(Jewish News of Greater Phoenix via JTA) – Two weeks before Paul Gosar appeared via video at a conference by white nationalists, he held a different kind of fundraiser: with a Jewish candidate.

Rodney Glassman, who is running in the Aug. 2 Republican primary for Arizona’s attorney general, is a member of Congregation Beth Israel in Scottsdale and a regional board member of the Jewish National Fund. He also touts his endorsement from Gosar, a Republican member of Congress who has associations with white nationalist groups. 

“Congressman Gosar supports me,” Glassman told the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix. “I’m building a coalition of people that want me to be the attorney general, and part of building a coalition is having a diverse group of people.” 

Gosar appeared at a fundraiser with Glassman on Feb. 19, shortly before he appeared in a pre-recorded video message at the America First Political Action Conference, a right-wing organization founded by Nick Fuentes. The Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center both designate Fuentes as an extremist and Holocaust denier. He has routinely spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, including recently claiming that “Jews stood in the way” of Roe v. Wade being overturned by the Supreme Court, and that “Jewish people can be here, but they can’t make our laws.”

Gosar has held other fundraisers with Fuentes, appeared in person at his 2021 conference and has repeatedly declined to condemn Fuentes’ movement’s ideology when asked, despite condemnations from top Republicans including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Glassman’s association with Gosar troubles many members of Arizona’s Jewish community. But Glassman himself shrugs off the criticism.

“He’s supporting my candidacy. He’s never asked me to go and comment on his Twitter feed,” Glassman said, calling Gosar “one of the staunchest fighters for the Jewish state of Israel in our country.”

Glassman himself has an unusual background as a candidate. Formerly a Democrat, he served on Tucson’s city council from 2007 to 2010 and was the 2010 Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate against John McCain (a campaign during which his staffers said he made homophobic comments and acted erratically). He switched parties in 2015, saying he did so “the day President Trump announced his candidacy,” although Glassman had reportedly been a registered Republican prior to his political career.

The Air Force veteran explained his switch by saying, “I became more conservative and the Democrats moved way left.” Glassman then ran unsuccessfully for a spot on Arizona’s corporation commission and Maricopa County assessor before his current AG run. 

Glassman claimed that his involvement with Gosar only became an issue after thousands of emails were sent out by Kris Mayes, a Democratic candidate running for attorney general.

“It was because the presumptive Democratic nominee was sending out emails about how the Jewish candidate is endorsed by Congressman Gosar, who’s endorsed me in every race I’ve ever run,” said Glassman.

Glassman has been quick to embrace current Republican ideology. He said he is running for attorney general to “protect you from the government” at the federal level, and he emphasized enforcing immigration laws and fighting illegal immigration “because illegal immigration impacts our schools, health care and public safety.”

He added that children need protecting “from school districts pushing critical race theory and human sexuality instead of focusing on reading, writing and math.”

He also has embraced the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, telling the Arizona Republic that former President Donald Trump “was cheated out of Arizona’s electoral votes.” Arizona was one of the states targeted by Trump and his supporters in the aftermath of the election when the state’s electoral votes went to President Joe Biden, and the state was the subject of a Republican-led “voter audit” amid widespread unproven claims of election fraud. 

As attorney general, Glassman would have a certain degree of authority in enforcing voter ID laws in the next election. A new Arizona state law requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections was challenged in court this week by the Justice Department.

One endorsement Glassman doesn’t have, though, is Trump’s. Instead, Trump has endorsed Abraham Hamadeh, a U.S. Army Reserve intelligence officer.

A version of this story was originally published in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix and is reprinted with permission.

(JTA) — Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder asked to postpone an appearance for a deposition on the sexual harassment scandal surrounding his team on July 6 or 8 because of a trip to Israel to observe his mother’s yahrzeit, or ceremony marking the anniversary of her death, his rabbi claims.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform had summoned Snyder and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to appear as part of an investigation into the Commanders’ work culture and Snyder’s response to several complaints.

In a letter obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Snyder’s attorney Karen Patton Seymour said that the owner is traveling to Israel, but would be available for video testimony on July 28 or 29. After Snyder missed the first hearing on June 22, claiming that he had asked for a delay, the committee had offered the dates of July 6 and 8.

“Given that these plans are part of religious observances honoring his mother’s memory on the one-year anniversary of her passing, Mr. Snyder’s trip to Israel cannot be rescheduled,” Seymour said in the letter. 

Multiple women employees in executive positions with the team have accused their coworkers of sexual harassment. According to a document released in June by New York Democrat Carolyn Maloney, the House committee’s chair, Snyder conducted a “shadow investigation” to discredit their allegations, which involved hiring private investigators to intimidate witnesses and filing an overseas lawsuit to obtain phone records and emails.  

