TAIPEI, Taiwan (JTA) — Rebecca Kanthor, a member of a progressive Jewish community in Shanghai, knows that she can easily order lulavs and etrogs in a few clicks online.

Kanthor, who belongs to Kehilat Shanghai, simply logs onto Taobao, China’s equivalent to Amazon. Etrogs, important components of a ritual for the Sukkot holiday, are known as xiang yuan (fragrant citrus, or citron) in Chinese. While American Jews may spend anywhere between $20 and $200 on a single etrog grown in the Mediterranean, etrogs grown in China, mostly in the southwestern Yunnan province, are available on Taobao for about $2 each.

Taobao also sells a wide array of traditional products made from the etrog, including tea, perfume, preserves and candy. The fruit is well known in China as a medicine used to treat everything from stomach issues to severe cough. (The components of the lulav, the other major component of Sukkot rituals, are available, too, in potted form: palm, willow, and myrtle plants go for around $7 altogether.)

But even though etrogs are available locally, most Jewish communities throughout Asia opt to import them from countries such as Israel or Italy for Sukkot. That’s because rabbinic authorities on Jewish law have for decades debated whether etrogs grown in Asia meet the standards for ritual use.

The etrog plays a central role on Sukkot, when Jews are commanded to hold it as they shake the lulav and recite the holiday’s prayers. The fruit’s ritual significance has given rise to a competitive marketplace: Some Jews pay hundreds of dollars for the perfect fruit and spend hundreds more on etrog boxes.

Most important to observant Jews today are the rules proclaiming that an etrog must be clean and without blemishes; that it retains its pittam — a protrusion separate from the stem; and that the plant must not be grafted.

“Most important: etrog is a weak tree,” said Rabbi Shalom Chazan, an emissary for the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement stationed in Shenzhen, China. “Usually, farmers will make a graftage between an etrog and lemon tree to make it stronger. That makes the etrog not kosher. We don’t know if the Chinese farmers do it or not, therefore we buy from Israel or Italy, and Morocco, to make sure it’s kosher.”

Chabad will import about 40 etrogs to share with the eight Chabad communities throughout China this year, he said.

Centuries of debate over the ritual propriety of Asian etrogs

These rules are borne out of rabbinic commentary, not the Torah, which only describes the ritual fruit as p’ri etz hadar, which has been interpreted as “fruit from the beautiful tree,” “beautiful fruit from any tree” or the “choice fruit of a tree.”

Scientists have traced the fruit’s genetic origins to the triangle of southwest China, northern Myanmar and northeast India. Today the etrog still grows in abundance in that area. But it was after the fruit migrated that it caught on with ancient Jews.

According to David Z. Moster, a Bible scholar and author of “Etrog: How a Chinese Fruit Became A Jewish Symbol,” the etrog was the first citrus fruit that traveled from East to West — likely because of its thick rind that hardens rather than rots over time, preserving the fruit and seeds inside. It arrived in Israel around the fourth to third centuries BCE, and while it is not clear when exactly the etrog became the “choice fruit of the tree,” it quickly rose as an important symbol to distinguish Jews from Christians and Samaritans while fulfilling rules laid out in the Torah.

“Every Jewish community has, in the past, found what they wanted the most,” said Moster. “There’s the Yemenite etrog, which, if you get a really good one, you get the size of a football. … A lot of the European Jews are looking for [an etrog with] a gartel, a belt … Now, in the modern world, a person like me can go to Borough Park [a heavily Orthodox neighborhood in Brooklyn] and see 10,000 etrogim in one day.”

In modern times, most Jews in the West used etrogs grown in what is now Israel, the Caribbean or North Africa, including Morocco. But in the East, where most Jewish communities formed in the 18th and 19th centuries, debates over the etrog continued, especially with the discovery of the Chinese “Buddha’s hand” citron, which sprouts finger-like protrusions due to a genetic mutation.

Rabbi Asher Oser of Hong Kong’s historic Ohel Leah synagogue has researched the subject heavily for classes he has taught. He found documents revealing debates among Baghdadi rabbis about the Buddha’s hand citron, which is often not considered an etrog at all. (“All etrogim are citrons but not all citrons are etrogim,” Moster wrote.) Most important, the rabbis wrote, was continuing tradition.

“In the city of Baghdad we don’t allow the Dibdib tree, which has all the signs of an etrog, except it is sour,” wrote Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad in 1909 in response to questions about the Buddha’s hand. “If a person is in a strange place and they find a fruit completely similar to etrogs of the place where they are coming from, then they can be used. If they’re not completely similar … they should not be used.”

Hong Kong’s Jewish community has continued the tradition today, ordering etrogs from Israel or the United States.

Thapan Dubayehudi, a member of the Jewish community in Kochi, India, said Jews enjoyed local etrogs from trees outside of the local synagogue until the late 1990s. But as more Jews began traveling between Israel and Kochi every year, the community elected to ditch the local fruits and use Israeli ones brought back by individuals.

“There’s high-quality, rabbinically blessed supplies coming from Israel. Then why would we grow the local varieties that are usually smaller and not exactly the same species?” Dubayehudi said. “It’s been 30 years, none of the trees are left there.”

A World War II etrog rescue, of sorts

According to researchers, etrogs from what is now Israel or Iraq have long been preferable in Asia. Jewish communities in Shanghai and Kobe, Japan, for decades in the late 19th and early 20th centuries received etrogs from the wealthy Abraham family, international traders who had brought a Baghdadi etrog plant with them to Shanghai. It was planted outside the Abraham mansion and tended by Chinese gardeners, according to Yecheskel Leitner’s 1987 book “Operation–Torah Rescue.”

Leitner wrote that this tradition ended after Pearl Harbor, when patriarch David Abraham was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp and the family’s property was seized by the Japanese, who had occupied parts of the city. With the Jewish community desperate for the ritual fruit at Sukkot, someone was sent to climb the walls around the family’s garden and pick etrogs to distribute. The Japanese army then cut down the tree in retaliation.

With no other choice, the Jews were left to source local etrogs and were again faced with the Buddha’s hand variety. The community was conflicted.

“Some experts in halacha [Jewish law] used this esrog for the religious observance without pronouncing the customary blessing over it — to denote their doubts regarding its authenticity,” Leitner wrote. Others used it as a symbolic physical reminder of the mitzvah, while others refused to use it at all.

Getting ‘creative’ to import etrogs

In today’s world, importing fresh fruit across borders is a complicated process that can require significant paperwork and sometimes diplomatic intervention. Chabad was only able to legally import etrogs into China beginning in 2017, after a Chinese professor of Jewish studies helped the communities provide adequate documentation, according to an article from that year on the Lubavitch website. Before then, emissaries had to come up with “creative alternatives,” said Rabbi Shalom Greenberg of Shanghai. Chabad emissaries did not elaborate when asked what those solutions were.

In Taiwan, decades ago, community members would bring etrogs from Hong Kong back to Taipei in their luggage. Since Chabad arrived in 2011, they have been legally imported with the help of the Israeli representative office but not always made available to the wider community.

Today, the Japan Jewish Community in Tokyo also gets help from the Israeli consulate and Chabad, though “nothing is certain until it arrives,” said Rabbi Andrew Scheer. One lulav and etrog set is priced at $150 before shipping, and as far as Scheer knows, etrogs don’t grow locally. “If it could be produced locally, that would be best. Just like with cars, ‘Made in Japan’ implies the highest quality.”

The etrog has long been hard to get, said Moster.

“In many Jewish lands, if they wanted an etrog, they’re gonna have to send someone on a multi-thousand-mile trip and cross many nations, just to be able to pick this thing up and get it there in time,” he said. “So the idea of it being historically hard to get also added to its value.” 

At least one community in Asia has used locally grown etrogs since its establishment over 2,000 years ago: the Bene Israel in Western India, where the citron is known as the bijora. 

In Bene Israel Jewish culture, the bijora appears across traditions and holidays, said Esther David, a Bene Israel writer from Ahmedabad, a city of about 8 million with a community of about 100 Jews.

“For Bene Israel Jews, Bijora is a holy fruit and placed as an offering with a myrtle twig on the chair of Prophet Elijah, at the synagogue. Bijora is also placed on the prophet’s chair during the circumcision of a Jewish male child,” David said. During a malida — a ceremony of thanksgiving to the prophet Elijah unique to the Bene Israel — a bijora is placed on the ceremonial plate.

Austen Haeems, a member of the Ahmedabad community, has been growing etrogs for over a decade and providing them to the community free of charge. He says they are grown naturally and without grafting, starting from the seed. The trees produce 30 to 40 fruits each year. 

But if there isn’t enough to go around, bijoras are readily available at local markets for about 100 rupees, or $1.20, year-round.

“On my dining table, you will always find one etrog. My wife keeps it until it dries up,” Haeems said.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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Attorney Alan Dershowitz has joined a last-ditch effort to avert the execution of a Jewish man on death row in Texas. 

