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- Overwhelmed by the NYC mayor’s race between Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo? A guide for the perplexed

- Jews alone can’t help Cuomo pull off an upset – but they may be fueling his momentum

- Why rabbis across America are taking sides in New York’s mayoral race

- American synagogues are closing at a record rate. This retired judge is rescuing their stained glass windows.

- Mamdani opposes Zionism, but wants New York public schools to teach about it

- It’s so cool that Sandy Koufax was there for that

NEWS | OCT 30, 2025, 1:37 PM EDT | UPDATED OCT 30, 2025, 6:04 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Overwhelmed by the NYC mayor’s race between Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo? A guide for the perplexed

Hannah Feuer

What you need to know about Zohran Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo, Curtis Sliwa

Mayoral candidates (from left) independent former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa and Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani participate in a mayoral debate on Oct. 16. Photo by Angelina Katsanis-Pool/Getty Images

Just now tuning in to the New York City mayoral election or feeling utterly overwhelmed by it? As early voting is underway, and Tuesday’s election nears, here’s a look at what each mayoral candidate could mean for Jews.

– Zohran Mamdani – Democratic nominee

Start here: Mamdani, a 34-year-old self-described democratic socialist, won the Democratic mayoral primary in a major upset in June. Mamdani has served as a State Assemblyman representing Queens since 2021. If elected, he would be the city’s first Muslim mayor.

His pitch to voters: Mamdani has focused on affordability. His signature campaign promises include making buses “fast and free,” freezing the rent for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments, and creating city-owned grocery stores.

Plans to combat antisemitism: Mamdani has committed to increase funding for hate crime prevention by 800%. He also supports the “Hidden Voices” curriculum, which teaches students about Jewish Americans in U.S. history, as a way to combat antisemitism in schools. The curriculum defines Zionism as “The right to Jewish national self-determination in their ancestral homeland,” which seems to be at odds with Mamdani’s own position that Israel has a right to exist as a democratic state, but not a Jewish one.

Positions on Israel and Gaza:

- Mamdani got his start in political organizing as co-founder of a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin College, which he graduated from in 2014. He has called the Palestinian cause “central to my identity.”

- In 2020, Mamdani said he joined the Democratic Socialists of America because of their stance on Israel and said mayoral candidates should pledge to boycott Israel. He later downplayed those remarks, but has also called for a permanent end to New York City’s investments in Israel bonds.

- Days after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Mamdani said, and has repeated, that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.

- Mamdani has declined to recognize Israel specifically as a Jewish state and said he would refuse to visit the country as mayor. He has also pledged to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he comes to New York, honoring an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court. The U.S. is not a party to the ICC, making it highly unlikely Mamdani would be able to carry out the arrest.

- In June, Mamdani drew fire for his initial refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” though he later said he would discourage its use.

Policies affecting Hasidic communities: Mamdani has said he would work to protect Hasidic yeshivas that face scrutiny for failing to meet state education standards.

Bagel order: “As someone who grew up in Morningside Heights, I have to go back to Absolute Bagels. Poppy seed bagel, scallion cream cheese. Some pulp Tropicana on the side. And this is going to lose me some votes, but to be honest with you: toasted.”

What else you need to know:

- Mamdani has clashed with the Anti-Defamation League, saying the ADL does not speak for New York Jews’ concerns.

- Mamdani has many Jewish advisers and was endorsed by Jewish city comptroller Brad Lander in the primary.

- Rabbis across the country have weighed in on Mamdani’s candidacy. A group of 650 rabbis and cantors signed a letter opposing Mamdani and the “political normalization” of anti-Zionism. A second rabbinic letter offered support for Mamdani, and there are others circulating as well.

- Ruth Messinger, the first Jewish woman to win a New York City mayoral primary, endorsed Mamdani.

- Mamdani has pledged to keep Jewish police commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is currently serving in Mayor Eric Adam’s administration.

– Andrew Cuomo – Independent

Start here: Cuomo, the 67-year-old former governor of New York, is running as an independent in the general election after losing the Democratic primary to Mamdani. Cuomo resigned as governor in 2021 following numerous allegations of sexual harassment. Cuomo denied the allegations, and all criminal charges related to the matter have been dropped or dismissed.

His pitch to voters: Cuomo has cast himself as a pragmatic moderate with the governing experience to get policy passed. He has also argued Mamdani poses a threat to New York’s Jewish community.

Plans to combat antisemitism: Cuomo has committed to adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism, which labels many forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic. He also plans to “provide a strong response to antisemitic incidents in schools, including curriculum reforms.”

Positions on Israel and Gaza:

- Cuomo visited Israel three times as governor. In 2016, he signed an executive order barring government business with any company that boycotts Israel.

- Cuomo has defended Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against the International Criminal Court’s claims of war crimes. Later, he distanced himself from Netanyahu, saying, “I never stood with Bibi” and calling for the “horrific” Gaza war to end.

- In September, Cuomo told the Forward he wanted three things: “We want killing to stop, because it’s a matter of humanity. We want the hostages returned, and Hamas eliminated. If you don’t eliminate Hamas, you accomplish nothing. This will happen again and again.”

Policies affecting Hasidic communities: Cuomo apologized to New York’s Orthodox Jews for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic as governor, when he imposed health restrictions that also limited religious gatherings.

“I recognize that some of those decisions caused pain in the Jewish community because we did not always fully consider the sensitivities and traditions that are so deeply important,” Cuomo said.

Bagel order: “Bacon, cheese and egg on an English muffin, and then I try to take off the bacon, but I don’t really take off the bacon. The bagel I try to stay away from, to keep my girlish figure.”

What else you need to know:

- Cuomo has been endorsed by several Orthodox Jewish leaders.

- Cuomo has referred to himself as a “Shabbos goy” and said Mamdani won’t be able to “stand up to Donald Trump, who’d knock him right on his tuches.”

- Cuomo has also pledged to keep Jewish police commissioner Jessica Tisch.

– Curtis Sliwa – Republican nominee

Start here: Sliwa, 71, is a former radio talk show host and founder of the Guardian Angels, a nonprofit citizen patrol group that deploys volunteers across the city to deter crime. Sliwa is the Republican nominee after running unopposed in the primary. He is not a supporter of President Donald Trump and said he did not vote for him in 2016 or 2020.

His pitch to voters: Sliwa has a “law and order” platform and argues he is the best candidate on public safety. He has proposed hiring 7,000 new police officers.

Plans to combat antisemitism: Sliwa has said that “Jews must protect themselves,” telling the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “If you depend strictly on Gentiles, history is replete with instances where you’re going to be horribly disappointed.“ He said groups like Shmira or Shomrim, Jewish civilian watch groups that operate mostly in neighborhoods with large Orthodox Jewish populations, should secure Jewish safety.

In July, Sliwa apologized for past remarks about the Jewish community, including a claim that Hasidic Jews are “making babies like there’s no tomorrow” to collect government benefits.

“I’ve said a lot of things I shouldn’t have,” Sliwa told the Forward. “What I’ve learned in life is the art of apology. You have to understand the hurt that you cause people, and you have to apologize and mean it.”

Positions on Israel and Gaza: Sliwa has visited Israel three times and has criticized Mamdani as having “no love in his heart for the state of Israel and for Israelis.” He also rebuked Mamdani for his initial refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.” Sliwa has acknowledged that “there are many Jews who are opposed to the killing of what’s gone over in Gaza,” but said “I disagree with them.”

Policies affecting Hasidic communities: Sliwa said the Bill de Blasio administration didn’t do enough to enforce state guidelines requiring private school education to be “substantially equivalent” to instruction at public schools.

“If parochial schools and religious schools that are not ultra-Orthodox or Hasidic have to follow those rules, then everybody does,” Sliwa told the Forward. “We can’t start making exceptions.”

Bagel order: “I get me and my wife’s breakfast while she feeds our five rescue cats. For me it’s two toasted plain bagels. The schmear 🥯 is butter. My wife has an everything bagel toasted. The schmear is cream cheese. Two cups of coffee and we are good to go. I go to Giacomo on the UWS [Upper West Side]. A mom and pop shop with classical music playing and the customers standing on line waiting are a good political focus group for me. 👍”

What else you need to know:

- During the 1991 Crown Heights riots, Sliwa patrolled the streets with the Guardian Angels to protect the Jewish community.

- Sliwa has two Jewish sons who are being raised as Jews by their mother, Melinda Katz. She and Sliwa are no longer a couple.

- Sliwa was the sour garlic pickle-eating champion of the world for four years in a row.

- In 2002, Sliwa placed second in a matzah ball eating contest, only to be disqualified after he was caught squishing the matzah balls to get the liquid out.

Hannah Feuer joined the Forward as a general assignment reporter in May 2025 after two years as a culture reporter at Seven Days, an independent weekly in Burlington, Vermont. Originally from the Washington, D.C., area, she is a 2023 graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

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- @hannah_feuer

This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/news/779980/zohran-mamdani-andrew-cuomo-curtis-sliwa-nyc-mayoral-election/ at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

NEWS | OCT 29, 2025, 2:43 PM EDT | UPDATED OCT 29, 2025, 7:45 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Jews alone can’t help Cuomo pull off an upset – but they may be fueling his momentum

Jacob Kornbluh

After Zohran Mamdani’s primary upset, Andrew Cuomo finds new hope in Jewish neighborhoods

Independent New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo on Oct. 27. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Andrew Cuomo is entering the final stretch of the New York City mayoral race with high expectations. After a bitter defeat in the Democratic primary to Zohran Mamdani in June, the political scion and former governor is betting that a different and more motivated electorate will give him a second chance.

Cuomo, who is running in the general election as an independent, is buoyed by signs that the city’s older, more moderate voters, and Jewish voters, are turning out in greater numbers than the progressive, younger bloc that powered Mamdani’s primary victory.

Early voting data show a notable surge in turnout from heavily Jewish and Black neighborhoods during the first few days, a shift that could narrow the gap in a race that polls show is tightening.

For Cuomo, that’s a reason for optimism. “I’m working 24/7, and there’s much more information out there now about Mamdani,” he said in a recent interview. “And the more they know, the more frightened they are.”

Mamdani’s positions on Israel have roiled New York’s Jewish community — the largest outside of Israel — despite an increased effort to court them.

The growing awareness of Mamdani’s rhetoric and positions has sparked voter registration drives across Brooklyn’s Orthodox community, early voting mobilization efforts, and an unprecedented wave of prominent rabbis publicly urging support for Cuomo as the only viable candidate to defeat Mamdani. Some Orthodox voting blocs, who supported Cuomo in the primary and were influential in Eric Adams’ victory in 2021, have reissued their endorsements in recent days.

Dov Hikind, a former Democratic assemblyman who became a Republican and initially backed Curtis Sliwa before switching his support to Cuomo earlier this week, said the current level of engagement in the community rivals the intense voter turnout of 1993, when Rudy Giuliani defeated incumbent Mayor David Dinkins by a little more than 40,000 votes. Dinkins was accused of restraining the police and allowing rioters to harm the Jewish community during the 1991 riots in Crown Heights. Exit polls showed that Giuliani received 67% of the Jewish vote, including nearly 100% in Orthodox neighborhoods.

“I have never seen anything like it, never in my life,” Hikind said. “People are truly concerned about Mamdani getting elected.”

Still, the math is daunting. Mamdani continues to hold a double-digit lead over Cuomo, while Sliwa has vowed to remain in the race despite Republican pleas for him to step aside.

Jews make up an estimated 10% of the general election electorate, and their strong backing for Cuomo in the primary was too little to overcome the city’s shifting political landscape. More than a third of Jewish voters support Mamdani, according to recent polls, and several liberal Jewish election officials are backing him.

“I think our community can help to make a difference and to stop the normalization of casual antisemitism in New York’s political environment,” said Sara Forman, executive director of the New York Solidarity Network, a pro-Israel political organization. A post-primary survey sponsored by the group found that 58% of Jewish voters believe Mamdani’s leadership would make the city less safe for Jews.

To pull off an upset, Cuomo will need not only strong margins in Jewish and Black precincts but also undecided moderates to rally around him, accompanied by a diminished youth turnout. Voters over 55 accounted for more than half of those who cast ballots during the first two days of early voting, while youth turnout was notably lower.