The NFL fined the team $10 million and Snyder stepped down from day-to-day operations after the investigation was announced last July. 

In another letter to Maloney, obtained by this reporter, Snyder’s rabbi, Sholom Raichik, wrote that the Snyder family had been planning a trip to Israel over the course of the past year. A yahrzeit is usually marked with a ceremony at home and occasionally the synagogue, but Raichik said this year’s anniversary coincides with the completion of a commissioned Torah scroll by a scribe in Israel to honor Snyder’s late mother, Arlene Snyder. 

Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, who is a ranking member on the Oversight Committee, was also cc’d on the letter from the rabbi.

Raichik wrote that the services he and Dan Snyder planned for the Israel trip will “encompass most of July and into August.”  

“Mrs. Snyder was a person who held the Torah laws and traditions dear to her heart,” Raichik said. “The ceremony in completion of the Holy Torah scroll in her merit and memory is a step in the process of the elevation of her soul and being drawn closer to G-d in heaven.” 

Raichik also said that representatives from the Snyder family informed Maloney on multiple occasions about the yahrzeit observance and offered several alternative testimony dates, “including appearing remotely from Israel.” 

“I understand that many of these Jewish traditions may be unfamiliar to you and your staff,” Raichik wrote to Maloney. “The staff’s insistence that Mr. Snyder disrupt his observances to participate in proceedings before your committee reflects an insensitivity to sacred Jewish traditions.” 

Seymour said that Committee staff declined “even to acknowledge the proposed dates, stating only that the Committee would have to ‘determine how to proceed.’”

“I am concerned that the way the Committee staff has proceeded — including inaccurate public statements accusing Mr. Snyder of attempting to ‘evade’ an appearance and ‘seek[ing] special treatment’ — is not only unfair, but will detract from Mr. Snyder and his family’s ability to focus on the solemn rituals associated with the observance of his mother’s first yahrzeit.” 

A committee spokesperson told JTA that Snyder failed to appear voluntarily at the Committee’s hearing in June and refused to allow his attorney to accept service of a subpoena.

(JTA) — Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister of Japan who boosted relations with Israel as part of his effort to increase his country’s global influence, was assassinated at a campaign rally on Friday.

Abe, 67, who led Japan from 2012 to 2020 after a short stint in 2006-2007, was speaking at a rally in Nara when he was shot multiple times from behind. Japan has some of the strictest gun policies in the world, and one of the lowest gun violence rates; the alleged shooter’s gun looked to have been homemade, NPR reported.

Abe was a staunch nationalist who sought to dramatically change Japan’s pacifist postwar character, increasing military spending and becoming more engaged with several world powers. His multi-faceted plans for sweeping economic reforms earned its own internationally known nickname: “Abenomics.”

Increased diplomacy with Israel was a prime example of Japan’s foreign policy shift during Abe’s consequential second tenure as prime minister. Due to its close ties with oil-producing Arab countries that were historically hostile to Israel, Japan had for decades been wary to establish warm relations with Jerusalem.

But by 2014, after a visit to Tokyo by then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a leader who shared many of his Japanese counterpart’s right-wing characteristics, trade between the two countries had risen by nearly 10%. Beyond economics, the two leaders signed historic pacts to bolster tourism and security cooperation. Israel’s military expertise made the country a particularly attractive partner for Abe, a historian told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2015.

“I am determined, together with Prime Minister Netanyahu, to make further efforts to strengthen Japan-Israel relations, so that the potentials are fully materialized,” Abe said at the time.

Abe returned the favor by offering in 2017 to host a four-way peace summit among Israeli, Palestinian and U.S. officials and then visiting Jerusalem in 2018. Things were going smoothly until the meal at Netanyahu’s residence ended with dessert served in a shoe — a major faux pas that made international headlines. In Japanese culture, shoes are kept outside of office and work spaces, a well-known taboo.

(JTA) — A Jewish summer camp in southern California is reassuring families after a prominent anti-LGBT+ Twitter account, Libs of TikTok, called attention to a year-old “diversity and inclusion” statement on its website.

“Camp Ramah, which owns tens of camps across the country, announced they are housing kids according to their gender identity rather than birth sex,” the account tweeted Wednesday afternoon. It linked to a document published by Camp Ramah in California explaining how the camp would include staff and campers with different religious backgrounds, family structures, gender identities and more.

The tweet was standard fare for Libs of TikTok, which has amassed 1.3 million followers for its stream of mostly anti-LGBT+ content, much of which aims to generate outrage about how public schools and individual educators teach about gender and sexuality. The account’s growth has dovetailed with a broad push by conservative lawmakers in many states to restrict medical care for trans children, penalize their parents or limit their participation in school activities, including sports.

