As the New York City mayoral race nears its end, Manhattan Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch has a message for his colleagues: It’s not too late to provide “leadership and clarity of perspective” to voters to oppose Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, citing the candidate’s hostility towards Israel and refusal to recognize it as a Jewish state.

Hirsch, a prominent and notable moderate pro-Israel voice within the progressive-minded Reform movement isn’t surprised by polling showing Mamdani leading his opponents, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent, and Republican Curtis Sliwa, among unaffiliated and Reform Jews, who skew overwhelmingly liberal.

But Hirsch, the senior rabbi of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, expressed frustration with the lack of organized effort among Jewish leaders to oppose Mamdani, whose affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and antagonistic views on Israel — including his refusal to condemn the term “globalize the intifada” — have generated private and public criticism. 

In an interview with Jewish Insider on Wednesday, Hirsch, who has led the Upper West Side congregation for the past 20 years, said there is still time for left-wing Jewish leaders to find their voice. Even without initiatives and statements from the Reform movement, progressive Jewish leaders can still “make a difference” by “laying out the stakes” — even as early voting begins this Saturday. 

Hirsch recently released an online video message, addressing Mamdani directly. “I do not speak for all Jews, but I do represent the views of the large majority of the New York Jewish community, which is increasingly concerned with your statements about Israel and the Jewish people,” the rabbi said. “Your opposition to Israel is not centered on policies, you reject the very existence of Israel as a Jewish state … I urge you to reconsider your long-held rejection of Israel’s right to exist. Be a uniter and a peacemaker.”

Following Hirsch’s video, other Jewish leaders began to follow his lead. Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of the Conservative Park Avenue Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side said in an address to his congregation last Saturday, “Mamdani’s distinction between accepting Jews and denying a Jewish state is not merely a rhetorical sleight of hand or political naïveté — though it is to be clear both of those — his doing so is to traffic in the most dangerous of tropes.”

On Wednesday, more than 600 rabbis from around the country signed on to an open letter, “A Rabbinic Call to Action: Defending the Jewish Future,” spearheaded by The Jewish Majority.

“As rabbis from across the United States committed to the security and prosperity of the Jewish people, we are writing in our personal capacities to declare that we cannot remain silent in the face of rising anti-Zionism and its political normalization throughout our nation,” the letter states. 

“When public figures like New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani refuse to condemn violent slogans, deny Israel’s legitimacy, and accuse the Jewish state of genocide, they, in the words of Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, ‘Delegitimize the Jewish community and encourage and exacerbate hostility toward Judaism and Jews.’” 

Hirsch, who serves as president of the New York Board of Rabbis, sat down with JI to discuss the current moment, one that he called “an obligation — it’s the call of history — for Jewish leaders to stand up” ahead of the Nov. 4 election. 

Jewish Insider: You’ve been raising your voice against Mamdani, but with voting starting this weekend, do you think other Jewish leaders who have just started speaking out took too long? 

Ammiel Hirsch: The Jewish world has very serious self-reflection to do in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks. Everything has changed and the future will be different than what it was going to be pre-Oct. 7. The American Jewish community has substantial — in some respects unprecedented — challenges in the years to come.

The kind of antisemitism we are seeing now and likely to see in the future is different and more widespread than anything anyone alive has experienced. Our relationship with Israel has to be reassessed and reevaluated. How we teach our young people has to be reassessed and evaluated and the nature of the American Jewish community itself — we are seeing a deep polarization that should have taken everybody by surprise. During crunch time, when Israel was under real existential threat, we didn’t expect this kind of polarization around the idea of the existence of Israel. 

Everything needs to be reevaluated. I concluded over the last two years that certain things I was perhaps willing to overlook in favor of other values and interests need to be looked at more carefully now. I’m not prepared to overlook candidates for public office who express fundamental anti-Zionism. We need to draw the line on anti-Zionism because it disenfranchises and delegitimizes Judaism itself. It leads to an intensification of antisemitism. 

JI: Are you surprised there hasn’t been more of an organized effort among the Jewish community to challenge Mamdani since he won the primary in June? Has the Jewish world met the moment? 

AH: We’ve been slow to respond to widespread, pervasive, global anti-Zionism and we’ve been slow inside the Jewish community in countering Jewish voices who are anti-Zionist. We, the mainstream of the Jewish community, have an obligation to counter that ideology. If it’s not countered, it intensifies and exacerbates the problem and that relates to public candidates as well. It’s imperative for the American Jewish community to stand up and express the kinds of views that I expressed. I think more are doing so. It is a responsibility at this historic moment in time for Jewish leadership to do so. 

It would have been better had it been earlier, but it’s welcome — and imperative — at any time. It does make a difference and I urge everybody, especially those in Jewish leadership, to lay out the stakes. I say this as a Jewish leader, but I’m a New Yorker and U.S. citizen as well and care about the well-being of the city and country. It goes way beyond the well-being of the Jewish community. 

Judaism has a lot to say about poverty, economics, immigration, the death penalty — all of those issues are important as well. But specifically on the anti-Zionism issue, it goes to the very existence and future of the Jewish people. Anti-Zionism means dismantling the place where half of the world’s Jews live. That’s the intention of the anti-Zionist enemies of Israel and Zohran Mamdani is giving them ideological and communal support. It’s an obligation — it’s the call of history — for Jewish leaders to stand up at this moment of Jewish history. Our people need leadership and clarity of perspective from their leaders. They’re thirsting for Jewish leaders to clarify what is in the best interest of the Jewish people and what is in the best interest of our values. Not to do that is to fail at this inflection point of American and world Jewish history. I’m heartened that more American Jewish leaders are speaking up now, but not enough. 

JI: What do you ​​make of the recent IRS reversal allowing rabbis and other clergy members to make political endorsements from the pulpit? One of the most recent examples being by another prominent New York City rabbi, Elliot Cosgrove, who heads the Park Avenue Synagogue. He decried Mamdani in a speech to his congregation last Shabbat, saying he believes the front-runner “poses a danger to the security of the New York Jewish community.” 

AH: For me, I uphold the Johnson Amendment [a 1954 provision in the U.S. tax code that prohibits all 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates], no matter what the IRS decided to enforce. I do not endorse political parties or candidates. I speak about policies, which are directly relevant to our roles as rabbis and Jewish leaders. Policies reflect public morality. I’m not going to become partisan. It’s wrong on principle, because we receive tax relief status on the basis of our commitment to being nonpartisan. It weakens us because it unnecessarily splits the community and runs the risk of making synagogues into political centers. I try very carefully to speak about general policies and not endorse parties or candidates. That’s why my message was in the form that it was [speaking to Mamdani directly]. 

In my message, I was turning to the candidate himself. I didn’t tell people what my political preferences were or how they should vote. My message was that anti-Zionism endangers the Jewish community.

JI: Polls that look at Reform, Conservative and Orthodox voters have found Reform Jews are more supportive of Mamdani — why do you think that is? You’ve authored several essays, both before and after Oct. 7, about why the Reform movement is more inclined towards criticizing Israel than other branches of Judaism. Is that a driving factor here for support for Mamdani?

AH: The more liberal a person is the more likely they are to resonate and support liberal candidates, so it’s not surprising to me. The Reform movement started in North America as a religious movement that negated the centrality of Jewish peoplehood, so of course they were going to resonate more to universal values, not as an expression of Jewish peoplehood values, but the negation of it. Part of that still exists and the more years go by that Jews do not perceive an existential threat against the Jewish community, the more they return to that inclination towards universalism — that Jewish peoplehood is the problem. I’ve called that out for years now and I think that does play a role. It’s why I feel so strongly that I need to speak out.

I do not consider anti-Zionism to be a liberal position, it’s illiberal and I think many people are confused. Zionism is the liberation movement of the Jewish people, that’s a liberal philosophy. 

