gentrification has yet to result in anyone using automatic weapons to blow away white hipsters at the newest Blue Bottle Coffee.

People said you needed to put this horror into context. The very idea is obscene.

Context? I was not able to find any similar context in media reports after the 2015 massacre at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, or the 2016 massacre at an LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, Florida, or the 2019 massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas frequented by Latino shoppers all hate-crime attacks that unambiguously targeted minority groups This is hateful victim-blaming, the equivalent of analyzing the flattering selfies of a rape victim in lurid detail in order to provide context for a sexual assault.

Many of us understand that Jews, and Judaism and Jewish culture, are different. How different? Horn, who is first and foremost a scholar of Yiddish literature, points out that whereas typical stories end on an up note They all lived happily ever after that is not how Jewish stories end. Jewish stories are not as uplifting as we would want them to be.

This is especially true with stories about the Shoah, and it is even more true with stories about righteous gentiles. Everyone loves Schindlers List, but the truth is that .001% of Europeans saved Jewish lives.

In fact, quite often, Jewish stories do not end; they stop. The Torah does not really end; it just kind of stops with the death of Moses. In Jewish storytelling, (there is) a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world, Horn writes.

You want to bring down the full wrath of a Jewish audience on your head? Try telling them: No, the people who worked at Ellis Island did not strip your great-grandfather of his European name.

And no, your ancestor was not the exception to that historical fact.

The truth is: The people who worked at immigration centers were highly literate, in multiple languages. They were not able to blithely change peoples names. They already knew the names of new arrivals. Why? Because they had the ship manifests before them.

But, no. This is the origin myth of American Jews, and as a myth, it is quite potent.

Horn says: No. She shows that it was Jews themselves who changed their own names, because they believed that more neutral names would lubricate their entry into America, and would be the key that would unlock the gates of opportunity.

I could have imagined Horn arguing that, in fact, it was the Jewish need to fit in that drove the name-changing thing. In other words, we changed our names because we wanted to assimilate.

Except

Many names circulating in the United States during this period were foreign-sounding and difficult to pronounce and spell for example, LaGuardia, Roosevelt, Juilliard, Lindbergh, DiMaggio, Vanderbilt, Earhart, Rockefeller, and Eisenhower. Yet as the remarkably low numbers of non-Jewish name-change petitioners in New York City demonstrate, such families and their forebears do not appear to have been subject to embarrassment or affected socially, educationally, economically, and patriotically by having names that were difficult to pronounce and spell.

In other words, it was not the desire to merely fit in. It was fear fear that American antisemitism would prevent their familys success. That Jews were not welcome here.

One last thing. It occurs to me that all the people whom I have cited in this essay Ozick, Silverman and Horn are women. Add to this the names of Deborah Lipstadt and Bari Weiss. Not to mention Horns dissertation adviser, Ruth Wisse.

It has long been this way, but it is only now, perhaps, that we notice: Some of the most trenchant observers of Jewish life and especially, some of the most vociferous voices against antisemitism are women. (Yes, her recent remarks offered Silverman an honorary key to this club.)

This is, as they say, good for the Jews.

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The thing about dead Jews - Religion News Service

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Posted By admin on October 9, 2021

Ive felt it too, every time. Ive walked through places where Jews lived for hundreds or even thousands of years, people who share so many of the foundations of my own life the language and books I cherish, the ideas that nourish me, the rhythms of my weeks and years and I have felt the silence close in.

I dont mean the dead Jews silence, but my own. I know how I am supposed to feel: solemn, calmly contemplative, and perhaps also grateful to whoever so kindly restored this synagogue or renamed this street. I stifle my disquiet, telling myself it is merely sorrow, burying it so deep that I no longer recognize what it really is: rage.

That rage is real, and we ignore it at our peril. Its apparently in poor taste to point out why people like Mr. Simentov wind up as Last Jews to begin with: People decided they no longer wanted to live with those who werent exactly like themselves. Nostalgic stories about Last Jews mask a much larger and darker reality about societies that were once ethnic and religious mosaics, but are now home to almost no one but Arab Muslims, Lithuanian Catholics or Han Chinese. It costs little to wax nostalgic about departed Jews when one lives in a place where diversity, rather than being a living human challenge, is a fairy tale from the past. There is only one way to be.

What does it mean for a society to rid itself of other points of view? To reject those with different perspectives, different histories, different ways of being in the world? The example of Jewish history, of the many Last Jews in places around the globe, holds up a dark mirror to those of us living in much freer societies. The cynical use of bygone Jews to inspire us can verge on the absurd, but that absurdity isnt so far-off from our own lip service to diversity, where those who differ from us are wonderful, so long as they see things our way.

On paper, American diversity is impressive. But in reality, we often live siloed lives. How do we really treat those who arent just like us? The disgust is palpable, as anyone knows who has tried being Jewish on TikTok. Are we up to the challenge of maintaining a society that actually respects others?

I hope so, but Im not holding my breath. The Last Jew of Afghanistan is gone, and everyone is glad to be rid of him.

Dara Horn is the author, most recently, of People Love Dead Jews and the creator and host of the podcast Adventures With Dead Jews.

