Bernie Sanders has become the first U.S. senator to label Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a “genocide,” in an essay posted Wednesday to his Senate website.

“The intent is clear. The conclusion is inescapable: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza,” Sanders wrote.

The essay came the same day that another Jewish member of Vermont’s delegation in Congress, Rep. Becca Balint, published her own op-ed calling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.

“As the granddaughter of a man murdered in the Holocaust, it is not easy for me to say that,” Balint wrote in the Courier, a nonprofit outlet focused on democracy. “But the trauma of the Holocaust serves as a reminder of the power of speaking out.”

Sanders and Balint, both progressives, are the first Jews in Congress to use the “genocide” term, as the war in Gaza nears its two-year mark. Previously, Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib and Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene were the only members of Congress to have done so publicly.

Sanders, an independent who leads the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, is a longtime critic of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the far-right ministers he has empowered in his current government. Sanders introduced legislation to halt arms sales to Israel, but he also drew criticism from some of his allies for being relatively slow to call for an end to the war, and since doing so he had refrained from using language about genocide even as it became widely used among his followers.

In his essay, Sanders says Israel had the right to defend itself after Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, 2023, when it invaded southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 and taking 250 hostages. But he cites Israeli civil rights groups, a scholarly group and a United Nations panel that recently issued genocide pronouncements in saying that the war had gone beyond self-defense and become a campaign with the intent to harm the Palestinian people.

He also cites public comments throughout the war by Israeli leaders that he says provides evidence of intent, required under the legal definition of genocide.

Israel rejects the allegation, saying that it is only trying to dismantle Hamas and noting that if it wanted to kill more Palestinians, it could have. Critics have also argued that both the scholarly group and U.N. panel cited by Sanders and Balint are starkly biased against Israel, and hundreds of genocide and Holocaust experts have called on the scholars’ group to retract its resolution.

Sanders nods to the critics in his essay. “I recognize that many people may disagree with this conclusion,” he says. “The truth is, whether you call it genocide or ethnic cleansing or mass atrocities or war crimes, the path forward is clear. We, as Americans, must end our complicity in the slaughter of the Palestinian people.”

He also notes that “this issue goes beyond Israel and Palestine” at a time when “hatred, racism and divisiveness are on the rise.” Upholding the rule of law around what happens in wars is essential, he writes.

“The very term genocide is a reminder of what can happen if we fail. That word emerged from the Holocaust — the murder of six million Jews — one of the darkest chapters in human history,” Sanders writes. “Make no mistake. If there is no accountability for Netanyahu and his fellow war criminals, other demagogues will do the same. History demands that the world act with one voice to say: enough is enough. No more genocide.”

In her essay, Balint wrote that she believes too much attention to the term is misplaced. “I don’t think it’s useful to fixate on getting other leaders to use the specific word ‘genocide,'” she wrote. “Many Americans do see the profound suffering that Israel is causing but are hesitant to use the label because many Jews still live with the trauma of the Holocaust. More important than the word itself is that we change the conversation and change our policy. That’s what Americans want.”

Jerry Greenfield, one of two founders of the iconic progressive ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s, has stepped down citing political pressure from the brand’s parent company, Unilever.

The Ben & Jerry’s brand has clashed with Unilever over Israel in recent years, and Greenfield’s co-founder Ben Cohen has been a vocal critic of Israel’s war in Gaza. But Greenfield’s resignation letter, which Cohen posted to social media, does not mention Israel issues at all. Instead, it cites domestic political issues on which Greenfield said Ben & Jerry’s had been “silenced.”

In the letter, Greenfield writes that a guarantee of political independence was the bedrock of his agreement to sell to Unilever two decades ago.

“It’s profoundly disappointing to come to the conclusion that that independence … is gone,” he wrote. “And it’s happening at a time when our country’s current administration is attacking civil rights, voting rights, the rights of immigrants, women, and the LGBTQ community.”

He said he felt he had no choice but to step aside. “Standing up for the values of justice, equity, and our shared humanity has never been more important, and yet Ben & Jerry’s has been silenced, sidelined for fear of upsetting those in power,” Greenfield wrote. He later added, “If I can’t carry those values forward inside the company today, then I will carry them forward outside, with all the love and conviction I can.”

The surprise announcement follows years of tension between Ben & Jerry’s and Unilever, which started in 2021 when the company board announced that they no longer wanted to sell ice cream in “occupied Palestinian territory.” The move — which Cohen and Greenfield endorsed in a New York Times op-ed in which they noted that they were “Jewish supporters of Israel” — touched off a years-long legal battle that ended with its Israeli brand splitting off and being sold to a different entity that continued to do business in the West Bank.

Greenfield has since been quiet on Israel issues compared to Cohen and the company itself. In March, Unilever removed the company’s CEO (who was neither Ben nor Jerry) over what both parties agreed was pro-Palestinian activity — including planned donations to the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace and social media posts calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of pro-Palestinian protest leader Mahmoud Khalil. 

In May, the Ben & Jerry’s board called Israel’s military campaign in Gaza a “genocide.” In July, Unilever cut off funding to the company’s charitable foundation. Unilever has also moved ahead with plans to spin off the brand into a separate venture, a move Cohen has publicly attempted to head off.

Unilever also reportedly took issue with planned company stances opposing President Donald Trump and celebrating Black History Month.