JI: Would you like to see the Union for Reform Judaism come out with an official statement against Mamdani?

AH: I don’t participate in the decisions of the URJ. As I said, I believe it’s important for every Jewish leader to speak up at this inflection point of American Jewish history, so I would welcome it from everybody across the board.

I’ve seen some very good statements from our Orthodox colleagues. We need to unite as much as possible. There is room for debate and disputation, it’s part of Judaism, but at this critical moment in Jewish history we should seek to lay aside for another day controversies that distract us from the main objective that we have, which is to counter antisemitism and a form of anti-Zionism that constitutes antisemitism.  

All of us need to unite on that because we’re a small minority and the task is monumental. If we don’t voice a common position, then what happens is we give an impression that the Jewish community is split on the very essence of the contemporary Jewish experience, which is the centrality of Jewish peoplehood and support of the Jewish state. We give the impression that the small minority of Jews, who are very noisy, constitute a much bigger component of Judaism than they really are. That’s another reason we need to counter this loudly. 

In our movement, which is the most liberal of affiliated American Jews, there are some anti-Zionist voices but the overwhelming majority of the Reform movement is pro-Israel and considers Israel to be a component of their own Jewish identity. 

JI: What are some ways in which you would encourage synagogues and Jewish institutions to engage with Mamdani if he is elected mayor?

AH: If he becomes mayor, he will have been elected fair and square. Then we’ll have to try our best to work with him where we can and oppose him when we must. 

Given that this anti-Zionist philosophy is mainstream, it is imperative for American Jewish leaders to stand up, push back. People will vote how they vote and whoever wins will reflect the will of the people and then we’ll have to work within those constraints. 

Growing up at a Reform temple in suburban Boston, Sarah Hurwitz learned that Judaism is just “four holidays, two texts and a few universalistic values.” 

When she left home, she largely eschewed all Jewish observance for two decades, she reflected in a recent interview with Jewish Insider. In that time, she got two degrees at Harvard and reached the pinnacle of Washington success, serving as a senior speechwriter, first to President Barack Obama and then to First Lady Michelle Obama. If she engaged with Judaism at all, it was with a light touch — she was merely a “cultural Jew,” as she usually called herself. 

“I just didn’t realize there was Jewish culture. I just meant, ‘Oh, I’m anxious and kind of funny,’” Hurwitz told JI last month. 

Approaching a midlife crisis, Hurwitz found her way to an intro to Judaism class at a Washington synagogue nearly a decade ago. She embarked on a journey of learning Jewish traditions and studying Jewish texts that sparked her first book, the 2019 Here All Along, a joyful and accessible primer to Judaism. 

“Its thesis was, ‘Isn’t Judaism amazing?’ Not a lot of Jews are going to disagree with that thesis,” Hurwitz said. 

She is doing something different with her new book, As A Jew: Reclaiming Our Story From Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us, which was published this week. 

“This is definitely a book with an argument. It is definitely edgier than my first book,” Hurwitz said. 

That’s because in As A Jew, Hurwitz is grappling with a question that struck at the core of who she is, or at least who she was until a decade ago. Why, she asks, was she always qualifying her Judaism? She was always a “cultural Jew,” an “ethnic Jew,” a “social justice Jew,” she writes. Hurwitz was never simply a Jew, one word, proud, head tall. 

In her new book, as she tackles the millennia of antisemitism that led her to unwittingly minimize her own identity, she is asking questions that others who similarly distort or diminish their Jewish identity may not want to face. 

“I was really trying to make others comfortable with me, right? I didn’t want them to think I was one of those really Jew-y Jews, which … why would that be bad, again?” Hurwitz said. “Why did social justice have to be my Judaism? Why couldn’t Judaism be my Judaism?”

This doesn’t mean Hurwitz is criticizing people who engage with Judaism through a social justice lens, or through culture, or any other avenue besides religious observance. Her own personal Jewish learning journey has not made her an Orthodox Jew. The argument she’s making is that Jews should engage with Judaism … well, Jewishly — by learning what Jewish texts have to say about social justice, rather than taking some universal values like “care for the vulnerable” and calling that your Judaism.

“Social justice is also a gorgeous way to be a Jew when you actually know what Judaism says about social justice,” said Hurwitz. “When I was this kind of contentless Jew, I don’t really know what I was doing. I was often just articulating my own views and opinions and kind of attributing them to Judaism.” 

She begins with a basic question: The Holocaust happened because the Nazis hated the Jews. But why did they hate the Jews? OK, the Jews were the scapegoat after World War I. But why the Jews? That unanswered question makes it hard for anyone to identify modern-day antisemitism, Hurwitz argues.

“These poor kids, it’s very confusing, because they’ve gotten Holocaust education, and they’re like, ‘That’s antisemitism education,’” said Hurwitz. “And then you get to campus and there are no Nazis, and you’re like, ‘What is this?’”

To answer that, she goes back thousands of years. The book examines Judaism in the context of the historical movements that have tried to crush it, or at least confine it: early Christianity, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Enlightenment, the Holocaust. Not each of these eras sought to eliminate Judaism, but each one presented a particular idea of the good kind of Jew. 

Throughout history, some Jews always tried to adapt to the mores of the day and disavow essential parts of Judaism in order to fit in. The only problem, writes Hurwitz, is it didn’t work. You can be Jewish, but not too Jewish. Like when modernity swept across Western Europe in the 19th century, and Jews could suddenly become citizens of France and Germany — so long as they placed their country’s identity above their Jewish identity.

“This book was very much my journey to stripping away all those layers of internalized antisemitism, anti-Judaism, all of that internalized shame from so many years of persecution, and just saying, ‘You know what, no, I’m a Jew,’” said Hurwitz.

Hurwitz pitched this book before the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks that sparked a wave of global antisemitism. But she says the events of the last two years have only furthered her argument that Jews throughout history have felt the need to separate from parts of their community to earn the approval of the rest of society.

“Oct. 7 did not change the overall argument at all. It unfortunately, in many ways, gave this devastating, heartbreaking, new evidence from the argument,” Hurwitz said. 

Hurwitz hopes to reach a broad audience. But she spent a decade and a half enmeshed in Democratic politics professionally, and she particularly hopes to can reach Jews on the left who have distanced themselves from Zionism partly as a condition of their belonging in progressive spaces. 

“I am hoping that I can speak particularly to Jews who maybe have identified as Democrats, who are a little bit more on the left, and I can tell them why I am a Zionist. I can tell them why I think it is so important that Israel exists,” Hurwitz said. “I can make that argument, and I’m hoping that it will be credible coming from me, in a way that maybe it wouldn’t from others.”

It was 2007 and the Boston Red Sox had just won the World Series in Denver. Back at his hotel, three-time Major League Baseball all-star and World Series champion Kevin Youkilis had a “big party.” 

“All of sudden, we started breaking out [dancing to] Hava Nagila. The pride of celebrating a joyous occasion brought me back to my childhood and the traditions we learned in synagogue,” Youkilis said in a webinar on Wednesday, reflecting on his “proudest” Jewish moment and calling himself “lucky” to have largely avoided antisemitism as an athlete.   

But since his retirement in 2014 — and particularly in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks in Israel — Jewish athletes have been thrown a curveball, facing exclusion and increased antisemitic sentiment both on and off the field. 

At the 2024 Paris Olympics, for example, fans displayed a banner reading “Genocide Olympics” alongside Palestinian flags. In February, the Israeli Under-19 baseball team was refused participation in a German tournament over fears of “troublemakers attacking Israelis” and “the political situation.”  

In response, the Anti-Defamation League and Maccabi USA launched a new web series dubbed “Game Changers,” with the goal of bringing together athletes and advocates “to explore how sports can inspire dialogue and challenge antisemitism.” 

