His parents, Marla Covin Cooper and Ross Cooper, younger brother Ethan and grandfather Jerry were visiting him in Israel when he died, and ahead of his funeral a request went out to the public saying that they were inviting members of the public to “come and accompany him on his final journey so that he won’t be alone in death.”

At his funeral held after the Jewish mourning day of Tisha B’Av, his father thanked those gathered for answering the family’s call. “This is the reason he came to this country, to protect in ways other than faith,” he said.

Ethan Cooper said that after serving completing his initial service in Israel, his brother joined the war effort in Ukraine as a volunteer. “Jordan is the truest embodiment of selflessness I have ever known,” he said.

Jordan, who was from Garnet Valley, Pennsylvania, attended Camp Ramah in the Poconos for several years, where the camp said he would be “fondly remembered by his camp friends for always having a smile on his face and bringing joy and laughter to those around him.” He moved to Israel in 2018 through the Garin Tzabar program for lone soldiers.

“I have lived my whole life in an area with a very small Jewish population. Growing up in the type of town that I did, I learned very quickly that a Jew can very easily become an outsider,” Cooper told Haaretz in 2018 when he arrived in the country. “My reason for wanting to move to Israel is that I wish to serve in the IDF. I feel it is my responsibility as a Jew to protect future Jewish generations so they can live in their homeland without fear of persecution.”

After completing his service in the Nahal infantry brigade, Cooper returned to the United States where he attended university. He came back to Israel after Oct. 7 as part of the country’s mass mobilization of reservists. His 200 days of reserve duty ended on July 18.

Cooper’s mother is the former chief development officer at the Jewish Federation of Delaware and a recent president of the family’s synagogue, Congregation Beth Shalom in Wilmington, Delaware.

According to accounts shared widely in Israeli media, the family said Cooper’s mother had purchased halva at a market on Monday after receiving assurances by the seller that it did not contain any nuts. After Cooper suffered a severe allergic reaction, he received an epipen injection but later collapsed and died.

The Israeli couple who “adopted” Cooper during his time in the country, in keeping with a tradition for soldiers who have no other family in the country, Shlomo and Patty Asur, told Ynet that after Oct. 7, he had planned to stay in Israel.

“He planned to build a life here, marry his girlfriend and start a family,” said Shlomo Asur. “He rented a house in Rishon LeZion and planned to join the Border Police as a career officer.”

The family is sitting shiva in Tel Aviv before returning to the United States.

To read more content visit www.jta.org

“Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance” was named the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year and won both the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial History Award and the Holocaust Award in Memory of Ernest W. Michel. The book explores how four towering composers who lived through the Second World War transformed their experiences into what Eichler calls “intensely charged memorials in sound.”

James McBride won two National Jewish Book Awards for fiction for his novel “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store,” a sprawling whodunit centering on a small Pennsylvania town whose Jewish and African-American residents find common cause in the 1920s and 1930s.

McBride won the JJ Greenberg Memorial Award for Fiction and The Miller Family Book Club Award in Memory of Helen Dunn Weinstein and June Keit Miller.

The son of a Jewish mother and African-American father, McBride has said the book is based in part on his Jewish grandmother, who was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home in a small Virginia town and worked in her family’s store.

The National Jewish Book Awards, in their 73rd year, are an opportunity to “bring to the fore books that may give readers one more way, perhaps a new way, to connect with their Judaism,” said Elisa Spungen Bildner, president of the Jewish Book Council, in a statement.

The awards were announced live at the JCC Manhattan as part of its Books That Changed My Life festival. The winners will be feted at a March 26 event at the Upper East Side’s Bohemian National Hall.

Ruth Madievsky won the the Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction for her novel “All-Night Pharmacy,” about a troubled young woman and the Soviet Jewish refugee who purports to act as her spiritual guide.

Benjamin Balint received the Biography Award in Memory of Sara Berenson Stone for his book “Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History,” an examination of the life and legacy of the enigmatic Polish writer.

Sabrina Orah Mark’s memoir “Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales” was awarded the Krauss Family Award in Memory of Simon & Shulamith (Sofi) Goldberg for Autobiography & Memoir. The essays in the book use fairy tales as jumping off points to talk about motherhood, family and the challenges of raising mixed-race children.

Elizabeth Graver’s novel “Kantika,” a 20th-century saga about a Turkish-Jewish family and their immigration to America, won the Sephardic Culture Mimi S. Frank Award in Memory of Becky Levy. Yariv Inbar won the Hebrew Fiction in Translation Jane Weitzman Award for his book “Operation Bethlehem,” which is self-translated.

The Modern Jewish Thought and Experience Dorot Foundation Award in Memory of Joy Ungerleider was awarded to Jeremy Brown for his book “The Eleventh Plague: Jews and Pandemics from the Bible to COVID-19.”

The book council also presented its annual mentorship award, named in honor of the JBC’s former executive director, Carolyn Starman Hessel, to Altie Karper, who retired this past December as editorial director of Schocken, the venerable Jewish publishing house. The judges said Karper “has been at the forefront of promoting Jewish literature, and truly upholding the history and mission of Schocken Books” while helping to “publish some of the most important Jewish books in recent history.”