Jedidiah Murphy, 48, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Oct. 10. The date coincides with World Against the Death Penalty Day, a day of advocacy by death-penalty opponents.

Murphy murdered 79-year-old Bertie Cunningham on Oct. 4, 2000, in Garland, Texas. He was high on cocaine when he shot her, stole her car and bought alcohol and cigarettes with her credit cards. He has been on death row in Livingston, Texas, since 2001.

Activists acknowledge that the chances of averting his execution are slim. “It would be a miracle,” said Abraham Bonowitz, co-founder of the organization L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty, which has been organizing support for Murphy.

In an email sent to the Forward from prison, Murphy wrote: “I have two weeks left before the state tries to kill me.”

The case against execution

Dershowitz, an expert on constitutional law and former Harvard law professor, has advised on defense cases for many controversial high-profile clients, including O.J. Simpson and former President Donald Trump. He said he’s trying to personally reach Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to lay out what he sees as compelling legal arguments for commuting Murphy’s sentence.  

Dershowitz said he’s been opposed to the death penalty since he was 15. “But even if you believe in the death penalty, this is not the proper case for it,” he said in a phone interview. “There are thousands of murders and homicides committed every year, many of them in Texas, and only a tiny number get the death penalty. The death penalty should be reserved for the most heinous repeat offenders. This case doesn’t fit that criteria.” 

But he agreed with Bonowitz that the battle to save Murphy is “all very uphill.” He was only recently brought into the case and said he even spent part of Yom Kippur working on it: “I went to shul, I fasted, but the saving of human life — pikuach nefesh — is more important than davening.” 

Dershowitz said several legal issues justify commuting Murphy’s sentence to life in prison. Among them: Prosecutors suggested at his trial, without evidence, that he had committed a prior carjacking. But he was never charged in that case, and the evidence is “overwhelming” that he had nothing to do with it, Dershowitz said. 

In addition, Dershowitz said, jurors were instructed to impose the death penalty if they believed beyond a reasonable doubt Murphy was likely to commit more violent acts. “Twenty years have passed and he hasn’t been violent, so the current evidence undercuts the false prediction made by the jury,” Dershowitz said. “The instructions to the jury were deeply flawed.” 

Finally, Dershowitz said, “this is a man with a long history prior to his crime of serious mental illness. The court did not pay sufficient attention to his history of mental illness, hospitalization and psychosis.”

Childhood trauma 

Murphy has been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, a condition brought on by childhood abuse and trauma. It is characterized by changes in behavior and memory gaps. He has said he has no memory of murdering his victim.

Murphy lived with his  grandparents in Texas until he was 5, according to an account he wrote for a website created by L’chaim. His alcoholic father nearly beat his mother to death, and after his grandmother died, he was sent to an orphanage and then adopted by a family that abused him.

He was removed from that family after several years and placed in foster care, then adopted by another family. He began drinking at age 13 to self-medicate and was living on his own by age 16. His original name was Jim Kines; the name Jedidiah Murphy was given to him by a foster family.

A Jewish response

In response to outreach by L’chaim, several synagogues and Jewish organizations put appeals for Murphy’s case in their High Holiday messages and have organized letter-writing campaigns on his behalf. They include Congregation Beth Shalom in Arlington, Texas; the Or Hamidbar congregation in Palm Springs, California, and Matir Asurim, which describes itself as “the Jewish care network for incarcerated people.”  

“We’ve been asking rabbis and communities and Sunday school classes to get out a piece of paper and a stamp and put letters in the mail to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and to Gov. Abbott to ask for mercy for Jedidiah,” Bonowitz said. L’chaim also has an online petition for Murphy.

Campaigns to avert executions are often based on a claim of innocence. Although that’s not the situation here, there’s “a really strong case to be made for Jedidiah,” Bonowitz said. “He is remorseful, he has changed as an individual and he can be a productive member of the prison community. Nobody is advocating that he be freed and he is not asking for that.”

L’chaim co-founder Michael Zoosman added that “despite the fact this horrific act occurred during one of his blackouts, Jedidiah has admitted his guilt and has demonstrated sincere contrition.”

Texas executes prisoners by lethal injection, a method that Bonowitz and Zoosman say poses additional moral issues for Jews because it’s how the Nazis murdered children and others deemed disabled or mentally incompetent. 

“The shadow of the Holocaust is inextricably linked to our firm rejection of the death penalty in all cases, even for the Tree of Life synagogue shooter,” said Zoosman. He was referring to the gunman who murdered 11 Jews in 2018 in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in the worst antisemitic attack in U.S. history. Jurors sentenced that attacker to death on Aug. 2.

Jews on death row

Murphy is one of a dozen death-row prisoners identified by L’chaim as Jewish nationwide.

In response to a query from the Forward about his Jewish heritage, Murphy said in an email that his mother, like him, had been adopted and was told by her adoptive parents that “she was Jewish and a Hoffman.” He added that the inmate identification card assigned to him “says JEWISH. It’s always been that way. Anyone that knows anything about prison knows this. You DO NOT come to prison as Jewish for fun. This is the worst place in the world for a Jewish person to be. Yet I have walked for 23 years in pride of my heritage.”

Murphy was also deemed halachically Jewish by Rabbi Dovid Goldstein, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of West Houston and lead Jewish chaplain in the Texas prison system. In 2016, Goldstein got permission to provide Murphy with tefillin, and Murphy performed the tefillin-wrapping ritual as Goldstein coached him from behind the glass that separates prisoners and visitors. The brief ceremony, in which Murphy donned a yarmulke, was described by Chabad as the bar mitzvah Murphy never had as a child.

Death row in Texas

Taking a prisoner off death row in Texas requires action by both the governor and the state Board of Pardons and Paroles. The governor has the power to grant a temporary reprieve in death penalty cases, but the sentence cannot be changed unless the board recommends clemency and the governor then grants it. 

Texas has the third-highest number of people on death row, behind California and Florida, and has executed 577 prisoners since 1982. In the four decades since then, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has recommended clemency in only five cases, and in only three of those cases did the governor grant clemency. 

Abbott accepted one clemency recommendation from the parole board when he commuted a death sentence for Thomas Whitaker to life in prison in 2018. 

Abbott’s press office did not immediately respond to an email and phone request for comment.

The post Can the execution of a Jewish prisoner in Texas be stopped? Supporters are praying for a miracle appeared first on The Forward.

Two-time Oscar winner Lee Grant lost 12 years of her career to the Hollywood Blacklist, shut out of the industry just after her film debut in 1950’s Detective Story, which garnered her first Academy Award nomination.

When Grant was able to return to film in 1963, she wound back the clock on her age to make up for lost time. Her exact date of birth, on Wikipedia and a CBS Sunday Morning interview, is tough to pin down, but speaking from her apartment in Manhattan, Grant says she is 97-and-a-half. When a reporter failed to seem appropriately impressed, the legendary filmmaker offered direction.

“Wait a minute, you’re supposed to react to that, kid!” Grant said, laughing. “You’re supposed to say ‘What?! You’re kidding!’ Do your part. You’re supposed to react to that.”

It goes without saying that she looks great, sporting her familiar bangs, and taking time to get the right soft focus for a Zoom conversation.

Grant, whose filmography includes her Oscar-winning turn in 1975’s Shampoo and an Oscar for her 1986 HBO documentary Down and Out in America, about the dispossessed in Reagan’s America, is having a moment. While perhaps best known for her roles in classics like In The Heat of the Night and her Emmy-winning run on Peyton Place, it is her work as a director of over two dozen projects that is coming into focus. Last year her documentaries played as part of the Glasgow Film Festival and, beginning Sept. 30, two of her narrative films, The Stronger and Tell Me a Riddle are being screened at the New York Film Festival. 

The films, one a short based on an August Strindberg play set during Christmas and starring Susan Strasberg and Dolores Dorn, the other a feature about an aging Russian Jewish immigrant couple who met as Communist firebrands, don’t have much in common. But one paved the way for the other.

When Joyce Aliason and Alev Lytle, college students studying under writer Tillie Olsen, saw The Stronger, they approached Grant to make a film of Olsen’s O. Henry Award-winning short story, “Tell Me a Riddle,” which they adapted as a screenplay. Grant immediately connected with the story and the main character of Eva, played by Lila Kedrova, who left Russia when Stalin’s reign of terror came for her comrades.

“My whole background was from a blacklisted point of view,” Grant said of her approach to the material. 

Tell Me a Riddle contrasts ideals and the excesses of Stalinism. While Grant was never a Communist — and hardly political — her marriage to screenwriter Arnold Manoff, and her eulogy for their friend J. Edward Bromberg, where she blamed his death on his persecution in the Red Scare, led to her own appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where she refused to name names.

“The Communists really were like Jews or Catholics,” Grant said. “People who so deeply believed, and don’t forget they came from the garment industry.”