The spun-off venture, Magnum Ice Cream Company, said in a statement on Greenfield’s resignation that it “disagrees with Greenfield’s perspective and has sought to engage both co-founders in a constructive conversation on how to strengthen Ben & Jerry’s powerful values-based position in the world.”

Cohen and Greenfield’s role at Ben & Jerry’s had become largely ceremonial since the Unilever sale, though they still attended numerous meetings and store openings and functioned as jovial mascots. They have also served as company figureheads on political matters.

In recent months, prior to Greenfield’s resignation, Cohen was arrested on Capitol Hill while demonstrating against the Gaza war and sat down for a solo interview with Tucker Carlson, another vocal opponent of the war. A spokesperson for Cohen told the Wall Street Journal that he would remain in his role at Ben & Jerry’s.

For the first time, Cohen will occupy that role without his business partner of 48 years.

“From the very beginning, Ben and I believed that our values and the pursuit of justice were more important than the company itself,” Greenfield wrote. “If the company couldn’t stand up for the things we believed, then it wasn’t worth being a company at all.”

Earlier this year, the National Endowment for the Humanities was shedding staff and canceling hundreds of grants to the museums, libraries and scholars that have traditionally relied on federal funding to help Americans engage with history, culture and ideas.

The Trump administration said the agency was a waste of taxpayer money and suggested eliminating it entirely.

By August, however, the NEH was announcing new awards, including its largest one ever: $10 million to the University of Virginia for a project tied to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026. In its 60-year history, NEH had rarely given more than a few hundred thousand dollars to any single project.

That record lasted just six weeks. On Monday, the NEH announced an even larger, $10.4 million grant for a nationwide “Jewish Civilization Project” aimed at combating antisemitism. The group behind the project is Tikvah, a New York-based think tank and education center dedicated to advancing “Jewish excellence and Western civilization.”

Tikvah, which means “hope” in Hebrew, is identified with the conservative movement in American politics. Right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, Free Press co-founder Bari Weiss, and ex-GOP strategist turned pro-Israel author Dan Senor are slated to receive awards at its upcoming conference. Among the prominent alumni of Tikvah’s programs is Jacob Reses, chief of staff to Vice President J.D. Vance. 

In Israeli politics, Tikvah is associated with its Conservatism Conference, and with the Kohelet Policy Forum, the intellectual force behind controversial efforts to curb the power of Israel’s judiciary. Kohelet’s founder, Moshe Koppel, serves on Tikvah’s board. The group is also known for helping Benjamin Netanyahu publish his autobiography during his most recent campaign for office in 2022.

But Tikvah’s reach and influence extend well beyond the right. Its education programs have been taken up by a wide array of Jewish schools. Last year, it launched Emet Classical Academy, a selective Jewish day school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that emphasizes “the great intellectual history of the West.” The school opened with about 40 students and offers Latin and Greek alongside Hebrew and Jewish studies. 

According to the NEH, the new project will create K-12 curricula, university courses, fellowships for students and journalists, a slate of public programs and a series of scholarly books that emphasize Jewish contributions to Western and American civilization.

The initiative is designed to trace Jewish civilization across time, from ancient scripture to modern culture. It will highlight the Bible and the Talmud alongside Jewish contributions in literature, art and philosophy, while taking up themes such as Zionism’s development, the role of Jewish ideas in shaping Western democracy, and the dilemmas Jews face today.

Tikvah CEO Eric Cohen called the grant “an ambitious educational project” that answers “the perverse ideology of anti-Semitism with the enduring majesty of Jewish civilization.” 

In an interview, Cohen said the NEH invited Tikvah to apply and that the proposal then went through “multiple rounds of rigorous review” with staff and outside experts before approval. He declined to say who issued the invitation, adding that NEH should “speak for their own processes.” The NEH did not respond to a request for comment.

The NEH’s press release frames the project as part of a broader push to fight antisemitism through the humanities. “While it is essential to combat the rise of anti-Semitism in the political and legal arenas, the humanities also have a vital role to play in this fight,” the agency’s acting chair Michael McDonald said. 

McDonald also linked the grant to one of the new priorities outlined by the agency earlier this year: the promotion of American exceptionalism. He said the project would demonstrate that “the sinister and hate-filled attacks on Jewish people that we have been witnessing on American campuses and streets are, at a deeper level, also attacks on the very foundations that have made the United States the exceptional nation that it is.”

The unprecedented award for Tikvah comes amid a period of dramatic growth for the organization. Cohen noted that Tikvah’s U.S. program budget grew from roughly $19.3 million in 2024 to a pre-NEH 2025 budget of $24.5 million, and said the grant will accelerate, not initiate, expansion. 

The award also comes months after the NEH terminated grants for dozens of Jewish programs, as part of the cuts mandated by the White House. The Klezmer Institute lost its federal funding for an archive of klezmer compositions. Translators working on Yiddish women’s writing, Ukrainian-Jewish poetry and Soviet Holocaust literature were told their support was ending. A Psalms project at Duke Divinity School was canceled along with hundreds of others. Many recipients said they learned of the cuts from form letters stating that their projects no longer fit “the President’s agenda.”

Writing at the time, historian Pamela Nadell attempted to take stock of what could be lost due to the cuts. She noted that her own forthcoming book, tracing the history of antisemitism in the United States, received NEH funding and lamented the Jewish stories that won’t be told absent public funding. 

“This history is more essential than ever today to counter the rising tide of antisemitism in this nation,” she wrote. 