“I was very lucky, I didn’t have many incidents [of antisemitism],” Youkilis, 46, said during the inaugural webinar, which was moderated by Alex Freeman, ADL’s director of sports engagement and also included remarks from Morgan Zeitz, a University of Michigan student and Maccabi USA athlete. 

“Guys would joke around, ripping and good fun, but there was never anything directed at me that I felt was antisemitic,” Youkilis, who primarily played for the Red Sox and had stints with the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox, continued. “People asked questions based on ignorance. Like everything in life, when you are a minority and all these things are happening and there’s a lot of rhetoric out there, you have two ways to go about it. You can get really reactive and angry, or you can educate. I think education is always the best tool.” 

“What we’re seeing is fascinating,” said Youkilis, who since MLB retirement served as hitting coach for Team Israel in 2023 and is currently on the board of directors of Israel Baseball Americas, a nonprofit that brings Israel Baseball to communities across North America and provides resources to Israel’s baseball team. “That spike after Oct. 7 is the most concerning for me. The tragedy occurred and now you see people [emboldened] to be more antisemitic online. The one key thing I’ve learned online is most of these people are anonymous, so you have to be very careful about picking your fights on social media.” 

Throughout his career, Youkilis’ focus “was always on, how do I get better every day? How can I help our team win?” he recalled. “The Jewish side of me was really through family, through my father, brothers and cousins. Judaism for me was more about the community aspect than the religious aspect while I was playing baseball. When we would go to New York, there was no doubt that I was going to Carnegie Deli.”

But his Judaism was top of mind one day each year — Yom Kippur. “Are you going to play on Yom Kippur? That became a big thing,” he said, recalling that while playing for the Red Sox, he attended High Holiday services in Brookline, a heavily Jewish suburb of Boston.  

“Growing up, my dad taught me the Jewish way of working hard,” said Youkilis. “Find your passion, go hard at it and love it. For me, that moment after winning a World Series was a very special moment.” 

American-Israeli venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg isn’t just watching Israel’s transformation — he’s trying to shape it. As cofounder of the prominent investment fund Aleph, early backer of companies including Lemonade and WeWork, and a longtime thought leader in the intersection of Judaism, economics and technology, Eisenberg has become an influential voice in Israel’s public discourse.

In a wide-ranging conversation on the Misgav Mideast Horizons podcast, co-hosted by Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov, Eisenberg discussed the impact of the war in Gaza on Israeli society and the tech sector, what the government must do to turn postwar recovery into long-term renewal and why he sees young Israelis as a “defining generation.” 

“It’s not just a defining generation for Israel, it’s a defining generation for the West,” Eisenberg said. “These were kids that everybody was worried about, that they were behind their screens, Instagram, TikTok, who put it all aside and got up to defend the values of Israel, the safety of Israel, the people of Israel and by extension, Western civilization, because Islamism is on the rise.”

Eisenberg also made the case for an ambitious AI-powered regional alliance between Israel and its Abraham Accords partners — and warned that Israel’s political dysfunction could squander the opportunity.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q: When you look at the Israeli tech ecosystem over the next five years, look at Israeli society in general over the next five years, what makes you optimistic and what makes you worried?

Michael Eisenberg: Part of what makes me optimistic is the youth of Israel. Two years into this war that nobody wanted, two years into a war that saw hundreds of thousands of people called up to reserves — [I have] sons, sons-in-law who have probably done more than 1,500 days of reserve duty in Gaza or mandatory service in Gaza. We currently have two kids in the army right now. 

These kids have proven to be what I called already in November 2023 the “defining generation.” It’s not just a defining generation for Israel, it’s a defining generation for the West. These were kids that everybody was worried about, that they were behind their screens, Instagram, TikTok, who put it all aside and got up to defend the values of Israel, the safety of Israel, the people of Israel and by extension, Western civilization, because Islamism is on the rise.

And Hamas is not even an extreme version of Islamism. It is one of the variants of this disease called Islamism, which is a mutant form of Islam promulgated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and these kids stood up, risked their lives, some of them lost their lives. I lost two cousins since Oct. 7.

The most important reason to be optimistic about Israel is the young people here who have shown incredible courage, conscientiousness, responsibility, fortitude and innovation in tackling this problem. I’m a high-tech investor in my day job. The amount of innovation that this war has brought out of Israelis, like magic stuff, the AI and space lasers, etc., but also just simple innovation. Just the amount of ingenuity that has come out is stunning, and people are paying attention to it. The U.S. Department of Defense just issued [a statement that] they want technologies that have been battle-tested. There’s nowhere where technologies have been more battle-tested than Israel, maybe Ukraine second, but certainly kind of the high-tech wizardry and missiles — it’s Israel. I think that sets us up now for a lot of positives. 

What worries me is a lack of political will. And I use one example of it. We need to borrow the money to fight the war, but at the same time, politicians need to rise out of the sectarianism and to make the hard political decisions to cut the budget in places which are not growth investments or investments in security. Period. Full stop. 

Q: What needs to change?

A: Israel is not necessarily on the best path. We went into the war with a debt-to-GDP ratio in the low 60s; we can finance our welfare state for the most part. However, to the best of my knowledge, there’s nobody in the Israeli government or the Ministry of Finance who sits down and says, “OK, these shekels are for investments in future growth; these shekels are just handouts or part of the welfare state.” The only way to get our debt-to-GDP ratio back to where it needs to be, post the war — and again, we should borrow money to prosecute this war and win it as fast as possible — is to grow. In order to grow, you need investments in infrastructure. The investments in infrastructure are more limited because we spend way too much on the spending part of the ledger, which is non-investment, whether it’s supporting ultra-Orthodox yeshivas or unproductive parts of society in general.

Western society has been taken over by progressive nonsense in which you fund the fringes, instead of focusing on the core of society. The core of Israeli society serves. We can’t afford [funding the fringes] and we need to make the cuts necessary to be able to focus on the core needs of society, which is defense. We need to revamp our education system completely from the ground up. We need to make sure that our health system is taken care of, because we’re one of the best health systems on the planet, but it’s falling behind because it’s both underfunded and there aren’t enough doctors and nurses in the system. These are solvable problems, but they need shekels that are being frittered away elsewhere.

Q: Is it just an issue of priorities? At the Knesset last year, at a hearing on AI, you described Israel’s approach as amateurish and said that nobody in the Knesset knows what they’re talking about. What do you think Israel needs to do to ensure its leadership is moving forward in critical tech areas like AI and defense tech?

A: Generally, in technology, civilian innovation wins, and we’re very good at that. Nobody said, “Hey, go do defense tech.” People came out of Gaza and said, “Hey, I saw drones or missiles or AI, I can do this.” Defense tech has popped up without any government help, and that’s the way it should be. 

AI is an entirely different story. AI is infrastructure for the future nation state, like nuclear power, like nuclear weapons. This is what will define the winning nation states of the coming 100 years. And it’s infrastructure, because it needs a lot of energy, because you need a lot of human beings with a lot of degrees. We’re a small country, so we need to bring some of these people either back, because they left, or [bring them] in, because there’s not a small number of Jews or other people who would want to live in Israel that we can bring into this.

Q: You recently said the following about AI: “As Europe declines and the east and south rise, Israel and our Abrahamic partners are perfectly placed as the innovation ecosystem that will help drive their economies and drive an AI future in this region and a realigned world.” How do you think Israeli innovation and AI can change Israel’s standing in the world and change the Middle East more broadly?

A: The leadership of Israel has always been very tactical. Part of it, I think, comes from a survival mentality and instinct. But we are now a regional superpower. We need to think like a regional superpower and that requires much more strategy, but it also requires working with our neighbors. 

The UAE has spent incredible amounts of time, energy, money and professionalism, and they’ve done incredible work on AI strategy. They figured out, to their credit, that what they have in abundance is energy, and their capability to do large projects, I would argue, is almost second to none. The Emiratis are incredible at building infrastructure projects, whether it’s the new airport in Abu Dhabi, the airport in Dubai, the energy fields. It’s mind-boggling and a sight to behold. I admire them greatly. 

