WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is again planning to highlight the threat of antisemitism and accuse Kamala Harris of enabling it — the latest spotlighting of a Jewish issue in a presidential election that has seen a heavy focus on American Jews.

On Thursday, the former president will join Miriam Adelson, the Israeli American casino magnate who is one of his leading donors, to roll out what the campaign said is a “Fighting Anti-Semitism in America Event.”

The event will take place at a Washington DC hotel just 90 minutes before Trump is set to speak at a conference of the Israeli American Council. Earlier in the day, he is scheduled to visit a Jewish restaurant in the heavily Hasidic neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Much of the announcement of the event sought to associate Harris, Trump’s rival in the November presidential election, with Hamas terrorists and antisemites. It notid for instance that she attended the inauguration of Honduras’ president and vice president in January. The country’s vice president, Salvador Nasralla, had once appeared to accuse Israel of controlling a political rival.

This is the second time that Trump and Adelson have joined together to decry antisemitism at a campaign event. Trump has said that electing Harris will spell the end of Israel within two years and that Harris presages the oncoming of a second Holocaust.

Democrats have also accused Trump of posing a danger to democracy; a Jewish Democratic group has accused Trump of being an antisemite and has drawn a connection between him and Hitler.

On Tuesday, a slate of Jews who have deep ties in the Jewish organizational world endorsed Harris, saying she was best suited to advancing the U.S.-Israel relationship and combating antisemitism.

The statement released Tuesday by 78 Jewish figures, most of them Democrats, was made in their capacity as “Jewish communal leaders.” It included past members of the board and a past director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, past top officials and founders of pro-Israel groups and members of the Schusterman family, a major donor to Jewish and Israel-related causes.

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz are “are champions of the prosperity, security and freedoms that are vital to our community and all Americans,” the statement said. “That is true across the spectrum—including strongly advancing the US-Israel relationship and fighting antisemitism.”

It quoted at length Harris’ pledge upon accepting her party’s nomination last month to continue supporting and defending Israel.

Susie Stern, a philanthropist who has held senior lay positions with the UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Federations of North America, said the statement was necessary to underscore the broad Jewish communal support she believed Harris had, even as Trump is seeking to depict the vice president as alienated from Jews.

“People signed in their own names, but they are people who have been leaders, national leaders, and pretty much the ABCs of the Jewish organizations, but really from all ends of the spectrum,” Stern, who is the incoming chairwoman of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said in an interview. “It demonstrates a broad based support from our community.”

 

The genetic testing company 23andMe has agreed to pay $30 million to American plaintiffs to settle a lawsuit over a data breach last year that specifically targeted customers of Ashkenazi Jewish and Chinese ancestry.

The breach, which occurred last October, affected more than 6.9 million customers and included users’ personal details such as their location, name and birthdate, as well as some information about their family trees. That data was shared on BreachForums, an online forum used by cybercriminals.

According to court documents, the data breach was revealed Oct. 6 after a hacker going by the pseudonym “Golem,” a reference to the Jewish mythical defender made of clay, published a link to a database labeled “ashkenazi DNA Data of Celebrities.” According to the lawsuit, the hacker referred to the list as “the most valuable data you’ll ever see,” though most of the names were not famous.

In total, 999,998 individuals with Ashkenazi heritage were included on the list, which also contained data from another 100,000 people with Chinese ancestry. “Golem” also claimed to possess the data of 350,000 users with Chinese heritage and offered to sell data from both sets of information for a fee.

According to the complaint, 23andMe did not disclose the full extent of the breach to its customers until December, when the company stated that the hackers were able to access the large number of accounts by initially hacking a smaller number of accounts, and then gaining access to information from other accounts through the site’s “Family Tree” and “DNA Relatives” features.

Complainants alleged in court documents that in addition to their data being stolen, 23andMe misrepresented how secure its users’ data was. They alleged that the data “is now in the hands of cybercriminals and is readily available to download by anyone with access to the hacking forum.”

In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 23andMe said, “We continue to believe this settlement is in the best interest of 23andMe customers, and we look forward to finalizing the agreement.”

This article is also available as a weekly newsletter, “Life Stories,” where we remember those who made an outsize impact in the Jewish world — or just left their community a better or more interesting place. Subscribe here to get “Life Stories” in your inbox every Tuesday.

Dan Morgenstern, 94, Holocaust survivor who fell in love with jazz

Like many Holocaust survivors, Dan Morgenstern’s early years told a story of flight: Munich, Vienna, Sweden, Copenhagen and eventually New York. 

His story, however, also included jazz, which he discovered as a Jewish teen in Copenhagen during and after World War II. “There was quite a bit of jazz, good Danish jazz, and as was the case in any country that the Nazis overran, jazz became quite popular, because it represented something that was the antithesis of what they stood for,” he said in an oral history in 2007. 