Asked to comment on the Tikvah announcement, she invoked the story of a 19th-century Jewish movement called Wissenschaft des Judentums, a German name meaning the scientific study of Judaism.

“Two hundred years ago in Germany, a group of young Jews also planned to educate the world about Jewish civilization to eradicate Jew hatred,” she said. “That they and those who followed them with similar proposals failed does not bode well for mitigating antisemitism with Tikvah’s ‘Jewish Civilization Project.’”

For many scholars in the field of Jewish studies who had seen the funding slashed, it felt that the grant to Tikvah came at the expense of their own work. 

“Every Jewish Studies colleague I know who had an NEH grant saw their funding cut earlier this year. Now we know where the money went,” Samuel Brody, a professor of religion at the University of Kansas, wrote in a post on Bluesky. 

Cohen declined to address the cuts, saying he was focused on his own project and humbled by the award to Tikvah. 

“The NEH clearly felt that our distinctive approach and our educational capabilities are much needed in the current cultural moment,” he said, adding, “I’m excited about our approach. That’s where my focus is.”

Some are welcoming the break with the past. 

“The usual formula of diversity training and Holocaust education has not succeeded. The Tikvah Fund has a different approach. It believes that people should know something about the Jews beyond that others have tried to kill us,” said Elliot Kaufman, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board who participated in Tikvah educational programs as a student at Stanford, in an email.

Steve Mcguire, a conservative scholar and commentator on higher education, said the grant is important because it will allow Tikvah to offer university students something different from what they can get on campus. He believes that antisemitism spreads through the pervasive teaching of “anti-American and anti-Western ideologies.”

“We must give Americans, and especially American students, opportunities to learn about the great history of Jewish ideas and the contributions those ideas, and Jewish people, have made to America and Western civilization,” he said in an email. “True education can be a powerful antidote to the stunted ideological perspectives that too many students hear.”

Others say they see the award as evidence of favoritism and the politicization of federal funding for the humanities.

Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah, a left-wing Jewish advocacy group, said the grant elevates a group that is not representative of the majority of American Jews, while sidelining other Jewish initiatives. 

“Tikvah has a long history of pushing conservative ideas into American Jewish spaces, presenting them as Jewish ideas, when these are really ideas that are coming out of the either secular or Christian right-wing world,” Jacobs said in an interview.

She argues that the Trump administration’s commitment to fighting antisemitism is insincere and instead advances an authoritarian agenda, using the grant to enlist Tikvah in the effort.

“The Trump administration is saying, we are giving money to the Jewish think tank that is going to support us in our goals of undermining democracy and liberal democratic institutions and feminism and diversity and pluralism,” Jacobs. 

Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, argued that the grant should be understood as part of a broader authoritarian attempt to reshape education that some Jews have acquiesced to at their own peril. 

“Authoritarians cannot win in a free marketplace of ideas in a healthy liberal democracy,” he wrote in a new essay. “Their methods – to coerce, to deceive, to violate norms, or to inflame populist sentiment – are a confession of their weakness. This is the real story of the Trump administration’s approach to remaking education in America in its own ideological image, a battle it cannot win on the merits.”

Asked to respond to the criticism, Cohen insisted the project is rooted in traditional humanistic study and rejected the idea that it promotes a narrow ideological aim of the right. 

“The categories of my critics are not of interest to me. What’s of interest to me is Jewish civilization,” he said. “The best response to them is the seriousness of the work that we do and  the intellectual and educational mission of the institution.”

In an email, he also shared an excerpt from Tikvah’s grant proposal, an elaboration of the argument that the best antidote to antisemitism is the illumination of Jewish contributions to Western history. 

“My answer to the critics: come learn with us,” he wrote.

The European Commission Wednesday proposed plans for the European Union to impose harsh sanctions on Israeli officials and suspend a trade arrangement with the country to urge them to change course on the war in Gaza.

While the measures currently do not have enough support from EU member nations to pass, including from Germany which said it wants to keep communication with Israel open, the proposed measures mark a major policy shift for the bloc.

The measures were proposed by Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, as Israel has launched a major ground operation in Gaza City, causing many of the city’s roughly 1 million Palestinian residents to flee en masse.

“Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza will make an already desperate situation even worse,” said Kallas in a post on X. “Suspending trade concessions and imposing sanctions on extremist ministers and violent settlers would clearly signal that the EU demands an end to this war.”

The suspension of Israel’s trade agreement with the European Union would impose tariffs on about $6.87 billion of Israeli exports. Additionally, around $37.5 million in bilateral funds controlled by the European Commission would be immediately suspended as part of the plan.

Kallas also urged the EU’s 27 member nations to impose sanctions on 10 Hamas leaders, “violent” Israeli settlers and far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

Kallas stipulated during a news conference in Brussels that the proposed measures were intended “not to punish Israel,” but rather to “improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who has come under fire from some EU leaders and political groups for her lack of strong action against Israel over its offensive in Gaza, noted that the measures were designed not to affect “Israeli civil society or Yad Vashem,” Israel’s Holocaust memorial.

The announcement of the proposal drew strong condemnation from Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who called them “morally and politically distorted” in a post on X, adding that “steps against Israel will be answered accordingly, and we hope we will not be required to take them.”

“Moves against Israel will harm Europe’s own interests,” Sa’ar continued. “Israel will continue to struggle, with the help of its friends in Europe, against attempts to harm it while it is in the midst of an existential war.”

