The Twin Cities Jewish Renewal Community aims to start a new chapter of growth as Kohenet Riv Shapiro steps into the role of managing director.

The community will celebrate this transition and former TCJRC leader Sherry Stern with an Aug. 9 program featuring Michelle W. Malkin, the executive director for ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal. (See Page 6 for event details.)

Jewish Renewal is a transdenominational movement that, according to ALEPH, combines “the socially progressive values of egalitarianism, the joy of Hasidism, the informed do-it-yourself spirit of the havurah movement, and the accumulated wisdom of centuries of tradition.”

According to TCJRC, Jewish Renewal has been in Minnesota since the 1980s and officially became Twin Cities Jewish Renewal Community, and formally affiliated with ALEPH, in 2019.

In a conversation with the Jewish World, Kohenet Shapiro emphasized that Jewish Renewal aims to be accessible for all people — of any age, Jewish affiliation, gender, etc. — and encourages tikkun olam (repairing the world) and the integration of religious practice with “the issues that we care about today.”

Stern added that Jewish Renewal upholds connection to the earth and spirituality and, especially, song and joy.

Sherry Stern first learned about Jewish Renewal around seven years ago at Temple Adath Or in Florida, where she will move in September, and where she plans to remain involved in Jewish Renewal. Upon returning to the Twin Cities after that winter stay in Florida, she connected with TCJRC board member Terry Gips and Living Mussar Executive Director and Founder Julie Dean to begin cultivating the Twin Cities Jewish Renewal Community.

Now, TCJRC hosts experiential programming from personal growth workshops and spiritual programs around holidays to events with speakers and musicians. One regular offering is the Spiritual Jewish Monthly Book Group, which meets via Zoom and is wrapping up Heart of a Stranger: An Unlikely Rabbi’s Story of Faith, Identity, and Belonging, by Rabbi Angela Buchdahl (reviewed in AJW, Feb. 2026).

The next book, for which meetings will start in November, will be the 50th anniversary edition of Jewish Renewal Founder Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s Fragments of a Future Scroll: Hasidism for the Aquarian Age.

TCJRC also partners with other Jewish organizations, synagogues and leaders, most recently with Mount Zion Temple for a song circle with Cantor Linda Hirschhorn, and with Adath Jeshurun Congregation and Living Mussar for an evening of Hebrew chant with Rabbi Shefa Gold, both in July.

Looking forward, Shapiro, an artist and ordained kohenet (priestess), will bring to TCJRC what they’ve learned from the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, Jewish Studio Project and Wilderness Torah, among other experiences.

They will continue holiday programming that emphasizes earth-based traditions and innovative practices but also envision more programming for people throughout the lifecycle, such as space for seniors to explore together what it means to be an initiated elder and outdoor rite of passage for B’nai Mitzva-age youth. (Shapiro described outdoor rite of passage as a “transformative, nature-based coming-of-age experience designed to mark significant life transitions.”)

At Wilderness Torah, Shapiro was a ritual leader and outdoor rite of passage mentor for middle schoolers, which they said was “one of the most impactful things of my life so far, and it’s something that I am beginning to work on bringing to the Twin Cities.”

Stern said Twin Cities Jewish Renewal Community feels fortunate to have Shapiro as its next leader — that more than an administrator, Shapiro is a leader who understands Jewish mysticism and Kabbala and is a “wonderful creative talent.”

Shapiro already has a lineup of new programs that will begin in the fall: a young adult affinity space; monthly Rosh Chodesh gatherings, for all genders, that center around creativity and mindfulness; and quarterly intergenerational fire councils. Shapiro said fire is a core element of Jewish practice and that each season will have an opportunity for people to share and listen from the heart around a fire.

As they continue to work on these programs, Shapiro commented that they are interested in hearing from people across the Jewish community about how TCJRC can serve their spiritual development. “I think there’s really almost unlimited potential of what we could do in this work,” they said.

Shapiro invites people to reach out to them at tcjewishrenewal@gmail.com to connect or join the TCJRC mailing list.

“TCJRC can be a place for those who share values of curiosity, compassion, interconnection and cultivating wise responses to the world we live in, where … people who share those values can come together across all these differences,” Shapiro said.

In a prepared statement, they added: “I hope [TCJRC’s programming] will inspire people to be engaged with Judaism in their respective communities in ways that bring more love, justice and curiosity into our world. This is a difficult time on our planet in so many ways, and we hope to be a resource for spiritual development for all who are seeking.”

(American Jewish World, August 2026)

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I was the last to go over the pond.
My wife, Maj-Britt Syse, organized a family reunion in Denmark and Sweden in July. She had been traveling for several weeks in the far north of Sweden and Norway when I left MSP on July 7, on a flight to Copenhagen, via Keflavik, Iceland.

Editorial

My sons’ families living in Minneapolis, along with the two barnbarn (Swedish for grandkids), convened in Copenhagen for three nights at the beginning of the sojourn and spent six nights in Ystad, Sweden, a city on the Baltic Sea.

My wife’s brothers and their families gathered with us on July 16, in Ystad, to celebrate the 40th birthday of my eldest son, Jonas — we were 20 in all at the party.

Maj-Britt is a dual citizen of the United States and Sweden, as are our three sons. I’ve mentioned in the past that our son Max has been living in Copenhagen for the past eight years. He graduated from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and also earned a master’s degree in data science from the same school. He has been working in research and development for a hearing aid company.

On my first morning in Copenhagen, I left our Airbnb rental apartment and walked over to Sankt Peders Bageri, the oldest bakery and confectionery in Copenhagen, from 1652. I picked up a variety of pastries for breakfast, including croissants for the barnbarn, who ate many croissants during our vacation.

The short walk to the bakery took me through the lovely Ørstedparken, an oasis of greenery around a pond. Various sculptures in the classical style adorn the premises.

On my second day in Copenhagen, our traveling party was joined by visitors from England: my younger brother, Jonathan, sister-in-law Alessia and their daughter Ariel and her boyfriend. Some Jewish World readers likely knew Jonathan from his youth in Mendota Heights.

