Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian English teacher and activist featured in the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,” was shot and killed Monday during a confrontation with Israeli settlers in the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair.

According to witnesses and human rights groups cited in multiple media reports, the incident began when settlers arrived with a bulldozer and began clearing land near the Palestinian community. Tensions escalated, and Hathaleen, 31, was struck by gunfire. He was transported to an Israeli hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.

On Tuesday, Israeli police identified Yinon Levi, a settler from the unauthorized outpost of Havat Ma’on, as the suspect in the shooting. Police detained him on suspicion of “reckless conduct resulting in death and unlawful use of a firearm,” according to the New York Times. Levi was placed under house arrest following a court appearance. An attorney representing Levi says his client acted in self-defense during a confrontation in which stones were thrown.

Levi, who owns an earthworks company that has been used by the Israeli military for demolitions, had previously been sanctioned by the Biden administration for alleged acts of violence against Palestinians. Those sanctions were lifted in January by President Donald Trump. Sanctions imposed by the United Kingdom and European Union remain in place.

Hathaleen, a father of three, had long documented life in Masafer Yatta, a cluster of Palestinian villages in the South Hebron Hills that face displacement due to Israeli military zoning and settlement expansion. Footage he filmed was featured in “No Other Land,” a documentary co-directed by Palestinian and Israeli activists that won Best Documentary Feature at the 2024 Academy Awards.

Hathaleen had visited the United States in June but was detained upon arrival at San Francisco International Airport along with his cousin Eid. 

The two were invited to speak at events organized by Kehilla Community Synagogue in the Bay Area. Though they held valid visas, U.S. border officials canceled their entry and deported them the following day without providing a public explanation. Kehilla’s leaders described the treatment as “ridiculous and insane” and held a vigil in protest.

The shooting comes amid rising violence in the West Bank, where confrontations between settlers and Palestinian residents have intensified since the start of the war in Gaza. 

Rights groups have long raised concerns about a lack of accountability for violence committed by settlers, noting that Palestinians fall under military law while settlers are generally subject to Israeli civilian law. Settlers say they’re being unfairly blamed for defending themselves against regular Palestinian attacks.

Yiddish is the language of the Jews of Eastern Europe and all the places to which they spread. 

It is the language of socialists and capitalists, the Partisans who fought the Nazis and most of the millions who were killed in the Holocaust. It is the everyday tongue of tens of thousands of haredi Orthodox Jews and a “post-vernacular” language nurtured in academic programs, cultural festivals and a small but active community of Yiddishist speakers, writers, translators and musicians. 

In its latest incarnation, it is also the language of 17 songs of solidarity with the Palestinians and anger at the Israeli war in Gaza. “Lider mit Palestine: New Yiddish Songs of Grief, Fury, and Love” draws on the history of the language — including a rich legacy of progressive protest songs — in ways validating to Jews who share the contributors’ leftist politics and no doubt infuriating to Jews who don’t. 

Produced by Joe Dobkin, Josh Waletzky and Isabel Frey, “Lider mit Palestine” arrives as criticism of the war has been intensifying, especially amid a hunger crisis in Gaza and accusations, which Israel fiercely denies, that its government is directing a genocide. 

The songs take up that criticism, and then some: In dirges, prayers and folk songs by an array of musicians, Israel is referred to as an “evildoer” (roshe) and “oppressor” (badriker); counting the producers’ and artists’ statements and the lyrics themselves, “genocide” is mentioned over a dozen times. (The Hebrew word “khurban,” which can be used in Yiddish to mean genocide in general and the Holocaust in particular, originally described the destruction of the First and Second Temples,.) The album has no laments for the Israeli hostages, and no explicit reference to the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023 that initiated the war.

“What all of the songs have in common is that they’re speaking out,” said Dobkin, in a Zoom interview with his co-producers. “The unifying thing is a need to not just be silent and tacitly accept what’s happening.”

The producers are all well-known figures in the global secular Yiddishist community: Dobkin, 42, is a Brooklyn-based audio producer and poet, and Frey, 30, is a singer and ethnomusicologist who writes and records Yiddish protest songs in her native Vienna. 