The Saudis have launched this initiative called HUMAIN. The Saudis, I think, are behind the Emiratis, but they have abundant energy and abundant money to be able to bring chips in, and perhaps, although I’m skeptical of it, to bring manufacturing in. 

What they all lack is talent. What do we have? We’re way worse than the Emiratis at building big projects. We have way less energy abundance, but we have real innovation talent. Number two, we have a relationship with the United States, which wants to kind of own this sphere of AI, that almost nobody has. Now we have this new energy agreement that was signed by the prime minister when he was in Washington a couple of weeks ago, and an AI agreement and very friendly people coming into the State Department. 

Q: When you look at the coalition politics, the question is, can we get there? You can be supportive of Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu, you can be critical of him, but he has a vision for the Israeli economy and for Israeli technological development. But when you look at the broader political spectrum, you don’t seem to have that kind of strategic thinking and the economic vision is often subsumed by politics. Most of Netanyahu’s partners are not free-market capitalists like he is.

A: I actually think that a not-small part of the Likud party, currently in government, is socialist. All the ultra-Orthodox parties are socialists, even though the bases of these parties are not socialists. I think Prime Minister Netanyahu is a capitalist, but below him on the list are a lot of people who unfortunately have the wrong view of economics, or forgot what socialism is, and certainly the ultra-Orthodox politicians who just want handouts without responsibility. They just want to kind of keep the people underfoot.

Q: So what do you do about it? 

A: To use a different example, because it’s less personal. You ask yourself, How is it plausible that Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the U.K., has said such a dumb thing [recognizing a Palestinian state]? I don’t think there is a dumber statement ever made by a politician. We should say it openly. He may have killed the hostages by caving to Hamas and the Palestinian narrative. [French President Emmanuel] Macron, also. These two may be responsible for the life of our hostages because of stupid things that they said. 

Why are people so stupid? And the answer is, because all politics, at the end of the day, are local. My friend Eugene Kandel, the former economic advisor for the prime minister, said the KPI [key performance indicator] of every politician is to get reelected. That’s what they want. And you look at the voting bases, under Starmer and under Macron, there are a lot of Islamists there in these countries. And so they’re pandering to the base. 

I think a lot of this in democratic politics, unfortunately, comes down to a lack of leadership and people who pander to the base, and populism has become popular again. But the laws of physics for every action is an equal and opposite reaction. I hope that there is going to be an era of leadership that follows this era of populism, because I think people are sick and tired of the amateur hour that has become much of government, technology and economic policy. They’re sick and tired of it. And they’re sick and tired of the cost of living going up here. 

When you want to be a regional superpower, you can’t run a country like this in the modern era, and we need to fix that. This younger generation is incredible. They’re going to fix it. 

Q: We’ve seen the negative impact of campaigns against Israel, not just in Europe, but particularly in the U.S., where we’ve seen a drop in public opinion towards Israel. You’ve talked a lot about narrative and storytelling and how it applies to startups, but when you look at Israel, what do you think it should be doing differently?

A: I did some work at the beginning of the war on bot networks, and how this coordinated campaign got unleashed on Oct. 8. Amazingly, there were Google Drives all over campuses in America that had posters that you could download and print. The people were ready for this. The Network Contagion Research Institute run by Joel Stein has done an incredible job recently of charting this, and there is a very, very well-honed narrative meme-making system, probably funded by Qatar in various ways, that has gotten the best of the West and Israel, too. 

You have a very complicit media. You just look at that picture of the poor kid with MS that ends up on the cover of all these pages, and you look at the inside deliberations of The New York Times where they knew the problem and they still decided to publish it. It is outrageous, by the way. You can read on my Twitter, I’m calling for the New York Times editor Joe Kahn to resign. In this case, Kahn got it right, and he still published it. The guy is complicit in spreading false narratives to a level of nobody anywhere in the world. 

We need to start playing offense and not defense. And unfortunately, I think the government and the narrative are always defensive, rather than offensive, and we wait for the crisis to happen rather than crafting the narrative ourselves. 

What is the narrative? I think the answer is, we are Israel. Israel is the freest, most innovative, most initiative-taking society in the world, and it is the most mutually responsible. You want to raise your children here, because they grow up with mutual responsibility for their society and in an emergent regional superpower. Together with our cousins in the UAE and Saudi Arabia and the southern part of the Mediterranean in Greece and Italy, we can define this region as a future model for the world. 

Q: What impact has the war had on the tech sector and the economy? It seems that things are better than anyone could have predicted.

A: Israel is the best-performing stock market in the world since October 2023. It’s pretty mind-blowing. It’s been very resilient. 

Since the war started, numerous American funds have been set up in Israel. People want to access the innovation. I’ve been working very, very hard to try to develop the finance sector here. I think the current Finance Minister [Bezalel Smotrich] has figured this out, and I think you’ll see some news in the future about a regulatory and tax overhaul to enable the emergence of the finance industry. We need a second industry other than tech. 

In tech, cyber carried us this far, but it’s not enough to carry us to the next phase. We need the AI enabled services businesses to sell globally from here — like Lemonade, which I was lucky to be the first investor in, is the fastest growing insurance company in the world. It’s an AI native business and we now operate globally, we started here. We need these businesses to grow so that we have more engines of growth other than just cyber and defense. 

Q: Now for a more personal question. You have eight kids. How do you manage running a large investment fund, writing books, chairing charitable organizations, owning a winery — and being a dad and grandfather?

A: I think the secret in life is kind of two things. Marry well, and I was very fortunate to meet my wife young, and we’ve had just an incredible relationship and partnership and raising a family together, and incredible business partners and in the nonprofit universe. And we don’t have a television — I say that half in jest, but it’s kind of true, I don’t have that many hobbies in life.

Even on the books that I’ve published, I have an incredible editor who is also a thought partner and challenges me really hard and fine tunes me quicker. So everything in life is who you partner with. And then my only two real hobbies that I have that I enjoy very much are skiing, which you can only do a small number of days a year, unfortunately, and drinking Israeli wine. I just want to write books and help Israel and the Jewish people. That’s my life. And raise our family together. 

I actually don’t believe in work-life balance. I think this is a terrible promise that psychologists make to kids, and it’s just false. What is balanced about the last two years? If I’ve promised you that your life is going to be balanced and you encounter the last two years, you will have failed, because there’s no balance. No one promised my daughter, who had three kids and now had her fourth in the middle of the war and her husband was 300-plus days in reserve duty, any balance this year. What we need to do is to tell people that there are trade-offs in life because there are 24 hours a day and seven days in a week, and we try to be as good as we can at everything, and we’re going to fail. And I think that builds resilience.

What I think Israel has in spades is optimism and resilience. Optimism and resilience. That’s the reason I’m bullish on Israeli society in this generation, that’s because they’re battle hardened. They have built resilience. It hasn’t been easy. Nothing is easy. That’s real life.

We got knocked on our butts, and we got up and gave it back, and it’s had a tremendous price. It still has a price. The hostages are still the price. There’s still people fighting in Gaza, and unfortunately, soldiers being killed and a lot of broken hearts and a lot of widows and orphans who are our responsibility collectively. But we have, unfortunately, through trauma, built resilience, and now we need to get to the post-traumatic growth phase.

Wesley LePatner, a Blackstone executive who was involved with Jewish communal organizations in New York City, was killed in the Monday shooting at the firm’s Midtown headquarters, the company confirmed on Tuesday.

LePatner was the global head of Core+ Real Estate at Blackstone and CEO of Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, according to Blackstone’s website. A Yale graduate, she joined the company in 2014 after more than a decade at Goldman Sachs.