Our somewhat unwieldy group ventured out in Copenhagen and made its way via metro and bus to Reffen, a popular collection of street food vendors on the harbor. On the way back, we piled on the harbor bus, my favorite conveyance in the Danish capital. The harbor buses zigzag along the harbor and give a visitor a wonderful view of the city.

And it should be mentioned that the harbor has been cleaned up and locals flock to numerous swimming sites along the waterway. The weather was warm in July, and swimmers and sunbathers were out in force.

This was my seventh visit to Copenhagen, going back to 1985, when I first met my in-laws. My wife’s mother was from a small town in Denmark, and her father was from Norway; she was raised in Sweden, where my late father-in-law worked as an electrical engineer, traveling the globe and balancing electric turbines for an industrial firm.

Anyway, I’ve become familiar with Copenhagen but haven’t seen every attraction in the picturesque and charming city. During our visit in July, we visited Designmuseum Danmark, which boasts a large collection of items under the category of Danish Modern and celebrates the Danish designers that made everyday items attractive. On our return to Copenhagen, after the Swedish idyll, we visited the National Museum of Denmark, an encyclopedic collection of art and artifacts, including rooms of Greenlandic artwork, clothing and tools.

On the topic of Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat), the world’s largest island and an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, readers might recall that Donald Trump has been making noises about invading the place.

PBS News reported on July 8 that Trump “insisted that the United States should be in control of Greenland rather than NATO ally Denmark, renewing tensions in Europe even as the trans-Atlantic military alliance was announcing billions in arms deals at a summit in an attempt to appease the mercurial U.S. leader.”

The PBS story continued: “Trump called the semiautonomous island ‘an important part’ for the United States, as he repeated the false claim that it’s surrounded by Chinese and Russian ships and said he won’t let Greenland be threatened.”

Of course, the Greenlandic people, who are mainly Inuit, don’t want to be part of the U.S. And the Danish people just think that Trump is an ignorant buffoon.

Europeans generally cannot comprehend how the U.S. got into this fix. I would point out at certain junctures in conversations that the people in Minneapolis are still traumatized about the U.S. sending in 3,000 masked paramilitary immigration enforcement agents to assault and shoot down people in the streets.

So, part of the fun of our vacation was getting out of the country and enjoying the atmosphere offered by a more peaceful and rationally ordered society.

Denmark has been a steadfast ally of the U.S., despite the president’s mindless and abusive rhetoric. Moreover, it is a society built on trust among people and, generally, between the government and the citizenry.

Perhaps you’ve heard that the Danes are accustomed to leaving their sleeping babies outside in carriages while they patronize a store or café. And I experienced an instance of trust in a Copenhagen shop during my recent visit.

Around the corner from our first Airbnb rental in Copenhagen was an apparel shop called Bagabù. I found the shop on Google Maps and perused the website. A colorful shoulder bag, a “rambler bag,” caught my fancy. After a full day of touristing, I stopped in the shop accompanied by my grandson. There was a bag on display, a slightly different color than the one I had picked out online, but still fine.

We chatted with the friendly woman in the shop as she attempted to get the credit card reader to work. After a number of failed attempts, she suggested that I just take the bag and the proprietor would send me an email with a link for payment. So, I walked out of the shop without paying for the artisanal bag. Of course, when I got back to the apartment, the email arrived and I paid for the item with a credit card.

I can’t imagine a shopkeeper in the Twin Cities letting a stranger walk out of her boutique before paying for some item. Danish society is different, in an admirable way.

In Skåne

After three nights in Copenhagen, our party headed for Malmö, Sweden, where Jonas had reserved a rental car that could convey all of us to the next Airbnb rental. Max recently bought a car, so my son Isaac and his girlfriend, Diana, traveled with Max and his girlfriend, Silvia. We also packed most of our luggage into Max’s little van.

We took the train from Copenhagen to Malmö, which traverses the bridge across the Øresund Strait. It’s a marvel of engineering and an entertaining train ride of about 35 minutes. We shopped for lunch on the go in the Malmö train station then hit the road in our new Peugeot.

Our destination was Ystad, a magnet for Swedes and others on vacation. My brother-in-law Pelle, his wife Marie and their son Ludwig towed their caravan south and rented a spot in a nearby campground with varied amenities.

Maj-Britt’s older brother, Bent, a retired archeologist, and his wife, Cinna, also joined us, along with my Swedish nephew Björn and his son Franke. My niece Anna, her husband Johann and their two small children, who live in Lund, which is just north of Malmö, also joined us for the birthday party in Ystad.

It was nice to have six nights in our Airbnb rental in Sweden — although it seemed weird that the homeowners, a couple with two young children, went camping for most of a week while strangers lived in their home.

In Ystad, we visited the picturesque old town and Greyfriars Abbey, a 13th-century red-brick monastery, which had a playroom on the second floor for the barnbarn. We had a beach day at Sandhammar on the Baltic, with waters as cold as Lake Superior — still, I jumped in for a minute. Just west of Sandhammar we visited Ales stenar, an arrangement of massive stones in the shape of a ship atop a cliff overlooking the Baltic. The mysterious monument is said to be 1,400 years old, and its purpose is unknown.

And there was an excursion to Glimmingehus castle, a well-preserved fortress from the 16th century built by a powerful knight who was under the protection of the Danish king. Skåne, the southern part of Sweden, was occupied by the Kingdom of Denmark, and the two nations fought bloody wars over control of the land.

In Scandinavia, I ate more than the usual ration of korv (sausage). Hot dogs are popular in Sweden and Denmark. Max and Isaac invited us out for korv one afternoon in Ystad, and we visited KorvOlle, a shop in an industrial area that had tasty sausages and whimsical décor.

Back in Denmark

After the celebration of Jonas’ milestone birthday, we returned to Malmö and gave Avis its car back. We took the train back across the Øresund Bridge to the Copenhagen central station. My son Isaac left Ystad for Uppsala, Sweden, then on to Finland and Estonia. Diana flew to northern Spain for work and vacation.