Grant, born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal, grew up in Manhattan on 148th Street and Riverside Drive. Her father was born in the Bronx to an Orthodox Jewish family and her mother came from Odesa in what was then part of the Russian Empire. When Grant was a child, her mother, Witia, told her how she was sitting on the steps of her home when the Cossacks arrived under orders from the tzar to murder Jews. Though Eva, in Tell Me a Riddle, has nightmares about Stalinist thugs terrorizing her shtetl, Grant is quick to say the two women were very different.

“My mother’s experience could not be farther away,” Grant said. “My mother and my aunt Fremo were models. They were two beauties. They spoke in the way that they saw the people on the movie screens speak, and at that time they spoke slightly English accents, so that they were very beautiful and very affected, and didn’t speak like any Jews I ever knew.”

Witia was glamorous, and a committed stage mom, helping Grant study ballet (she was in George Balanchine’s company) and get into the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre (where she studied under Sanford Meisner).

“Her whole focus was to create — and she did — to create somebody who never experienced what she experienced,” Grant said.

Grant never encountered Cossacks, but she has a vivid memory of her own brushes with antisemitism. When she was 8 or 9, walking down Convent Avenue with a friend, a nun pointed them out to one of her students. The little girl pursued them saying, “You killed our Lord.” Grant realized then that being a Jew was “not very popular.”

There were times during high school, when she was around Catholic kids, that Grant hid her heritage, but when she was 18, she asserted it. Cast as the understudy for Ado Annie in a traveling production of Oklahoma! Grant’s makeup station was next to an actress who would always go on about “the Jews.” Grant had her father send her a book of Jewish wisdom and placed it next to her. When the actress asked what it was, Grant said, “That’s my religion.” The actress switched her place in the dressing room, but Grant views that moment as the beginning of an internal change.

“It was the kind of thing that made me make documentaries later on,” said Grant. “It was the need to stand with the troops and not to hide anything.”

Grant’s documentaries are marked by their focus on underdogs. Her first, The Willmar 8, followed striking woman bank employees in Minnesota and 1985’s What Sex Am I? is one of the first films to profile transgender people.

With regard to the ongoing actors’ strike, Grant says artists in film and television are in an impossible position, with studios now trying to use artificial intelligence to own performers’ likenesses.

“They can take any image and put it down there and it’s like you could be cartooned out of any reality and that’s one of the dangers in our world today,” Grant said. “That anything can be posted from one group of people to another group of people. And lies can be told freely and believed as the truth. There is no way now of saying ‘Oh that’s not the truth, that’s a lie.’”

This post-truth moment, and the upcoming 2024 election, scares her more than anything she ever faced in her life — and that includes McCarthyism.

“This is McCarthyism, only it’s on a grander scale,” said Grant, who requested to play Roy Cohn’s mother in a 1992 TV movie to “find what the soul of the scorpion was.” (She failed, but thinks Jews who support Donald Trump should remember that he asked “where’s my Roy Cohn,“ desperate for McCarthy’s handmaiden, who sent the Rosenbergs to their deaths.)

She is also dispirited by the attacks on the trans community, whose rights have recently been targeted in red states.

“What is there to attack?” said Grant. “These are people in such turmoil and so searching for who they are, that — not to help, not to say ‘I understand,’ even. Not to say, ‘I’m so relieved that I’m not in your position. That at least I know what sex I am.’ Not to have a heart, it bewilders me.”

Grant, whose mother came from Ukraine, lights a candle every evening as a show of support for the country, and believes that Tell Me a Riddle, with its subtle but sharp attack on Russian autocracy, now works as a rebuke of Putin. She’s beyond grateful that the film is being shown in a new restoration, but says it’s too long. Grant lost her mother during the production, and couldn’t bear to let Kedrova’s Eva, who has terminal cancer, die earlier in the runtime.

When Grant gives her introduction for the films on Sept. 30, she knows she will be speaking as a survivor. The leads of The Stronger and Tell Me a Riddle have passed away.

“It’s very emotionally hard,” Grant said of the speech, “and I’m trying to find my way out of it so that I don’t get up there and just cry, you know? It’s a life. You know, it’s my life.”

Summing up a nearly 80-year career is no easy feat, but Grant is very certain of the key to her longevity: her marriage to a younger man.

“I happen to be married to a little Italian boy,” said Grant, of her producer husband, Joseph Feury. “I’m 97-and-a-half, because I’m with him. And that’s the f—ing truth.”

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Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb is recognized as the first woman ordained by the Renewal movement, in 1981, and one of the first 10 female rabbis in the United States. She also could be considered the first female spiritual leader trained by the Conservative movement when she led High Holiday services at a New York congregation for the deaf eight years earlier.

Ask about her denominational affiliation today, however, and she’ll respond “shomeret shalom” — practicing peace.

Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1949, Gottlieb first took the pulpit of Temple Beth Or of the Deaf while a student at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary 50 years ago on Sept. 26, 1973. She served there, and also at Mishkan, an experimental shul in New York, through 1980. She was ordained in 1981 by Rabbis Everett Gendler and Zalman Schachter. She then co-founded Congregation Nahalat Shalom in Albuquerque, New Mexico, becoming rabbi emeritus in 2005. She now lives modestly in Berkeley, California, where she continues her writing, storytelling, art and interfaith and peace activities.

Among the latter are the Muslim-Jewish Peace Walk, her advocacy for BDS as a nonviolent tactic for Palestinian rights and leading a delegation to Iran in 2008 for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, becoming the first female rabbi to enter that country since its 1979 revolution. The author of several books, including Trail Guide to the Torah of Nonviolence and the forthcoming Way of the Mishkan, Gottlieb spoke with Forward Editor-at-Large Robin Washington shortly before her 50th anniversary as a rabbi. Their conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Washington: One of your books is The Trail Guide to the Torah of Nonviolence. Is there really a Jewish basis for pacifism? Christianity has the Sermon on the Mount, which is decidedly pacifist, but the Torah is filled with incredible violence.

Gottlieb: Anyone who tries to pin a verse in the Bible on God is not acknowledging the human creation of these stories. Are these stories coming from the kings? Are they coming from the prophets? Are the stories coming from conquerors? Is it conquest or equity? The voice is in our hands.

When we see the face of the divine in each other, then of course we can’t take a life or harm.

At Nahalat Shalom, very early on I asked, “Well, what shall we do with Haman?” And somebody would yell, “Hang him!” And inevitably, the whole place would yell, “No!” I didn’t even moralize about it. And Haman

 got the most amazing restorative justice tasks ever! But then we could study the story and understand where it came from and who tells it and what it means to Persian Jews who actually have the graves of Esther and Mordecai in Hamadan.

Washington: Rabbi Everett Gendler, who died in 2022, was a significant figure in the Civil Rights Movement and many other progressive causes. Tell me how he came to ordain you.

Gottlieb: I started a Jewish feminist theater in 1975. I was invited to perform in Boston. Not only was Everett in the audience, he was in the front row. He immediately came up and was so supportive. And right there I thought, “Oh my goodness, is this my rebbe?” So we began a friendship and I found out he too is a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and all about his history. I would go and study with him. And whenever I visited, he always had a gig for me.

Washington: What does shomeret shalom mean — or what do you mean by it?

Gottlieb: I made up this term. Everett preferred rodef shalom. Rodef means you pursue it, meaning that you should run after peace. You shouldn’t be passive and wait until peace — shalom — comes to you. That is like tzedek, tzedek, tirdof — “justice, justice, you shall pursue.” It’s the same idea with peace.

Washington: That sounds like the guiding mantra of the Fellowship of Reconciliation: “There is no way to peace, peace is the way.”

Gottlieb: Right. But shomer to me refers to a practice. So when people are shomer kashrut, they keep kosher. When they’re shomer Shabbat, they keep Shabbat. Shomer shalom is keeping peace or practicing peace.

Washington: So that’s your denomination now?

Gottlieb: Denominational affiliation does not matter. The person standing before you matters. Something small, but for me very important, is that anybody can be called to the Torah. You don’t have to be Jewish to be called to the Torah. If you are celebrating a Bar Mitzvah, the whole family comes up. Everybody carries the Torah in their way. Everybody is a Torah. Everybody has wisdom. I want people to walk in the door and feel like, “Oh, yeah, this feels like a place where I could feel at home.” Trans, gay, lesbian, gender nonbinary; everyone is a divine image. We’re not having a debate whether or not someone is a divine image. Of course they are!

I admire people who can thrive in existing institutions, because I never have been able to do that. I sometimes describe myself as a street rabbi.

Washington: You didn’t mention a husband on the questionnaire you filled out for this interview. Not trying to get personal here, but other than your mentor rabbis, have men been helpful in your life at all?

Gottlieb: Patriarchy is a very damaging system. Three out of five women in their lifetime will experience assault or sexual violence. But I have so many beloved male students who come to me with deep respect and a desire to unpack and disassemble patriarchy in themselves. And I have such a good relationship with my son, who’s 39 and a public defender.

Washington: But relationships?

Gottlieb: It’s completely nobody’s business.

Washington: You have a play you’ve taken on the road.