Other National Jewish Book Award winners include:

•The Nahum Sarna Memorial Scholarship Award: “Fractured Tablets: Forgetfulness and Fallibility in Late Ancient Rabbinic Culture,” by Mira Balber
•The Children’s Picture Book Tracy and Larry Brown Family Award: “Two New Years,” by Richard Ho, illustrated by Lynn Scurfield
The Young Adult Literature Award: “The Blood Years,” by Elana K. Arnold
•The Middle Grade Literature Award: “The Dubious Pranks of Shaindy Goodman,” by Mari Lowe.
•The Jane and Stuart Weitzman Family Award for Food Writing and Cookbooks: “Kibbitz & Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow’s Cafeteria,” by Marcia Bricker Halperin
•The Berru Poetry Award in Memory of Ruth and Bernie Weinflash: “When There Was Light,” by Carlie Hoffman
•The Holocaust Memoir Award in Memory of Dr. Charles and Ethel Weitzman: “The Ghost Tattoo,” by Tony Bernard
To read more content visit www.jta.org

“Having been a Democratic member of Congress, I don’t think there’s anyone who better understands the threat that extreme partisanship poses to the country and, frankly, to the issues that we in our community care deeply about,” Deutch told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview last week. “And someone’s got to stake out a loud position that says, ‘We’re not going to be pulled to the far right or the far left.’”

Deutch succeeded David Harris as head of the 116-year-old AJC after 12 years representing South Florida in Congress, where he was an outspoken advocate for Israel and for combating antisemitism. One year into his new job, he’s carefully stoked AJC’s reputation as a sort of “State Department” of the organized Jewish community, with its citizen diplomacy on behalf of Jewish concerns and advocacy for Israel.

At the same time, he was drawn into unforeseen crises, like the outrage that followed online antisemitic rants by the rapper formerly known as Kanye West and and the tumult over the right-wing Israeli government’s judicial overhaul plans.

He’s also cultivated the AJC brand: temperate, somewhat patrician, more comfortable pulling together a task force or quietly meeting with a social media executive than issuing an angry press release or tweet. In a wide-ranging conversation, he discussed whether that approach remains viable — or even advisable — in the current political climate, why he thinks AJC speaks for a majority of American Jews and how he feels about reports that support for Israel is softening among his former Democratic colleagues.

Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.

It’s been almost a year since you left Congress to take your position at the American Jewish Committee. Do you miss politics?

I’m grateful to have had the opportunity and proud of what I was able to do on Jewish issues as chair of the Middle East, North Africa, and Global Counterterrorism Subcommittee. I chaired the Ethics Committee, which, especially around the time of the High Holidays, feels like a Jewish part of my work as well, frankly. And it was really great work. It’s also, as everyone knows, a bitterly partisan place. It was different when I left than it was when I got there seven terms before. And to have had the opportunity to leave what is perhaps the single most partisan place in America to lead a Jewish organization that allows me to work on the issues that are central to who I am to and do it every day of the week (except for Shabbat) — and to do it in a space that is nonpartisan and nuanced, and that recognizes the importance of working together — that’s been fantastic.

I want to get back to the issue of partisanship, especially as it applies to the Jewish community. But first I want to ask: The Anti-Defamation League and dozens of other organizations fight antisemitism. AIPAC lobbies for Israel. A network of community relations councils advocates for a Jewish agenda in local government. Why do we need the American Jewish Committee?

AJC is the global advocacy organization for the Jewish people. The mission is both straightforward and incredibly expansive. Our mission is to enhance the well-being of the Jewish people and advance democratic values. Yes, there are lots of organizations that work on various pieces of that, but we have for more than 116 years. We have been active in the United States and around the world now with 25 regional offices, and offices and representatives all across the globe, forging the kinds of relationships that are necessary in a nonpartisan way to advocate for the entirety of the Jewish people. There’s 16 million Jews in the world out of eight-and-a-half billion people and AJC’s role is to advocate on behalf of all of them — whether it’s working in Paris, to help ensure that the Macron government understands the challenges that Israel or the Jewish community faces, or our new regional office in San Diego or our regional office or in Atlanta that’s working on building relationships in the intergroup space.

The Jewish community may not be partisan in the sense that you are using the term, but it’s certainly polarized, with its own far right and far left. In recent years AJC has been seen as the ultimate “centrist” Jewish group, which to some is a compliment and to others a sign that it doesn’t take tough positions that could alienate those on either side of the political debate. Do you accept the label of “centrist” and if so why?

Proudly centrist. Yes, you’re right, in the Jewish community, like in the broader community, there are definitely extremes. But I absolutely believe that the vast majority of members of the Jewish community, like most people in America, don’t spend their time on the extremes. They don’t spend their time looking for ways to demonize one another. In the Jewish community that means finding opportunities to work together to strengthen the Jewish community, like giving voice to Jewish students or training the next generation of global Jewish leaders to stand and advocate for Jewish communities with governments around the world and here in our own country.

The suggestion that being centrist is somehow more challenging, with the noise coming from the extremes, highlights exactly why AJC’s role is so necessary. We’re going to call out antisemitism wherever we see it on the far left or the far right. We’re going to work with whoever we need to to advance the Jewish community’s interests.

So let me give you a test case. AJC issued a statement on the judicial reform effort in Israel, essentially criticizing the government’s rush to change the law, defending checks and balances, minority rights and civil liberties, and urging compromise. Other Jewish groups, alarmed by the government’s anti-democratic moves, have used much stronger language. Does AJC risk appearing out of step by in this case saying less?

I would absolutely disagree. I took a group of AJC leaders to Israel in January. The protests had been going on for a couple of weeks, as I recall, and we were the first organization to lay out our position with respect to judicial reform. And we haven’t wavered from it. We’ve engaged with all of the parties and that I think is perhaps a difference. Our view, as we said in Israel at the time, is that it’s not up to us to decide whether Israel decides [to change] their judicial system. That’s not our call. However, if they’re going to do anything that dramatically impacts the institutions that are fundamental to Israeli democracy, given the importance of democracy in Israel and to the Jewish people, if they’re going to do anything that’s going to affect that, it ought to come as a result of a process that is thoughtful and deliberative and that ultimately seeks compromise and respects civil liberties and minority rights. I said it in my meetings with the Knesset. I said it in my meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu. And it’s why we’ve been so supportive of [Israeli] President [Isaac] Herzog’s efforts to reach a compromise. And when the “reasonableness” bill went through and it wasn’t the result of a deliberative process or compromise, we said so at the time.