After enjoying the Boston jazz scene as a student at Brandeis University, Morgenstern went on to become one of the country’s most influential jazz scholars and critics. He edited the magazines Metronome, Jazz and DownBeat, reviewed music for The New York Post and The Chicago Sun-Times, and served from 1976 to 2011 as the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark.

He died Sept. 7 in Manhattan. He was 94.

Elijah Rips, 75, the mathematician who cracked the ‘Bible code’

As a renowned mathematician at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Eliyahu Rips was known among peers for his work in a field called geometric group theory. But wider fame came in 1994, when he and two Israeli colleagues claimed to have found a hidden pattern in the Hebrew letters of the Torah that hinted at deeper meanings, including the birth or death dates of dozens of Jewish scholars.

Their findings inspired “The Bible Code,” a bestselling book by journalist Michael Drosnin that claimed the codes revealed not only the birthdays of famous rabbis but also predicted future historical events including the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Rips distanced himself from the book’s more improbable claims, but always insisted that the text of the Torah contained meaningful patterns that were “not due to chance.”

He died on July 19 at a hospital in Jerusalem at 75. 

Arline Geduldig, 93, comic’s mom and pandemic lockdown sensation 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, comedian Lisa Geduldig created a virtual show, “Lockdown Comedy,” broadcast from her mother Arline Geduldig’s home in a Boynton Beach, Florida retirement community.

The Zoom program turned her mother into a viral sensation, as Arline, then 89, “made light of quotidian errands and revealed her interest in studly firefighters,” according to J., the Jewish newsweekly of Northern California. “I really had no idea till I started living with her” how funny she was, Lisa told J.

Arline died Aug. 7 at the age of 93; her daughter is putting together one final episode of “Lockdown Comedy” on Sept. 19 as a tribute to her mother.

Ofra Bikel, 66, Israeli-born documentary filmmaker

Ofra Bikel, an Israeli-born documentary filmmaker best known for her work on PBS’ “Frontline” series, died Aug. 11 at her home in Tel Aviv. She was 94.

Her prize-winning films included exposes of the U.S. criminal justice system, a profile of onetime Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and a film about the struggles of Soviet émigrés adjusting to life in the United States.

In the trilogy “Innocence Lost” (1991-1997) she debunked accusations of child sex abuse against workers at a day-care center in North Carolina. “The fact that we fought for them, and were right, and managed to get seven people out of jail was astonishing, intoxicating,” said Bikel, who was briefly married to the actor and singer Theodore Bikel. “That’s when I realized what power I had in television.”

Steve Silberman, 66, ‘Deadhead’ who shone a light on autism

 Steve Silberman, a science journalist who moonlighted and then some as a writer for and about the Grateful Dead, once likened the band’s nomadic fans to Talmud students in turn-of-the-century Russia, who would travel from town to town to hear the teachings of different rabbis. “They were the tourheads of the Torah,” Silberman, the son of two English professors, explained.

The longtime Wired magazine correspondent’s 2015 book, “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity,” is credited with changing the conversation about autism and popularizing the idea that “there is no single correct way of thinking, learning or communicating,” according to the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, as a diehard Deadhead, he wrote liner notes and a reference book for the band and produced a five-disc box set, “So Many Roads (1965-1995).”

Silberman died Aug. 29 at his home in San Francisco. He was 66.

Wireless devices carried by Hezbollah operatives and their associates exploded en masse Tuesday, killing at least eight and wounding more than 2,700 people in Lebanon and Syria, a mass targeted attack on the terror group as tensions on Israel’s Lebanese border continue to escalate.

No one claimed responsibility for the series of explosions on Tuesday, and Israel has not commented publicly on them. The United States has also said it was not involved in the attack. Hezbollah blamed Israel for the attacks, Reuters reported, and said there would be “fair punishment.”

Lebanese officials said the fatalities included two Hezbollah operatives and a child. One of the dead was the son of a Lebanese lawmaker. The Iranian ambassador to Beirut suffered minor injuries. Iran is Hezbollah’s chief ally and sponsor. Emergency rooms in and around Beirut were overwhelmed with casualties, reports said.

The blasts are the latest indication that nearly a year of clashes between Hezbollah and Israel could spiral into a full-fledged war. On Monday, Israel’s security cabinet added “Returning the residents of the north securely to their homes” to its list of official wartime goals, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a U.S. official that Israel will “do what is necessary to safeguard its security” in the north.

Earlier this week, Israeli Gen. Ori Gordin, who heads the country’s Northern Command, proposed that Israel invade southern Lebanon in order to create a buffer zone between Israel and Hezbollah, effectively reviving an occupation that Israel maintainedfor nearly two decades until it withdrew from Lebanon in 2000.

Hezbollah began firing missiles at Israel shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7 invasion, and clashes have intensified since July, when a Hezbollah attack killed 12 schoolchildren in a Golan Heights village. Israel assassinated Hezbollah’s military chief, Fuad Shukr, in retaliation, and Hezbollah vowed revenge. Last month, Israel struck hundreds of Hezbollah missile launch sites in what it said was a preemptive attack.

Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow who studies counterterrorism at the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy, said Tuesday’s attack damaged Hezbollah’s deterrence as the two sides are on the brink of war.

“It comes against the backdrop of Israel’s pretty impressive, timely intelligence that Hezbollah was about to shoot rockets at intelligence agencies near Tel Aviv and preemptively striking them, which itself comes on the heels of the targeted killing of Fuad Shukr,” he said. “So if you’re in Hezbollah right now, you’re probably pretty concerned about the level of penetration.”

The Wall Street Journal quoted anonymous sources as saying the pagers were from a recent shipment to the terrorist group. Should the explosions prove to be part of a planned mass attack, it could be unprecedented in scope, if not in method. In 1996, Israel remotely exploded a single cellphone to assassinate Yahya Ayyash, a leading Hamas official.

A new outpost of Eyal Shani’s popular kosher restaurant, Malka, is set to open at 56 Adams St. in Dumbo, Brooklyn later this month.

Malka Dumbo joins Malka on the Upper West Side — Shani’s first kosher establishment outside of Israel, which opened to great buzz last November — and Miznon in Times Square in Shani’s rapidly expanding kosher empire in New York City and beyond.

Malka Dumbo will be Shani’s third kosher-certified establishment to open in New York in less than a year. When it launches, the Israeli celebrity chef will have a total of eight restaurants in New York — plus one Michelin star, which was bestowed upon his “highly seasonal” Greenwich Village spot Shmoné last year.

Shani told the New York Jewish Week that he chose the Dumbo location, most recently home to well-received but short-lived Israeli restaurant Nina, for its “romance,” as he described it. “It is the most romantic neighborhood and place,” he said of the neighborhood. “I couldn’t refuse. It’s like a dream when you are thinking about New York.”

While Shani himself doesn’t keep kosher, he said his focus on expanding his kosher network is related to the attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. “Before Oct. 7, I tried to connect to the world through the terroir, the culture of being Israeli,” he said, using the French culinary term for natural environment. “What I produced and created was food that was in style from the special place that we are living in in Israel, in between the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

“After Oct. 7, that identity was changed,” he continued. “I found that I’m not just living in Israel as a cultural place that’s got some of the best food in the world. I also recognize that I belong to my people, to the Israeli people, and a big part of them are Jewish people. The terroir was changed from a geographic, cultural terroir into a national terroir.”

Shani first arrived in New York six years ago when he opened Miznon, a fast-casual street food restaurant, in Chelsea Market. Since then he’s opened a variety of spots in the city, including the music-oriented Port Sa’id, party spot HaSalon and several locations of Miznon.

And while Shani recently obtained kosher certification for the Times Square location of Miznon, he has no plans on turning other non-kosher restaurants into kosher ones. “In the other restaurants in my life, I need the complete freedom of cooking,” he said.

Shani, who was one of the New York Jewish Week’s 36 to Watch this year, is known for his vegetable-centric cuisine and his focus on seasonal ingredients, sourced from small local purveyors, in his ever-changing menus. Shani cites his vegan grandfather as inspiration, and he told the New York Jewish Week that while meat and fish are always on his menu at all his restaurants, more than half of his dishes are plant-based.

Malka Dumbo will feature some of Shani’s signature dishes like schnitzel stuffed with mashed potatoes, a tomato farro risotto, French and Israeli wines and an espresso martini made creamy with tahini. There will also be some dishes exclusive to Brooklyn, such as bourekas stuffed with scallions and za’atar.

Though Shani is well-known — even notorious — for his love of tomatoes, he considers olive oil to be an essential ingredient of his cuisine. “Our exclusive use of olive oil, even in sweet pastries, the prominence of vegetables, fresh, local seafood, and the finest kosher meat cuts allow our guests, whether they keep kosher or not, to fully enjoy and appreciate the beauty of nature and all it provides,” he said in a press release.

Shani told the New York Jewish Week last year that he first opened a kosher restaurant because kosher-keeping consumers were “craving” his food. “These people are part of my nation,” Shani said. “Part of my people. How can I make food without letting half of my people eat it? That is the main reason I opened Malka.”

The Dumbo location was designed by Dror Sher & Tal Friedland Sher of Sight Specific. Shani told the New York Jewish Week that he and his staff plan to “keep the main lines” of Nina, a previous restaurant that operated in the space, but will make some changes to the kitchen to accommodate Malka’s service.

Though the opening date remains TBD as of this writing, at least one event at Malka Dumbo is on the calendar: a benefit for “rebuilding Israel” hosted by La’Aretz Foundation on Monday, Sept. 23.

“The real thing I want to do in my life is to show the light that is coming out of kosher food — it doesn’t have to be a dark cuisine or limiting,” he said. “That is the reason why I continue to create a new kosher cuisine, and one of the best places to do it is in New York. It is filled with Jewish people.”

