By posting as the ‘Chief Rabbi of Gaza’, Michael has amassed almost 7,000 followers, some of which include Fleur Hassan, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem and Disturbed lead singer David Draiman. While poking fun at the often careless ignorance of anti-Israel progressives, Rabbi Linda has duped ‘Tinder Swindler’ Simon Leviev, Jewish Currents, former British MP Thelma Walker, and most notably, New Jersey congress hopeful Imani Oakley.

I sat down with Michael to talk about creating the account, the shenanigans he’s been up to as Rabbi Linda, and the astute political commentary behind them.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about when Rabbi Linda was born and what inspired you to create her.

I’m normally scrolling through Twitter, but during the last flare up in Gaza back in May, I was seeing so much hate and disinformation coming from progressive circles. I’m thinking of people like Ariel Gold, for example, who just seem like a parody even though they aren’t. 

Why not have a character that takes these anti-Israel positions to the extreme and attempts to predict the future on antizionist positions? And it happens. Rabbi Linda will say something absolutely crazy, and then a real person comes along and inevitably says the same thing.

I’ve been having fun with it. It’s taken off more than I expected. I did it as a sitting-on-my-couch kind of thing. But now she has a bit of a following, and people expect her to tweet about certain things. I’ll get messages all the time from people asking me to respond to something or to support something by highlighting it in an outrageous way. 

Can I ask about her photo? Is it from one of those AI websites that generates a realistic fake face?

Yeah, I definitely didn’t want to take anyone else’s image or get in trouble for that. I was refreshing the website for about an hour until I found the right picture of what I imagined her to look like. And these websites have gotten better since then, but I can’t change it now because you know her face. Like, punchable with the sunglasses… 

Yeah, you can’t change it anymore. She’s so recognizable, and people on the Jewish enclaves of social media have become quite attached to her.

For sure. In the beginning, when I would go dark for Shabbat people would be asking, “Why aren’t you tweeting?” I think the Imani Oakley story was actually published once Shabbat had already started. I’m not online on Shabbat, so I didn’t see anything. Once I came back I had like 50 DMs from people being like, “Are you suspended? What happened to your account? Why haven’t you tweeted yet?”

The Imani Oakley story was incredible. Did you expect to be duping people and pranking public figures since the beginning or is that something that came later on?

That came later. My earliest tweets were about organizing a Tehillim group for Hassan Nasrallah when he was ill, and then trying to organize a Gaza Pride Parade. I think the Pride Parade was what really made the account take off. Pinkwashing was a big thing at the time, and I was just trying to highlight how ridiculous that is when Tel Aviv is one of the most LGBT friendly cities and Gaza is very much the opposite.

I was honestly expecting the account to move around the anti-Israel circles and instead it was noticed by pro-Israel people, which I guess are the people who get the joke.

With Imani Oakley, I was inspired by some previous disastrous interviews by AOC and the founders of Ben and Jerry’s that illustrated that they just parrot talking points and they don’t have any substantive understanding of Israel. I thought it would be fun to test the empty suit theory on Oakley. 

How much background went into creating Rabbi Linda? This character has a lot of detail and it’s all very consistent.

It’s loosely based on my life. I am married. I have a wife, so Linda has a wife. She has a daughter. I have a daughter… Unlike Linda, my daughter’s name is not Leila Khaled.

The parallels make it easier to keep the details consistent. But she does have a lot of backstory, and part of it is remembering it. There’s the name of her shul and her OnlyFans page and all that ridiculous stuff that she does. Part of what makes her fun is that she has a real story.

So you’re also a nude yogi like Rabbi Linda?

Not a nude yogi. I have tried yoga, and I’m not the biggest fan. But it’s those kinds of things that make Linda realistic. There was one time when Jewish Currents retweeted Rabbi Linda not knowing she is a satire account after they had posted an article about at home abortion guides. I had thanked them and said how helpful it was for sex workers like myself.

I don’t care if someone wants to get abortion, but I wanted to show the ridiculousness of a rabbi being a sex worker and they just took it at face value. It was up there for a while before they took it down. 

The ‘nude yogi’ thing comes from that. I’m trying to make it obvious for anyone looking at the page that this is satire. I hope that gives it away.

And yet there’s still people who are consistently falling for it. They don’t know that these things aren’t true and they are confidently engaging.

That’s the fun part. Her bio says “Chief Rabbi of Gaza”. There are no Jews in Gaza. It says “Jewish Issues advisor to Ismail Haniyyeh,”  who is a senior political leader of Hamas. That’s obviously not a thing. Just the idea that there is a shul in Gaza [laughs]… People have asked me privately who I serve there, and I tell them there’s plenty of UNRWA workers who are Jewish. 

It just shows that many people are completely ignorant of all these issues. Jews are not permitted in Gaza, and in any future Palestinian state, there would be no Jews there either. As a base point, if you don’t understand that Hamas’ charter calls for the destruction of Israel in its entirety as an open, safe society for Jews, then you’re not really getting it.

Do you ever worry about how coverage like this interview, or the New York Post article might make tricking public figures more difficult?

That was one of my biggest hesitations with the New York Post. If I let them write about this, I will be able to do this less because a quick Google search now shows it’s a parody account. But there are other parody accounts out there that no matter how big, people fall for it. So I just figured, if they can stay relevant, then I can do it too. 

And Rabbi Linda is in more of a niche space. How many Zionist Jews on Twitter care to follow an account like this? There’s only so far she can go, and she’s gone pretty far. Yeah, I guess it will be harder to do those kinds of things, but at this point, I’m over that concern.

Rabbi Linda’s account is critical of the left-wing Israel-Palestine discourse, but it’s also critical of the woke-type rhetoric that often comes attached to it. For example, she writes Torah as “TorXh,” which I’m guessing is alluding to the controversy behind the term “Latinx.”

That was in response to an article about the Torah being gendered. Somebody re-gendered the whole Torah and switched all the genders around. So then I responded by asking her not to gender the Torah at all. She asked how you would do it if it wasn’t gendered, so I made it “TorXh.”

I’m just trying to keep the character consistent. There are real rabbis that she may or may not be modeled after who are much more interested in fitting Judaism into progressive politics than actual Jewish traditions. It’s the woke types who engage with Rabbi Linda. I just go where the audience goes. 

People’s observances are between them and God and I’m not critical of how someone practices their faith, but it tends to be antizionist Jews who are the type to do these things, so it blends in. And so the people I’m trying to parody don’t recognize it either. It fits into their circle perfectly. They have no idea.

There’s some sort of a mess of ideologies and a rebranding of Judaism in a way that perhaps makes space for anti-Israel views.