What we’re not going to do as an organization that is fiercely pro-Israel, is we’re not going to take positions that play into the hands of those whose interest is not in Israeli democracy, but whose interest is in finding ways to undermine Israel’s very right to exist. So I’m not going to declare that this government is illegitimate. I’m not going to take sides in political battles. We have a principled approach that respects the importance of Israeli democracy for Israel and for Diaspora Jewry. And we point out that the fact that these protests have gone on as long as they have, using as their symbol the Israeli flag, is a perfect example of what Israel represents.

The fight against antisemitism has also become partisan, even within the Jewish community, with disagreement over whether the biggest threat is from a violent right or an anti-Israel left. Are you concerned about how it’s been made a partisan issue and a polarizing issue when it should be a consensus issue?

I don’t know how anyone who couldn’t have that concern. We do not have the luxury of picking and choosing which antisemites we’d like to focus on. It’s why we do so much in the Latino Jewish space, in the Black church space and why our Muslim Jewish Advisory Council matters so much. It’s why we’ve been so engaged with the Catholic Church. When I was in Congress, it was always easy to point out the antisemitism among those that you disagree with in partisan political terms. It’s a lot more challenging to call out the statements and behavior of those in your own party. That, unfortunately, is now something that we see beyond the halls of Congress.

Take the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, for example. It looks a lot like the AJC’s, which we published several years ago, and we worked hard with the White House to help inform them in drafting their society-wide approach. There are over 200 specific action items that will help keep the Jewish community safe, and yet there are those who immediately pivot to the things that they think undermine the effort to fight antisemitism. That’s the challenge. We have to be able to come together and call out the antisemites wherever they are, and it’s hard. But again, it’s what most people want us to do in the real world.

Speaking of the National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, which the Biden administration announced in May: I’m curious how you, as a former member of Congress, view the effectiveness of such strategies. Have you seen examples of an administration setting priorities like this that have a real effect in bringing about change, and do you worry that action plans like this sound great but won’t be enacted?

That’s why we immediately formed a task force with over 50 of our professionals from around the country and from 14 different departments of AJC, all with a goal of identifying every one of the 200 action items and making sure that it’s carried out. This cannot be a document that sits on a shelf. It can’t be a document that is important in this administration, but then future administration’s may push it aside. I can tell you just from the work that we’ve done, there are parts of the federal government that never really think about antisemitism. That’s why his plan is so significant. It went out to the bureaucrats, the policy people who are doing the work.

Can you give me an example? When AJC follows up with bureaucrats in government to discuss the strategy against antisemitism, what’s the ask?

Sure. We entered into an agreement with the Small Business Administration. Administrator [Isabella Casillas] Guzman came down to South Florida and we did a roundtable with small business owners. Small businesses represent the heart and soul of our economy. They don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to fight antisemitism. They’re trying to earn a profit. So this roundtable will be replicated around the country with the regional offices of the SBA, to help them understand how to respond if there’s antisemitism in local small businesses and better understand the challenges that Jewish small business owners face. This is the kind of thing that can make a real difference, if for no other reason than there are lots of people who don’t think about antisemitism who will now join in this fight with us.

There’s one other quick example. We recently had a meeting with a number of mayors on Long Island. We’ve partnered with the Conference of Mayors to come up with a mayor’s guide to combating antisemitism, which these mayors are now committing to. So that when a national debate happens after Kanye decides to unload an antisemitic rant on the Jewish people online, there’s an opportunity to engage more allies with us than we’ve ever had before.

When you raise Kanye, we’re talking about the toxic effect of social media and celebrity and how someone with antisemitic ideas can own a platform with a couple of rants. Tell me about your outreach to social media companies. You saw how Elon Musk went after the Anti-Defamation League for calling out antisemitism on X/Twitter. What does AJC do differently in this regard?

I can tell you what we have done for some time now. A few weeks ago, I had a meeting with Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X. And we were very, very clear about what we wanted and steps that they could take to make their platform safer for the Jewish community. And she made clear to us that she’s the CEO and that she welcomed our input. We’ve continued the conversations where we’ve offered to be helpful in a whole variety of ways, including helping to identify blind spots.

We know that outside of the Jewish community, there are lots of antisemitic tropes that over millennia have led to really dire outcomes for the Jewish community, including violence and pogroms and expulsion from countries and and obviously, the worst case, the attempted annihilation of the Jewish people in the Holocaust. We understand that there are lots of people who need to be educated about why statements about Jews and power and conspiracy theories about Jewish control are so dangerous. That’s one of the ways that we’ve offered to be helpful.

We’ve also suggested some steps that can be taken right now. For example, if there’s a post on X that is antisemitic in nature, there’s not a way to respond and raise the issue for X and specifically identify it as antisemitic. Well, that’s an easy step. And then big picture: What we want from all of the social media companies first and foremost is for them to enforce their own rules. These are private companies. They have rules about what is and what isn’t tolerated on their platforms. We want them to enforce those rules to prevent antisemitism that’s a threat to the Jewish people.

And it was your takeaway that Yaccarino seemed amenable to these kinds of suggestions?

She was absolutely willing to continue to engage with us. We’ve continued to follow up and, and certainly my hope from that response is that we’ll see concrete actions.