The identity of the person behind “Libs of Tiktok,” Chaya Raichik, an Orthodox Jewish woman based in Los Angeles, was discovered by Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz in April. In an in-depth report, Lorenz detailed how Raichik’s account can set the agenda for conservative personalities as well as online trolls, who have inundated some of the people the account has featured with harassment and even death threats.

Exactly what that has looked like for Camp Ramah in California is not clear. Directors Rabbi Joe Menashe and Ariella Moss Peterseil told parents by email Thursday that they were aware of a “social media offensive” against the camp and had taken steps to ensure security.

“We have no reason to believe there is any specific threat; however, we are responding and communicating with you in line with our commitment to transparency,” they wrote to families of the hundreds of campers spending the summer at the camp, located in Ojai, California.

The entrance to Camp Ramah in California, located in Ojai, is seen in a photograph from 2006. The Hebrew words on the wooden sign mean “Welcome.” (Stephen Osman/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

“Please know that camp continues to run seamlessly for our chanichim (campers) and tzevet (staff), and we are in contact with our security partners out of an abundance of caution,” they added.

Reached at camp late Thursday, Menashe told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “We are focused on providing camp for our community at this time and have no comment.”

Ramah is the Conservative movement of Judaism’s summer camp network, and the National Ramah Commission operates 10 overnight camps and five day camps in the United States and Canada.

Each Ramah camp sets its own approach to gender diversity and inclusion, according to the National Ramah Commission. Ramah New England, for example, noted in a diversity statement published in April that some of its campers might identify with a different gender than they had in the past, and might therefore be assigned to a different bunk in the future.

The statement Raichik referred to from Ramah in California is not new. It was uploaded to the camp’s website in April 2021, and the section about sexual orientation and gender diversity represents just a small portion. It says the camp is committed to creating a “safe and welcoming environment for LGBTQ+ identified kids, staff, and parents” and also acknowledges that adjusting to the needs of transgender campers may be challenging for some.

“We recognize that this may represent a ‘learning zone’ for some of our families,” the statement said.

Ramah is far from the only camp to have also sought to be more inclusive of children who are transgender, nonbinary or otherwise gender non-conforming; some Jewish camps have offered all-gender or transgender-friendly housing since at least 2016, and alums of Jewish camps opened a new camp this year serving exclusively transgender children, from all religious backgrounds.

Libs of TikTok has called out some of the others, too.

“Camp Akita in Ohio, an accredited camp with @ACAcamps, is housing kids based on their gender identity,” the account tweeted on July 4. “Parents won’t be notified if their child switches cabins or if their kid’s counselor or bunkmates, who sleep in their cabin, identify as transgender.”

While many of the responses to the Libs of TikTok post about Camp Ramah mocked the camp or slammed it for its approach to gender and sexuality, others replied with a different take.

“Hi. Parent of three #Ramah campers and I couldn’t be prouder of their efforts to support LGBTQ youth,” wrote an account operated by a woman in Phoenix. “And you know what else? It doesn’t bother my kids because camp has fostered their sense of community and inclusion. You should consider it.”

(New York Jewish Week) — Baruch Lanner, the American rabbi who served nearly three years in prison for sexually assaulting students at a Jewish high school in New Jersey, has been granted a temporary residency visa that will allow him to stay in Israel while the country’s Interior Ministry reviews his request for citizenship.

Advocates for sexual abuse victims were aghast at the news, first reported by Haaretz. While Israel’s Law of Return provides every Jew in the world the opportunity to apply for citizenship, Israel has withheld citizenship in the past from those with criminal records who are seen as posing a danger to the Israeli public.

Lanner and his second wife, who was granted citizenship, also appeared in a video for the law firm that is handling the case, which alerted activists to his immigration status. In the video, in which Lanner and his wife’s faces are blurred, Lanner praises the attorney and declares, “I had some legal issues in the United States and I never thought I would be able to make aliyah,” Haaretz reported. The video has since been taken down.

In 2000, following reporting by the New York Jewish Week, the Orthodox Union, where Lanner worked as a regional director of the National Conference of Synagogue Youth, launched a probe indicating that Lanner was responsible for an array of sexual, physical and emotional abuse involving dozens of teenagers in his charge. He was convicted in 2002 of endangering the welfare of two girls during his time as principal of Hillel Yeshiva High School in Deal, New Jersey, in the 1990s.

Late last year, alleged victims filed a civil lawsuit against Lanner and his former employers under New Jersey law that allowed for a two-year “lookback” window during which sexual abuse victims could sue their abusers and their enablers.