It’s putting an American progressive lens on everything Jewish even if it’s not taking place in America and trying to fit everything into that mold and hierarchy, which doesn’t really apply… It’s just how it works. People impose their views on anything and it happens on the right too. I’m not opposed to criticizing Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar. I’ve definitely done plenty of that too.

Maybe the next step for Rabbi Linda is beef with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

I don’t think she’ll engage with me. I’ve tried on Twitter a few times. But the space laser thing was pretty amazing. There’s just always good content with her. 

There was also Thomas Massie, a Kentucky congressman who has voted against Iron Dome funding, when he tweeted a picture of his whole family holding guns. Some of them were Uzis, which are Israeli made weapons, so I attacked him for that. He also didn’t respond.

Maybe the left is more gullible here because they’re excited to see someone else on their team.

There’s more of a platform for the squad-type people. It’s Ilhan Omar who serves on the foreign affairs committee, even after saying we shouldn’t send weapons to Ukraine and whatnot. Then there’s people like Steve King, who is on the right, and he was stripped of all of his committee assignments when he said something antisemitic. Both parties definitely have a problem with antisemitism, but I think some tend to have a bigger platform. In this case, it’s the squad, where it seems like they can just say anything and get away with it. 

I honestly think we’re not very far behind what happened in England with Labour and Jeremy Corbyn. Our progressive wing is maybe four or five years behind.

I’m sure many British Jews would agree with that assessment. There’s been a lot of criticism on that end because it feels like Jewish community is splitting off here and many are blinding themselves to it, while in the UK, there was more unity.

When you are too steeped in ideology, whether it’s far left or far right, it takes over your Jewish identity. It takes priority over it. So I think in this country, the Jews who are giving cover to folks like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are more concerned with being accepted in certain circles than with being Jewish.

What is in the future for Rabbi Linda? What’s the big picture?

I think she’ll be relevant as long as there’s some sort of commentary to make based on what’s happening in Israel. And there are quieter weeks, which are good. I like the quiet weeks. But there are weeks where things are going on and something needs to be said to highlight the ridiculousness of some positions. 

I saw a woman holding a sign in Ukraine which had Golda Meir’s very famous quote, which is originally about Israel: “If we lay down our weapons, there’ll be no Ukraine, but Russia lays down its weapons, there’ll be no war.” I’m a huge Golda fan, so I love that quote, and it describes the situation in Israel so well, and I’m happy that it was used in Ukraine too. But the fact that people can understand it when it applies to Ukraine, but not Israel, just shows it’s always different when there are Jewish people involved.

That kind of hypocrisy will probably always exist, and flare ups like the Israel-Gaza conflict last May are bound to happen again, so she’ll always be relevant.

I don’t want her to have to exist, but at this point, I can’t really take her away. Even after the Texas hostage situation… I didn’t expect to say anything. I actually didn’t want to. And some prominent people kept saying, “Rabbi Linda’s got to weigh in here. People are upset.” I was like, “Alright, if it makes light of the situation.” But I felt uncomfortable doing it.

I didn’t want to tweet about Ukraine either. It’s a sensitive situation, but some things just need to be said. I made a situation in which I just have to be consistent with the character even if it sucks.

It’s interesting to hear about how playing this character can sometimes become uneasy, but it just comes with the territory of committing to the bit and the satire. Still, it’s a very Jewish thing to deal with serious situations with humor. I hope we can all continue to do that.

It started because it was just so exhausting to be pro-Israel on social media. Someone’s gotta make light of it a little bit, and be able to laugh at it all.

You can follow Rabbi Linda Goldstein on Twitter @RabbiLindaGold1 and on Instagram @realrabbilindagoldstein.

The post Who Is Rabbi Linda Goldstein, Really? appeared first on Jewcy.

This is undeniably a different show—with a different sensibility—than the series it would over the years grow and evolve to become. Carrie is a brunette. She’s saltier and less precious. She talks directly to the camera.

A self-proclaimed “sexual anthropologist,” she spends the episode investigating ideas about relationships: why are there so many great unmarried women, and no great unmarried men? Or: can women have sex without emotion—like men do? To get the answers, she interviews friends and acquaintances. Here we meet Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte, along with a roster of toxic bachelors who give us the male perspective as they pump iron at the gym.

As the years passed, however, the show drifted away from this early vision. Carrie stopped talking to the camera, they lightened her hair and ditched the light jazz, and the aesthetic became somehow pinker and shinier. It would seem, then, that the Sex and the City we have (along with its movies and reboot) is only one of many possible shows that could have emerged from this pilot.

So what is it that pushed SATC to choose the path they chose? And was that choice inevitable? The answer—it would seem—is Mr. Big, smiling from the back seat of his limo, offering Carrie a ride home from Manhattan’s hottest new club—Chaos. 

It’s Mr. Big who will pull Carrie out of her role as “sexual anthropologist” and make her the hero—not the observer—of the story. It is their great and tortured romance that will transform her character from smokey sex columnist to wide-eyed romantic. His story arc will end up becoming the arc of the show itself. 

This is made all the more fascinating by the fact that Sex and the City very nearly had no story arc at all. According to the ever-valuable SATC coffee table book, Sex and the City: Kiss and Tell, Darren Star originally conceived of the show as an anthology series—a kind of relationship procedural, with Carrie as the investigator focusing on a different “case” each week.

Having ditched the anthology idea, Sex and the City became something akin to a romcom adapted for the small screen and spread out across six seasons. To characterize it as such, however, requires the clarity of hindsight. Watching SATC in real time back in the 2000s, it was not at all obvious that this was a love story at all, let alone Mr. Big’s love story. It felt entirely plausible that Carrie would end up with someone else, or with no one at all. 

Perhaps, however, such speculation is fruitless. As the sages wrote of the book of Genesis in the Midrash (forgive me, I’m a rabbinical student), it is not appropriate for humans to inquire of what happened before creation. The Torah begins with the moment order emerged from chaos, and we will never know what came before—nor what alternative creations could have possibly emerged instead. 

Similarly, we cannot know what would have happened had Carrie not stumbled out of Chaos that night. We cannot know what would have happened had Big not been there to pick her up. All we have is what’s in front of us. 

That said, seeing Carrie and Big sit together in the back of Big’s limo, I can’t help but be impressed with a sense of rightness. 

Yes. This is how it had to be.

Inspired by the sages of old who paired the weekly Torah reading with a selection from the books of the prophets, I will be pairing my SATC commentary with a selection from the later works of the franchise (the two movies and “And Just Like That…”) with the hopes that this act of juxtaposition can help us make meaning: 

Pair SATC S01E01 with AJLT S01E10 (minute 35:44-37:00), in which Carrie scatters Big’s ashes off of “their bridge” in Paris. It would seem that this would end Big and Carrie’s multi-decade story arc. This arc emerged from Chaos, and to chaos it has returned. What comes next is anyone’s guess.