She served on the board of trustees at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, a pluralistic Jewish day school in New York, and she joined the board of directors at UJA-Federation of New York earlier this month.

“We are devastated by the tragic loss of Wesley LePatner, a beloved member of UJA’s community and a member of our board of directors, who was killed in yesterday’s mass shooting in Midtown,” the federation said in a statement. 

“Wesley was extraordinary in every way — personally, professionally, and philanthropically,” the organization said. “In the wake of Oct. 7, Wesley led a solidarity mission with UJA to Israel, demonstrating her enduring commitment in Israel’s moment of heartache. She lived with courage and conviction, instilling in her two children a deep love for Judaism and the Jewish people.”

In 2023, LePatner was awarded the Alan C. Greenberg Young Leadership Award at UJA’s 2023 annual Wall Street dinner. In a speech, she outlined her involvement with the organization, dating back nearly two decades.

“I first attended the UJA Wall Street dinner as a young analyst in 2004, where I am pretty certain I sat in one of the last tables at the back of the room,” LePatner said at the event, which took place two months after the Oct. 7 attacks. “Never in my wildest imagination could I have believed that I would be up on this stage two decades later. UJA has many super-powers, but its most important in my view is its power to create a sense of community and belonging, and that ability to create a sense of community and belonging matters now more than ever.”

LePatner also sat on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Yale University Library Council and Nareit, a real estate organization. 

The shooting also claimed a second Jewish victim, Julia Hyman. A Cornell graduate, Hyman worked for Rudin Management in the Midtown skyscraper.

Ofir Akunis, consul general of Israel in New York, called the murder of LePatner and Hyman — as well as NYPD Officer Didarul Islam — “horrific and senseless” at the Israel on Campus Coalition’s National Leadership Summit in Washington on Tuesday. “In this difficult moment, Israel stands in solidarity with New Yorkers and all Americans,” Akunis said.

In 2025, all it takes to answer any factual question, no matter how trivial — Who won the 1974 World Series? Where was Taylor Swift born? — is a quick Google search and, usually, a click to Wikipedia, which has 62 million pages in English alone. But a new report from the Anti-Defamation League urges people to think twice before using the popular free encyclopedia, arguing its administrators have failed to prevent biased editors from manipulating entries related to Israel and Judaism. 

Wikipedia is maintained by an army of volunteer editors, many of whom have spent years amassing knowledge of the site’s wonky rules in order to keep its pages up-to-date and accurate. But that honor system is vulnerable to bias. The ADL found that a group of 30 editors collaborated to insert anti-Israel and antisemitic narratives and falsehoods into articles, working together in a way that may have violated Wikipedia’s policies.

“Despite Wikipedia’s efforts to ensure neutrality and impartiality, malicious editors frequently introduce biased or misleading information, which persists across hundreds if not more entries,” the report stated.

For instance, the main Wikipedia entry on Hamas was edited to downplay the Palestinian group’s terrorist activity. A subhead that was formerly ‘violence and terrorism’ is now just ‘violence’ — a change that was made on Oct. 19, 2023. ADL researchers found that the first reference of Hamas as a terrorist organization was pushed further down in the lead section, and the description of the Oct. 7 attack no longer mentions the total number of people who were killed during the massacres. Numerous other details about the attacks were also removed.

In the section titled, ‘The 2018-2019 Gaza border protests,’ an editor removed a reference to a 2018 NPR interview with a Palestinian in Gaza who was preparing to launch an incendiary balloon with a swastika on it.

A series of edit wars on Wikipedia’s main Zionism page has, since 2022, sought “to reframe Israel’s founding,” according to the report. After one editor changed the language used to describe the goal of Zionism and the Zionist movement, the editor put a 12-month discussion moratorium in place, which keeps other editors from making edits to the language.

The report issued recommendations toward policymakers, toward private companies that rely on Wikipedia’s information and toward Wikipedia itself, with the gist of its suggestions amounting to a plea to those actors to take antisemitism seriously. 

An ADL spokesperson declined to say whether the leadership of Wikipedia has been willing to engage with the group. A spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, said on Monday that the organization was “not asked to provide context that might have helped allay some of the concerns raised.”

“Though our preliminary review of this report finds troubling and flawed conclusions that are not supported by the Anti-Defamation League’s data, we are currently undertaking a more thorough and detailed analysis,” the spokesperson said.

After the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks, Wikipedia — like social media and other platforms where Internet users go to access information — became a proxy fight for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and digital battles emerged over how its story is told to news consumers. 

A group of Wikipedia editors voted last summer to rate the ADL as an unreliable source on matters related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and antisemitism, which brought concerns about reliability and editorial integrity at the world’s largest encyclopedia to the public eye. 

In the aftermath, the ADL tried to raise the issue with leaders at the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia, which has for years taken a hands-off approach to content moderation, was not responsive to concerns from Jewish advocates. More than 40 Jewish organizations wrote to Wikimedia last June urging reform. 

The problem has not receded, according to the new ADL report. If anything, it has become more entrenched. The biased anti-Israel editors — described by the ADL as “bad faith editors” — are much more active than the average editor on Wikipedia, even more so than those who edit other controversial topics. 

These “bad faith editors” attacked other editors deemed hostile to their cause in Wikipedia discussion forums, and they often used “Zionist” as a slur to tar their opponents. They would make edits on other pages, on unrelated content, to avoid detection.

On pages dedicated to major historical events, like several Israel-Arab wars or peace negotiations, editors would make “extensive edits” in “tone, content and perspective” to advance an anti-Israel narrative, the report found.

“The larger pattern of changes demonstrates a systematic effort to skew numerous Wikipedia entries to promote a set of narratives critical of Israel, often delegitimizing Israel’s existence and actions,” the report stated. Wikipedia has a policy against advocacy, and the ADL argued that this pattern of edits violates that policy. The advocacy group’s key recommendation for Wikipedia is for the encyclopedia to enforce higher content standards and stronger moderation guardrails, although such a request is likely an impossible bar to clear, given Wikimedia’s leniency toward its editors.

“The values of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation reflect our commitment to integrity and accuracy, and we categorically condemn antisemitism and all forms of hate,” the Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson said. “Content added to the site must be presented, as far as possible, without editorial bias.”

“As we have shared previously, Wikipedia is a constantly evolving, living encyclopedia based on principles of neutrality, which means content added to the site must be presented, as far as possible, without editorial bias,” they added. “Wikipedia includes more than 65 million articles and is edited by nearly 260,000 volunteers from across the world.” 

The ADL seemed to identify only limited opportunities for government officials to impact the state of affairs at Wikipedia. Policymakers “should prioritize raising additional awareness of antisemitism, and structural issues, within Wikipedia,” the ADL argued, writing that they should use their convening power to bring together academics, computer scientists, civic leaders and Wikipedians to study the issue further. 

Search engines and the large language models being used to train artificial intelligence programs should limit their use of Wikipedia, the ADL argued — and in particular, they should try to avoid citing Wikipedia as a source, instead directing users to more reputable sources. Users should be warned that Wikipedia is an unreliable source. 

A spokesperson for the ADL maintained that the report is not meant to be a repudiation of how Wikipedia currently operates. Rather, it is intended to be a very public reminder to Wikipedia “to apply its policies at scale, to prevent malicious manipulation.” 

“We are not advocating for the abandonment of Wikipedia,” said Daniel Kelley, the interim head of the ADL’s Center for Technology and Security. “We want Wikipedia to address these issues, but we would urge people to use caution with contentious articles.” 

Jewish Insider’s Tamara Zieve contributed to this report.

Fifteen years ago, Mark Gerson, the co-founder and chairman of United Hatzalah and African Mission Healthcare, was invited by a friend for the unexpected combination of a cigar and Haggadah study session. Apprehensive to believe the Passover manual required more of his attention, Gerson agreed to join what seemed more an excuse for a cigar than an illuminating discussion.