Back in Copenhagen, my old friend Gesa Mackenthun, from Rostock, Germany, paid a visit. In my February editorial concerning the ICE invasion of Minnesota, I wrote about speaking via Zoom to her master’s class at Rostock University. We hadn’t seen each other in person in 30 years.

We met up one afternoon by the Danish Architecture Center, then walked over to the Royal Library Garden, a lovely park on the Royal Island, the site of Christiansborg Palace, which houses the Danish parliament. Gesa has retired as a professor of American studies. We sat in the garden, near the Danish Jewish Museum, and talked about the old days traveling around out west with the American Indian Movement.

Again, my European friends and relatives are at pains to understand how the U.S. has fallen under the misrule of a corrupt and incompetent administration. Among other topics, Gesa mentioned that Pete Hegseth, the self-styled “Secretary of War” from Forest Lake, Minn., had been in the news regarding his plan to determine the testosterone levels in U.S. soldiers. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he seems like a psychopath.

The problem seems to be that the increasingly deranged president is surrounded by craven sycophants. There is no one in the room to contradict his crackpot ideas. Lately, the gaggle of Trump lackeys are going along with his unfounded stories about unknown individuals vandalizing the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC. Perhaps, this vast and resourceful nation can muddle through, take some remedial actions on long-running social problems.

Or we can all move to Denmark.

Mordecai Specktor / editor [at] ajwnews [dot] com

(American Jewish World, August 2026)

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On Aug. 14, Ben Sidran, the renowned jazz pianist, composer, chronicler of American music and raconteur, will turn 83. He’s been playing the Twin Cities for more than five decades and will return to the Dakota for a show on Aug. 17.

During a recent telephone interview from his home in Madison, Wisc., Sidran reflected on his musical career, a new book about Georgie Fame and the state of the American Revolution 250 years on.

Ben Sidran at the Dakota on Aug. 17

“I always love playing the Dakota,” Sidran commented about the upcoming gig. “It’s a great room, it really is. And being there with Billy and Ricky, it’s old home week for me, just being with those guys and Leo, of course, … I always look forward to it.”

For those unfamiliar with the Sidransphere, Billy Peterson, of Minneapolis, will be on bass and his brother, Ricky Peterson, will navigate the Hammond B3 organ. Leo Sidran, Ben’s son, will be on the trap set.

Regarding the upcoming birthday, I mentioned enjoying shows by the first-generation blues artists that performed around the University of Minnesota in the late 1960s: Mississippi Fred McDowell, Mance Lipscomb, Arthur Crudup, Jesse Fuller, et al. And I ventured that Sidran is likely as old as those bluesmen were back then.

“Older,” Sidran replied. “It’s really wild and kind of strange to realize that.”

The native of Racine, Wisc., said that he doesn’t feel old, apart from “some infrastructure issues that I didn’t have.”

He added, “My perception of where I am and what my job is, is pretty much the same. That must have been true for all those guys, too,” he commented about the legendary bluesmen of yesteryear. “You get on that path and that’s it, you ride it out.”

Sidran allowed that he never saw himself as one of “the old jazz guys,” his heroes.

“I just hope that I live as long as Irv Williams, that’s my goal,” Sidran concluded, in reference to the local legend of the saxophone who moved to the big bandstand in the sky in 2019 at the age of 100.

I recall seeing Williams sitting in with Sidran and company some years ago at the Dakota. The show followed the publication of Sidran’s book There Was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream, which was a finalist for a 2012 National Jewish Book Award. The volume is perhaps the definitive work on the prodigious contributions of Jews to American popular music — without the Jewish tunesmiths, there would be a much thinner Great American Songbook.

And speaking of books, Sidran just published Cool Cat Blues: The Life and Times of Georgie Fame (Equinox Publishing).

Fame (né Clive Powell) came from humble origins in England, and his band, Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames, helped popularize American Black music in swinging 1960s London.

“We’re the same age, and we both grew up on a similar diet of music,” Sidran explained. “He never was that famous in the United States because unlike the Beatles and the Stones and the other British Invasion bands, he played keyboards,” when guitar bands were the sensation.

“I met Georgie in the ’80s, when I was just starting GoJazz Records, my record label; so, for about 30 years, we spent a lot of time together, all over the world. … And I got to hear his story, which I found absolutely one of a kind,” Sidran remarked.

“How he went in a few short years from dropping out of high school and working in a cotton mill to dining with British aristocracy and Diana Ross and being No. 1 on the pop charts. It’s an extraordinary story of the British cultural explosion.”

Fame’s hits back then included “Yeh, Yeh,” “Get Away” and “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.”

Sidran agreed that the kids don’t know from Georgie Fame.

And as he’s done over many years, Sidran played dates in Europe this summer, following shows in New York City. “We always go to London and Paris and Madrid and Barcelona — some years we go beyond that,” Sidran recounted.

In a recent episode of Leo Sidran’s “The Third Story podcast,” Leo talked with his father while they were on vacation with their families on the Greek island of Paros. The talk turned to “democracy” — a word from ancient Greece — and its endangered state under the current Trump 2.0 regime.

Sidran observed that, from the vantage of Europe, “you can see your life in America more clearly.” And he mentioned that Europeans have a different view of the United States.

“Nobody that I [talked to] anywhere in Europe could understand how America and Americans could wind up in this situation that we’re in now — it’s just incomprehensible [to them], as it is to the majority of Americans.”

That accords with my conversations with friends and in-laws over two weeks in July in Denmark and Sweden.

Sidran’s most recent album, Are We There Yet (Live at the Sunside), released last year on the Nardis label, was recorded in Paris in 2024.

As our conversation wound down, I wondered if Sidran, who was the host of National Public Radio’s jazz series “Jazz Alive,” which received a Peabody Award, ever interviewed Sonny Rollins, the esteemed jazz saxophonist who died on May 25.