I want to pivot to talk about a survey AJC did last year, which confirmed that American Jewish millennials are distancing themselves from Israel more than their elders. AJC’s message at the time was that the numbers were not quite as bad as some people feared — nevertheless, the trends are clear. How worried are you about disaffection for and alienation from Israel for younger Jews — and if you had a solution, what would it be?

Well, first of all, the top line of the survey was that three-quarters of American Jewish millennials believe that it’s important for Jews to have close ties with Israel. So I think that’s significant. That’s something that we see in the work that we do every day.

There are others who have questions about Israel’s policies, and I’m not writing off young Jews who come from a place of concern about Israel. It’s a serious issue. We engage in it. It’s why we devote so much attention through our high school division, our Campus Global Board, our young leadership division, in ensuring that we’re addressing these issues that we’re discussing, but that we’re also capitalizing on the incredible energy and enthusiasm and passion of young people who absolutely want to join the effort with their fellow Jews from around the world in supporting one another and supporting Israel.

But it’s also a little more complex. We don’t shy away from the conversations that young people want to have. I don’t believe that the way to address concerns about millennials is simply to lecture them and tell them that if you simply understand this piece of history, then you’ll understand why this should all be so important to you. I was in France a few months ago and heard from a number of Jewish university students that when they went to parties, as soon as someone learned they were Jewish, they were bombarded with questions about Israel and the Palestinians. And so for some, [in terms of their distancing from Israel,] it’s more an issue of not wanting to define their Jewish identity [in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict]. It doesn’t mean that they’re anti-Israel.

The anecdote about the French students reminds me of a critique, not just about AJC but many Jewish mainstream institutions, that by making Israel so integral to what it means to be an American Jew, it came at the expense of creating a distinct American Jewish identity. Do you think Jewish organizations somehow share in the blame for that, in the sense that they tied the two identities too closely together?

No, I don’t. Israel means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Some people engage in Israel because they care about Israel as a Jewish homeland. Some people recognize it as a refuge for Jews from around the world. For some it’s based purely on the importance of Israel in our prayers.

I do think, however, that this gets to a broader point of what we should be advocating for. If the only thing that we’re doing as a community is responding to antisemitism, if we’re letting the people who hate Jews define the Jewish community’s mission, or that the only Jewish history that we’re really focused on is the Holocaust, then we’re failing our young people. The big question that I find myself asking, especially around the holidays, is what happens when we win the battle against antisemitism? That’s why it is so important for us to be not just a global organization, but a proudly Jewish organization. We have to understand who we are so that others can understand who we are and what we’ve contributed to the world and to America. And that requires us to learn a little more and be understandably proud of what it means to be a Jew in America.

Can you give me a specific example of AJC programming that’s about inculcating this sort of Jewish pride?

Our Leaders for Tomorrow program for high school teaches kids to not just be proud, proud Jews and and proudly pro-Israel but helps them understand what we’ve contributed throughout history. And our center for Contemporary Jewish Life does educational programs that lead the way on this whole Jewish-and-proud effort.

You succeeded David Harris, who led the organization for over 30 years. What goals did you set out for AJC when you took over and what have you achieved? What hasn’t been done and are you most anxious to get going?

First of all, AJC for over 116 years has been a trusted — I would argue, the most trusted — voice across the globe in representing the Jewish community. And I came in committed to expanding on that legacy. Right at the beginning I wanted to make sure that people know who we are. There’s no benefit when you’re a global NGO in being referred to as “the best kept secret,” which is something that I heard from time to time when I started.

But in my first week Kanye went on his antisemitic rant against the Jews and suddenly, I found myself in front of cameras and talking to reporters about antisemitism because this is something that AJC had been dealing with for decades in Europe. It’s the reason that we worked so hard with the White House and in helping to inform the creation of the national strategy.

When I first announced I was taking this job we were in a different place in Israel. The government was different. It was the most diverse government in the history of Israel, and now we have the most conservative government in the history of Israel. But that hasn’t stopped us from continuing to work hard to expand Israel’s place in the world and expand the Abraham Accords. So we’ve continued to meet with leaders from throughout the Gulf and to build out the work that we do in our offices in Jerusalem and in Abu Dhabi to really help propel the Abraham Accords forward.

We also recognize the need to continue to expand, which is why we opened the new office in San Diego in my first year, deepening our relationship and our political activity in Denver and in the Mountain States and embarking on a major expansion in Florida.

What haven’t I been able to do? For my first 12 months after leaving Congress, I’ve been barred [by House ethics rules] from engaging my former colleagues on any substantive issues. Come Oct. 1, as someone who has deep personal relationships with members of Congress across the aisle, I’ll be re-engaging with Democratic leaders and Republican leaders in ways that will strengthen our place in Washington and in turn, the Jewish community’s and Israel’s place in the world.

On the holiday, Jews tell and retell the familiar story of the Exodus, she explained, and often add to it. The reasons for and solutions to antisemitism must also be told again and again, in ways, she said, that “connect to the past, and talk about what’s happening now.”

Her new book, “We Need to Talk About Antisemitism,” also has a Passover motif. So much of contemporary antisemitism, she writes, is about “narrowing” – the same way that the Israelites’ identity in Egypt (Mitzrayim, or “The Narrows,” in Hebrew) was restricted to a “specific, inflexible, and incomplete Jewish stereotype.” She sees such narrowing in the way even well-meaning people expect Jews to look or behave. “Narrowing” is what leads the far right to assign Jews to a conspiracy to undermine the West. And the left “narrows” Jews when they slot members of a diverse, complex community as white people who are leveraging their privilege to oppress others, especially Palestinians, and who themselves have no claim on victimhood.

Fersko is the senior rabbi, since 2020, at the Village Temple, a Reform congregation in Manhattan. She began at the start of the coronavirus epidemic, and her efforts to engage congregants despite the lockdown were the subject of a piece in The New Yorker.

