When the Sarajevo Haggadah first went on permanent display at Bosnia’s national history museum in 2002, it was seen as a hopeful symbol for the future after a decade of ethnic strife.

Now, the museum has turned it into a different kind of symbol: for how criticism of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza is having collateral effects on Jews around the world.

The National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina announced on Friday that it would donate proceeds associated with the Passover haggadah, which dates to the 14th century, “for the purpose of helping Palestine.” The museum specified that it was allocating funds both from the sale of a book about the haggadah as well as ticket sales to the gallery where it is displayed.

“In this way, the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina provides support to the people of Palestine who are suffering from systematic, calculated and cold-blooded terror, directly by the state of Israel, and indirectly by all those who support and/or justify its shameless actions,” the museum said in a statement published on its website.

The museum’s statement went on to charge Israel with committing a “genocide” in Gaza.

“In a time when we cannot justify ourselves with a lack of information, any aversion, any feigned neutrality in the face of everyday examples of killing, starvation and forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians, primarily women and children, is an expression of acceptance and complicity in the genocide that we are all witnessing in real time,” it said.

The Bosnian government has taken a staunchly anti-Israel stance that has spilled over into trouble for Jews in the country in the past. In June, a federal minister successfully urged a Sarajevo hotel to cancel a convening of European rabbis on the grounds that hosting them would signal support for Israel.

The haggadah was written six centuries before Israel was founded and has never left the European continent. It was handwritten in Spain and brought to Sarajevo after the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in the late 15th century.

The museum’s announcement immediately elicited a sharp backlash from Jewish groups and leaders, including some that have played a role in the text’s preservation.

“The Sarajevo Haggadah, a symbol of Jewish resilience, survived the Inquisition, exile, and the Holocaust,” the American Jewish Committee said in a statement. “Now in Bosnia’s National Museum, its legacy is being tarnished by the museum’s decision to politicize the exhibit’s proceeds. By its recent actions, the museum disgraces itself and disrespects the generations of Jews who read from this Haggadah at their Seder tables.”

Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, lamented on X that the haggadah had been “reduced to a political prop” by the Bosnian government. “Can we get a philanthropist to buy it and preserve its dignity?” he asked.

In its only post on social media since announcing the donation plan, the museum lashed out at a Bosnian politician who supports Israel. On X, it noted criticism of its announcement by Milorad Dodik, a separatist politician who attended a controversial Israeli government convening of far-right leaders earlier this year while evading arrest at home.

“The greatest form of hostility toward a people is expressed by selling a replica of their treasured heritage in order to take a stance against their state,” Dodik had written on X.

A Bosnian court last week upheld a one-year sentence for Dodik for ignoring legal rulings, and on Wednesday he was removed from his role as president of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb entity within the Bosnian government.

The museum responded by noting that Dodik had used its official name, an apparent dig at his own nationalist ambitions, and cheekily invited him to visit to see how the museum was caring for the Sarajevo Haggadah. If he bought the accompanying book, it conceded, it would donate the proceeds not to the Palestinians but to printing a new version.

Bosnia is half Muslim, with Christians making up nearly all of the other half. It is home to an estimated 1,000 Jews who, like other minority ethnic groups, are legally barred from holding some political offices.

Nearly 2,000 prominent Jews around the United States and U.K. — and counting — have signed a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urging him to end the war in Gaza.

Coming amid a flurry of open statements to similar effect, the letter is notable because it has garnered signatures from influential Jewish voices with an extensive track record of donations to Israel, some of whom have not previously weighed in publicly on the nearly two-year-old war.

Among the signatories are Charles Bronfman, the Jewish Canadian-American billionaire philanthropist; the philanthropist Marcia Riklis; Dame Vivien Duffield, chairman of the Clore Foundation; and Trevor Chinn, the president of United Jewish Israel Appeal, a leading British Jewish charity that funds initiatives in Israel.

The letter is an initiative of a new liberal Zionist network called The London Initiative, founded earlier this year to “strengthen Israeli democracy, advance a fairer shared future for all citizens of Israel, revive hope in the prospects of achieving secure peace, and improve relations between all Israelis and world Jewry.”

The initiative is helmed by Mick Davis, a former CEO of the British Conservative Party, and Mike Prashker, the founder of Merchavim: The Institute for the Advancement of Shared Citizenship, in an effort to “to reverse the direction” of the State of Israel, Prashker, who lives in Israel, told eJewish Philanthropy at the time of the launch.

The letter, titled “A protest letter to PM Netanyahu from world Jewry,” outlines four requests for Netanyahu: to “permanently restore and enable the provision of food and humanitarian aid to the Gazan population; end the war; enforce the law in the West Bank; and commit that neither you nor any member of your government will again advocate policies of starvation or expulsion as weapons of war.”

The support for the letter underscores growing criticism of the Israeli government from Jewish communities in recent weeks amid allegations of widespread starvation in Gaza and reported plans by Netanyahu to further occupy the Palestinian enclave.

It focuses primarily on the harm to Israel and Jews of Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war and handling of widening violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank.

“We are under no illusions about the actions and intentions of Hamas, other extremist forces and the states that support them, and we acknowledge the painful dilemmas any Israeli government would face in addressing these threats,” the letter reads. “Yet we also cannot escape the fact that the policies and rhetoric of the government you lead are doing lasting damage to Israel, its standing in the world and the prospects of secure peace for all Israelis and Palestinians.” 

It continues: “This has severe consequences for Israel but also for the wellbeing, security and unity of Jewish communities around the world.”

Some of the letter’s signatories also signed onto a letter in early 2023 urging a halt to Netanyahu’s efforts to overhaul Israel’s judicial system, which they said would erode democracy in a state they had invested billions of dollars to strengthen.

The London Initiative declined to comment about the new letter, and the list of signatories has not yet been made public. A source close to the effort confirmed the number of signatories as of Tuesday afternoon as well as the identities of the prominent signers, whose names have been included in urgent appeals on social media. The appeals said organizers have set a deadline of Wednesday night to sign on.

Among those to endorse the letter on social media was Rabbi Marc Israel of Tikvat Israel Congregation in Rockville, Maryland. He wrote on Facebook that he saw it as an opportunity to weigh in constructively at a time when, he said, it feels like much of the criticism of Israel’s leadership comes with an attack on the Jewish state, too.

