Good morning, New York, and grab your vaccine card. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced yesterday that the city will require proof of vaccination for indoor activities starting Sept. 13. Let us know what you think.
For now, join UJA-Federation of New York and The Jewish Week today at 7 p.m. for a conversation with Robert Abrams, the former attorney general of New York and author of “The Luckiest Guy in the World.” He and moderator Sandee Brawarsky will discuss his journey in politics, his career and his life of public service. Register here.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-Manhattan) said Gov. Cuomo “must resign” after State Attorney General Letitia James released a report that found Cuomo had sexually harassed numerous women.
- Quotable: “Sexual harassment is an extremely serious transgression, and we stand with the brave women who have come forward to share their experiences working for and around Governor Andrew Cuomo. It is clear that he engaged in inappropriate, unlawful and abusive behavior,” according to a statement from Nadler and 11 other Democratic members of New York congressional delegation.
- Cuomo vehemently denied the report’s findings, even as President Biden called for him to step down.
- Read our story about Cuomo’s relationship with the Jewish community.
The debate over secular education at NYC yeshivas is getting the documentary treatment in a new film.
- “An Unorthodox Education” examines the fallout from a 2015 complaint by graduates of haredi Orthodox schools who felt ill-equipped for jobs and higher learning.
- “Most graduates of ultra-Orthodox schools … are happy with the education they receive and they have no desire to leave,” Joe Kolman, the film’s director, tells our colleague Shira Hanau. “But those that do want to leave their communities, they feel imprisoned by the education they never received.”
LEGISLATION NEWS
Dozens of Jewish organizations are seeking to stop a bill they say would hurt charitable giving by placing restrictions on donor-advised funds.
- The Jewish Communal Fund of New York, which provides annual support for UJA-Federation of New York and other local Jewish charities, joined the long list of groups signing a letter to the leaders of the Senate Finance Committee. The letter was spearheaded by the Jewish Federations of North America.
- At issue: The funds encourage donors to funnel charitable giving to pet causes through an existing foundation. Supporters of the bipartisan bill want to speed up disbursement of the money parked in the funds, saying the funds currently provide more tax advantages to the donor than help to the needy.
- Read a Jewish Week interview with an author who has studied the history of Jewish donor-advised funds.
The $1 trillion infrastructure funding bill announced by Sen. Chuck Schumer Sunday includes funding for energy efficiency measures at religious institutions, a measure long sought by Orthodox Jewish groups.
- “Our nation’s synagogues, churches, day schools, and many other nonprofits have badly needed to update their energy infrastructure but haven’t had the funds to do so,” said Nathan Diament, the Orthodox Union’s Washington director, welcoming Schumer’s announcement.
THE ARTS
Our colleagues at Alma look at the Jewish women featured in a new Met Museum exhibit about pioneering women photographers.
- “From war scenes to glamorous commercial photoshoots to indecipherable photos of the body, the photos captured work from many walks of life, countries and styles, and coalesced into a scattered exhibit that felt surprisingly contemporary,” writes Sarah Rosen.
REMEMBERING
Louise Fishman, who explored feminism and gay and Jewish identity in her Abstract Expressionist paintings, died July 26 in Manhattan. She was 82. Fishman grew up in Philadelphia and moved to New York after receiving a master’s degree at the University of Illinois at Champaign in 1965. “After a trip to Central Europe in 1988 with a friend who was a Holocaust survivor,” The New York Times reports, “Ms. Fishman expanded on the Jewish and Holocaust themes that she had already begun to explore. For some of the works she made in that period, she mixed her paint with ash she had picked up in Auschwitz.”
ASK THE JEWISH WEEK
(Flickr Commons)
Today we introduce a new feature: “Ask The Jewish Week.” Got a conundrum about Jewish life, New York or anything else? Send your question to editor@jewishweek.org. First up:
- Q: A colleague asks, “Why do we as Jews care when Jewish athletes win at the Olympics?”
- A: Guilty. We keep regular tallies of the Jews who are winning medals in Tokyo this year. But it’s not just a Jewish thing: As Ketra Armstrong, a sports management professor at the University of Michigan, explains, Black audiences root for Black athletes out of what she calls “a commonality of struggle.” “Oftentimes, seeing people with a shared struggle, a shared kinship, those are the people that we connect with because we’re rooting for them. Because rooting for them is also rooting for us, for our history,” she told PBS NewsHour. Jews, meanwhile, have long been a diaspora community, and have tended to identify not just with the country in which they are citizens, but with their Jewish family — literal and figurative — wherever they live.
WHAT’S ON TODAY
The Museum of Jewish Heritage, 36 Battery Place, presents an in-person screening of Exodus, the 1960 film starring Paul Newman as a Haganah rebel who smuggles Jews out of a British internment camp and onto a ship bound for Palestine. Information here. $10. 3:00 pm.
CORRECTION
Yesterday’s newsletter incorrectly identified the executive director of CAMERA. She is Andrea, not Andrew, Levin.
Photo, top: Israel’s David Litvinov competes in the men’s +109kg weightlifting competition during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Tokyo International Forum in Tokyo on Aug. 4, 2021. He finished fifth. (Photo by Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)