The post In the Beginning, There Was Carrie and There Was Big appeared first on Jewcy.

“I didn’t even mean to match with you,” Romanian Jew told me over mid-week Chinese. He threw up his hands, exhausted by the notion he needed to explain such things.

“I changed my settings. For five minutes. For five minutes I accidentally said age wasn’t a deal breaker. I didn’t even mean to meet you. I’d been with older women before and all they wanted was sex.” 

He glanced down at his bowl of sweet and sour soup and sighed, befuddled by the fact that a woman six years older than he was, a divorced woman with two teenage children, could develop actual feelings. This was mind-blowing to Romanian Jew. 

“This is so stressful,” he said, twirling lo mein around his fork. “This is so hard. I like you. But my mission is to get married and have kids. My parents, my family–they’re on my case to have a family. And I can’t do that with you. I need someone younger. Not because your age matters. But you know, are you honestly going to…,” he trailed off. “You have, you know—teenagers. It’s fucking weird, man.” 

Around us, Chinatown was aglow with its pink and green neon signs. Like a 1940’s romance, like an old Robert Town movie. It was quiet and empty. Save for us, seated across from one another at an outdoor metal table as our waiter filled up our water glasses. 

“OK,” I said. “So this is it.” 

“But this is not it,” he said. 

“So what is it?” I asked. 

He sighed again, his bald head glistening under the hot white lights of the Chinese restaurant sign. 

“I don’t know.” 

We strolled through Chinatown, snapping photos of the Pagoda-style buildings and undulating lanterns in flashing shades of red and gold. Eventually, we sat down on a cold stone bench in the neighborhood’s main plaza and made out under the watchful eye of a dragon mural. Every few minutes, Romanian Jew would look at me and smile.  His mouth tasted like Cherry Coke and he opened his eyes as he kissed me. “I like this,” he kept saying. It was both one of the most romantic encounters in recent memory and a fruitless attempt to stave off the inevitable. 

“Enjoy your family,” he said before getting into his car, an old beat-up Toyota of the sort cash-strapped post-doctoral students looking for a much younger version of yourself are wont. “Enjoy your kids. You are so lucky to have them. Find somebody with children, too. That makes much more sense!” 

There is, of course, nothing richer than a single, fatherless, never-before-married bald man six years your junior sending you out to pasture because you have already procreated on planet earth. Because who would know better than a man who has never sired a child what makes sense for a divorced single full-time working mom raising two teenage children single-handedly at least 75% of the time? How daft to have ever considered otherwise! 

“I don’t want you to be sad because of me,” he texted, days later. “I’m not that great of a person.”

He was right, of course. They were all right. None of them had been that great. My ex-husband, he’d been special, but that’s also because our relationship was so traumatic and dramatic and lasted for 15 years. Over 15 years even the dullest of men can reveal something about themselves  that’s interesting. But the ones after my marriage? It had been two-and-half years since my ex and I had separated, and the men that came along– they were commas, place holders. None of them amounted to anything so much as ellipses in terms of romantic relationship potential. 

Several days later, I was on a plane to Seattle with three teenage kids. The trip had been planned well beforehand–a bat mitzvah for my daughter’s summer camp friend–and I’d offered to chaperone. It was me, my daughter, Tzvia, and son, Sam, and one of my daughter’s bunkmates. It felt good to be part of a squad, if only that it resembled in number the family unit of which my kids and I used to be a part, before their father and I divorced. Within five minutes of takeoff, Sam flipped me the middle finger, Tzvia instructed me to pretend I didn’t know her and it was advised that upon landing I not say anything or do anything or almost do anything that might possibly embarrass any of them. Memories of summers as a camp counselor to discourteous, hormonal teens attempting to ruin my life on canoe trips came rushing back. Still, it felt glorious to get away, especially since we hadn’t traveled for so long due to Covid. 

Seattle was rainy and bone-cold, a city of radical juxtapositions, awash in pandemic gloom and emerald-green forest. At the airport, Tzvia and her bunkmate joined their camp friend and her mom, squealing and scurrying off to partake in celebratory bat mitzvah festivities while Sam and I set off to embark on our own mother-son weekend. 

The Lotte Hotel was a soaring husk of sparkling glass, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the inky December waters of Elliot Bay. Within minutes of checking in, Sam was standing in front of the window in our 15th floor room, pulling down his pants and mooning the entirety of Seattle. 

“What are you doing?” I shouted. “You can’t just flash the Pacific Northwest.” 

“I’m pretending to be Kieran Culkin in Succession,” he replied, laughing hysterically as he pressed his bottom against the window pane. 

“People fall out of windows. Get back!” 

“It’s fine, mommy. The windows are fine.” 

“You’re watching Succession?” I asked, yanking him toward the middle of the room. “You’re fifteen.” 

“It’s the best show ever,” he said, flopping onto the bed, his arms extended like the wingspan of a bird. “I don’t understand what’s happening, but I love it.” 

Sam was small for his age, so when he pretended to be drunk that night at Rocco’s, a pizza place in the Bellevue section of town, it didn’t look like a teenager was sauced, but a 12 year-old. He knocked back his Mexican Coke like he was Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Slapping the bottle down on the counter. Our waitress laughed, and Sam proceeded to fake-slur his way through a monologue from a scene in Euphoria, which I’ve determined is Gen Z’s version of 1990’s Larry Clarke movies. Sam is on the autism spectrum, and over the past couple of years, his special talent appears to be the ability to memorize entire episodes of tv series and films after a single viewing. At the Public Market, where we strolled around looking at tiny shops filled with tchotchkes ranging from antique coins to rose quartz crystals, Sam recited Vito Corleone’s “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” speech from The Godfather. At the Chihuly glass museum, he walked around quoting Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. It was Chanukah, so we indulged in powdered sufganiyot from a local Jewish bakery and Sam reenacted one of his favorite skits from Saturday Night Live, where Bowen Yang plays the iceberg that sank the Titanic. 

For two days, we roamed the city, dodging downpours by ducking under restaurant awnings and snapping photos outside the original Starbucks. We navigated the infamous Gum Wall, used chewing gum stuck to the alleyway’s cool brick walls, and Sam pretended to vomit: “I’m like Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses!” On Sunday, we collected Tzvia and her bunkmate and flew back to Los Angeles just in time for Omicron to rear its ugly head and our entire family–vaxxed, boosted, masked–contracting the dreaded Covid. 