A pending case like that should be reason enough to reconsider Lanner’s request for residency, said Shana Aaronson, director of Magen, an Israeli organization that advocates for sexual abuse victims, especially in the haredi Orthodox community.

“It’s more than disheartening, it’s infuriating that despite efforts by organizations like mine and by various government agencies, the government would make such a morally bankrupt decision like this,” Aaronson said.

Magen has compiled and shared with authorities lists of as many as 100 accused and convicted offenders who have applied for and succeeded in getting Israeli citizenship or residency visas, Aaronson said. She said that she had known about Lanner’s intentions to move to Israel since 2019.

“We were aware of his history and recommended strongly that he not be granted citizenship,” she said. While Lanner served his time in the 2002 case, granting him citizenship would erase the relevance of his presence on the U.S. sex offender registry and allow an abuser like him to “disappear into general society,” said Aaronson.

If granted citizenship, “Baruch Lanner could tomorrow walk into any school and apply for a job and be given a certificate of good standing from Israel law enforcement and get a job working with kids,” she said.

According to Haaretz, Lanner and his wife arrived in Israel as tourists and submitted their request for citizenship after landing, thereby circumventing the Jewish Agency, which handles citizenship requests in the United States and tends to reject those with criminal records. Lanner had been living variously in New Jersey and Florida.

“The details [of the Lanner case] will be thoroughly examined,” an Interior Ministry spokeswoman told Haaretz.

(JTA) – Lovers of hummus and falafel beware: data shows that global supplies of chickpeas, the main ingredient for both dishes, may dip up to 20% this year. 

A combination of Russia’s war in Ukraine, poor weather and transportation issues is leading to the shortage, which is predicted to increase prices and make cheap hummus harder to come by, Reuters reported on Thursday.

Farmers in the United States, the fourth-largest chickpea exporter in the world, planted less of the protein-packed legume this year due to less than ideal weather conditions in the spring. 

Russia is also a top chickpea producer. Global sanctions have interrupted the country’s global chickpea exports, while the ongoing war has decreased the amount of chickpeas normally grown in Ukraine by about 50 tons, the head of a global chickpea trader and brokerage firm told Reuters.

Many communities around the world have depended on chickpeas, which are a staple of many Israeli dishes, as cheap sources of protein and fiber. Demand for hummus has skyrocketed in the United States over the past two decades.

According to NielsenIQ data, chickpea prices are already 17% higher than they were before the pandemic began. 

(JTA) – The video taken at the mixed-gender prayer space at Israel’s Western Wall is brief, but the incident it captured has left a lasting impact.

A group of Jews are celebrating a bar mitzvah at the Kotel’s egalitarian prayer space. Dozens of haredi Orthodox men and teenage boys enter the scene and aggressively harass and intimidate the participants: shouting down the prayers, calling the gathered Jews “Nazis,” “animals” and “Christians,” and ripping up their prayer books.

As one of the boys celebrating his bar mitzvah continues with his service, a haredi boy blows his nose with pages from the prayer books.

The incident that took place last Thursday was only the latest in an ongoing series of harassment of non-Orthodox Jews by haredi men opposed to egalitarian prayer at the Wall and Israel’s other holy sites. (Just prior to the bar mitzvah disruption, the activist group Women of the Wall had been blocked from bringing a Torah into the women’s plaza, as it seeks to do monthly.)

Yet two things set it apart: its location, at the tiny, peripheral plaza that has been carved out as a safe haven for non-Orthodox Jews who want to pray in a mixed-gender setting at Judaism’s holiest site, and the crudeness captured on camera. Those details have prompted especially strong and lasting reactions — a denunciation from Israel’s prime minister and a fierce debate over whether the U.S. State Department should treat harassment of Jews by other Jews as antisemitism.

“Israel is the only Western country in which Jews don’t have freedom of worship,” Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said Wednesday from Paris in response to the incident, according to Israeli media outlets.

Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar and newly appointed State Department antisemitism monitor, suggested that what took place at the Western Wall was indeed antisemitism.

“Let us make no mistake, had such a hateful incident — such incitement — happened in any other country, there’d be little hesitation in labeling it antisemitism,” Lipstadt wrote from the State Department antisemitism office’s official Twitter account.

Lipstadt’s role carries no authority to penalize or otherwise act in response to antisemitism abroad. But her voice carries weight in public discussions of antisemitism, allowing others to cite a top U.S. government official in making their own cases.

While Lipstadt hedged on actually labeling the Kotel incident itself antisemitic, a person familiar with her thinking told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the encounter fit the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s widely adopted definition of antisemitism, which could help determine how the international community responds to it.

“It’s classic antisemitism under the IHRA definition, there’s dehumanizing, there’s Holocaust distortion — calling Jews Nazis falls under the scope of denial, denying the mechanisms and intentionality of the Holocaust,” said the person, who asked to remain anonymous to speak frankly.