Gottlieb: It’s called “Magidah on Sacred Ground.” It’s about my pilgrimage toward justice. It’s seven stories. I could bring it to you if you’d like. And I just started a Jewish storytelling guild.

Washington: As you look back, any regrets? If you had followed a more traditional path, you could be retired from a large synagogue and have every creature comfort you could want.

Gottlieb: Who says I don’t? I have every creature comfort I need. If you’re making art and theater and poetry and writing and working with people who are often marginalized, you don’t really have time to pursue those other kinds of comforts. And I am blessed to be savta to Lila Sivan and enjoy the proximity of my beloved family, friends and fellow travelers who pursue justice and peace.

The post After 50 years, pioneering female rabbi is still practicing peace — and protesting appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) – Richard Cortes can trace his spiritual development to a class field trip at a Florida theme park.

It was 2008 and Cortes was taking classes at a Pentecostal megachurch, on a path toward seminary and eventually leading a congregation, when his group spent the day at Orlando’s Holy Land Experience.

The creation of the park, which has since shuttered, had worried Jewish groups. They were concerned it might be intended as a tool of proselytization because its founder, Marvin Rosenthal, was a Jew who became a pastor, referred to himself as a “Christian Hebrew” and engaged in missionary work.

For Cortes, the park had the opposite effect. He marveled at the imaginative recreations of the biblical world he had been studying, explored the Second Temple-era replica of Jerusalem, and strolled through a scriptorium that displayed Torah scrolls. But when he encountered a park employee playing the character of Aaron, the biblical priest and brother of Moses, and heard the blast of the shofar Aaron carried, something broke open deep inside Cortes. He realized he wanted to experience religion the way Aaron did.

Cortes couldn’t sleep that night, staying up in a fervor of weeping and prayer. His soul had been stirred by the encounter, and the feeling was so intense he would later liken it to being reunited with a long-lost parent. He was also a little embarrassed. Traditional Christianity was now so clearly in his eyes a false religion that he kicked himself for not having realized it sooner.

When the sun came up, he woke up his wife, Alpha, and told her he could no longer return to the church. He was determined to find a synagogue, he told her. A Christian herself, Alpha resisted for months as her husband charted a path toward what is known as Messianic Judaism, a religion rejected by all mainstream Jewish groups that combines the practice of Jewish rituals with the worship of Jesus as the messiah.

But she ultimately came along, and over time, so did more and more people. By last year, Cortes was leading a thriving Messianic community in a remote mountain town in Arizona. Drawing from the area’s heavily Mormon and evangelical population, Cortes’ congregation was seen as a successful outpost in the wider Messianic movement.

Yet an uneasy feeling was gnawing at Cortes. Messianism promised that he would find proof of Jesus’ divinity within Jewish texts, but the harder he looked, the less he could see, leaving him in spiritual crisis. He was confused about how to proceed and terrified about the reaction of his wife and congregants to his internal transformation, but he knew he had to make a change.

Last month, Cortes and 20 of his followers converted to Judaism. Dozens of others in his community are considering doing the same.

Their mass conversion is an event with few precedents in Jewish history and a seemingly unlikely outcome for a group of people who live hours away from any Jewish community. The presence in Phoenix of a rabbi with an open mind and unusual point of view and the shifting of Jewish life online because of the pandemic opened doors that might otherwise have been closed. But it was not only Cortes and his followers undergoing a transformation: The very idea of who is a Jew, and how one becomes Jewish, is changing, too.

On the day of their conversion at a synagogue in a suburb of Phoenix last month, Cortes, 53, said he regretted his prior association with the Messianic movement, accusing it not only of inappropriately adopting symbols of Jewish religious observance like the kippah and the shofar but also of masking its tenets in order to proselytize to Jews.

“I never partook in missionary activity but the fact is that I was involved in a movement that did a lot of missionary work,” he said. “I am just completely appalled that I was a part of it.”

Cortes was wearing a dress shirt and slacks and sported a close-cropped beard. His eyes were shielded by athletic sunglasses as he lingered in the synagogue’s sweltering courtyard, awaiting his turn to appear before a Jewish court, immerse in a mikvah or ritual bath, and receive a Hebrew name.

In converting, he hoped to demonstrate the sincerity of his transformation, mark a clean break with past worship and usher in a new and final phase in his dramatic spiritual journey.

“This day is about righting a wrong and holding our hands with our new brothers and sisters,” Cortes said. “We are so excited to be a part of the Jewish community, and to prove ourselves to the Jewish community that we are legitimate.”

The next day, Cortes would attend his first Shabbat dinner as a Jew; the day after that, he’d be called up to the Torah for the first time, at Congregation Or Tzion in Scottsdale, the Conservative synagogue whose rabbi, Andy Green, had convened his conversion court. And then on Sunday Cortes and the other new Jews of Show Low, Arizona, would head home to their mountain town in a remote corner of the state to begin the rest of their lives as a Jewish community.

No Jewish denomination regards the Messianic movement or belief in Jesus as compatible with Judaism. Nevertheless, about 225,000 American adults identify as Messianic Jews, according to data from a 2020 Pew Research Center study. (An additional, unknown number of people belong to the Hebrew Roots movement, a related denomination that also blends Jewish practice with Christian belief but differs on some doctrinal issues.)

Experts say the Messianic movement is growing rapidly in many places in the world, competing, for example, with the evangelical church for lapsed Catholics in Latin America and the Philippines. As it grows, however, the movement is also hemorrhaging adherents who come to experience it as a stepping stone on the way to something else.

Some turn to Noahidism, a pared-down version of Judaism that doesn’t require conversion. A concept that comes from the book of Genesis and is developed through rabbinic discourse in the Talmud about halacha, or Jewish law, Noahidism stems from the story of Noah and teaches that there are seven basic commandments applying to all people, Jewish or not. A contemporary religion based on the seven Noahide commandments is growing rapidly, says Rachel Z. Feldman, a professor of religion at Dartmouth College and the author of a forthcoming book offering the first comprehensive academic look at the phenomenon.

“A theological and abstract concept that we’ve been talking about in the halacha for thousands of years is now for the first time in history being transformed into a living faith identity,” said Feldman, who does ethnographic research on Noahide communities and estimates the number of followers in the tens of thousands worldwide.

Feldman said the Show Low group fits within the global trend she’s been examining.

“We’re talking about a massive new movement of the Jewish world that not that many people know about. Entire congregations, like the one in Arizona, are leaving Christianity,” she said.

Others who leave the Messianic movement ultimately hope to reach Judaism. But Judaism is not an easy religion to join. Prospective converts must form relationships with rabbis and convince them of their sincerity, which can be difficult in the many places where there are no rabbis, no way to participate in Judaism’s communal practices, and not even any Jews to learn from.

To make matters more challenging, Messianics are deeply distrusted in the Jewish world. They are often seen as agents of a Christian effort to proselytize by masquerading as Jews — an effort that some Messianics embrace. Deceitful tactics by Messianic missionaries since the movement was founded several decades ago, especially the offshoot Jews for Jesus, echo a longer, painful history of forced conversions by the church. Many even consider the movement antisemitic for claiming that rabbinic scholars have intentionally suppressed the truth of Jesus.

But experts also say the Jewish community has become so accustomed to thinking of Messianics as a potential threat that it’s failing to perceive an important new phenomenon: Although covert Messianic missionaries do continue to exist, many more from the movement seem to be abandoning Jesus with a genuine hope to engage with Jews.

“It’s sort of ironic, right? This movement that was supposed to be so feared, you could say is the greatest producer of new converts, probably in the world today,” Taylor said.

“It is quite possible that there is no group today more responsible for conversion to Judaism than Jews for Jesus, than the Messianic movement,” said Tovia Singer, an Orthodox rabbi who heads Outreach Judaism, a counter-missionary organization that serves as one of the first ports of call for questioning and lapsed Messianics.

“Richard’s case seems like a very rare story, but there are many people like him,” said Pinchas Taylor, a rabbi trained by the Hasidic Chabad movement who heads American Faith Coalition, a group catering to spiritual seekers of all backgrounds. He said he’s encountered thousands of people who have left Christianity and become interested in learning Jewish wisdom, even if they are not always able or seeking to convert.

Cortes was born in New York City in 1971 and lived happily among Jews in Brooklyn and the Bronx until his family moved him to Puerto Rico when he was a young teen. He attended a Pentecostal church in his youth and became irreligious as an adult only to be drawn back in, leading him in his late thirties to take preparatory classes to join a seminary program at Victory Church in Lakeland, Florida. He left the church following his epiphany at the Holy Land Experience theme park and connected with a Messianic synagogue near his home in the Orlando area.

Richard immersed himself in Jewish texts, reading the weekly Torah portion and studying Jewish sages from Rashi to the Rambam. Hoping to delve deeper, he began to learn Hebrew. He eventually became ordained as a Messianic pastor. On a trip to Israel, he visited the Western Wall and, surrounded by Jewish worshippers, he prayed about bridging the gap between his Messianic community and the Jewish world. “I prayed, asking, ‘Why can’t the Jewish people just receive us?’ We love the Torah. We’re not the church,” Cortes recalled.