On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged at a conference in Jerusalem that Israel faces a “sort of isolation” over its prosecution of the war in Gaza, and urged greater self-reliance.

“We’ll need to develop our weapons industry. We’re going to be Athens and super Sparta combined. We have no choice, at least for the coming years when we’ll be required to deal with these isolation attempts,” he said.

A rare 15th-century Portuguese Jewish manuscript, long incomplete after it was split into three parts, is whole again after the National Library of Israel reunited its final missing pieces.

The Lisbon Mahzor, which contains Sephardic prayers for the High Holidays, Three Festivals and more, was produced by the Lisbon school of Portuguese Jewry in the final years before the region’s Jews were forced to either convert or be expelled in 1496.

“It appears that even in their most difficult moments the Portuguese Jewish community did not give up its books – they took these cultural treasures along to their next destination,” Chaim Neria, the curator of the National Library of Israel’s Haim and Hanna Solomon Judaica Collection, said in a statement.

The small-format manuscript on parchment features artistic decorations throughout, including lace and geometric and floral motifs typical of Portuguese manuscript illumination.

At an unknown point in time, the mahzor was split into three parts, with the first, containing Sabbath prayers, being delivered to the National Library of Israel in 1957.

The final two parts had been lost to history until they recently came up for auction and were withdrawn and purchased on behalf of the library due to their historical significance.

“That this treasure has ‘come home’ just at the time of Rosh Hashanah is especially meaningful, as the Jewish New Year is one of the most important liturgical moments in the Jewish calendar, a time of prayer, reflection, and renewal,” Neria said.

The three parts of the Lisbon Mahzor will now be digitized by the National Library of Israel for study and research, according to Neria.

While the auction price of the final parts of the Lisbon Mahzor were not public, in 2021, the 700-year-old Luzzatto Mahzor was sold at auction to an American Judaica collector for $8.3 million.

Speaking last week on Facebook, against the backdrop of his synagogue’s main sanctuary, Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz issued a blunt message about the New York City mayoral race: “The Mamdani policy initiatives will destroy New York City.”

In the face of what he views as an imminent “catastrophe” if mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani is elected, Steinmetz believes the candidate polling second, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, can win.

“The only way that we can beat Mamdani is if all of the registered voters show up at the polls,” he said in the video, which he posted on Facebook.

Steinmetz, who leads Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, a Modern Orthodox synagogue on the Upper East Side, said the video marked a sharp departure from his typical policy of avoiding politics in shul. And the change wasn’t because the Internal Revenue Service recently reversed a decades-long policy barring endorsements from the pulpit, he said.

“I’m generally against political endorsements, and I know that now it’s acceptable with the new IRS changes,” said Steinmetz. “However, to every rule, there is an exception.” Steinmetz added that he would also soon sign a letter of support for Cuomo alongside several other local rabbis, whom he declined to name.

Steinmetz is not the only New York City rabbi to be occupied by the looming mayoral election. A few have openly endorsed candidates, appearing with them at rallies. More of them are, like Steinmetz, wading into politics despite believing that it’s generally ill-advised to do so. Others say they are sticking to their non-partisan principles even as the election occupies and at times divides their communities. And some say that their congregants’ minds are so made up, there’s little reason for them to say anything at all.

“There’s so much alignment on this that there’s really no debate over this race in terms of who we are not voting for,” said Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, the co-founder and rebbetzin of The Altneu, an Orthodox synagogue on the Upper East Side. Referring to Mamdani, she said, “The community is very organized and committed to electing anyone else, anyone but him.”

Mamdani’s deep criticism of Israel and its actions in Gaza have made him toxic not only in Modern Orthodox spaces, which lean conservative, but also among other pro-Israel Jews in the city. While polls show that Mamdani enjoys substantial Jewish support, much of it comes from Jews who identify as secular.

Still, some congregational rabbis have come out as supporting him — at least in their personal capacity.

Rabbi Rachel Goldenberg, the founder of Malkhut, a progressive, non-denominational congregation in western Queens, was the only current pulpit holder among six rabbis who co-authored a July op-ed saying they support Mamdani.

“We believe that Jewish safety will not be secured by demanding unconditional support for Israel or imposing litmus tests on public officials around language. It will be secured through effective policy, education, solidarity, and shared struggle. That is what Mamdani offers,” they wrote.

Throughout the mayoral race, Goldenberg said some of her congregants had approached her to say that they were “concerned” about Mamdani’s relationship to the city’s Jews and to ask whether she shares their worries. She said that while she and Mamdani “are not identical in our Israel-Palestine politics,” she did not share those congregants’ fears.

“I definitely try to reassure folks that I do think that the stirring up of fears around antisemitism are really coming from vested interests in defeating him, using Jewish fear and using the real rise of antisemitism to sow distrust in a Muslim candidate for mayor,” Goldenberg said.

But she also said she did not consider her op-ed to be a rabbinic endorsement for her congregation.

“This statement that I made was one as a Jewish leader in New York City,” said Goldenberg. “I think it’s important for me to use my position and my voice in public to speak, and it’s my right to do that, but I don’t campaign and make endorsements as the rabbi of my community.”

The endorsement calculus changed this year with the revision of the IRS regulations. But at least in non-Orthodox congregations, there is “pretty universal rejection” of the new latitude, according to Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism. This week, his group along with the organizing bodies of the Conservative and Reconstructionist movements issued new guidelines for rabbis urging them not to endorse candidates.