Waletzky, 77, is a prolific composer of new Yiddish song; “Lider mit Palestine” grew in part out of a songwriting workshop he co-led at the Yiddish New York festival in December 2023. 

“That was just a few months into the Israeli military action against Gaza, and there was an outpouring of Yiddish songs newly written,” he recalled. “It was a very emotional workshop, because the songs were treating what was happening every day in the news. It had a tremendous effect on everyone.”

Among the songs being workshopped that day was Dobkin’s composition,”Falndike vent” (Falling Walls), which references his grandparents’ suffering in the concentration camps to conclude that “that wound must not be turned into a weapon.”

“Because of my proximity, in terms of my grandparents having survived the camps and their families having been killed, it felt like something that I wanted to communicate,” he said. “Writing and singing in Yiddish was just the natural way to do it.” 

The last line of the song invokes one of the most controversial slogans of the pro-Palestinian movement: “No one is free,” Dobkin sings in Yiddish, “until all are liberated between every sea and river.”

Many Jews and supporters of Israel regard the phrase “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea” as a call for the elimination of a Jewish state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, and even a goad to genocide. “I am emphatically not interested in provocation for the sake of provocation. I chose to include that phrase because I see it as being misrepresented,” Dobkin said. “It’s important for me to say, as a Jew in a Yiddish song, that freedom for Palestinians is not a threat to Jews.” 

What can be dizzying about the collection is the way traditional themes of Yiddish song and Hebrew liturgy — lyrics of resilience in the face of persecution, prayers of consolation for the brokenhearted, Lamentations read on Tisha B’Av — are recast with the Palestinians as their protagonists. Dobkin said his song was inspired in part by a video of an Israeli soldier who sang “Zog nit keyn mol,” an anthem of the Jewish Partisans, from the turret of a tank presumably headed to Gaza. 

“The message we were supposed to get from that was that this military operation was for the sake of Jewish survival,” said Dobkin. “And my instinctual response was that it’s not.”

Frey offers a dizzying reversal of her own, using the melody of Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah,” to condemn “Jewish ethno-nationalism.” “We don’t need armies, / We don’t want a state,” she sings in what she calls a “parody” of the anthem. “Our strength doesn’t come from artillery.”

Frey said the song is a reaction to her own upbringing, when she belonged to a Labor Zionist youth group that presented an uncritical picture of Israel. Having become disillusioned after a visit to the West Bank, she gravitated toward a form of “diasporism,” which seeks to elevate the culture Jews created outside of the Land of Israel. She identifies with the Bund, the Yiddish socialist organization that opposed Zionism before the founding of the state and is committed to Jewish life and culture in the diaspora.

Leftists like her also see Yiddish itself as an ideological mainstay of Jewish movements that opposed Zionism, even as Israel embraced modern Hebrew. 

“That was something that brought me to Yiddish, because I didn’t have a background with Yiddish,” she said. “What attracted me was this left-wing Jewish history of anti-assimilationist politics.”

The album reflects a small but increasingly apparent divide among Yiddishists, and the Jewish public in general, that often plays out in generational terms. Yiddish cultural institutions in the United States have faced tension over the Israel-Hamas war, after younger students and employees, anti-Zionist or just deeply critical of Israel, demanded that the groups’ Zionist older guard weigh in against the war.

Yiddishists are not of one mind on the war in Gaza. At last year’s KlezCanada, a summer retreat for the North American Yiddish community, amid the Yiddish classes and musical performances, organizers held a series of four “Community Conversations” to help attendees air “the diverse ways we have been connected to and impacted by the war in Israel and Gaza.” 

On Reddit, a user in the r/Yiddish group objected that the album was released in the three-week stretch ahead of Tisha B’Av, a period of communal Jewish mourning. “During the 3 weeks?” they wrote. “That is so culturally insensitive.”

But Frey, Waletzky and Dobkin said it is vital that the “grief, fury and love” of the album’s subtitle be expressed in a Jewish vernacular. 

