Your Daily Phil: Studying Jews’ long, strange trip with psychedelic drugs
Good Tuesday morning. Today is GivingTuesday.
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we report on a new study examining the relationship between Jews and psychedelics, and feature an opinion piece by David Marcu marking International Day of Persons With Disabilities by highlighting the growing numbers of disabled IDF veterans. Also in this newsletter: Jeannie Suk Gersen, Susan Rona and Alan Shulman. We’ll start with last night’s Nefesh B’Nefesh Bonei Zion Prize ceremony in Jerusalem.
Hundreds gathered in Jerusalem last night to celebrate the contributions that immigrants have made to the State of Israel both in general and particularly over the past two turbulent and painful years at the 10th annual Sylvan Adams Nefesh B’Nefesh Bonei Zion Prize ceremony, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judith Sudilovsky from the event.
Speaking at the Beit Ha’Am Cultural Center in downtown Jerusalem, Rabbi Yehoshua Fass, co-founder and executive director of Nefesh B’Nefesh, the aliyah advocacy organization, said the accomplishments of the prize winners demonstrated the resilience of the Israeli people in the face of hardship.
“In the midst of all of this pain, there is also a remarkable strength,” Fass said. “It is a privilege to celebrate their remarkable contributions, which strengthen the Jewish state and inspire future generations of olim to continue shaping our homeland.”
The six recipients of the 2024 award are: Phyllis Heimowitz, the co-founder of A Partner Left Behind, which represents the non-spouse partners of fallen IDF soldiers; Eylon Levy, a former government spokesman who founded a public diplomacy nonprofit; Dr. Debra Gershov-West, the director of the emergency department at Samson Assuta Ashdod University Hospital; Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, a Foreign Ministry special envoy focused on combating antisemitism; and Natan Sharansky, the refusenik and former Jewish Agency chairman and government minister.
The award ceremony also featured a memorial to Omer Neutra, 21, who had immigrated to Israel from New York and served as a “lone soldier” in the Israel Defense Forces. Neutra’s death at the hands of Hamas on Oct. 7 had been confirmed by the IDF on Monday morning, ending more than a year of hope that he was still alive. Neutra, a tank commander, and his team were among the first soldiers to respond to the Hamas attack.
Recipients of the 2023 awards were recognized at the ceremony, as last year’s event was cancelled because of the outbreak of the war.
Nefesh B’Nefesh’s co-founder, Tony Gelbart, told eJP that recognizing the immense contributions of English-speaking immigrants to Israeli society can serve as an inspiration to other people wanting to make aliyah.
“We have to recognize the people, the olim, who came here and contributed so much in medicine, in health care, in teaching, in aviation, the military and in high-tech…all these people have contributed immensely during their entire lifetime,” he said. “They come here and show what they can achieve and how valuable it is to the country.”
Gershov-West, director of the emergency department at Samson Assuta Ashdod University Hospital and founder of the Frontline Emergency Medicine nonprofit, led her hospital’s emergency department through the mass casualty event treating 113 wounded soldiers and civilians, and since treating hundreds more. “It has been a challenging year, all-encompassing,” Gershov-West, who immigrated from Australia in 1994, told eJP. “I have thrown in my lot with the Jewish people and do everything I can possibly do to help. There are a lot of olim who make a difference. It is nice to have that recognized.”
Canadian-Israeli businessman and philanthropist Sylvan Adams, who funds the prize, presented a special recognition award to Sharansky, lauding the Soviet human rights activist and former head of the Jewish Agency as a “force of nature.” Thanking Sharansky for his lifelong dedication to Israel and world Jewry, Adams described him as “the embodiment of modern Zionism.”
“You are a beacon of perseverance, courage, unwavering determination who has inspired generations of people, including U.S. presidents all around the globe,” said Adams. “Your journey standing up to brutal totalitarian authoritarianism is a testament to the strength of the human spirit, but also a demonstration of the unbreakable bond between the Jewish people and Eretz Israel. Your efforts almost single-handedly led to the immigration of more than a million Soviet Jews, which profoundly and positively impacted our state.”
DOORS OF PERCEPTION
Jim Joseph-backed study explores Jews’ relationships with psychedelics
Rabbi Zac Kamenetz grew up terrified of drugs, believing they fried users’ brains and caused birth defects later in life. After trying psilocybin (the psychoactive compound in so-called “magic mushrooms”) as part of a 2017 study for religious professionals, he came to the conclusion that the Jewish world needed to better understand psychedelics and the psychedelics world needed to better understand Jews and created a nonprofit — Shefa — to do just that in 2020. The organization is now teaming with Emory University for a national population study of Jewish Americans’ perspectives on psychedelics. Gathering data with an online questionnaire and follow-up interviews, the study — titled “Jewish Journeys” — launched in early November seeking to explore perspectives across the Jewish and psychedelic spectrum. “We’re not giving anyone drugs,” Kamenetz told Jay Deitcher for eJewishPhilanthropy. “We want to know why people are using these drugs. This is not condoning or condemning. This is wanting to understand the reality.”