The guidelines warned that endorsing political candidates could risk “undermining our leadership and dividing our community,” and that they could also open up the door for political coercion, including “threats or promises from donors, elected officials, or interest groups for backing a candidate or party.”

Some New York City rabbis cited those concerns in explaining why they did not plan to make an endorsement in the mayoral election.

“We will not turn our synagogue into a place for political campaigns, and we will not open the door to the possibility that members may seek to use their donations to influence elections,” Rabbi Roly Matalon of the non-denominational synagogue B’nai Jeshrun on the Upper West Side wrote in an email.

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, a Reform congregation on the Upper West Side, warned that the IRS ruling could cause politicians to be “tempted” to look at religious institutions as a source for funding and support, a dynamic he said would harm synagogues.

But Hirsch, who leads a Zionist organization within the Reform movement, said he would not be sidestepping politics from the pulpit even as he will not endorse.

“No matter what the IRS says, even assuming that they permit now clergy to speak whatever it is they want to say about support for political candidates, we’re not going to do that here, but we will be very engaged in the political process, especially about clarifying what our understanding is of Jewish values and their implementation in the policy dimension,” he said.

Hirsch said that for his congregants, there were three main areas of concern about Mamdani: his lack of “considerable executive experience,” his socialist policies and his “hostility to Israel.” But he suggested that his congregants did not all hold a single view and added that rabbis risk compromising their moral authority when they wade too deeply into partisan politics.

“When it comes to preferences for political candidates, every Jewish broad-based institution, generally, but especially in the American Jewish community, there’s a diverse spectrum of opinions,” he said. “As spokespeople for religious values … it diminishes us if we are perceived as being in a partisan camp.”

For some rabbis, neither the heated race nor the changes in IRS rules will get them to change their longstanding policies. Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of the Upper West Side Conservative synagogue Ansche Chesed said endorsing candidates would be an “inappropriate use of my rabbinic role.”

Others have engaged in a delicate balancing act. Rabbi Kyle Savitch, the founder of Kehilat Harlem, a non-denominational congregation in Harlem founded in 2017, said he has spoken openly with congregants about the mayoral election and, ahead of the primary in June, encouraged them to rank neither Mamdani or Cuomo.

“The most political I got was encouraging people to take advantage of the ranked choice voting system,” he said. “It was relatively clear that the two main candidates were Cuomo and Mamdani, and that I was encouraging people to take advantage of ranked choice voting, to choose neither.”

For the general election, Savitch is not making his preference known, though he said he reached out to Mamdani’s campaign to try to get a “firm statement on antisemitism” from the candidate. He didn’t receive a response.

“I have had conversations one-on-one with folks, with a lot of folks,” Savitch said. “I won’t say who I’m voting for or endorse anyone, but I will kind of talk openly about all the candidates and my feelings and thoughts and concerns, and listen to their feelings, thoughts and concerns also.”

Jacobs emphasized that rabbis should absolutely engage with their congregants on the issues and ideas that matter to each of them.

“If you’re a rabbi, you know how to talk about the issues of the day and the values that are most important to people,” said Jacobs. “You don’t need to mention a candidate or a name to be talking about the most important issues, but I think our job is to get deeper than the current pain going on on any given question or any race.”

But sliding too much into politics can take a toll, Chizhik-Goldschmidt said.

“We try to avoid political discussion here as much as possible, and I think that’s necessary for many congregants’ mental health,” said Chizhik-Goldschmidt. “I think it is different for a rabbi to post on their personal social media, for example, about politics. It’s different from hearing it from the physical pulpit.”

With seven weeks to go before the election and many opportunities on the way for rabbis to address their congregants — the High Holidays begin next week with Rosh Hashanah — it’s possible that more New York City rabbis will take a stand. Of the 40 rabbis of varying denominations across the city asked for comment for this story, most did not respond.

Some of the rabbis reached left open the possibility of a future endorsement. Rabbi Jonathan Glass, the leader of the Orthodox Tribeca Synagogue, and Rabbi Paula Feldstein, the leader of the Reform Hebrew Tabernacle of Washington Heights, each said they would not be endorsing a candidate “at this time.”

It’s not clear how much difference any rabbinical endorsements will make, particularly if Mayor Eric Adams drops out as his campaign has signaled he could. Steinmetz conceded that at Kehillat Jeshurun, there’s not really anyone for him to sway in a head-to-head matchup.

“In my congregation, this is so obvious, I don’t need to endorse Cuomo,” he said in an interview. “I think everyone knows everyone is voting for Cuomo, or almost everyone, but no one is voting for Mamdani, and so it’s really unnecessary.”

Still, Steinmetz felt a need to take a public stand.

“The specter of having a mayor of New York — the single city in the world with the largest Jewish population — be someone who is committed to the destruction of the State of Israel, who accuses Israel of genocide and threatens to arrest the prime minister of Israel if they come visit, I think that would be a catastrophe,” said Steinmetz. “And even though one should have a rule not to get involved in politics, that is not a rule that applies when something this awful can occur.”

This piece first ran as part of The Countdown, our daily newsletter rounding up all the developments in the New York City mayor’s race. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. There are 48 days to the election.

🤔 What to do about Netanyahu?

• Gov. Kathy Hochul may have endorsed Zohran Mamdani this week, but she’s not backing his pledge to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu upon visiting New York City.

• “I disagree with that,” Hochul told reporters on Tuesday. “And I also do not believe the mayor of New York or the NYPD have the legal authority to do so.”