Waletzky says love inspired his song “A shtik fun harts” (A Piece of My Heart), which is about a childhood friend who grew up to be an uncritical Zionist. “It’s about the love of someone that you’ve grown up with, knew from childhood, who has taken a different path, a path of supporting what Israel is doing,” he said. “And that’s a heartbreaking moment in anyone’s life.”

For Dobkin, the album’s subtitle reflects a “love of humanity that explicitly includes the humanity of Palestinians, and a love of Jewishness and of the Jewish family that I hope would be self-evident.”

Dobkin said proceeds from downloads and sales of the CD would go toward cultural initiatives in Gaza, to be used, depending on conditions on the ground, for arts education and programming or to buy food.

(Editor’s note: Due to a transcription error, a previous version of this article misrepresented a quote by Joe Dobkin. He did not say, “For the sake of provocation, I chose to include that phrase because I see it as being misrepresented.” What he did say was ““I am emphatically not interested in provocation for the sake of provocation. I chose to include that phrase because I see it as being misrepresented,” he said. The text has been corrected. JTA regrets the error.)

Jewish institutions in New York City are reeling after a prominent and beloved communal leader was among the victims of a mass shooting Monday in Midtown Manhattan.

Wesley LePatner, 43, was a board member for UJA-Federation of New York and The Heschel School, where her name is now listed as “z’l” in memoriam. She received UJA’s Alan C. Greenberg Young Leadership Award in 2023.

She was also involved at Manhattan’s Altneu synagogue, according to co-founder Avital Chizik-Goldschmidt. She was married with children.

LePatner was the global head of core+ real estate and CEO of Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, one of the world’s largest investment firms, according to her Linkedin.

The shooting occurred at an office building in Midtown Manhattan that is home to the headquarters of the NFL and Blackstone. The alleged shooter, identified by authorities as Shane Tamura of Las Vegas, killed four people, including a New York City police officer, and wounded a fifth before taking his own life.

While a motive has not been officially announced, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said police are investigating a note from the suspected gunman reportedly referring to potential links to the NFL and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a neurodegenerative disease linked to head trauma.

“We’re still investigating, this is relatively new,” Adams said. “There’s no more than just a note at this time and as you indicated he talked about CTE.”

Just a third of Americans say they now support Israel’s actions in Gaza, and almost all of them are Republicans, a new poll finds.

The poll by Gallup is the latest in a series by the polling firm about U.S. attitudes about the war. Early on, in November 2023, it found that half of Americans approved of the actions Israel was taking in Gaza, and fewer disapproved. (Some said they did not know.) By last June, more Americans disapproved than approved, Gallup found, but there was still 42% approval.

Now, after more than a year later, the proportion of Americans who say they approve of Israel’s war in Gaza has fallen to 32%, according to the poll. Among Democrats, who started out at 36% approval, the proportion has fallen to just 8%.

The proportion of Republicans who approve of Israel’s actions in Gaza is at the same level today — 71% — as it was in November 2023, Gallup found. The gap was the largest partisan divide on the issue that the poll has ever found.

The poll was conducted July 7-21, starting when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington, D.C., and continuing during a period when concerns about a humanitarian crisis in Gaza were simmering but had not reached their current level. The results add to mounting signs of that Israel is losing the support it has long enjoyed among Democrats.

The poll also found both a plummeting approval rating for Netanyahu and sharp disapproval for Israel’s military actions in Iran among Democrats.

As images of starving children in Gaza continue to circulate and the international outcry grows louder, a number of American rabbis used their pulpits this past Shabbat to speak up about the humanitarian crisis, some with sorrow, others with moral urgency, and many with a sense that silence was no longer tenable.

The sermons came amid growing pressure on Jewish institutions to reckon with the consequences for Palestinian civilians of Israel’s war against Hamas as it nears the end of its third year. In recent days, more than a thousand rabbis from around the world and across denominations signed an open letter demanding that Israel “stop using starvation as a weapon of war.”

The Union for Reform Judaism issued a public statement saying, “The situation is dire, and it is deadly,” and that Israel bears part of the blame even if Hamas is the primary cause. “The primary moral response must begin with anguished hearts in the face of such a large-scale human tragedy,” the statement said. In the Conservative movement, meanwhile, the Rabbinical Assembly cited Jewish values in calling on the Israeli government to alleviate the suffering in Gaza.  

