The war against the Jewish story

Jewish Media Review - May 2024

🤜🏻🤛🏻Opposing views

• An open letter to the Columbia University Gaza war protesters from a pro-Palestinian activist in Israel (JTA) 
  “If I were studying at Columbia today, I would ask myself: Should I join your protests? After all, I, too, am pro-Palestinian.
   
  But I am also pro-Jew.
   
  And when you chant, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution!” and “From the Sea to the River, Palestine will live forever!” you are not calling, as I and my Palestinian-Israeli friends are, for peace, justice and equality for all humans within those borders. You are calling for the violent destruction of the country where we live, and the murder of its citizens — including the Palestinian ones. As we saw on Oct. 7, Hamas has no more sympathy for other-than-Jewish Israelis — not even for Muslim ones — than it does for Jewish Israelis.
   
  When you say, “I am Hamas!” you are not identifying with innocent civilians, including children, women and seniors who were massacred and kidnapped or the women raped in captivity (according to eyewitness accounts from hostages who were freed). Even my Palestinian Israeli activist friends strongly condemned Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7 and say Hamas is terrible for the Palestinian people.”
  
  
• Protesters at Columbia are fighting for our deepest values as Jews (Forward)
  The confluence of the outbreak of new protests with Passover is a reminder of what it means to fight for what’s right
  
  
• I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice (New York Times)
  Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.” Two students in my class are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.
  
  I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza war would view them that way. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?
  
  
• Yes, antisemitism is rising. But pro-Palestinian protests aren’t the real threat to our campuses (Forward)
  University administrations are complicit in a political movement that’s making students feel more insecure

😧 This rabbi is ‘horrified’ at how a song he wrote is being used at campus pro-Palestinian protests (Forward)

Rabbi Menachem Creditor said he objects to ‘Olam Chesed Yibaneh’ used to protest Israel

🏫After USC cancels graduation amid Israel protests, some Jewish students question their place on campus (Forward)

“Our campus has become such a spotlight,” one student said. “It used to be a place where we learned and studied, and now it’s this hotbox of tension and news and all eyes are on us”

🕊️Violence at UCLA will only produce more violence. A remarkable Palestinian peace activist showed me an alternate way (Forward)

Amid the senseless violence at UCLA, a few demonstrators are genuinely promoting peace

Zahra Sakkejha is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants to Canada and works in Los Angeles in biotech. She and about 25 members of the LA support group for Standing Together, an Israeli social movement of Jews and Arabs demanding political and social equality and reconciliation, constituted a small, third group at UCLA protests over the weekend. 

She and her peers wore purple T-shirts and held signs that read, “Free the Hostages, “Ceasefire Now,” “Diplomacy Now,” and “Not One More Drop of Blood!” They chanted, “In Gaza, in Tel Aviv, all the children want to live!” 

✖️Verified pro-Nazi X accounts flourish under Elon Musk (NBC News)

An NBC News review identified 150 verified "Premium" accounts that have posted or amplified pro-Nazi content.

⤴️ ADL: Reported antisemitic incidents up 140% in 2023, shattering records (JNS)

“Antisemitism is nothing short of a national emergency, a five-alarm fire that is still raging across the country and in our local communities and campuses.”

⚠️The war in Gaza and rebellion against the God of the Bible (All Israel)

“Is it alright to bring God into the discussion about the war between Israel and Hamas? Are the Israelis not just colonialists, annexing the land and displacing the native population? A short review of the history of the region in question and its biblical context sketches an astoundingly simple answer to the question of the war in Gaza.”

🥹The Rise of the ‘Survivors’ (Tablet)

And the increasingly forgotten story of the Shoah’s displaced persons

“At war’s end, an archipelago of hastily built or repurposed facilities, among them former concentration camps and Nazi youth summer camps, housed an estimated 1 million people left homeless. Though not all displaced persons were Jews, all surviving Jews were displaced persons, consigned by nationality to live among their tormentors. Once this and other untenable conditions came to light, a consequence of the harrowing revelations of the 1946 Harrison Report detailing the abysmal physical environment in which Jewish victims of the war unwittingly found themselves, they were relocated to displaced persons camps populated entirely by their own kind.” 

🪆‘We Have Our Own History, Our Own Trauma, and Our Own Experience’ (Tablet)

A roundtable discussion with Jews from the former Soviet Union about their experience as immigrants, where they fit into the American Jewish community, how they view rising antisemitism after Oct. 7, and which customs and recipes they’re passing down to the next generation

🎞️Peacock’s ‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’ tackles a Holocaust love story based on real events (Jewish Chronicle)

“The Tattooist of Auschwitz” joins a crop of World War II-period TV series inspired by buzzy bestselling novels.

• Just how accurate is the Peacock series ‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz?’ (Forward)
  Relying on testimony, the series try to correct some of the elements that caused controversy in Heather Morris’ book.

📖 How Maurice Sendak’s Jewishness shaped ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ (Forward)

The children’s book author was raised by Jews from Poland. A show at the Skirball in LA explores those roots

🎬Amy Schumer Can’t Escape Backlash… She’s OK With That (Variety)

“Amy Schumer was in the zone. This was in March, when she was filming on the street in Brooklyn for her upcoming movie “Kinda Pregnant,” a comedy about a woman who pretends to be knocked up for attention. In one take, Schumer emerged from a subway station while answering a phone call — and was interrupted by a stranger shouting at her from the sidewalk: “F*** you, Amy Schumer! You’re a Zionist! You love genocide!”

“It didn’t even raise my heart rate,” Schumer says over brunch at a cozy Brooklyn Heights tavern a couple days later. “I didn’t cry. Nothing.”

Later, “a 20-something woman approached our table and addressed Schumer. “Thank you for everything you’re doing for Israel,” the Brooklynite said. “I follow you on social media. I used to live in Israel and … thank you. We support you.”

After the woman disappears, Schumer says, “That moment you just saw? Maybe 10 times a day that happens to me.”

🪖The Americans Fighting—and Dying—for Israel (Tablet)

On Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, remembering those who’ve died in battle since Oct. 7, including three U.S.-born ‘lone soldiers’

📣 Ultra-Orthodox rabbis openly call to avoid anti-Christian attacks in Jerusalem’s Old City (All Israel)

First public campaign by ultra-Orthodox Jews against ugly phenomenon

📕Holiness and Loneliness - Commentary of Parashat Kedoshim (Substack)

“There is nothing alienated or lonely about the Jewish concept of Kedusha. Holiness, in the Torah, is about intimacy with God.”

Thumbnail/Banner Image credit: John Perivolaris via Flickr (cc)