What Jewish leaders are saying

Mamdani’s victory in June marked a watershed moment in New York politics — the first time a self-described democratic socialist and outspoken critic of Israel became the Democratic Party’s nominee and the favorite to govern the city. Some Jewish leaders gave the 33-year-old candidate a chance to reach out and clarify his past statements.

Professor Ester Fuchs, director of the urban and social policy program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, said Mamdani had an opportunity “to demonstrate that Muslims and Jews can work together constructively to make our city a better place for everyone.” Fuchs, who worked with the Dinkins and in the Michael Bloomberg administration, said after the primary that Mamdani would first need to build trust with the Jewish community. “He needs to demonstrate and he needs to make clear that he understands how we need to protect every community in the city,” she said.

While he did outline his plan to fight antisemitism and commit to protecting Jews in private meetings with rabbis and Jewish political leaders, the Democratic nominee didn’t do much to assuage those concerns.

He faced scrutiny for: refusing to outright condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada;” holding back from celebrating the ceasefire in Gaza — which he had called for since the start of the war — and the release of the last living hostages; repeating his pledge to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits the city; and saying he doesn’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state. He is the first major party nominee to pledge to publicly back the movement to boycott Israel as mayor. On Tuesday, Mamdani declined to say whether he stands by comments made in a newly surfaced 2023 video in which he said that the New York Police Department’s boots are “laced by the IDF.” A recent poll showed that 75% of Jewish voters hold an unfavorable view of Mamdani.

Forman said Mamdani had a chance to sway opinion about him after his victory by toning down the rhetoric and walking back some of his statements. She said that those people “who were resolved to just hang their heads after the primary have started to hold their heads up a little higher” in recent weeks and go public with their opposition, as a reaction to the idea that New York City could elect a mayor who is not very supportive of the Jewish community writ large.

That shift led to a split among rabbis, many breaking tradition to issue political endorsements. Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue openly urged congregants to back Cuomo, calling Mamdani a threat to Jewish security. Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz of Manhattan’s Kehilath Jeshurun wrote in an open letter that Mamdani “represents a genuine threat to our city and way of life.” And more than 1,100 rabbis from across the nation have signed a statement opposing Mamdani.

Meanwhile, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Central Synagogue reaffirmed her congregation’s stance against endorsements. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism and head of the largest Jewish movement in the U.S., wrote that crossing the line into electioneering is the wrong approach. “Keeping partisan politics out of our politically diverse congregations feels more essential than ever in today’s polarized climate,” he said.

Cuomo backed out Tuesday, at the last minute, from speaking to 210 members of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, in a town hall series for the mayoral candidates, which Mamdani addressed earlier this month.

Hikind, who caused an uproar by wearing blackface for Purim in 2013, didn’t mince words about what’s at stake for Jewish voters in this election. “Look, Mamdani wins, Hamas in Gaza will celebrate because it will be their victory,” Hikind said. ”He’s one of their boys. I am not saying he indulged in terror. But they will celebrate, no question. Our enemies all over the world will see this as a great victory.”

Mamdani accused his opponents of targeting him because he’s the first Muslim favored to become mayor of New York. His campaign did not provide details about its outreach to Jewish voters despite multiple requests. Several progressive Jewish groups — The Jewish Vote, affiliated with Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, Bend the Arc and Jewish Voice for Peace Action — are actively campaigning for Mamdani.

On Tuesday, Mamdani posted a video with famed Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin and his wife, actress Kathryn Grody, urging voters to elect “this extraordinary human being who’s going to lead our city.”

Phylisa Wisdom, the executive director of the liberal New York Jewish Agenda, said the Jewish community is very diverse in its attitude towards Mamdani. “I think there are some Jewish New Yorkers for whom total agreement on Israel is required in their mayor,” she said. “And there are many Jewish New Yorkers who acknowledge that they don’t agree with him on Israel, and that’s not a barrier to voting for someone in a municipal election in the way that it may be for Congress or for president.”

Whether or not Jews will be the tipping point, the surge in turnout could definitely help fuel Cuomo’s comeback, Forman said. “I’d like to be optimistic and say the turnout that we’re seeing right now will continue through the end of the election, and this is going to be a very close election,” she said.

Jacob Kornbluh is the Forward’s senior political reporter. Follow him on Twitter @jacobkornbluh or email [email protected].

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This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/news/779482/cuomo-mamdani-mayor-jewish-voters/ at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

NEWS | OCT 29, 2025, 2:38 PM EDT | UPDATED OCT 30, 2025, 2:17 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Why rabbis across America are taking sides in New York’s mayoral race

Benyamin Cohen

From California to Pennsylvania, clergy are speaking out — some warning Zohran Mamdani endangers Jewish life, others calling that fear itself the real threat

Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani prepares before the New York City Democratic Mayoral Primary Debate in June. Photo by Vincent Alban/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

Rabbi Danny Schiff had a rule: no national letters.

The community scholar of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh avoided open statements about far-off politics. But this month, he broke that rule — for a mayor’s race nearly 400 miles away.

“I never, ever, ever sign on to national rabbinic letters,” Schiff said. “And I made a lifetime exception for this particular instance.”

That exception was Zohran Mamdani — a New York state assemblyman, outspoken critic of Israel and, according to polls, the frontrunner to become the city’s first Muslim mayor. Schiff joined more than a thousand rabbis who signed an open letter opposing Mamdani, arguing that he “gives oxygen to anti-Zionist voices” and represents “a threatening reality for the American Jewish future.”

Schiff, who splits his time between Pittsburgh and Israel, said Mamdani’s campaign risks normalizing a “playbook” that other politicians might follow.

But not all rabbis saw danger in Mamdani’s rise. From Oregon to California to Illinois, other clergy have spoken out in support of him — or at least in defense of his right to run without being cast as a threat. The unusual spectacle of rabbis across the country weighing in on a New York City election has revealed deep fault lines over Israel, antisemitism, and what Jewish leadership looks like in 2025.

The question animating the debate is less who should be mayor of New York than what it means, right now, to speak as a rabbi in public life.

A new letter of solidarity

A new open letter published Tuesday, titled Jews for a Shared Future, gathered more than 900 signatures from rabbis, cantors, rabbinical students and Jewish leaders who reject efforts to frame Mamdani’s candidacy as a threat.

“As antisemitism and Islamophobia both rise in America, we understand that our fates are bound together,” the letter reads. “Jewish safety cannot be built on Muslim vulnerability, nor can we combat hate against our community while turning away from hate against our neighbors. Our traditions teach us that justice is indivisible — we are only truly safe when we ensure the safety and dignity of all. This is not merely strategic; it is sacred.”

The letter’s point person, Rabbi Shoshana Leis, co-rabbi with her husband of Pleasantville Community Synagogue in Westchester County, New York, said she wrote it after seeing how the national conversation about Mamdani had hardened into mutual accusation.

“I felt there needed to be a response,” she said. “I didn’t want to endorse any candidate, but I wanted to give an alternative perspective — the way we’re going to live safely is to engage across differences and choose our shared future.”

Leis called New York “our pluralistic, treasured city,” and said Jewish safety “is fully interdependent on the safety of everyone in New York City.” Her letter, she added, was meant to be “a letter against divisiveness.”

‘Mamdani has become the lightning rod’

Mamdani’s positions on Israel have roiled New York’s Jewish community — the largest in the United States — as he has faced scrutiny for refusing to outright condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” calling the Gaza war a genocide, and pledging to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits the city.

In Manhattan, two of the city’s most prominent rabbis took sharply different approaches to the campaign. Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue openly urged congregants to back Andrew Cuomo, calling Mamdani a threat to Jewish security. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Central Synagogue reaffirmed her congregation’s stance against political endorsements.

Adding to the moment, a July ruling by the Internal Revenue Service said that clergy can now endorse political candidates without automatically jeopardizing their congregations’ tax-exempt status, a change that has effectively loosened decades-old restraints on rabbinic speech from the pulpit.

The divergent choices of Buchdahl and Cosgrove captured a new era in which rabbis, once shielded from electoral politics, now face pressure to take public stands in the age of livestreamed sermons and viral petitions.

From Los Angeles, Rabbi David Wolpe, emeritus of Sinai Temple, said the anxiety is less about New York policy than precedent. “It’s New York — and whatever happens in New York is, by definition, national news,” he said. “People worry that a mayor of a major city with Mamdani’s views creates both a permission structure and an incentive for others to follow.”

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who writes the newsletter Life Is a Sacred Text from Chicago, said the controversy reflects deeper communal and generational shifts. “Mamdani has become the lightning rod for Jewish communal tensions,” she said. “All of our intra-communal tsuris — everything that had begun to boil over since Oct. 7 — needs a new place to manifest, and this is where it’s going.”

She said the uproar is less about New York than about Jewish anxiety. “People’s fears about ‘antisemitism on the left’ find prominent articulation here, while a whole world of antisemitism on the right is being left unaddressed,” she said.

“There has been a sea change in how an entire generation engages with Israel,” she continued. “Mamdani’s popularity with younger Jews is reflective of that. It’s easier to blame him than to grapple with how the conversation around Israel has changed nationally and globally.”

Ruttenberg added that if she lived in New York, she would endorse him. “He has said repeatedly that he’s going to increase hate crime funding by 800% in New York, a city that he is meant to serve. His priority is not foreign policy.

“He’s become symbolic of all of these fears that people have about so many other things that are not his to hold,” she said.

‘We don’t need rabbis fighting rabbis’

From Eugene, Oregon, Rabbi Ruhi Sophia Motzkin Rubenstein of Temple Beth Israel — a Reconstructionist congregation of about 400 households — signed the Shared Future letter.

“It’s absolutely absurd that I’m weighing in on a New York City election,” she said. “But I do have a stake in how Jews and rabbis are publicly portrayed on a national scale.”

“I do think there is a manufactured panic that is very dangerous,” she added. “This is not the greatest threat to the Jewish people. This is a dangerous red herring.”

Not every rabbi fits neatly into one camp. Rabbi Suzanne Singer, emerita of Temple Beth El in Riverside, California, signed both letters — the one opposing Mamdani and the one urging solidarity.

“I hesitated before signing the first letter because I didn’t particularly want to attack one person,” she said. “I don’t think Mamdani is an antisemite. He’s an anti-Zionist, and there are plenty of Jews who are anti-Zionist. That doesn’t make him an outlier.”

Singer said she worries about rhetoric that casts Israelis as “settler colonialists,” and believes Israel and the Palestinians both have the right to self-determination. But she was also drawn to the second letter’s message. “We have to find a way to work together and live together,” she said. “Antisemitism is enough — we don’t need rabbis fighting rabbis.”

She expects some overlap between signatories of both letters. “The first letter, I wish it hadn’t targeted Mamdani so directly,” she said. “Everything has gotten to be black and white — there’s no nuance, no complicated narrative anymore.”

The moral crossroads

For Schiff, the Pittsburgh rabbi who broke his lifetime rule, the issue is existential. “Clearly Mamdani has made it his business to let everybody know what his views are on Israel — in the largest Jewish city in America,” he said. “Other politicians around the country might take note.”

“The end of the kinetic war has not brought an end to the war of delegitimization against Israel,” Schiff added. “If you can’t beat Israel militarily, then the anti-Zionism campaign becomes the favored route for aggression.”

Ruttenberg said she sees something different in that lightning. “If we think that magically defeating Mamdani will somehow return us to the way things used to be,” she said, “that is not what is going to be the outcome.”

She also questioned the moral calculus behind the opposition’s preferred candidate. “If we want to talk about Torah values,” she said, “Cuomo is a serial sexual abuser who spent $20 million of taxpayer money paying for his defense. In what way do my colleagues think this is any representation of either pragmatic or ethical values?”

Her conclusion was blunt, and hopeful. “When we make choices out of fear, it tends to end badly,” she said. “And when we choose based on building relationships and solidarity — understanding that our liberation is bound up with everyone else’s — that’s how we win, as Jews and as people.”

Jacob Kornbluh contributed to this article.

This article has been updated to reflect that the Jews for a Shared Future letter had gathered more than 900 signatures by Oct. 30.

Benyamin Cohen is a senior writer at the Forward and host of our morning briefing, Forwarding the News. He is the author of two books, My Jesus Year and The Einstein Effect.

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This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/news/779548/mamdani-new-york-mayor-race-rabbis/ at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

HOLY GROUND | OCT 29, 2025, 7:06 AM EDT | UPDATED OCT 29, 2025, 3:12 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

American synagogues are closing at a record rate. This retired judge is rescuing their stained glass windows.