Despite these public declarations, in many congregations the topic of Israel and Gaza remains complicated, given the unresolved trauma of Oct. 7, and the 50 hostages that remain in the hands of Hamas. Some rabbis have struggled with whether, and how, to speak publicly. Others have doubled down on the pulpit’s role as a space for moral wrestling and prophetic critique.

“This is not the Judaism we want our 12-year-olds to inherit,” said Rabbi Sarah Reines in her Friday night sermon at Temple Emanu El, the Reform congregation in Manhattan, referring to the Torah’s account of a divinely sanctioned war in which Moses commands the killing of Midianite men, women, and children. 

Reines did not explicitly mention the situation in Gaza, but she unmistakably wrestled with the moral toll of war. Drawing from the week’s Torah portion, Reines used the imagery of the war against the Midianites to examine the ethical conduct of war through the lens of Jewish tradition. Citing Maimonides, she emphasized restraint, civilian protection, and the imperative to free captives, calling them “wartime priorities” rooted in Jewish values. “Are we protecting life,” she asked, “or are we hardening ourselves to it?”

Reines was one of several rabbis who framed the current moment as a test of Jewish ethics, not only in terms of Israel’s actions, but in how Jews worldwide choose to bear witness. In Gloucester, Massachusetts, Rabbi Naomi Gurt Lind grappled with the Torah’s command to “dispossess” the land’s inhabitants, a concept she called morally troubling in light of the ongoing war in Gaza. 

A newly ordained rabbi serving Temple Ahavat Achim, a Conservative synagogue, she reflected on the Hebrew root “yarash,” which is linked to both “dispossess” and “inherit,” and explored how Jewish and Palestinian experiences of displacement echo each other. Identifying as “a Zionist through and through,” Gurt Lind affirmed both peoples’ connection to the land, saying she condemns Hamas’s actions as well as starvation as a tactic of war. 

Not all rabbis spoke from the same ideological place, but a common thread was their effort to assert Jewish moral vocabulary in a moment of despair. 

At SAJ, a Reconstructionist synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Rabbi Lauren Grabelle Herrmann delivered a sermon that she acknowledged might alienate some people when she posted it to Facebook the next day. “I stand here broken-hearted before you,” she said. “Broken-hearted by what I am witnessing … and deeply troubled by the responses I am seeing from the broader Jewish community.”

Herrmann, a self-described progressive Zionist, organized her sermon around three common Jewish responses to the aid crisis: denial (“They are making it up”), deflection (“It’s Hamas’s fault”), and moral relativism (“This is just what happens in war”). She challenged each in turn, rooting her critique in teshuvah, the Jewish practice of repentance. 

“Israel may not be responsible for the entire systemic problem,” she said, “but it is responsible for its part in the tragedy that is unfolding.”

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, Rabbi Neil Amswych of Temple Beth Shalom delivered an introspective and agonized message, one that wrestled not only with Israel’s actions but with the very role of the rabbi as public moral voice. “Why do some people need me to say what they’re thinking about Israel?” he asked. “Why can’t they do it?”

Amswych ultimately decided to sign the recent rabbinic letter urging Israel to change course, but only after what he described as a painful internal journey. He rejected performative politics and the culture of “black-and-white” statements. 

“Every public statement lacking nuance that I make brings some people who agree with it closer to the Temple, and simultaneously pushes some people who disagree further away,” he said. “There is a cost to every public black-and-white statement in a community that is trying to be truly diverse.”

Even in sermons that didn’t deal with Gaza at all, the heaviness of the moment was salient. 

In Los Angeles, Rabbi Hannah Jensen, who helps lead the progressive congregation Ikar, invoked the traditional Three Weeks of mourning on the Jewish calendar — and reimagined them as an extended period of civic grief for her city. Referencing the devastating wildfires in January and the mass ICE raids of recent weeks, she drew a direct parallel to ancient laments for Jerusalem. 

“Lonely sits the city once great with people,” she quoted from the Book of Lamentations. “The imagery feels so palpable in the city right now.” 