“Tearing pages of a siddur and blowing your nose in it is classic. The only thing that confuses people is that Jews are doing it. The IHRA definition doesn’t say it applies only to non-Jews.”

The IHRA definition of antisemitism has been controversial because of its inclusion of some forms of anti-Israel rhetoric and activity. Its invocation in fights among Jews could open another front for debate.

Jews on both the right said Lipstadt should not wade into the Kotel dispute from her official position as antisemitism monitor.

David Friedman, former U.S. ambassador to Israel under President Donald Trump, said Lipstadt should focus instead on threats posed by non-Jews.

Security guards confront members of the Women of the Wall movement during Rosh Hodesh prayers at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Nov. 5, 2021. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)

“The Jewish people need to fix this internally, it’s our collective problem — you should focus instead on external threats,” Friedman tweeted, adding that he found the harassment at the Kotel “deeply disturbing.”

The Orthodox publication Ami Magazine also tweeted that Lipstadt’s office had “undermined the gravitas and significance” of the concept of antisemitism by using it to refer to “Jewish infighting.”

On the left, Abe Silberstein, a progressive commentator on Israel issues, told JTA that dealing with the incident as antisemitism, as opposed to “Jewish extremism,” ignored a “difficult truth.”

Since demonstrations against non-Orthodox Jews are routinely encouraged by haredi politicians and media who are opposed to egalitarianism, they require different tactics from dealing with outsiders who hate Jews, he said. (Silberstein works for a nonprofit focused on civil society in Israel but said he was speaking as an individual.)

“By invoking antisemitism, I am afraid we bolster the illusion that this is something that can be disowned without confronting it,” he said. “Calling the actions of these boys antisemitic is misidentifying the symptom while failing to diagnose the problem.”

But others believe that treating haredi harassment of non-Orthodox Jews as a form of antisemitism is appropriate and important.

“Is it antisemitic to attack Jews engaging in Jewish ritual at a Jewish holy site? When you phrase it that way, the answer is clearly yes,” David Schraub, a law professor at Lewis & Clark College who writes frequently on Jewish issues, told JTA. “The only reason why it wouldn’t be is if you think it gets some sort of exception because of who the attackers are.”

Tensions surrounding prayer at the Western Wall have long drawn attention from non-Orthodox Jews, including from outside Israel. Arie Hasit, an influential Israeli Masorti/Conservative rabbi who was working with the American bar mitzvah celebrant, posted on Facebook that he was “broken” over the haredi youths’ treatment of the bar mitzvah group.

“Some people hate me. Who are willing to hurt me. Because my Judaism is different from their Judaism,” Hasit wrote in Hebrew.

Lapid, a longtime proponent of egalitarian prayer in Israel, condemned the harassment. “I am against all violence at the Western Wall against people who want to pray as their faith allows them,” he said. “This cannot continue.”

Lapid’s statement followed pressure from American Jewish groups, both religious and not, to take action against haredi influence in Israeli prayer spaces. Two separate letters, one from the heads of the Reform and Conservative movements and another from the heads of some of the United States’ most prominent pro-Israel Jewish groups, had called for the prime minister to respond to the harassment.

Yair Lapid, then Israel’s foreign minister, speaks at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Oct. 12, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

“Mr. Prime Minister, we turn to you because this situation cannot go on,” Union for Reform Judaism head Rabbi Rick Jacobs and United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism head Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal wrote in their letter to Lapid. “We represent millions of Jews who cannot tolerate such behavior, who are tired of being treated as second-class citizens at the Wall.”

Jacobs and Blumenthal called on Lapid to implement the so-called “Western Wall compromise”: a plan that would expand and make permanent the Kotel’s egalitarian prayer section, known as Ezrat Yisrael.

The agreement has languished in the Knesset for years, because it is staunchly opposed by the country’s religious right. A planned implementation earlier this year was put on hold after threats of violence. Lapid supports the plan, but his influence as a caretaker prime minister is limited until Israel holds new elections this fall (the country’s fragile ruling coalition recently dissolved, in part prompted by a different religious disagreement).

The other letter — from the Jewish Federations of North America, the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency and Israel fundraising network Keren Hayesod — also called on Lapid to condemn the harassment at the Kotel.

“This is about the basic ‘derech eretz’ [consideration for others] of Israelis welcoming Jews from around the world who come to celebrate their most cherished smachot [celebrations] in the Jewish State, follow all the established rules for such an event, engage in no provocation, demonstrate nothing but ‘ahavat Yisrael’ [love of Israel], and are nevertheless subjected to conduct that should embarrass every Jew of every level or style of Jewish practice,” the letter said.