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Opinion | What Happens When the Last Jew Leaves Afghanistan - The New York Times

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Posted By admin on October 9, 2021

"The Inquisition has been caricatured," Daily Wire host Matt Walsh insisted in a recent segment on his show, unearthed by Media Matters journalist Jason Campbell. "I mean, it was far more defensible than modern-day cancel culture is, especially the cancel campaigns waged by trans activists."

The attack on trans people here is standard for the rabid right-wing media. The apologetics for the Inquisition is a little more unexpected.

But hatred of trans people is in fact perfectly of a piece with a defense of torturing Jews. Walsh is a white Christian nationalist, and white Christian nationalists see patriarchal gender roles and Christianity as perfectly synchronized. For Walshs movement, Jewish people and trans people are both deviant, and both must be disciplined, with fire if necessary.

Contrary to Walsh, the Inquisitions reputation for injustice and cruelty was well-earned.

In its pursuit of heretics, the Church is believed to have murdered some 32,000 people in horrific ways; inquisitors burned people alive, tortured countless more: by waterboarding them, stretching them on the rack, flaying skin and crushing limbs. The Church targeted Jews and Muslims, who had done nothing wrong, hunting and persecuting them from Spain to Mexico, Portugal to Peru.

And despite the talk about pursuing the purity of faith, many of those accused and maimed were the subjects of false accusations, as "good" Christians accused other good Christians of heretical thoughts in order to settle scores, steal property, or just for sport.

Walsh claims that trans people force people out of jobs or shame them into submission. He suggests that this distinguishes trans rights proponents from the Church, which he said, just harmed peoples bodies, not their reputations.

This is silly on its face; murder is not some minor misdemeanor compared to shaming and anyway, of course the Church used shame, people lost their livelihoods and their reputations.

But the truth is that trans people rarely have power to enforce social censure, even on people who blatantly violate their human rights by hounding them out of jobs or denying them access to health care. Its not cis people, but trans people who are routinely discriminated against which is why trans people have higher rates of unemployment, lower incomes, and higher rates of poverty than the cis people Walsh insists they are oppressing.

Walsh doesnt care that the Inquisition murdered people and trans people dont. Instead, for him the Inquisition is less dangerous than trans activists because, "In this Inquisition of today, the inquisitors are not trying to coerce a belief in or submission to any sort of eternal, celestial God. Rather they themselves are the gods. At least thats what they believe, and they want us to believe."

"Trans activists" by which Walsh means any trans people asking to be treated as human are godless heathens who undermine the True Faith, while also setting themselves up as gods to be worshipped.

He refers to trans rights struggles as a "modern form of forced conversion," because he believes that it violates Christian tenets for trans people to exist, or to ask for acceptance. Walsh first whitewashes the Inquisition, and then declares that trans people are heretics. The implication is clear enough. Walsh would like to treat trans people the way that Jews and Muslims were treated during the Inquisition.

There is plenty of evidence that homophobia is a core tenet of American right-wing Christianity. Polls show that white American Christians are the U.S. group who are the least accepting of LGBT people. White evangelicals made up Trumps core support as he pushed extreme homophobic and transphobic policies like banning trans people from the military and barricading legislation that would prevent discrimination against LGBT people.

Just as white Christian nationalists often treat queer people as religious apostates, so they tend to treat Jewish people as sexual apostates. Sexual incapacity or sexual deviance is a big part of what Christian nationalists or fascists are hinting at when they refer to Jews as "decadent."

The notorious Nazi propaganda film 'The Eternal Jew' claimed that Jewish people controlled 98 percent of prostitution worldwide. Along the same lines, Georgia Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has accused Jewish billionaire George Soros and the Rothschild family of being core players in the antisemiticQAnonconspiracy theory that claims that Democratic leaders run a vast ring of child sexual abusers.

Soros has also been accused of being the hidden hand behind the LGBT rights movement as if LGBT people themselves arent capable of demanding equality unless some shadowy Jewish manipulator masterminds their actions.

Walsh himself doesnt mention Jewish people or Muslim people directly in the clip. They are erased from the history of the Inquisition, because talking about them directly would require actually engaging with Christianitys history of intolerance and violence.

Walsh is determined to portray Christians as the victims of a heretical intolerant trans cabal. Thinking about how Christians have treated Jewish people in the past would raise uncomfortable questions about who wants to convert who, and by which methods.

Walsh really should have just avoided talking about the Inquisition altogether. But the temptations of projection were apparently too much for him. Once he has decided to compare trans people to the Inquisition, hes got to deal with the real Inquisition and to reveal that he finds its not-so-gentle mercies somewhat appealing.

The Inquisition, at least, was a crusade for the eternal glory of God. The Inquisition, at least, only harmed bodies, not souls. You might even say it harmed bodies to save souls. Thats virtuous, right?

At the end of the clip, Walsh refers to the effort to secure trans rights as "repulsive." Its a telling word, which frames morality in terms of visceral, instinctive disgust. White Christian nationalists imagine a unitary, pure America, which kneels before a solitary God.

Those outside the charmed circle of the righteous are a chaotic mishmash of indistinguishable error; wrong bodies, wrong desires, and wrong beliefs. Jewish people or trans people or any number of others; you can shuffle one out for the other, and it doesnt matter.