• Andrew Cuomo, the former governor seeking to defeat Mamdani as an independent, also slammed the threat against Netanyahu, which Mamdani says is needed so the city “stands up for international law.”

• “That’s weaponizing the justice system,” Cuomo said at a press conference yesterday, according to Politico. “I don’t like you politically. I’m going to arrest you. That’s illegal, unconstitutional, anti-American, and it is the exact thing that we complain that the federal government does.” He added, “A mayor doesn’t do American foreign policy.”

• Cuomo called for an end to the war in Gaza in a New York Times interview this week. But he reiterated his “100% pro-Israel” position yesterday, calling himself “the most aggressive governor in the country on behalf of Israel.”

• Meanwhile, New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik introduced a bill yesterday to block any attempt by Mamdani to arrest Netanyahu. Her Sovereign Enforcement Integrity Act seeks to stop state and local law enforcement “from arresting foreign nationals within the United States solely on the basis of an indictment, warrant, or request issued by the International Criminal Court.” The United States is not party to the pact that created the court.

📊 Numbers to know

• Mamdani is dominating the race in yet another poll by Marist, which has him winning 45% of likely voters — 21 points ahead of Cuomo, his closest competitor.

• Mamdani and Cuomo are tied for Jews in this survey, with both winning 35% of Jewish voters. Mayor Eric Adams lagged behind with 17% and Republican Curtis Sliwa won 11% of Jewish voters.

• In a hypothetical head-to-head match between Mamdani and Cuomo, Cuomo would win 56% of Jews to Mamdani’s 37%, according to the poll. But Mamdani would still win the election with 47% to Cuomo’s 39% of registered voters.

• Several other recent polls have predicted Mamdani winning a plurality of Jewish voters without a majority.

• The Marist Poll of 1,470 people between Sept. 8-11 has a 4.1% error margin. Jews made up 15% of the likely voter sample.

💰 Following the money

• Ronald Lauder, a pro-Israel activist and billionaire cosmetics heir, donated $750,000 to a super PAC boosting Cuomo. It’s the group’s largest contribution since the mayoral primary, when it spent $20 million on Cuomo’s unsuccessful campaign.

• Lauder is a prominent art collector and Museum of Modern Art trustee. His brother Leonard Lauder, who died in June, had a $400 million collection that was secured by Sotheby’s this week.

• Though Adams’ chances of remaining mayor appear to be near zero, the independent spending group Empower NYC has raised nearly $1.5 million for his reelection campaign — mainly from real estate megadonors, reported The City.

🏆 Endorsement tracker

• Some New York Democrats who have resisted endorsing Mamdani are lining up behind him — starting with Carl Heastie, the state Assembly Speaker, who is expected to announce his support this morning, per Politico.

• Rep. Yvette Clarke of Brooklyn is also set to endorse Mamdani on Monday, according to New York Times reporter Annie Karni.

• And state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli endorsed Mamdani yesterday, albeit with reservations. He told Politico that he respected the choice of New York City’s primary voters, adding, “Though Assemblyman Mamdani and I have some serious differences on certain policies, I look forward to working with him to help New York City succeed and thrive.”

In the hallways of New York’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the story was told as a punchline: the great Yiddish dictionary project that took 25 years and never got beyond the first letter of the alphabet, aleph. 

Composer Alex Weiser and librettist Ben Kaplan, both longtime YIVO staffers, heard the tale so often that it seemed like lore. Then they dug deeper — and found an epic.

The result is “The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language,” an original chamber opera premiering this week as part of YIVO’s centennial celebration. Featuring music by Weiser, a 2020 Pulitzer Prize finalist for an album of Yiddish and English song, and a libretto by Kaplan, YIVO’s director of education, the work dramatizes the extraordinary, and unfinished, post-Holocaust effort to create the definitive Yiddish dictionary.

“We’d heard the joke version — two Jews, three opinions, they couldn’t even make a dictionary,” Kaplan recalled. “But the real story is so much more powerful. These were Holocaust survivors and émigré scholars in New York, racing against time to salvage a civilization through its words.”

At the opera’s heart is Yudel Mark (1897-1975), the dictionary’s indefatigable editor, who in the piece is cast as a visionary. His foil is Max Weinreich (1894-1969), YIVO’s legendary director, a gatekeeper who demanded adherence to YIVO’s standardized spelling rules and kept one eye on budgets and deadlines. 

“Mark is the prophet, Weinreich is the priest,” said Weiser, citing a classic essay by the Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am that contrasts the uncompromising idealist with the enforcer of tradition.

Mark worked in the 1950s out of a small office at YIVO’s mid-century headquarters on Fifth Avenue and later in Jerusalem. The four “aleph” volumes of the “Groyser verterbukh fun der yidisher shprakh” (“The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language”) appeared between 1961 and 1980. (The language has a plethora of words that start with aleph, as both a vowel sound and a silent letter.) After that — gornisht, as they say in Yiddish.

The volumes were published with a disclaimer from YIVO, which did not allow the use of the institute’s logo because of the orthography issue and other objections. 

“After Mark’s death, mismanagement and continuing scholarly disputes paralyzed the dictionary project,” Gennady Estraikh, a professor of Yiddish studies at NYU, writes in “The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.” The story of the dictionary is fleshed out in a doctoral dissertation that Weiser and Kaplan drew on, written by Leyzer Burko, a Yiddishist with a doctorate in modern Jewish studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

The opera dramatizes the Mark-Weinreich clash as more than academic squabbling. It is staged as a battle over memory itself. 