Shani is opening another Malka restaurant by the end of the year — this one in West Palm Beach, Florida. He is also opening another kosher outpost of Miznon in Holmdel, New Jersey, sometime this fall.

The video that the influencer Ellie Zeiler uploaded for her millions of followers last week included her content’s regular fare: outfits, selfies and jet-setting around the world.

But there was a big change: Instead of filming herself in Ibiza, or promoting jewelry, Zeiler, 20, was posting from Jerusalem. And she had news: She was now enrolled in a seminary for Orthodox girls and would be focusing her content on life as an observant Jew.

The caption was “Ellie in Israel Era” and Zeiler’s video showed photos and clips of her evolving style over several years.

“You guys have seen me grow up and go through a lot of eras on the internet,” she said. “But post-Oct. 7, a lot in my life felt meaningless. As you know, I posted a lot about my pride for being Jewish and my support for Israel. And as I continued to post, my beliefs grew stronger and stronger. I started keeping Shabbat, and now I can never see my life living without it, as well as keeping kosher, and now I grasp at any piece of knowledge that I get to learn about connection and religion.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Ellie Jane Zeiler (@elliezeiler)

Zeiler’s change of pace is an influencer case study in the shift that some Jews have experienced since Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked Israel and sparked a global reckoning about Jewish identity. Some Jews — including second gentleman Doug Emhoff, whom Zeiler has interviewed in the past — have reported feeling more connected to their identities and interested in spending time more often with other Jews. Some, like Zeiler, have taken on new Jewish observances.

But while several influencers have made Israel and their Jewish identity a more central component of their content in the last year, Zeiler is the first major influencer to relocate fully to Israel and to devote her time to Jewish learning.

Zeiler did not reply to requests for comment. But her posts indicate that she has enrolled at a seminary run by an Orthodox outreach organization that operates a yeshiva for men and a seminary for women in the Old City of Jerusalem, and whose programs have long been popular among non- or newly religious Jews seeking to intensify their observance.

Zeiler launched her Instagram account in 2015 with a post celebrating her elementary-school graduation and now has more than 10 million followers on that platform and another 10.5 million on TikTok. She has long posted about Jewish topics, Holocaust remembrance and antisemitism — and engaged in those topics offline, too.

In high school, she co-founded a teen movement called “Together as One” for people of different cultural backgrounds to share their experiences of prejudice. “I had a lot of people make fun of me for being Jewish in high school,” she told The Teen Magazine in 2020.

While she was still in high school, Zeiler was known for her dance and cooking videos and was part of a team of content creators deployed by the White House in 2021 to promote the COVID-19 vaccine. (She also had a leadership position in a Chabad youth group in San Diego, where she grew up.)

But the frequency with which Zeiler posted Jewish content increased after the Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7 — as did the criticism she received over it. Even before Oct. 7, some of her posts about Israel would occasionally receive anti-Israel comments, or “free Palestine” or Palestinian flag comments from Instagram users. Since Oct. 7, her posts have been filled with them — both those that mention Israel as well as some that focus on Jewish observance — and the post

Now, as she settles into life in Israel, Zeiler is shifting the kinds of content she posts — though she doesn’t appear to be pulling back from social media at all. While her previous Instagram highlights showcase outfits such as a sleeveless embellished minidress by Carolina Herrera, she’s now posting “tznius,” or religiously modest, outfit inspiration — stylish versions of the seminary de rigueur floor-length skirts, high necks, and long sleeves.

“Your Mama and your family could not be any more proud of you … then and now. I love you.♥️,” her mother Sarah Zeiler said in a comment on TikTok.

Zeiler is also giving her followers a window into the daily life of a seminary student. In a video about her first day of class, Zeiler shared that she ate an Israeli breakfast in the morning, moved on to a class on Judaism and gender, learned about Shabbat, and then had a class on humility and confidence. She also showed herself drinking three cups of coffee throughout the day, calling it “longest day ever.”

By the end of her first week of classes, some of the shine appeared be coming off — but Zeiler, whose rapport with her online audience stretches back nearly half her life, found relief from her followers.

“I was in a very bad mood because [I was] having regrets on how I used to live my life and how I’m being taught to live life now, and I, like, felt this overwhelming wave of anxiety,” she said in a video she shared ahead of Shabbat on Friday afternoon.

She added, “And then I went outside, and I met so many of you guys before Shabbat, and I honestly could do none of this without you.”

The next day, she was back with a new video — from her morning coffee to her dating class to her lessons on keeping kosher. And on Monday, she posted again, this time without the production values typical of her posts.

@elliezeiler

We are all feeling the same way so lets be kind to ourselves and to others❤️ i love you all sosososo much. Our life will be the same when we get back but we will be better people!

♬ original sound – Ellie Zeiler

“The truth is, I am tired. I am homesick. I am confused. I am having regrets. I am having so many feelings I didn’t think I would have coming here,” she said.