By the time I heard from Romanian Jew again, I was too sick and exhausted to care. Which, all things considered, wasn’t a bad place to be. 

I wished him well and put my dating apps on pause.

The post Sent Out to Pasture appeared first on Jewcy.

But the Orthodox community is diverse, with diverse beliefs, including feminists and advocates against dangerous extremism. Take Shoshanna Keats-Jaskoll, co-founder of the Orthodox organization Chochmat Nashim, which directly translates to “women’s wisdom.” 

Although she was born in Lakewood, New Jersey, a very traditional Orthodox community whose practices oft border on extreme, Keats-Jaskoll did not grow up religious, and therefore was not a witness to this extremism. Her drive to oppose extremism, she says, came later in life. However, justice has always been a core value of hers. Her grandparents, Holocaust survivors, inspired her not to stand idly by as others were being hurt. When Keats-Jaskoll joined the Haredi Beit Shemesh community in Israel, she first encountered extreme behavior taking place, for example, in the form of women and girls’ erasure in images and her young daughters pressured to sit in the backs of buses. Keats-Jaskoll subsequently arrived at the conclusion that the driving force behind the behavior was not Torah, but a desire to control. “There was just a sense that the Torah and the Judaism that I loved was being used for abusive purposes by those who wanted to control others,” she says. 

It spurred a revolution.

Chochmat Nashim was born after several factors came together for Keats-Jaskoll. Serving as the physical representative for her aunt, whose husband, in refusing to give her a get (Jewish divorce document), had fled to Israel and left her an agunah (chained woman), Keats-Jaskoll experienced disillusionment in the religious court and leadership. This, combined with an influx of letters from people who read her blog in the Times of Israel, telling her about how they had noticed similar extremism on the rise within their own religious communities, led Keats-Jaskoll to co-found Chochmat Nashim. Chochmat Nashim is an organization dedicated to fighting extremism within Orthodoxy and fighting for women and their rights. What makes Chochmat Nashim unique is the internal nature of the advocacy. When calls for change come from within the house, it is more likely to be perceived as originating from a genuine desire to help and improve, as opposed to external critiques, which are perceived as empty criticisms intended to belittle its practitioners. It is therefore less likely to be viewed as an attack and more likely to be heard. When there is a social problem plaguing the community, responses from within are more welcome.

Chochmat Nashim’s initiatives include the creation of a photo bank of ordinary Orthodox women, designed to counter the extremist erasure of women in Orthodox publications; a subtle campaign inside the Haredi world for breast cancer awareness, intended to encourage women to get checked; fighting for other agunot (women who are victims of get refusal), and a project for women to write more articles in spheres wherein female contributions to Torah insights may have gone unnoticed. Most recently, following the breaking news of the Chaim Walder case, Chochmat Nashim was involved with the distribution of flyers raising awareness of sexual assault and the dangers of including the Biblical prohibition against gossip in the dialogue around sexual abuse. 

Chaim Walder was a well-known children’s book author and therapist in the Haredi world, who was accused of serial sexual abuse of women and children over the course of decades in an exposè by Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. Following a conviction by a Safed rabbinical court, Walder committed suicide. In the aftermath, the Haredi community varied in response to the allegations. Some newspapers reported on his death without mentioning the accusations, painting him as a hero; others included them. 

In general, Walder’s death prompted a wave of discourse on the appropriate response to sexual abuse within the Haredi world. Some, including anonymous Haredi women working on this campaign alongside Keats-Jaskoll, were horrified by the seemingly halfhearted responses to sexual abuse in their communities. Others cited the halachic prohibition against gossip as a reason not to discuss allegations or, presumably, address them. This notion is exacerbated by the old adage that lashon hara kills, and is therefore equivalent to murder. Keats-Jaskoll, in countering that concern, describes a hypothetical scenario in which a young Haredi boy sitting in school will, upon hearing this, think to himself, “Wow, I’m so happy I didn’t tell anyone that so-and-so touched me. And now I never will.”

The Haredi community is saying, ‘you’re not sacrificing our children anymore for the klal, for the entirety.’

In some cases, says Keats-Jaskoll, “anything that could bring harm to the community as a whole has to be stopped, regardless of who’s harmed in that process,” the community’s needs being prioritized over individuals’. There has been a change in sentiments brought about with the Walder case. Now, says Keats-Jaskoll, “the Haredi community is saying, ‘you’re not sacrificing our children anymore for the klal, for the entirety.’” A line has been drawn. No longer will Haredi people stand by as sexual predators’ crimes are brushed off, ignored under the guise of avoiding gossipmongering. To advertise the cause and their support for victims of sexual abuse, Haredi women put up fliers offering support to victims of sexual assault, redirecting them to available resources. As the community deeply values halacha, Jewish law, as well as the perspectives of Rabbinic authorities, they will sometimes obtain Rabbinic approval in order to address sensitivities of the Haredi world. A set of fliers that were put up quoted Rabbinic statements, elaborating on the importance of reporting sexual assault, and affirming that reporting sexual abuse does not violate the laws of lashon hara.

In the long run, Chochmat Nashim’s goal is to fight extremism and protect Orthodoxy. Extremism begins, says Keats-Jaskoll, by targeting the most vulnerable members of society, women and children. But when the most vulnerable members of society are treated fairly, that serves as indication that Chochmat Nashim has done its job. “When women are back in pictures in Orthodox publications, and there’s a systemic solution for Jewish divorce, so that no one’s trapped in marriage,” says Keats-Jaskoll, “I’m happy to close my doors.”

Change on the ground starts with change in the conversation.

It is clear that Chochmat Nashim has had an impact in recent years. “Change on the ground starts with change in the conversation,” says Keats-Jaskoll. And the conversation has changed. Various individuals have reached out to the organization to thank them for providing the words and the terminology to discuss their feelings. Members of the community reach out to Chochmat Nashim for advice on how to make change–and it works. Some people have even thanked Chochmat Nashim for being the reason that they did not leave Orthodoxy.

“I see change in the community wanting to take action, meaning they’re not sitting silently,” says Keats-Jaskoll. “They want to know, ‘How do I make personal change?’ As opposed to waiting for change from the top-down, I see a real movement of people wanting to make change within, bottom-up.”

The Orthodox community is complex. It isn’t easy to maintain a millenia-old legacy in a new world, and we will not always agree on the best approach. But we are, as one, driven by the beauty of our religion and committed to following its ways. Chochmat Nashim is a perfect example of the struggle to preserve our values, keep our faith, while simultaneously keeping a balanced, healthy Orthodoxy.