Benyamin Cohen

Inside a Chicago synagogue, retired judge Jerry Orbach has built a refuge for the stained glass of America’s vanishing Jewish communities

Jerry Orbach at Northbrook Community Synagogue in front of stained glass windows he rescued from Temple B’nai Israel, a shuttered synagogue in Saginaw, Michigan. Photo by Benyamin Cohen

For our Holy Ground series, Benyamin Cohen has visited sanctuaries on the brink and others being reborn. In Chicago, he found one filled with the rescued light of seven vanished shuls.

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CHICAGO — Jerry Orbach moves through the sanctuary of Northbrook Community Synagogue with the practiced eye of a man who’s spent years rescuing pieces of a fading world. The suburban Chicago congregation glows with stained glass saved from shuttered synagogues, their colors reframed along these walls. What began as one man’s mission has turned the space into a living museum — a collage of light and loss.

A large gold Star of David hangs from a chain around Orbach’s neck, catching the light from the windows he’s saved from seven shuls. At 79, the retired judge has made a second career of rescuing what others have left behind: stained glass from synagogues that have closed, merged, or fallen into disrepair.

He isn’t just saving glass; he’s salvaging light — the one thing that never stops traveling.

Each panel is marked by a small plaque: the name of the congregation, the town it once illuminated, the year it died. When the sun hits them just right, color ripples across the walls like ghosts, a chorus of light still singing long after the voices are gone. “A continuation instead of a destruction,” he says, as if arguing a case.

A wall of stained glass windows from Congregation Ner Tamid, a Conservative synagogue in West Rogers Park that once hosted 1,000 people for the High Holidays, was relocated 15 miles to the back of the sanctuary at Northbrook Community Synagogue. Photo by Benyamin Cohen

For more than a century, the number of synagogues in America steadily climbed, a reflection of immigration, assimilation, and Jewish ambition. But by the 1990s, that momentum stalled. In the decades that followed, it reversed. There are roughly 20% fewer synagogues today than there were in 1990, according to data gathered by Alanna E. Cooper, a Jewish studies professor at Case Western Reserve University. For the first time in American history, more synagogues are closing each year than opening.

The walls of Northbrook Community Synagogue now hold what those closures leave behind: fragments of glass salvaged from sanctuaries across the post-industrial Midwest, where factories shuttered and congregations dwindled. Most of what he’s salvaged has ended up here, but he’s also hoping to play matchmaker, connecting closing synagogues and new ones that want their windows. Orbach has become a one-man preservation society.

A history in glass

Stained glass has long been a marker of Jewish arrival in America. When immigrant congregations began erecting monumental synagogues in the early 1900s, they built them with arches, domes, and large window apertures. Glass became the medium of belonging.

A pane of glass highlighting the tribe of Benjamin. It once stood at a synagogue in Michigan, but when that congregation closed, it was moved to Illinois. Courtesy of Alanna Cooper

In cathedrals, stained glass told the stories of saints. In synagogues, it told the story of survival. Early designs depicted the 12 tribes, the days of creation, the Exodus from Egypt. Later came darker panels, fractured blues and reds evoking the Holocaust, followed by bursts of gold and white celebrating the creation of the state of Israel. Across a century of Jewish life, the art evolved into a visual Torah of endurance.

The factories closed. The congregations scattered. But the windows remain: fragile, luminous, still looking for a home.

Orbach leads me into a small elevator, one hand steadying his cane as the doors close. “You’re gonna like this,” he says, as the bell dings and the elevator jolts to a stop.

The basement sprawls beneath the entire building, a hidden warren of storage rooms and concrete corridors. One room is a large gym. Another section is soon to become indoor pickleball courts. But in a far corner, the scene could be straight out of an Indiana Jones movie. This is where Orbach has built something else: a warehouse of memory.

Wooden crates line the walls, some open, others nailed shut. Inside are stained-glass windows that have yet to find a new home — towering panels from Beth Achim synagogue in Southfield, Michigan, each 13 feet tall and 3 feet wide. For now, they rest here, waiting for wherever their journey next takes them, like the vessels of a traveling tabernacle.

Jerry Orbach in the basement of his Chicago synagogue with 14 stained glass windows rescued from the closed Congregation Beth Achim in Southfield, Michigan. Photo by Benyamin Cohen

Orbach lifts his phone, flicking on the flashlight. Dust drifts through the beam. The air smells faintly metallic, like old pews and time. He runs the light along the edge of a crate, tracing the outline of a hidden window.

“I just got these in two weeks ago,” he says, like a shopkeeper showing off new stock. “Seven for the holidays, seven for the days of creation. They’re gorgeous.”

He steps closer to a crate, resting his hand on the wood as if on a headstone. This, he said, is how memory becomes a kind of faith.

The case for light

A son of Chicago, Orbach was born in Humboldt Park to parents who fled pogroms in Eastern Europe — his mother from Ukraine, his father from Poland. When he was 8, the family moved north to Albany Park, then a humming center of Jewish life. He’s stayed close to the city ever since: studying law at Loyola, serving as a prosecutor and alderman, and later, in 1988, taking the bench in Cook County. In time he rose to head the court’s law division in District 2, a job that taught him to listen before ruling. He retired two decades ago, though he now mediates and arbitrates cases — a judge, it seems, never entirely off duty.

A few of Orbach’s earliest rescues were the panels from his childhood synagogue in Albany Park. They once illuminated the sanctuary where he became bar mitzvah, where he was married, where his parents once prayed. Reinstalled now in Northbrook, they’ve since framed his grandchildren’s baby namings. “They sold the building to a church,” he said. “I couldn’t stand the idea of those windows ending up in a dumpster.”

Something shifted. He started calling contractors, preservationists — anyone with a ladder and a conscience. Soon he was showing up at demolition sites, paying crews out of pocket to let him climb the scaffolding and pry the glass from the walls. Once, at Mikro Kadosh Anshei Ticktin, an old Chicago congregation, he and his crew worked through the night, prying the stained glass from the front while a bulldozer tore into the back of the building. “By the end, there was one wall left,” he said. “It was shaking while we got the last window out.”

He talks about the windows the way some people talk about those who once prayed beneath them, as if they still have a pulse. “If you keep the memory of the shuls alive,” he said, “the people in them are alive too.”

From ruin to renewal

Among Orbach’s most prized rescues are a set of stained-glass windows from Saginaw, Michigan — luminous panels manufactured in France and salvaged just before their synagogue was torn down. He brought them to Northbrook several years ago, giving their light a second life.

A few months after Orbach installed the Saginaw windows, Cooper — the scholar who tracks synagogue closures and the fate of their sacred objects — flew in from Cleveland to see them. She’d been studying what happens to the sacred items left behind when synagogues close: Torah scrolls, yahrzeit plaques, arks, pews, memorial lights. But the stained glass, she said, posed the hardest questions.

Alanna Cooper is the chair of the Jewish studies department at Case Western University. Courtesy of Case Western University

Stained-glass windows don’t have a sacred status like a Torah scroll or even the building itself. They carry a different kind of holiness. “I’ve heard many congregations describe their windows as the soul of their congregation,” Cooper said.

She found in Orbach what her fieldwork had only theorized. “He’s creating an afterlife for these windows,” she said at a dedication ceremony at Northbrook, where they both spoke.

Standing before the crowd that day, Cooper described the scene she’d witnessed when windows were removed from Ahavath Israel in Kingston, New York, which Orbach also rescued and relocated to Northbrook. Cooper recalled workmen carrying the panels to their crates as the last members of the congregation looked on. “As they lowered the windows into the boxes,” she said, “it felt like a burial.”

Now she gestured toward the sanctuary, the glass alive with color once more. “And this,” she said, “is the afterlife.”

In his own sanctuary

Orbach has one more thing to show me, in his two-story home on a quiet suburban street. Rusty, his six-year-old rescue mutt, bounds to the door. His wife, Noreen, waves from the hallway.

The foyer is lined with photos of his two daughters and their families. Hanging above the entryway are two stained-glass windows he salvaged years ago from a shuttered synagogue in Lakeview, Illinois, where he used to go for minyan. The site is now condos.

“In my own way, this is how I keep those shuls alive,” he says, glancing up at the glass.

Benyamin Cohen is a senior writer at the Forward and host of our morning briefing, Forwarding the News. He is the author of two books, My Jesus Year and The Einstein Effect.

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This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/news/779236/saving-stained-glass-synagogues/ at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

NEWS | OCT 28, 2025, 4:23 PM EDT | UPDATED OCT 29, 2025, 6:19 AM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Mamdani opposes Zionism, but wants New York public schools to teach about it

Hannah Feuer

The anti-Zionist candidate is backing a curriculum that defines Zionism as ‘the right to Jewish national self-determination’

New York Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on Oct. 16. Photo by Angelina Katsanis / Pool / AFP / Getty Images

Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has announced plans to fight antisemitism in New York City using a curriculum that seems to contradict his own views on Israel.

The “Hidden Voices” program, reviewed by the Forward, teaches students in kindergarten through 12th grade about Jewish Americans in U.S. history and defines Zionism as “The right to Jewish national self-determination in their ancestral homeland.” That is not language Mamdani, an anti-Zionist, has used himself. Mamdani has repeatedly said Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish state, but rather “as a state with equal rights.”

Yet at the mayoral debate last Thursday, Mamdani said he would be a mayor who “actually delivers on the implementation of the ‘Hidden Voices’ curriculum in our school system.”

Mamdani reiterated that position Sunday on ABC’s Up Close with Bill Ritter, saying the curriculum “would celebrate the breadth and the beauty of Jewish life in our city’s history.”

What does the curriculum say about Israel?

The curriculum says “an important aspect of Jewish American identity is a connection to Israel,” citing a 2023 statistic from the Pew Research Center that “82% of Jewish adults in the United States said caring about Israel is an essential or important part of what being Jewish means to them.”

It notes that, “For millennia, Jews have directed their prayers toward Jerusalem and continue to do so.” The curriculum also points to traditions like concluding the Passover seder with “Next year in Jerusalem” as evidence of Jews’ enduring connection to Israel.

“Many Jewish Americans have family and friends in Israel, again reinforcing the familial concept of Jews around the world as an ‘am,’ a people,” the curriculum reads.

At the same time, the curriculum acknowledges that Jews “are not a monolith” and hold a range of opinions about Israel. The Jewish figures profiled “exhibit a range of attitudes about Zionism and the state of Israel, from passionate support to disengagement to harsh criticism,” the curriculum says.

For example, the curriculum notes that businessman and progressive philanthropist Julius Rosenwald “did not support Zionism.” It also says that “Jewish students bring a range of feelings and opinions about Israel to the classroom; they should be allowed to develop those ideas and speak for themselves.”

Why was the curriculum created?

“Hidden Voices” began in 2018 as an initiative of the New York City Department of Education to integrate the stories of underrepresented groups into its history curriculum. Curricula include lessons on LGBTQ+ history, Asian Americans, Muslim Americans, the Black and African diaspora, and Americans with disabilities.

Following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel in 2023, Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, set out to help create a Jewish version, with historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela as one of the lead authors. Mayor Eric Adams also backed the curriculum, led by his Office to Combat Antisemitism.

“The most effective way to combat antisemitism is education, teaching about Judaism, the Jewish people, and their longstanding relationship with Israel,” Moshe Davis, executive director of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, told the Forward.

The result is a nearly 300-page curriculum that focuses on teaching Jewish history as U.S. history, rather than concentrating on European history or the Holocaust.

On ABC, Mamdani described “Hidden Voices” as “an existing curriculum. It just hasn’t actually been implemented.”

But as of this school year, the curriculum is already available to all New York City public school teachers for optional use, after being piloted in five districts last year. Mamdani’s campaign did not respond to questions from the Forward about how his proposal would differ from current policy or whether he was calling for the curriculum to be mandated.

What else does the curriculum teach about Jewish history?

The curriculum includes profiles of Jewish figures from colonial America through the Industrial Age, a glossary of key terms, and a map of New York City marking sites significant to Jewish American history — including the Forward’s former office at 173 East Broadway.

Among the featured figures: Asser Levy, one of the first Jewish settlers of what was then New Amsterdam; Harry Lender, who pioneered the idea of freezing bagels; Ayn Rand, the political philosopher who championed unfettered capitalism; and Rose Schneiderman, a feminist labor union leader.