Her 10 years in the rabbinate have also coincided with a rise in reports of antisemitic incidents, from vile social media campaigns to the killing of 11 Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018. She wrote the book in part as a response to the questions she has gotten from members of her congregation.

“I’ve been having to preach about antisemitism for the decade or so that I’ve been a rabbi,” she told me. “Congregants started telling me their stories, and asking me their everyday questions. I felt like my congregants were asking amazing questions that I couldn’t answer on the fly. They deserved more serious answers, longer answers, and they deserve a book that hopefully helps them with the everyday antisemitism that they faced.”

In a conversation last Monday, we spoke about the climate for Jews on American college campuses, why one editor turned down the book and why physical violence from the right is the greatest threat facing Jews.

The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

You catalog a lot of recent incidents of antisemitism in your book, but I want to compare what is happening now in America to, say, the middle of the 20th century. My parents and their generation remember having to change their last names to get a better job, there were certain clubs you couldn’t belong to, there were schools that wouldn’t allow you in. What are the main ways people are feeling antisemitism today, in your experience?

The answer depends on your life stage. If you are a teen, the answer is what is happening on social media, or at school. What I’ve seen is that there is almost no teen who has not experienced or witnessed some level of direct and personal antisemitism. So for them, I think it’s meteorological, it’s atmospheric, it’s just out there. And it’s something they encounter all the time on TikTok, on Snapchat, in the hallways, etc.

I’ve also seen it come up in the workplace, as our society is more and more reliant upon identity, and having a focus on that in our professional setting. It comes up when Jews are asked to sort themselves in a category that they’re not fully comfortable with, or being denied the chance to organize and gather as Jews where you see other groups organizing and gathering and having a desire to share with people that have similar experiences.

And yes, I have heard from some of my older congregants kind of, “You know, it’s not so bad.” I hope that’s true, but this could get quickly worse. And I think we really need to be quite active to make sure it doesn’t.

When you talk about people being denied the chance to organize, you tell that story about the parents in a New York City private school who wanted to form a Jewish affinity group, but the administration told them, “Now’s not the time.” What was in the mind of the administration? What were they so nervous about?

I’ve heard this story many times, from multiple people and different versions. The Jewish parents wanted to gather, like the other affinity groups in school, where their identity would be honored and celebrated. The administration, in many of these cases, has pushed back and said, “The optics don’t look good.” I think the idea there is the false idea that Jews are privileged, Jews have proximity to power, and that Jewish gatherings somehow take away from other types of justice — which I just find very upsetting because of course Jews have always been so closely tied to the idea of justice.

That reminds me of another point in your book, when you write that a book editor rejected the manuscript because it “centered Jews.” What do you think they meant?

I took this to mean that Jews don’t have the right to tell our stories. Or by telling our stories, it diminishes the pathway to justice for other groups, which I don’t believe is true. I certainly believe in the growing fight towards justice [for all groups], and a growing awareness of injustice that we’re struggling with in all our communities. But I think antisemitism is a part of that awakening. We need to acknowledge that antisemitism is real, that it’s back and in many troubling and tricky forms. And I think Jews have a right and an urgency and a need to tell our stories.

Or as you write in the book, “The liberal world has not embraced the notion that Jews have a meaningful history to tell. They are surprised that instead of being associated with victimhood, Jews are becoming increasingly associated with words like ‘privilege.’”

Yes. It seems shocking, because we don’t follow the same patterns as other minorities in our culture, right? It’s not necessarily that we’re a racial minority. We’re not a religion only. We are also an ethnicity and a history and a people and culture. We don’t fall into the kind of sorting that the wider culture likes to do. And so we’re misunderstood. I think there needs to be a fair amount of education about how Jews are a people, and just demonstrating to people that actually Jews today in the U.S. are less safe than we’ve ever been here.

You feel that? That American Jews have never been less safe in America?

I recently went to a briefing with different organizations and backgrounds in New York City where we spoke with the commissioner of police. And every Jew there had a story about a concern of physical violence — like me. I’ve received threatening postcards in the mail on multiple occasions over multiple years. Or someone in Brooklyn who was talking about the change of tone in his neighborhood and feeling concerned about doing everyday tasks like walking down the street. I think there is a lot of anxiety and tension over the freedom to be Jewish in public ways. And I think that’s scary.

I want to get back to the older congregant who says, “Things are not so bad compared to when I was a kid.” And certainly Jews have, in general, freedoms and material comfort in this country that they never had before.

When I first started talking about antisemitism from the bimah, that was the main piece of pushback that I got. I completely agree: What’s happened to us has been remarkably successful. And I think that’s wonderful. And I want it to stay that way. I want Jews to be able to be Jewish, in public and in private, and I want Jews to be able to be represented in cultural institutions, in academia, in medicine, in media and in any field you can think of.

And I think that we need to be aware that this has happened before. Jews have been successful before — not just in Germany, but in the Golden Age in the medieval period, when Jews were thriving and living with Christians and Muslims in the same area. But guess what? It didn’t last and it ended horribly on the Iberian Peninsula. So I don’t think we can fool ourselves and say, “Oh, look, you know, we’re over represented in a certain field, and therefore, we have nothing to worry about.” But it’s a wonderful fantasy.

You write at length and powerfully about right-wing extremism and the violent threat it poses, from the Tree of Life murders in Pittsburgh to the “Jews will not replace us” march in Charlottesville, Virginia. It’s a big part of the book and I don’t want to diminish that in any way. But I detect – and if I am wrong, tell me so – that the antisemitism of the moment that you find particularly confounding is on the left, perhaps because it comes from a world that includes your political allies on so many other issues.