Only the righteous are truly individuals worthy of empathy. Their integrity, their freedom, and indeed their violence, must be defended. For everyone else, the Inquisition will sort them out.

Noah Berlatsky is a freelance writer. He lives in Chicago. Twitter:@nberlat

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Why America's Christian nationalists now defend the torture of Jews - Haaretz

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October is rich with German celebrations. Many of us will visit one of the local Oktoberfests in North Texas in the coming weeks. Additionally, Oct. 6 is German-American Day, commemorating the founding of Germantown, Pa., in 1683. But did you know that the holidays origins are connected to Dallas and a man named Gershon Canaan, who had a particularly inspiring vision of what it meant to him?

Far away from Dallas, Gerhard Kohn was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1917. By the 1930s his family was being persecuted by the Nazis, so they fled to Palestine, where Gerhard Kohn became Gershon Canaan. When the war broke out, Canaan joined the British Armys Jewish Brigade, serving on multiple fronts and ultimately helping to liberate concentration camps in 1945.

In 1947, Canaan moved to the United States to study under Frank Lloyd Wright, eventually relocating to Austin to pursue studies at the University of Texas. In 1958 he took a job in Dallas, where he would meet his future wife, Doris, and start his own family.

Canaan worked tirelessly to promote Dallas as a cosmopolitan city with international flair in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. He served as honorary consul for the Federal Republic of Germany from 1962 to 1987 and traveled frequently to West Germany on behalf of the mayor of Dallas and the governor of Texas, facilitating reparations to Holocaust survivors. Despite his wartime experiences, Canaan never felt ashamed of his German background. He felt it was still a part of who he was.

Canaan saw no contradiction between his German and his Jewish identity. When asked about representing Germany as a Jew, according to an obituary in the Dallas Goethe Center archives, he responded: Times change. People change. I find satisfaction in the modest part I play in increasing peace, friendship and increasing understanding between our two countries. The time has come to move ahead.

And Canaan did just that, highlighting what he believed to be the most positive aspects of German cultural identity. Canaan lobbied for a celebration of German culture in Texas, which was made official in 1963. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan made the celebration a nationwide affair, declaring Oct. 6 German-American Day, honoring the contributions of German American immigration.

In 1982, Dallas Mayor Jack Evans proclaimed Sept. 14 Gershon Canaan Day. That same year Germany presented Canaan with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic, one of its highest civilian decorations. These honors were in part a recognition of the ideals that fueled Canaans 1962 plan to build a German Cultural organization that became The Dallas Goethe Center and its language school.

Canaan envisioned an organization that would celebrate not only German culture as represented by Germanys greatest poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but also an organization that through its renewed cultural values would help remedy the chauvinistic, nationalist and racist elements of the past. He and his co-founders often asked themselves how such an organization could promote democracy, tolerance, peace and understanding.

Today the Dallas Goethe Center continues that conciliatory tradition that Canaan wished so fervently to start. As a nonprofit nonpartisan organization it is dedicated to fostering the German language, lifelong learning and cultural dialogue.

During these times of political and social upheaval we would all do well to consider Canaans positive, community-oriented commitment to mutual understanding. This October when you raise a beer in honor of German-American Day, consider also the man who helped inspire it and his wish to celebrate the human spirit that lies within us all, regardless of our backgrounds.

As Goethe once said: We can most safely achieve truly universal tolerance when we respect that which is characteristic in the individual and in nations, clinging, though, to the conviction that the truly meritorious is unique by belonging to all of mankind.

Jacob-Ivan Eidt is president of the Dallas Goethe Center and an associate professor of German at the University of Dallas. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

Find the full opinion section here. Got an opinion about this issue? Send a letter to the editor and you just might get published.

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How a German Jew inspired an annual celebration of German heritage in Texas - The Dallas Morning News

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Posted By admin on October 9, 2021

Leibman does this by excavating the genealogies of Sarah and Isaac Lopez Brandon, siblings born in the late 18th century to a wealthy Barbadian Jewish businessman and an enslaved woman. The siblings eventually made it New York, where they were able to pass as white. They became accomplished and affluent members of New York Citys oldest Jewish congregation, Shearith Israel.

Sarah and Isaacs father, Abraham Rodriguez Brandon, was a Sephardic Jew who traced his ancestry to the expulsion of Jews from Spain. He settled in Barbados as part of a Jewish community of between 400 and 500 families that worked on the islands sugar plantations and refineries.

Brandon secured his childrens manumission fees, and in 1801 they became free mulattos. In Barbados, that still meant they could not vote or hold office, or for that matter be married in the islands synagogue or buried in its cemetery.

But America was kinder to them. Both Sarah and Isaac immigrated to America and married into prominent and wealthy U.S. Jewish families while hiding their past. One granddaughter had no clue about their origins.

Religion News Service talked to Leibman about her discovery of the Brandon genealogy and what it means for the U.S. Jewish community to grapple with its multiracial past and present. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

How did you come across this amazing story?

Many years ago, when I was working on a different book, I interviewed Karl Watson, an expert on the Jews of Barbados. He mentioned an incident in the synagogue minutes about Isaac Lopez Brandon and his fight for civil rights and how he had eventually been cast out of the synagogue. I stored it away. Years later I was entranced with Isaac Lopez Brandon. I started working with a student on what was going on with the battle for civil rights and how it intersected with people of color on the island. It wasnt until many years later that I was able to prove that Sarah, who was manumitted with him, was the same sister who lived in New York.