“I want to encourage those who have been looking to express concerns about certain Israeli government actions and statements without adding fuel to the fire of Israel’s enemies and the antisemitic anti-Zionist propaganda to consider signing-on,” the rabbi wrote.

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, arrived at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Churchwide Assembly last week with decades of experience building ties between the Lutheran and Jewish communities.

But on Wednesday, as Jacobs listened to attendees debate a memorial titled “Stand of Palestinian Rights and End to Occupation of Palestine,” Jacobs said he felt compelled to speak out over what he saw as a “one-sided” narrative.

He tore up the speech he planned to give the next day, instead telling the hundreds of Christians gathered in Phoenix that he had hoped for something different — and that the stakes were high.

“Friends, I fear that the resolution you affirmed last night will make our community less safe,” Jacobs told the assembly. “I feel it will embolden those who do not envision a peaceful future for Palestinians and Israelis.”

Jacobs said in an interview that he had been startled by how little the statement seemed to acknowledge calls for peace that have come from Jewish communities, including the Reform movement. In May, Jacobs was one of the first denominational Jewish leaders to urge Israel to abandon what he said was a policy of “starving Gazan civilians” in an op-ed for the Washington Post — previewing the collective outcry over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza that has galvanized sharp criticism of Israel in recent weeks.

“We have the largest movement in Jewish life, and we love Israel, and we work closely with the church, and we also care about the rights and dignity of Palestinians,” Jacobs said. “I felt like they just didn’t in any way acknowledge all of those things that are also true, and it made me sad, to be honest.”

Memorial D4, which the assembly passed, outlined a list of stances for the Lutheran Church, including that the office of the presiding bishop “petition U.S. leaders to recognize and act to end the genocide against Palestinians, halt military aid to Israel used in Gaza, and support Palestinian statehood and U.N. membership.”

Jacobs said he was startled by how little the perspectives of Israelis and Jews were reflected in the statement. He brought his concerns to the church’s presiding bishop, Rev. Elizabeth Eaton, who invited him to formulate a response.

“There are some specific references to Israel in D4 but I felt like the empathy was entirely to the Palestinian narrative, which on one level I can understand,” said Jacobs. “But there really is a deep relationship of the church and Jewish communities locally, and I felt it from the senior leadership of the church, especially Bishop Eaton.”

The war in Gaza has caused some longstanding interfaith alliances to fray, as progressive churches and clergy were in some cases quick to condemn Israel’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and sharply judgmental of those who did not share their perspective.

But Eaton, Jacobs said, was receptive to his concerns, telling him to “take the time you need” to think about how to broach them.

That night, he revised his speech, and on Thursday, he took his qualms to the lectern — rebuking the assembled crowd.

“It is possible to strongly support the State of Israel and at the very same time to fight for the dignity and rights of Palestinians,” he said in his remarks. “Last night, I was hoping to hear more of that kind of ‘both and’ thinking, but I didn’t.”

Jacobs then cited the violent attacks on Jewish gatherings in recent months, including the deadly shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers at an event in Washington, D.C. and the deadly firebombing attack on a group of demonstrators drawing attention to the remaining hostages in Gaza in Boulder, Colorado.

He also recounted several moments of unity between him and the Lutheran community, including one instance during the second intifada, a Palestinian uprising from 2000 to 2005 that was marked by a series of suicide bombings, in which Rev. Munib Younan, the bishop emeritus of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land, drove Jacobs home for his safety.

And he emphasized that he and many liberal Jews share some if not all of the beliefs underlying the approved statement.

“We share your commitment to a free Palestine, free of tyranny and exploitation by Hamas and free of Israel’s occupation,” he said. He also spoke about the murder of Vivian Silver, the founder and leader of Women Wage Peace, an Israeli organization that supports a peace agreement with Palestinians, on Oct. 7.

“The brutal massacre on Oct. 7 included extraordinary people like Vivian,” said Jacobs. “It was as if Hamas was trying to murder not only people, but also the possibility for coexistence, and we, dear church, we must not allow them to kill the hope for a better tomorrow.”

In the conclusion of his address, Jacobs urged the Lutheran community to continue “working together” with the Jewish community, emphasizing a shared commitment to “bringing peace everywhere, everywhere and especially in the Middle East.”

“Challenges facing our faith communities and our nation can feel overwhelming, but facing them together gives us the possibility of transforming for good the tide of hate, demonization and anti-democratic attacks that threaten our freedom, our lives and our future,” he said in the speech. “But working together, oh yes, working together, we can and we will overcome.”

At the end of his remarks, Jacobs was met by a standing ovation, which he said left him feeling “very embraced and supported.”

Jacobs told JTA that he felt his strategy of confronting the assembly over his concerns in real-time was “successful,” and he hoped that “what I planted were seeds of deeper relationship.” He said he didn’t necessarily see his audience as just the Lutherans in the room.

“I’m not naive. I don’t think one talk and one gathering changes everything, or maybe changes most things,” he said. “But I want it to be appreciated, and I want my clergy colleagues, particularly my Jewish leader colleagues, to realize that you don’t have to agree with a community on every point to work with them and to find ways to be in community with them.”

There are many ways to decide where to eat in NYC. You can look up reviews on Google, get recommendations from friends and critics, or just walk into the new place next door.

And now, there’s a website that can help you choose where to grab a meal based on a new metric: how attractive its customers are.

LooksMapping, a website created by a San Francisco-based programmer, helps its users “see which restaurants have the most attractive diners — according to AI!” as its tagline goes. Riley Walz, 22, created the site by using artificial intelligence to scrape data from some 2.8 million Google Maps reviews. LooksMapping then uses the information to rate some 9,800 restaurants in New York — as well as in Los Angeles and San Francisco — across three values: from hot to not, young to old and ratio of female to male customers.

Naturally, when the New York Jewish Week found out about this website, we immediately typed in the names of a bunch of Jewish, Israeli and kosher restaurants to see what LooksMapping had to say about how hot the customers are at some of the city’s best-known Jewish establishments.

The results were rather mixed. Some Jewish restaurants, like the famous Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side, garnered an 8.1 rating out of 10 — and is therefore an undeniably “hot” spot. But most of the Jewish restaurants on LooksMapping seem to fall into a 5-6 range on the 10-point scale, and no Jewish restaurant made it to the tippy-top of the list, where East Village spots like Salma, a Lebanese restaurant, and 11 Tigers, a Thai spot, both received a 10/10. 

