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- Hochul makes play for Orthodox voters with tuition relief and synagogue buffer zones

- Middlebury College Hillel votes to rebrand, distancing from parent group on Israel

- Remembering Abe Foxman, the longtime ADL leader known as the ‘Jewish pope,’ who always answered my calls

NEWS | MAY 11, 2026, 5:03 PM EDT | UPDATED MAY 11, 2026, 6:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Hochul makes play for Orthodox voters with tuition relief and synagogue buffer zones

Jacob Kornbluh

The incumbent Democrat is moving to lock down a key block and ahead of Jewish showdown with Republican rival Bruce Blakeman

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on April 24. Photo by Kena Betancur/Getty Images

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is making an early play for Jewish voters ahead in her reelection bid, coupling a major initiative to help families pay for yeshivas with tough-on-antisemitism legislation.

The moves aid Orthodox Jewish voting blocs — before her Republican challenger, Bruce Blakeman, gains traction.

A recent Siena University poll of 804 voters found Hochul leading Blakeman statewide by 16 points, 49% to 33%. But among the smaller sample of 65 Jewish voters, the race was far tighter, with Hochul leading just 46% to 41%.

Central to Hochul’s outreach was her announcement last week, during a private meeting with Orthodox leaders, that New York will opt into President Donald Trump’s new federal school-choice tax credit program. Known as the Education Freedom Tax Credit, it allows taxpayers to receive up to a $1,700 federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, which can then fund tuition assistance and other educational expenses.

A spokesperson for the governor confirmed that Hochul is supportive of the program as part of a broader commitment to helping families afford nonpublic education. Emma Wallner, the spokesperson, added that the administration is reviewing the federal program to ensure there are no “poison pills that could harm New York’s education system.”

For Orthodox voters, tuition relief has long ranked alongside Israel and antisemitism as a political priority. In 2014, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo made a last-minute effort to court the community by pledging to expand a state tuition assistance program to cover yeshivas as “a matter of justice.” Cuomo ultimately won 70% of the vote in Borough Park, one of the largest Orthodox strongholds. That proposal later failed in the state legislature.

Hochul and her allies remain mindful of the results of the 2022 governor’s race, when former Rep. Lee Zeldin came within five percentage points of defeating her. Zeldin, who is Jewish, was powered by strong Orthodox support.

That memory looms large as Hochul prepares for a likely matchup against Bruce Blakeman, the first Jewish executive of Nassau County, who has positioned himself as a tough-on-crime conservative focused on antisemitism and support for Israel.

Blakeman supported the federal program when it was first announced earlier this year. In January, Blakeman criticized Hochul for not joining the tuition-relief initiative.

The Republican candidate has so far struggled to gain broader traction statewide and has yet to build deep relationships within the Orthodox political infrastructure in Brooklyn and Rockland County. Orthodox voting blocs, a traditionally Republican-leaning constituency, have repeatedly backed incumbents and even Democrats when communal priorities align.

Addressing rising antisemitism

Gov. Kathy visits a local Judaica and bookstore in Borough Park, Eichler’s, on June 19, 2022. Photo by Jacob Kornbluh

Blakeman, who met with Trump at the White House last week to discuss his candidacy, could further face a challenge presenting himself as a stronger protector of the estimated 1.8 million Jews across the state amid rising antisemitism.

Hochul, who endorsed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani last year after remaining neutral during the Democratic primary, has been seen by some in the Jewish community as a counterweight within the Democratic Party to the mayor, whose handling of antisemitism and criticism of Israel has left many Jewish voters uneasy.

The Democratic incumbent has publicly opposed several key Mamdani priorities, like universal free buses and a millionaire tax, and has also distanced herself from Mamdani on Israel and pro-Palestinian protests on campus.

Hochul is moving fast on that front, too.