The post Preserving Tradition, Rejecting Extremism appeared first on Jewcy.

Jesus was not white. This statement is simple enough, and it is truthful, I suppose. (I never assumed he looked like a Renaissance painting because I have common sense, and now we have BBC’s reconstruction, which looks like he would have been profiled by airport security, for sure.) 

But once you give an inch… Now, absolutely everyone wants to claim the lord and savior as theirs. I mean, we’re all obsessed with “representation,” and the son of God is the ultimate cop. Jesus has been Black. He has been Asian. He has been Irish. Jesus has even transcended the racial debate and has been gendered as non-binary. OH, and lest I forget, Jesus has of course been Palestinian. A Palestinian Brown Jew, nonetheless. Might as well have been a sphinx. 

So here’s where the Jews come in. We–and this is a loose ‘we’ thankfully–have resorted to defending ourselves against misinformation and erasure by stating the obvious. Jesus could not have been Palestinian because Palestine did not exist in his lifetime. He was born in the Kingdom of Judea, and the term “Palestine” wasn’t used until more than a century after his death. And I hope I don’t have to explain why he wasn’t Black or Asian because I won’t. Jesus was a Jew. He was Judean, if you will. Fine.

There are, of course, those of us who are going as far as to say Jesus was Mizrahi, which is unfortunately as ridiculous as saying he was a Palestinian Jew. If we’re using the argument that he could not be Palestinian because Palestine wasn’t a thing… Well, then neither was the Mizrahi because the diaspora wasn’t a thing either (not as we know it today), and Jesus was also not in it. No sense at all. This argument, apart from being very wrong and using the same non-logic as other communities, seems to one-up the defensiveness of just saying he was a Jew. It’s a little iffy, and this is the sense I get from a lot of the Jewish response.

To put it plainly, my friends, some of you Jews are a little too eager to ‘claim’ Jesus. 

I get it. As Jews, we’re forced to cede our representation all the time now because we’re deemed not worthy of it. But Jesus!? We’ve spent thousands of years distancing ourselves from this man who, by the way, was a heretic according to our tellings, one whose name many religious Jews will not even utter. There was a whole other religion created from him which was used to oppress us, and the cherry on top is we were blamed for his death. Now suddenly he is our poster child? Hashem Yishmor. I’m all for claiming what’s ours, but I will graciously take this ‘L’.

Also, isn’t the whole point of Jesus that he was a beacon of universalism? I claim to be no expert on Christianity, but I’m pretty sure obsessing over Jesus’ race and appearance is counterintuitive to his message, no? The fact that communities want to see themselves in him, and depict him in their own image is not crazy. It’s natural, and I take no issue with it.

I do not care. I don’t! And neither should you. Wasn’t that one of the selling points for Judaism in the first place? That we do not have to care about all this? God knows we have other things to worry about.

Let them claim him. He was one of ours, but he isn’t ours. Ironic as it may be, it is funner this way too and great to watch from afar. What will Jesus be next? Azerbaijani? Losangelino? A teletubby? Vegan? A barb? Maybe he’ll even be Ashkenazi. I bet he likes bagels and klezmer and chopped liver. Happy for him. And ultimately, whatever he is, wherever life takes his legacy, I’ll take comfort in knowing that it’s absolutely none of my business.

The post Jesus Was Ashkenazi appeared first on Jewcy.

The sheitel, or wig, captivates the imagination of audiences. Youtube is full of content featuring curious folks like Oprah popping into Brooklyn sheitel shops, marvelling at the walls of chestnut bobs and the freshly blown-out barrel curls of their hosts. Instagram influencers tag their sheitels on the grid. Tiktok users flood the comments of frum women, asking, “why are you covering your hair with hair?!”  

Despite what dramatizations about frum ladies will have you believe, more young women are covering their hair than the previous generation, and they’re coming up with innovative, halachically informed ways of doing it – without trumping their personal style or sense of self. 

When an Orthodox Jewish woman gets married, Jewish law stipulates that she should cover her hair. Exactly how her hair should be covered is a question in itself. Scarves, hats, and wigs are common, but how does she know what’s right for her? 

“There’s a big debate,” Rabbanit Leah Sarna told me. Rabbanit Sarna is an expert in halacha and the associate director of the Drisha Institute, a center for women’s advanced study of Jewish texts. “Rav Ovadia Yosef felt that sheitels are not an appropriate way to cover your hair, and that actually scarves and hats are what people need to be wearing – as opposed to the Lubavitcher Rebbe who felt that sheitels were the ideal way that a person should cover.” 

With so many options, are women really that eager to cast away the practice? Esti Shapiro didn’t lob her bob into a lake for no reason – it symbolized her freedom from an oppressive world and a rigid lifestyle. Of course, there’s more to it. 

Mandy Getz, a young mom who creates content on TikTok under the moniker ForJewPage, understands that hair covering is a fraught topic. “The whole situation brings a lot of controversy with the wig looking exactly like real hair,” she said. She stressed to me that covering isn’t about hair being too sexy, or being controlled and oppressed, adding, “When people say this I get so angry. Like, what do you mean?! Should we be ashamed we have hair?” 

The decision to cover isn’t always taken lightly. Most women admit that it’s difficult to go from one day with their hair uncovered to covering it the next day – forever. Mandy pokes fun at sheitels in her content all the time, joking about whipping her sheitel at strangers or throwing it on in a rush. There are myriad factors that play into covering, like community, level of observance, family, and physical comfort. In turn, there are countless styles to choose from – some obvious, and some totally discreet. 

Every mitzvah is beautiful, but it comes with weight and effort. For those of us who struggle with certain mitzvot, it’s inspiring to watch other people reconcile their observance with the demands of the modern world. Between cycling trends, shifting beauty standards, and dizzying social pressure, waking up every day and choosing to do this one thing seems like a feat on its own. 

“Feeling beautiful in how you dress is really important,” Rabbanit Sarna tells me. “In considering all the other elements that play a role in how you cover your hair, feeling beautiful is also cultural.” She pointed out that while some Modern Orthodox women in Israel wear ornate, voluminous mitpachat, it’s uncommon to see them in the diaspora. 

“There’s a real cultural piece of, could I imagine myself walking down the street in this, and would that feel beautiful to me?” she says. 

It’s no surprise that the most traditional styles of sheitel don’t work for everyone – but a lot of women still want to take ownership of this mitzvah. They just don’t want their wigs to look wiggy.

“The hardest part of your sheitel is the front. That’s where you can always tell whether it’s someone’s actual hair or not.” Rabbanit Sarna says. You might be familiar with the band fall, a popular style of wig with a hard front that’s often covered by a headband or a hat. A kippah fall takes this a step further: “The front of your hair is your actual hair and the fall matches your hair perfectly, and you wear your hair down underneath.”

