After almost two decades away from The New School, alumni of Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts Louisa Solomon is returning in partnership with the Jewish Culture Club (JCC) as a rabbi for students.
Solomon will be officially ordained when she completes her degree at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 2025.
Solomon’s undertaking of the new role at TNS comes as the on-going conflict of the Israel-Hamas war continues to intensify. The majority of this interview was conducted before Oct. 7, However, The New School Free Press reached out to Solomon on Oct. 10, for a follow-up after the escalations in the Israel-Hamas war and she provided the following statement:
“My Palestinian and Israeli friends are asking for a ceasefire and I will lift up their call. I believe it is my moral obligation to oppose any more violence and its justification. I firmly oppose the weaponization of grief toward further desecration of life and I stand with those who are fighting for peace and justice. Jewish tradition teaches us to protect life above all else and I will do what is in my power to honor that wisdom by protesting the Israeli assault on Gaza and the United States’ facilitation of it.”
But the rabbi-in-training was outspoken about her political activism on the topic long before the current developments began.
“Jews are not a monolith, and antisemitism teaches that we are,” Solomon said. One way she believes in pushing back against this expression of antisemitism is to engage in debate and critical discussions about nation states, including the United States and Israel.
“Because Israel is a state, it’s not a person. It’s not actually representative of all Jewish people,” Solomon said.
“Celebrating Jewish culture while engaging in rich debate, I think that’s … a very strong communal response to antisemitism. And I will say, I have a long history of human rights activism. I see supporting Palestinian human rights as a core expression of my Judaism,” Solomon said.
As a student at Lang in the early 2000s, Solomon majored in Cultural Studies with a concentration in race, ethnicity, and postcolonial studies, where she got to explore her religious beliefs in a new light. “When I was at Lang as a student, I found myself building a radical Jewish community and it was largely through political work, organizing, and activism,” she said.
A year after graduating from TNS in 2005, Solomon formed The Shondes, a Jewish punk band, with another Lang alumni, Elijah Oberman. The band was outspoken in their politics, songs like “I Watched The Temple Fall” contained lyrics such as, “The names and places are erased, replaced / I watched cities consume cities / Killing history.”
They also had partnerships with progressive organizations like Jews Against the Occupation for performances.
During her time as the lead singer she became deeply involved in ritual life and incorporated that into her music and shows. “We would tour with a little kit for Shabbat on the road…and sometimes do events and rock shows that were connected to Jewish holidays, it felt very seamlessly intertwined,” she said.
While touring Soloman realized her path forward involved a desire to deepen her religious practices which ultimately led her to pursue rabbinic studies. “I set that desire over here in a box while I was touring all the time…but I just knew I was gonna come back to it,” she said.
The New School has stayed an active part of her life. Besides her position as an alumni, her partner Miller Oberman is the director of the first-year writing program at Lang. Coming back to the place where she first found the freedom to grow her own religious practice and knowledge only made sense, she said.
“As I approached my fieldwork years in rabbinical school, I thought a lot about what I might do…I decided to pursue the possibility of helping to build a really radical Jewish community at The New School, because that is something that I always wanted when I was a student,” Solomon said.
After reaching out to the Jewish Culture Club through Narwhal Nation she connected with JCC president and Lang senior, Ramona Saft, and JCC faculty advisor Sherri Cohen. “I think it’s a very exciting opportunity and I think there’s a need for non-professor relationships with people at The New School,” Saft said.
As Solomon embarks on her new role within the community she is noticing a new engagement with religion in a way that wasn’t as visible during her time at Lang. Since her time as a student at the university, both the Religious Studies and Jewish Culture minors were added to the curriculum offerings.
“It’s a generally progressive community at The New School and as progressives confronting fast rising fascism, climate crisis, etc, I think that the need for spiritual grounding is becoming clearer to more people,” Solomon said.
She encourages any students curious about religion, Judaism, or wanting to engage in conversation surrounding spirituality to reach out.
In terms of the conversation about what it means to be Jewish, Solomon is here for critical conversations about the subject and all that comes with it. “I think that most Jews have ethical, moral and spiritual questions that arise around Israel,” the rabbi-in-training said.
“I come from this Jewish background…But there’s something else that’s more universal, which is the desire to talk about one’s pain and suffering and desires and fears, and all of that with a sort of spiritual frame as part of the conversation…I’m open to speaking with anyone, not only Jewish students,” Solomon said.
Connect with Solomon by signing up to meet with her here or at the next JCC event for Shabbat on Oct. 20 at Maria Hernandez park in Bushwick.