To his surprise, the evening jumpstarted an obsession with the Haggadah. “It is nothing less than the greatest hits of Jewish thought,” Gerson told Jewish Insider in a recent interview wedged between virtual book tour appearances for his latest title, The Telling: How Judaism’s Essential Book Reveals the Meaning of Life.

The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Jewish Insider: Passover is probably the most popular holiday in Judaism, why is that? Is it for the same reasons the Haggadah is the “greatest hits of Jewish thought”?

Mark Gerson: I don’t know because I don’t think most people recognize the Haggadah as the greatest hits of Jewish thought. If people go through it quickly and basically treat it like a dinner program — literally, the book you get to before you can get to the meal — we’re not going to see this ‘greatest hits of Jewish thought,’ and we’re not going to get very much out of it. Just the fact that it is completely loaded with Jewish wisdom, perfectly oriented, to help us live happier, better and more meaningful lives in the year to come — it’s the best book ever written word for word, but if you treat it like a dinner program we’re not going to see it that way. Alternatively, if we think that the obligation of the Seder is to get through the entire Haggadah, we’re going to have a similarly bad experience, because we’re not going to be able to really stop and contemplate the existential lessons and the life-altering meanings that come out of basically every passage.

JI: Why do you think it’s so significant that the Haggadah and the Seder are so full of questions?

Gerson: That’s such a deep and fundamental question, and it gets to the essence of Judaism. The fundamental characteristic that all children share all over the world and all throughout history is curiosity, and every parent knows that when a child is two or three years old what that child will say about 20 to 25 times an hour… And so Moses — he’s a genius psychologist — identified the curiosity of children. He heard those 20 to 25 ‘whys,’ and he said, ‘That is what I will build the future of the Jewish people on, on the questioning of their children.’ These are all basing education on the question. The idea of using education at all as a means for perpetuation is totally radical. Because if one generation takes it off, the whole previous chain is broken… So it’s paradoxically on the basis of questioning, which leads to unpredictable answers and unexpected responses that we’ve built the future of the Jewish people, and that’s the focal point of the Seder night.

JI: Does that make Judaism more liberal than most religions?

Gerson: I think just the fact that we have no word for obedience is kind of astonishing. I mean you know other cultures and traditions command obedience, we don’t have a word for it. Even in the Bible, what’s our great tradition related to obedience, for which we have no word? It’s arguing with God. It’s Abraham arguing with God at Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s Moses arguing with God after the golden calf. It’s the daughters of Zelophehad arguing with Moses, and ultimately with God. So, yeah, we love questioning and Moses invented the idea of perpetuating a tradition through questioning, and it’s done very well.

JI: What do you think is the most important question in the Seder?

Gerson: I think they’re all important. The Haggadah, because it asks and answers all the great questions in life, it addresses each of us at any stage we’re at. Whatever anyone’s thinking about, aspiring towards or going through, the Haggadah is there to help in different passages. So it’ll be different for each person in each year.

JI: One of the passages you look closely at is perhaps the most perplexing and problematic of the whole Haggadah — the Wicked Son. What did end up finding so redeemable in that passage?

Gerson: It’s a very interesting response because the phrase blunt your teeth, a lot of people think it means punch him in the face. I don’t know if people thought that in ancient times, but certainly now when we hear blunted teeth, we think punch him in the face but then we realized that same expression comes from Ezekiel and Jeremiah. So where was that used? Well, it was used twice, neither of which had anything to do with punching anybody in the face. It was that the father who ate sour grapes and his son’s teeth were blunted. [Ezekiel 18:12 and Jeremiah 31:29] It’s clearly an expression of the father accepting the blame. This is why it’s good to really consider this when one has small children, because then you could think, what might I be doing that will lead to a wayward child when the child is 15 or 16, and then not do it.

JI: After a full year of the COVID pandemic, what new understanding do you bring to the Seder?

Gerson: Exodus 12 has this very strange but deeply instructive passage which says that there can be no leftovers at the Seder meal. Why are leftovers un-kosher for Passover? You can have leftovers any other time, but not after a Seder meal. It explains that if one household is too small to consume a lamb by itself, it must invite another household. Now we know from Josephus and modern science that it took approximately 15-20 to consume a lamb, meaning every household is too small to consume a lamb. So we begin this fundamental night of Jewish peoplehood — the great new year of the Jewish people — in the act of giving and sharing the spirit of hospitality. And that’s why we set big Seders, because it tells us to in the Bible. We couldn’t do that last year, and we really can’t do that this year.

JI: You write about how the Egyptians don’t seem to learn from the plagues. After letting the Israelites go, Pharaoh decides “Actually, we’re going to go after them,” and of course we know what happens then. How do you see that as a warning to us now?

Gerson: Everything in the Haggadah exists to teach us a lesson to be implemented today… and if we don’t see it in the passage, we’ve just got to keep interpreting. The purpose of the plagues was obviously not just to free the Jews, because if God wanted to free the Jews, as my daughter said when she was five years old, well, why don’t you just use a magic carpet or a big waterslide which starts in Egypt and ends in the Promised Land? (I would pick the waterslide.) But that wasn’t his purpose, that was one of his purposes, but his purpose was to educate the world that he is the one true God and that people should turn towards ethical monotheism. That’s the purpose. He wants to win an argument.

JI: Any special plans for this year’s Seder? Anything new or different?

Gerson: Well the difference is it’s the second year of just family, and, God-willing, it looks like the last year of just family. Normally we have 50 people or so — Jews, gentiles, people who have never been to a Seder before. It’s often a gentile at the Seder who is coming with such newness, freshness and appreciation who are the ones who most enhance and enrich the evening.

JI: Who are the Seder guests past or present you would most like to invite?

Gerson: No one’s ever asked that. Number one is Martin Luther King Jr., because he was living the Exodus story. Exodus is the great freedom story for the world and he was magnificently applying it to the struggles of his day… You know who else I’d like to have? I don’t even know who this person is, but in the Capitol there is a relief of 23 lawmakers with 11 facing one way, 11 facing the other, and Moses in the middle. I want to know who designed that, because the greatest Seder of them all is American history. I would say Harriet Tubman, who was nicknamed Grandma Moses. This story massively inspired her as well. It’s the quintessentially Jewish event with quintessentially universal implications and applications so I would want to have Maimonides — the quintessential rationalist whose approach I so deeply admire. I’d love to have some of the early rabbis. I talked in the book about how the early rabbis all had professions. If they weren’t working hard enough at their profession, whether it was a shoemaker or a carpenter or whatever it was, they were criticized by saying people say that you’re not going to be a great rabbi unless you work hard at your profession. I’d love to have that discipline.

Next year in Jerusalem. Last year on Zoom. This year — vaccination proof or negative test in hand — in Miami. 

The end of the coronavirus pandemic is in sight — millions of Americans have already received the COVID-19 vaccine, and many are ready to party. Or at the very least, spend Passover at a luxury resort with gourmet kosher food. 

Passover is a holiday typically celebrated with family and friends, at large Seders that go on for hours. After the pandemic forced Jewish families around the world last year to host downsized Seders, people are beginning to plan larger celebrations, asking guests to have either a vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test. This year, several dozen luxury Passover retreats are operating around the U.S., roughly a quarter of the number that normally run in a typical year — but more than the zero that were in operation last year. 

The all-inclusive getaways — which can cost up to $11,000 per person — offer a week of kosher food, entertainment and activities to those who want to celebrate Passover without the hassle of cleaning a household and with the luxuries of a getaway stay. Though operators are implementing COVID precautions, including capacity limits in dining rooms and mask requirements, thousands of people want in. 

“The interest has just been mega,” said Raphi Bloom, the co-owner of Totally Jewish Travel, a website that serves as a directory for Jewish travel companies and programs around the world. “It’s unbelievable. Considering the world we live in, the desire for people to travel is just incredible.” Spaces at these programs usually fill up months in advance. Now, less than a week before Passover, families are still trying to find spots at these retreats. 