Then she offered advice for people who, like her, have struck out on their own for the first time and are struggling with it.

“For the sake of your mental health, if that means ditching your last class to go get your nails done because it’s going to make you feel better about taking care of yourself, then go do it. Spending extra money to buy a sweet coffee — who cares? Do it. Going to get a cute sweater so you can wear it at the end of the week on Shabbat? Go do it,” Zeiler said.

“This is the only time that we will have to be selfish,” she added. “All of the things that we left will be there when we get back, I promise you, but I also promise you that we are all going through the same thing and going through it right now. And I’m here for you guys, and I love you so much.”

An American Jew is facing the death penalty for his involvement in an attempted political coup in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in late May.

Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun — a Washington, D.C.-area native and father of three — was one of three Americans and 37 people total sentenced to death Friday in the DRC over an attempt in May. The failed coup was led by Christian Malanga, a onetime used car salesman and gold miner who sought to overthrow the country’s president, Félix Tshisekedi. Six people were killed in the coup attempt, parts of which were livestreamed, and Malanga was later shot and killed by the Congolese army while resisting arrest.

Zalman-Polun, who pled guilty to conspiracy to distribute marijuana in the United States a decade ago, was reportedly a gold mining business associate of Malanga’s. The other two Americans who were sentenced to death are Marcel Malanga, the son of Christian Malanga, and Tyler Thompson.

Zalman-Polun was at the presidential palace before coup leader Christian Malanga was shot dead, according to photos and videos taken that day.

Zalman-Polun and the other Americans were caught on the banks of the Congo River as they were trying to escape, according to NPR. They claimed at trial that they were forced to participate in the coup at gunpoint.

Zalman-Polun reportedly had been living in South Africa with his family for the past several years. Before that, the family lived in Washington, D.C., where they were members of the Washington Hebrew Congregation, when their first child was born in 2017, according to announcements distributed by the Reform synagogue.

Zalman-Polun is now also the target of conspiracy theories that claim he is a CIA and Mossad agent sent to destabilize the Congolese government. Users on X have been sharing a photo of Zalman-Polun and Christian Malanga taken outside of Golan Spy Shop, a technology and security supply store in Tel Aviv, saying that it is proof that they were trained by Israeli forces.

Congolese law gives the men five days to appeal their sentences. The country reinstituted the death penalty last year.

The U.S. State Department has not declared Zalman-Polun and the other two Americans wrongfully detained, the Associated Press reported, making it unlikely the American government will try to arrange their release.

In May, just hours after the attempted coup, U.S. Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo Lucy Tamlyn condemned the coup and the involvement of American citizens.

“I am shocked by the events of this morning and deeply concerned by reports of U.S. citizens allegedly being involved,” Tamlyn wrote on X. “Please be assured that we will cooperate with DRC authorities to the fullest extent possible as they investigate these criminal acts and hold accountable any U.S. citizens implicated in criminal acts.”

Zalman-Polun is not the first Jewish intersection with the DRC’s tumultuous politics. Moise Katumbi, whose father was a Jewish refugee from Greece during the Holocaust, has faced ongoing efforts to block him from running for office, most recently last year when a rival pursued a law that would bar candidates whose parents were not both Congolese; Jewish groups abroad condemned the law as antisemitic. The rival ran against Tshisekedi, the subject of the coup attempt, and received less than 1% of the official vote.

Jewish authors Shira Dicker and Don Futterman both grew up in Queens in the 1970s. In many ways, their memories are similar — attending the annual Salute to Israel Day Parade and rallies for Soviet Jewry; playing football on weekends in Flushing Meadows — but they also reflect childhoods spent in very different New York neighborhoods among vastly different Jewish communities.

Dicker, 63, who runs her own communications firm, recently published her first book, a short story collection called “Lolita at Leonard’s of Great Neck and Other Stories from Before Times.” A rabbi’s daughter, Dicker spent her childhood in Douglaston and attended North Shore Hebrew Academy in Great Neck and the Ramaz School in Manhattan. Her family moved to Forest Hills when she was 17.

Meanwhile, Futterman, 66, is the author, most recently, of “Adam Unrehearsed,” a coming-of-age novel about a Queens bar mitzvah boy that came out at the end of last year. Futterman grew up in Flushing — first in an apartment building on bustling Main Street, and then in a ranch house abutting the more suburban Queens neighborhoods of Bayside and Whitestone — and attended public school.

Both authors are appearing together in Manhattan on Tuesday night at The Society for the Advancement of Judaism on the Upper West Side for a discussion, “Two Kids from Queens: On Growing Up Jewish in the ’70s.”

“For me, it was a paradise of security and I was totally free,” Dicker told the New York Jewish Week about her childhood. “It was before the era of kidnapping. My parents, who were pretty much on top of my life, did practice benign child neglect, which I think all parents did. I don’t think they knew what we were up to. I remember going out on bicycle trips at the age of 7 or 8, [biking for] miles, getting lost and finding myself in Jamaica and having to find my way back.”