How many slaves integrated into Jewish households and became Jewish?

There are a lot of people who lived at the margins of the Jewish community because they were genealogically related to Jews or are in households where they pick up Jewish religious practices. But because conversion was so rare in early Barbados, they often hover at the edges of the Jewish community until theyre able to join openly later.

Why was the Jewish community so opposed to converting them?

My guess is it was politics on the island. They experienced antisemitism and pressures not to do so. Barbadian Jews didnt want to push against Anglican elites and jeopardize their own standing. Theyre not converting anybody at that period, not just people with African ancestry.

Were Jews more likely to take up with slaves in Barbados?

No. The reason why you see such a large percentage of people who have one foot in the community of free people of color and one foot in the Jewish community is that theres a large proportion of Jews and people of color. Theyre living right next to each other.

We see that in the story of Sarah and Isaac. Their mothers father is Anglican. Their father is Jewish. Their mother is enslaved by Jews. She meets Abraham Rodriguez Brandon. They never officially marry. But by the time her children move to New York she takes his name and is accepted by the Jewish community in New York and Philadelphia. She and her mother and grandmother are referred to as multiracial in the records.

In Barbados, freed slaves often owned slaves. How did that happen?

In Bridgetown, the vast majority of people who were once enslaved and later owned their relatives did so because it was too expensive to free them. So its a way of being able to protect the relatives, even if they cant pay the high fees to get them legally free. Sarah and Isaac inherit their own great-grandmother, presumably so they can take care of her. There are the very wealthy free people of color in Barbados who own large numbers of enslaved people and are running plantations. Thats not the norm. Its much more common for people to inherit relatives from their previous owners and its a way of keeping them safe.

These synagogues were very different from today. They were benevolent societies that took care of people into their old age. How did synagogues work in those days?

To receive welfare, you needed to belong to a religious organization and the one deemed appropriate for you by the powers that be. If you were born Jewish, you couldnt get money from the Anglican church. Synagogues were quite powerful. In some synagogues, a third of the money they collected went to pay for poor Jews. Particularly for women, it was really important to be in the good graces of the synagogue board. Some synagogues put in rules about having to live in the town for a certain amount of time or rent a seat in the synagogue for a certain amount of time to become a member. Theyre trying to protect the synagogue from a whole bunch of people coming in from someplace else and transforming it.

The book is the perfect example of how race is a social construction. Can doing genealogy help people understand that?

Yes and no. Genealogy tests will tell you youre this percent Jewish and this percent that like its embedded in you. Thats exactly what we dont want to emphasize. Isaac Lopez Brandon, when he lives in New York, is considered white but when he goes on business to Barbados hes a person of color again. That ability to see a persons race is dependent on the rules of the society hes living in at any particular time. Genealogy does, however, allow us to see a multitude of things going on in our past things our families have chosen to emphasize and things they havent chosen to emphasize.

Whats the reception to your book in Jewish settings?

It seems to resonate with a lot of different people because its so concrete. Its a message people are interested in, in terms of whats going on with the diversity of Jews, particularly in the United States today.

Do you see U.S. synagogues needing to readjust how they treat Black Jews or multiracial Jews?

There are moments where seeing how things have happened to people in the past can make us more aware in the present. An example in the book is a man from Germany who comes to Shearith Israel in New York in the middle of the 19th century and begins interrogating (the multiracial) women in the congregation: Where are you from? What are you doing here? How did you become members of this congregation? It suggests they dont belong there. One can only imagine it was a painful moment for those women.

When I teach classes at my childrens day school, I really think, how do the children sitting in that classroom relate to the stories we tell about American Jewish history? Does it give implicit messages of who are the important Jews and who arent? The more we can be attuned to that history, which is complicated and diverse, the more we can make it part of the normal vision of what it means to be a Jew in America or in Europe. What are the stories we as historians have told that make people feel they arent the important Jews and how does that create feelings of exclusion today?

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Born into slavery, they rose to be elite New York Jews J. - The Jewish News of Northern California

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Posted By admin on October 9, 2021

(RNS) Jews are proud of the biblical story from Exodus that recounts their deliverance from slavery in Egypt in the third century B.C.

But few U.S. Jews consider that some of their ancestors were slaves in the trans-Atlantic slave trade that ended in the 19th century.

In her new book, Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family, Laura Arnold Leibman, a Reed College English professor, conclusively shows that Jews, who were typically thought of as white, were not only slave owners. They were also slaves.

Leibman does this by excavating the genealogies of Sarah and Isaac Lopez Brandon, siblings born in the late 18th century to a wealthy Barbadian Jewish businessman and an enslaved woman. The siblings eventually made it New York, where they were able to pass as white. They became accomplished and affluent members of New York Citys oldest Jewish congregation, Shearith Israel.

Sarah and Isaacs father, Abraham Rodriguez Brandon, was a Sephardic Jew who traced his ancestry to the expulsion of Jews from Spain. He settled in Barbados as part of a Jewish community of between 400 and 500 families that worked on the islands sugar plantations and refineries.

