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. 

This past Saturday night, during Selichot services, I led members of our congregation in our first recitation of “Ashamnu,” the confessional acrostic that we accompany by striking our hearts.

There will be many recitations of the confessional to follow in the coming weeks. Yet it is the first — said late at night, and not, in my community, in the midst of a great throng but instead in an intimate circle — that always moves me the most. I have long loved Selichot, which on the Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah begins a cycle of prayers for forgiveness. It is an experience that, for me, offers an invitation into the heights of the holidays themselves, but without the attendant rabbinic pressures — and it is often a highlight of my own Jewish year. So it was this week.

And then I went home, still humming “Ashamnu” and still thinking about my friends and family who sang it along with me, and something rather incredible happened. I turned on Netflix and there they were again: “Ashamnu,” Selichot and the extraordinary drama of the High Holidays, as I have never before seen them depicted in anything remotely mainstream.

In a storytelling landscape that almost always depicts American Jewish ritual life in terms that are wildly unrealistic (“Nobody Wants This”), pediatric (“You Are SO Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah”), or chaotic bordering on hostile (“Bad Shabbos”), this was something different. In an unusually effective scene, one of the central characters in “Long Story Short” finds herself in shul, unexpectedly, on Yom Kippur. Like so many other scenes in Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s animated series about a Jewish family, it was letter-perfectly accurate, loving and profound. It was astonishing.

If you have already seen it, then you know. And if you have not seen it, in all seriousness and as a rabbi, I am advising you to binge the entire 10-episode run over the next week in preparation for Rosh Hashanah.

What is so incredible about the “Ashamnu” scene in particular — and this could also be said of the series as a whole — is how artfully it plays against much of what we’ve come to expect from depictions of synagogue life on television. Contemporary Jewish American artists, from Larry David to the Coen Brothers (many of them, perhaps, let down by synagogues at some point) tend to use synagogue scenes as grist for an endlessly satiric mill — the staid sanctuaries in which an unrepentant Larry commits his peccadillos, the horrific vacuousness of suburban Jewish life in “A Serious Man.” There are scattered exceptions, of course, and I admire both David and the Coens as brilliant and important Jewish storytellers. But there is more to say about Jewish American life, and synagogue-going, than is possible to say from within the four narrow cubits of satire.

Enter “Long Story Short,” which is certainly the most Jewish television show airing right now on any mainstream platform and also, very likely, among the most authentic pieces of Jewish American narrative art in the 21st century. And it is very funny. There are moments of satire, in particular a riotously funny send-up of bar mitzvah candle-lighting ceremonies in the opening episode. But unlike most other shows of its ilk, Judaism and the Jewish characters that populate the story (which is all of them, more or less) aren’t the joke. They are simply the reality, the context in which tragedy transforms itself into farce and farce, in turn, transforms itself into tragedy again.

And, though it might seem like a surprising thing to say about an animated series, it presents that reality with unflinching, almost documentary-like precision. Some examples:

• An unnamed character in the “Ashamnu“ scene appears in a full tallit (no church-style stole, like the one worn by Rabbi Noah Roklov in “Nobody Wants This”) and, when asked by a main character if he knows of “a guy named Noah here,” replies dryly, but not unkindly, “There are probably like 50 Noahs in here.”
• An old woman, also in a tallit, next to whom the main character takes a seat, explains lovingly that Jews confess in plural language.
• The episode that is largely devoted to parents trying to decide whether or not to send their children to a Jewish day school.
• The moment when an adult child, faced with a sibling’s increasing observance, tells their mother that there is no one right way to be Jewish, and the mother responds immediately (and I quote) with, “But there is — a progressive egalitarian Conservative Judaism with an emphasis on ritual and community over faith and blind practice. That’s literally the only way it makes sense. I figured it out. And I gave it to my children because I love them. But they reject it because they want to reject me.”

These examples — one of a vast number that I could recite — all speak to a core aspect of why I found the show so moving on Selichot night and why it is so wildly successful overall, both narratively and aesthetically. It’s packed with so many highly specific Jewish cultural and religious touchstones — not to mention untranslated and unexplained Hebrew phrases — that I suspect, absent a solid day-school education (Bob-Waksberg, the son of a Jewish educator, had one), aspects of it would seem abstruse if not unintelligible. It’s all so ardently, shockingly particularist, which is a crucial element of faithfully rendering any culture and something that I think about a lot, both as novelist and as a rabbi.

As Jews in America, most of us, either through osmosis or because we seek it out, come to know a great deal about the majority cultures that surround us. They know less about us. That has always been — and will always be — a structural aspect of minority experience. That is why it is an ongoing challenge, in many corners of the entertainment industry, to tell stories from the particularist perspectives of minority and under-represented groups. It’s a worthy, important goal, both ethically (because it’s the right thing to do) and aesthetically (because stories absent culture are bland).

But despite all the laudable effort towards diversifying the kinds of American stories we tell, I have never seen a show that depicts a Jewish American reality that is recognizable to me — hilarious, unabridged, profound and reverent. Until now.

Representation matters. Do yourself a favor and start binging.

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 49 days to the election.

2️⃣ Cuomo polling second

• Andrew Cuomo, the former governor who is polling second, has called for an end to the war in Gaza for the first time.

• “There is no doubt that the people of New York and the nation see the continued carnage that is happening and are deeply, deeply disturbed and want it over, and believe it has gone on way too long,” Cuomo said in a New York Times interview published late Monday. He added, “It should end today. Return the hostages, end the violence. Today. I think it should have been over months ago.”

