May

9

2025

Sanders Isaac Bernstein (contributor): I approached Rachel Cockerell’s new family memoir, Melting Point: Family, Memoir and the Search for a Promised Land—a tale told wholly through archival materials and interviews—with, admittedly, great expectations. Its method of composition, a collage “from diaries, letters, memoirs, articles, and recordings,” gave me hope that I might even encounter a Benjaminian montage. Could Cockerell’s mosaic of fragments, a wandering narrative from Theodor Herzl’s Zionism and Israel Zangwill’s Territorialism (in which her great-grandfather played an important role), through the New Playwrights Theatre in interwar New York City (where her great-uncle was a playwright), and finally to the postwar London of her grandmother and Aliyah-bound great-aunt, reveal the fracture lines of history—its contingency? She suggests as much in her preface: “A Jewish homeland in Palestine was only one of several possibilities: As one character in the book says, ‘It’s never inevitable at the time.’”

But as I set out reading, I found the book to be strangely uncurious about how the past might have conceived its future differently, its textual selections focusing more on the immediate aura of its historical personages—how Theodor Herzl seemed “royal” or that Ze’ev Jabotinsky was “gallant,” or that Mike Gold had “‘proletarian’ props”—than in their political visions. The great potential of the book’s formal composition seemed to yield to the limits of the texts Cockerell chooses to describe the historical path that led to the writer’s existence, which began when her great-grandfather David Jochelman left Russia for London to team up with Zangwill on the Galveston Plan—a strange turn-of-the-century resettlement project of 10,000 Russian Jews in the United States by way of Galveston, Texas.

This journey isn’t without interest. The opening section begins with the first Zionist Congress and the pogroms of 1903 and guides us through the development of the Galveston Plan, while the second section plunges its readers into the 1920s and New York City’s socialist theater world, where Cockerell’s great-uncle, the forgotten playwright Emjo Basshe, was once active. If the final section, about the Jochelman family’s time in London from the ’20s to the founding of Israel, lacks some of this drive, its nostalgic interviews endow it with textured memory.

But while moments may be intriguing, the book’s framing often feels tired; history, in this context, seems designed to confirm the current state of the world rather than unsettle it. The treatment of the Galveston Plan is a case in point. The plan is certainly a historical curiosity, but my (perhaps naive) hope had been that Cockerell’s approach would let us see it as a real possibility—as it felt to the people at the time. Instead, Cockerell’s choice to filter the plan through the retrospective memoir of AJC leader Morris Waldman, instead of, say, a Jewish emigrant setting out from Germany’s Bremen ports, renders the venture “a somewhat romantic story,” in Waldman’s words, dooming the plan before we can even begin to understand it, let alone believe in it.

In the afterword, Cockerell reveals that survival has been the guiding logic of her text, directly linking her existence with the success of Zionism. She notes that a friend of Zangwill wrote that the Zionist leader had “confessed to me once that he had wasted half his life on Zionism.” Reflecting on this, Cockerell writes, “I have Zangwill’s half-wasted life to thank for my existence.” Where the scholar Bernard Marinbach once called the Galveston Plan “a movement which had abandoned Zionist aspirations as hopeless,” such a perspective is absent in Melting Point; Cockerell, rather, lets Zangwill’s friend frame this project simply as an outgrowth of the Zionist movement. In this way, Cockerell’s final words recast the Galveston Plan as a kind of rehearsal of a successful Zionism—and the book, in turn, becomes about how, even before the founding of the Jewish state, the dream of Zionism saved at least one family of Jews.

Perhaps the book reflects Zionism’s own myopia—where its focus on survival reproduced, rather than challenged, old forms—most notably, the ethnostate. The book similarly sacrifices the strange possibilities of the past’s vision of the future for an overarching pattern we know too well—pogroms, Zionism, World War II, Israel. I can only wonder what Melting Point might have revealed had Cockerell not only let the past tell its story through her artful collage but also let its perspectives influence her tale’s arc, not history as we know it now, but, rather, how it could have been.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): David Bezmozgis’s recent short story, “From, To,” published in the New Yorker, is a dispatch from the present tense of Jewish American family life. The protagonist—like Bezmozgis, a Gen X Soviet Jewish immigrant with a college-aged daughter—loses his mother suddenly. The loss strikes in the first paragraph, and delivers some of the most beautiful writing in the piece. Upon hearing the news from his aunt, “he feels a plummet and a deletion commensurate with the space his mother occupied in his life. Nothing will fill it. He knows this from his father’s death. He’ll go around with another amorphous blank, until he himself becomes one in the consciousnesses of his children.” The details and rituals of mourning are handled tenderly, but unsentimentally: the late-night call to the funeral home; the last, unceremonious parting with the dead body; the first morning in the hard truth of absence. “All that passes for normal life strikes him as mockingly, even malevolently, strange.”