Brandon secured his childrens manumission fees, and in 1801 they became free mulattos. In Barbados, that still meant they could not vote or hold office, or for that matter be married in the islands synagogue or buried in its cemetery.

RELATED: He claimed white Jews gained from white supremacy. Now hes more popular than ever.

But America was kinder to them. Both Sarah and Isaac immigrated to America and married into prominent and wealthy U.S. Jewish families while hiding their past. One granddaughter had no clue about their origins.

Religion News Service talked to Leibman about her discovery of the Brandon genealogy and what it means for the U.S. Jewish community to grapple with its multiracial past and present. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

Many years ago, when I was working on a different book, I interviewed Karl Watson, an expert on the Jews of Barbados. He mentioned an incident in the synagogue minutes about Isaac Lopez Brandon and his fight for civil rights and how he had eventually been cast out of the synagogue. I stored it away. Years later I was entranced with Isaac Lopez Brandon. I started working with a student on what was going on with the battle for civil rights and how it intersected with people of color on the island. It wasnt until many years later that I was able to prove that Sarah, who was manumitted with him, was the same sister who lived in New York.

There are a lot of people who lived at the margins of the Jewish community because they were genealogically related to Jews or are in households where they pick up Jewish religious practices. But because conversion was so rare in early Barbados, they often hover at the edges of the Jewish community until theyre able to join openly later.

My guess is it was politics on the island. They experienced antisemitism and pressures not to do so. Barbadian Jews didnt want to push against Anglican elites and jeopardize their own standing. Theyre not converting anybody at that period, not just people with African ancestry.

No. The reason why you see such a large percentage of people who have one foot in the community of free people of color and one foot in the Jewish community is that theres a large proportion of Jews and people of color. Theyre living right next to each other.

Portrait of Sarah Brandon, ca. 181516. Watercolor on ivory. Image courtesy of American Jewish Historical Society

We see that in the story of Sarah and Isaac. Their mothers father is Anglican. Their father is Jewish. Their mother is enslaved by Jews. She meets Abraham Rodriguez Brandon. They never officially marry. But by the time her children move to New York she takes his name and is accepted by the Jewish community in New York and Philadelphia. She and her mother and grandmother are referred to as multiracial in the records.

In Bridgetown, the vast majority of people who were once enslaved and later owned their relatives did so because it was too expensive to free them. So its a way of being able to protect the relatives, even if they cant pay the high fees to get them legally free. Sarah and Isaac inherit their own great-grandmother, presumably so they can take care of her. There are the very wealthy free people of color in Barbados who own large numbers of enslaved people and are running plantations. Thats not the norm. Its much more common for people to inherit relatives from their previous owners and its a way of keeping them safe.

To receive welfare, you needed to belong to a religious organization and the one deemed appropriate for you by the powers that be. If you were born Jewish, you couldnt get money from the Anglican church. Synagogues were quite powerful. In some synagogues, a third of the money they collected went to pay for poor Jews. Particularly for women, it was really important to be in the good graces of the synagogue board. Some synagogues put in rules about having to live in the town for a certain amount of time or rent a seat in the synagogue for a certain amount of time to become a member. Theyre trying to protect the synagogue from a whole bunch of people coming in from someplace else and transforming it.

Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family by Laura Arnold Leibman. Courtesy image

Yes and no. Genealogy tests will tell you youre this percent Jewish and this percent that like its embedded in you. Thats exactly what we dont want to emphasize. Isaac Lopez Brandon, when he lives in New York, is considered white but when he goes on business to Barbados hes a person of color again. That ability to see a persons race is dependent on the rules of the society hes living in at any particular time. Genealogy does, however, allow us to see a multitude of things going on in our past things our families have chosen to emphasize and things they havent chosen to emphasize.

It seems to resonate with a lot of different people because its so concrete. Its a message people are interested in, in terms of whats going on with the diversity of Jews, particularly in the United States today.

There are moments where seeing how things have happened to people in the past can make us more aware in the present. An example in the book is a man from Germany who comes to Shearith Israel in New York in the middle of the 19th century and begins interrogating (the multiracial) women in the congregation: Where are you from? What are you doing here? How did you become members of this congregation? It suggests they dont belong there. One can only imagine it was a painful moment for those women.

When I teach classes at my childrens day school, I really think, how do the children sitting in that classroom relate to the stories we tell about American Jewish history? Does it give implicit messages of who are the important Jews and who arent? The more we can be attuned to that history, which is complicated and diverse, the more we can make it part of the normal vision of what it means to be a Jew in America or in Europe. What are the stories we as historians have told that make people feel they arent the important Jews and how does that create feelings of exclusion today?

RELATED: Study: Jews of color love Judaism but often experience racism in Jewish settings

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Born into slavery, they rose to be elite New York Jews. A new book tells their story. - Religion News Service

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When Elana Johnson was shopping for a synagogue three years ago, the mother of four approached a Conservative congregation in Lincoln, Nebraska, to ask about joining.

For most synagogues, such an inquiry would have been a no-brainer. But Johnson had elected not to circumcise her three sons, departing from one of Judaisms most widely practiced traditions, and she was concerned about whether that would be a problem.