While Jensen’s sermon focused on displacement and trauma in Los Angeles, it pointed to a universal imperative in the face of crisis. “Our grief cannot be the whole story,” she said. “It must move us to action.”

Action, too, was a central theme in the sermon delivered by Rabbi Adam Louis-Klein at Kehillat Beth Israel, a Conservative congregation in Ottawa. He placed the war and its global fallout within the longer arc of Jewish history, drawing connections from the Hebron massacre of 1929 to contemporary campus antisemitism and media bias.

Without directly addressing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, he said the current wave of criticism against Israel should be understood as a product of how antisemitism distorts the truth. He called on Jews to move beyond fighting antisemitism, arguing that only by engaging with Jewish knowledge and identity, can Jews assert themselves in the world, and escape what he characterized as the trap of perpetual defensiveness. 

“We are not survivalists,” he said. “We are not fighting just to persist. Our survival today is now bound to the survival of truth itself — in a world where it is once again under siege.”

Two months ago, on May 27, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began distributing food in the Gaza Strip. From the outset, the group was mired in controversy. Israel initially claimed it had no connection to the organization, calling it an independent American foundation. Within days though, the chairman resigned, and a major U.S. consulting group cancelled its contract with the GHF amid questions over its funding and management.

Despite the turbulence, that day was celebrated by some in Israel as a breakthrough. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich hailed the GHF’s arrival as a “turning point in the war.” Finally, he declared, there was an entity that could deliver to the Palestinian people who needed it without connection to the United Nations and without simply funneling supplies to Hamas. The GHF, Smotrich insisted, would bypass the terror group and reach ordinary Gazans in need.

“God willing, [this will] lead to victory and the destruction of Hamas,” Smotrich said at the time. “Better late than never.”

It’s worth recalling those words after Sunday, when Israel began parachuting aid into Gaza and allowing other nations to do the same, while implementing daily pauses in fighting as claims of mass starvation sparked unprecedented global outrage.

While the United Nations’ accusations should be viewed skeptically given its institutional bias against Israel, Netanyahu could not ignore a joint statement by 28 countries — including the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Italy and Japan — demanding an immediate end to the war and condemning what they called “the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.”

Under pressure and recognizing that ignoring the pleas would come at a price, Netanyahu ordered a dramatic policy shift: Israel would significantly increase aid deliveries, parachute food into Gaza, and implement daily 10-hour pauses in populated areas, establishing new humanitarian corridors.

The move raises stark questions about Israel’s conduct and assumptions throughout the war. Did the government genuinely believe, as it claimed in March when the last ceasefire collapsed, that it could halt nearly all aid to Gaza without paying a crushing diplomatic price? When the GHF began operations in May, did Israel truly believe that this private initiative would change the war’s trajectory and bring Hamas to its knees?

Reality tells a different story. Hamas has not buckled under pressure since the GHF began distributing aid. If anything, it has hardened its demands. Last week, both the United States and Israel pulled out of ceasefire talks in Doha, with President Donald Trump bluntly declaring that Hamas does not want a deal. Can Israel alone be blamed for the deadlock? No. When Hamas sees France formally recognizing a Palestinian state and dozens of countries issuing unprecedented condemnations of Israel, it has little incentive to compromise or free the hostages.

And while Israel is right to push back against the exaggerated language of “genocide” and “mass starvation,” it cannot deny that Gaza faces a genuine humanitarian crisis. Pretending otherwise — as some in Israel’s leadership have done — doesn’t make the problem disappear. Israel may insist that there is no famine, and technically be correct, but the optics are undeniable: After 22 months of war, Israel is airdropping aid and halting military operations, an act that for much of the world reads as an admission that the crisis is very real.

The deeper problem, however, is not the aid itself. It is the pattern the aid represents: reactive decisions by Jerusalem, and not strategic thinking. For over a year, this war has been plagued by the same flaw: no clear plan, no defined objectives and no coherent endgame. Only tactical moves, almost always made under either diplomatic or political pressure.

The GHF was supposed to isolate Hamas and the renewed military operation was supposed to force Hamas into a hostage deal. Neither outcome has materialized. Now, defense officials argue that by addressing the starvation narrative, Israel will corner Hamas and pressure it to negotiate. Will that theory hold? Maybe. But experience suggests otherwise.