First of all, I want to say I’m not trying to make an equivalence. Physical violence is the worst thing. Physical violence is the greatest threat and the greatest harm, and I see that from the neo-Nazi consortium more than any other group in the United States. So I just want to be clear about that.

When I write about the liberal world — and I don’t even mean politically liberal, I just mean broadly — that’s what I know. That’s who I am. And frankly, that’s what I love. Those are the values, ideas and people that I really want to be at home in. And I want the Jewish community to feel at home and welcomed and understood in those circles. And when I see an expansion of antisemitism in that world, it causes me grave concern, and I feel obligated to speak out as a liberal leader.

What Jewish groups might call antisemitic, left-wing and pro-Palestinian groups might defend as harsh but justified criticism of Israel’s human rights record. How do you tell the difference?

There’s no perfect answer, but what I tell people is to focus on the outcome of the conversation. If there’s a real outcome that would affect either Israelis or Palestinians, then I tend to be interested in it. Maybe this is a real conversation, if we want to learn from each other. If the outcome is only to create antisemitism on a college campus, then I do not think that conversation is worth having.

I hear a growing number of people that are just very uncomfortable being publicly Jewish on college campuses. And that’s wildly unacceptable.

How do you suggest they respond?

I tell kids and their parents, find a Jewish community when you get to campus. The first week, march yourself into Hillel or some other Jewish body and plant yourself there and make yourself known, because these conversations are not easy. And you will need the support and feedback of your community in order to know where you stand, to figure out your ideas.

You write about the dual loyalty charge, that Jews are suspect because of their attachment to Israel. Similarly, you cite cases in which liberal Jewish students are blocked from progressive coalitions on the assumption that as Zionists they can’t be “objective” not just on Israel but other things of concern to progressives. How do you explain, let’s say to a non-Jewish audience, that many Jews want their kids to identify very closely with Israel but that closeness does not imply dual loyalty?

You know, you can love a family member and still think about other things at the same time. It’s not a hard concept. When somebody comes to you, and accuses you of not being able to be objective because you’re a Jew, then that’s your opportunity to say “actually, what you’re accusing me of, it’s dual loyalties, here’s the history of dual loyalties, and here’s how you’re diminishing my role as a civic participant in student government, climate change, whatever sort of organization it is, based on the fact that I’m Jewish.” I don’t see a conflict at all in being a Zionist and being objective.

You talk about a certain kind of Christian antisemitism in the book, which could be described as appropriation — it’s not about killing Jesus, but almost the opposite: “You’re just like us,” which can be its own sort of denial of Jewish legitimacy.

Christian antisemitism historically has been about polarization: You are nothing like us, we are good, you are bad. But the Christian antisemitism of today is much different. And it often says that we’re the same as Christians. Growing up in Connecticut, I got so much of this: “What are you doing for Jewish Christmas?” There was a sort of pervasive identity denial, where there was a disbelief that I actually didn’t participate in any Christian rituals.

That’s so much better than the Christian antisemitism of the past, but I also think it needs to be talked about because it is reducing who we are as a people and eliminating our voices from public discourse.

The resurgence in antisemitism and intolerance in general of the past few years has coincided with the rise and presidency of Donald Trump, although a lot of people disagree whether he is the cause or the symptom. Trump’s name barely appears in your book. What do you think has changed in the past few years that has led to antisemitism’s comeback?

I’m not sure I’m the best person to answer that, but what I’ll say is that in my book, I interviewed third generation survivors. And one of them answered that question, and what she said was that all hate has basically risen as part of social media expression, where it has become normal to say horrible, hateful things online or see them said about you. I don’t think that’s the best answer to your question, because I really don’t know. But the truth is, I also am fighting what I see every day.

You are in New York City, which has a huge and growing haredi Orthodox community and the largest Jewish population in general outside of Israel. Do you see common ground among Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews in combating antisemitism, or are they fighting this on two different tracks?

I think we need to fight antisemitism on all levels. There are a lot more levels than just liberal Jews and haredi Jews. Liberal Jews too can be divided and subdivided. I would love to see more coming together of the Jewish people, but I actually think that we’re on our way. And I see signs of hope, and community and positivity from many of my rabbinic colleagues across the denominational spectrums, that we understand that this is a serious threat. And we’re willing and eager to organize with each other to fight it.

Your book is titled “We Need to Talk About Antisemitism.” I sometimes feel there is already a lot of talk about antisemitism – admittedly, Jewish conversation is my fulltime job — and I have heard others say that by concentrating on the threats against them Jews are ignoring, and failing to educate young people about, the ways Jewishness is flourishing or could flourish on its own diverse, creative terms.

I do very much appreciate the Dara Horn argument [in “People Love Dead Jews,” her 2021 book about antisemitism], which is basically, we need to celebrate Jewish life. And I think that is one of the best ways to fight antisemitism. I’m very interested in Jews doing Jewish things in a very assertive, active way. And I think that will only serve to strengthen our community, which will help us to stand up as Jews when we need to.

For more content, go to jta.org.

Consider the big best-selling books of the last century. Critics may debate the literary merits of bestsellers like “Exodus” by Leon Uris, “The Source” by James Michener and “The Chosen” by Chaim Potok, but cultural historians generally agree that each was an important indicator of Jewish tastes and preoccupations post-World War II.

But two other popular books of the era, both multigenerational Jewish family sagas, are rarely mentioned these days. Belva Plain’s novel, “Evergreen,” published in 1978, is a rags-to-riches story about a Polish-Jewish immigrant and her offspring. It spent 41 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list in hardcover and another 20 in paperback, and was made into a miniseries by NBC in 1985. Gloria Goldreich’s novel, “Leah’s Jour­ney,” also published in 1978, is also about an Ashkenazi  family that experiences most of the upheavals of the previous 100 years.