About a decade ago, Cortes and his wife Alpha left Florida and moved to Show Low in search of a fresh start and a flock with which to share their creed. The town is known for its unusual name and as a summer destination for people fleeing the Sonoran Desert heat. (Show Low is named, according to legend, after a fateful game of cards in the Old West, which ended when one rancher beat another by showing a deuce of clubs.)

As he ran errands in town, people noticed the tzitzit, fringes of a Jewish prayer shawl, hanging from his clothes and the conversations that followed brought in some of his first congregants. Cortes ministered to them out of a tent located on the rural 10-acre property he had bought.

The congregation, which he called Foundation of the Word Outreach Ministries, grew over time, eventually counting about 80 members, with more tuning in remotely. Followers came to witness Cortes teach, as the congregation’s website put it, the “Hebrew roots of the gospel” and help build a “Torah-based homestead community” devoted to the worship of Messiah Yeshua, the Messianic name for Jesus. Though they practiced Jewish customs and rituals and identified as Jews, no stream of Judaism regarded them as such.

Cortes’ congregation was a success story for the Messianic movement. He had come to a small town with no organized Messianic presence and well-established Mormon and evangelical churches and founded a thriving house of worship; usually, Messianic groups were organized as home fellowships and stayed that way if they didn’t fall apart quickly after forming. He was invited to join an online group of fellow Messianic leaders and regularly led workshops on his favorite topics for them.

Even as he preached, however, Cortes began to harbor doubts. “I was finding a lot of discrepancies,” he said. “So I decided to take my time and do an assessment.” He announced to his congregation that he would stop teaching the New Testament as he spent time studying it and focus in the meantime on lessons from Judaism.

The first time Cortes heard the name Tovia Singer, it was uttered in online conversations among leaders of the Messianic movement. They demonized the anti-missionary rabbi and warned that he was leading many of their followers astray. “I was already on the journey of saying goodbye to Yeshua, but of course, I didn’t reveal that yet,” Cortes said.

Singer’s name came up again a little while later. Cortes’ self-study was getting him only so far and he began seeking out a teacher or guide. He began following online content produced by Nissim Black, an African-American rapper and podcaster who has spoken extensively about being raised a Christian and turning to Messianism before converting to Orthodox Judaism. One day, Black’s YouTube talk show publicized a new episode featuring Singer as a guest.

For two days, Cortes couldn’t get himself to hit play. The voices cautioning against Singer kept bouncing around in his head. “I started talking to myself and asking, ‘Why am I so afraid?’” Cortes recalled. He finally decided to watch the video, “and that was the beginning of the end.”

Cortes reached out to Singer and they began studying together, dismantling lessons internalized over the years. Singer had supported many people making a similar transition but this situation stood out to him. For a leader of a congregation to make such a drastic change knowing how it would shake his followers requires “extraordinary heroism,” Singer said.

“Richard was a huge leader in the Messianic movement and he saw through it, that they’re masquerading as a Jewish sect and peddling in theological misdirection,” Singer said.

To Cortes it felt like he had been lied to twice, first by traditional Christianity, and now by Messianism.

“We came out of the church with a big disappointment,” he said. “Hatred for the Jewish people that is really encoded in all the church’s teachings. You come into Messianic Judaism and you’re like, ‘Oh, wow, this is amazing. More than likely, this is how Yeshua prayed. He prayed like a Jew.’ But then, you say, ‘Wait a minute. There’s still an element that’s the foundation of Christianity.’”

Cortes was terrified to tell Alpha of his change of heart because of how challenging it had been to drag her to Messianism. He put off the conversation for as long as he could.

He asked to talk and began by telling her about how he’d been studying.

“I really think we are on the wrong path,” he said.

She asked him to explain. He gathered his courage and continued.

He told her they had been right to follow the Torah but that they had “missed the mark on the messiah.”

She gave him a puzzled look. “It’s about time,” she said.

He was confused. What’s about time?

She revealed that she had been having the same kind of internal conversion with herself and was waiting for him to catch up. Both of them were deeply relieved at the meeting of their souls.

“I was waiting for him for two years,” Alpha later said.

“My wife and I have always been best friends but this has unified us in such an amazing new way,” Richard said.

They didn’t yet know quite where they would land religiously once they exited the Messianic movement. From Show Low, with the nearest Jewish presence hours away, Judaism seemed out of reach, but Noahidism was appealing.

They knew they needed to tell the congregation about their transformation and they knew they needed to do so carefully. The emotional turmoil that Cortes unleashed, however, went far beyond his expectations. With his Facebook announcement last December, most of his congregants immediately fell away.

Many of their former friends and followers accused Richard of heresy and betrayal. “How could you turn your back to Jesus?” they asked in agony, Cortes recalled. They said he defrauded the community for having fundraised for a new building under allegedly false pretenses. When word reached the wider Messianic movement, community leaders put out what Cortes calls an “APB,” an alert that he was an apostate to Messianic Judaism.

“And that word went out to all the Messianic synagogues in the United States,” he said. “How I know this is I started getting phone calls from people that I didn’t even know that were asking me, ‘How can you forsake Jesus?’”

Cortes said that in the reaction to his announcement, including a former congregant calling him a “Christ killer,” he recognized a certain strand of hatred in the Messianic movement he hadn’t allowed himself to see before: antisemitism.

While dozens abandoned him, a core group remained, eager to take their Torah journey with Cortes where it would lead. The congregants that would join him on conversion day included Alpha; their 11-year-old son Israel; Richard’s mother, Nellie Vienna; and a longtime family friend named Evelyn Lopez, as well as two other families, the Birds and the Mosts.

The Birds had moved to Show Low from Alaska a few years earlier and quickly discovered the Foundation of the Word. Peter Bird supports his wife Audrey and five children by working as an urban and wildland firefighter. Audrey homeschools the kids. The Most family left Utah and moved to Show Low specifically to join Cortes’ congregation. David Most and his son Joel build custom log homes, and are married to Linda and Stefani, respectively. The Most family includes five children, who were born to Joel’s late former wife, Danielle, and who are also homeschooled.

As a group, they enrolled in an 18-week online class through the Miller Introduction to Judaism Program at American Jewish University. Until recently, anyone interested in taking the course, typically a prerequisite for conversion, would have had to do so at the university’s Los Angeles campus or through one of the program’s synagogue partners. But during the pandemic, the program went online.

The Show Low contingent also began reaching out to rabbis online and in the Phoenix area, the closest major Jewish community. Singer would eventually visit the community for a daylong workshop in which he fielded questions and explained how Messianic claims about Jesus’s place in Judaism were deceitful.

Taylor, of the American Faith Coalition, would also pay them a visit and would be deeply impressed with Cortes. “Think of the amount of bravery and sincerity it takes to, as a community leader, admit you are going down a new line, which not only affects you and your family and their decisions, but your entire community,” Taylor said.

Not everyone was as willing to hear the Show Low group out. Orthodox Jews in Phoenix were especially reluctant to accept Cortes’ story, he said, because they had only recently fallen victim to a pair of undercover Christian missionaries who posed as rabbis and performed sacred rites. Cortes said he understood the suspicion: “I might be a threat, I might be a missionary.”

Eventually, Cortes found Rabbi Andy Green, who had taken up the pulpit at Congregation Or Tzion in Scottsdale in 2021. In Green, Cortes found the perfect person to welcome into Judaism a group of people with Messianic backgrounds. The rabbi had had a lifetime of experiences that would prepare him for this moment.

Already as a teenager, Green heard Singer, the counter-missionary rabbi, speak at his Jewish high school in Los Angeles. He also encountered Bentzion Kravitz, a rabbi working against the conversion of Jews to other religions, and in college Green became a volunteer for Kravitz’s group, Jews for Judaism.

“Rabbi Kravitz taught how to be proudly Jewish and not afraid to engage people with a distorted idea of Judaism,” Green said. “I had quality training in being able to understand missionaries and being able to be proud and articulate about my Jewishness even when challenged by missionaries.”

Green even developed a certain empathy for Messianics, as long as they were not proselytizing to Jews. He gave the example of a person from his college’s Hillel Jewish center whom he knew for years before learning of his Messianic belief.

“He was very secretive about his own background because he knew that if he outed himself as believing in Jesus as messiah he would be kind of uninvited and alienated from the Hillel Jewish space. But he never did anything that made us uncomfortable,” Green said. Today, the classmate is a clergy member in the Messianic movement.

Green’s first experience with how a welcoming attitude can create a congregant out of a Messianic came a few years ago, before he joined Congregation Or Tzion, while he was serving as an assistant rabbi in the Philadelphia area. A member of a nearby Messianic center began attending events at his synagogue. Some communities might have asked the visitor to leave, but Green’s congregation did not — and she ended up converting to Judaism.

When members of the Show Low group started reaching out, Green knew how to relate to them. Rather than put up defenses, he listened and was stirred by their humility and sincerity.