YIVO was founded in 1925 in Vilna, Lithuania as a hub for the academic study of East European Jewish life, language and culture. During World War II, much of its library was plundered by the Nazis, though portions were secretly hidden by the “Paper Brigade” of Jewish ghetto inmates. After the war, YIVO was reestablished in New York. At its current location at the Center for Jewish History on West 16th Street, it continues to preserve and study the legacy of Yiddish-speaking Jews while memorializing the lost.

As the opera opens, Mark is visited by three angels, performed by a trio of mezzo-sopranos, who embody three different forms of the letter aleph. They share a vision Weiser compares to the prophet Ezekiel’s valley of the dry bones. Instead of skeletons resurrected, it is a prophecy of words crumbling to dust — and revived through his dictionary. 

“It’s exactly what he thought he was doing: resurrecting the Jewish people through language,” Weiser said.

“Mark saw words as sparks,” added Kaplan. “Lose a word and you lose a piece of the Jewish soul. That symbolism cried out for opera, not just history.”

The score avoids klezmer clichés. “This is an argument happening in an academy, not at a wedding,” said Weiser. Instead, he draws on post-minimalism, biblical chant, incantatory motifs and, to this ear anyway, Stephen Sondheim at his most operatic. In the opening, the three Alephs sing in shifting heterophony, evoking divine prophecy. “I wanted people to feel the storminess of letters swirling into life,” he said.

The libretto is largely in English, but the Alephs sing in Yiddish — a subversive twist that the creators refined in conversation with one of their mentors, Israeli novelist Ruby Namdar. In Jewish tradition, Hebrew is lashon hakodesh, the holy tongue, as opposed to mere “vernaculars” like Yiddish. “Usually Yiddish is the language of the jokers and schleppers,” Kaplan said. “But for Mark, it was sacred. We made it the language of the heavenly realm.”

Workshops of the opera have already earned blessings from Yiddish scholars and even from Mark’s daughter and granddaughter. At one showing, cultural historian and Yiddishist David Roskies — who had known the two protagonists personally — declared, “I wasn’t just watching them. I was watching Hillel and Shammai,” referring to the rabbinic sages whose arguments are preserved in the Talmud.

For Weiser and Kaplan, both 36, the opera is also a personal act of homage. “In a way, it’s a love letter to YIVO,” said Kaplan. “We’re standing on the shoulders of giants, people who smuggled books past the Nazis, who saved treasures for us to work with today. You can’t repay that debt. You can only try to honor it and carry it forward.”

The premier performances of “The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language,” on Sept. 18  and Sept. 21 at 1:00 p.m. ET are sold out. Tickets are still available for a third performance on Sept. 21 at 4:00 p.m. The opera is presented by and at YIVO in collaboration with American Opera Projects, the League for Yiddish, the American Society for Jewish Music, and the Consulate General of the Republic of Lithuania in New York, and co-sponsored by Nusakh Vilne.

Israel’s culture minister says he will eliminate funding to the country’s version of the Oscars after a drama about a Palestinian boy won the top prize on Tuesday.

“The Sea” won the Ophir Award for best film during a ceremony in Tel Aviv where speakers condemned the ongoing war in Gaza and lamented the growing Hollywood boycott against Israeli film institutions. The Arabic-language drama becomes Israel’s automatic best international feature entry to next year’s Academy Awards.

It was produced with support from the Israel Film Fund, a public fund that is required to support artists without regard to their politics. A spokesperson for Film Workers for Palestine, the group behind the new boycott, told Variety this week that the Israel Film Fund meets its threshold for complicity.

The group’s pledge, which has drawn more than 4,500 signatures, names the Jerusalem Film Festival, where “The Sea” premiered in August, as among the institutions to boycott. It does not specifically name the Ophir Awards, but they have long benefitted from government funding.

Now, Culture Minister Miki Zohar says he will cut the Ophirs off starting next year, saying in a statement that the winning film “defames our heroic soldiers while they fight to protect us” and calling the awards ceremony “shameful.”

Speeches at the awards ceremony reportedly condemned the war, called attention to the Israeli hostages being held in Gaza and criticized both Zohar and the Hollywood boycott. One, a Palestinian Israeli star of “The Sea,” said via a written statement read aloud that Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza.

“During my tenure, the citizens of Israel will not pay out of their pockets for a disgraceful ceremony that spits on the heroic IDF soldiers,” Zohar said.

Directed by Shai Carmeli-Pollak, it tells the story of a boy from the West Bank who is denied a permit to visit Tel Aviv with his classmates and invites danger by setting out on his own instead. In his acceptance speech for best screenplay, Carmeli-Pollak read aloud a letter from a friend in Gaza who described going without food.

The best actor Ophir went to the movie’s 13-year-old star, Muhammad Gazawi, who said at the ceremony, “I wish for all the children of the world, everywhere, to have the same opportunity – to live and dream without wars.”

The festival’s director, Assaf Amir, said in a statement that he was pleased that “The Sea” would represent Israel at the Oscars, where no Israeli film has ever won best international feature. (Last year’s best documentary award went to “No Other Land,” a joint Israeli-Palestinian production about Israel’s treatment of West Bank Palestinians that also ignited scorn from Israeli government officials; this year’s documentary Ophir winner, “Letter to David,” is about the hostage David Cunio, himself a past film worker.)