Mind expanding: The study is funded by Common Era, the research and development wing of the Jim Joseph Foundation, which seeks to find new ways to connect with young Jews who may be disconnected from the community otherwise. Learning how the psychedelic community intersects with the Jewish community can lead to Jewish institutions better serving them. “Data gathered from this research will be useful in evaluating potential strategies, both cultural and religious, in an emerging and increasingly populated space,” said Yonah Schiller, chief R&D officer at Common Era.
TIME FOR CHANGE
Why this war must produce an inclusion revolution
“Several times a week, sometimes even several times a day, our phones light up with a news alert bearing the words hutar l’pirsum, ‘cleared for publication.’ We grimace in anguish, knowing that this means that more names have been added to the list of the fallen,” writes David Marcu, president of Israeli nonprofit Israel Elwyn, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.
Names you don’t see: “But alongside almost every military death is one or more serious casualties, often overlooked in the media coverage, perhaps because the scope of those injured is so staggeringly high and there is only so much we can take as a nation… This war will drastically increase the number of people with disabilities among our communities and our families. Certainly the most notable cases will be the soldiers with external wounds, including very serious ones, but tens of thousands of others will face emotional disabilities that will require many years of intervention if not lifelong care.”
A pressing imperative: “This massive challenge must also be viewed as an opportunity to finally recognize that people with disabilities can be part and parcel of us. Certainly, they live with daily challenges, but they are also vibrant and committed members of our greater society. Although Israel has made great strides in recent years, improving accessibility and developing community-based inclusion programs, the trail has largely been blazed by advocates and self-advocates who have demanded to be seen, heard and counted… As a society, we often create impediments to inclusion, and we can remove them. That is our task and our obligation.”
Worthy Reads
A Distinctive Bond: In The Times of Israel, Gila Isaacson writes about a meaningful moment she had during the recent funeral of her friend’s son, IDF soldier Zamir Burke. “What struck me wasn’t just my ability to express this raw grief publicly (or actually, my inability to contain myself, as a good South African would), but how those around me responded — a stranger offering tissues, another wrapping me in a much needed impromptu hug. There was no awkwardness, no judgment, just pure empathy and understanding. This is Israel at its core — a place where your pain is everyone’s pain, where the barriers between strangers dissolve in moments of shared emotion… It’s an understanding that our collective experiences — both joyful and painful — are meant to be shared. When we lose a soldier, we don’t just lose someone’s son or friend; we lose a piece of our national family. The ability to cry openly, to be held by strangers, to receive comfort without explanation — these aren’t signs of weakness but of the deep bonds that hold our society together.” [TOI]
Invest Differently: In the Winter 2025 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, David Fukuzawa, Nancy O. Andrews and Rebecca Steinitz make their case for a new blueprint for community development finance. “As leaders in community development and philanthropy, we aim to show why and how this crucial field needs to reframe the role of capital technicians and the market, rebalance power relationships, and prioritize community voice… [T]he reliance on a market-based theory of change often leads community finance toward projects that serve a business model as much as mission and bring about limited impact and community disempowerment. Also, getting past the scale threshold is functionally impossible in many low-income neighborhoods, where housing projects in particular cannot cover costs without significant subsidies. This realization has led many in the community finance world to redefine the rules of investment. The resulting growth of impact investing has led to larger pools of capital that prioritize people and racial, social, and environmental justice over return. In addition, we are seeing increasing evidence that investing in people directly — as in universal basic income demonstrations and pandemic-era public investments in income and housing stabilization, childcare, and college loan relief — has a transformative impact.” [SSIR]
Rules of Engagement: In The New Yorker, Jeannie Suk Gersen, who is currently converting to Judaism, looks at how rabbinates and prospective converts have approached the process in the wake of last year’s Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks. “Around the world, anti-Israel protests erupted, and antisemitism spiked; many Jews faced a fresh reckoning with the relationship between Israel and Jewish identity. It was a time of fear and dread and painful fractures within the Jewish community — it was no longer, as [Central Synagogue Rabbi Angela] Buchdahl had suggested, a moment when Jews widely felt at ease. Yet rabbis from a broad range of Jewish institutions observed something they hadn’t anticipated: a surge of interest in Judaism… This has included increased synagogue membership, expanded enrollment in Hebrew-school programs, full houses at Shabbat services — and oversubscribed courses for people interested in becoming Jewish. Suddenly, my own halting path to conversion was meeting a larger movement.” [NewYorker]
Word on the Street
A funeral for Omer Neutra will be held on Long Island today after the IDF confirmed that the Israeli-American tank commander was killed in the Oct. 7 attacks and his body was taken to Gaza, where it remains…