The list is not comprehensive. Only Manhattan restaurants have been “looksmapped,” and many well-known spots weren’t included, such as popular SoHo Israeli restaurant 12 Chairs and the iconic 2nd Avenue Deli.

Some observers have criticized the website for its racial bias. In the world of LooksMapping, a red marker means hot, a white marker is neutral, and a blue mark means not hot — and critics have pointed out that many of the “blue” restaurants appear in lower income, more racially diverse neighborhoods uptown.

Speaking to The New York Times last month, Walz noted that the data scraper is not necessarily precise, calling the way the AI model scored attractiveness was “admittedly a bit janky.” 

“It’s making fun of AI,” Walz added. “One of the ugliest restaurants is a country club.”

The website acknowledges its jankiness. “The model is certainly biased,” it reads. “It’s certainly flawed. But we judge places by the people who go there. We always have. And are we not also flawed? This website just puts reductive numbers on the superficial calculations we make every day. A mirror held up to our collective vanity.”

If you’re looking to grab a meal at a Jewish restaurant among a bunch of hotties — or not — take a look at some of the results in the Big Apple, below, from most hot to the least.

Essex: 9.9/10

124 Rivington St., Lower East Side

This Lower East Side eatery is located in the former home of Schapiro’s Winery, which was the city’s last kosher winery as well as a former bootleg alcohol operation during the Prohibition.

The contemporary restaurant, which pays tribute to its Jewish history on its website, also boasts late-night parties with DJs, happy hour specials, bottomless brunch and, according to LooksMapping, some of the hottest diners you can find in the city.

Katz’s Deli 8.1/10

205 East Houston St., Lower East Side

There’s nothing better than a pastrami sandwich from Katz’s — except, maybe, eating it in the company of a particularly good-looking crowd.

Founded in 1888, the famed deli is known for many things: their pricey but gravity-defying sandwiches; their World War II-era slogan, “Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army,” and that scene in “When Harry Met Sally.” Katz’s Deli aired its first-ever commercial last fall, created by “New York Nico” Nick Heller, and featuring Dave Roffe of lifestyle brand Old Jewish Men.

Long lines outside of Katz’s provide ample opportunity to mix and mingle, if that’s your cup of tea — I mean, Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda.

Miznon: 7.3/10

435 West 15th St., Chelsea

Israeli celebrity chef Eyal Shani’s opened his first restaurant in New York as a Chelsea Market outpost of his fast-casual pita chain, Miznon. The eatery quickly became a popular spot, known for its whole roasted cauliflower.

Since opening Miznon in 2018, Shani has gone on to open several restaurants in the city, including the Michelin-starred Shmoné, kosher spot Malka on the Upper West Side and in Brooklyn, and three additional Miznon locations.

In January 2024, Miznon’s Times Square location became kosher. So far, the only Shani spot on LooksMapping is the original Miznon in Chelsea. With a rating of 7.3 out of 10, this Miznon may not be kosher certified, but it’s definitely hottie certified!

UN Plaza Grill: 6.4/10

845 United Nations Plaza, Midtown East

International relations is the theme of the UN Plaza Grill, a well-reviewed kosher steakhouse that also serves Japanese cuisine.

Opened in 2017 as “kind of a hobby” by businessman Albert Gad, UN Plaza Grill is located on the ground floor of Gad’s former apartment building. After years of ordering sushi from a restaurant on the ground floor, Gad was disheartened when the restaurant went out of business — and was inspired to open his own kosher restaurant there. (Gad moved to Miami during the COVID pandemic in 2020, and the restaurant’s culinary director, Inés Chattas, who is also based in Miami, flies in to New York every few weeks to check in on the kitchen.)

As for the diners here, with a 6.4 rating, they’re apparently hotter than average.

Russ & Daughters Café: 4.7/10

27 Orchard St., Lower East Side

Ranking just below average in hotness is Russ & Daughters Café, the sit-down restaurant that opened in 2014 as an offshoot of the historic appetizing spot Russ & Daughters on Houston Street.

Named for founder Joel Russ and his three daughters — Hattie, Ida and Anne — Russ & Daughters, which opened in 1914, was the first business in the United States to have “& Daughters” as part of its name. The business is now run by fourth-generation owners and cousins Josh Russ Tupper and Niki Russ Federman.

Russ & Daughters Café doesn’t take reservations and doesn’t do takeout. There may be a wait, but with iconic old-school dishes like “schmaltz and a shot,” we think it’s worth it — even if the other customers aren’t ranked among the hottest of the hot. While you wait, there’s plenty of other Jewish businesses on Orchard Street to explore.

Tsion Café: 4.2/10

763 St Nicholas Ave., Harlem

Sugar Hill’s Tsion Café, which opened in 2014, became certified kosher and vegan in early 2024. Owner Beejhy Barhany, who was featured in our 2024 36 to Watch, released her first cookbook in April, inspired by her Ethiopian-Israeli upbringing.

The slightly subterranean spot is the former home of Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, a famous Harlem eatery and jazz club that was frequented by Malcolm X and comedian Redd Foxx, where jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker Jr. washed dishes before his big break.

Despite this iconic history, Tsion Cafe’s hotness ranking is somewhat low. Nonetheless, we can confirm that the food here is both tasty and beautiful.

Chop Chop: 4/10

501 West 184th St., Washington Heights

Located across the street from Modern Orthodox flagship Yeshiva University, serves fast, pan-Asian food, with dishes like sushi, Mongolian beef and udon that draw on Chinese, Thai and Japanese cuisines.

While their LooksMapping review is low, Google Reviews, Yelp and TripAdvisor suggest the people who dine there do enjoy their meals, and with a two-mile free-delivery radius, it’s a great option for many kosher-keeping New Yorkers.

Deli Kasbah AKA Kasbah Grill: 3.9/10

251 West 85th St., Upper West Side

Kasbah Grill may not have a particularly high rating on LooksMapping, but it remains a popular spot for a variety of kosher meat dishes, including burgers, grilled meats, steaks and sandwiches.

Pro tip: If you give a d’var Torah — a short talk on the week’s Torah portion — to your server, the restaurant will give you a free dessert. Now that’s hot.