Although “Leah’s Journey” won the National Jewish Book Award in 1979, I’ve never seen it nor “Evergreen” on a list of the century’s best or “most essential” Jewish novels.

And in truth, the qualities that make a book wildly popular aren’t always the ones that make it literary. A New York Times reviewer once described Plain’s books as “easy, consoling works of generous spirit, fat with plot and sentiment, thin in nearly every other way and almost invisible in character development.”

I brought all this baggage to my review copy of “Kantika,” Elizabeth Graver’s 2023 novel, described by its publisher as a “dazzling Sephardic multigenerational saga.” It’s about a wealthy Turkish Jewish family whose fortunes are reversed by the First World War and whose members are dispersed to Barcelona, Cuba and finally New York. And yet while it has all the drama one might expect from such journeys and the novels about them, it remains both lyrical and literary, and likely, if there is any justice, to stand the test of time.

How Graver pulled it off is something she and I talked about when I reached her in Cape Cod. (Graver, the author of five previous books of fiction, teaches creative and nonfiction writing at Boston College.)

At the center of the novel is Rebecca, a privileged daughter of a Jewish factory owner in Constantinople who must constantly reinvent herself as a daughter, wife, mother, immigrant and businesswoman. The character is based on Graver’s own grandmother, and the story Graver tells is rich in details about the Sephardic heritage of her mother’s side of the family. There are snatches of Ladino dialogue and song lyrics, and organic depictions of Ladino folk and religious culture.

“I had interviewed my grandmother telling stories when I was 21,” said Graver, who is 59. “And I’ve been sort of haunted by but a little scared of telling the story.” Between research and trips to Turkey, Spain and Cuba, the book took her a decade to write.

She decided against a nonfiction version of her grandmother’s life, thinking the story would contain too many holes and force her to insert herself into what would then become a sort of literary memoir. Instead, the book is fiction stretched over a real-life scaffolding: Each chapter begins with a photograph of the relatives who inspired the book’s characters.

One of the key relationships in the book is between Rebecca and her step-daughter, Luna, a willful, intelligent girl with a disability that affects her speech and movement. Rebecca dedicates herself to Luna’s education and what we would now call physical therapy, a set-up for shmaltz (or its Sephardic equivalent) if there ever was one. But just when you expect her to cue the string section, Graver often veers to show you how complicated and difficult people — even admirable people — can be.

“Rebecca is beautiful, and has that power and strength but is a bit narcissistic. She kind of relies on surfaces but is really good at passing,” Graver explained. “And then she has this child whose body doesn’t allow her to do any of that, but who is also fiercely determined and passionate and smart. In the interplay, they reveal each other through their different points of view.”

The book arrives at a time of renewed interest in Sephardic culture, and part of its appeal is that it is telling what to many American Jewish readers, fed a steady diet of the Ashkenazi experience, a fresh story.

Kantika” is also a migration story, another genre that is very much of the moment. Graver herself teaches the genre, which includes works by Korean-American author Min Jee Lee, Haitian-American Edwidge Danticat  and Vietnamese-American Viet Thanh Nguyen.

I asked Graver if she was conscious of genre when she was writing the book, and wary of the way a sprawling family novel like hers might be received.

“I don’t even like the term ‘family saga,’” said Graver, who, when I asked, wasn’t familiar with Plain or Goldreich. “It makes me wince, even though I suppose I have written one and I’m indebted to them in various ways. But I want the characters to be flawed and complex and for the turns that they take to come out of their intersections with both history and their own very particular circumstances. I think about big novels where there is a big social canvas and it’s not a story of triumph.”

Indeed, “Kantika,” unlike many novels of Jewish migration, is actually a story about a family’s economic decline. Ultimately, said Graver, she wanted to capture the story of her Sephardic family’s journey in all its complexity.

“I have a deep anxiety about being overly sentimental and wrapping things up too much,” said Graver. “I love fiction that gestures towards the complexity of real life.”

To read more content visit www.jta.org

Tec, a member of one of only three Jewish families from Lublin, Poland, to survive the Holocaust intact from a prewar population of some 40,000, was for decades on the sociology faculty at the University of Connecticut in Stamford. Her books included “Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust” (2003) and “When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland” (1986).

Prior to the film adaptation of her 1993 book, “Defiance: The Bielski Partisans,” Tec was best known within the academic world and the tight-knit community of American Holocaust survivors.

The film version of “Defiance” was directed by Edward Zwick and starred Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber as the Bielski brothers, Tuvia and Zus. Under the brothers’ leadership, Jewish partisans rescued Jews from extermination and fought the German occupiers and their collaborators in what is now western Belarus.

Historians had long known of uprisings at the Auschwitz and Treblinka camps, in addition to the better-known rebellion in the Warsaw Ghetto led by Mordecai Anielewicz, but the story of the Bielskis differed fundamentally in that it was successful.

When Tec set out to write a book about the Bielski brothers, she sought to fill in omissions and correct distortions created by their almost-total excision from historical accounts of the Holocaust.

“The omission is the conspicuous silence about Jews who, while themselves threatened by death, were saving others,” Tec wrote in the opening to “Defiance.” “The distortion is the common description of European Jews as victims who went passively to their death.”

In her five-decade career at the University of Connecticut, Tec explored overlooked or under-reported aspects of resistance during the Holocaust, including the role of Christian rescuers and the gender dynamics among and between Jewish survivors.