What is undeniable is this: Nearly two years after Oct. 7, Israel is not too far from where it started — improvising, dropping aid from the sky, pausing operations, and grasping for a path forward. The government still cannot articulate how this war ends. Until it does, every shift — from the GHF’s launch to the latest aid parachutes — will be just another tactical adjustment in a war drifting without a strategy.

Saying he believes there is “real starvation” in Gaza, President Donald Trump said the United States would set up barrier-free food centers in the beleaguered enclave.

The pronouncement, made in response to questions from reporters during an appearance in Scotland, came as a surprise, as the United States is already operating a humanitarian aid effort that has been criticized for being inaccessible and dangerous.

It also offered the latest sign of daylight between Trump and the Israeli government, which maintains that there is no starvation in Gaza even as it has begun ramping up aid efforts amid an international outcry.

“Some of those kids are — that’s real starvation stuff. I see it, and you can’t fake that,” Trump told reporters, referring to widely circulated footage of hungry children in Gaza that he said he had seen “on television.” At least two of the most searing viral images, defenders of Israel contend, do not reflect starvation but the ravages of congenital illness.

Trump said he would work with “European allies” to improve access to aid by setting up distribution points unlike those currently operating in Gaza. The distribution sites operated by the U.S.-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation have been plagued by near-daily shootings of aid-seekers, who must wait at a distance until distribution begins.

“The people can walk in and [there will be] no boundaries. We’re not going to have fences,” Trump said of the sites he envisioned. Of the current situation he said, “They see the food from 30 yards away … but nobody’s there because they have fences set up that nobody can even get it. It’s crazy what’s going on over there.”

Trump said he would press Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deliver more aid. “I want him to make sure they get the food. I want to make sure they get the food, every ounce of food,” he said.

Trump made his comments during a visit with Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, in Scotland, where they both drew protest over their support for Israel in its war with Hamas that began with Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Both have been sharply critical of the humanitarian situation and called on Israel to do more.

Several hours after the press conference, Netanyahu released a statement that did not mention Trump but reiterated his outlook on Gaza and warned that calling attention to hunger in the enclave could have negative effects.

“While the situation in Gaza is difficult and Israel has been working to ensure aid delivery, Hamas benefits from attempting to fuel the perception of a humanitarian crisis,” Netanyahu said.

Jewish singer-songwriter Regina Spektor shot back at a pro-Palestinian protester who interrupted her concert Saturday night, telling the protester, “You’re just yelling at a Jew.”

Later, she engaged in a back and forth with another audience member about the hunger crisis in Gaza, in a dramatic example of how deeply Israel’s war in Gaza is interceding in the public consciousness and shaping the experience of Jews.

The confrontation came 10 songs into Spektor’s performance at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon, when a protester began shouting “Free f—ing Palestine” from the crowd.

Spektor, who emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States as a child, has faced scrutiny for her pro-Israel activism on social media. In November 2023, the singer rebuked fellow artist Bjork for sharing an infographic about the displacement of Palestinians, and in July 2024 she was targeted by the Instagram account Zionists in Music for being a “proud Zionist who frequently posts her support for Israel on Instagram and X/Twitter.”

During an event to commemorate the anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas in New York City, Spektor sang a rendition of “Avinu Malkeinu,” the classic High Holiday prayer.

On Saturday, the singer stopped her concert and began speaking directly to the pro-Palestinian protester.

“You’re just yelling at a Jew,” she said to the person who interrupted her set. To the rest of the crowd, she said, “I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing. I really appreciate the security. We had a really hard time last night, when I said, ‘Shalom aleichem.’”

Most of the crowd responded by cheering for Spektor while others laughed, and several people yelled, “Am Yisrael Chai,” according to video of the concert posted on social media. Later, while an audience member who had yelled “Free Palestine” left the venue, Spektor said, “I thought this was different than the internet. This is real life.”

When another audience member said, “There’s a genocide happening,” Spektor said, “You can leave the show if you want. This is not an internet comment section. I know that you are mistaking my show for a YouTube video.”