With additional reporting by Noa Yolkut

Six weeks after being released by federal detention, Mahmoud Khalil, the first student pro-Palestinian protest leader to be arrested by the Trump administration last spring, said concerns about antisemitism at Columbia University reflected a “manufactured hysteria.”

Khalil first made the allegation in a jailhouse letter in April, soon after he was detained by immigration authorities over his role in the university’s pro-Palestinian protests, which critics said were fueling antisemitism.

He repeated it in a wide-ranging interview with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein published on Tuesday. The interview appears to mark the most extensive public questioning that Khalil has faced about the allegations of antisemitic activity that made him a symbol of the Trump administration’s crackdown on colleges.

In the interview, Klein delved into Khalil’s arrest on March 10, which stemmed from allegations that he had fueled antisemitism on Columbia University’s campus, and subsequent 3-month detainment at an ICE detention center in Louisiana. In June, in Khalil’s first interview since he was released from federal detention, he told the New York Times that his detainment “felt like kidnapping.”

During the interview, Klein repeatedly invoked his Jewish identity, but when he brought up his personal experience with antisemitism and allegations of antisemitism at Columbia University, Khalil pushed back.

“Look, I’m Jewish. I don’t take antisemitism lightly. You should see my inbox. And it can be true that Jews can be unsafe, but the idea — it is real that there was antisemitism at Columbia, yet nobody there ended up as unsafe as you did,” said Klein.

“I would push back regarding antisemitism at Columbia. I would really push back on that,” replied Khalil, to which Klein responded, “There was none?”

“I wouldn’t say there was none. I would say there is this manufactured hysteria about antisemitism at Columbia because of the protests,” Khalil replied.

He added, “Proud Boys were at the doors of Columbia, the very right-wing group. And there are incidents here and there. But it’s not like antisemitism is happening at Columbia because of the Palestine movement.”

Khalil’s arrest in March by immigration authorities marked a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s campaign against antisemitism on college campuses. In its wake, several other non-citizen pro-Palestinian student protesters faced arrests and deportation efforts, prompting outcry and calls for due process, including from many Jewish groups.

Last month, Columbia, where Khalil earned a graduate degree, reached a $221 million dollar settlement with the federal government over antisemitism allegations. In June, the school released a report that found that nearly two thirds of its Jewish students reported not feeling accepted for their religious identity during the school year that included Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

“This is why I would always push back,” continued Khalil in his response to Klein’s invocation of antisemitism at Columbia. “I have a strong belief that antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism rise together. The incidents rise together because the same groups are perpetrating that in different ways.”

Khalil also defended the phrases “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which pro-Palestinian activists say are nonviolent but many Jews interpret as calls to violence. He also said that Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack violated international law because it targeted civilians but characterized it as inevitable.

Early in the interview, Klein asked Khalil whether he thought Hamas attacked Israel to provoke “some kind of war,” or whether he saw it “as something that needed to happen to break the equilibrium” in a conflict that had stagnated.

“It’s more the latter — just to break the cycle, to break that Palestinians are not being heard,” said Khalil. “And to me, it’s a desperate attempt to tell the world that Palestinians are here, that Palestinians are part of the equation. That was my interpretation of why Hamas did the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.”

KIBBUTZ EREZ, Israel — Under the shade of a large tree on Kibbutz Erez less than a mile from the Gaza Strip, half a dozen Israeli children play history trivia games with a counselor.

When loud booms from Gaza echo across the sky, some of the kids flinch at the noise.

It’s a reminder of the omnipresence of war and the horrors of Oct. 7, 2023, in this community of 560, where on that deadly day one kibbutz member was killed and four were injured. For months afterward, the kibbutz was empty, its residents internally displaced and sheltering elsewhere amid the war between Hamas and Israel.

While in recent months members of Kibbutz Erez and most of the other Israeli communities near Gaza have returned to their homes, the area’s rehabilitation needs remain vast. The hardest-hit kibbutzim and towns require massive reconstruction; many homes and infrastructure in the area require extensive repairs, and residents remain deeply traumatized. 

The war, of course, has yet to end.

“A lot of people are still suffering from trauma,” said Shay Ilan, co-founder of the nonprofit group Totzeret Ha’Aretz, “not only from the event itself — the fact that a terrorist was inside your home — but after you’ve evacuated for a long time and the community is scattered all over Israel, that’s traumatic too.”

American Jews are helping the effort to rebuild and rehabilitate the area through Project Horizon, a $17 million program initiated by UJA-Federation of New York along with $4.4 million from Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston and $1 million from the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, D.C. 

The idea is to focus on four areas of assistance — community resilience, trauma care, informal education and employment — for the 30,000 or so residents in 53 Israeli communities near Gaza. 

“We understood there was a big gap between immediate needs and long-term recovery,” said Gabriel Sod, the Israel-based director of government relations for UJA. “For these communities to even have the opportunity to recover, we knew we’d need to assist them in this interim stage for the next 12 to 18 months. The government was helping them rebuild, but no one was holding these communities together.”

“We moved quickly in the early days to meet urgent needs,” said Eric S. Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York. “Now we’re focused on the future and reimagining what’s possible. Project Horizon is about fulfilling our promise to walk with the communities, not just through crisis but in healing and rebuilding better.”

Launched in March 2024, Project Horizon began by awarding $8 million to the eight communities that suffered most in the Hamas attack: Be’eri, Holit, Kfar Aza, Kissufim, Nahal Oz, Netiv Ha’Asara, Nirim and Nir Oz. On the ground, the project is coordinated by the Israeli organization Totzeret Ha’aretz (Hebrew for “Made in Israel”), which seeks to strengthen Israeli society by sending young people to live in peripheral communities like those near Gaza.

In the second stage, Project Horizon distributed $4 million in grants toward Erez and 11 other communities within about 4 miles of Gaza. Now Project Horizon is expanding the aid with $5 million more to an additional 33 communities near Gaza. 

Project Horizon is part of the more than $200 million UJA-Federation has allocated in Israel since Oct. 7. 

“Because we have a full team in Israel and real grasp of what’s going on in the field, we were able to act quickly and on a large scale, which very few funders in Israel were able to do,” Sod said. “Before we launched Project Horizon, we spent five months working with the communities. We went to the hotels where these people were evacuated and just listened to what they had to say. We encountered communities that didn’t have leadership, because in some cases the leaders had been killed or kidnapped.”