She received numerous awards for her publications, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination for “Resilience and Courage.” She was awarded the 1994 International Anne Frank Special Recognition prize for ”Defiance.” She was a member of the advisory council of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. In 2002, she was appointed by President George W. Bush to the council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Born May 15, 1931, to Roman Bawnik and Esther (Hachamoff) Bawnik, Tec was 8 years old when the Germans arrived in Lublin. She and her sister survived three years by posing as the nieces of a Catholic family; her parents also survived the war by hiding in homes and evading German detection.

“An extra layer of secretiveness, combined with a fear of discovery, became part of my being,” she wrote of those years in her 1982 memoir, “Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood.” “All my life revolved around hiding; hiding thoughts, hiding feelings, hiding my activities, hiding information.”

After the war, Tec immigrated to Israel, where she married Leon Tec, a noted child psychiatrist. Later they moved to the United States, where she earned her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees at Columbia University and served on the faculty there for a decade. She began teaching at Connecticut in 1974.

The couple had two children, one of whom — son Roland — co-produced the “Defiance” film. Her daughter, Leora Tec, is the founder and director of Bridge To Poland, an organization that aims to improve relations between Jews and non-Jewish Poles. Her husband died in 2013; both children survive her.

Tec met Tuvia Bielski only once, in Brooklyn, New York, just weeks before his death in 1987. In a 2009 interview with JTA, she recalled that Bielski’s legendary charisma was apparent, even though he was old and frail.

“He was whispering,” she recalled. “I thought that my tape recorder won’t get anything. And I was trying to have the information flow. And as he got into his past, he sort of just, before my eyes, he became the person that he was, this charismatic leader, that has this absolute power in the unit.”

She added, “When he came into the room, he filled it with himself.”

While Tec was gratified that the film offered a counterpoint to allegations of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust, she also resisted what she called an impulse to blame the victim.

“Antisemitism is with us; it is like a perpetual, chronic addiction of humanity,” she told JTA. “You cannot learn about antisemitism by examining what the antisemites tell us because this is not based on fact. It is based on their need to blame somebody for something that they have not done.”

For more content, go to jta.org.

Tec, a member of one of only three Jewish families from Lublin, Poland, to survive the Holocaust intact from a prewar population of some 40,000, was for decades on the sociology faculty at the University of Connecticut in Stamford. Her books included “Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust” (2003) and “When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland” (1986).

Prior to the film adaptation of her 1993 book, “Defiance: The Bielski Partisans,” Tec was best known within the academic world and the tight-knit community of American Holocaust survivors.

The film version of “Defiance” was directed by Edward Zwick and starred Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber as the Bielski brothers, Tuvia and Zus. Under the brothers’ leadership, Jewish partisans rescued Jews from extermination and fought the German occupiers and their collaborators in what is now western Belarus.

Historians had long known of uprisings at the Auschwitz and Treblinka camps, in addition to the better-known rebellion in the Warsaw Ghetto led by Mordecai Anielewicz, but the story of the Bielskis differed fundamentally in that it was successful.

When Tec set out to write a book about the Bielski brothers, she sought to fill in omissions and correct distortions created by their almost-total excision from historical accounts of the Holocaust.

“The omission is the conspicuous silence about Jews who, while themselves threatened by death, were saving others,” Tec wrote in the opening to “Defiance.” “The distortion is the common description of European Jews as victims who went passively to their death.”

In her five-decade career at the University of Connecticut, Tec explored overlooked or under-reported aspects of resistance during the Holocaust, including the role of Christian rescuers and the gender dynamics among and between Jewish survivors.

She received numerous awards for her publications, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination for “Resilience and Courage.” She was awarded the 1994 International Anne Frank Special Recognition prize for ”Defiance.” She was a member of the advisory council of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. In 2002, she was appointed by President George W. Bush to the council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Born May 15, 1931, to Roman Bawnik and Esther (Hachamoff) Bawnik, Tec was 8 years old when the Germans arrived in Lublin. She and her sister survived three years by posing as the nieces of a Catholic family; her parents also survived the war by hiding in homes and evading German detection.

“An extra layer of secretiveness, combined with a fear of discovery, became part of my being,” she wrote of those years in her 1982 memoir, “Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood.” “All my life revolved around hiding; hiding thoughts, hiding feelings, hiding my activities, hiding information.”

After the war, Tec immigrated to Israel, where she married Leon Tec, a noted child psychiatrist. Later they moved to the United States, where she earned her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees at Columbia University and served on the faculty there for a decade. She began teaching at Connecticut in 1974.

The couple had two children, one of whom — son Roland — co-produced the “Defiance” film. Her daughter, Leora Tec, is the founder and director of Bridge To Poland, an organization that aims to improve relations between Jews and non-Jewish Poles. Her husband died in 2013; both children survive her.

Tec met Tuvia Bielski only once, in Brooklyn, New York, just weeks before his death in 1987. In a 2009 interview with JTA, she recalled that Bielski’s legendary charisma was apparent, even though he was old and frail.

“He was whispering,” she recalled. “I thought that my tape recorder won’t get anything. And I was trying to have the information flow. And as he got into his past, he sort of just, before my eyes, he became the person that he was, this charismatic leader, that has this absolute power in the unit.”

She added, “When he came into the room, he filled it with himself.”

While Tec was gratified that the film offered a counterpoint to allegations of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust, she also resisted what she called an impulse to blame the victim.

“Antisemitism is with us; it is like a perpetual, chronic addiction of humanity,” she told JTA. “You cannot learn about antisemitism by examining what the antisemites tell us because this is not based on fact. It is based on their need to blame somebody for something that they have not done.”

A memorial service for Tec at Manhattan’s Plaza Memorial Chapel is planned for Oct. 1.

To read more content visit www.jta.org