Meira Weiser Statman is the cofounder of Kippah Falls Direct, a sheitel boutique with a fiercely loyal consumer base and one of the most popular distributors of custom-made kippah falls in the world. After spotting her work over and over on Instagram, I reached out to ask her about her product and why women choose hairpieces that look extremely natural. 

“When you see your own scalp showing in front, where you just pull your hair over it and show your part in the front, nobody can really tell it’s a wig.” She told me. “So it’s kind of like that private thing that they want to know they’re doing. I think of it as being between them and God – nobody needs to know.”

According to Rabbanit Sarna, one of the determinant factors in head covering is the concept of Dat Yehudit, the ways of Jewish women. “There are so many ways of understanding what this concept of Dat Yehudit is. And that’s what gives rise to all these different practices,” she says, adding, “Does that mean the ways of Jewish women for all time? Does that mean the ways of Jewish women within a three-block radius of me? Is it contextual based on what’s the standard practice in America?” It could be argued that if the practice is commonplace enough, it sufficiently encapsulates the ways of Jewish women. 

A generation ago, fewer Modern Orthodox women covered their hair outside the home. The kippah fall is a recent response to a new generation of women who want to cover, which Sarna attributes to “an explosion of Torah education.” Most young Modern Orthodox women have spent a year in seminary before college, while few women in their mothers’ generation did. “We went to Modern Orthodox, Religious Zionist seminaries and got this phenomenal Talmud education there. There’s a reclamation of ownership over Jewish texts that didn’t used to exist. Hair covering is one of the most obvious places generational divides play out.” 

The religious world isn’t immune to trends, either. Meira thinks we’re trending away from hats. – “Certainly a hat for every outfit, which was very ‘in’ 15-20 years ago, isn’t as in style anymore. That’s why people who don’t usually cover their hair are even coming to buy a piece for shul so they can be covered – for me that’s always surprising, and it’s more and more and more.” 

Despite the reclamation of text, tradition, and tresses, sheitels are still controversial in and out of the Orthodox world. Flyers distributed in Monsey and Lakewood called for families to “Erase the lace,” declaring full-coverage lace front wigs assur. “If you’re married, look the part,” one flyer implored women. Nevertheless, new styles persist. 

“At the end of the day everyone makes judgements constantly,” Mandy says. “Whether it’s your clothes, how smart you are, or your religious level. Keep reminding yourself that no one knows you better than you know yourself.” 

Every woman I spoke to emphasized that choosing to cover is complex. 

“I know it’s such a Gen Z word, but whatever. It’s fluid,” Meira says. “You could start this way and decide it’s not enough for you. You could stop covering your hair, or you could come back to it.” A lot of women who struggle with hair covering still want to stay in the game, making it work for their needs. “It’s going to change over the course of your married life. It doesn’t have to be one thing.” 

When Orthodoxy is formatted for public consumption, women are reduced to tropes that rarely centre on finding power, comfort, or meaning in their religious lives. In response to series like My Unorthodox Life, frum women took to social media to share stories and anecdotes about their Orthodox lives – balancing work, families, tradition, and Torah education. 

But still, what isn’t visible in a hashtag, and often unrecognizable to others, are the deeply nuanced and ongoing personal journeys that women take to carry forward tradition. 

The post The Bride, The Wig, The Gram appeared first on Jewcy.

But I am only one person. And this is only one column. And to be frank, I am far too tired to imagine everyone else’s tired when I am so buckled down by the weight of my own. Hopefully, the fact that I feed the homeless and donate to Holocaust survivors mired in illness and abject poverty in ramshackle Ukrainian villages helps assuage any prospective claims of misandry fired in my direction, through it probably won’t. That’s fine. Because, with rare exception, single working moms have it rough. 

And so, here is my own personal treatise on a very specific sort of maternal exhaustion affecting, well—me. 

The tired begins the moment I am awoken by the cacophonous symphony of my buzzing iPhone alarm. I am a night owl, and motherhood hasn’t changed that. I can not fall asleep before midnight, I can not get any serious writing done until my two unruly teenagers are asleep—breathing but not demanding my services—and the shadowy quiet of night spreads itself across earth. On average I am doing work until 3 a.m. and when my alarm sounds at 7, I embark on the day not with the plucky optimism of having benefited from a full-night’s rest, but like a misfit, low-ranking soldier that’s napped fitfully in a foxhole. 

In general, my kids are with me more than they are with their dad, but their clothes and books and retainers split their time between two different addresses. What this means is that, almost always without fail, there is a pair of favorite jeans or a leotard or a Nintendo Switch forgotten at a residence that is not the one at which my children wake up in the morning. Things both my ex-husband and I shuttle back and forth: sneakers, sweatpants, Zoloft. More than once I have begged a pharmacist to refill one of my son’s prescriptions prior to its due date because somewhere between my ex’s place and mine, the oval blue pills have gone missing, most likely nestled in the oceanic crevasse of a sofa. 

Charts and lists have been suggested by sociopathic experts on time management who have mistaken me for someone that is able to seamlessly juggle a demanding full-time job, raising two children (one of whom is autistic, the other a hormonal helion) and serving on various professional boards while also managing a haircut. Instagram mommies who do insane things like package Chanukah gelt in lucite boxes with blue velvet ribbon and arrange painfully adorable Bento box lunches like something out of a Wes Anderson film, are convinced that “bright little corners” hold the key to maintaining one’s sanity. Florals, they say. Florals. I have a friend, also a divorced mother of two, who runs. She gets up every morning while the moon still hangs in the sky and completes half-marathons. I have a cousin who does Pilates. Golf has been suggested. If I golf, everything else will fall into place. World order will be restored.

You might be thinking: this woman is lazy. This woman is complaining when she should be penning a gratitude list of just how lucky she is. She has kids. She has a roof over her head. She has a job wherein she gets to do things like pal around with noted individuals within the entertainment industry and amass free subscriptions to streaming networks. And you are right. And I am grateful. But that doesn’t mean I have the bandwidth to julienne cucumbers and Roma tomatoes in addition to getting my kids to their orthodontist/psychiatrist/therapist appointments on time and make deadline on that 2,000-word feature story for Oscar season. I’m so happy that cucumber-cum-watermelon body wrap has stripped five years off your skin’s age: You look amazing! But I’m just not living in that universe.