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Johnson didnt feel included: Her family joined a nearby Reform synagogue instead.

I want to be more observant and in a more observant community, she said. But I also just want my kids to be happy and welcome and feel as little judgment as possible no matter where we go.

A new organization launching this week aims to make that more likely. The group, called Bruchim (Hebrew for welcome), is seeking to normalize the decision not to circumcise Jewish boys, a venerable religious rite that goes back to the Bible and which is widely practiced across the spectrum of Jewish observance, even by otherwise non-observant Jewish families.

Families who are making this decision shouldnt feel marginalized and they shouldnt feel like they have to be secret about it, said Lisa Braver Moss, Bruchims co-founder and president.

The group is an outgrowth of advocacy that Moss and Bruchim co-founder and executive director, Rebecca Wald, have been doing for decades. Moss first argued against Jewish circumcision in a 1990 essay, and together they outlined an alternative ceremony, brit shalom (literally covenant of peace) in a 2015 book and distributed flyers at that years Reform movement convention outlining ways for synagogues to be more welcoming for families that had opted out of circumcision.

Now, in Bruchim, they have a volunteer staff, including Johnson as social media strategist, as well as a four-member rabbinical advisory board. The team includes people with professional backgrounds in all of Judaisms non-Orthodox movements, as well as several people who grew up Orthodox.

Among its objectives, Bruchim wants to see synagogues make proactive statements of welcome for non-circumcising families similar to those that have become common toward Jews of color and LGBT+ Jews. They also hope rabbis will offer one of several alternative welcome ceremonies for newborns in place of the traditional bris.

I see circumcision its described as a sign, a sign of the covenant and there are many options for signs, said Rabbi Elyse Wechterman, executive director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association and a member of Bruchims rabbinic advisory board. I actually dont think that it is an option [not] to bring your child into the covenant. I think you must bring your child into the covenant, or you should bring your child into the covenant. I want to push that as an expectation. How its done there are many equally valid options.

Whether Bruchims requests will find a ready reception within American Jewish communities is uncertain.

As one of the oldest rituals in the Jewish faith, we will always advocate and educate our community about the beauty and meaning of brit milah, Jacobs said. But he added, Connecting oneself to the Jewish community may take many forms, and we understand that some families and individuals are making the choice to not circumcise as part of the brit ceremony. There will always be a place for everyone in the Reform community, regardless of how they or their family choose to express their faith.

Rabbi Elliot Dorff, the leading bioethicist in the Conservative movement and the chair of its top Jewish law authority, said there is no basis in Jewish law for denying an uncircumcised man access to religious life, including bar-mitzvah. But his movement has not made any formal statements since the 1981 opinion taking bar mitzvah off the table for uncircumcised children.

And Dorff said that advertising openness to non-circumcising families, one of Bruchims main asks, is not something that he would endorse.

Do I want to say publicly, even though its certainly true, that people who violate Shabbat publicly are welcome in our community? Dorff said. Of course theyre welcome in our community. But I dont want to say publicly that its wonderful that you violate Shabbat.

One Bay Area Conservative rabbi who asked not to be named out of fear he would become the target of hate mail, said he has turned away about a half-dozen non-circumcising families in 20 years leading his synagogue.

Its a covenantal mitzvah, the rabbi said, referring to circumcision. Its the sign of the covenant, which is about as basic to Judaism as you can get. By not circumcising, youre saying that youre outside the covenant of Judaism. And bar-mitzvah is saying youre part of the mitzvah-observing community. Youre starting with the basic idea that youre not going to observe one of the most fundamental mitzvot of Judaism.

No reliable statistics exist on the percentage of American Jewish men who are circumcised, though the vast majority are believed to be. In part, thats because circumcision is performed on the vast majority of American boys some 90% of non-Hispanic whites, according to a 2014 study, making the US a global outlier on this issue. But that figure appears to be dropping.

Critics of circumcision object to the practice on a number of grounds, including the physical and emotional trauma inflicted on children, a conviction they lack the right to modify someones body without permission and a belief that there is no medical benefit for the child. The position of the American medical establishment is that the benefits of circumcision outweigh the risks.

The broad societal trend, coupled with the fact that 72% of American Jews who married between 2010 and 2020 chose a non-Jewish spouse, according to the 2020 Pew study, means that while the numbers of Jewish parents who choose to leave their children intact is almost certainly a tiny minority, their numbers are likely to be growing.

I looked into the medical reasoning. I thought a lot about the ethics of it all. And my conclusion was, I dont think I feel so good about this, said one Jewish mother who sits on Bruchims board but asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the subject. Am I the only Jew that doesnt feel so good about this? And I started to realize that I wasnt, but everyone felt the need to be very quiet about it.

Some efforts to bar circumcision in San Francisco, where Moss lives, and elsewhere have been criticized as antisemitic. Bruchim is limiting involvement to Jews, advertising that anyone who is Jewish may donate and come to meetings, in an effort to make parents like the board member feel comfortable discussing their wrestling with tradition.

We need almost a safe space to have these conversations without that sort of outside interference, where people can be really negative, even hateful, or just simply not get it even with the best intentions, said Johnson. Its a conversation that Jewish people should only really be having with other Jewish people. And having Bruchim means that were able to offer that support and community in a way that has not really existed until this time.