Last week, she announced a tentative budget deal that includes a measure to create a 25-foot buffer zone to protect houses of worship statewide from protest. “We’ve seen demonstrations targeting faith communities outside synagogues, mosques and churches,” Hochul told reporters. This is not free expression, this is harassment, and it has no place in the state of New York.” The measure would go further than a more limited enactment passed by the New York City Council requiring safety plans for protests near houses of worship, which Mamdani allowed to become law without his signature.

Hochul has also proposed an additional $35 million in security funding for vulnerable institutions, bringing total state spending on such protection to $131 million since she took office.

The legislation remains unresolved in Albany. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie told reporters Thursday there was “no deal” yet on the broader state budget package. Some Jewish lawmakers have also criticized the proposed 25-foot buffer zone as too narrow, arguing it should be expanded to at least 100 feet, similar to protections already in place around polling sites.

Blakeman told the Forward last week that he would push to expand the buffer zone if elected governor. “I think 25 feet is too close,” he said.

David Greenfield, a former New York City Council member who introduced Hochul to Orthodox leaders when she became the lieutenant governor candidate in 2014 and boosted her in 2022, said that Hochul is “cementing her status as the best friend the Jewish community has had in Albany in decades” by pushing this agenda. “At a moment when Jewish New Yorkers are looking for leaders who will actually show up for them, Hochul keeps showing up,” said Greenfield, now head of the Met Council charity organization.

Blakeman’s play

Bruce Blakeman, Republican candidate for New York governor, on May 04. Photo by Jacob Kornbluh

Blakeman has also made fighting antisemitism a central theme of his campaign. On Sunday, Blakeman addressed a rally held by Zionist groups in Queens, after swastikas were found spray-painted on synagogues and homes in Forest Hills and Rego Park. “We have to make sure that every antisemite knows that we will not back down, that we will stand up to it,” he said in his remarks. Speaking to the New York Post, Blakeman also called Mamdani “un-American” and “antisemitic.”

Last week, Blakeman held a press conference in Brighton Beach, a Brooklyn neighborhood with a significant Russian-speaking Jewish population, calling for the cancellation of a planned concert by Yulduz Usmonova, an Uzbek singer accused of making antisemitic statements. “Never again will we tolerate antisemitism or attacks on the Jewish people anywhere in the world, and especially here in Brooklyn, with this huge Jewish community of which my wife Segal was a member of,” Blakeman said.

Blakeman said in a statement to the Forward on Monday he wanted to ensure “every Jewish New Yorker knows Kathy Hochul failed to protect our state from a historic surge in antisemitic hate crimes while I made Nassau a safe haven by increasing police patrols near synagogues, creating buffer zones to stop protests near houses of worship, and banning masks for the cowards who use them to intimidate Jewish families.”

The battle for the Jewish vote traditionally unfolds later in the season, closer to the High Holidays season, when voters pay more attention to the election. But Hochu’s recent moves signal she is not waiting until the fall to lock up support from a swing and reliable voting bloc.

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/824353/kathy-hochul-orthodox-jewish-school-choice/ at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

NEWS | MAY 11, 2026, 4:44 PM EDT | UPDATED MAY 11, 2026, 8:32 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Middlebury College Hillel votes to rebrand, distancing from parent group on Israel

Louis Keene

Hillel International said it is reviewing its affiliation with the Vermont liberal arts college in response

A campus building at Middlebury College. Student leaders at the Vermont school’s Hillel voted to rename the Jewish student organization last week. Photo by PenelopeIsMe via Wikicommons

This story has been updated to include comment from a spokesperson for Hillel International.

The student leaders of the campus Hillel at a small liberal arts school in Vermont have voted to rename the student group, moving to distance it from an international organization they say is too pro-Israel.

Middlebury College’s Hillel student board made the decision last week after a yearlong consultation process with active participants in the campus organization, university administrators and Hillel International leadership, according to the student group’s co-presidents. The board also voted to disaffiliate from Hillel International, but were told by Middlebury’s administration that they lacked the authority to take that action, the co-presidents told the Middlebury campus newspaper.