Through a partnership with Israel’s Business Alliance, UJA-Federation enlisted the help of large companies like Wix, Viola, Cisco and Tidhar, which assisted residents of affected kibbutzim and towns to move to interim housing and, in some instances, to restructure their debt and raise funds. UJA-Federation also helped hire community managers to help residents figure out how to rebuild, create community resilience and trauma frameworks, and sometimes create the whole community infrastructure.   

Before the war, Dor Zohar, a lifelong resident of Erez, helped manage a Tel Aviv high-tech firm.

“Even though there were no hostages from Erez, it’s the same area and all of us know people who were kidnapped,” said Zohar, 35, tearing up recalling twins Gali and Ziv Berman — close friends of his younger brother — who were dragged into Gaza from nearby Kfar Aza. “After what happened on Oct. 7, I realized that I couldn’t just go back to a normal job making money for someone else. I understood that there was a vacuum of leadership at Erez.”

Zohar is now the partnership manager for Kibbutz Erez, overseeing how the kibbutz allocates the funds received through Project Horizon. The money has funded after-school activities, student trips, special events and the salaries of kindergarten coordinators.

“A lot of people who want to help think they know what’s best for you,” Zohar said. “What’s unique about Project Horizon is they didn’t tell us what we need. They sat with us and listened. And they helped us build an education plan that we couldn’t have done with our own resources.”

Yanir Yagel is the project’s partnership manager at nearby Dekel, an Israeli town that has also received support from Project Horizon. Among Dekel’s attractions is a small museum dedicated to the history of Yamit, an Israeli settlement in the Sinai Peninsula that was evacuated more than 40 years ago after Israel and Egypt signed a peace accord returning Sinai to Egyptian control. Dekel was founded by many of those evacuees.

“One of my projects is to do a movie on what happened in the area” on Oct. 7, said Yagel, 35, who before the current war worked as a tour guide. “I also want to take this money and build a coffeehouse to be located near the museum, so young people can learn how to start a business with their own hands.”

At Netiv Ha’Asara, where 20 people were killed on Oct. 7, Project Horizon’s grant focuses on community resilience. This includes replacing damaged trees, erecting new signage for families’ homes, a surfing program that offered a therapeutic outlet for 90 children, a five-day trip to Eilat for 20 high school students, a women’s day retreat for 20 community leaders and a local Purim celebration. 

The prolonged trauma has increased demand for mental health services and resilience programs, especially for children under 12, and many residents of Netiv Ha’Asara still haven’t returned home.

Community leaders from the town recently wrote a letter of thanks to UJA. 

“We want to express our heartfelt gratitude for Project Horizon’s support,” they wrote, saying it “helped us restore our daily routines, deepened our communal bonds and enhanced the well-being of our entire community.”

NUREMBERG, Germany — Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College for half a century, has seen many crises shake American colleges. But none has stripped schools of their leaders and their students like the present moment.

The second Trump administration has gone to war against elite universities, claiming to root out antisemitism and left-wing indoctrination. In a bid to ideologically reshape academia, the White House has severed billions of dollars in federal funding, attempted to block the enrollment of international students and pushed out college presidents.

University of Virginia President James E. Ryan resigned in June under pressure from the Justice Department over the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion practices, reflecting how the government’s premise of combating antisemitism has turned into a broader onslaught. In March, Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong stepped down after only seven months in office, amid the school’s concessions to Trump for allegedly tolerating antisemitism.

Before Trump’s return to power, turmoil over the way that schools handled pro-Palestinian protests toppled Armstrong’s predecessor, Minouche Shafik, along with presidents at the University of Pennslvania, Harvard and Cornell. Since he was sworn in, students who participated in those protests have faced government retaliation including high-profile arrests and detention, while hundreds more have had their visas revoked as part of Trump’s vast crackdown on immigrants.

Brown, Columbia and Penn recently cut deals with the Trump administration to free research funding by agreeing to steps like renewing partnerships with Israeli academics, codifying an Israel-related definition of antisemitism and excluding transgender people from athletic programs. Harvard is still embroiled in negotiations, but has already dismantled diversity offices, cut ties with a Palestinian university and adopted ties with Israeli ones, according to the Crimson.

In Botstein’s view, the government’s demands of these schools do the opposite of fighting antisemitism.

“I actually think the government is playing out a classic antisemitic routine,” he said. “Blame it on the Jews — ‘The reason that all the research funding is gone is because of the Jews.’”

In this era of fragile and sometimes conspicuously short-lived college presidencies, Botstein’s 50-year tenure stands out. Born in a ruined Europe in 1946 to Polish-Russian Jews who survived the Holocaust, he arrived in New York in 1949 as a stateless person. He was trained as a historian, musicologist and orchestral conductor, becoming Bard’s president at 29 years old.

He has steadily raised Bard’s national profile and shaped it in the image of his own beliefs — among them, that “the performing and visual arts are not a luxury in a free and democratic society but symptoms of its existence.” He has also forged cultural alliances in Israel and Palestine, directing the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra for eight years and founding an ongoing partnership between Bard College and Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency met Botstein during a trip to Germany with The Orchestra Now, or TŌN, a Bard graduate program that he founded and leads as its conductor. We talked just before TŌN’s concert in Nuremberg in early May, when Botstein led a program commemorating the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender.

This conversation with Leon Botstein has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

JTA: You became the president of Bard in 1975. What is the key to such a long and resilient tenure, especially at this moment of upheaval on college campuses across the United States?

Botstein: I never wanted to be a college or university administrator. It never occurred to me, not in a million years. I had a dual ambition: to be a scholar on the intersection between music and history, and to be a performer. And when I entered the job market, there were no jobs.

A career as a conductor is a hazardous business, no matter how you do it, so you have to have a day job. I had friends who were waiters or did office work, and I stumbled on a kind of office work in the New York City government. That’s what led me to be recruited to take over Franconia, a very unusual, bankrupt college in New Hampshire, which was protected by Dartmouth.

The president of Dartmouth was John Kemeny, a Hungarian-born Jewish mathematician. He was a protector of this experimental college that started in the 1960s and had 90 students. They were in bankruptcy in 1970, so they were either going to close or get a new president, and Kemeny talked them into hiring me. So I did it, and it was a lark. I was 23 — what could go wrong?