By spotlighting Jews from a range of backgrounds and beliefs — yes, Ayn Rand and a labor organizer are in the same lineup — the curriculum aims to challenge stereotypes about what it means to be a “New York Jew.”

The course of study also intends to offer a more positive portrait of Jewish identity, rather than learning about Judaism through the lens of victimization. While the curriculum does not ignore antisemitism, it seeks to include examples of “perseverance, empowerment, and joy,” it says.

A second “Hidden Voices” curriculum on Jewish Americans is expected to be released this spring.

Hannah Feuer joined the Forward as a general assignment reporter in May 2025 after two years as a culture reporter at Seven Days, an independent weekly in Burlington, Vermont. Originally from the Washington, D.C., area, she is a 2023 graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

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This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/news/779257/mamdani-zionism-hidden-voices-curriculum-antisemitism/ at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

SPORTS | OCT 28, 2025, 3:37 PM EDT | UPDATED OCT 28, 2025, 5:13 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

It’s so cool that Sandy Koufax was there for that

Louis Keene

The legendary Dodger pitcher witnessed Clayton Kershaw’s redemption, and a World Series game for the ages

Sandy Koufax saw one of the greatest World Series games ever played. Screenshot of Fox Sports

Sometime around the 16th inning of last night’s marathon World Series game, Dodger manager Dave Roberts admitted to a Fox sideline reporter he was on his last relief pitcher.

But some viewers, perhaps growing delirious as the clock approached midnight in Los Angeles, had an idea for who Roberts should call on next: a retired 89-year-old southpaw sitting behind home plate.

“If this game goes any longer,” one fan wrote on X, “Dodgers are gonna have to put in Koufax.”

It was one of the most improbable and most interminable baseball games ever played, a cosmic struggle between two powerhouses on the game’s biggest stage — cinema, if movies could run for 6 hours and 39 minutes. The Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays combined to use 44 players, 220 baseballs and throw 609 pitches. The game went so long there was a 14th-inning stretch — and then four more frames, before the Dodgers finally won 6-5 in the 18th inning.

Sandy Koufax, the Jewish sports hero and four-time World Series winner, was there for all of it. As the Dodgers and Blue Jays stayed deadlocked at 5 runs apiece for nearly 10 innings, Fox kept cutting to him, holding out for a breakthrough like every other diehard. More than a few marveled that he was still awake.

Sticking around meant Koufax witnessed not only one of the greatest baseball games ever played, but an incredible full-circle moment involving his heir apparent, Clayton Kershaw. Kershaw and Koufax, both of whom played their entire careers with the Dodgers, are said to be close; Kershaw, the only lefty to rival Koufax’s pitching dominance since the latter’s retirement in 1966, will retire after this World Series.

Kershaw spoke at Koufax’s statue unveiling ceremony in 2022. Photo by Kirby Lee/Getty Images

But comparisons between the two fall apart in the playoffs, where Kershaw has historically crumbled. Now 37, Kershaw was kept on the Dodgers’ World Series roster in case of emergency — an injury to a starting pitcher, for example, or other long-relief duties. Anything other than a Sisyphean set-up.

Instead, Dodger fans everywhere held their breath as Roberts called on Kershaw with the bases loaded and two outs in the 12th inning of a tie game. It was Kershaw’s first time pitching in extra-innings. All he needed was to get one out. This time, he did. As he walked off the mound, the broadcast cut first to Koufax applauding his old friend.

Nobody deserved this more than Clayton Kershaw. pic.twitter.com/Ja1Y2gCyTy

— Michael Bier (@MichaelJBier) October 28, 2025

One person wrote the scene was “as good as it gets for baseball history nerds.”

It must have pained Koufax to see his friend — Koufax-like in so many ways — fall short in the postseason so many times in the last 18 years. How cool is it that he was there to see Kershaw come through at the end? It must have meant a lot to Kershaw, too.

That was it for Kershaw, but not Koufax. Kershaw was replaced by Edgardo Henriquez, who was then replaced by journeyman right-hander Will Klein. Klein (not Jewish, to save you a search, though a few friends joked an unkempt red beard recalled a Chabad rabbi) had never thrown more than 30 pitches in a single appearance as a pro. On Monday, with no relief pitchers waiting behind him, Klein threw seventy-one, in a four-inning shutout performance that kept the Dodgers alive long enough for Freddie Freeman’s 18th-inning walkoff home run to deliver victory.

After the game, Koufax reportedly made his way to the Dodger clubhouse to congratulate Klein on his effort. It was well past midnight by the time he got there.

“Nice going,” Koufax told Klein, according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan.

You’d have to think Koufax had a moment in the clubhouse with Kershaw, too. Those words have not yet been revealed to us. What they shared on the field — and what fans watching got to share with them — is cool enough to suffice.

Sandy Koufax at the beginning of last night’s game. https://t.co/V6CAR3ldTI

— JonathanLightman (@JonathanLightm1) October 28, 2025

Louis Keene is a reporter for the Forward. His work has also been published in The New York Times, New York magazine and Vice. He is based in Los Angeles.

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This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/news/sports/779227/sandy-koufax-kershaw-world-series-dodgers/ at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

Opinions

- A sign in my neighborhood says ‘The Holocaust is fake’ — I wish I felt surprised

- The rabbinic backlash against Zohran Mamdani isn’t about Mamdani at all

- In the Mamdani-Cuomo race, why should I choose safety as a Jew over safety as a woman?

OPINION | OCT 30, 2025, 2:48 PM EDT | UPDATED OCT 30, 2025, 6:08 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A sign in my neighborhood says ‘The Holocaust is fake’ — I wish I felt surprised

Aviya Kushner

In a time of so-called ‘fake news,’ the truth doesn’t seem to matter anymore

A photo taken at Auschwitz, after the liberation of the extermination camp, 1945. Photo by Yad Vashem/AFP via Getty Images

When I saw a sign on my streetcorner in Chicago that said “The Holocaust is fake,” I immediately stopped. I had just left the pool and was on my way to shop for Shabbat. Disgusted, I brought an older neighbor to take a look. I knew he had taken down his mezuzah in fear after some of the protests after Oct. 7 and had only recently put another Jewish symbol back up.

Graffiti on the north side of Chicago. Photo by Aviya Kushner

I wanted company as I snapped a picture of the sign, but I also wanted him to be aware of what was happening in the neighborhood. Because these days, the truth and lies are blurred.

Later, I learned that similar stickers and graffiti, some of it misspelled, had appeared on other corners and benches on the Far North side of Chicago, traditionally a stronghold of the Jewish community here, which is the third largest in the U.S.

“Holocaust” and “fake” are two words whose meanings used to be clear to all. Yet the doubt cast on both “Holocaust” and “fake” represent two disturbing trends; their convergence is dangerous, and entirely predictable.

Those who traffic in Holocaust minimization and denial have been recent guests on The Joe Rogan Experience, the country’s #1 podcast, which has far more listeners than network television. Rogan, who has hosted the “Holocaust revisionist” Darryl Cooper, has 19.4 million subscribers on YouTube, 19.7 million on Instagram and 15 million on X. Meanwhile, NBC and CBS News average 5.6 and 3.6 million viewers, respectively.

Redefining fake

Meanwhile, the mainstream news media, where fact-checking is prized, has been maligned for years as “fake news,” a term the current U.S. president uses so often that no one blinks when something real is dismissed. When fact-checked information is “fake,” it’s not surprising to see history described that way too.

The Holocaust was the ultimate truth of the 20th century. The ghettos, the crematoria, the gas chambers — so many elements of the industrialized and intentional slaughter of an entire people were without precedent and were the final stop on centuries of anti-Jewish hatred.

In the weeks after Oct. 7, I was haunted by the thought that the “genocide” charge against Israel was not just about criticizing Israel, but at root, about minimizing the Holocaust.

The term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who had lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust.

Yet the world’s oldest Holocaust archive changed its name in September 2019 from the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide to the Wiener Holocaust Library. The Library, located in London, stated that it wanted to clarify “the centrality of the Holocaust” to our work without changing its “commitment to furthering the study of genocide.”

A few years earlier, in 2011, Jeremy Corbyn, who would become Labour Party leader in 2015, sought to change “Holocaust Memorial Day” to “Genocide Memorial Day — Never Again for Anyone” in 2011. That prompted swift backlash.

“Holocaust Memorial Day already rightly includes all victims of the Nazis and subsequent genocides,” Karen Pollock, chief executive of the UK’s Holocaust Educational Trust, wrote at the time on Twitter. “But the Holocaust was a specific crime, with antisemitism at its core. Any attempt to remove that specificity is a form of denial and distortion.”

Changing the meaning of the word ‘Holocaust’

Increasingly, the word ‘Holocaust’ is being used to describe what was not the Holocaust.

Simon and Schuster is currently promoting a forthcoming book edited by Susan Abulhawa that it describes as documenting “the holocaust of our time.” The editor’s note accompanying the copy that reviewers have received is signed “From the river to the sea.”

According to the United States Holocaust Museum, “approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. This number represented 1.7% of Europe’s total population and more than 60 percent of the world’s Jewish population. By 1945, most European Jews — 2 out of every 3 — had been killed.”

The world Jewish population still hasn’t recovered its 1933 levels.

Even in this moment where words and numbers increasingly do not matter, there is no account — not even from the Hamas-run Health Ministry itself—-that suggests that 2/3 of Gazans have been killed in this conflict.

This is not to minimize the tremendous suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians in a war that began with a Hamas-led attack on Israel, in which some Gazan civilians participated. It was a horrible and harrowing two years.

Returned Israeli hostages have described being held in the homes of ordinary Gazans. CNN reported that three hostages were held in the home of a physician whose son was a freelance journalist for the US-based Palestine Chronicle. The son filed dispatches about the war in Gaza while his family held hostages.

Fact-check: A military attack and hostage-taking were not features of the Jewish community’s experience during the Holocaust.

What is real? What is fake?

Who’s a journalist? Who’s a hostage-holder?

What’s “news”? What’s “experience”?

What’s the difference between the Holocaust and the holocaust?

In this world where facts can be fake and nothing is taboo, anything seems possible. You can make the Holocaust into a lower-case “holocaust.” You can make Raphael Lemkin, the columnist for Zionist World, into an anti-Zionist, which was what Lemkin’s family asserted that the Lemkin Institute was doing, as it used their relative’s name while attacking Israel. And you can put up a sticker in a Jewish neighborhood claiming that the “Holocaust is fake.”

Holding on to disgust

I wrote to various family members with a photo of the sign in my neighborhood. None reacted too strongly; “I hate to say it, but I’m numb to this already,” one wrote.

I’m glad I’m still disgusted. I’m writing this to encourage you to be disgusted, too. Resist the guests on podcast “experience” forums who claim that antisemitism is being exaggerated, and that the Holocaust wasn’t that bad.

Because once holocaust is just a word, marketing copy from a publisher, devoid of Jewish content, and cleansed of historical accuracy, all words can be redefined to serve this kingdom of lies we increasingly seem to be living in.

Aviya Kushner is the Forward’s language columnist and the author of Wolf Lamb Bomb and The Grammar of God.

- @AviyaKushner

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email [email protected].

This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/opinion/779974/holocaust-is-fake-graffiti-chicago-antisemitism-lemkin/ at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

OPINION | OCT 30, 2025, 9:42 AM EDT | UPDATED OCT 30, 2025, 11:18 AM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The rabbinic backlash against Zohran Mamdani isn’t about Mamdani at all

Nora Berman

It’s about the rifts in the Jewish community after Oct. 7 — and our ongoing unwillingness to address them

Zohran Mamdani, Democratic New York City mayoral candidate, during a campaign event in Queens on Oct. 26. Photo by Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The sheer number of letters by rabbis circulating about Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign is “mind numbing,” a rabbi friend texted me earlier this week.

There’s the public letter decrying Mamdani, the Democratic candidate, sponsored by The Jewish Majority, which as of this writing has 1,138 signatures from rabbis, cantors and rabbinical students. But two or three other letters are also making their way through her circles. (One affirms a belief that Mamdani’s support for Palestinian rights comes from “deep moral convictions”; the others have not yet been made public.) “Make it stop,” she wrote.