Futterman, meanwhile, recalls growing up on the 15th floor of a large apartment building. “You had this bird’s eye view of the world from up there and you could throw things down on the kids from 15 floors up,” he said. “It was very entertaining. My grandmother lived with us, she was the sweetest old lady in the world. When they would send people up to find out who these kids were, she would say, ‘There are no children here.’”

Both writers recall feeling a sense of “otherness” as kids: Growing up, Futterman recalls trying to manage his Jewish identity within the mixed community in which he lived; Dicker, meanwhile, longed to spend more time in secular culture, where feminism was ascendant and pop culture more vibrant.

These experiences are reflected, both covertly and overtly, in the authors’ recent books. In her anthology, which spans four decades, Dicker’s female characters grapple with their self-image and emerging sexuality. In her first story, innocent 13-year-old Rebecca attends a bar mitzvah at Leonard’s —  a popular Great Neck catering hall that both Dicker and Futterman frequented in real life — where she finds herself alone with her crush, a young (but nonetheless too old) male teacher.

In “Adam Unrehearsed” a 12- and 13-year-old Adam Miller struggles with who he is as a Jew in the months leading up to his bar mitzvah, while contending with societal ills like gangs and antisemitism.

Both writers have left their old neighborhoods. Dicker lives in Morningside Heights with her husband Ari Goldman, a journalist who himself has written memoirs about his Jewish life. They have three children: Adam, 40, Emma, 36, and Judah, 29. Futterman, meanwhile, moved to Israel in 1994; after settling in Tel Aviv, he and his wife, Shira, moved to Kfar Saba in 1997, where they raised their twin boys, Nimrod and Yaniv, 27, and daughter, Maayan, 21.

Futterman wrote his book, in part, because he wanted “to share some of his childhood with his Israeli children because it was so utterly different from theirs,” he said.

We spoke with the authors about their books, their early lives, and what it was like growing up in the so-called “golden age” of American Jewish life.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

How do your books reflect your childhood and your Jewish upbringing in Queens?

Futterman: Like any kid, I found Hebrew school a burden. It was three days a week. On the one hand, I was the star of Hebrew school, on the other hand it’s like being Miss Subways — it’s not necessarily the crown you want. It was an alternate universe for me. I had a very mixed group of friends. It was like my other world. But it was a very warm place.

I grew up reading Philip Roth and, anywhere in American fiction, any place Hebrew school was written about, it was ridiculed and completely mocked. So I kind of wanted to show it differently and show the positive side of this experience without trying to prettify it. Clearly it turned off generations of Jews, so it wasn’t working, in that way it was catastrophic. On the other hand, there were always those bright spots, and the people who somehow found their way through that to something that was rich and meaningful and helped you and inspired you in your life as well. I was trying to capture that.

Dicker: This is a work of fiction. The characters themselves are not stand-ins for me. Everything we do as creative people is a reflection that comes from the self, comes from the id. My stories have sparks, real-life sparks. 

[In the short story] “Persephone’s Palace,” the 18-year-old girl has just come back from a summer when she ran away from a summer camp in Ojai, California, that her parents forced her to get a job at. Well, as it turns out, when I was that exact age, my parents forced me to take a job at Camp Ramah in Ojai. I did not want to be there. I set about finding a boyfriend, making him do all kinds of things. I left, I ran away. I did, very irresponsibly, bolt out on everybody, so the beginning of this story happened. 

I was then at a diner [in Queens]. It was not Persephone’s Palace — it was called the Georgia Diner — and a businessman comes over to me. I see him staring at me the whole meal, and [he] tells me how beautiful I am and he’s enchanted and gives me his business card. He’s at the Hilton, room 1207. I have the card. That’s the spark. Everything after that point is fiction. It’s a “what if” story. 

What was your relationship with your Jewish identity when you were growing up? 

Futterman: The whole attachment to the Jewish world growing up in New York — it was a way to single myself out; it was a way to make myself different from all the other kids in my class. One of the things that was really special about me and my circle was that we took the Jewish stuff seriously and we were very committed to it. And at the same time we took the other stuff very seriously. We were very passionate baseball fans, football fans, Knicks fans. Very much part of American life — we didn’t look at it from the outside. 

Dicker: Don, we were both differentiating ourselves, given our setting. I had nothing but disdain for the kids who hung out in the kosher cafeteria and I even mention that in the story [“Persephone”]. I had 12 years of this. I need to engage with life, with other people, with culture. 

I think there’s autobiographical elements throughout. We both tried to recreate that atmosphere, that world, the places you would go. There’s a whole bunch of similar places mentioned in our books: That was our world. 

Futterman: Queens was our little universe. In some ways it was very safe. The antisemitic incidents I mentioned in the book, some of them happened the same, some of them happened differently. There weren’t that many of them.

Are any of your characters like you?