That led to my being recruited by Bard, which was desperate to find someone because the people they wanted to have as a president turned them down. Bard had an intellectual history from the 19th century. It had a real commitment to the arts and writing, and it had a board that wasn’t alumni-driven. After World War II, it struggled, but it developed a kind of intellectual cache and had a long tradition of hiring emigrés. It was very high-risk, didn’t have an endowment and wasn’t very visible.

I learned a lot from very good business people who were my friends. They told me, if you want to achieve anything of quality, you need two things: You have to have a good idea, and you have to stick to it through thick and thin. When I was in my twenties, I thought, what’s thick and thin? Maybe 10 years. Then 10 years go by, and you realize that you really haven’t gotten started yet — it’s going to need another 10 years. Now you’re 20 years in, and you realize you’ve paved five blocks, but you have to pave another 40 blocks.

What kind of ideas did you decide to stick to?

We took a stand on the liberal arts, on the fact that what you do in college is not the same as graduate school, but much more interdisciplinary.

We took a stand on extending our education to populations that people normally don’t think of. We have the largest prison program. We have 10 early college programs in six cities in the United States. And we have a big international program, including the largest Palestinian-American collaboration. For 16 years, we’ve had a graduate program training teachers for the Palestinian Authority, a high school on the West Bank, and an honors college with Al-Quds University — the war notwithstanding. They’re still going.

So we had ideas, and with ideas came philanthropy. For example, our high schools have been supported by the Gray Foundation. They didn’t go to Bard, but they were motivated very generously by the idea. So I realized that if you lead by ideas and you stick to principles, you won’t please everybody, but you’ll actually achieve something.

I’m an outlier in terms of length of tenure, but I’m not doing the same job as an Ivy League president — and those places wouldn’t hire anybody like me.

Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, presidents at five Ivy League universities have stepped down, some of them after being called into Congress to account for their handling of campus protests and alleged antisemitism. What mistake do you think these presidents made?

They didn’t speak with a voice of authority. People in a university should have the authority of knowledge, principle and the power of language. They should have answered their congressional interrogators and met fire with fire. The best defense is a good offense.

It’s completely preposterous, in my view, to defend the attack on Harvard because you’re fighting antisemitism. There’s nothing more hypocritical than that position. I actually think the government is playing out a classic antisemitic routine. Blame it on the Jews — the reason that all the research funding is gone is because of the Jews.

The fact is that antisemitism has always been a problem. Now Americans have discovered, oh, there’s antisemitism. Well, I’m a European Jew who came as a child to the United States. My parents were survivors of the remnant of Polish-Russian Jews. They landed in the United States with deep gratitude, but they didn’t believe it was a place without antisemitism. I’m not surprised that there’s antisemitism, and the universities didn’t invent it.

The punishment that the president is trying to wreak on these research universities is catastrophic and uncalled for, and has nothing to do with antisemitism. I disagree with many of my fellow American Jews who think this is a good thing. It’s not. We’ve always benefited from the rule of law and the protection of dissent, and not the use of government power to protect us. Spare me.

In Nuremberg, your orchestra is performing a program by Felix Mendelssohn, whose music was banned by the Nazis because of his Jewish heritage. As a conductor, you prioritize music that was repudiated by the politics of the past. Do you feel obligated to speak about the politics of the present?

Absolutely. I don’t believe in ghosts, or the idea of doing something because there is some spiritual remnant of something that happened 80 years ago. There are clearly consequences of what happened 80 years ago, but music and politics intersect today.

When we accepted this invitation, we didn’t really think about what the political situation would be when the concert day arrived. It has changed considerably from what we imagined. We accepted this invitation under the presidency of Joe Biden, when there was a strong affirmation of the alliance between the United States and its former Western Allies in the Second World War, and a real commitment to NATO and to the defense of Ukraine. Now that has all changed.

We have a new president who has no interest in the Atlantic alliance and seems to show nothing but contempt for Europe, and has cozied up to a truly tyrannical autocrat, Vladimir Putin. His violation of the fundamental tenets of American democracy is unprecedented in our lifetime. Our presence here is an affirmation of our determination to fight for the ideals that were fought for 80 years ago — against autocracy, censorship, cruelty, genocide and racist conceptions of the human character.

You founded TŌN in 2015. Over the past 10 years, how have you defined the orchestra’s relationship with history?

The orchestra’s relation to history is one of the central purposes of the orchestra. This orchestra is for musicians who have finished their conservatory training. So this is a three-year program that results in a master’s degree, but part of the purpose is to help musicians figure out how to present music — both old and new music — to the public today.

The classical music industry has drifted ever more strongly into a very narrow “masterpiece syndrome.” That is to say, orchestras, fearing declining audiences, have retreated into playing the very same thing. The Rachmaninoff concertos, Mahler’s symphony over and over again, Beethoven’s symphony over and over again. There’s a limited repertory. Our music history is a giant museum, and only two rooms are open. The rest is all hidden.

So our business is to revive the rich history of our own art form, to perform and record rare repertory in the hopes that people will pick it up in other places around the world. Bard has about 13 operas in full production that are not in the normal opera repertory of any American company. And these are great operas — people are astonished! They are sold out.

How did your parents, and the world of your childhood, influence how you approach music and lead a college? 

I remember my naturalization ceremony — I was 10 years old. We developed an unbelievable deep-seated patriotism to the idea of America. America was a kind of promised land, where we as Jews had some measure of equality and opportunity that never existed in Europe. I always felt that I had a civic obligation to make a contribution to the well-being of my fellow citizens. That’s one residue of being an immigrant.

On the music side, there is a psychological and linguistic reason. Like many young children who switched languages, I was a stutterer. I still am a stutterer — it’s a lifelong affliction. I’ve managed to conquer it, but it took me a long time, until my early twenties, and I stuttered in every language. Music seemed natural. It was a communicative system that I didn’t get stuck in. As a result of that, I developed an emotional attachment to making music.

That combined with the experience of being from a family where most of the discussion, and most of the photographs, were of people who were dead. What I discovered by having so many pictures of dead people is that we erase the memory of more people than deserve to be erased — especially in the art form I became interested in.

Music isn’t just Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms and Wagner and Debussy. No! I would go to the library and sit in the stacks and browse, and I saw names I’d never heard of before, and I’d pull out their scores. Partly because of growing up in the family I did, I found myself defending the unfairly forgotten. It definitely had something to do with being part of a family that, through storytelling, kept alive a world that had been obliterated.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly planning to fully occupy the Gaza Strip, including by launching operations in areas where Israeli hostages are held.