“I interviewed him a few times for different reasons over the years,” he replied. “A very sweet man, a gentleman, humble, the last redwood in the forest — the forest being the picture that was taken on the steps in Harlem.”

Sidran was referring to the famous group portrait of jazz greats assembled in front of a Harlem residence, in 1958. Apparently, Rollins was the last living jazz artist in the photo by Art Kane (né Arthur Kanofsky) titled “A Great Day in Harlem.”

***

Existential jazz poet Ben Sidran and his group will perform 7 p.m. Monday, Aug. 17, at the Dakota, 1010 Nicollet Mall, in downtown Minneapolis. For tickets, go to dakotacooks.com or call 612-332-5299.

Upcoming shows at the Dakota include St. Louis Park native Peter Himmelman on Aug. 20; Broadway star Shoshana Bean, Sept. 21; and Don Was and The Pan-Detroit Ensemble, Oct. 4. 

(American Jewish World, August 2026)

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You think you have tsuris?

Rabbi Adinah Feld has just returned from three weeks in Israel to find that a hurricane tore off a corner of her New Jersey synagogue’s roof, letting in torrents of water.

That corner is right above her office, leaving piles of sodden paper and ruining her cherished mother-of-pearl, Star of David-inlay table she’d bought years ago outside the Alhambra.

Louis, Temple Beth Israel’s longtime but decreasingly capable property manager, is feuding with Debra, Adinah’s hyper-capable administrator, over dealing with the insurance people.

The congregation president is enthusiastic about Adinah’s dream for “an immersive center for teaching Hebrew to the children and adults” and for finding the funds. But he wants the project managed by a well-qualified congregant who Adinah considers domineering, sarcastic and rude.

Worse, Fami, a college student working at the synagogue for the summer, is fighting for her life after being attacked after leaving a Labor Day party. She and her mother, Syrian refugees, had been taken under the congregation’s wing. When Fami was 14, Adinah became her mentor.

Such tsuris (trouble) you wouldn’t wish on an unfriendly mother-in-law. And Rosh Hashana is just 10 days away. Welcome home.

Comic as most of this seems, novelist Nathaniel Popkin’s Partly Strong, Partly Broken is an engaging, entertaining yet subtly serious look at the differences among largely secular American Jews and the difficulties rabbis face dealing with them while trying to hold congregations together.

Adinah, 45, has been at Reform’s Temple Beth Israel for eight years and is part of the city’s Multifaith Coalition, which welcomes refugees, sustains food banks and buys LGBTQ+ books for the local library.

“The heart of the coalition, for the rabbi at least, was Imam Abdul,” the one to steer the group toward concrete action.

The temple and Abdul’s Masjid Al-Aksa mosque have grown close, and so have their two leaders, who attend each other’s congregational events. Abdul seems to be Adinah’s closest friend.

“They pledged to each other unconditional support,” Popkin writes, “reasoning that if a California-born lesbian rabbi and a Detroit-born Palestinian American educated in Cairo could work toward common objectives, then anyone could.”

After the coalition meeting, Adinah recalls a story told to her during her last week in Israel by Sana, her long-ago lover, about a man close to death who miraculously revives after his family and relatives hold a vigil, reciting his name and trying to direct their energy toward him.

Why not a vigil for Fami? Imam Abdul buys in, suggesting it be held at the mosque. Soon, Adinah pitches the idea to her top Sunday school teachers, high school seniors, for whom she’s brought Israeli gifts.

There’s an anti-Netanyahu flag for Theo, interested in justice, and hamsa earrings for Celia, whip smart with a mouth to match. They’re close friends; Theo would like to be more. They agree to organize the vigil and invite friends. It is a huge success.

But some congregants disapprove of Adinah’s closeness to Abdul and her efforts at temple-mosque relations. And some fearfully disapprove of her permission to let Theo build the temple’s sukka proudly out front, visible to all who pass by.

At a board meeting, Debra reports issuing 1,500 High Holiday tickets. The meeting turns to the Hebrew learning center, igniting an angry debate about the need to learn Hebrew to be a Jew.

Two more incidents, one of them a whisky-sampling evening with a lecture from a speaker who claims trauma can be passed down through generations — Jewish and Arab — shake Adinah’s popularity and grip on her congregation. With Rosh Hashana looming, Adinah ponders it as high-performance time for a rabbi.

“Those who came every week had no need for the performance,” Popkin writes, “and while some were heartened to see so many people and welcomed them like long-lost friends, quite a few others experienced the High Holidays as an invasion of the false and the feckless.”

The latter was her target audience.

The deeper you get into Partly, the richer it becomes, including phrases and prayers in Hebrew type (translated) and Adinah’s explanations of Jewish faith, culture and ethics. There’s a book club guide for discussion. Those with scant knowledge of Jewish fundamentals can get an education that’s entertaining and affectionate.

All of us can just enjoy.

***

Neal Gendler is a Minneapolis writer and editor.

(American Jewish World, August 2026)

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Why has Ari Hoptman chosen Is That Why? as the title for his one-man show at this year’s Minnesota Fringe?

Why is he explaining “why”? What is he asking “why” about?

Stage veteran Ari Hoptman explores those random language mysteries that occupy our minds while we’re trying to fall asleep at night or are stuck in team leadership meetings. Why don’t we have a letter for “th”? Is writing left to right logical? How do you name mammals? What’s wrong with “gooder,” anyway? See Ari talk about what a lot of smart folks figured out a while back.

Aside from being a freelance performer, in real life Hoptman is a professor of German philology at the University of Minnesota. Philology? That’s a word you don’t run into every day. The Webster’s dictionary I won in my fifth grade spelling bee says it’s “the study of etymology, grammar, criticism, literary and linguistic history, etc.” In other words, word origins and grammar.

Hoptman’s been studying and teaching it in German since he left the Detroit area in 1992 to study the subject with the University of Minnesota’s legendary Professor Anatoly Liberman. This explains why the Fringe promo describes Is That Why? as “a fast-moving show about the mysteries of language. Why are words the way they are? How do languages change? Why is grammar hard? And what IS the plural of ‘octopus,’ anyway? Every show will be different!”