The audience member then replied, “I’m watching children dying. That hurts.”

“I think you should go because this is not the place for that conversation,” Spektor replied.

“The only reason I even speak English is because I came here to escape this shit,” Spektor continued after several audience members left the concert. “I only speak English because I came from a country where people were treating Jews as others, and now I’m being othered here, and it sucks. It’ll be nice if one of my family’s generation didn’t have to go to a new country and learn a new language.”

For six years, Gady Levy, executive director of the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center in Manhattan, has had a dream: to host the world’s largest Shabbat dinner.

The previous record, documented by the Guinness Book of World Records, was set in Berlin in 2015, when 2,322 people gathered for a Shabbat meal during the European Maccabi Games.

Now, this fall, Levy aims to top that with The Big Shabbat, a massive Shabbat dinner to be held on Friday, Nov. 21 at Javits North, the newest addition to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center at 445 11th Avenue. More than 3,000 people are expected to attend the event, which Temple Emanu-El is organizing in partnership with UJA-Federation of New York. It will include a meal “curated” by celebrated Jewish foodies Adeena Sussman, Jake Cohen, Joan Nathan and Beejhy Barhany.

“We are the biggest Jewish city outside of Israel,” Levy told the New York Jewish Week. “Time for us to stand up for who we are.”

Levy is no stranger to large, attention-grabbing events. Over the past year, the Streicker Center has hosted a wide variety of speakers at the Upper East Side synagogue’s 2,500-seat main sanctuary, including business leader Bill Gates, singer and actress Cher, and Bret Stephens, an opinion columnist for The New York Times.

So when Levy learned that UJA-Federation of New York was looking to underwrite large-scale events that emphasize Jewish joy, he dusted off the proposal he has kept in his desk these many years for a gargantuan Shabbat dinner. To his delight, Streicker received a grant of $500,000 from the philanthropy to bring his vision to life.

Levy is hoping to recreate the feeling of joy and warmth that he experienced during Shabbat at sleepaway camp. As both a camper and a counselor at Camp Ramah in California, Levy recalls Shabbat being his “favorite part of camp.”

“The experience will start as soon as people get here,” he said of the Javits Center affair. “There will be people welcoming them. Lively music. Food passed around. Drink stations. Activities for kids and for adults.”

“At it’s core, it’s Shabbat,” Levy said. “By the time people leave, I want them to say three things to themselves: I’m proud to be part of the Jewish community of New York; who knew Shabbat dinner could be so much fun; and, no matter what our differences, we still want community and we are doing things that Jews did thousands of years before us.”

There will also be plenty of surprises. “Once Shabbat dinner begins, there is a big opening moment which I am not telling anyone, including you!” he told this reporter.

However, Levy did share his plans to build a reproduction of the Kotel, the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where people can write notes and stuff them into the wall, as is customarily done in Jerusalem. At the end of the evening, one of the guests in attendance will be randomly picked to win a trip to Israel — the winner will then take the notes and place it in the actual Kotel on behalf of the 3,000 people in attendance.

Clergy from New York City — including those from partnering synagogues, which include Temple Israel, Temple Shaaray Tefila and SAJ-Judaism That Stands for All — will recite the traditional Shabbat blessings. There will be “a bunch of celebrities,” Levy promises, and lots of “wow” moments, but he’s keeping mum about them for now.

The actual dinner portion of the Shabbat gathering will last an hour. “That’s the Guinness rules so from the minute we say motzi [the blessing over the bread], people need to be seated for one hour,” Levy said.

Participants will pay $54 per person for the family-style dinner, prepared by In Thyme Catering together with Yalla Teaneck, certified kosher by the Rabbinical Council of Bergen County, New Jersey. There will be a selection of salads, vegetarian stuffed peppers from Nathan and Sussman’s tomato jam-roasted salmon from her acclaimed cookbook, “Shabbat.,”

In Thyme Catering will prepare 300 challahs, more than 1,500 pounds of salmon and more than 15,000 hors d’oeuvres, according to founding partner Arthur Bassani.