The last two years have been unbelievably difficult for American Jews, and particularly so for rabbis. Rabbis have been tasked with counseling congregants deeply affected by the trauma caused by Oct. 7 and the rise in antisemitism, as well as the global outcry against Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza. Not to mention navigating efforts by certain political actors to weaponize Jewish pain in order to silence pro-Palestinian activists, remake higher education and accelerate an aggressive deportation agenda.

Now, the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has created something of a vacuum, leaving rabbis to channel the complexity of the last two years into an unrelenting, disproportionate and often negative focus on Mamdani.

The old joke goes “two Jews, three opinions.” It’s rare to find Jewish consensus on where to get the best bagels, let alone a political issue. Yet rabbis from states as distant as Nevada, Illinois, Georgia, Indiana, New Mexico and Tennessee have signed the Jewish Majority letter, which calls out “rising anti-Zionism and its political normalization,” publicly affirming their opposition to a potential Mayor Mamdani. While the letter boasts 1,138 signatures, only around 100 of them actually live in New York City and would be directly affected by a Mamdani administration.

Isn’t it a bit strange that no cause has apparently rallied more American rabbis — not a devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza; not an antisemitic AI chatbot developed by the richest man on Earth; not the Department of Homeland Security sharing antisemitic dogwhistles; not U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement kidnapping people off the street — than opposition to a Muslim, Democratic socialist mayoral candidate who is not pro-Israel?

I find it hard to believe that New York City’s next mayor is truly the most vital issue facing American Jews outside this specific city. So why this level of focused condemnation?

I think there’s an answer in the striking timing of these letters. Mamdani won the Democratic primary overwhelmingly in June. Where were the letters then? If anything, his victory seems less assured than it did a month or two ago — recent polls suggest that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent, has cut Mamdani’s lead in half following Mayor Eric Adams’ withdrawal from the race.

In the end, the anti-Mamdani letters say very little about Mamdani and everything about American Jewry.

So what changed? With the ceasefire and the return of the last living hostages, I think that diaspora Jewry is suddenly unsure about our political role. Now that the living hostages — the one issue most of us agreed on in the last two years — are home safe, whom do we advocate for? What are we supposed to talk about now?

The flurry of these rabbinic anti-Mamdani letters less than a month before the mayoral election in November has been framed by some as an extraordinary expression of rabbinic unity in the face of a dangerous candidate. “Look at how many American rabbis have ever signed a letter,” one commenter on r/Jewish wrote on Reddit. “This is one of the largest rabbinic sign-on letters in history.”

But I worry this proliferation is a sign of insecurity in our community, not health.

In a time when it has felt so impossible to express nuance and to allow for a multiplicity of truths, Mamdani represents, for many, an easy opportunity to align against a figure whose position on Israel departs from the long-accepted political norm of vocal support.

A recent poll conducted by The Washington Post shows that nearly 40 percent of American Jews believe Israel has committed genocide. That number jumps to 50 percent between the ages of 18 and 34. Synagogue leaders, who are always trying to grow their community with new, younger members, must appease older, more pro-Israel congregants while remaining in touch with the changing views of the new generations — a balancing act that is increasingly untenable.

For a rabbi who is attempting to negotiate the tensions of differing political beliefs within their congregation, it is far easier to sign a letter than it is to reckon, both personally and communally, with the profound generational divide on Israel.

Mamdani’s campaign is not the only time that rabbinic leaders have spoken out since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 — or this year. On Feb. 13, 350 American rabbis took out a full-page ad in The New York Times to oppose President Donald Trump’s plan to remove all Palestinians from Gaza. “Jewish people say NO to ethnic cleansing!” it read in bold letters. In July, 1,200 rabbis and Jewish leaders from around the world signed a letter urging Israel to open Gaza to humanitarian aid, followed by a letter in August from over 80 Orthodox rabbis, led by the former mashgiach ruchani of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Yosef Blau.

But the Jewish Majority letter has made by far the biggest impact. And I wonder at the usefulness of its signatories expending limited political capital against a candidate who, by all accounts, is likely to become mayor. When historians write about this charged era of American Jewish life, when authoritarian power is aggressively taking hold, I doubt that this letter will be regarded as a worthy use of their considerable communal power.

In the end, the anti-Mamdani letters say very little about Mamdani and everything about American Jewry. Instead of coming together based on a shared commitment to Jewish values, American rabbis are choosing an enemy to ally against. Instead of drawing “a line in the sand,” as one commentator framed the letter, I fear it is simply a line that will further divide us.

Since Oct. 7, American Jews have been buffeted by anti-war protests, antisemitic attacks and institutional strife. The Hamas attacks and Israel’s war in Gaza have unleashed a profound internal and external reckoning about the previously sacrosanct relationship between the U.S. and Israel. With the tenuous ceasefire coming soon after the start of a new Jewish year, and the traditional pro-Israel consensus irrevocably cracking under the strain of war and religious extremism, American Jews have an important opportunity, now, to look inward.

What have we learned over these painful years? How can we heal, while also taking responsibility for the ways in which we did not use our power for good? How do we want to use our communal power, period? If the party line on Israel has changed, how do American Jews want to change with it?

The conversations within the Jewish community are just beginning, and will last long past the New York City mayoral election on Nov. 4. I pray that our rabbinic leaders will have the courage to help us have them.

Nora Berman is the deputy opinion editor for the Forward. She is based in Atlanta.

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- @noraeberman

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email [email protected].

This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/opinion/779746/zohran-mamdani-rabbis-american-jews/ at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

OPINION | OCT 28, 2025, 1:39 PM EDT | UPDATED OCT 30, 2025, 11:39 AM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

In the Mamdani-Cuomo race, why should I choose safety as a Jew over safety as a woman?

Emily Tamkin

The relentless focus on whether Mamdani is a threat to Jews overlooks his opponent’s alleged record with women

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, running as an Independent, and Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani prepare for a mayoral debate on Oct. 16. Photo by Angelina Katsanis-Pool/Getty Images

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When we talk about Jewish safety, whose safety, exactly, are we talking about?

I found myself mulling that question after Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, of Manhattan’s Park Avenue Synagogue, recently came out against Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Instead, Cosgrove encouraged his congregants to support former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. He said he was moved to take that public stance out of concern for Jewish safety and the Jewish future.

“It’s not my style to endorse any candidate. But as a rabbi, when there’s a threat to the Jewish community, I believe it’s my responsibility to call that out,” Cosgrove told Haaretz in a follow-up interview.

Cosgrove was articulating one understanding of Jewish safety — an understanding contingent on politicians voicing support for Israel. He has been far from alone in the run-up to this election, for which early voting is already underway.

The American Jewish Committee expressed “alarm” at Mamdani’s charge that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, and his refusal to say he supports the existence of Israel as a specifically Jewish state, among other positions. (Mamdani has said he does not support any state’s right to a racial or religious hierarchy.) The group urged Mamdani to better consider the concerns of the Jewish community, and “change course.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, has attacked Mamdani as being insufficiently committed to Jews and Jewish safety. More than 1,000 rabbis across the country signed a letter, citing Cosgrove’s speech, that denounces Mamdani and the political normalization of anti-Zionism.

But there’s an understanding of Jewish safety missing from that viewpoint — one that largely impacts Jewish women.

Cuomo resigned as governor after being accused of sexually harassing multiple women — 13, per the Department of Justice — while in office. He was accused, in one case, of attempted retaliation; in another, he sought the gynecological records of one of his accusers.

Why is his alleged behavior not also seen as a threat?

I don’t live in New York City. I can’t vote in the mayoral election. But the failure of so many Jewish leaders to meaningfully engage with what Cuomo’s election might mean for women has deeply alarmed me.

I do not know how to be just Jewish or just a woman. I only know how to be a Jewish woman. And the idea that I, or any woman, has to pretend that the normalization of sexual harassment in politics is somehow irrelevant to our day-to-day safety — because our commitment to Jewish peoplehood comes first — seems to me to be an extremely limited understanding of Jewish safety. And, for that matter, of Jewish peoplehood.

For many Jewish women, we cannot talk about threats to our safety and dignity, and the importance of preserving our ability to move through the world without fear — all subjects rightly brought up when we speak of Jewish safety — and not talk about sexual harassment. That harassment is wrapped up in how we experience antisemitism: Antisemitic abuse toward women often includes sexist language. For example, in response to my writing as a Jewish woman weighing in on Jewish politics, I have been told more than once that I deserve to be sexually assaulted.

And sexual harassment has been a serious issue in explicitly Jewish spaces. For just two examples: Leading Jewish sociologist Stephen M. Cohen was accused of sexual harassment and forcible touching by multiple women in 2018. Leading Jewish philanthropist Michael Steinhardt was accused of a pattern of sexual harassment the following year. More generally, a 2023 poll found that 35 percent of women in the U.S. have been sexually harassed or abused in the workplace. 81% of women nationwide report experiencing sexual harassment at some point in their lives; it stands to reason that, for Jews, that statistic is likely similarly, shockingly high.

There is a meaningful risk that the election of a mayor with a record like Cuomo’s would make women feel less secure reporting harassment to those in power. It’s also possible his election would make women more likely to experience harassment from those who might see his victory as an opening to resume patterns of behavior briefly made taboo by the #MeToo movement. To avoid seriously contemplating those prospects when considering which mayoral candidates might endanger the well-being of New York City’s Jews is to treat the specific safety of Jewish women, and other Jewish victims and survivors of sexual harassment and assault, as secondary.

I know that not every Jewish woman will agree with me. Many of the rabbis who signed the letter warning against Mamdani were women. I know that there will be those who say that this is irrelevant, or not a Jewish issue. I know there will be others who feel, even if they wouldn’t say so, that Jewish women should, in this instance, place concerns tied to their womanhood behind concerns tied to their Jewishness.

But I can’t untie the two. And I can’t understand why so many leaders in my community seem not to have even considered the possibility that the return to power of an accused serial sexual harasser might be relevant to Jewish safety and dignity.

It’s true that many of those who have spoken out against Mamdani have not explicitly thrown their support behind Cuomo. But as Cosgrove noted, to not support one is effectively to support the other.

And here is the broader picture of what we risk supporting by not treating sexual harassment as a real danger: We live in a country in which the president has been found liable of sexual abuse and was still reelected; two Supreme Court justices have lifetime appointments despite having been accused of sexual harassment and assault; and the Defense Secretary was accused of sexual assault and was confirmed anyway.

All of that is normal now. You can be accused, credibly and repeatedly, of sexual harassment or worse and still be given immense power. So, I have to ask: Isn’t that normalization a threat to the safety and dignity of the many Jews who are women? And if not: why not?

Emily Tamkin is a global affairs journalist. She is the author of The Influence of Soros and Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email [email protected].

This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/opinion/779173/mamdani-cuomo-antisemitism-sexual-harassment/ at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

Culture

- How Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture kicked off a democratic crisis

- How a curator and a rabbi joined forces to keep a piece of Boston’s Jewish history alive

- In HBO’s new Stephen King series, the Holocaust is fuel for jump scares

- Was the ‘Yiddish Sherlock Holmes’ the first Jewish superhero?

CULTURE | OCT 30, 2025, 11:33 AM EDT | UPDATED OCT 30, 2025, 1:25 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture kicked off a democratic crisis

Jake Wasserman

Germany has made remembering the Holocaust central, but that commitment has been strained by Oct. 7 and the rise of the far-right. What happens if Germany loses its memory?

Photos of survivors from Buchenwald by photographer Thomas Müller stand in the square outside of Weimar’s central train station in the public art project “Die Zeugen”. Photo by Jake Wasserman

Research for this article was made possible with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Washington, DC.

WEIMAR, Thuringia, Germany — Walking through Weimar, Germany, the legacy of the Holocaust seems inescapable. Stolpersteine — German for “stumbling blocks” — are placed outside the homes of people killed during the Shoah, essential evidence of Erinnerungskultur, or memory culture, a national commitment to memorializing, and learning from, the Nazis’ atrocities.

But this commitment is being challenged, with incidences of antisemitism and hate crimes against migrants on the rise. Alan Bern, who a Yiddish musician described to me as “the man who solved the Shoah” — a description Bern himself contests — had just returned from a press conference when I met him, where he spoke alongside local law enforcement officials about a 51-year-old man charged with the 33rd case of vandalism of the memorial stones in the Eastern German city this year.

Bern, 70, an American who came to Germany nearly 40 years ago and holds the nation’s highest civilian honor, said, “Attacks on Stolpersteine are not primarily attacks against Jews, but rather against society and, not least, against human dignity.”