Thank God for the single parent friends that I do have who refrain from offering advice, or places to go for a hot-stone massage. I have a friend from college who heads the pediatric cardiology unit of her local hospital while raising two kids solo. She hasn’t made her kids anything for dinner save for macaroni and cheese from the box. She doesn’t do yoga. She doesn’t meditate cross-legged on the floor while humming mantras from her guru on speed-dial. This friend is relatable. 

This friend is a hero.

Peak Jewish Divorcee is a bi-weekly column charting the (mis)adventures of a Jewish, newly single working mom in Los Angeles. 

The post I’m Tired appeared first on Jewcy.

Nonetheless, there is one aspect of the Harry Potter universe we have seldom talked about. In perhaps the biggest cultural phenomenon of our generation, the actor who played the eponymous character is a Jew.

That’s right, if you didn’t know this by now, Daniel Radcliffe is part of the tribe, and Tuesday marked 20 years since the release of the first installment of the film series–“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”–in which he was cast to play the lead. The rest is history. 

Despite Rowling’s noble attempt to post-canonically signal representation of Jews at Hogwarts, and then having the Goldstein sisters in the “Fantastic Beasts” prequels, nothing will be as powerful as our Jewish Harry.

Daniel Radcliffe has said he is “very proud to be Jewish,” although he is an atheist. 

With the stardom that came with the Harry Potter movies, Radcliffe became one of the most famous people in the world. Out of everyone, it was someone from our teeny tiny ethno-religious nation. And a very proud one. How fucking cool!

Since Harry Potter, the Jewish star has played both the very famous Jew, poet Allen Ginsburg, and a neo-Nazi, while drawing on his Jewish identity for both parts, as he’s discussed in a few interviews.

Clearly, Daniel Radcliffe is more than just Harry Potter. But for many of us, he’ll always be the boy who lived… and the boy who gave young Jews much needed representation.

We’re excited to see Daniel, along with his co-stars, in the upcoming 20-year reunion of Harry Potter, ‘”Return to Hogwarts” coming to HBO Max on January 1.

The post We Had a Jewish Harry Potter. That Matters. appeared first on Jewcy.

‘Sure,’ I responded, girding myself for something offensive or tone deaf. They looked up at me, trying to figure out how to phrase it. Finally, they let themself speak…

‘Can you explain to me where Jews come from?’ They stared at me expectantly as my mouth betrayed the barest hint of a smile. It’s a simple question, but one that belies a frighteningly common lack of basic understanding of Jewish history, identity, and culture.

Believe it or not, I am asked questions about my Jewishness far more often than I am asked questions about my transness. Perhaps it’s the circles I move in, as most of my friends are queer folks who are either trans themselves, or at least very trans-literate. I’m also a good person to ask. On top of, you know, being a Jew, I wrote my thesis paper, in part, on Jewish ethnogenesis and identity.

While I have of course experienced transphobia in my lifetime, including rather merciless bullying as a child as well as the expected slurs and verbal assaults, I have experienced more extreme and violent antisemitism in my life; bomb threats and suspected arson at local temples, swastika graffiti, being verbally accosted in a restaurant on Christmas, having strangers spot my Hamsa, or the Magen David that was passed down to me by my grandfather and take that as an opening to spew their hatred, and I could go on and on.

People tend to be quite surprised when I express this reality of my life. And I do recognize that I have privileges today that spare me from the worst of transphobic violence; I am often, though not always, white-assumed, and I am typically cis-assumed. These are realities of my life that protect me and cannot be ignored or unaddressed.

However, my larger point is that one of my identities is considered unequivocally marginalized, while many continue to brush over antisemitism as a non-issue despite its meteoric rise over the last decade in the U.S. As David Baddiel so clearly elucidated, it’s the ‘Jews don’t count’ of it all.

This point of view extends to the way we are portrayed in media.

Recently, it was announced that Kathryn Hahn would be playing Joan Rivers in an upcoming biographical series about her life. Quickly, Sarah Silverman waded into the argument over Hahn’s casting, rightly pointing out the clear double standard that in this era where there are greater and greater calls for authenticity, Jews don’t count. Soon after, it was announced that Claire Foy, another non-Jew best known for playing the Queen of England, would be playing Sheryl Sandberg in an upcoming film based on the book An Ugly Truth. 

Hahn and Foy join the ranks of Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Rachel Brosnahan as Midge Maisel, Michael Keaton as Ken Feinberg, Vanessa Kirby and Ellen Burstyn as Martha and Elizabeth Weiss, Helen Mirren as Golda Meir, and the list goes on and on. In fact, it’s almost become a rule that Jews are not played by Jewish actors, which compounds the misunderstanding of who we are.

In my work as a trans media consultant, we often talk about the small percentage of the U.S. population that is trans, and even more importantly, the percentages of cisgender people who personally know a trans person. The reason why these statistics are important to keep in mind is that when people don’t know a trans person personally, and then see inaccurate trans representation on screen, they have no real world baseline to compare it to. This exacerbates transphobia.

Approximately 2.5% of the U.S. population is Jewish. It’s ironic that oftentimes our population is vastly overestimated. I have my theories as to why. There is, of course, the reality of Jewish contribution to American culture. However, because of the adoption of Jewish texts in Christianity and the development of Islam being closely tied to the history of the Jewish diaspora in the Arabian Peninsula, Jews become narrative characters in two of the world’s largest universalist religions (as opposed to Judaism, a particularist spiritual movement that is only concerned with the Jewish people as an ethnic and national identity).

People are comfortable with Jews as a parable. I mean, a whole religion was developed on this foundation. Non-Jews enjoy when we are a mirror for society to hold itself up to, to understand and see its ills. Oftentimes, as Dara Horn pointed out in her book People Love Dead Jews, this functions best when we are dead; a relic. Because then we can be whoever the world wants us to be.

In fact, I see it all the time. Every Christmas season, I see a litany of posts saying ‘Jesus was…’ and nearly universally the words that complete this sentence are not, ‘a Jew’… the only ethnic identity that Jesus indisputably was. What I find interesting is that I often see it posted by the same people who are dead-set on the concept of universal Jewish whiteness. This in turn is often an argument only conveniently invoked by non-Jews when they want to argue that they don’t need to care about antisemitism. Ironically, it’s another role we get cast in to make non-Jews feel better about their own world-view: Jews as a mirror. And when the representation they see is Vanessa Kirby in a large manor house pretending to be the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, it’s no wonder people feel this way.

These are prime examples of this dynamic. And it creates a disconnection point in popular imagination between ‘the literary Jew,’ who teaches the world a lesson about themselves, and real live living Jews who are currently experiencing the highest levels of antisemitism in this country since the first half of the 20th century. And confronting this antisemitism in the here and now, which would need to start with a basic understanding of who we actually are, would upset the balance of whatever morality play we’ve been cast in by others. Then this silence helps perpetuate the hatred and allows it to flourish.