Neutra’s family released a statement after his death calling on American and Israeli politicians to secure the release of the 101 hostages still held in Gaza; New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered flags on state buildings to be flown at half-staff in Neutra’s memory…
An American-Israeli man who was recently released from an Israeli prison after serving his sentence for masterminding a campaign of bomb threats in the United States in 2018, including against Jewish Community Centers, was detained in Norway on a U.S. extradition request after he attempted to seek asylum…
Islamist terror incidents in the U.S. rose sharply in 2024, according to a new study by the Anti-Defamation League, which found a “troubling” uptick following several years of “reduced activity” within the country…
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt received NonProfit Pro’s 2024 Nonprofit Professional of the Year Award…
Susan Rona was named the next director of the ADL’s Mountain States region, which operates in Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming…
Temple University reached an agreement with the Department of Education to provide anti-discrimination training to all students and faculty and review its responses to bias complaints in response to an investigation into the school’s handling of antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus…
The Jewish Museum in New York acquired an art installation by Israeli artist Ruth Patir that was initially meant to debut at the Israeli pavilion at the Venice Biennale; the exhibition, which will debut at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in March, remained closed for the duration of the Venice Biennale at the insistence of Patir and the pavilion’s curators, who decided not to open it until a cease-fire and hostage-release deal was reached…
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency examines the mental health struggles that survivors of the Oct. 7 massacre at the Nova music festival are facing and what many describe as the government’s insufficient efforts to address them…
The senior rabbi of the United Kingdom’s Spanish and Portuguese Sephardi community, Rabbi Joseph Dweck, and his wife, Margalit, will be leaving the country and immigrating to Israel in 2026…
Berlin’s Alfred Landecker Foundation awarded a $4.3 million grant to the U.K.’s Sussex University to create a new research hub dedicated to ensuring “the sustainability of Holocaust memory in the digital age”…
The Jewish Fertility Foundation launched its Cleveland chapter last week; Tamar Poupko Smith was selected to manage it…
Longtime New York Stock Exchange fixture Art Cashin died at 83…
Alan Shulman, described by the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County as a “patriarch” of the community and a longtime member of the Jewish Agency’s Board of Governors, died on Wednesday at 92…
Rabbi Simcha Raz, an Israeli author and educator who wrote biographies of famous rabbis, died today at 93…
Pic of the Day
Israeli First Lady Michal Herzog (right) stands with Yuval Wagner and Michal Rimon, the founder and director, respectively, of the nonprofit Access Israel, which advocates for people with disabilities, at the organization’s fundraising drive last week.
The annual event was held ahead of today’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities.
Birthdays
Associate professor of Jewish history and chair of Jewish studies at Yeshiva University, Joshua M. Karlip, Ph.D….
One of the closest associates of the Lubavitcher Rebbe and a leader within the Chabad movement, Rabbi Chaim Yehuda (“Yudel”) Krinsky… Malibu resident, she is the founder of a successful wedding gown business and a lifestyle coach, Sandy Stackler… 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winner for his book on Arabs and Jews in Israel, he was a long-serving foreign correspondent and Washington bureau chief for The New York Times, David K. Shipler… Member of the New York State Assembly since 1994, Jeffrey Dinowitz… Argentina’s minister of foreign affairs, Gerardo Werthein… Miami-based criminal defense attorney whose clients have included O.J. Simpson and Charlie Sheen, Yale Lance Galanter… Painter and art teacher residing in Maryland, her teaching career started in Petach Tikva, Heidi Praff… Former editorial page editor at USA Today, William (Bill) Sternberg… Member of the House of Representatives (D-NC) until her term ends in January, she was the founding chair of Prizmah and former chair of JFNA, Kathy Manning… President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since January 2023, Sally A. Kornbluth… Aerospace and technology executive, entertainment attorney and media mogul, Jon F. Vein… Former member of the Knesset for the Yisrael Beytenu party, Eli Avidar… Member-elect of the House of Representatives, she won Adam Schiff’s House seat, Laura Friedman… First vice president at Adat Ari El Congregation in Valley Village, Calif., Malinda Wozniak Marcus… Cellist and associate professor at McGill University, Matt Haimovitz… Senior vice president of strategic initiatives at NBC News until earlier this year, Alison “Ali” Weisberg Zelenko… French journalist, author, television and radio personality, Marie Drucker… Emmy- and Grammy Award-winning comedian and actress, she discovered her Eritrean Jewish roots as an adult, Tiffany Haddish… Financial trader and founder of XTX Markets, Alex Gerko… CEO of Solar One, he was a member of the New York City Council through 2021, Stephen T. Levin… Founding partner and head of business strategy at Triadic, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Edelman… Professional tennis player with a WTA doubles ranking that reached as high as 21, she won the gold medal in women’s singles at the 2005 Maccabiah Games, Sharon Fichman…