Sussman, who lives in Tel Aviv, will fly to New York for the event. She feels a communal Shabbat dinner is especially important in our post-Oct. 7 era.

“With every passing week, it is more and more important that Jewish people feel they have common spaces to come together over the aspects of our culture that unify us,” Sussman said. “Shabbat dinner for the initiated is a huge source of comfort and succor and joy.”

She added: “For the uninitiated, I would imagine it is needed more than ever. The fact that it is going to provide an entry point for a lot of people for the first time is also amazing in these times. Ever since the idea was announced, it seems more relevant and more important than ever.”

The “humongous room,” according to Levy, will hold 100 tables of 30 seats each, plus three stages and large video screens, ensuring that there are no “good” or “bad” seats.

And yet, “We want to create an intimate experience,” Levy said. “White tablecloths. China plates. Candles. Washing stations at each table. And lots and lots of food on the table.”

Once the dinner is over, the reception room will be reopened for live music, dancing and dessert tables. Hopefully, said Levy, everyone will be celebrating Shabbat — as well as celebrating that “we did it,” he said, meaning earning a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.

But beyond the fun of it, Levy is hoping that participants will be so moved by the experience that they will want to do Shabbat at home, too.

“One of the surprises is that when people leave, they get a Shabbat box,” he said. “One box will have a challah cover. Another will have candlesticks. Some will include questions to engender conversation around the Shabbat table.”

The Big Shabbat will take place on Friday, Nov. 21. Tickets will go on sale on Monday, Aug. 11. Click here for details. 

Former Jewish Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel lambasted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government for perpetuating the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, accusing them of having responsibility for the ongoing humanitarian crisis.

In an interview Monday morning on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer,” Emanuel accused Netanyahu of refusing to acknowledge allegations of starvation in the region, telling Blitzer that Netanyahu had failed to devise a “day-after plan.”

“It has nothing to do with Israel’s security. You need to get food into that area, Gaza, to feed the people there and stop enforcing some type of collective punishment on the people of Gaza,” Emanuel said.

“He was warned 18 months ago, you have to have a day-after plan,” Emanuel continued. “The idea that you’re calling Israeli soldiers up on the third or fourth tour of duty to shoot at hungry people trying to get food shows you how bankrupt this entire policy is.”

Emanuel’s comments come as reports of near-daily killings at aid distribution sites in Gaza have attracted widespread scrutiny. On Sunday, Israel announced that it would pause military operations in some parts of Gaza for 10 hours a day to facilitate the distribution of aid to civilians as international calls for humanitarian relief in the region reached a fever pitch.

They also come as Emanuel, whose father is Israeli and who volunteered as a civilian with the Israeli army as a young adult, eyes a potential 2028 presidential bid in a Democratic Party where support for Israel is waning sharply.

Emanuel — the former mayor of Chicago who served as the U.S. ambassador to Japan during the Biden administration — has stoked speculation about a potential bid during recent media appearances.

In the last week, speaking separately with Bari Weiss of The Free Press and on SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show,” he has emphasized his support for Israel as a “Jewish democratic state” and also his history of clashes with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“I’m also the only person who has gone toe-to-toe publicly with Bibi Netanyahu,” he told Weiss while excoriating the war in Gaza as Netanyahu has prosecuted it.

“I don’t think young men and women should be called up for their fourth tour of duty in Israel to shoot hungry people,” he said. “That has nothing to do with the security of the state of Israel.”

Later in the CNN interview Monday, Emanuel also invoked Shabbat while condemning Israel’s lack of efficacy at distributing aid in the region.

“On Friday nights, when you do Sabbath and the prayers over the candles, the wine and the challah bread, I have never remembered the prayer for starving children,” said Emanuel. “That Israel is participating in this, perpetuating it — wrong on every level.”

When asked by Blitzer whether he was “blaming Israel for what’s going on in Gaza,” Emanuel replied, “They are responsible.”

“I am putting this at the doorstep of where it belongs, and the idea the prime minister just yesterday says there’s no starvation, people’s eyes do not lie to them,” said Emanuel. “And so I think in this case, from a strategic standpoint, from a moral standpoint, and from a political standpoint, it’s fully bankrupt.”