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These Jews want to normalize not circumcising with the synagogue's help - The Jerusalem Post

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Asher Lovy was expecting a flood of notifications on Monday morning when he posted information about a sexual abuse case to several WhatsApp chat groups devoted to tracking the work of his organization, which provides support to survivors of sexual abuse within the Orthodox community.

Instead, he heard nothing. WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging app he uses, was down, along with Facebook and Instagram, three of the most widely used social platforms in the world.

I was worried that people who were trying to reach us wouldnt be able to, Lovy said. He began to worry about what would happen if the outage extended later into the week, when Zaakah would ready its mental health hotline for Orthodox Jews who have crises on Shabbat, when many other services are closed or inaccessible.

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We have people contacting us on WhatsApp to get referrals for resources for therapists or lawyers, or just to talk and receive support, he said. I get texts at 2 oclock, 3 oclock in the morning from people in crisis who need support or resources, who do they reach out to if not us? The thought of Whatsapp going down on Shabbos is terrifying.

Lovys fears did not come to pass: WhatsApp was back up after six hours, along with Facebook and Instagram. But the outage, which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said was the most significant interruption in service in years, brought into sharp focus the degree to which WhatsApp is baked into the communication infrastructure for most of the worlds Jews and how vulnerable that infrastructure may be.

With more than 2 billion users worldwide, WhatsApp is by far the most widely used instant messaging service in the world. Its simple platform, which works even on older flip phones, is the communication standard in many countries in Africa and the Middle East, and its early adoption in Israel and the relative unpopularity of iPhones there means it remains the countrys text messaging app of choice.

In the United States, its dominance is perhaps most clear in the haredi Orthodox world.

Its not just rumors that take hold on Orthodox WhatsApp chats. We run all our groups of employees on various businesses through WhatsApp, said Mordy Getz, a community leader who owns a health clinic and Judaica store in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

A unique confluence of factors drives the penetration and lasting power of WhatsApp in Orthodox communities.

Many community members have filters on their phones to prevent them from accessing external websites and social media platforms, so they receive all their information through WhatsApp, according to Getz. (This creates its own problems, as misinformation can circulate easily and quickly without the ability to fact-check.)

Whats more, WhatsApps integrated voice notes option allows people with wide-ranging skills in written language to communicate with each other, a potential issue in communities where critics have charged that yeshivas do not always leave graduates with a strong secular education.

And WhatsApp video and phone calls dont carry long distance calling fees. For Jewish families in which some members are Orthodox and others are not, or some members live in Israel and others in the Diaspora, WhatsApp can serve as a vital convening ground.

Every Orthodox Jew has people in Israel and Europe, said Getz. You have to have WhatsApp if you want to talk to them.

When that stops working, the distance can feel greater.

Orli Gal, a Philadelphia nurse, said her family, which includes people in Israel and across the United States, would have been celebrating a milestone in her sisters medical training over WhatsApp Monday when the outage cut off their communications.

Weve got people all over the world, and some of them are pretty elderly. This is the only way they know how to get in touch, she said. WhatsApp is the only thing that connects us all.

Mendel Horowitz, a therapist and teacher in Jerusalem, was suddenly unable to be in touch with his 20-year-old son, Alty, who was vacationing in Egypts Sinai Desert with friends.

I dont want to say I was up all night worried because I wasnt, he said. But it was on our minds that this is the only way to reach him and we cant.

The outage got Horowitz thinking about his own familys reliance on WhatsApp and whether it was wise given the apps vulnerabilities. Its not an emergency, but it gets us thinking about the next time somebody goes somewhere, we should have a plan B, he said.

Horowitz wasnt alone.

If WhatsApp were to disappear, there would be no backup infrastructure for communication within the Orthodox community, said Lovy.

The outage, Gal said, mostly made me rethink: Why did we allow Facebook to buy it in the first place?

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How did the WhatsApp outage affect Orthodox Jews and Israelis? - The Jerusalem Post

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When Elana Johnson was shopping for a synagogue three years ago, the mother of four approached a Conservative congregation in Lincoln, Nebraska, to ask about joining.

For most synagogues, such an inquiry would have been a no-brainer. But Johnson had elected not to circumcise her three sons, departing from one of Judaisms most widely practiced traditions, and she was concerned about whether that would be a problem.

Johnson says the synagogue told her she was welcome to enroll her sons, but that without circumcision they would not be allowed to celebrate their bar mitzvah. That decision was in line with a position adopted by the Conservative movements Jewish law authorities in 1981 that recommended including non-circumcising families in synagogue life but denying uncircumcised boys a bar mitzvah.

Johnson didnt feel included: Her family joined a nearby Reform synagogue instead.

I want to be more observant and in a more observant community, she said. But I also just want my kids to be happy and welcome and feel as little judgment as possible no matter where we go.

A new organization launching this week aims to make that more likely. The group, called Bruchim (Hebrew for welcome), is seeking to normalize the decision not to circumcise Jewish boys, a venerable religious rite that goes back to the Bible and which is widely practiced across the spectrum of Jewish observance, even by otherwise non-observant Jewish families.

Families who are making this decision shouldnt feel marginalized and they shouldnt feel like they have to be secret about it, said Piedmont resident Lisa Braver Moss, Bruchims co-founder and president.