The student group, renamed to Jewish Association of Middlebury, will continue to perform similar functions as Hillels do on hundreds of campuses around the world — holding events around Shabbat and Jewish holidays and other Jewish religious and social programming. The board says it will maintain an on-paper link with Hillel without adhering to its guidelines.

“While Middlebury College will continue to be affiliated with Hillel International, we believe this name better reflects our local community,” the board wrote last week in an email to students, according to The Middlebury Campus, the college’s student newspaper. “This decision was made to reflect the desires of our diverse student body, and it doesn’t endorse any one political persuasion.”

Hillel International, which does not employ a rabbi or any professional staff at Middlebury, said in a statement that it was currently reviewing Hillel’s affiliation status with the college to confirm it will ensure that JAM “adheres to our mission and standards.”

“Hillel is committed to supporting all Jewish students — from all types of backgrounds and with a diversity of views and beliefs on a range of issues including Israel,” the statement in part read. “At the same time, we are a proudly Zionist organization, and do not provide a platform for programming that denies Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state within secure borders.

“All campus Hillels — even those that are just a student group without dedicated professional Hillel staff — are expected to operate in line with our mission, vision, values, and policies.”

The renaming at Middlebury comes amid a nationwide campaign against Hillel on college campuses, premised on the organization’s involvement in Israel, which includes sending students there to volunteer. Hillel buildings have occasionally been the protest of pro-Palestinian protests since Oct. 7, and anti-Zionist student groups have recently pushed to defund campus Hillels or disaffiliate them from the century-old Jewish organization.

The student senate of the New School in New York recently voted to defund its campus Hillel and call on the school to stop partnering with the organization — a vote the college administration rejected, saying that it did not have the authority to act. A group of Jewish students and faculty at New York University has also called to boycott Hillel.

But Middlebury College is believed to be the first school where the push to untether from the international movement came from leaders of the campus Hillel itself.

Hillel/JAM co-president Caroline Jaffe told the Campus that conversations around disaffiliating from Hillel dated back to Nov. 2023, when Middlebury Hillel sold challah to raise money for World Central Kitchen, a humanitarian aid group that was delivering food to Palestinians in Gaza.

“We got a stern email from Hillel International, saying, ‘Why are you guys raising money for Gaza?’” Jaffe told the Campus. “I think that was the first time I remember [thinking], oh wow, this really isn’t aligned with my Jewish values at all, to be like, ‘Why are you guys feeding these starving people?’”

In response to Hillel’s concerns, the student group edited the Instagram post about the event to say it was a fundraiser for WCK’s team in “Israel and” Gaza.

The Forward has reached out to Jaffe for comment.

After that incident, the student-led board of Middlebury Hillel began soliciting feedback about possible disaffiliation in online forums, in person and through anonymous forms. The response, Jaffe said, was broadly supportive of disaffiliation, leading the board to schedule a vote on the matter.

Rabbi Danielle Stillman, a campus chaplain at Middlebury and the Hillel’s advisor, told the Campus that the students had received support from college administrators, who helped them “think through the different perspectives of various stakeholders in the community who might be impacted by a name change.” (Stillman, who is not employed by Hillel International, did not respond to an inquiry.)

A week before the Nov. 2025 vote, however, the college administration informed Jaffe that the board did not have the power to rename the group or disaffiliate from Hillel. The board voted anyway, resulting in a 7-1 recommendation to disaffiliate.

“Let us be clear: this decision is not a rebuke of Zionism, Zionist students, or the importance of Israel to many in the Jewish community,” a Dec. 2025 email to JAM membership read. “Rather, it reflects a desire to create the most welcoming and pluralistic space possible.”

At the university’s behest, the students then met virtually with Hillel International, whose representative reiterated that the board members must universally adopt Hillel International’s political views and values about Israel, according to the Campus. But the representative also conceded that it couldn’t stop the students from changing the organization’s name.

“We said we want to disaffiliate, and they said you can’t. And we said, well, we’re going to change the name anyway. And they said, we can’t stop you,” Jaffe said.