Alan Bern stands next to a door from Weimar’s Deutsches Nationaltheater inside of the Other Music Academy. Photo by Jake Wasserman

Bern, a composer, founded a school called the Other Music Academy, where he and his colleagues are creating encounters critical to the fight against Jew-hatred in Germany.

They bring together Jews and the descendants of Nazis, Israelis and Palestinians, and Germans and Syrian migrants in an attempt to apply the lessons of the Holocaust forward to the issues facing Germany today. Democracy is in the center’s DNA both in ethos and architecture — the entrance to their dance hall is a 100 year-old door from the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar, where Germany’s first constitution was written and ratified.

“I believe that the encounter with otherness,” Bern said, “is essential to transforming yourself and transforming society.”

Bern’s work helps extend Germany’s memory culture, applying its lessons beyond the Holocaust to address threats against democracy posed by the far-right, which is gaining popularity around the country.

Although not all incidents of antisemitism in Germany are coming from the right, the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has forced a new debate over Germany’s commitment to remembering the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. AfD holds a plurality in Thuringia’s state parliament, and, after this year’s February elections, became the main opposition party in Germany’s federal parliament. The party’s most radical wing says that memory culture is a “guilt cult” and calls for a “180 degree turnaround” in the nation’s approach to remembering its history.

And while many Jews are deeply concerned about the right’s desire to abandon memory culture, some Jews in Germany, particularly those on the left, feel that the societal commitment to preventing another Holocaust has caused the state to police their ability to act and think freely, particularly when critiquing Israel. Since Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish activists have lost awards and speaking engagements, and have even been labeled extremists and put under surveillance by Germany’s state intelligence service.

Memory culture is not just essential to Germans, however; it’s a key for Jews around the world, who take heritage trips to concentration camps and ancestral homes there as part of memorializing the Holocaust. And worldwide, memory culture is essential to remembering global atrocities — yet its tenets are under attack. The Trump administration has criticized the Smithsonian’s approach to slavery, while Turkey refuses to acknowledge the existence of the Armenian genocide.

I went to Germany to speak with both Jews and non-Jewish Germans who are doing the work of bringing memory culture to life, to see how their work is being impacted by these political shifts, and to find out: What is lost if Germany loses its memory?

A brief history of memory culture

After the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, the newly reunited and democratic Germany defined its national identity as a state committed to learning from the atrocities it committed in the past, thus preventing them from ever happening again.

But this devotion to the Holocaust wasn’t always the case. At the end of World War II, fewer than 15,000 Jews remained in Germany, the majority of whom went to West Germany when the country was partitioned after World War II. West Germany largely avoided accepting responsibility for the Holocaust until 1970, when Chancellor Willy Brandt visited the Warsaw Ghetto, in Poland, and laid a wreath at its memorial.

Meanwhile, under East Germany’s Soviet-style system, Nazi crimes were stripped of their antisemitic motivations and recast as offenses to communism; the small Jewish community of less than 1,000 people who remained there continued to be persecuted by the Stasi for perceived opposition to socialist values.

After the Berlin Wall came down and Germany reunified the following year, Chancellor Helmut Kohl oversaw the immigration of some 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union. The majority of Germany’s new Jews moved to Berlin, but others repopulated Jewish communities in the former East.

With the formation of the new German republic, the government moved back to Berlin, and in 1999, voted to construct the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the heart of the city — next to Berlin’s famous Brandenburg Gate. They expanded concentration camp memorials to include details about the Holocaust and built a world-renowned Jewish museum designed by Daniel Libeskind. Visits to these sites became a regular part of German school curricula. A centralized national Jewish council — The Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland, or the Central Council of Jews in Germany — today receives €22 million in government funding to serve as the official voice of Jewish people and to advocate against antisemitism across society.

Memory culture is palpable everywhere in Germany, whether in large memorials and historical sites like concentration camps, or the small plaques and reminders, like the stumbling blocks, about the Jews who once lived there.

A sign outside of the Wittenbergplatz U-Bahn station in Berlin lists the names of concentration camps. Photo by Jake Wasserman

For years, however, shame over the Holocaust has muted national pride. Many Germans avoided flying their flag for fear of invoking the kind of nationalism that led to the rise of the Nazi party. (Though in the past two decades, flags have become more common at German sporting matches and events.)

That has led some, such as the far-right AfD party, to claim that memory culture has harmed Germany. Former party leader Alexander Gauland referred in 2018 to the Nazi era as a speck of “bird shit” in an otherwise grand national history, a speck that was given outsize importance.

And more recently, memory culture has become complicated by modern political concerns. In 2008, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that supporting Israel was Germany’s “reason of state,” and the government has consistently operated with an iron-clad support for Israel as a form of reparations for the Holocaust.

But as Israel’s actions have come under increasing international condemnation since Oct. 7, Germany’s memory culture too has come under broader criticism by Jews and non-Jews alike. Some Jews in Germany are concerned over what they see as Germany abandoning Israel after Chancellor Friedrich Merz halted weapons exports to the Jewish state in August to curb the supply that could be used in Gaza. Other Jews, meanwhile, feel unable to speak out against the war given the national devotion to Israel.

And the Central Council, the state Jewish voice, believes that AfD is taking advantage of the war to inflame tensions between a new wave of Muslim immigrants and Germany’s Jews — and, in turn, win Jewish support for their party, including their belief in dismantling memory culture. Before this year’s elections, the Council circulated a letter signed by the leaders of every Jewish state organization warning that the AfD “uses Jews as an excuse to spread its racist and anti-Muslim slogans.”

The right-wing critique of memory culture in Germany

The AfD was officially designated a ‘rightwing extremist’ force by Germany’s intelligence agency, a status the far-right party is contesting in court. Still, it is the largest party in Thuringia and is poised to take over at least one state in  next year’s elections. This would give it control over the educational and cultural agencies that fund memory culture in Germany, agencies it hopes to defund. Clearly, the AfD is not a fringe group.

And it is gaining increasing influence nationally and visibility internationally. Prior to their strong showing in February’s elections, both vice president JD Vance and President Trump’s ally Elon Musk encouraged German voters to vote for AfD.

The official voice of the Jewish community in Germany unambiguously says that the AfD is a growing threat to German Jews, and Jews around the world. In their 2024 annual report, the Council called the AfD a “legitimizing bridge” between the political mainstream and extremist actors — like the man who livestreamed himself ranting about the Great Replacement Theory before trying and failing to break into the synagogue in Halle with a gun in 2019, killing two people outside its doors.

“There is a will in this party to change the remembrance and the memory of National Socialism in focusing on the positive parts of German history,” said Shila Erlbaum, the Council’s director of policy. “This is an attack on Jewish history and Jewish memory.”

But not all Jews agree the AfD is such a threat. In 2018, a group of Jewish party members founded the Federal Association of Jews in the AfD (JAfD), a small caucus within the party’s 70,000 members. Today, JAfD has only 25 members, along with another 80 supporters who are not full members.

Artur Abramovych, the JAfD’s 29-year-old chairman, told me that they established the caucus after anti-immigrant demonstrations broke out in the eastern city of Chemnitz, when two Kurdish immigrants stabbed and killed a man.

Like the party’s leaders, the JAfD believes, according to its website, that “the greatest threat to Europe in the 21st century is the growth of the Muslim population” and adds that “the rise of political Islam is also primarily a threat to Jews.” While party leaders’ statements contradict AfD’s official support for Israel, the JAfD is strongly and unequivocally pro-Israel.

In January 2024, the German investigative newsroom Correctiv reported that AfD members secretly met with neo-Nazis and wealthy businessmen to plan the mass deportation of immigrants from Germany in a plot called “remigration.” The news brought hundreds of thousands of Germans into the streets in protest.

AfD initially disputed what was discussed at the meeting, though eventually party leader Alice Weidel embraced remigration as the official party platform. Though the party is once again trying to distance itself from the controversial remigration concept to create a broader appeal among the mainstream electorate, JAfD still believes that the plan is essential. Abramovych himself is an immigrant — from Ukraine — but claimed that immigration is threatening German society due to Muslim fertility rates.

Like the party’s hardliners, JAfD is also critical of Germany’s memory culture. Abramovych said that it didn’t originally hurt Jewish people, but now does “because people are forcing German politics to keep the borders open and let millions of Jew haters into the country” due to the state’s Holocaust guilt.

Germany’s immigration politics have moved to the right since Oct. 7, 2023. In an interview with Der Spiegel after the Hamas attack, former Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the magazine, “We have to deport people more often and faster.” Earlier this year, Merz’s government tightened border controls, and in October the Bundestag, analogous to the U.S. House of Representatives, voted to revoke a fast-track to citizenship law passed by Scholz.

While he smoked handrolled cigarettes and drank a cup of black coffee outside of a Ukrainian cafe in Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg neighborhood, I asked Abramovych if he was concerned that Jewish immigrants like himself could be deported from Germany in the future if the AfD gained power and remigration became government policy.

“What? Who would deport the Jews? That’s ridiculous,” Abramovych said.

An alternative critique of memory culture from the left

AfD had its first electoral win in the Bundestag, Germany’s lower parliamentary house, in 2017, becoming the third-largest party in the parliament. Shortly after, poet and political scientist Max Czollek published the best-selling De-Integrate!: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century, a polemic about Jewish assimilation into German culture. As a result of his edgy take on memory culture in Germany, Czollek has become something of a celebrity, and a bit of a pariah.

For Czollek, AfD is the symptom of a greater problem in Germany where the nation’s guilt over the Holocaust creates a “theater of memory” — a term borrowed from the late sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann — in which Jews play out their dutiful role on the national stage, held up by the state as model minorities, but are subject to losing its protection if they deviate from accepted norms.

Thuringian AfD leader Bjorn Höcke gained infamy when he called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame,” but Czollek wrote that the idea was not new; in 1998, famed German left-wing intellectual Martin Walser called Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture “monumentalization of shame” in his acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Publishers’ Association.

Visitors walking through Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in September 2024. Photo by Jake Wasserman

To Czollek, AfD is just the latest step in a proud German tradition of tacitly accepting Nazism, albeit by a different name, in the East.

Behind Balenciaga sunglasses outside of a Kreuzberg cafe, Czollek described his family’s life in the former East Germany, part of a very small community of Jews who stayed after the war instead of departing for West Germany, America or Israel.

“The Jewish rituals I grew up with when my father started to reconnect to this tradition is more like the old, dark, empty synagogue singing of 20 people,” he explained. “And it’s like, ‘Why are there no people?’”

Czollek was born just before the Berlin wall came down, but for his family in East Germany, the Shoah was ever present in the absence of Jews. And it was magnified by what he described as a betrayal by the communist government that took over, which declared itself, its state and all of its citizens to be anti-Nazi — even if they had previously been active members of the Nazi party.

A report by the CIA in 1959 identified over 150 former high-ranking Nazi officials then working in positions of power within the communist East German government, and called it “doubtful” that they were sincere in the “change of political thinking.”

“You have this first generation of Jewish communists who came to Germany to build a better Germany and build up on this idea of anti-fascism as a proper fighting position,” he explained. “Suddenly, a lot of former Nazis were declared anti-fascist. So this is where the memory work fails.”

After the wall came down, Czollek argues that memory culture became a branding tool for Germany to prove itself as a democracy on the international stage — a tool that never offered anything meaningful to the few East German Jews like him, and that has proved ineffective at preventing the revival of a new ethno-nationalist right.

“Memory culture has become a tool in legitimizing and justifying the pride in Germany,” he said. But, he noted, memory culture is a relatively young part of German life; its widespread adoption came, ironically, during the “Years of the Baseball Bat” in the ‘90s, when neo-Nazi violence against migrants escalated severely.

After Oct. 7, Czollek believes that memory culture warped into something else entirely; today, anyone who speaks out against Israel’s response to the attacks in Gaza faces cancellation, disinvitation or even arrest.

“Memory culture used to be a pretty self-centered process of German self-improvement and reinvention,” Czollek said. “By now, it has become a tool of dominance and hegemony.”

“It’s almost like we have done the worst, and we have remembered the best,” he continued, opining that Holocaust and concentration camp memorials boost Germany’s national self-esteem and identity as a moral actor. Then, “you can start accusing migrants of not being as good as you are.”

And Jews who criticize the government’s version of memory culture risk losing state protection.