The question now is: How did he come to choose such an esoteric subject to entertain a generally quirk-loving audience? Hoptman explained, “It’s an outgrowth of my performances at BALLS Cabaret at Strike Theater in northeast Minneapolis. I used to do comedy stories and bad poetry there. At some point, I decided to talk about words, word origins and language.”

This is not surprising since for years he worked on an etymological dictionary, an effort led by Liberman. “We rescued a lot of ‘lost’ articles on etymology in largely unread academic journals; for example, we found eight somewhat useless articles on the origin of the word ‘gazebo.’”

Hoptman likes to educate people through humor. “I use humor, hoping that the audience has a good time and that they learn something fun.”

Why would a guy brought up in one of the most Jewish suburbs of Detroit choose German over its Jewish relative, Yiddish? Our lingua franca never was part of his plan. After struggling through French in high school, he tried out German to fulfill a language requirement at Wayne State University and found it to his liking.

Outside of the classroom, though, Hoptman doesn’t find a lot of opportunity to use Yiddish or German. “I don’t run into a lot of German speakers on the streets of the Twin Cities, and when I do, the conversation is pretty superficial. I don’t get to use a wide vocabulary.”

As an actor, Hoptman has some favorite roles: Ira Stone — a brilliant comedy writer, hypochondriac and extremely irritating person in Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor, which he performed with Park Square Theatre. And then there’s his smarmy Department Chair Arlen Finkel in A Serious Man, the 2009 Coen brothers film shot in the Twin Cities.

Other Jews performing at the Fringe Festival this year include Abbey Lowenstein directing Guy For Now, described as a comedy for all ages that takes the audience on a “journey of self-discovery as our everyman encounters a cast of ‘unique’ characters who teach him about life, love, and the art of letting go,” as per the Fringe website.

Rachel Redleaf is the writer, director and star of Too Much of a Good Thing. The story follows our heroine from her challenge with The Itty Bitty Titty Committee to being president of The Big Booby Brigade. Somehow, Rachel enlists her talking breasts to help her decide: Can you have too much of a good thing?

Julia and Eli Maskin have written, produced and now star in Castrati: A Tale of Two. This show “weaves song with castration” and challenges the audience members to shed their bodily prisons during this groundbreaking musical.

***

Ari Hoptman’s show will be performed on five dates, Aug. 7-16, at the American School of Storytelling, 1762 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis. Information on performances can be found at minnesotafringe.org.

(American Jewish World, August 2026)

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Some Israelis might say nothing has gone wrong.

But the premise of Omer Bartov’s book is that much is wrong, particularly as summarized in an introduction called “From Liberation to Oppression.”

Bartov asks: “How is it possible that a state founded in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust stands today credibly accused of perpetrating large-scale war crimes, forcible displacement of civilian populations, and crimes against humanity?”

Are those accusations credible? Views differ.

One possible answer is that a century of killing of Jews and wars to drive them out of Israel could not help but harden many hearts.

Israeli-born Bartov, a veteran of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, who is Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, neither denies nor minimizes the horrors of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, invasion.

But he questions the nature of Israel’s response.

Even more usefully and quite credibly, he examines changes in Israeli society and governance. He criticizes Israel’s lack of a constitution, which causes problems in governance, and Israel’s current government and prime minister.

That’s solid reading that fits well with reporting in daily English-language editions of mainstream Israeli newspapers. Those who read and see or hear only U.S. media accounts of Israeli events would learn enormously from Bartov’s book.

He’s particularly sensitive about Israel’s treatment of the Arabs under Israeli occupation — descendants of those who rejected the U.N. plan for sharing the expiring British Mandate.

“Told that we were the first generation of our people’s resurrection, we never questioned our presence, existence, and future in Israel,” he says.

He cites “colonial views of Palestine as an empty space.” Yet, over time, “some of us became increasingly aware that our resurrection had come at the price of another people’s catastrophe.”

That’s part of his views of the Palestinian Arab problem. Near the end of the book, he gives a potential solution from scholar Dahlia Scheindlin: a confederation of independent Israeli and Palestinian nations with open borders, rights of permanent residence in each other’s nation and cooperation on shared concerns such as public health, natural resources, security and the economy.

He says that the occupation of Judea and Samaria “has dehumanized the occupied and occupiers alike.” He says settlements have created “an apartheid regime,” and he claims that the Shoah caused Jews fear of extermination that leads to “no obligation to accept any international norms.”

That stunning claim is in keeping with Bartov’s criticism of the extent of war destruction in Gaza; but if he says anywhere that buildings were destroyed because Hamas was operating or shooting from them, I must have missed it.

Bartov acknowledges that “Judeophobia, now commonly referred to as antisemitism, has a long and vile history.” Later he writes: “Antisemitism cannot be dismissed as marginal to the Holocaust.”

But he says that “defining criticism of Israel as antisemitic is the best way to help the current Israeli leadership practice unchallenged extremist, racist policies.”

Again, views may differ, but it seems clear that Israel “is now the best excuse for antisemites everywhere.”

One area for argument, even as it’s part of his academic title, is Bartov’s repeated assertion that Israel’s war in Gaza is genocide.

He presents definitions of genocide that are broader than many of us may think. For example, the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention definition ranges from killing members of the group — which Israel certainly did — to inflicting conditions of life calculated to physically destroy the group “in whole or in part.”

Two U.S. dictionaries offer shorter, simpler definitions that describe the Shoah’s intent — but not the Gaza war. Merriam-Webster: “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.” American Heritage: “the systematic, planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.”

The word genocide was invented in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish refugee from Poland who defined it as “the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group” by actions with “the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”

That’s what Nazi Germany planned. It managed to kill around 33 percent of the world’s 18 to 19 million Jews — all but about 500,000 of those who came under German control. Hamas’ claim of 73,000 deaths — apparently including deaths from any cause — is 0.0365 percent of Gaza’s population of 2 million.