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/824410/middlebury-college-hillel-votes-to-rebrand-distancing-from-parent-on-israel/ at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

NEWS | MAY 10, 2026, 4:23 PM EDT | UPDATED MAY 11, 2026, 7:54 AM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Remembering Abe Foxman, the longtime ADL leader known as the ‘Jewish pope,’ who always answered my calls

Jacob Kornbluh

Foxman, who died at 86, mixed blunt political analysis with personal warmth, Yiddish and weekly Shabbat greetings

Abe Foxman on May 8, 2014. Photo by Michael Kovac/WireImage/Getty Images

Friday before sundown, I realized that Abe Foxman had not sent me his weekly “Shabbat Shalom” message. For the past seven years, since we began texting regularly about Jewish and political issues, the message would arrive each Friday like clockwork — often accompanied by screenshots of Shabbat memes. My response never changed: “Good Shabbos, tzaddik,” using the Hebrew word for a righteous person that Foxman himself often used.

A few minutes after sundown, I texted him anyway: “Good Shabbos, tzaddik.” Then I turned off my phone. The message showed as “read” Saturday night. But there was no response.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one waiting for Foxman’s Shabbat greetings. The silence said everything. On Sunday, the Anti-Defamation League announced that its former longtime chief had died at age 86.

I first started texting with Foxman after he stepped down in 2015 as national director of the ADL, concluding a remarkable 50-year run with the organization, including nearly three decades at its helm. By then, he had become one of the most recognizable Jewish communal leaders in America. He was nicknamed the “Jewish Pope.” Former President Barack Obama, a frequent target of Foxman’s criticism over Israel policy, said upon Foxman’s retirement: “Abe is irreplaceable.”

For me, a rookie journalist covering national politics through a Jewish lens, Foxman became an invaluable source. He was in the room with presidents, prime ministers and world leaders during some of the Jewish community’s most consequential moments. Yet he was always available. He answered calls quickly. He texted back. He spoke candidly. He could be sharp, direct and deeply critical when he thought leaders were making mistakes. But he was also compassionate, warm and surprisingly personal.

Every conversation began the same way: asking about me. My kids. How I was holding up. Only then would we get to politics. The conversation would often veer from Yiddish to English and back again.

Our last conversation was on April 15, after a record 40 Senate Democrats voted to block $295 million for the transfer of bulldozers to Israel and 36 of them also supported a measure to block the sale of 1,000-pound bombs to the Jewish state. “A broch,” Foxman replied, using the Yiddish word for disaster. “A sad time for American politics.”

That worldview shaped much of his public commentary in recent years. In interviews with the Forward and other publications, Foxman weighed in on rising antisemitism, campus protests, Democratic divisions over Israel, President Donald Trump’s rhetoric, and the Biden-Netanyahu relationship.

Foxman could be combative and unapologetic. Critics on the left viewed him as too hawkish on Israel, while critics on the right sometimes accused him of being too willing to criticize the Israeli government or American conservatives. But nobody doubted his commitment to the Jewish people and to Israel.

Jacob Kornbluh and Abe Foxman at the 2023 White House Hanukkah party. Courtesy of Jacob Kornbluh

Foxman’s own life story

Born in Baranavichy in 1940, in what is now Belarus, Foxman survived the Holocaust as an infant after being hidden by his Polish Catholic nanny, who baptized him to hide his Jewish identity, while his parents were confined to a ghetto. After the war, he was reunited with his parents, first living in a displaced persons camp in Austria before immigrating to the United States.

Those early experiences shaped the course of his career and ultimately made him one of the most influential Jewish communal leaders of the modern era.

Foxman attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush. In 1965, after getting degrees from City College of New York and New York University School of Law, he joined the Anti-Defamation League as a legal assistant. Over the next five decades, Foxman rose through the ranks of the organization before being named its national director in 1987, a position he held until 2015.

Under his leadership, the ADL became one of the world’s most prominent voices combating antisemitism and hate.