The organizations’ letter did not make specific policy demands. It stressed that the latest incident was “not about the Kotel agreement,” and did not call on Lapid to advance the plan — only to more strongly enforce a prohibition on violence at the space. (Israeli police are seen in the video holding the parties back from each other but otherwise not acting.)

But it did suggest that, on the eve of U.S. President Joe Biden’s first scheduled trip to Israel, the stakes of preventing another episode like the one that interrupted an American boy’s bar mitzvah last week are high.

“No effort to unite or strengthen the ties between Israel and the Jews of the Diaspora,” the letter said, “can be remotely successful while such behavior is allowed to continue.”

This story originally said the people interrupted by protest were Reform Jews. The bar mitzvah ceremony was in fact a Masorti/Conservative service. The story has been corrected.

(New York Jewish Week) — When Oren Saar moved to the United States seven years ago, he already had lived many lives: five years in the Israeli Defense Forces, four years at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, one a year traveling in South America and two years working as an engineer for an Israeli technology company. 

But for Saar, 36, the immigrant experience in the United States was something entirely new, and it was sometimes difficult. As an MBA candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then as an intern at Google before moving to New York City to work for Boston Consulting Group, Saar found himself more homesick than he expected. More than anything, he and his wife longed for a homemade meal that reminded them of their family gatherings in Israel, like the Moroccan fish they would have for Shabbat dinner, or jachnun, a flaky Yemeni pastry served on Shabbat mornings.

And thus, the idea for WoodSpoon, a homemade meal delivery service, was born. “The core essence and the story of WoodSpoon is a very simple story,” Saar told the New York Jewish Week. “We were living in New York City, and we just missed the taste of homemade food.” 

Instead of ordering from a restaurant, WoodSpoon customers order their meals from a pre-vetted home chef, many of whom specialize in a particular cuisine, such as Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese or Dominican.

“In New York, you’re surrounded by thousands of really good restaurants,” Saar said. “But as an immigrant who lives in a city, it’s still very hard to find the types of dishes that make you feel at home. WoodSpoon is there to help us and others get this feeling when they eat something.”

WoodSpoon launched in March 2020 with 20 chefs on the platform and with most dishes ranging between $14 and $25. And yes, while the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic was a death knell for many small businesses, for Saar, it was serendipitous: The entire city — and world — was stuck in quarantine, unable to see or connect with family and friends. If there was ever a perfect time for contactless, homemade comfort food to arrive at people’s doors, this was it.  

WoodSpoon offered a solution on both ends: Here was a convenient delivery option for New Yorkers stuck at home. At the same time, it offered a stream of income for home cooks and a way for professional chefs and food industry types to try out new recipes, explore different cuisines and keep busy at a time when restaurants were shuttered. 

WoodSpoon’s offerings provided a more personal touch than a restaurant or delivery service. “Each dish is being uniquely prepared and tailored for the person that just ordered it,” Saar said. “It just gives you the feeling that somebody’s taking care of, or at least thinking of you. That’s what it’s all about.”

Not that WoodSpoon invented the wheel —  it operates similarly to UberEats, Grubhub, Seamless and every other online food delivery service. An app and website connects customers to available home chefs, whose online storefront includes a bio, the dishes they’ll be making that week and reviews from previous customers.

The platform offers plenty of Israeli, Mediterranean and even kosher options for diners — including a storefront called “The Kiddush Club,” a glatt kosher kitchen operated by Corrin Gidon, an Israeli TV presenter, and Yehiel Sorotzkin, her New Yorker husband. The pair, who also own a Jewish deli-style restaurant in Tel Aviv, cook homemade Shabbat dinners with the help of a team — both Ashkenazi-style (with liver, herring and gefilte fish) and Sephardic-style (with Syrian lahmacun or Moroccan cigars and matbucha). 

Saar and his business partner, Merav Kalish Rozengarten, also have hopes that the platform will help connect cultures and expose its customers to new types of food. “I used to order Americanized Chinese food all the time,” Rozengarten, who is also Israeli, said. “Through WoodSpoon, I’ve discovered authentic, homemade Chinese cuisine. It blew my mind how different it was than what I thought Chinese food could be.”

One of Saar’s favorite orders — Peruvian empanadas — remind him of his travels in the country after he left the Israeli army. “It was hard for me to find a really good empanada here,” Saar said. 