No death is insignificant, but if Israel is attempting genocide, numbers suggest that its very competent armed forces are doing a very poor job of it.

***

Neal Gendler is a Minneapolis writer and editor.

(American Jewish World, July 2026)

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Winona is a lovely Mississippi River town. Apart from the scenery, for many years there really wasn’t much to attract people from the Twin Cities down Hwy. 61.

My Richfield neighbor, Dave Gepner, grew up in Winona’s tiny Jewish community and says he never felt any antisemitism. Winona is open-minded enough to have a Jewish senator in the Minnesota Legislature, Jeremy Miller, who even had a term as GOP majority leader.

I’ve been taking my out-of-state visitors down to Winona for the past decade or so after I discovered the Minnesota Marine Art Museum (MMAM) there. For those readers puzzled by the use of “Marine” when the museum is well over 1,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, here’s the story: For purposes of the MMAM, a painting must contain at least a part of a body of water and a part of a water vessel.

It’s fortunate for Jewish artist Tali Weinberg that the curators at the MMAM have stretched those requirements for her to be invited to exhibit in their current show “Water | Craft.”

The curators explain it this way: “Just as water flows through our bodies, landscapes, and cultural memories, craft knowledge passes between generations, carrying technical skills alongside cultural values. The featured artists employ traditional methods not as nostalgic gestures but as living practices that offer sophisticated perspectives on ecological and social challenges. By positioning these works in a contemporary art context, the exhibition questions hierarchies between art forms while demonstrating how generational wisdom can help us navigate environmental crises.”

Weinberg tells us in her artist statement that she “create[s] weavings, sculptures, and drawings that explore the interconnected harms extraction inflicts on humans and the earth, from rising temperatures, species loss, and plastic proliferation to illness and displacement. I trace these connections through the systems and structures of weaving, vascular systems of people and trees, flows of watersheds, and streams of news and data. … Much of my work simultaneously references landscape and body.”

She continues, “I weave monofilament and cotton into silhouettes of tree species threatened by climate crisis, suspending the ghostly, semi-transparent forms upside-down to evoke lungs, arteries, and roots. I make sculptures referencing circulatory systems from the more-than-human world using expired, petrochemical-derived medical waste once associated with the circulatory systems of human bodies: Tourniquets become tree rings, and tubes become flowing water bodies. Together, these works retrace and reimagine relationships between corporeal and ecological bodies, between personal and communal loss, and between grief and possibility.”

Weinberg is currently based in Champaign-Urbana, Ill., but her art has traveled far and wide. She’s mounted solo shows in the Marian Gallery, Mount Mary University, Milwaukee; New York University Gallatin Galleries, New York, NY; University of Missouri Bingham Gallery, Columbia, Mo.; Denver Botanic Gardens, Denver, Colo.; and the California College of the Arts gallery, Oakland, Calif., among others.

A few of the group shows where she’s been invited to exhibit are Fowler-Kellogg Art Center, Chautauqua Institution, N.Y.; the Bemis Center, Omaha, Neb.; and form & concept gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Weinberg’s art is in the collections of Berkeley Art Museum, Georgia Museum of Art, and Denver Botanic Gardens and is exhibited internationally, including at Griffith University Art Museum (Australia) and Zhejiang Art Museum (China).

She seems to be quite the “wandering Jew,” so we’re fortunate to have her art here in Minnesota until the end of this year. It’s a shame that the American Jewish World learned about Weinberg’s show too late to do an in-person interview at the opening back in January. She seems to be an interesting person as much as a talented artist.

Weinberg received her MFA from California College of the Arts and an interdisciplinary MA (textiles and social theory) and BA (peace studies) from New York University.

The schlep to Winona takes a little over two hours from the Twin Cities; but, if you combine your visit to the MMAM with a performance at Winona’s Beethoven Festival (which runs through July 19), you could make the most of the drive and spend the night discovering this under-appreciated gem on the Mississippi.

Or you could wait until mid-October and admire the fall colors during your drive, since the “Water | Craft” show is on display through Dec. 27, 2026.

***

For information about Minnesota Marine Art Museum, 800 Riverview Dr., Winona, Minnesota, go to: mmam.org.

(American Jewish World, July 2026)

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The award follows on the popular resistance here to the ICE invasion, the deployment of some 3,000 federal immigration enforcement officers from an alphabet soup of U.S. police agencies — the invasion was dubbed Operation Metro Surge.

The heavily armed and masked thugs assaulted immigrants and U.S. citizens. They arrested hundreds of people residing in the Twin Cities, including five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was wearing a blue bunny rabbit hat, along with his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias. The father and son were detained by ICE in Columbia Heights, in January, and spent nearly two weeks at an ICE family detention center in Dilley, Texas, before being returned to Minnesota.

And as the world knows, two U.S. citizens were shot to death on the streets of Minneapolis by federal agents in January. Renée Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother, was killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, on Jan. 7, on Portland Avenue near 34th Street. And Alex Pretti, also 37, an ICU nurse at the VA Hospital in Minneapolis, was shot multiple times on Jan. 24 by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers on Nicollet Avenue near 26th Street. Pretti was going to the aid of a woman who had been knocked down by immigration agents when two CBP officers opened fire on him.

In the aftermath of the Good killing, the U.S. Department of Justice quickly announced that there would be no civil rights investigation of the shooting. Instead, prosecutors with the office of the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota were directed to investigate Becca Good, the widow of Renée Good.

Thus began a wave of resignations of prosecutors at the office headed by U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, who was appointed to the post last year by President Trump. At first, six senior prosecutors quit, including Joseph Thompson, the head of fraud investigations, who had been a fixture on the local TV news reports about the Feeding Our Future scandal. The press has reported resignations of eight more lawyers from the office — a total of 14 conscience-struck individuals.