This is a high-stakes emotional environment in which to set the familiar intergenerational political impasse between father and daughter, who is active in her school’s encampment alongside her Palestinian Egyptian girlfriend. Here, too, the portrait of middle-aged Jewish grievance and myopia is accurate and arresting. The protagonist seems entirely inured to what he identifies as the casual eliminationist fascism of his elders—this is thoroughly digested, even with some distaste, and in fact, universalized: All people share this totalitarian drive, if they think it will benefit them. But he is activated in describing—in perhaps the most propulsive cadences in the piece—the explosion of post-October 7th vitriol against Israel, narrowly focused on its most bombastic expressions. He tiptoes up to the edge of empathy with Palestinian fathers in attempting to understand the clips of Gazan suffering posted by his largely “third world” soccer crew, before retreating again and again into his own story, his parents’ story: “birth in the embers of the Shoah, Yiddishkeit, Soviet existence, antisemitism, immigration, courage, struggle, family, community, legacy.” He fears that his daughter Mila has lost any connection to these seminal Jewish struggles, that she cannot feel the pain of his own grandfather for his lost brother—murdered by gentiles “in the proverbial wood”—that what the grandson “feels doesn’t possess sufficient charge to be transmitted further.” What does “from the river to the sea” or “intifada, revolution” mean to his daughter in light of this inheritance?

But these questions are never asked of Mila, so they are never answered. We never see her youthful political folly or her principled defiance, her soft denial or wholehearted appeal to Jewish identity. For her part, she appears polite and dignified in her mourning and her activism in a way that falls flat. If she is withholding from her father in his moment of grief, we soon understand why, as her decision to return to the encampment under the threat of its clearing instead of staying at the shiva another night spurs an ugly outburst in front of her girlfriend. According to her father, the rift in their relationship is the fault of the “homicidal maniacs” who perpetrated October 7th, and not at all a function of his lack of curiosity about her. It is an apt accounting of the father’s unrelenting projection, his successful barricading of his own story from the one playing out in Gaza, his smug indulgence in his own grievance. And yet, by the end of the story, as the protagonist earnestly appeals to law—real estate law, of all things!—as if dispossession and apartheid and genocide were not the law in Israel, and martials the Kaddish’s invocation of peace toward a misguided sense of moral superiority, the reader suspects that the author has just gotten on his soapbox. Though the father’s outburst saves him from perfect righteousness, it is not enough to suggest a deeper authorial self-awareness, an ability to see around his largely “reasonable” protagonist. It made me feel an uncomfortable desire to debate the author rather than sympathize with the character, which was otherwise easy to do. An enormous shame for a story so otherwise sensitively observed.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): One of life’s purest delights is the pleasure of discovering the work of a great artist I’d never heard of—as happened to me just recently while reading about the family of the French composer Léon Reinach (1893–1944). The surname will ring a bell for those familiar with the Dreyfus Affair: Léon was the son of Theodore Reinach, one of three Jewish brothers, along with Salomon and Joseph, who were among the most vocal supporters of the Dreyfusard cause. The family had risen to wealth and prominence thanks to the French Revolution, which emancipated the Jews and the republic—in which they prospered and to which they all felt they owed a debt. The Reinachs were deeply involved in French cultural life, and though he worked as a lawyer, Léon also studied musical composition at the Paris Conservatory. He married into even greater wealth: His wife, Béatrice, hailed from the fabulously rich Camondo banking family. (The clan, originally from Constantinople, was so powerful in Turkey that, in order to facilitate communication between their different offices, they built their own staircase connecting the streets that separated them, about which I wrote some years ago.)

All of this gave Léon the leisure to live his life pretty much as he pleased, and the result was the remarkably beautiful Sonata in D Minor for Violin and Piano from 1925. The piece is seldom performed, and I haven’t been able to find any recording of it other than one haunting rendition by the Italian pianist Maria Pia Carola. The sonata bears all the earmarks of its time and place, but raises the standard tropes of early 20th-century French composition to its highest emotional level. From the first notes of the first movement, the music is nearly unbearably beautiful, the piano and the violin almost yearning for one other. D minor is the key of virtually all klezmer, and while there is nothing remotely klezmer about this piece, the ache it expresses is deeply Jewish.