• The comments marked a departure for Cuomo, who has long fashioned himself a “hyper-aggressive” supporter of Israel and has accused Zohran Mamdani of “fueling antisemitism” as the frontrunner wielded much stronger criticisms of Israel. After appearing to criticize Gaza’s aid crisis in August, Cuomo quickly clarified that it was just “some people” — not him personally — who questioned Israel’s conduct.

• Cuomo’s latest comments come amid a historic decline in support for Israel among Democratic voters. They also come as polling shows that New York City voters strongly prefer Mamdani’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over Cuomo’s.

• Cuomo chastised Mamdani for his renewed pledge to arrest Netanyahu as mayor, and he avoided criticizing the Israeli leader himself. But a year after volunteering to join Netanyahu’s legal defense against a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, Cuomo placed some distance between them: “I never stood with Bibi,” he said.

👀 Adams watch

• Mayor Eric Adams is taking a different tack when it comes to Netanyahu, posting a picture of himself shaking the Israeli prime minister’s hand.

• “As Mayor of New York City, I’ll never forget the warm welcome I received in Israel from Netanyahu and the Israeli people,” he said on X. “I look forward to returning that hospitality when the Prime Minister comes to New York for the United Nations General Assembly.”

• Adams also met with Jewish leaders in the heavily Orthodox Brooklyn neighborhood of Borough Park, bought a packet of honey cookies for Rosh Hashanah at Weiss Bakery and smiled while Rabbi Moshe Davis blew a shofar for him at Eichler’s Judaica.

• He is counting on a cohort of Jewish voters who strongly support Israel. According to a Times/Siena poll last week, 40% of Adams voters are Jewish. But they aren’t enough to save his single-digit polling numbers.

🍎 Jews share food and reflect on Mamdani

• Our reporter Grace Gilson swung by a food distribution event by the Met Council, a Jewish social services nonprofit, to hear what Jews are saying about Mamdani and food affordability on Monday.

• Passing out crates of Kedem grape juice, Met Council CEO David Greenfield said they planned to distribute 1.7 million pounds of food — reaching over 200,000 people — for the High Holidays this year.

• Greenfield said he was “keeping an open mind” about the candidates and Mamdani’s promise to make the city more affordable. “I think it’s important to broaden the tent, and so I genuinely do look forward to hearing what he has to say and evaluating it from there,” he said.

• Comptroller Brad Lander also showed up. He suggested that Mamdani’s proposed city-run grocery stores could stock kosher food.

• “Mayor Mamdani will be a partner with Met Council and making sure that New Yorkers who need kosher food have a chance to get it, whether they’ll do that through the city-run grocery stores, or whether they’ll do that through Met Council,” said Lander.

🚫 Non-endorsement tracker

• Mamdani got Gov. Kathy Hochul’s endorsement on Sunday — but other New York Democrats didn’t fall in line, highlighting the party’s internal tensions ahead of election day.

• “I will not be endorsing Mamdani,” said Long Island Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi on Monday. “While I share his concern about the issue of affordability, I fundamentally disagree with his proposed solutions.”

• Laura Gillen, another Democratic Long Island Rep., also issued an anti-endorsement. “I completely disagree with the Governor’s endorsement of Mr. Mamdani,” she said in a statement to Politico. “Long Islanders are already facing a cost-of-living crisis and the last thing they can afford is Zohran Mamdani’s reckless agenda.”

• Top New York Democrats Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries are still staying quiet.

🐝 Social media buzz

• Mamdani and Jewish actor Ilana Glazer hopped on a viral trend last night, proclaiming their alliance as a “Muslim immigrant socialist Democratic nominee” and a “proud self-loving Jewwy Jewish New Yorker” who agreed that “the safety of Jews and Muslims are inextricably linked.”

A United Nations Commission of Inquiry concluded Tuesday that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, marking the three-member panel’s first such finding.

Israel immediately rejected the finding, as it has when other bodies and individuals have used the term to describe its campaign in Gaza.

In a 72-page report, the three-member panel accused Israel of committing four genocidal acts since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack, including killing Palestinians and creating conditions to cause the “physical destruction in whole or in part” of the Palestinian people. They cited the destruction of a fertility clinic as evidence that Israel was “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

The panel accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant of inciting genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

“The responsibility for these atrocity crimes lies with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons who have orchestrated a genocidal campaign for almost two years now with the specific intent to destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza,” the panel’s leader, Navi Pillay, a South African jurist and former U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement.

The commission had previously issued reports accusing Israel of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The panel has no enforcement powers but may be used by the International Court of Justice as well as the International Criminal Court, which is currently weighing an accusation by South Africa that Israel is committing a genocide.

Israel’s critics have seized on the report. Irish President Michael Higgins called it a “very, very important document” and suggested that Israel and countries who supply Israel with weapons should be excluded from the U.N.

Israel, meanwhile, called the panel’s findings “distorted and false.” The Israeli Foreign Ministry accused the panel’s members, who announced their resignation in July, of “serving as Hamas proxies.”

The recent finding comes weeks after the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution accusing Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza. The resolution gained widespread coverage as well as revelations that membership in the group required only a nominal fee and no proof of credentials.

Among those to condemn the IAGS resolution were over 500 genocide, Holocaust and legal scholars who called on the association to retract its ruling, citing both the conclusion and the process used to reach it.