Sources within Netanyahu’s government spoke to Israeli media outlets on Sunday and Monday about the plan, which would mark a stark departure in Israel’s tactics in Gaza.

The announcement fulfills the wishes of Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners, who want to see Jewish resettlement in Gaza 20 years after the country unilaterally disengaged from the territory. Israeli forces removed 9,000 Jewish residents exactly 20 years ago this week.

But it has been widely panned by others in the country and beyond, who see a full occupation as likely to put hostages and soldiers in harm’s way without any payoff, and as moving in the wrong direction away from ending the grinding war after nearly two years.

This week, 19 living past directors of Israeli military and intelligence agencies called on Netanyahu to end the war, saying that while it had begun as a just war it now had uncertain military aims and was creating suffering without results. And the IDF’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, reportedly has opposed the occupation decision privately.

“The die is cast — we are going for a full occupation of the Gaza Strip,” a senior official close to the prime minister told Ynet on Monday. “There will be activity also in areas where hostages are being held. If this doesn’t suit the IDF chief of staff, he can resign.”

Currently, Israel controls around 75% of the besieged enclave, but under Netanyahu’s new plan, Israel could come to control the rest of the territory. The IDF has said it opposes the occupation of the entire Gaza Strip, citing the challenges of clearing all of Hamas’ infrastructure and potentially endangering the lives of the remaining Israeli hostages, according to the Times of Israel.

Last year, Hamas executed six Israeli hostages after IDF forces came near, in an incident that shook the country and Jews around the world.

The new vision comes after ceasefire negotiations with Hamas fully halted in recent weeks. Last month, President Donald Trump appeared to call on Israel to escalate its offensive in Gaza, telling reporters that Hamas “didn’t really want to make a deal,” and that Israel is “going to have to finish the job.”

The decision to change the military strategy must get approval from Netanyahu’s cabinet, which is reportedly meeting Tuesday to discuss the matter.

But sources close to Netanyahu’s government told Israeli media they understood the decision to be likely to move forward.

“We’re going to occupy the strip. The decision has been made,” said one senior Israeli official in Netanyahu’s office, according to Amit Segal, the chief political analyst of Channel 12 who is known as a right-wing journalist. “Hamas won’t release more hostages without total surrender, and we won’t surrender. If we don’t act now, the hostages will starve to death and Gaza will remain under Hamas’ control.”

The vast majority of Israelis say in polls that they want a deal that would end the war and cause the remaining 50 hostages to be released.

The buzz around occupation — which some are referring to as annexation — has elicited stark warnings from around the world, including from pro-Israel voices.

“I hope the reports that PM Netanyahu has made the decision to annex Gaza are wrong,” tweeted Dennis Ross, who served in Middle East security roles in both the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations. “Not only would that create an ongoing insurgency, drain the IDF, doom the remaining hostages, and cement Israel’s isolation internationally—it might trigger a tipping point of loss of U.S. support.”

The Israeli government bought a billboard in New York City’s Times Square to showcase the video released last week by Hamas of one of its Israeli hostages, Evyatar David.

The campaign, which was sponsored by the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the Consulate General of Israel in New York, showed new footage of David released last Friday by Hamas in dire physical condition inside a tunnel.

Its goal was to call attention to the plight of the hostages who remain in Gaza — and strike out at those who have expressed concern for hungry Gazans but not the hostages.

“Hamas is starving the Israeli hostages,” text alongside the video said. “Ignored by the media too busy echoing Hamas propaganda.”

In recent weeks, images of emaciated Palestinians have drawn global outcry over allegations of widespread starvation in the besieged enclave as well as some criticism from some pro-Israel groups who believe the photos falsely depict the aid crisis in Gaza.

The critics include the Israeli government, which has seized on an editors’ note added last week to a story in The New York Times — the newspaper for which the landmark was named — alleging starvation to discredit the idea that any Gazans may be going without adequate food.

“We will fight the blood libel that Hamas is spreading about ‘starvation’ in Gaza. They use fake images and cynically exploit young children suffering from completely unrelated illnesses, presenting them as if they are starving,” Ofir Akunis, Israel’s consul general in New York, tweeted about the ad campaign.

David, 24, was taken hostage at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023 along with his best friend, Guy Gilboa-Dalal, who also remains in captivity. The release of the video of David shortly followed another video released by Palestinian Islamic Jihad of Rom Braslavski, 21, who was abducted while working as a security guard at the Nova music festival during a break in his army service.

Moshe Spern thought Michael Mulgrew would listen to him.

The 14-year UFT member lobbied hard for the incumbent president of the United Federation of Teachers, New York City’s teachers union, to be reelected back in May, writing in an open letter that he believed Mulgrew “understands the pressing concerns facing Jewish educators in 2025.”

Mulgrew ultimately eked out a win in the union’s closest-ever election, fending off two progressive challengers who had previously expressed public criticism of Israel.

So when the union faced a decision about whom to endorse in the New York City mayoral election, Spern was optimistic that Mulgrew might take heed of his exhortation not to back anyone at all. He was particularly concerned about Zohran Mamdani, the frontrunner who has received criticism from Jewish groups and leaders for his record of criticizing Israel and supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

“I would never, ever, ever call Mamdani an antisemite,” said Spern, saying that was a determination he would not make “until I actually have a conversation with a person or I see something. But Mamdani is an open anti-Zionist, and that’s not debatable.”

Last month, the UFT made its decision: It’s backing Mamdani for mayor.

For Spern, who leads a 250-member advocacy group called United Jewish Teachers, the endorsement came as a blow.

“We helped elect Mulgrew, and now we feel like Mulgrew sort of stabbed us in the back,” said Spern, who works as a special education and history teacher at a Queens high school before pulling a second shift as a yeshiva administrator in the afternoon.

He is not the only UFT member to feel that way. Across the 200,000-member union, which was once dominated by Jewish teachers and had Jewish presidents from its founding in 1960 until Mulgrew’s election in 2009, some Jewish educators are grappling with feelings of betrayal and fear after their union backed a candidate that they believe is dangerous for them.