Indeed, it’s hard, in retrospect, to separate the sonata’s sorrow from the composer’s fate. Léon and his family thought their wealth and connections would enable them to avoid the destiny of the Jews around them. But their efforts to exempt themselves from the escalating antisemitic measures only worked for so long. (On the registration card he, like all French Jews, was forced to carry, Léon gave his profession as “comp. de musique.”) He was deported with his family late in the war and died in Birkenau. That his magnificent music is almost totally unknown only adds to the tragedy.

In this week’s double parshah, Acharei Mot-Kedoshim, we are introduced to the ritual of Yom Kippur as it was practiced in the Tabernacle and Temple: a performance of the High Priest involving intricate vestments, a series of sacrifices, several ablutions, and verbal confessions enacted in order to intercede on behalf of the people and cleanse them and the sanctuary of their sins. The ritual also includes two goats, upon whom lots are cast: one which is sacrificed as a burnt offering to God, and one which the priest “lays both his hands upon” in order to “confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the Israelites” before sending it off to the wilderness “to carry on it all their iniquities to an inaccessible land.” As the Torah portrays it, this ritual seems to effect something of a magical transformation: The sins of the people are deposited upon this lone creature—what came to be known as the “scapegoat”—and disappeared into the wilderness (or, as per rabbinic literature, pushed off a cliff), leaving the people purified of all transgression.

Perhaps discomfited by the idea that absolution can simply occur through ritual transference, without sincere internal work and external repair, the rabbis carefully circumscribe the application of this switch-flipping version of purgation. In Mishna Yoma—the tractate that details the rules of the Yom Kippur service—they declare that Yom Kippur can only automatically atone for transgressions we’ve committed against God; for sins against another person, atonement must entail making amends with the individual who was harmed. Repentance thus comes to fill part of the void left by sacrifices in a post-Temple world. But it is hard to fully abandon a model in which magical transference can clear us of culpability. In medieval Ashkenaz, people began to practice the ritual of tashlikh, a custom that involves reciting liturgy and tossing bread crumbs into a body of flowing water between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, symbolically achieving the “casting away of one’s sins.” According to Shadal, a 19th-century Italian rabbinic scholar, tashlikh follows the same logic as the scapegoat ritual, in which sins are transferred to an external object that is then sent away to nature’s depths.

For centuries, many rabbis fervently opposed the practice of tashlikh, largely because they feared that people might interpret it as effecting absolution in and of itself, incorrectly assuming that throwing some bread crumbs in a river meant they were now purified of all transgression and freed of the obligation to do sincere repentance. Some who upheld the tradition proffered rationales that avoided magical efficacy: For example, Rabbi Moshe Isserles, a preeminent 16th-century halachic authority, argued that the awe and fear inspired by standing before immense bodies of water can itself prompt people to contemplate God’s majesty; realizing that the entire world and its wonders exist only at God’s will inspires people to align themselves with the Divine and repent of their wrong-doing. It is through the repentance that tashlikh inspires, rather than the ritual itself, that their sins are then “cast into the depths of the sea.”

The Rambam offers another framework for understanding the role of this kind of ritual in his discussion of the scapegoat. Ever the rationalist, he was unconvinced by the idea that the animal metaphysically assumes our transgressions: “Sins,” he writes, “cannot be carried like a burden, and taken off the shoulder of one being to be laid on that of another.” Instead, Rambam explains, the ritual is “of a symbolic character, as if saying, we have freed ourselves of our previous deeds, have cast them behind our backs, and removed them from us as far as possible.” In this view, the power of a ritual like the scapegoat (or, by extension, tashlikh) lies in the image of sins as separable from ourselves—in imagining what it would look like, what it would feel like, for our transgressions to be truly lifted. To be sure, believing this too wholeheartedly can lead to the trap tashlikh’s opponents feared, in which a person abdicates responsibility for their misdeeds and for the tangible action needed to address harm they’ve caused. But at its best, this act of aspirational imagination can involve not only a casting-off but also a taking-on—a release of unproductive guilt, a vision of what it would feel like to be truly clear of all harm I have caused or allowed, and an assumption of the responsibility for enacting the repair required to achieve such a vision.

In activist circles, we often wrestle with the advantages and limits of the language of complicity and guilt. On the one hand, we know that we must recognize our participation in systems of supremacy and see how that recognition can spur us and our communities to urgent action. On the other hand, excessive self-castigation can become self-defeating, a navel-gazing practice that’s paralyzing rather than motivating. Ideally, the tashlikh ritual, like the scapegoat before it, can be a model for striking a balance: In casting off demobilizing guilt and shame, we become able to more productively assume the responsibility for sincere, effective teshuva. No symbolic gesture can clear us of our sins, let alone dispel the harms to which we contribute; only concrete action can do that. But the radical act of imagination may help us move toward true repair.

Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.