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed Foxman to serve on the council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He was reappointed by Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. He was also vice chairman of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.

Foxman was often willing to challenge leaders he believed were wrong on Israel, including Democratic presidents he otherwise respected. He was sharply critical of Obama’s approach toward Israel early in his presidency and became one of the leading Jewish voices opposing the administration’s 2009 demand for a freeze on Israeli settlements.

In remarks at Foxman’s farewell dinner in 2015, Susan Rice, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and national security advisor under Obama, told the audience: “The thing I most value about Abe is his candor and integrity. He holds everyone to the same high standards, and I can always count on him to tell it to me straight, even when he knows I won’t necessarily like what he has to say.” In 2020, Foxman publicly advocated for Biden to choose Rice as his vice-presidential running mate.

“America and the Jewish people have lost a moral voice, a passionate advocate for the Jewish people and the state of Israel, and a remarkable leader,” Foxman’s successor, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a statement announcing Foxman’s death.

Foxman’s political commentary

Even after retiring from the ADL, Foxman remained a leading voice in Jewish public life, especially after the election of Trump in 2016.

Foxman told me in an interview at the time that the Jewish community should engage with Trump and hold him accountable when needed. He advised Trump to be cautious about making good on his promise to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He became more critical of Trump after the president said that there were “very fine people on both sides” in response to a 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In 2020, Foxman broke his tradition of not endorsing political candidates to back Biden. He argued that Trump was a “demagogue” whose reelection would be a “body blow for our country and our community.”

Once Biden took office, Foxman started to express doubts about the president’s handling of the U.S. relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He said it “sends the wrong message to our friends and enemies” that Israel is being held to a higher standard than other countries in the region. Foxman was also a harsh critic of the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul, warning that the right-wing cabinet ministers could hamper support for Israel among American Jews.

In 2024, he warned that Biden’s increasingly harsh rhetoric over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza would repel Jewish voters. “I believe that this administration, because of its political season, is taking American Jews for granted or has written us off,” said Foxman. ”If they’re worried that the Arabs in Michigan will vote with their feet, they need to worry that Jews can also vote with their feet.”

Most recently, Foxman was critical of national Democrats opposing the military operations against the Iranian regime in March for a lack of congressional authority. “Sadly, it is purely political games,” Foxman told me, noting that previous Democratic administrations conducted military operations without explicit congressional authorization. “Ninety-nine percent of Democrats are on record saying Iran is a terrorist state and cannot have nuclear weapons. So why this game?” he asked.

Now, as Jews mark Jewish American Heritage Month, that voice is silent. But for me, and for the many people still waiting for one more “Shabbat Shalom” message from Foxman, he will not soon be forgotten.

Foxman is survived by his wife Golda, his son Ariel, his daughter Michelle and four grandchildren.

JTA contributed to this article.

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/824152/abe-foxman-adl-antisemitism-israel-obit/ at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

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Culture

- At this interfaith calligraphy class, the lines between Jew and Muslim blur

CULTURE | MAY 10, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT | UPDATED MAY 11, 2026, 4:06 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

At this interfaith calligraphy class, the lines between Jew and Muslim blur

Simone Saidmehr

Sacred Scripts brings together young artists and community leaders to write in Hebrew and Arabic, who draw connections between the letters and themselves

Sacred Script fellows practicing their Hebrew and Arabic calligraphy Photo by Simone Saidmehr

“So…are you Middle Eastern?”

I had just walked into the American Sephardi Federation office in lower Manhattan, where 20 Muslim and Jewish young people gather twice a month to learn Arabic and Hebrew calligraphy together. I was clearly the newbie, and one of the participants was sussing me out.

“I am,” I replied.

“Fully?” he asked.

I gave my usual spiel, explaining my Iraqi and Iranian background.

“Sick,” he said. “I’m only half.”

It struck me then that neither of us had any idea whether the other was Muslim or Jewish.