“The concern isn’t just political,” said Karen Feldman, a former New York public school teacher and co-founder of NYCPS Alliance, a Jewish educator advocacy group with over 2,500 participants. “It’s about safety for Jewish educators, the growing politicization of our classrooms, and the erosion of trust in a union that should protect teachers — not push a radical agenda. We truly were hoping that our union would not endorse anyone this election because it is such a divisive and heated one.”

At the same time, some Jewish teachers are cheering their union’s endorsement, saying they believe Mamdani is the best candidate in the race — and in some cases backing his stances on Israel, too.

The UFT did not endorse in the primary after initially pledging to, saying that members were too divided to reach a consensus, including over issues related to Israel and the war in Gaza.

But that it is backing Mamdani in the general election is not fully surprising: He’s the Democratic candidate, and he also says he wants to roll back aspects of mayoral control, which the union reviles, and give more power to educators in the city. He’s a graduate of a public high school in the city. And his campaign has centered on the kinds of pocketbook issues that affect municipal workers including teachers.

“We have to make New York City safer and more affordable for working- and middle-class families. We have to make the jobs of educators and nurses more attractive with better pay and benefits, and retain those already doing the work. We need a mayor who understands the task before us and who will help us get it done,” Mulgrew said in a statement after the union’s decision-making body announced its endorsement. “The UFT Delegate Assembly has determined that Zohran Mamdani can be that partner as the next mayor of New York City.”

Still, there are precedents for the union to stay out of mayoral elections. The union did not endorse anyone in 2005 or 2009, when Michael Bloomberg ran for reelection, and also sat out two general elections in the 1990s, according to the education news outlet Chalkbeat.

Some UFT members are lashing out at the union, sharing information about how to opt out of payments to its political arm, known as the Committee on Political Education or COPE. Others are considering stopping paying dues entirely, an option that has been available to them only since a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that barred mandatory enrollment in public sector unions.

On social media, some teachers have taken to reposting a UFT website instructing teachers on how to opt out of COPE payments. Spern — who himself has endorsed Mayor Eric Adams in the election — said he believed that “hundreds” of educators had stopped their COPE payments and said he knew of close to 100 who planned to stop paying dues.

He believes the number will rise. Last month, he hosted a webinar with Feldman for more than 100 attendees explaining how teachers can pull their dues. And last week, he published an article in 5 Towns Central, serving a heavily Jewish region of Long Island that is home to many union members, announcing that UFT members were organizing a movement to pull dues over the Mamdani endorsement.

“Many educators have come out of concern about whether they should continue their dues, seeing how the union has sort of left them behind,” Spern said in an interview. “And I think that’s a very, very real, raw emotional state of Jewish teachers, where they question whether they’re paying their dues to the right organization.”

Among those to have sent a letter expressing intent to withhold dues for the coming school year is a Modern Orthodox occupational therapist who has worked in the city’s schools for nine years and has a son in the Israeli army.

“It not only shows that they’re maybe dumb and corrupt, but it shows they have absolutely no regard for people like me, they have no regard for my needs,” the educator, who asked for anonymity to avoid jeopardizing her employment, said in an interview about her union. “You’re picking someone who hates me and has threatened my people and my homeland.”

But other Jewish educators in the city say they have no qualms about continuing to support the union, at least when it comes to its mayoral endorsement.

Melissa Turoff, who teaches at Bard High School Early College in Manhattan, said she was “happy” to learn of the union’s endorsement of Mamdani.

“I think that unions should back candidates that have a really progressive vision for New York, like Mamdami,” she said.

Turoff, whose grandmother was Israeli, has studied the history of imperialism in Israel and the Middle East; attended meetings of Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group, and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice; and signed an open letter condemning Israel during its 2021 war with Hamas in Gaza. She said she understood why some Jewish educators may be anxious but said she thought a focus on Mamdani’s attitudes about Israel were misplaced.

“The fear can be well founded, but the accusations of antisemitism for me are not right,” said Turoff. “I feel like the real enemies are the fascist right wing, and sowing division amongst really progressive, likeminded people is, I feel, a divisive tactic that we shouldn’t fall for as Jewish educators that believe in human rights and know our history.”

Others said their stance on the union’s endorsement was more pragmatic.

“We represent these kids, and we represent this city, and I guess Mamdani is the best bet for schools,” said Arthur Goldstein, the Jewish vice chair of the union’s Retired Teacher Chapter, which votes in its elections.

“I haven’t heard that many specifics about how he would change what goes on in the schools, and we’ll just have to see, but I like him better than any of the other candidates,” continued Goldstein, a longtime activist in a faction of the union that has been critical of its leadership. “I mean, Adams is beholden to Trump. [Andrew] Cuomo is a sociopath, and he’s been horrible to the schools.” (Cuomo earned the ire of many educators a decade ago when he sought to toughen how teachers are evaluated.)

At Goldstein’s school, Francis Lewis High School in Queens where he teaches half time after retiring following 38 years in the classroom, he said that most of his fellow Jewish teachers felt similarly.

“I think most of the Jewish teachers are kind of like me, and not militantly against Mamdani, or claiming that he is an antisemite, which I don’t believe he is,” he said.

Polls show Mamdani leading among Jewish voters, but a majority are supporting other candidates. A poll released last week found that many Jewish voters are concerned about Mamdani’s stances on Israel and about whether they would become less safe under his leadership.

Spern said his objection is to the union’s endorsement process as much as to whom it ultimately decided to back. He said he believed that he and other Jewish educators should have been more heavily consulted.

“Due to the process in which the UFT went about their endorsement, we felt that it was not a democratic way to gauge interests of the Jewish educators who had supported the current president, Michael Mulgrew, in his re-election campaign,” Spern said.

“We felt that without that dialogue, without that conversation of making sure Jewish teachers are safe under Mamdani’s endorsement, we have felt that message needs to be sent to the UFT, and the only way you can send that message is through your power of your money,” he continued.

A UFT spokesperson said in a statement that the endorsement vote followed a discussion among delegates about which candidate would be the “best partner in advancing the priorities of UFT members.” That doesn’t mean the union won’t look out for those with a dissenting view, the spokesperson said.

“The UFT is a representative democracy, which means that the majority rules,” the statement read. “But we remain vigilant to take action to protect the rights of people who vote in the minority on any given issue. Protecting our members, their families, and the communities they come from is the heart of our mission.”