Add socially ingrained casual antisemitism into the mix, as opposed to overt antisemitism like the white-supremacists marching in Charlottesville chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’, and it’s a toxic stew. For example, a person I know well was sued by a man for ‘wrongful termination’ after he fired him for stealing a lot of money from his business. Of course, firing someone for stealing from you is hardly wrongful. This person I know counter-sued. After depositions were filed, it was decided that it would be a jury trial. This person was then advised by his lawyers to settle, because the man who stole from him was a white Christian, and the jury was ‘unlikely to trust the word of a Jewish doctor.’ No wonder we’re rarely trusted to tell our own story. 

But herein lies the problem. And it’s the same problem that I spoke of when it comes to trans representation. Because we are such a small percentage of the population, most people’s first encounters with us are either in biblical stories, or they are in media. Stories have a unique power, as does accurate representation. We’ve seen massive shifts in perceptions of LGBTQ people thanks to shifts in how we are portrayed in film and television. But when it comes to my other identity, we barely register in the discourse.

And so the problem that Sarah Silverman brought into the spotlight stretches beyond the disparity in opportunity, which is certainly a problem. When Jews are misrepresented in media by non-Jews doing their best caricatures of us, it enshrines us as a character in someone else’s passion play rather than human beings and a living culture that is still here. It perpetuates misunderstanding of who we are. And when our population is so small, it becomes impossible for many people to have real life living breathing Jews that they know to hold these representations against.

This isn’t just problematic. It helps to perpetuate antisemitism in all of its mutations.

So I sit across from my friend and I say, “Well, to answer that question, I need to go back to about 1600 B.C.” I watch as their mind explodes a little bit. 

I tell them about the various historically-based theories of our ethnogenesis. I explain the consolidation of Jewish national identity at the dawn of the 1000s B.C. I talk about the Romans, and Bar Kokhba. I talk about Beta Yisrael. I talk about Shammai and Hillel and the origins of rabbinical Judaism. I talk about The Crusades, The Inquisition, and Sephardi Pirates; Sabbatai, Chassidism, and Haskalah; Pogroms, the Dreyfuss Affair, and of course The Holocaust; Farhud, Operation Magic Carpet, and Operation Solomon. I talk about the diversity of the American Jewish experience, where intermixture with other ethnic groups has often strengthened our community and made it better. 

But most of all, I talk about Jewish pride and Jewish resilience, and the fact that while people still try to tell us who we are, we refuse to be defined by others.

Media matters. It especially matters for marginalized people. And we are marginalized people. One only needs to look at the last few years; we’ve had multiple deadly shootings, stabbings, arsons, physical assaults, car attacks, and murders motivated by antisemitism. The claim that we’ve assimilated to the point that hatred of our community is a non-issue falls apart with the barest interrogation. Jews deserve all of the same consideration and care that any other marginalized group does.

It is high time that we are allowed to wrestle ourselves out of someone else’s narrative, and instead, with clarity, honesty, and the lived experience that only Jewish artists can bring to our own stories, have the chance to tell our own. After all, our histories live in our blood, from generation to generation. 

The post The Jewish (Casting) Question appeared first on Jewcy.

And yet, despite the numerous attempts to navigate this widening divide, there’s one simple, yet crucial ingredient that’s missing from the dialogue: empathy.

As an Australian Jew who indulges in far too many conversations on this issue — both with Israelis and Americans — their defining feature, time and again, is how little either side understands about the other. Indeed, both Israelis and American Jews are correct in lamenting how rarely their brethren appreciate the anxieties they suffer as a result of their communities’ unique challenges.

So let’s chart a new path for this conversation. Let’s begin at a simple, human level. “We need to appreciate the fact that each major center of Jewish life is responding in a way that is appropriate to its circumstances,” bestselling author Yossi Klein Halevi recently told me. Instead of reprimanding one another for how wrong they are, both communities would do well to ask why. Why are so many Israelis infuriated by calls to “end the occupation”? Why are so many American Jews abhorred by Israel’s lack of religious pluralism?

These two issues — the occupation and religious pluralism — among many others, are part of a long list of grievances between Israelis and American Jews; all of which have boiled over in recent years, culminating in today’s crisis. The key cause of these quarrels, however, is that rarely do Israelis and American Jews actually understand one another. To be sure, they hear the other’s argument, but seldom do they truly understand how such a conclusion was reached.

As Gordis explains, Israel and the United States are fundamentally different societies, created for radically different purposes. While “it was American universalism” that defined the United States, argues Gordis, in Israel, “it was particularism that gave the country its purpose: to save and protect Jewish lives.” The worldviews of Israelis and American Jews are, therefore, entirely different. It’s time for both communities to accept that, due to their vastly disparate histories, they naturally arrive at different conclusions for a variety of issues. And that’s okay. The problem is that they are yet to accept this reality.

If Israelis and American Jews can’t find a genuine desire to understand each other’s hopes and fears, then to hell with any hopes for healing this fissure.

And should the deteriorating relationship continue down this path, disaster is sure to follow. Be it the financial and political support that American Jewry has long provided Israel, or the way in which, for decades, the Jewish state has animated American Jewish life, it would be foolish to assume that either community would continue to thrive post-divorce. And as concerns grow around the future of Israel’s relationship with the Democratic Party — which receives the majority of the Jewish vote — American Jewish support for Israel is more important now than ever.

History has a cruel tendency to remind Jews to not get too cozy in whichever society we may be. Today, that lesson manifests itself in a warning to not assume that any one Jewish community can survive by itself.

It’s not just American Jews and Israelis who will suffer, should there be no rapprochement. The current divide is nothing less than an existential threat to the Jewish world, with Yossi Klein Halevi describing it as “one of the seminal questions for this generation.” With around 85 percent of world Jewry residing in either Israel or the United States, a permanent break in the relationship would spell an unspeakable tragedy — not just for American Jewry and Israelis, but for Jews worldwide.

This year bore witness to a global explosion of Jew-hatred like no other in recent memory. If anything, it served to remind us of the fragility of Jewish life and the consequent centrality of Jewish unity. In such times, no Jewish community can afford for our two largest and most important hubs to continue down their path toward divorce.

While having empathy for one another won’t mend divides overnight, a sincere appreciation among American Jews and Israelis for the challenges they face would help facilitate the conversations that will hopefully lay the groundwork for reconciliation. And if this relationship is to be saved, those conversations are the only hope we have left.

The post What’s Missing in the Conversation Between Israelis and American Jews appeared first on Jewcy.