“There’s a tempting quality to playing along with the theater of memory, because being Jewish is rewarded if you do it in a specific way,” he continued. “Being a non-aligned Jew comes with a price.”

Although solidarity between Germany’s minorities — particularly Jews and Muslims — has become strained post-Oct. 7, exacerbated by the AfD, Czollek believes it’s the only way through the crisis brought about by memory culture and the rise of the far-right.

That’s why Czollek’s new book is called Alles auf Anfang — or, Everything Back to the Beginning. It’s a search for a new culture of remembrance in German life that includes not just Jews, but recognition of other migrant victims in German society.

Currently, much of Germany’s memory culture, exemplified in memorials like the Buchenwald concentration camp, keep their focus firmly in the past. But Czollek believes that, to address the current era, Germany needs to also find ways to commemorate violence perpetrated against its other minority groups.

“If you want to have memory culture as a living, active and productive thing today, it has to be updated every generation,” he said. “Sadness or grief is not a limited resource. We can all grieve together.”

The weaponization of memory culture against Jews

Immediately after Oct. 7, Wieland Hoban, a Jewish German living in Frankfurt am Main, began demonstrating against Germany’s support for Israel, and was arrested multiple times — the first time for wearing a shirt displaying a revolutionary fist logo, which is associated with the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel organization Samidoun that was banned in Germany a few days following the attack.

The next month, Hoban gave a speech where he said, “Germany can’t wash away its Holocaust guilt with the blood of Palestinians.” Afterwards, he was taken aside by police and charged on suspicion of Volksverhetzung — “incitement to hatred” — a charge that has been used by the German government to prosecute neo-Nazis and far-right extremists, and carries a sentence of up to five years in prison.

In Hoban’s view, memory culture had extended past its logical limits to charge him, a Jew, with a violation of the German criminal code for invoking his own history.

“They explained to me that I had mentioned the Holocaust and that in Germany, they take the Holocaust very seriously,” Hoban said. “This was a bit surreal.”

Hoban, a composer and translator, has been chairman of Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East) since 2021. He told me that, like many artists in Germany, the cause of Palestinian self-determination has been important to him.

“This occupation of Judaism, through Zionism, had just pushed me away from any identification with Jewishness,” Hoban said. But joining Jüdische Stimme helped him resolve “an inner contradiction” he felt in being Jewish and also supporting Palestinians.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators protest on a lake in Berlin’s Tiergarten on September 20, 2025. Photo by Jake Wasserman

This June, Hoban received a text from a journalist asking him if he’d seen the latest report from the BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, on extremist groups in Germany. He hadn’t, but when he looked it up, Hoban learned that his organization had been labeled as a “foreign-related extremist” group.

While AfD is using the courts in an attempt to clear their domestic extremist label, Jüdische Stimme is not pushing back. Hoban doesn’t dispute the reasons for the label — he does criticize Israel and Germany’s memory culture — so his group sees no way to clear its name.

“I wish more people would just have the balls to say, ‘I don’t care if you call me antisemitic, I’m sticking to my guns here,’” Hoban said.

With the BfV’s extremist designation, Jüdische Stimme is now vulnerable to surveillance by the intelligence agency, as well as infiltration by informants.

But while the state is adamantly opposed to their cause, Hoban believes that public opinion is changing. The week that we spoke in September, a poll showed that 62% of all German voters believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, including a majority of both Christian Democratic Union and AfD voters. A report by the International Federation for Human Rights also found in October that Germany, among other nations, has weaponized the fight against antisemitism to suppress dissent.

And, over a year after Hoban was charged with incitement to hatred, he received a letter from the public prosecutor’s office informing him that the charge against him had been dropped.

A concentration camp gets political

The Buchenwald Memorial was established in 1958 on the site of the former concentration camp by the government of East Germany to commemorate communist resistance fighters; it did not memorialize the dead Jews. But after reunification, the Memorial’s focus expanded to include the more than 56,000 people killed and 280,000 who were imprisoned at the site, becoming a centerpiece in Germany’s tapestry of memory.

Today, Buchenwald — one of the centerpieces of Germany’s memory culture — finds itself caught in the middle of the debate over how to remember the Holocaust. It’s using its mission to confront its dark history in a new way: fighting back against politicians who distort the Holocaust.

The Jewish bunk memorial at the Buchenwald Memorial. The inscription from Psalms 78:6 reads: “So that the generation to come might know, the children, yet to be born, that they too may rise and declare to their children.” In the background is the crematorium. Photo by Jake Wasserman

When an AfD member ran for mayor of Nordhausen, a city in Thuringia, in 2023, the Memorial’s official social media pages called him out online for dog whistling to right-wing extremists, invoking a false Holocaust-distorting conspiracy theory. The post changed the course of the election; in the first round of elections, the candidate had more than 45% of the vote, but after the Memorial’s statement, he failed to win in the second round.

“Many older inhabitants of Nordhausen who had not voted for many years said, ‘No, we don’t want to have a Holocaust denier as a mayor,’” the memorial’s director, Jens-Christian Wagner, said in an interview.

Last year, Wagner pursued a more extensive outreach with 300,000 letters mailed to seniors in Thuringia ahead of the state’s elections. The letters warned of the ways in which AfD party leaders have used Nazi language and distorted history.

The AfD fought back, taking the Memorial to court and accusing the Memorial of interfering in “political decision-making.” They lost.

“The court says explicitly that we can’t be neutral against any kind of Holocaust distortion,” Wagner explained to me.

With that mandate, Wagner now considers it his duty and the mission of the Memorial to combat Holocaust distortion, especially when it might affect elections. The Memorial has a particular interest; it’s located in Thuringia, where the AfD is gaining power, and it could lose its funding if the party wins control.

“With our interventions, we don’t think that we can change the positions of the AfD,” Wagner said. “We want to reach all these people who are not specifically voting for the AfD, who are in the gray zone, who can be rescued for democracy.”

Looking towards Germany’s future generations

The AfD has lately focused on reaching youth voters, spending heavily on digital outreach. As a result, young people in Germany are becoming increasingly anti-migrant, embracing far-right political ideas that were once verboten in Germany for being too close to Nazism.

Despite the Memorial’s successful interventions to deter adults from voting for AfD, Wagner is concerned about the rightward shift of younger generations, who are less likely to treat information from a Holocaust memorial with reverence — or even respect its history.

The director described young people who visit the Memorial on school trips displaying the Hitler salute, shouting “Sieg Heil” and photographing each other in front of crematory ovens.

“There were some right-wing young people in every school class for years, but these were only one or two, and the majority was against them, and this has completely changed,” Wagner said. “Now, spreading Holocaust distortion, being right-wing, is common sense in these school classes, and it’s very, very difficult for our educators to have a discourse with them.”

The Memorial has been attempting to revise their educational programming to make visits longer and more in-depth, and even built a youth hostel on the site so that school groups can stay and have extended experiences that they hope will make a lasting impact.

Alan Bern, of the Other Music Academy, also is also worried about the younger generations; he sees resonating with Germany’s youth as one of his most urgent and important challenges.

“Young people in Weimar have almost no real relationship to what it is that we’re doing,” Bern said. “So when they’re told ‘You shouldn’t be antisemitic,’ it’s just some adult telling them ‘Don’t do this.’”

A former East German youth prison next to the Other Music Academy in Weimar. The courtyard behind the prison was once used by the Nazis for executions by guillotine. Photo by Jake Wasserman

Like at Buchenwald, where the education department has placed its hopes for the future into its youth hostel, Bern wants to transform the former youth prison next to Other Music Academy into a dormitory of sorts where young people can stay for several days. The dichotomy of the prison’s barbed wire courtyard and its painted exterior wall, which artists have covered with colorful Keith Haring murals, pose a striking question about the direction of Germany’s future: Which way?

Pointing towards the floor and then to the prison across the driveway, Bern said, jokingly: “It’s either this or that.”

Challenged from both the left and the right, it’s unclear what is next for Germany’s memory culture. For now, the younger generations are caught in the middle.

While waiting at the bus stop to head back from Buchenwald, I found myself unexpectedly sandwiched in the middle of a high school tour group as they posed for a class photo. After we all boarded the bus, about half of them sat quietly —  maybe contemplating the horrors they’d just seen, maybe dozing off. But as we drove down the hill toward Weimar, the bus also filled with the sound of laughter.

The future of memory culture, ultimately, will be up to them.

Jake Wasserman is an audience engagement editor at The Guardian. He was the engagement editor at the Forward from June 2021 to September 2025.

- jacobhwasserman.bsky.social

This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/culture/779542/germany-memory-culture-afd-holocaust-democracy/ at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

CULTURE | OCT 30, 2025, 9:30 AM EDT | UPDATED OCT 30, 2025, 4:06 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How a curator and a rabbi joined forces to keep a piece of Boston’s Jewish history alive

Noah Hirsch-Rechter

When Chelsea’s Orange Street Synagogue shuttered in 1999, the fate of its elegant Torah ark hung in the balance

The top of Sam Katz’s wooden Torah ark, featuring a pair of golden lions and a Torah crown Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The most striking artifact in the Judaica collection at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts isn’t from Yemen or Galicia, or any other far-flung Jewish community that’s long since dispersed; it’s from Chelsea, Massachusetts.

The magnificent wooden Torah ark is just shy of 12 feet tall, and until 1999 it was the centerpiece of the Orange Street Synagogue, in Chelsea, a suburb that once teemed with so much Jewish life it earned the nickname ‘Little Jerusalem.’

But with American synagogues now closing at a record pace, the arks and facades and stained glass windows that testified to American Jewry’s dynamism face an unsettled future.

Indeed, to make the short hop from Chelsea to northeast Boston, the MFA’s ark took a rather scenic — even biblical — route. There’s a last-gasp reprieve as destruction looms; an extended stint in a wilderness of sorts (Texas); and a healthy sprinkling of rabbinic wisdom.

All the same, it illuminates an often forgotten chapter in Boston’s Jewish story.

A thriving Jewish enclave

Around the turn of the 20th century, tens of thousands of mostly eastern European Jewish immigrants arrived in Chelsea, transforming a provincial Protestant outpost into a chiefly working-class center of Jewish cultural, religious and economic life. By 1920, it had between 15 and 20 synagogues; a Hebrew School that graduated over 400 people a year; and dozens of clubs and organizations that held their meetings in Yiddish.

One of its more well-known inhabitants was Sam Katz, a Galician immigrant who was, for a time, Massachusetts’ pre-eminent woodcarver. Katz was born in 1884 in Veshnevets, modern Ukraine, and emigrated to the US in 1910. He lived briefly in New York before settling in Greater Boston, where, even though he lacked formal training, he built an estimated 24 synagogue arks during the 1920s and 30s. “These immigrant wood carvers, in general, learned from their father and their grandfather,” said Simona Di Nepi, curator of the MFA’s Judaica collection.

Still, Katz found his own style. “When I see vine leaves and grates and these kinds of lions,” Di Nepi told me, pointing to a pair of gilded lions affixed to either side of the MFA’s ark, “I know that it’s Sam Katz.” Perched on top of the ark is a bald eagle, jostling for position with a Torah crown. Taken together, said Di Nepi, the sculptures are a kind of shorthand for the burgeoning Jewish-American culture Chelsea represented. Indeed, this is one of the gallery’s abiding themes: the various ways artists have combined age-old Jewish iconography with time- and place-specific motifs.

Sam Katz (right), ark-itect Courtesy of The Wyner Family, Jewish Heritage Center at American Ancestors, Boston, Massachusetts

The ark needs a hero

By 1950, Jewish Chelsea had entered a terminal decline. Many of its inhabitants had moved to tonier Boston suburbs like Brookline or Newton, propelled by improving socio-economic mobility, though the construction of the Tobin Bridge between 1947 and 1950 also pushed out some 250 families and effectively split the Jewish community in two. In early 1999, the Orange Street Katz Torah ark closed for a final time, its fate uncertain.

That’s when rabbi David Whiman, a congregational rabbi in nearby Newton, and an avid Judaica collector, stepped in.

Whiman salvaged the ark alongside a small crew of friends. A small screen in the gallery plays grainy footage of Whiman in an oversized white T-shirt, smiling broadly. Though the Orange Street shul pews are empty, and the work laborious, Whiman and his group appear noticeably upbeat. The opportunity to preserve such an invaluable link to Chelsea’s Jewish past is, clearly, a happy one. (Whiman, rabbi emeritus at North Shore Synagogue, did not respond to an inquiry.)