Dicker: The character closest to me is Anna in “Persephone’s Palace.” Her struggle was she needed to get away from her parents, whom she loved, but they were clinging to her. That’s a conflict I had with my parents when I was an adolescent and I went to Queens College. I wanted to go away, but my parents wouldn’t let me. And they pointed to all the other Jewish parents in Queens who seemed to have this secret pact, like the devil worshipers in “Rosemary’s Baby,” that all their kids were going to go to Queens. That was a very, very big thing in my late adolescence. 

Futterman: Adam has a lot of me in him. I’d say the character is a much more self-aware version of who I was at 12, partly because I was writing in a close third person. It’s not a first-person narrative, and there are reasons why I didn’t do it that way, but I was trying to look at the world through a kid’s eyes as he’s discovering the world, but still be able to make more sophisticated comments or commentary than a child.

Do you ever visit your old neighborhoods? How did they change? 

Dicker: I go back all the time. I haunt places where I grew up. The Marathon Community Jewish Center [where Dicker’s father was the rabbi] first merged several years ago and that section of Queens became very Asian. I would come to visit and sit in the sanctuary. I got a call from the shul about a year ago that the building was finally being sold and they invited me to come and pick up my father’s bimah chair.

Futtenberg: I left home at 17 and never actually lived in Queens again, although I did visit my parents a lot. Temple Gates of Prayer was there just a few years ago, now the building’s gone and the community has been relocated. And it’s become a largely Asian neighborhood. There have been big waves of immigration, first the Koreans and then the Chinese. 

A recent article in the Atlantic claims the 20th-century “Golden Age of American Jewry” —  described as Jews’ “unprecedented period of safety, prosperity, and political influence” — as having come to an end. Does this resonate with you? Did your childhood feel like a “golden era” and do you think that it is over? 

Dicker: Oct. 7 brought the sense of living in a Golden Age to a screeching halt. For me, I think I became aware, slightly after Sept. 11, that what I had lived up until that point was a blip and an exception to the rule. I was in the haze of just happiness. Everything was not perfect — we had conflicts, we had fights — but there was an overarching remove from the experience of Jews throughout much of history. I could’ve felt marginalized as the rabbi’s oldest daughter; [instead] I felt admired, not just in my Jewish community, but at large. In New York City, everyone admired Jews, and it was great to be Jewish. It was an aspiration. We were a social elite. There was no self-consciousness to Jewish humor.

Now look how radically everything has changed. Jerry Seinfeld can’t make shows without being heckled. I think it started to unravel before Oct. 7, but Oct. 7 gave permission to those who were thinking it to start thinking it loudly. I don’t think it’s all gloom and doom. I don’t know. I feel something has changed locally and globally. But I knew even before Oct. 7, that we lived something special.

Futterman:  I see it a little differently and I think partly because I’ve been living in Israel for so long, and seeing American Jewry evolve from the outside, as someone who drops in occasionally, it’s very hard to have a real perspective of an event that is still going on. We’re still in this event, since the Hamas attack and hostages were taken and the horrific war in Gaza and in the north. 

The era we’re writing about, I don’t want to imagine that period as better than it was. There were plenty of problems; there were refugees and people were struggling. I think the glory of that moment is that we grew up in the first generation that felt completely accepted and completely at home in America. And when our parents would say those things about being careful not to make a shanda for the goyim, be careful how you behave in public, don’t feed the antisemitic undertow, ever, we thought they were being paranoid. 

We’ve reached the highest pinnacles of power in the United States of America: in the arts, in culture and in broadcasting. In all kinds of professional fields from which we were once excluded in our parents’ generation. I don’t know if the Golden Age is over.  I think we’re facing challenges we thought were history. I don’t know where we’re going. A lot of it has to do with how American Jewish leadership reacts. And what Israel does influences American Jewish life and security as well, in quite dramatic ways.

BUENOS AIRES — Argentina experienced a 44% increase in reported antisemitic incidents in 2023, mostly after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, according to a report issued Monday by the country’s Jewish umbrella organization..

The report makes Argentina the latest country to record a spike in antisemitism following the attack and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Antisemitism watchdogs in the United States, Germany and elsewhere across Europe have all recorded steep rises.

According to DAIA, which unveiled the report at the Buenos Aires City Legislature, 57% of all antisemitic incidents last year took place in the three months after the attack. 

What’s more, the organization found, Israel shot up as the cause of antisemitic incidents. In 2022, about 11% of antisemitic incidents in Argentina related to Israel. Last year, the proportion was 40%.

And the rate at which antisemitic incidents took place in person also rose. (Most incidents that DAIA recorded took place online.) In the nine months before the Oct. 7 attack, 72 in-person incidents were recorded. In the three months after, there were 150.

Among the in-person incidents that DAIA logged in its report were the word “Hamas” and a crossed-out Star of David that was drawn on a student’s desk and a building that hung a sign reading, “Zionists out of Palestine. This did not start on 7/10. Hitler fell short.” 