In a normal year, about 130 Passover programs are offered at luxury resorts around the world, in places like Miami, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Tuscany. Bloom estimates that upwards of 100,000 hotel rooms are sold each year for Passover vacations. “Some of our program operators will do an entire hotel buyout,” said Bloom, while others “will do a partial buyout where they’ll buy 50 rooms or 100 rooms and one of the banquet rooms and one of the kitchens.” In any case, attendees get access to extravagant Seders, multiple minyanim, buffets open round the clock and entertainment ranging from live music to rabbis-in-residence to guest speakers like conservative commentator Dennis Prager and parenting expert Sharon Mazel. 

Last year, Passover program operators were forced to shut down at the last minute, when shelter-in-place orders emerged at the start of the pandemic. Many companies offered partial refunds or full credit toward a retreat this year. In some cases, operators had to forego a year’s salary. 

This year, about a quarter of Passover programs are operating. Many, like those in parts of Europe where lockdowns remain in effect, are not able to operate at all, while certain American companies are forgoing programming this year in order to give the industry a year to bounce back. Some retreats have moved location from states with more restrictions to states with less. Others are going ahead with their normal programming, with some adjustments. “Everything about the whole landscape is different in terms of how we operate,” said Avi Lasko, president of Lasko Getaways, a travel company that this year is operating three Passover programs in Miami and Orlando.

“We have put a lot of COVID precautions into place, but we are running a full program, not cutting back or scaling down on anything,” Lasko explained. “In fact, I would say it’s just the opposite. It’s probably more than ever before. We’re doing more programming and more entertainment and things that are obviously very COVID-safe, but we’re really putting all of our effort into making this a fantastic program.”

In a typical year, Lasko’s three programs draw up to 3,000 guests. This year, he expects to serve about 1,000 people, due to capacity limits his company has set. But among participants, the desire to be on a vacation and with the Jewish community is enormous. “A lot of people have told us this is the first time they’re leaving their own house or their state in more than a year,” Lasko observed. 

There is at least one entirely new program this year, in a location that could never have hosted a Passover retreat in the past: Dubai. “Since the Abraham Accords were signed last year, there’s been an explosion of kosher travel to Dubai in the UAE,” Bloom said, referring to the deal brokered by the Trump administration normalizing relations between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain. “Rooms are still being sold as of today,” Bloom said last week. “Even 10 days, 11 days before Pesach, people are still booking to get on a plane to Dubai.” 

Food on display at Whistler’s “Pesach in the Mountains” program in 2019. (Courtesy)

The luxury Passover hotel industry has grown exponentially in the past decade, although its roots date back to the Catskills resorts popular in the mid-20th century. Due in part to discrimination — and the difficulty of finding kosher food — Jews have long traveled en masse, and the Catskills provided a close, convenient option for people from New York City looking to get away. But with the rise of air travel in the 1960s and 1970s, people began to travel to farther-flung destinations, leading to the decline of the Borscht Belt resorts in upstate New York. 

“Twenty-five or 30 years ago, if you wanted to go on vacation and have kosher food, you would either have to schlep it with you — you have to buy frozen meat or fresh meat and take it with you on the plane or in the car — or if you are going on a cruise, you could order kosher food, but it would be basically an airline meal,” said Totally Jewish Travel’s Bloom. “So everybody else is at their tables getting full service, [but] the waiters will be bringing you a triple-wrapped plastic dish in foil.”

Mediocre pre-packaged kosher meals are no longer a necessity for observant Jews who wish to both travel the world and keep kosher. “As people’s demands got greater and as the ease of transporting the food around the world got greater, travel companies started to offer kosher tours,” Bloom explained. 

Passover is the biggest event for the global kosher travel industry, but Jewish travel companies offer tours year-round. “You can go on a five-star Glatt kosher safari in the middle of South Africa or Zimbabwe,” said Bloom. “The company will hire a chef, they’ll get a mashgiach, fly in all the kosher meats, and you can eat like a king in the middle of [South Africa’s] Kruger National Park.”

Of course, most of those programs are not operating right now amid the COVID threat. But the Passover programs that are taking place this year offer an opportunity for Jewish travel operators to find out: Are people going to travel when the pandemic winds down? The answer is unequivocally yes — even if travel might not look exactly the same.

Some of the Passover programs are tweaking their offerings so that individual families can have private service. Instead of getting a block of hotel rooms, with family members eating in the same communal spaces as the other guests, a family might rent a private villa, with a full-service chef and catering service provided by the travel company. 

Yocheved Goldberg, the rebbetzin at Florida’s Boca Raton Synagogue, told JI that a lot of members of her community are going to Orlando and renting houses at resorts that offer in-home catering. “That’s very popular,” Goldberg said, noting that people generally booked those private houses months ago, “when they weren’t sure the [Passover] programs were opening and didn’t want to risk not having an option.” But not everyone who previously used to travel will do so this year. Many people who used to go to the luxury getaways every year were forced last year to buy Passover dishes and host Seders. “They’re all set up to do it again,” Goldberg explained, and many have realized “it wasn’t so bad.” 

Some people see Passover 2021 as the first opportunity for a full, in-person Jewish celebration in more than a year. “Purim [in 2020] was the last holiday before everything shut down literally overnight,” said Rabbi Steven Burg, CEO of Aish HaTorah, “and, I think at that time, everyone was saying, by Pesach, by Shavuot, then it was by Rosh Hashanah [that things will reopen] — that’s how we divvy up our years, totally based on holidays, so just the ability to be with people is nice.”

Burg will be a scholar-in-residence at a Passover retreat in West Palm Beach, where he will spend the holiday with his family. The hotel is requiring either proof of vaccination or a negative test within three days of arriving, and the hotel will offer testing on the reverse end for people who have to fly home afterward. Burg intends to focus his talks and discussions on reconnecting to Judaism after a difficult year of isolation. “Because everyone’s so spread out and split up,” he said, “we want to come together and really refocus on Jewish spirituality.”

A Brooklyn auction house’s attempt last month to auction off two Jewish communal registries — one a list of Jewish residents of a Romanian city from the late-19th and early 20th centuries and the other a book of Jewish burials in another Romanian city — was set to proceed until it was halted at the last minute. The sudden move highlighted a wider issue regarding items looted from Jewish communities that, many decades later, are being sold at auction.

“The private market sale of Judaica and historical Judaica items tends to operate in the dark,” Gideon Taylor, chief of operations at the World Jewish Restitution Organization, told Jewish Insider. “There is not a visible or known market [for these items], and there is no central registry or depository. What we do know is that these were treasures of Jewish history that belong to a Jewish community and, thus, to the Jewish people… For many, it is the last connection with people who died and their roots.”

Taylor said he wants to use the attempted sale of these two registries to “open up and expose this trade. We want to talk with state and federal authorities and auction houses to try to ensure that such items of huge significance to the Jewish people are not held privately but instead are available as part of the heritage of the Jewish people.”

Just days before the Feb. 18 auction at Kestenbaum & Company, members of the two Jewish communities to whom the registries had belonged learned of the impending sale and wrote to the auctioneer asking that it be canceled. One letter was from the Jewish community of Oradea in Romania, whose Jewish population registry, which dated from the late-19th century to 1944, was to be auctioned. The community’s more than 30,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz by the Nazis in May-June 1944, and most were murdered while their offices were ransacked. 

“The item that will be auctioned is very valuable on its own and very precious for the history of our community,” said the letter. “It is one of the items which disappeared during the Holocaust. This volume was illegally appropriated by persons who have not been identified to this day.”

The other item was a registry that contains a handwritten list of all Jewish burials in what is today Cluj/Napoca, Romania, between the years 1836 and 1899. Most of the city’s 16,000 Jews were similarly murdered in Auschwitz and the community’s offices were “ransacked and robbed.”