Whiman kept the ark with him as his rabbinical career took him first to Houston, where he stayed for the better part of decade, and, later, to Syosset, Long Island. And then, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he emailed Di Nepi. He had heard the MFA was establishing a permanent Judaica collection. “He initially said, ‘I’m a collector, and you can have anything you want,’” Di Nepi recalled. In 2022, she went to Syosset, and was immediately taken with the ark. “There were other things that I might have been interested in,” she said, “but this was so much a Boston story — a local story.”

The ark bore the scars of nearly 20 years in storage. “All the attached pieces were in a box,” Di Nepi said. “And the wood had marks all over it.” Over six months, the MFA’s Conservation department, led by Christine Storti, restored the ark’s original flourishes: On top, an eagle and a torah crown; just below, two golden lions and three Magen Davids; and, in the middle, two gilded hands of Kohanim clasped together in prayer. Di Nepi then placed the renovated ark on a bimah-esque plinth, where it remains today, resplendent in the dim gallery light.

For every rescued Torah ark, however, are dozens that couldn’t overcome the demographic and cultural changes that have reshaped American Judaism during the past half-century. “There used to be a high demand for Torah arks,” Di Nepi said. “But now, we have the inverse situation, where there is mass demand for finding homes for arks that are closing.”

The Sam Katz ark is therefore a monument to a community that’s largely slipped from view. Yet there’s one fragment of Jewish Chelsea that’s proved remarkably durable. The glass light bulb Katz hung from the ark more than a century ago still works, Di Nepi told me, though she and Storti opted against displaying it, given its obvious fragility, and commissioned a replica. I am nevertheless consoled by the thought that somewhere in the Museum of Fine Arts’ storage there’s a tiny piece of Jewish Chelsea, waiting to shine again.

Noah is a Forward intern who recently completed a master’s in journalism at City St George’s, University of London and previously worked as an Education Associate at Harvard Hillel, where he organized educational trips; taught seminars to undergraduates on a range of Jewish subjects; oversaw Hillel’s social media; and ran its social justice and equity programming.

This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/culture/779536/curator-rabbi-rescue-judaica-museum-torah-ark/ at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

FILM & TV | OCT 28, 2025, 12:23 PM EDT | UPDATED OCT 28, 2025, 2:34 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

In HBO’s new Stephen King series, the Holocaust is fuel for jump scares

Olivia Haynie

A prequel to the movie ‘It,’ the series ‘It: Welcome to Derry’ uses tales of the Shoah to haunt its Jewish character

Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise in the series It: Welcome to Derry. Photo by Brooke Palmer/HBO

This article contains spoilers for the first episode of the HBO Max series It: Welcome to Derry.

In the first episode of It: Welcome to Derry, it’s immediately clear that the local high school has a bullying problem. Kids stuff pickle jars in the locker of a girl whose father died in a pickle jarring accident. The Bert the Turtle mascot (it’s set in 1962 after all) is knocked around. But among the bullies stands Theodore “Teddy” Uris, a kinder, more compassionate teenage boy. It may come as no surprise that he’s Jewish.

A prequel to the 2017 movie of It, based on Stephen King’s novel, the series starts with the disappearance of the friendless and abused Matty Clements. Teddy immediately feels guilty, wondering if he could’ve prevented Matty from running away by being nice to him. Teddy’s friend Phil, who is much more interested in spying on female neighbors as they undress, doesn’t understand why Teddy cares.

Jewish men are often painted as less masculine and more sensitive than their non-Jewish counterparts. This is sometimes done derisively, although in Derry, it makes Teddy one of the most likeable characters.

What feels more shocking is the way the show incorporates the Holocaust to torment him, although King’s work has mined the Holocaust for horror fodder in the past, such as in the novel Apt Pupil. The series was developed by Andy and Barbara Muschietti, the brother-sister director-producer team behind It and It Chapter 2, and Jason Fuchs, co-writer of Wonder Woman.

Shabbat dinner at the Uris household starts off normally, with the Hebrew prayers for wine and challah (incorrectly identified as “Yiddish” in the subtitles). Teddy, who is haunted by the idea that Matty is still alive, asks his dad, Rabbi Uris, if it’s possible for someone to be held underground for months. His father chides Teddy for what he thinks is his son’s wild imagination. Rabbi Uris reminds Teddy that his grandparents survived Buchenwald, where Jewish skin was allegedly turned into lampshades.

“We are Jews, Theodore,” he says. “We know better than anyone the real horrors of this world. Reality is terrifying enough as it is. Cut it out with the fantasy.”

That night, as Teddy reads a Batman comic, his lamp begins to turn off on its own. The third time he turns it back on, he is greeted with a lampshade sewn out of groaning faces.

Although the episode is packed with creepy moments — some are so overdone as to verge on parody — this scene feels the most disturbing. You may or may not believe in the two-headed devil baby that flies at us in the beginning of the episode, but the horrors of the Holocaust are very real. Behind the otherworldly spectre of the lampshade is true torture and abuse.

It feels almost exploitative to use the Holocaust for shock value. For many years, claims that Nazis turned the skin of Jewish prisoners into objects were seen as too controversial to discuss. Some feared that the claims were so outlandish, it would give credence to Holocaust deniers. Although it’s not clear if this was a common Nazi practice, at least one lampshade recovered from Buchenwald was confirmed to have been sourced from human skin. Should one really be using the skinned faces of Holocaust victims for a jump scare?

There’s something to be said for how Pennywise, Derry’s resident demon clown, mines the psychology of his victims to terrorize them, and surely the rabbi’s comments about the Shoah affect Teddy’s young mind. But one can point to epigenetic Jewish trauma in other ways.

In It, the Jewish character Stanley Uris (Teddy’s nephew) is haunted in his synagogue by what looks like a surrealist Amedo Modigliani figure. It’s a Jewish haunting in setting and source (Modigliani was Sephardic), but it didn’t play on specific Jewish trauma the way the lampshade does.

Maybe the whole point of Derry is to take things up a notch from its predecessor. It certainly doesn’t pull any punches in the final scene of the episode: Multiple children are brutally murdered on screen, something most shows tend to avoid depicting in detail. The first — and most graphic — kill is Teddy.

Olivia Haynie is an editorial fellow at the Forward.

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This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/culture/film-tv/779152/it-welcome-to-derry-teddy-uris-lampshade-buchenwald-stephen-king/ at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

CULTURE | OCT 28, 2025, 12:14 PM EDT | UPDATED OCT 28, 2025, 4:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Was the ‘Yiddish Sherlock Holmes’ the first Jewish superhero?

PJ Grisar

Detective Max Spitzkopf, now in English translation, gave Jews of the 20th century an avenger of their own

Spitzkopf tussles with an assailant on a bridge. Courtesy of White Goat Press

In 1908, around 30 years before Batman was first billed as the World’s Greatest Detective, and 15 after Sherlock Holmes solved his final case, another sleuth made his bombastic debut, rescuing a rabbi’s kidnapped granddaughter.

This hero distinguished himself in a major way. As the back blurb of his adventures insisted, “Max Spitzkopf IS A JEW — and he has always taken every opportunity to stand up FOR JEWS.”

The adventures of Spitzkopf, the nattily-dressed, pistol-brandishing Viennese gentleman, renowned throughout Austria-Hungary for his gumshoeing, were published in 32-page pulp pamphlets across the Yiddish-reading world. In his memoir, Isaac Bashevis Singer, vividly recalled devouring these stories as a child, and he was far from alone. Yet for all their popularity, copies of the original volumes, like Batman’s first appearance in Detective Comics #27, are exceedingly rare.

In 2017, Mikhl Yashinsky was a fellow at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, when it received the first five stories in a bound volume from a donor. They were in rough shape, their cheap paper crumbling. Yashinsky set out to translate them.

“He was really a kind of Jewish superhero,” said Yashinsky, whose full translation of the 15 Spitzkopf stories, written by Jonas Kreppel, is out now. (He received the other 10 from the Yale Judaica Library, one of the only institutions in the world to have the complete collection.)

The cases Spitzkopf and his capable Watsonian assistant, Fuchs, take on reflect the early 20th-century conditions of Jews in Galicia.

Spitzkopf uncovers a blood libel plot — and thwarts a Passover pogrom. He frees a young Jewish woman from sexual slavery in Constantinople. While Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, which were translated to Yiddish, certainly had a literary edge on these mysteries, Spitzkopf was an avenger for his people. And whereas these Jewish cause célèbres rarely had a happy outcome, Kreppel, the author, always served up poetic justice. The writer was so sensitive to his readers, no doubt affected by the prejudice and violence he ripped from the headlines, he didn’t leave them in suspense, revealing the villains’ machinations early on.

While Spitzkopf is described in the translation’s subtitle as the Yiddish Sherlock Holmes, Yashinsky said the stories themselves are scanty when it comes to the character’s Yiddishkeit. The text itself calls him the “Viennese Sherlock,” and he appears to be a well-assimilated Austrian citizen, written in a distinctly German-inflected Yiddish. He is just the kind of person his creator aspired to be.

Kreppel, born into a Hasidic family in Drohobycz, Galicia, was a prolific writer on many subjects in four languages (Yiddish, German, Hebrew and Polish). He edited Jüdische Korrespondenz, a newspaper of German-Jewish concerns, wrote a still-used reference text on German Jewry, Juden und Judentum von heute (Jews and Judaism of Today) and countless political tracts. (He also published one-off, sensationalist adventure stories with titles like My Son-in-Law the Murderer.)

Initially poised for a rabbinical career, Kreppel settled in Vienna and eventually served the Austrian government as a press officer and advisor to the foreign consulate. Ever the patriot, and a defender of his fellow Jews, he was an early critic and victim of Nazism. The Nazis sent him to Dachau in 1938 and murdered him in Buchenwald on July 21, 1940.

Yashinsky translates the Spitzkopf stories with a flair reminiscent of gangster flicks. He also cites inspiration from his maternal grandparents, voice actors Elizabeth and Rubin Weiss, who performed a variety of roles on radio serials like The Lone Ranger and Challenge of the Yukon.

“They played those villains and damsels in distress,” said Yashinsky, himself an actor, who recorded a brief selection of the Spitzkopf stories for the current exhibition at the Yiddish Book Center.

The crooks Spitzkopf tracks down speak of “cheesing it” when they wish to make themselves scarce. Antisemitic Poles speak in heavy dialects of the loathed Żydzi they plan to blame for the death of a child before Passover.

The Yiddish literati of the early 20th century looked askance at Kreppel’s stories, deriding them as “shund,” originally a term for waste left after butchering animals. Yashinsky read that Yoel Teitelbaum, founder of the Satmar Hasidim, was scandalized that his words were “distributed far and wide as though they were Holy Writ.” Yashinsky believes they have value.

“To me, it’s important to take seriously the popular culture of the day,” Yashinsky said. “They’re stories of heroism and of sticking up for the persecuted and defending them. So I think that’s relevant in any time, and especially in ours.”

Perhaps it’s wish fulfillment, like the claims on every booklet that Max Spitzkopf was a man who “LIVES AND BREATHES.”

He didn’t do either, but those who read of his exploits likely felt better believing the lie.

PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.

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This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/culture/779128/max-spitzkopf-detective-yiddish-sherlock-holmes-mikhl-yashinsky-jonas-kreppel/ at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

Table of Contents

The Forward: 2025 Oct 30

News

Overwhelmed by the NYC mayor’s race between Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo? A guide for the perplexed

Jews alone can’t help Cuomo pull off an upset – but they may be fueling his momentum

Why rabbis across America are taking sides in New York’s mayoral race

American synagogues are closing at a record rate. This retired judge is rescuing their stained glass windows.

Mamdani opposes Zionism, but wants New York public schools to teach about it

It’s so cool that Sandy Koufax was there for that

Opinions

A sign in my neighborhood says ‘The Holocaust is fake’ — I wish I felt surprised

The rabbinic backlash against Zohran Mamdani isn’t about Mamdani at all

In the Mamdani-Cuomo race, why should I choose safety as a Jew over safety as a woman?

Culture

How Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture kicked off a democratic crisis

How a curator and a rabbi joined forces to keep a piece of Boston’s Jewish history alive

In HBO’s new Stephen King series, the Holocaust is fuel for jump scares

Was the ‘Yiddish Sherlock Holmes’ the first Jewish superhero?