“When someone comes from that kind of background, that can be an alarming and dangerous thing in the American Jewish psyche,” he said. “But I was less threatened perhaps than a colleague who had never had encounters or experiences with this in the past.”

Cortes and others from Show Low began talking to Green on the phone and via email, sharing their spiritual journeys and asking questions about Judaism and the conversion process. They also began attending Or Tzion’s online Shabbat services weekly on Zoom and made spirited contributions in the chat box. Appreciating their energy, Green gave them shoutouts and began telling his congregants about the Show Low group. The Cortes and Most families each paid a visit to Or Tzion for Shabbat, spending a weekend with the congregation.

In Show Low, Cortes and his community began making changes. Dropping “Outreach Ministries” from its name, Cortes redefined Foundation of the Word as a Jewish learning center. And they would eventually donate to Congregation Or Tzion, becoming members once they were Jewish.

Before the conversions could begin, the men and boys had to arrive a day early for a special ceremony. They were brought into a private room at Green’s synagogue where a congregant who is a physician was waiting. One by one, he drew a drop of blood from their penises in a ritual, known as hatafat dam brit, that symbolizes the covenant of circumcision for converts who are already circumcised. A stained gauze and the doctor’s testimony were submitted as proof to the conversion court, formed by Green, with his synagogue’s cantor, Dannah Rubinstein, and education director, Andre Ivory.

The next day started at 7:30 a.m. with a prayer service, which took place a short drive away from Or Tzion, at Congregation Beth Israel, a Reform synagogue that houses the only non-Orthodox mikvah, or ritual bath, in the area.

No one could recall a day with more conversions in a single mikvah, not in Phoenix and maybe not anywhere in the United States.

Throughout history, few groups of any kind have converted en masse to Judaism. Some evidence exists for a surge in converts in classical antiquity, but later, with the rise of Christianity and Islam, Jewish proselytizing was largely prohibited for centuries. In the early 2000s, rabbis formally converted hundreds of members of the Abayudaya community in Uganda, but the Abayudaya had already regarded themselves as Jewish for generations. In recent memory, the typical convert has been a single individual marrying into an established Jewish family.

It was the first day of the month of Elul on the Hebrew calendar, marking the birth of a new moon, and, Green noted, a propitious occasion for new beginnings. As the service went on, he invited two of his congregants to join him on the bimah, or synagogue stage, as he read from a Torah scroll.

“This is the last service where it isn’t your privilege quite yet and that’s exciting,” Green explained to the 21 men, women and children awaiting conversion.

Now came time for the prospective converts to appear before the conversion court and answer a series of questions about their intention and commitment. Only then, if the court was satisfied, would they be permitted to immerse in a ritual bath of living waters and emerge as Jews.

“I have confidence that we would not have reached this moment and that you would not be here if you weren’t going to pass that test. So don’t be scared. It’s not meant to be frightening,” Green said.

His words did little to dispel their sense of anticipation on a day that many described as among the most joyous and important in their lives.

For Audrey Bird, the excitement had kept her from sleeping very deeply the night before. The ding of a phone notification that she was usually able to ignore woke her up. Any desire to fall back asleep faded away as soon as she saw it was the result of the DNA test she had taken a few weeks earlier.

A former Seventh-Day Adventist, Bird sensed she might have Jewish ancestry, and the timing of getting the result, just hours before she was set to undergo conversion, seemed almost too improbable to be a coincidence. The mystery of her background, which was impossible to unravel using her family’s few genealogical records, was about to end.

She clicked through and learned that her DNA was 11% Ashkenazi. Elated, she woke up her husband, Peter, and shoved the screen in his face.

“I felt such a strong pull towards Judaism that there had to be Judaism in our background. It’s not a huge percentage, but it shows that somewhere down the line of my family someone stood at the foot of Mount Sinai,” she said, referring to the location of God’s revelation to the Israelites in the Bible.

For Alpha Cortes, who donned a festive pink hat for the occasion, the joy of the day was mixed with a reckoning about a profound change to her relationship with her Catholic mother and siblings. Although her path had taken her from Catholicism, she had always shared a belief in Jesus with them.

“Religion is what has bound my family together so this day feels like entering an abyss,” Cortes said. “I’m mourning the abyss, but not because I have left their religion, because this decision is actually making me very happy. I know I am choosing the truth.”

She was tearing up as she spoke, but where the makeup she normally wore on special occasions would have smeared, her face was bare: Green instructed everyone that no cosmetics, or fabric or jewelry, come between their body and the living waters of the mikvah.

Each member of the Show Low group went through the traditional steps of a conversion: an interview with a court of Jewish law, a complete immersion in the ritual bath, blessings and the bestowal of a Hebrew name. Alpha became Malka Rena; Richard, Akiva.

Then, at a ceremony marking the end of the day, the group added their own flourish to the procession of rituals. Father and son David and Joel Most, sporting long bushy beards, took out the shofars they brought from Show Low on Green’s invitation and lifted them to their lips.

It was their first time blowing the ram’s horn as Jews, but from the quality of the four piercing blasts, which lasted nearly a minute, it was clear the instrument was not new to them.

The shofar is popular among Messianic groups precisely because it’s seen as a potent and authentic Jewish symbol, David Most said. But looking back, he regretted how his relationship with the shofar had developed.

“One of the things that we didn’t know when we were in the Messianic Judaism was that you’re not supposed to play the shofar on Shabbat — and we would open the services with it,” he said.

The conversion of the Show Low group and the unique perspective they bring to Jewish practice is both a cause for celebration and a corrective to narratives of decline that have taken hold in the Jewish community, according to Jeffrey Herbst, president of American Jewish University.

Herbst has been drumming up attention for a concept he refers to as the influx of “distant relatives.” Whether it’s groups like the one in Show Low, individuals who become curious about Jewishness after receiving the results of an ancestry test or people from the former Soviet Union who realize they have significant Jewish heritage that had been suppressed under communism, there are perhaps millions of people with a newfound affinity to Judaism, he said.

In that spirit, last year, AJU’s Miller Intro to Judaism Program started making its online course available in Spanish.

“For the first time since the Second Temple, people are coming to us,” Herbst said. “The Jewish narrative is in part about a beleaguered demography. We’re so small and maybe in some ways we’re shrinking. And I don’t want to trivialize those concerns. But this is another perspective: There are people who want to either join us formally or be related or be supporters and we should embrace that.”

For whatever changes this trend may bring to Jewishness, Herbst suggests getting over potential discomfort.

“There’s always been more diversity, perhaps, than we’ve accounted for,” he said. “Within the realm of people who are deeply committed, if they bring in somewhat different traditions, I think we should celebrate it.”

Much of the content at Foundation of the Word would be familiar to the average American Jewish synagogue member. The Show Low group studies classic Jewish texts and discusses the weekly Torah portion. They also read prayers from the Conservative prayer book provided by Green and continue to livestream the services he leads. His sermons call to mind the preacher he once was, but also the cadence of Orthodox rabbis who upload their lessons to YouTube.

“They’re adapting a kind of worship that’s more familiar to what they were doing before, but directing it toward the God of Israel and authentic Jewish learning,” Green said. “So instead of starting with the Christian rock songs that I’ve seen when I visited mega-churches, they’re singing Jewish pop and rock songs by artists like Benny Friedman and Mordechai Shapiro, and Nissim Black.”

For Cortes, who is an experienced religious leader but new to Judaism, the current moment is a bit daunting.

“We’re under a different order now. We are no longer pretending to be Jews. Now that we are part of the house, part of the people, we’re trying to figure out where we fit in now that we are in Judaism,” he said. “We’re more cautious in how we do things. We want to line up with traditional Judaism.”

One adjustment is that, in accordance with halacha, they no longer write on Shabbat.

“That was probably the day that we wrote the most because you come and you try to take down good notes about everything that you’ve learned,” he said.

Cortes thought he and others would go back to be with Congregation Or Tzion for Rosh Hashanah, but he decided against doing so for the first holiday after their conversion.

They instead embarked on a full High Holidays program in Show Low, complete with honey cakes. For Sukkot, the plan is to pitch a big Moroccan canvas tent with a roof that allows starlight to shine through and spend the holiday together outdoors. Green and Or Tzion’s educational director, Andre Ivory, hope to visit for a day.

Cortes said there’s also a scheduled visit to the Holocaust museum in Tucson, which should provide one element of a standard education for American Jewish youth.

The plan for giving the children a Jewish education throughout the year is still being formulated, but the parents have already begun integrating materials provided by Ivory into their homeschooling curriculum.

One source in the Talmud outlines the Jewish infrastructure that must be established before a community is suitable for a Torah scholar to take up residence: a synagogue, a mikvah, a charity fund, a school, a kosher butcher and more. Show Low has none of that. But their creation seems a lot less implausible today than it might have before.