As I broke bread with the group, we chatted over an odd but familiar spread of kosher pizza and Gojeh Sabz, golf-ball-sized and very tart plums – a common Middle Eastern fruit many of us grew up eating. Somehow, religion didn’t really come up.

Eventually, felt-tipped multicolored calligraphy pens were passed around, and we began learning to write Hebrew letters — letters I had been perfecting since I embarked on my Hebrew School journey as a fourth grader. I was terrible. My reyshes weren’t swooping as they should, my khafs were somehow uneven and my yuds looked suspiciously like daleds.

Across the table, a young man who had introduced himself to me minutes before as Mohamed from Saudi Arabia had effortlessly filled the page with elegant Hebrew letters. He noticed my frustration. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve done this like a million times. You’ll get it.”

Fellows practicing their Hebrew letters Photo by Simone Saidmehr

The person at the helm of this unusual form of interfaith exchange is Ruben Shimonov, a 38-year-old Sephardic polymath. I first discovered Ruben’s work when I saw an exhibit of his calligraphy blending Hebrew, Arabic and Farsi at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. I assumed he was a full-time artist, but soon learned that his main gig is serving as an educator, interfaith organizer, and mentor to dozens of Sephardic and Mizrahi college students. Now, he leads Sacred Scripts in NYC, a new six-month-long cohort-based interfaith calligraphy fellowship where Jewish and Muslim community leaders learn the intertwined history and etymology of Hebrew and Arabic.

A Bukharan Jew, Shimonov was born in Uzbekistan, a Muslim-majority country. For him, that background makes interfaith work feel like an extension of his upbringing.

“As a Jew from a community whose culture was shaped by Islamic cultures and histories, it is a natural expression of my Jewish identity to be in interfaith spaces,” he told me. “It’s not something I do because it’s cool or trendy or whatever. I just feel at home, because these are my people. This is my own background.”

From a young age, he was drawn to language, inspired in equal measure by the Hebrew letters he learned for his bar mitzvah and the Arabic script that adorned the mosques and architecture of his hometown.

Eventually, he taught himself calligraphy in three languages and came to see it as a powerful tool for the interfaith work he was already doing — organizing gatherings such as iftars in synagogues and seders in mosques through the Muslim Jewish Solidarity Committee. Over the past decade, Shimonov has led more than 100 interfaith calligraphy workshops around the world, highlighting the deep historical and linguistic connections between Hebrew and Arabic.

Ruben Shimonov and his exhibit at the Center for Jewish History, “Convergence” Courtesy of Ruben Shimonov

This year, Shimonov launched Sacred Scripts alongside his longtime partners at the Muslim American Leadership Alliance (MALA), drawing fellows from networks he and MALA have built over the years. The program brings together young artists and community leaders — many with Middle Eastern backgrounds — who they feel stand to benefit from sustained engagement. Over the course of six months, fellows study calligraphy and the histories of the languages, while connecting over shared meals and cultural outings. This month, they are attending a concert focused on Jewish and Muslim music from the Maghreb.

After Oct. 7, Shimonov said, he witnessed fractures between many Jewish and Muslim organizations that had been working together on interfaith initiatives. “That sense of betrayal and hurt was very real,” he said. “But if the only times you meet are when things are bad, what do you expect? I think the secret sauce to all this stuff is you’ve got to be in it for the long haul.”

The Sephardic connection

During each session, we practice writing while Shimonov lectures on the connections between the two languages. Shimonov gives each language its due, devoting several sessions to studying each before bringing them together.

Eventually, we learn the same words in Hebrew and Arabic — beit and bayt for home, Shabbat and al-sabt for Saturday — the list goes on. Before tackling day one of learning the Arabic alphabet, we practiced writing the phrase Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim, which appears at the beginning of every surah in the Quran, into Hebrew. Translated word-for-word, it sounds remarkably similar.

For Shimonov, that overlap is the point. He believes strongly that Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews occupy a unique place in interfaith work because of the seemingly endless cultural similarities they share with Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa.