Alon Hadar’s mushroom Kurdish kubeh in beet stew. (Courtesy)

Chef Alon Hadar, a WoodSpoon chef who runs a storefront called Hamara Family Style, appreciates the flexibility and creativity he finds through using the platform. He uses it to cook and cater his family’s Kurdish-Jerusalemite recipes like kubeh, a type of dumpling soup, and kadeh, a cheese-stuffed pastry similar to an empanada, as well as mezze platters, kebabs and shawarma. (Hadar described a hamara as a small, local Middle Eastern cafe where friends and family meet to have a drink, listen to music, play backgammon and share small plates: “As soon as you enter, you’re family.”)

Hadar had previously worked as one of the main chefs for Homemade by Miriam in Tribeca, a to-go outpost of Miriam, an Israeli restaurant with sit-down locations in Park Slope and the Upper West Side. However, he realized his love of food and cooking depended upon being able to experiment with his recipes, as well as sharing personal stories along with his dishes. That’s not always possible in the restaurant business, especially in a fast-casual setting, he explained, so he transitioned to working with WoodSpoon two months ago. 

“I really liked that WoodSpoon gave me the opportunity. They run with me to do anything. They say to me, ‘Challenge yourself, don’t stop here, don’t worry about what other chefs are making. Go with your vision, go with your experience,’” Hadar said. “In a regular restaurant, it can take years for that to happen. My heart has grown bigger, and they really opened doors for me.”

His WoodSpoon recipes, he said, are his way of bringing his Israeli grandmother and mother with him to New York. But he also loves to experiment: He is currently developing a Mexican-style Mediterranean taco.

Hadar’s Jerusalem-style beef kebab is served with Kurdish flatbread, a tomato salad, zhug, amba, tahini and hummus. (Courtesy)

In the nearly three years since Saar and Rozengarten began WoodSpoon, the company has managed to steadily scale up, including a subway marketing campaign that plays on the idea that while visits with family can be delicious and comforting, they can also be stressful. “It’s like getting Grandma’s soup, without the ‘When are having kids?’” one subway advertisement reads. “Miss home? We can deliver it,” another offers. 

Business is good, said Saar, WoodSpoon attracting “thousands of customers, hundreds of sales per month, and both have been steadily growing month over month.” With over 300 home chef partners and operating in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia, Saar is as confident as ever that his idea will resonate with America’s immigrants. 

“During Shabbat when people order jachnun or cholent or kubeh or couscous or any type of other Israeli dish, to get it from a real Israeli home chef or Jewish home chef that will make it exactly with the nuances of how they used to make it in Israel — that’s where we come in,” he said. “Everyone in the community provides value in a different way. For us, it’s making people feel at home for even a few minutes.”

(JTA) — In 2009, James Caan, one of the leading movie stars of the 1970s, told Vanity Fair that he was twice honored as New York City’s “Italian of the Year.” The kicker: He’s not Italian.

Caan, who died Wednesday at 82, according to a post from his family to his Twitter account, staked out rare ground in Hollywood as a Jew known for blockbuster tough guy roles — and for almost always being considered anything but Jewish.

The Italian reputation dogged him after what was arguably his most famous role, as mafioso Sonny Corleone in “The Godfather,” which he reprised briefly in “The Godfather Part II.” (In that same Vanity Fair profile, Caan said that people often approached him in public to see if he was as hot-tempered as his Corleone character.)

One of his earliest roles, in the 1966 Howard Hawks classic western “El Dorado,” also gave him a longtime cowboy moniker. Caan said in an interview earlier this year that he worked as a professional rodeo performer for years before becoming famous, and that Steve Wynn, the disgraced Jewish casino magnate, used to introduce him to people in Las Vegas as “the best Jewish cowboy” he had ever met.

Born in the Bronx, Caan was raised by working class German-Jewish immigrants in Sunnyside, Queens, where he has said he developed some of his tough guy mojo. His father was a kosher butcher, and while he worked for him at various times, Caan looked to avoid the meat trade.

He played football for two years at Michigan State University, where he was a member of the Jewish Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. He transferred to Hofstra University on Long Island, where he became friends with fellow undergraduate Francis Ford Coppola.

Some of Caan’s other notable performances include a football player diagnosed with cancer in “Brian’s Song” (1971); a sailor who falls in love with a prostitute in “Cinderella Liberty” (1973); a professor with a gambling addiction in “The Gambler” (1974); and the protagonist of “Misery” (1990), a famous adaptation of the Stephen King novel. He also played Barbra Streisand’s love interest in “Funny Lady” (1975), a sequel to the Fanny Brice story in “Funny Girl.”

A later career highlight came in 2003, as a side character in the Will Ferrell Christmas-themed hit “Elf.”

In 2017, at age 77, Caan starred in “Holy Lands” as a Jewish doctor who moves from New York City to Israel, where he starts a pig farm in Nazareth. The real-life Caan had visited Israel in 2016 and reportedly said, when asked by The Media Line, that no one had ever questioned his support of Israel.