The group is an outgrowth of advocacy that Moss and Bruchim co-founder and executive director, Rebecca Wald, have been doing for decades. Moss first argued against Jewish circumcisionin a 1990 essay, and together they outlined an alternative ceremony, brit shalom (literally covenant of peace) in a 2015 book and distributed flyers at that years Reform movement convention outlining ways for synagogues to be more welcoming for families that had opted out of circumcision.

Families who are making this decision shouldnt feel marginalized and they shouldnt feel like they have to be secret about it.

At the time, Moss told J. that at the bris of her sons 20 years earlier, I couldnt feel Gods presence. It left me feeling very confused about where my spiritual voice was in all of this.

Now, in Bruchim, they have a volunteer staff, including Johnson as social media strategist, as well as a four-member rabbinical advisory board. The team includes people with professional backgrounds in all of Judaisms non-Orthodox movements, as well as several people who grew up Orthodox.

Among its objectives, Bruchim wants to see synagogues make proactive statements of welcome for non-circumcising families similar to those that have become common toward Jews of color and LGBT+ Jews. They also hope rabbis will offer one of several alternative welcome ceremonies for newborns in place of the traditional bris.

I see circumcision its described as a sign, a sign of the covenant and there are many options for signs, said Rabbi Elyse Wechterman, executive director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association and a member of Bruchims rabbinic advisory board. I actually dont think that it is an option [not] to bring your child into the covenant. I think you must bring your child into the covenant, or you should bring your child into the covenant. I want to push that as an expectation. How its done there are many equally valid options.

Whether Bruchims requests will find a ready reception within American Jewish communities is uncertain.

The Reform movement does not have a policy about how to handle families who are considering or have decided not to circumcise. But the movements leader, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, said in a statement that ritual circumcision remains something his movement will always advocate for even as other choices are accepted.

As one of the oldest rituals in the Jewish faith, we will always advocate and educate our community about the beauty and meaning of brit milah, Jacobs said. But he added, Connecting oneself to the Jewish community may take many forms, and we understand that some families and individuals are making the choice to not circumcise as part of the brit ceremony. There will always be a place for everyone in the Reform community, regardless of how they or their family choose to express their faith.

Rabbi Elliot Dorff, the leading bioethicist in the Conservative movement and the chair of its top Jewish law authority, said there is no basis in Jewish law for denying an uncircumcised man access to religious life, including bar-mitzvah. But his movement has not made any formal statements since the 1981 opinion taking bar mitzvah off the table for uncircumcised children.

And Dorff said that advertising openness to non-circumcising families, one of Bruchims main asks, is not something that he would endorse.

Do I want to say publicly, even though its certainly true, that people who violate Shabbat publicly are welcome in our community? Dorff said. Of course theyre welcome in our community. But I dont want to say publicly that its wonderful that you violate Shabbat.

One Bay Area Conservative rabbi who asked not to be named out of fear he would become the target of hate mail, said he has turned away about a half-dozen non-circumcising families in 20 years leading his synagogue.

Its a covenantal mitzvah, the rabbi said, referring to circumcision. Its the sign of the covenant, which is about as basic to Judaism as you can get. By not circumcising, youre saying that youre outside the covenant of Judaism. And bar mitzvah is saying youre part of the mitzvah-observing community. Youre starting with the basic idea that youre not going to observe one of the most fundamental mitzvot of Judaism.

No reliable statistics exist on the percentage of American Jewish men who are circumcised, though the vast majority are believed to be. In part, thats because circumcision is performed on the vast majority of American boys some 90% of non-Hispanic whites, according to a2014 study, making the U.S. a global outlier on this issue. But that figureappears to be dropping.

Critics of circumcision object to the practice on a number of grounds, including the physical and emotional trauma inflicted on children, a conviction they lack the right to modify someones body without permission and a belief that there is no medical benefit for the child. The position of the American medical establishment is that the benefits of circumcision outweigh the risks.

The broad societal trend, coupled with the fact that 72% of American Jews who married between 2010 and 2020 chose a non-Jewish spouse, according to the 2020 Pew study, means that while the numbers of Jewish parents who choose to leave their children intact is almost certainly a tiny minority, their numbers are likely to be growing.

I looked into the medical reasoning. I thought a lot about the ethics of it all. And my conclusion was, I dont think I feel so good about this, said one Jewish mother who sits on Bruchims board but asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the subject. Am I the only Jew that doesnt feel so good about this? And I started to realize that I wasnt, but everyone felt the need to be very quiet about it.

Some efforts to bar circumcision in San Franciscoand elsewhere have been criticized as antisemitic. Bruchim is limiting involvement to Jews, advertising that anyone who is Jewish may donate and come to meetings, in an effort to make parents like the board member feel comfortable discussing their wrestling with tradition.

We need almost a safe space to have these conversations without that sort of outside interference, where people can be really negative, even hateful, or just simply not get it even with the best intentions, said Johnson. Its a conversation that Jewish people should only really be having with other Jewish people. And having Bruchim means that were able to offer that support and community in a way that has not really existed until this time.

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These Jews want to normalize not circumcising J. - The Jewish News of Northern California

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