Show Low is a small but growing community with a hospital, a regional airport and the most robust water resources in a parched state. Locals hope that with an influx of visitors coming for summer and winter outdoor recreation, the town can become another Flagstaff. People from Phoenix decamp for Show Low when it’s too hot, swelling the town’s summertime population. Show Low has also captured some of the remote work crowd and is poised for more.

It’s still remote enough that the Hasidic outreach group Chabad, known for its outposts serving Jews living in or traveling to in far-flung locations, has no local presence. But a small group from Chabad did visit the area a few weeks ago to meet local Jews. They arrived as part of Roving Rabbis, a program for young Chabad rabbis and rabbinical students during summer breaks and Jewish holidays. Their visit to the Show Low area happened before the conversion of Cortes’ group, and it’s unclear whether they would make a stop at Foundation of the Word in the future. As an Orthodox movement, Chabad has a complicated relationship with conversions by Conservative and other non-Orthodox rabbis.

For his part, Cortes says that while he continues to regard Green as a teacher and a leader, he has not committed to an exclusive relationship with Conservative Judaism. He’s already scheduled an introduction with Pinchas Allouche, the rabbi of an Orthodox synagogue in Scottsdale.

Meanwhile, a small group of Jews living in the area showed up at the Foundation of the Word for Shabbat dinner recently after learning about their conversion to Judaism. Afterward, one of them, Jan Perry, wrote about the experience on a Facebook page for local Jews with 30 followers, gushing with praise about the community, service, and food.

Cortes, whose title within his community is now “moreh” or teacher, was elated by the visit.

“It turns out, there are a lot more Jewish people here on the mountain,” he said. “Jan is on a mission to let all of them know about us.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post The New Jews of Show Low, Arizona: How a pastor parted with Jesus and led his congregation to Judaism appeared first on The Forward.

Dozens of prominent Democrats are imploring Sen. Bob Menendez to resign following a federal indictment on bribery charges. Some pro-Israel groups are not ready to see him step down.

They know Menendez, who pleaded not guilty in court Wednesday, as a foreign policy hawk, chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and strong supporter of Israel.

“Like all Americans, he deserves the presumption of innocence,” said Marshall Wittmann, a spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC’s political action committee endorsed Menendez for reelection in March. “The pro-Israel community deeply appreciates Senator Menendez’s leadership in strengthening the US-Israel relationship,” Wittmann said when asked if AIPAC still stands by the embattled politician. 

Calls for Menendez’s resignation came days after the Department of Justice unsealed a three-count indictment against him and his wife Nadine for allegedly accepting substantial bribes, including gold bullion bars, to leverage his political influence. To date, more than half of the Senate’s Democratic conference, including the second highest ranking Democrat, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, and New Jersey’s junior senator, Cory Booker, have called on him to step down. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has so far refrained.

Menendez has defiantly rejected calls to resign and maintained his innocence. Over the weekend he gave up his chair of the Foreign Relations Committee as required by Senate rules. 

NORPAC

Dr. Ben Chouake, a longtime Menendez ally and president of NORPAC, a pro-Israel fundraising group, said he and Menendez developed a strong relationship over the years over the senator’s “fantastic” record. That history, Chouake said, impels him to declare, “hineni,” Hebrew for “here I am,” for Menendez and “I believe you.”

NORPAC, which was considered the largest pro-Israel political action committee before AIPAC launched its own political arm in 2021, has held numerous fundraising events in recent years for the three-term incumbent. 

Chouake noted that Menendez faced similar charges in 2015 but the trial resulted in a hung jury. His allies at the time speculated that Menendez was targeted for opposing the Obama administration’s Iran deal. The administration denied the accusation.

In a 2018 speech at AIPAC’s policy conference, Menendez thanked the pro-Israel lobby for their support during his trial. “Sometimes God puts a Goliath in your path until you find the David within you, and I found the David within me,” Menendez said. “Many of you today were part of that slingshot.”

Chouake suggested the charges leveled against Menendez this fall were instigated by “the same people” who targeted him in 2015, calling the Biden administration an extension of Obama’s. “This is essentially the same administration that came after him last time,” he said. 

Election 2024

With Menendez’s political future uncertain, a number of Democrats are gearing up to either challenge him in a Democratic primary next year or succeed him in an open contest. The Democrats hold only a one-seat majority in the Senate. New Jersey is a reliably blue state.

Rep. Andy Kim, a three-term incumbent of Burlington County, has already declared a run. Other potential candidates include Jewish Rep. Josh Gottheimer of Bergen County, Rep. Mikie Sherrill and New Jersey’s first lady, Tammy Murphy.

The post As Democrats urge Menendez to resign, pro-Israel PACs stand by him appeared first on The Forward.

Last month, my 10-year-old son Naftali said: “Mami, I want to go to a synagogue.”

It took me by surprise. When I was a kid, no one in my family had ever taken me to a shul — except maybe for a wedding. My grandparents were secular Bundists, and my father took his atheism quite seriously.

I didn’t get a formal Jewish education, but the 7th grade Year of Bar Mitzvahs was a crash course for me. Being in synagogue each weekend exposed me to every brand of Judaism. It didn’t make me believe in a solid idea of God, but it sparked a recognition that Judaism was more than just bagels, Yiddish and stories of the Holocaust. I started to identify a little more deeply as a Jew.

But I was a Black Jamaican-Ashkenazi girl. Even though I grew up steeped in Yiddishkeit, emotionally close to my Holocaust survivor grandparents, it was my father who was Jewish, so according to Jewish law, I wasn’t. (The Torah stipulates that only a person with a Jewish mother is Jewish.) So between halacha and race, I didn’t quite fit the Jewish mold. I was often bugged by questions like, “how can you be Jewish when your mom is Black?” Or plainly dumb comments from other kids like “You’re Jewish, but not really Jewish.”

It nagged at me for years, but by the time my son was born, I’d made peace with the kind of Jew I was — not religious, but deeply connected to ritual and culture, and keen to pass a heritage largely lost in the Holocaust on to my child who, like me, had only one Jewish parent. So Naftali had a bris and to this day we say the shema together each night.

Naftali experiences Rosh Hashanah at an outdoor service

I created a community of other mixed-race moms and kids called “Afro-Semitic Sisters” — and we marked the holidays together. We were our own kind of Jews, lighting candles and eating challah at a Shabbat table with folks of different backgrounds. Once he was old enough for sleepaway camp, I sent Naf to Be’chol Lashon, a camp for Jewish kids of color.

After his second summer at camp, I was startled when he came home asking about ritual hand washing, correcting my recitation of the hamotzi on Shabbat, and wondering why we didn’t go to synagogue.

“If you’re going to show this world to him, you can’t show him just half. You have to show the whole thing,” says my Episcopal friend Erica, who coaxed her own kids, firmly, through confirmation in the church. “He has to know where it comes from.”

So I signed us up for Rosh Hashanah services at Kehilla. It’s a progressive Bay Area congregation, with the LGBTQ+ flag hanging outside the building. Their homepage even acknowledges that they stand on native Ohlone land. The morning family service was held on the lawn of a park. Families had blankets and camping chairs, and kids of all ages were running around getting splattered with mud. Three women in tallitot, one with a guitar, invited us to sing the wordless “dai, dai, dai” melody in one of the prayers, and Naftali immediately began singing along. I knew he’s heard some of these tunes at camp, but he seemed deeply familiar with the music.

Naftali wants to see a ‘real’ shul

All the prayers were typed out on a two-sided handout — the shema, the mourner’s kaddish, the shofar calls — but somehow sitting outside in a field didn’t feel like shul to me, or like something out of the ordinary. I wore a dress and made Naftali wear a collared shirt with his cargo pants.

He squirmed a bit during the service but was excited when the Torah scroll was brought out of the makeshift ark. With only a little prodding, he joined the kids that were called up to the plastic folding tables covered with brightly embroidered cloth where they laid the the scrolls, and with some shy reluctance followed the procession of the Torah through the crowd of families on the muddy lawn.

Although the cantors told us we need not stand for the prayers unless we’re moved to do so, I stood up for the “standing” prayers and told Naf to do the same. To me, a shul has certain rules that may be very different from the rules we follow in our everyday lives. I wanted this to feel different for him, and for me, and to instill a respect for the formality of religious practice in him. But I wasn’t sure why. Religious practice isn’t something I’ve ever learned to do, or want to do. And it wasn’t part of my plan for Naftali, either.

“Did you like it?” I asked him later that afternoon.

“I liked the music,” he said. “And when they do the prayers from the Torah. But is that a synagogue? Where do they usually keep the Torah?” He wanted to see a real shul, a building with an ark, a Torah scroll adorned and protected in its permanent home. So I bought tickets for the Kol Nidre service Yom Kippur night at Temple Beth Abraham, a Conservative congregation in Oakland.

Beth Abraham was by-the-book Yom Kippur

I worried over everything about going to a real synagogue. Has Naftali outgrown his one pair of decent pants? Will other boys wear suits, or dress in the typical Bay Area casual? What if we’re the only people of color there? What if Naftali likes it? What if he likes it too much? What if he wants to join a shul? And if he wanted to join a congregation, could I say no?