“In the face of the Israeli government’s attacks on Israeli cinema and culture, and the calls from parts of the international film community to boycott us, the selection of ‘The Sea’ is a powerful and resounding response,” Amir said. “I am proud that an Arabic-language film, born of collaboration between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis, will represent Israel in the Oscar competition.”

To build up an exhibition marking a milestone birthday, Temple Emanu-El on Manhattan’s Upper East Side borrowed a portrait of one of its storied members from its regular home 20 blocks north.

“I am thrilled that for the first time, we have a loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Warren Klein, the director and curator of the synagogue’s Herbert and Eileen Bernard Museum of Judaica, said on Monday as he opened the exhibition focused on Jews in the Gilded Age, when the Reform congregation constructed its lavish building.

The portrait is of Frieda Warburg Schiff (1876-1958), philanthropist and the daughter of banker Jacob Schiff, one of the Jewish titans of the period of rapid economic growth in the United States, from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s.

Schiff was associated with Emanu-El, making her a fitting addition to the retrospective on how the venerable Reform congregation helped shape American Jewry, with a portion of the exhibit dedicated to its prominent members during the Gilded Age.

Founded in 1845 on the Lower East Side, Temple Emanu-El was the first Reform congregation in New York City. Though its beginnings were modest — the 37 founding members met in a rented room in a private home — it grew into one of the most influential synagogues in the United States. The congregation was an early adopter of mixed-gender seating and English-language prayer books, and also introduced the use of organ music during services. (Its organ, still in use today, is the largest synagogue organ in the world.)

“We could have done an exhibition just on our history,” Klein said, pointing to unique artifacts in the museum’s holdings, such as the first Jewish hymnal printed in the United States, created by the congregation’s third rabbi, Gustav Gottheil (1827-1903).

But he said the popular HBO series “The Gilded Age” was one of several indicators of broader interest, spurring the museum to widen the exhibition’s scope.

“Drawing upon the recent zeitgeist and interest in all things Gilded Age, why not look at some of the Jewish stories that are often overlooked in the mainstream narrative?” Klein said to a room of about 120 people during the opening reception.

The two-room exhibition features one room dedicated to the synagogue’s own history. Items on display include a machzor, or High Holiday prayer book, written by Emanu-El’s first rabbi, Leo Merzbacher (1809-1856), and a deed for a pew — an old-fashioned way of maintaining membership at a synagogue.

The second room takes a closer look at some of the synagogue’s wealthiest and most powerful member-families of the late 19th century. To set the stage, there’s a large-scale, “extremely simplified” family-and-business tree depicting New York Jewish families of the Gilded Age. Taken from Stephen Birmingham’s 1967 book “Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York,” the tree shows how “The 100” — the Jewish version of high society’s “The 400,” which included families like the Astors and the Vanderbilts but excluded Jews — preserved their wealth and status through marriage and joint business ventures.

In addition to the Schiff portrait, there is also an antisemitic political cartoon depicting banker Joseph Seligman, also an Emanu-El member, being denied entry from a hotel in Saratoga Springs by owner Henry Hilton. It is believed to be the first documented instance of antisemitism to be widely condemned in both the Jewish and secular press in the United States.

Also on view are items belonging to Isidor and Ida Straus, the wealthy Jewish couple who famously died together on the Titanic. (Isidor [1845-1912], an immigrant from Bavaria, started out in New York as a crockery vendor at R.H. Macy and Co.; eventually he and his brother, Nathan, owned the entire department store.) Though Ida’s body was never found, Isidor’s was — a watch fob engraved with his initials, which likely hung on his pocket watch, was recovered from the wreck and is on display, next to the couple’s marriage certificate and photos of the Straus family.

“I think it’s very surprising for people to know that there’s something in our museum that was on the Titanic,” Klein said. “I think there is a great weight to an object like that that survived such a disaster. The owner didn’t survive, but this is still in the family.”

After years of renting rooms on the Lower East Side, Temple Emanu-El bought its first building, a former Methodist church at 56 Chrystie St., in 1848. The congregation moved to East 12th Street in 1854; in 1868, it moved to 43rd Street and 5th Avenue, where it erected a grand Moorish Revival synagogue. The congregation has been at its current address at 1 East 65th St. — an architectural marvel that’s a mix of Romanesque Revival, Moorish Revival, Byzantine and art deco styles — since 1929, following a merger with nearby Temple Beth-El.

With some 2,500 member families today, Emanu-El is one of the largest synagogues in the world. It is still an influential congregation and is the spiritual home of dozens of prominent American Jewish families, including the Bloomingdale family, former CNN CEO Jeff Zucker and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The Bernard Museum of Judaica, located on the second floor of the synagogue, opened to the public in 1997. It hosts a permanent collection that includes stained-glass windows crafted by Louis Comfort Tiffany for the synagogue’s Brooklyn cemetery, historic Hanukkah lamps that date as far back as the 14th century, and various Torah ornaments and historic manuscripts.

Temple Emanu-El is also home to The Streicker Center, the congregation’s outreach and educational arm. Opened in 2016, the center hosts a wide variety of events, including book launches, Shabbat dinners and conversations with thought leaders such as Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan and Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“Emanu-El at 180” is on view at the Herbert and Eileen Bernard Museum of Judaica (1 East 65th St.) through May 17, 2026. Click here for more information.