The communities pointed out that stolen goods are covered by clauses in the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947 and the 2009 Terezin Declaration in which 46 countries, including Romania, pledged to return all objects illegally appropriated to the rightful owners.

In an email, Daniel Kestenbaum, the founding chairman of the auction house, wrote that the items were withdrawn from auction to give the communities time to “present necessary documentary evidence” of ownership.

On its website, Kestenbaum & Company said the seller of the registries is a “scholarly businessman who for decades has exerted enormous effort to rescue and preserve historical artifacts that would otherwise have been destroyed — either willfully or due to neglect.” It said the registries were “saved from certain destruction in the horrifying war years and through the [subsequent] decades of repression and institutional neglect” that make the matter of their ultimate title “deeply complex.”

In an email, administrative manager Massye Kestenbaum told JI  that the auction house is “deeply committed to Jewish cultural needs” and that the seller of the registries “was eager to discuss with the relevant parties their concerns. Please note, we are not a party to these discussions and so cannot comment.”

Philosopher, writer, spiritual leader… soothsayer? Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks has filled many roles, but even he could not predict the timeliness of his latest book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times.

“A free society is a moral achievement,” Sacks, formerly the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain, opens. “Over the past fifty years in the West this truth has been forgotten, ignored, or denied. That is why today liberal democracy is at risk.”

The last portion requires little further elaboration. Any casual glance at the current state of the Western world reveals the fragmentation of a society in an era of rising tensions. But rather than dwell only on describing the existence of these problems — as many recent authors have done — Sacks follows their historical and philosophical origins to understand how what he calls the “moral achievement” of creating a liberal society could become forgotten.

The book, which is released today for American audiences by Basic Book, examines what Sacks terms the “I” of self-interest and the “we” of shared values and responsibility, ultimately providing a pathway for moving from the former to the latter.

In doing so, Sacks provides as good an argument as any for moving forward productively and conscientiously. 

Sacks — who studied philosophy at Oxford and Cambridge, including under the late Roger Scruton — mixes sociology, history, philosophy and theology, all the while writing with a perceptive clarity and underlying warmth that explains his status as one of the foremost Jewish thinkers of today.

Building his argument from the ground up, Sacks starts with the roots of free society in examining the political philosophies that not only informed the creation of modern democracy, but also developed the idea of individuality and personal liberties.

In his chapter “Democracy in Danger,” Sacks contrasts the two most influential definitions of the social contract that defines liberal democracy: Rousseau’s definition of rights as rendered by individuals against the state versus Locke and Hobbes’ definition of rights as a mutual protection from the state. He warns that a growing Anglo-American preference for the former belies the importance of shared responsibility in a democracy, writing that if communities “stop believing in the existence of a significant arena of individual responsibility, we will lose the sense of common morality that finds its natural home in families and communities.”

Sacks further connects this thread to Anglo-American society’s growing sense of separation and loneliness, joining a long list of thinkers — including Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker — in citing the twin processes of social media use and identity politics as driving factors in an epidemic of isolation and fragmentation that has increasingly transformed Western politics.

In an interview with Jewish Insider, Sacks cited the multiculturalism that began in the 1970s and more recent identity politics each as a wave that “fragments and destroys the idea of an overarching culture that turns disconnected individuals and communities into a cohesive society.”

While he reserves no criticism, Sacks treats these movements and their disciples with evident care, describing them as unfortunate products of postmodernism rather than simply the work of ill-intentioned radicals seeking disruption.

“The first country to introduce multiculturalism, and the first to regret it, was the Netherlands.” Sacks writes in his chapter on identity politics. “When asked why they were against it, the Dutch people interviewed said: because they were in favor of tolerance. When asked for their explanation of the difference between the two, they tended to reply that tolerance means ignoring differences; multiculturalism means making an issue of them at every stage.”

In most Western countries, that heightened focus on identity has coalesced into nationalism, the return of which has become especially apparent across Europe. As history shows, the products of such movements ultimately target the foundations of liberal democracy, while including a rise in antisemitism and other forms of hatred.

The way forward, Sacks argues, requires an acceptance of difference alongside a shared cause, more commonly and aptly called patriotism.

In conversation with JI, Sacks cited George Orwell’s differentiation of the two in his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism,” during which the English novelist wrote, “The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”

Patriotism, Sacks argues, is the best means to turn from “I’ to “we.” Inserting a shared commitment and shared values without erasing individuality or identity. Throughout his book, Sacks also refers to this commitment as a “covenant,” a permanent and powerful collaboration that turns individual “I”s seeking personal good into “we”s seeking common good.

Yet many of the examples of success that Sacks cites from the 19th and 20th centuries were precipitated by violence, including the Civil War and World War II.

Jonathan Sacks readily acknowledged this pitfall. “Violence is always a sign of political failure,” he said.”I would hope that wise political leadership will lean in to people suffering early enough to avoid the need for violence”

In his epilogue, Sacks touches on this subject, contrasting the different responses to World War I — which saw few changes and ultimately led to more chaos — and World War II — which saw a reformation of institutions and a commitment to shared values. 

The latter saw a development of national narratives that inculcated a common morality and sense of commitment. 

Now, 75 year later, these narratives are depleted. “Britain, like America, has recently become sort of ashamed of its national narrative,” Sacks remarked, noting that he has spent time working alongside numerous prime ministers in an effort to resurrect a respectable replacement. He cited the popular Broadway musical “Hamilton” as an important example of renewing old values by “[retelling] the national narrative in a thrilling way.”

But broader than hit musicals, Sacks argued that the most effective and immediate move towards reinstating a shared commitment lies in requiring mandatory national military service.

Citing Israel — which he called one of the best examples of a current Western-style democracy with a “we” culture — described national service as “the most sensible socially and financially way of engaging that generation and getting them to feel that this was something other than a black period in their lives.”

But Jonathan Sacks wisely advised that no quick fix exists. 

“You don’t expect quick victories. When it comes to changing the mood, we expect to win a few cycles,” he said. “And then they generate disciples and before you know it, the world has changed. But it changes in very small steps at the beginning.”

Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) has begun to circulate a letter among his House colleagues calling for the Trump administration to pressure the Ukrainian government into allowing religious exemptions for Jews looking to make their annual pilgrimage to Uman, Ukraine, for the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah. The move comes amid a strict border closure by Ukraine designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus in the country.

The House letter is addressed to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and asks him to “consider advocating on behalf [of]  a group of American citizens whom find this annual pilgrimage extremely important.” 

Duncan’s office distributed the letter, obtained by Jewish Insider, to other Capitol Hill offices for signatures late Friday afternoon. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Ukrainian border closure extends through September 28, Yom Kippur. The letter references a number of exceptions in the current order, and states that all of the visitors would pay to test themselves upon arrival and would quarantine apart from the local population.

“The Ukrainian government could add a limited religious exception allowing for a small fraction of the regular attendees (not to exceed 2000 people) to enter the country for a total of five days,” the letter to Pompeo reads. 

In recent years, as many as 30,000 Orthodox Jews have made the annual trek to Uman to visit the gravesite of Rabbi Nahman Breslov around the Rosh Hashanah holiday.

Israel’s coronavirus commissioner, Ronni Gamzu, has been vocally opposed to this year’s pilgrimage, predicting that it could prompt a major spike in coronavirus infections. Gamzu asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week to ban Israeli pilgrims from entering the Eastern European nation, prompting public clashes between Gamzu and several ultra-Orthodox politicians in Israel.

The pilgrimage has already become a flashpoint between local Ukrainian residents and visitors, with a scuffle breaking out between residents, local authorities and pilgrims earlier on Friday. Following Ukraine’s border closure, some pilgrims also found themselves stranded at Ukrainian airports on Friday.