From before Oct. 7, it included the inclusion on a restaurant’s menu of an “Anne Frank” hamburger and “Adolf” fries; the restaurant changed the items’ names after members of the Jewish community, including DAIA, criticized the menu for trivializing the Holocaust.

Marisa Braylan, the report’s author and the director of DAIA’s Center for Social Studies, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the tally reflected a sad reality for Argentine Jews since Oct. 7.

“The attack did not generate empathy towards the victims. There was silence, there were justifications and in the worst cases, there was admiration,” she said. “On Oct. 7, a latent antisemitism was dusted off.”

Admirers of artist Mark Podwal’s work tended to describe the visual puns, metaphors and transformations that were his signature. 

“A city grows out of an open book.” 

“A child’s noisemaker can become a gallows for the wicked.” 

“A Jewish runner — identified by an Israeli flag emblem on his or her bib — passes not through finish-line tape, but an arch with columns and floral designs, typical of title-pages of Jewish books.”

In illustrations like these — created for children’s books, major newspapers, synagogue tapestries and gallery walls — Podwal devised a Jewish visual vocabulary that made him one of the best known Jewish artists of his era. He also became the only working dermatologist whose works on paper are included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Modern and Contemporary Art Collection.

The novelist Cynthia Ozick once compared him to a Hasidic master, writing that he “can fire magic into visual being, and can actually reverse nature and society.”

Podwal, who lived in New York, died Friday. He was 79. 

Ozick’s praise was included in the 2016 book “Reimagined: 45 Years of Jewish Art,” a retrospective of his work that included a foreword by his friend Elie Wiesel. Podwal illustrated an edition of Wiesel’s “Jews of Silence,” a book about Soviet Jews, and in 1983 collaborated with Wiesel on “The Golem,” a version of the folktale set in medieval Prague, a city for which the artist had a particular affinity. Podwal accompanied Wiesel to Oslo when the Holocaust survivor accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

“They became not only close friends but co-authors as well, as Mark’s imaginative artwork breathed color and life into the Jewish tales they told together,” the Elie Wiesel Foundation wrote in a tribute. 

The New York Times frequently commissioned his illustrations, including a portfolio, appearing a week after the terror attacks of 9/11, depicting homes, businesses and offices flying the American flag.

Nevertheless, he invariably returned to Jewish themes. Last year, the Museum at Eldridge Street, in a renovated 19th-century synagogue on the Lower East Side, featured Jewish woodcuts from the 16th century that Podwal had “revised” with contemporary references.  A limited edition of his archival prints, tracing Jewish history through the words of the psalms, was first exhibited at the Terezin Ghetto Museum in the Czech Republic.

“Museum directors and curators have urged me to broaden my subject matter — to become an artist more universal rather than being limited by Jewish content, but my heart is with the Jewish experience,” Podwal told the New York Public Library last year.

Other Jewish work included his  illustrations for a Haggadah and a Reform prayer book for young people, and textiles he designed for the Altneuschul in Prague and the Brno synagogue in the Czech Republic. In 2016, the Museum at Eldridge Street featured an exhibit of his works based on the Polish shtetl where his mother was born and raised, and this year installed a mosaic floor featuring his interpretation of the Hebrew zodiac. In 1996, New York’s Temple Emanu-El dedicated an ark curtain and five embroidered Torah covers that he was commissioned to design.

He also designed the stage backdrop for a 1981 Simon and Garfunkel concert in Israel.

Throughout his career as an artist, which drew praise from figures as diverse and well-known as Mel Brooks and the historian David McCullough, Podwal continued to serve on the faculty at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine, where he taught dermatology.

Podwal was born June 8, 1945, and was raised in the Fresh Meadows neighborhood of Queens, New York. His father, a bar owner, encouraged him to pursue a medical career. His mother, Dorothy, came to America in 1929 with her parents at the age of 8, and often spoke of her brother, David, who was unable to emigrate at the time and was later killed in Treblinka. Her mother suffered a breakdown upon hearing the news, and spent the last 18 years of her life in a psychiatric hospital in Queens.

“I’ve been told that my Uncle David drew very well,” Podwal told the New York Jewish Week in 2016. “I’d like to believe that my talent in art is a gift to his memory.”

He first began drawing seriously as a medical student at NYU, and his work was exhibited at the medical school’s main hall and appeared on covers of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Political drawings that he completed in his fourth year of medical school were published in his first book, “The Decline and Fall of the American Empire,” published in 1971, and were exhibited at a Madison Avenue art gallery. He pursued dermatology as a specialty rather than the more consuming surgical track so he would be able to devote more time to his art. 

In the Jewish Week interview Podwal described himself as a “non-observant Orthodox Jew.”

“My drawing is my way of participating in Judaism,” he said. “It’s a form of prayer.”

 Podwal’s survivors include his wife Ayalah, and sons Michael and Ariel.