Posted on September 30, 2026
I’m David Mahfouda, I was a Bronfman Fellow in 1999. I’m an artist, entrepreneur and a rabbinical student. I grew up on Long Island. My dad’s Israeli of Moroccan origin — his whole family emigrated to Israel in ’55 — and my mom’s family is Hungarian. Family was a big part of my life growing up, and Judaism was a big part of my family life — coming from such different cultures, it was the thing my parents shared and felt grounded in.
Growing up I really liked school and was very much an achiever. I think some of that was first generation vibes — thinking, I know what I can do, I can just be successful and that will make everything okay and safe.
So you went and became an artist.
Exactly. That worked for about 17 years, and then I kind of went off the rails.
I started out at Harvard, before going to Deep Springs — a two-year college and kind of a kibbutz, on a cattle ranch in Eastern California. Those two years were pretty formative. A lot of that decision was about wanting to see what else was out there, having grown up in a pretty provincial place. Some of it probably had to do with wanting to be more like my dad, who was a soldier and a farmer and knew how to do all these technical things. And it was expressive of an early interest in community — the value of working together, relying on each other. It was also a nascent interest in spirituality.
After that, a lot of my pursuits have been about either the power of the collective or about spirituality, both in my art life and in the entrepreneurial projects I’ve worked on. After college, I worked as an artist, lived in a group house, threw a lot of parties, and made art that involved a lot of people. I made a giant flag that I would take to parks, and people would work on mending it together. Repair became a big part of the motivating logic behind my art. I started a collective called the Fixers Collective that still meets today, where people get together to fix their broken objects. I also started a ride-sharing company called Bandwagon about a month before Uber was started. Bandwagon had its successes but ultimately failed. The logic was the same, though: how can we repair our cities, resource ourselves collectively to move more efficiently?
All that felt like a way to explore these ideas about community, interdependence, and repair. Building a company was an okay way to go about it, but going to rabbinical school felt like a more direct, people-and-spirit-centered approach.
I’ve been living in Jerusalem for the past year, studying at Pardes as a component of my smichah program at Hebrew College. It’s heartbreaking to be here in so many ways. I went on a long run last night around the old city and as I ran past a Muslim graveyard, it just seemed so clear to me that we’re all a collective, that we’re all going to the same place, that we all came from the same place.
I’ve been to Israel consistently throughout my whole life, but the first time it really felt different was a trip I took in 2018. Some of the political orientations just read differently to me after the resurgence of Trump’s political movement in America. I remember thinking, there’s something similar happening here, and feeling a hardness I hadn’t felt in my body before.
That was a turning point. Then in summer 2022 I visited Bethlehem. Somehow, that was the first time I’d ever seen a checkpoint. In that moment I thought, this place is really, really broken. Up until then I thought, sure, Israel has its problems like any country. But in that moment I felt, no — this is a fundamentally broken way of organizing society.
Being here now feels like a continuation of that sensibility. I’ve been noticing things I just hadn’t seen before, like the kinds of jobs that most Arabs have versus Jewish Israelis. It seems so explicitly classist. That’s something that has felt distinctly different this time — noticing how the occupation is expressed economically in a city and on people’s bodies.
You use the term ‘broken’ — so many of your projects have been about tikkun, collectively trying to fix something. What possibilities for that do you see around you?
There’s a cooperative Palestinian-Israeli cultural organization called Feel Beit [“beit” meaning “home” in both Arabic and Hebrew], on the border of East Jerusalem. It’s a shared cultural and community space. I’ve been working on a project around food, trying to start a twice-a-week shared meal there. I’ve been working on food and community informally for the past two decades. And two years ago, I co-founded the Shul Lunch Coop at Hebrew College. So being in Jerusalem, I felt: I can do this, this is what I know how to do, and this could be supportive of shared society in some small way.
But I really think there is work we need to do — and not just Jews, the West generally. The foundation is coming into an awareness of the history of this place. We had a Zionism course this year, and the texts are idealistic and understandable, but the awareness of the Palestinian population that was here is just non-existent — or it’s orientalist and degraded. That fundamental omission needs to be addressed and dealt with emotionally and spiritually.
I think as people we’re responsible to each other, and as Jews we’re responsible to each other. I’m not sure which takes precedence, and I don’t think one needs to. It’s not about separating Judaism from Zionism — it’s that Jews need to hold one another and the state accountable, in a familial way, self-implicating and not othering. It needs to be a collective project of teshuvah, turning toward the history and moral injury of what it meant to build the state. I don’t know what the outcome of that is, but it’s something all of us need to do together — not just Israelis, not just diaspora Jews goading Israelis into doing it. And it’s not just a Jewish problem. That’s one of the things that feels really sad about the way the conflict has broken in the West: it doesn’t implicate Europe, or Britain — the architects of this giant colonial project. Israelis, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians are all victims of this tragic colonial history. It just seems so clear to me that everyone is involved in something bigger than all of us, something we all need to reckon with. I felt that really strongly during the second part of the war with Iran in March. I’ve been working as a line-cook in a kitchen in Jerusalem, and a lot of the other folks in the kitchen are Arab-Israeli. The experience of rushing to the bomb shelters together made it clear we’re all implicated in this larger brokenness and violence, all living under the same falling missiles.
There’s a John Berger piece called “Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead”. It’s what I wrote my rabbinical school entrance essay about, and it’s continued to be really powerful for me over these past five years. It’s about religiosity, and it’s really helped me understand what religion is and what can be powerful about Jewish ritual. His basic thesis is that we’re living alongside our dead — our ancestors. There’s something in that mentality that puts things in perspective, exposes progress for the farce that it is, and helps us understand what we hold in common with all other beings. In this technical, poetic, mystical language, he makes claims about the ways we belong to each other. He talks about the dead as a collective, and the living as already being part of that collective. The earth is made of the dead. He talks about mystical experiences as exchanges between the living and the dead. As Jews, we reference this all the time — we call on our ancestors, we think about the overlap between this time and the time of our ancestors, and the overlap between Olam HaZeh [“this world”] and Olam HaBa [“the world to come”] — that they’re sort of inscribed over one another.
It reminds me of a line in a poem by Yehuda Amichai: “I’ve never been in those places I’ve never been and never will be. I have no share in the infinity of light years and dark years, but the darkness is mine and the light and my time is my own.”
There’s something about the very material and earthly way in which I can participate in the infinite, while also having it be beyond me.
I’m still interested in what we share, how we can rely on each other, what it means to be alive, and how to be alive in a good way. How to practice, how to move through a day. Ultimately, I guess I’m still trying to answer the same questions — how to love, how to live.