In January, the Star Tribune reported that Thompson’s resignation “was followed by at least five other senior members of the office, including Assistant U.S. Attorney Harry Jacobs, chief of the criminal division and the lead attorney prosecuting Vance Boelter in the assassination of Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the attempted killing of Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. Jacobs was also instrumental in prosecuting the Feeding Our Future trial. Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Calhoun-Lopez also resigned; he was the lead investigator for a series of federal racketeering trials targeting members of Minneapolis street gangs.”

The Star Tribune also reported: “Assistant U.S. Attorney Melinda Williams, who led the prosecution of sex trafficker Anton Lazzaro, is also among the resignations. Thompson, Jacobs and Williams are the three top-ranking prosecutors in the office.”

Compounding the January debacle at the U.S. Attorney’s office, Daniel Rosen, an Orthodox Jew who wears a small suede yarmulke, convened a press conference on June 16 to announce indictments of 15 local anti-ICE activists, who were charged in U.S. District Court with “conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer.”

No Profile in Courage Award for these local political activists — they won the federal conspiracy legal jackpot.

As the indictment details — and as Rosen explained to the gathered reporters — the defendants conspired “to prevent by force, intimidation, and threats, officers and employees of the United State Department of Homeland Security … from discharging the duties of their officers.”

The indictment alleges that the defendants “were members and associates of Twin Cities Direct Action … which later changed its name to Direct Action Minnesota (“DAMN”), an organization dedicated and committed to direct action against federal law and immigration enforcement.”

On Sept. 25, 2025, President Trump designated “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization,” in an executive order. The June 11 indictment of the local anti-ICE activists also mentions that many “self-proclaimed ‘antifascist’ or ‘Antifa’ groups in the United States exist at the local level, in small units called affinity groups. Antifa groups frequently blend anarchist and communist views.” The indictment continues with a laundry list of “militant class struggle” activities of DAMN sub-groups, including the “Black Cat Worker’s Collective (‘BCWC’)” and the “Ray Rainbolt Memorial Shooting Club.”

At his Jan. 16 press conference, Rosen did not answer reporters’ question about the exact nature of antifa and promised that the government’s evidence would be put forth as the case proceeded.

In reality, there’s no organization called “antifa,” which refers to a movement to combat fascism. The opposite of antifa is fascism. Many people have pointed out in social media posts that their parents, veterans of World War II, were antifa, Americans who fought fascism in Europe and in the Pacific.

What is clear is that the Trump administration, through the Department of Justice, is on a course of political repression. Sadly, Daniel Rosen has shown himself to be a pliable tool in the administration’s schemes. When law enforcement becomes politicized, everyone’s constitutional and legal rights are imperiled. As Jews, we know about tragic outcomes of law enforcement bending to the whims of a tyrant.

An astute analysis of the federal conspiracy case — now known as the “Minnesota 15” case — was provided recently by Scott Tilsen, an old friend who recently retired from his career as a federal public defender in Minnesota and Missouri.

“Tuesday’s indictments join a long tradition of the federal government’s history of attempting to silence dissent through multiple-defendant conspiracy charges,” Tilsen wrote on Facebook.

He continued his historical legal review:

As exemplified by the 1670 trial of Willam Penn and William Mead for ‘conspiring to breach the peace,’ resulting from religious gatherings, the U.S. government has routinely sought to oppress opposition views through criminal trials. Other such cases have followed.

During and after World War I, authorities used the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 to prosecute and imprison war opponents; the 1950s saw intense ‘Red Scare’ conspiracy cases against members of the Communist Party; the 1969 ‘Chicago 7’ trial accused Vietnam War opponents in a conspiracy case stemming from anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

In the 1970s, the government turned its attention to the American Indian Movement, prosecuting AIM leaders after the government siege at Wounded Knee; in 2008, the government turned its focus to cases involving protesters at the Republican National Convention in St Paul.

These examples by no means represent an exhaustive list. The point is that when government suppression is the goal, conspiracy charges are a frequent means to that goal.

I commented on Tilsen’s post and expanded on the prosecution of the “RNC 8,” local political organizers indicted in Ramsey County district court in the aftermath of the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul. The initial charge against the local protest organizers was “conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism.”

As some Jewish World readers might recall, my son Max was one of the defendants.

Susan Gaertner, then the Ramsey County attorney, prosecuted the case for more than two years. When it appeared that a lengthy and costly trial was in the offing, everyone — both prosecutors and defense lawyers — lost interest in the case. Felony charges were dropped, several defendants had all charges removed and none of the defendants was sentenced to additional jail time.

So, readers might see something about the Minnesota 15 case on the TV news or in the newspapers and think that the defendants are malcontents or troublemakers. However, the presumption of innocence applies to defendants in criminal cases — the government has the burden of providing proof of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. And when the weight of the U.S. government is arrayed to crush an individual, it’s serious business.

In the RNC 8 case, I worked with the legal defense committee for more than two years to raise money to pay about 10 defense lawyers. We received thousands of dollars in donations, including generous donations from individuals in the Jewish community. In this country, justice is expensive and as the legal process grinds on, it also takes an emotional and psychological toll on defendants and their friends and family members.

And in the Minnesota 15 conspiracy case, there are ominous signs that the Trump administration could prevail.

In late June, the Justice Department triumphantly announced that “eight North Texas Antifa Cell operatives were sentenced for their roles in rioting, using weapons and explosives, providing material support to terrorists, obstruction, and the attempted murder of an Alvarado police officer at the Prairieland Detention Center on July 4, 2025.”

The Justice Department press release noted that this is “the first sentencing of defendants affiliated with Antifa following President Donald J. Trump’s executive order designating the group as a Domestic Terrorist Organization in September 2025.”

The Justice Department crowed that the “Prairieland terrorists received a combined sentence of 450 years in prison.”

A report on the Prairieland case from Houston Public Media, a service of the University of Houston, mentioned that, as in the RNC 8 case, friends and supporters of the defendants, “dubbed the DFW Support Committee, have coalesced around the case. Throughout the trial, protestors marched and spoke outside the courthouse decrying what they saw as an injustice against the protestors.”