“I don’t hang around with antisemites if that’s what you mean, and I don’t know any,” he said, “and if I did, I’d punch them in the face.”

In his 2021 memoir “Yearbook,” Seth Rogen calls Caan “a scary Jew, which is almost unheard of.”

“He’s in his own lane, Jew-wise,” Rogen wrote.

(JTA) – For many Britons, Boris Johnson’s tenure as prime minister will have been defined by scandals like the one that forced him to resign on Thursday.

For Jewish Britons, the memories might well include a broken menorah.

Elected in 2019, the Conservative Party leader announced Thursday that he would step down after his cabinet collapsed amid his latest scandal — the way Johnson handled the case of a senior official who had been accused of sexual abuse. Johnson has also come under criticism for his violations of the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 rules and his alleged failure to report some meetings with Russian oligarchs (notwithstanding, Johnson has been relatively tough in his criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin.)

Johnson said he intends to stay on until his party holds an internal vote for a successor, leaving open the question of when and whether he will actually vacate the office. 

When he does, Britain’s nearly 300,000 Jews are likely to remember him as someone whose leadership had little lasting effect on their status. Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, led the U.K.’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, blacklisted Hezbollah as a terrorist group and lifted the unofficial boycott on official visits to Israel by senior members of the British Royal House. 

In contrast, Johnson’s tenure featured few changes, for better or worse, on the issues that many community members hold dear, according to Herschel Gluck, an influential Orthodox rabbi from northern London. He noted that under Johnson, British authorities did strengthen enforcement of rules that haredi Jewish schools in the United Kingdom seem reluctant to uphold.

“Johnson has charisma, spoke generally in positive terms and gave the feeling that the community was dear to his heart, which a lot of people liked. But I can’t think of a single area where he actually delivered,” Gluck said. 

Anat Koren, the editor-in-chief of London’s Hebrew-language newspaper, Alondon, offered a more sanguine assessment of Johnson’s tenure. 

“He was a friend to Israel with a warm attitude to the Jewish community,” she said. “He made sure there isn’t a deterioration when it comes to the government’s attitudes to Israel and the Jews, and that’s already a lot.” 

Whatever his scorecard on Jewish issues, Johnson certainly provided some memorable Jewish moments since 2019.

A rare visit to the Belfast synagogue

During a coalition-building visit last month to the offshore British territory, Johnson, who is a key promoter of the U.K.’s departure from the European Union, visited the Belfast synagogue and vowed to sort out the kosher market problems that Brexit helped create. The issue has not been solved as of yet, but its acknowledgment was an unusual recognition of the plight of a small minority by a politician who has sought to minimize Brexit’s negative effects.

The broken menorah

During a Hanukkah reception in London last year, Johnson enthusiastically waved around a delicate menorah that he had just been given as a token of the appreciation of the Conservative Friends of Israel group. The object’s candle holders went flying across the room. Johnson, true to his bumbling public image, looked sheepish while the menorah was reassembled. Yair Lapid, who was then Israel’s foreign minister, laughed at the situation, Johnson, or both. “I guess you’re not supposed to wave a menorah about,” Johnson was heard mumbling.

Yiddish on Passover

In a 2021 video greeting for Passover, Johnson, whose maternal great-grandfather, Elias Avery Lowe, was a Moscow-born Jew, demonstrated some deep familiarity with Jewish customs and even used a Yiddish word, kvetch — which means to whine — to refer to some of what goes on when Jewish families sit around the Passover Seder dinner table.

A shift on Israel and the UN

As foreign secretary, Johnson spoke out pointedly against what he described as anti-Israel bias at United Nations forums. He also shifted the position of the United Kingdom on items dedicated to criticizing Israel alone, moving it from “yes” to abstention and finally to a “no.” In 2021, he went one step further and stated that the United Kingdom was opposed to the Palestinian bid for an investigation into alleged war crimes by Israel. “This investigation gives the impression of being a partial and prejudicial attack on a friend and ally of the U.K.,” he said. His position furthered the reversal started by his predecessor May, which ended decades of the Foreign Office’s endorsement of resolutions and initiatives hostile to Israel.

An intimate Holocaust survivor discussion

Whereas his predecessors often spoke at events featuring Holocaust survivors and commemoration activists, Johnson last year organized an hour-long video call with a survivor and a death camp liberator in which his role was to listen. Johnson sat on the edge of his seat as he heard the stories of Auschwitz survivor Renee Salt and a Bergen-Belsen liberator Ian Forsyth. As he interviewed the two elderly speakers, he stopped to inquire about certain details (“You must have been 14 by then?” he asked Salt) and told the two that what they had told him was “one of the most powerful things I’ve ever heard.”