That sensibility is reflected in the space itself. The fellowship is hosted at the American Sephardi Federation, a Jewish institution that looks more like a place to sip chai and do a close reading of Rumi’s greatest hits. The floors are covered with embroidered rugs, the walls are lined with ouds, a pear-shaped Middle Eastern instrument, and endless shelves are packed with rare books in Hebrew, Arabic and Farsi.

Ruben Shimonov’s calligraphy blending the Hebrew and Arabic words for pomegranate, רִמּוֹן‬ (rimmon) and رُمَّان (rummān) Courtesy of Ruben Shimonov

Because of these connections, the days focused on Arabic study are more Jew-y than one might expect. Shimonov takes care to highlight Jewish history in the Middle East, explaining how Iraq — not Europe — was the world’s foremost hub of Jewish life for centuries, where many Jews only spoke Arabic because Hebrew wasn’t widely taught, and presenting pivotal Jewish texts written in Judeo-Arabic.

In Shimonov’s Sephardic approach, the aim is less to “build bridges” — a phrase that has become a catch-all interfaith mantra — than to reveal how much was never separate to begin with.

Ali Saracoglu, a Muslim participant in the fellowship and an artist from Izmir, Turkey, said Sacred Scripts reshaped his understanding of Jewish identity.

When he moved to the United States, his primary exposure had been to Ashkenazi Jewish communities. “When you open the conversation to Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, you encounter people from Uzbekistan to North Africa to descendants of communities from Spain,” he said. “You start to see a much more global form of Judaism.”

Saracoglu joked that within the group, it was often impossible to tell who was Jewish and who was Muslim unless it came up in conversation.

Nora Monasheri, a 23-year-old Iranian Jew, said that after Oct. 7, she had participated in countless interfaith dialogues at her alma mater, Binghamton University. “I felt like I’d been there, done that on campus,” she said, lamenting that such gatherers were “always very focused on Israel and Palestine, and it felt very forced.”

Ali Saracoglu and his marbling art featuring Ruben Shimonov’s calligraphy Courtesy of Ali Saracoglu

For her, creating calligraphy rather than debating peace agreements from the ’90s is a welcome change.

“I found that some of our most important words in Hebrew are the same in Arabic — faith, charity, blood — So instead of debating each other, we’re discovering this shared history, tradition, and spirituality together.”

For Saracoglu, the program’s artistic aspect is particularly powerful. He first met Shimonov at a one-off interfaith calligraphy workshop two years ago, an experience that stayed with him as an artist. He has been creating ebru, the traditional Turkish art of marbling, since the age of five, and now practices it in his New York City apartment. In a recent series he calls “One Word: Peace,” he layers his marbled designs with calligraphy by both Jewish and Muslim artists — often including Shimonov himself.

During one session, Shimonov read aloud from a Judeo-Arabic translation of the Torah, explaining that many Jews in the Arab world historically translated religious texts into Arabic because many did not understand Hebrew. The word for God was therefore transcribed as the Arabic word, Allah.

I chimed in that my own Jewish parents say “Inshallah” all the time when they simply mean “God willing.” My non-Sephardic friends always found this bizarre, but among this crowd, it barely required explanation.

As he read from the Torah, one Muslim fellow suddenly interrupted.

“It sounds like the Quran!”

Simone Saidmehr is an editorial fellow at the Forward. She previously served as a research assistant at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where she worked on the Koret Project on Arab-Israel Relations. Originally from New York City, she is a graduate of the dual bachelor’s program between Columbia University and Tel Aviv University, where she studied Middle Eastern studies and political science.

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This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/culture/823984/interfaith-calligraphy-muslim-jewish/ at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

Table of Contents

The Forward: 2026 May 11

News

Hochul makes play for Orthodox voters with tuition relief and synagogue buffer zones

Middlebury College Hillel votes to rebrand, distancing from parent group on Israel

Remembering Abe Foxman, the longtime ADL leader known as the ‘Jewish pope,’ who always answered my calls

Culture

At this interfaith calligraphy class, the lines between Jew and Muslim blur