The article quoted a statement provided by one supporter, Ana Marie Thorne with the All People’s Church Unitarian Universalist in Fort Worth. “These defendants are not militant monsters out to kill,” Thorne wrote. “They are everyday people who saw our country literally interning people in concentration camps and decided to show up at Prairieland Detention Center to let those incarcerated there know that they mattered. We leave here today knowing that the outcome of this trial is not the end. It is the beginning.”

The Houston Public Media story also mentioned that similar cases “are being tried across the country. Most recently, Minnesota prosecutors alleged 15 people charged in a conspiracy to injure federal officers earlier this month are tied to antifa groups.”

As the Trump administration tries to vilify its political opponents as “communists” and “antifa,” there is growing resistance across the land to the U.S. government’s benighted policies. We are awaiting justice for Renée Good and Alex Pretti, victims of this government’s dirty and criminal repression.

Daniel Rosen should indict all of us.

Mordecai Specktor
editor [at] ajwnews [dot] com

(American Jewish World, July 2026)

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This is an excellent opportunity for elected officials and candidates for office to get their message out to a segment of the community that takes its politics seriously — and votes.

There are open races for Minnesota governor and U.S. senator, along with many contested federal, state and county elective offices. The primary elections will be held on Tuesday, Aug. 11.

The ad space reservation deadline for the July issue is 12 pm this Wednesday, June 24.

Prepayment is needed for election campaign ads.

For information, click HERE.

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Joyride is a perfect title for writer Susan Orlean’s new book.

Not only has her life and work been filled — mostly — with joy, but reading the book is a joy.

It very engagingly summarizes a career from a startup Oregon magazine to Vogue, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and now nine books.

One book, The Orchid Thief, became the basis for the 2002 movie Adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze.

Exuberant and humorous, Joyride charms with stories of research experiences and the interesting, unusual people she encounters doing it. It’s hard to put down.

Orlean also tells us much about writing, describing the motivations, processes and “delight gotten from tacking a series of words in place that feels right.”

She’s had lots of practice, writing her first book around age 5: Herbert the Nearsighted Pigeon.

Writing “was something I wanted to do as soon as I realized it could be done,” she says. It “always felt natural to me.”

So was reading, with weekly walks with her Hungarian-born mother to a suburban Cleveland library. “I was the kind of kid who read until my mother told me to turn out the lights,” then read under the covers with a flashlight.

Her paternal grandfather came from Poland.

“My parents were defined by being Jewish,” she says. “It wasn’t a matter of observance or specifics; being Jewish was simply integral to who they were.” Hebrew school extended through high school.

Orlean’s professional path was shaped while in junior high by a Life magazine piece that followed a country doctor through a workday, from delivering babies to comforting dying patients.

“Reading that story was like hearing a thunderclap,” she says. “The content was fascinating.” More important was “realizing that a writer could produce a story about something routine… someone not famous” that could reveal “the truth about another life and nothing more” yet be interesting enough to be published.

“I knew then that using writing to satisfy my curiosity, and to illuminate the truth in the lives of others, was what I wanted to do.”

And that’s what she did, sometimes walking around New York to spot things that sparked her curiosity, research and writing. One of her stories was about an Ashanti king she met driving her in a cab.

“I kept looking for places to be published,” she says. “I had a relentless desire to expand my options and a constant yearning to be recognized, approved, acknowledged.” The New Yorker was an early goal.

Vogue offered access to free shoes sent for review and to low-price designer clothes sales. Her piece on being a hostess featured a cover photo of her “in hostess mode.”

Then she learned “The New Yorker was looking for new ‘Talk of the Town’ writers. This was shocking. It was as if the Vatican had put a listing for cardinals on Craigslist.”

Despite rejection of an earlier submission to The New Yorker, she got an interview and an assignment, in 1987, to write about how Benetton workers were trained to precisely fold clothes. Upon getting a call saying it would run, “I jumped up and down shrieking.”

Then it was more Talk of the Town pieces. Meantime, her marriage was deteriorating, and she was way behind on her first book, about Saturday night in America, eventually having to repay part of her advance and find another publisher. She kept traveling around the country, seeing what people did on Saturday nights, and asking them why. Research included a Saturday night with an alert crew in a Wyoming missile silo.

Saturday Night was a success. She was hired as a New Yorker staff writer, which had a startling change when Tina Brown came from Vanity Fair as editor.

Brown was determined to perk up the magazine with different types of pieces, says Orlean, who wrote both assigned pieces and ones she suggested. Her work took her into “worlds I might never have visited otherwise.”

One was traveling for two weekend performances with the Jackson Southernaires, five black gospel singers and their crew busing among small southern towns for loving, ecstatic audiences and sometimes-slender receipts. Her article — one of five in an appendix to the 368-page memoir — brings vividly to life a world about which most of us know nothing.

“I was deeply affected by what I saw: faded towns that lit up with sheer joy at the arrival of the Southernaires; animated crowds dressed in their best clothes; hours of magnificent music.”

Her 16-year marriage to an undemonstrative, withdrawn attorney ended. Later she would marry an investment banker and have a son.

Their temporary move to California to research and write Rin Tin Tin became permanent. That successful book took nearly 10 years, delving into the film and television history atop poring through the archived papers of owner Lee Duncan, who “kept every clip, every flyer, every press photo related to his dogs,” the original and its offspring.

“Reading them made me feel as though I had drilled inside a still-human life,” she says. “The day I reached the cache of funeral announcements for him in the archives, I cried.”

A tour of Los Angeles Central Library piqued her curiosity — and childhood memories — leading to The Library Book, another triumph of her ability to engage readers in an institution and people that most folks take for granted. But a memoir

“I resisted the idea of even saying the word memoir,” she writes late in the book, which has sold an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 copies.

“I wasn’t convinced I deserved that attention.”

***

Neal Gendler is a Minneapolis writer and editor.

(American Jewish World, June 2026)

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