If Kehilla was a remix of Rosh Hashanah accompanied by guitars in the woods, Beth Abraham was by-the-book Yom Kippur. Please stand. Be seated. Lots of people there seemed to have memorized prayers over a lifetime of Hebrew school and services. The rabbi gave a sermon about politics in Israel.

But just as Naftali did on that muddy Rosh Hashanah morning a week earlier, every time the cantor started singing, he tried to sing along. Some of the tunes and even the words came back to me from all those bar mitzvah ceremonies, all the tagging along with my high school and college friends and whoever else would take me to services. It was a time when I was trying to figure out who I was in a world where being Jewish the way I was Jewish made me feel different, excluded, needing to right a wrong I didn’t quite understand.

But as we both mumbled through “Avinu Malkeinu,” I realized Naftali didn’t have to figure this part out. He’s never been told that being Jewish and Black is a problem. His mother, despite the halacha, is Jewish.

When we got home Naftali said he wanted to become a bar mitzvah so “I can be seen as a Jewish adult.” He may not yet have a strong understanding of his spirituality, but he knows he has the space to explore and create it. It’s a space I was not given, but that I took for myself and am passing on to him. Maybe I can just walk alongside him, as he figures out how his ethnicity and his spirituality can speak to each other. Along with the cantor’s voice, he seems to hear both clearly.

The post I’m the daughter of an atheist but my bi-racial son wants to go to synagogue appeared first on The Forward.

This article is part of our morning briefing. Click here to get it delivered to your inbox each weekday. A 98-year-old veteran. A politician ousted. Meet the Nazi-obsessed reporter behind it all.   Our contributor Lev Golinkin is always looking for Nazis. He’s been pretty busy lately.   Lev, who has over the past three years documented more than 1,600 monuments to Nazis and their collaborators in 30 countries, on Sunday was the first journalist to report that the 98-year-old World War II veteran given a standing ovation in Canada’s Parliament had actually fought with a Nazi unit. The story was picked up by news outlets around the world and had quick repercussions: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized and the speaker of Canada’s House of Commons, who’d engineered the ovation, resigned Tuesday amid the spiraling scandal.   Some background: Ukrainian immigrant Yaroslav Hunka was a member of the SS Galichina, a unit created by the Third Reich in 1943 out of recruits from Western Ukraine. The soldiers took an oath of loyalty to Hitler and were trained by his henchmen. Lev and our engagement editor, Jake Wasserman, put together this explainer on the unit.   Rewriting history: By war’s end, the unit had been renamed, and thousands of its veterans eventually emigrated to Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. “Unlike the Nazis in South America who were in hiding,” Lev explained, “these people put out yearbooks, held parades, and built monuments.” After Lev’s August article about such a monument in a suburban Philadelphia cemetery, outrage from Jewish groups prompted the Ukrainian Catholic Church to temporarily cover it.  Heinrich Himmler inspects the SS Galichina in 1944. (Wikimedia) Zooming out: Lev, who himself was born in Western Ukraine, noted that 2 million Ukrainians died during World War II, and that 99% of the country fought against the Nazis. “Modern-day Ukrainians walk past graves on their way to buy groceries,” he said. He likened those who celebrate veterans of SS Galichina like Hunka to Americans who revere the Confederacy or the KKK. “They’re seen as heroes in a very specific region,” he said, “and are not seen as heroes by the vast majority.” A new battleground: I asked Lev, who wrote a memoir about his native Ukraine, why he’s obsessed with Nazis. He spoke about “a new generation of Holocaust distorters” who “turn perpetrators into victims,” adding: “This is the battleground for Holocaust memory.”   “I look at these dead Jews and they never got to the safety of America,” Lev added. “I don’t think it’s too much to ask that the Jews who have the privilege and the blessing of being here speak out when their murderers are being celebrated.” Read all of Lev’s Nazi reporting ➤ Tune in: Hear more from Lev about his reporting on SS Galichina and monuments to Nazis today at 11 a.m., when he’ll be chatting with our opinion editor, Laura E. Adkins, live on Facebook and YouTube.  Related: Does Ukraine really have a neo-Nazi problem? ALSO IN THE FORWARD The Republican presidential candidates, sans former President Donald Trump, at the first debate. (Getty) Opinion | No Republicans have expressed support for the Israeli protest movement — yet. Here’s why they should at tonight’s debate: “If the judicial reforms proposed by the Netanyahu coalition are allowed to advance, Israel’s national unity and security capabilities will be irreparably shattered, with enormous damage done to the U.S.-Israel relationship,” write Tali Reiner Brodetzki and Brett Goldman, who joined pro-democracy demonstrators at the last GOP presidential debate. “This should be of immediate concern to all champions of a secure Israel, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals.” Read their essay ➤   Jewish writers, Bible stories and Holocaust history are on a new list of every banned book in the US: A new report from PEN America found that three Jewish writers of young-adult fiction are among the 10 most-banned authors. The nonprofit group also documented 3,362 instances of book bans in U.S. public school classrooms and libraries in the 2022-2023 school year, an increase of 33% from the previous school year. Read the story ➤   Related: Biden’s new book ban czar is a longtime progressive Jewish leader And one more: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, newly acquitted over alleged election-related misconduct, blamed George Soros, the Jewish liberal billionaire and Holocaust survivor, for his recent troubles. Share this newsletter with a friend ➤ WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY Passengers in the departure hall at Ben-Gurion Airport earlier this year. (Moti Milrod/Haaretz)  ✈️  In a historic move, Israel gained entry into the U.S. Visa Waiver Program, officials confirmed this morning, ending a decades-long effort aimed at allowing Israelis to travel to the United States for 90 days without getting a visa. (Haaretz)   🗳️  Daniel Lurie, a Jewish philanthropist and an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, filed to run for mayor of San Francisco. A Democrat, Lurie will compete in a primary campaign with the city’s current mayor, London Breed. (Jewish News of Northern California, New York Times)   📈  Right-wing extremist and antisemitic attitudes are on the rise in Germany. That’s according to a new study, which found that 8% of people in Germany have a right-wing extremist worldview, up from 2-3% in previous years. In related news, and for the second time this month, Germany banned a neo-Nazi group. (JTA, Reuters)   🏈  A high school football coach in Cleveland resigned after his team used the word “Nazi” in addition to racial slurs in its play-calling during a game on Friday. (AP, JTA)   🇮🇱  Israeli security forces evacuated an illegal outpost in the occupied West Bank Wednesday morning, and arrested four Jewish settlers amid the scuffle. (Times of Israel)   🎬  The organizers of the Golden Globes expelled a voting member from Egypt following the revelation of past tweets in which she appeared to promote conspiracy theories about Israel and Zionists. (JTA)   📺  An Israeli TV drama about a teen educational Holocaust trip to Poland was nominated for an International Emmy. The awards will be announced in November in New York City. (Times of Israel)   ✍️  Albert Einstein’s secret plan to rescue an academic targeted by Nazis was revealed in a new letter, and that letter is now up for auction. This is a good time to remind you that next month, we’re hosting an event where actor Mandy Patinkin will discuss how Einstein inspired him to become a refugee activist. (Jewish Chronicle)   Shiva calls ➤  Zvi Hecker, known as the “bad boy of Israeli architecture” for his controversial designs, died at 92 … Juan Bradman, a Cuban-Jewish exile whose life inspired a novel, died at 90 … Jeremy Silman, an international chess master and author of several bestselling books, died at 69. What else we’re reading ➤  In the Hunter Biden case, a shadowy Israeli witness faces a crucial dilemma … The Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side fully reopens after year-long preservation project … This Brooklyn band is making music inspired by illicit recordings from inside synagogues. ON THE CALENDAR On this day in history (1922): Jewish director Arthur Hiller Penn, the younger brother of photographer Irving Penn, was born in Philadelphia. Penn, best known for directing Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and the Broadway premiere of The Miracle Worker (1959) as well as its 1962 film adaptation, was affiliated with the American New Wave movement. He first took an interest in directing while stationed in the U.K. during World War II, when he got involved with staging theatricals to entertain soldiers. PHOTO OF THE DAY (Getty) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lays a wreath during the state commemoration ceremony for fallen soldiers on the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War on Tuesday in Jerusalem. Related: Why Leonard Cohen performed for Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur War   — Thanks to Lev Golinkin, Jodi Rudoren and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter, and to Beth Harpaz for editing it. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com. Hope you have a terrific day.

The post Meet the reporter who prompted Canada’s latest Nazi scandal appeared first on The Forward.

This article originally appeared on Haaretz, and was reprinted here with permission. Sign up here to get Haaretz’s free Daily Brief newsletter delivered to your inbox.

Israel has gained entry into the coveted U.S. Visa Waiver Program, U.S. officials confirmed Wednesday, ending a decades-long effort aimed at allowing Israelis to travel to the United States for 90 days without having to undertake the time-consuming and expensive process of obtaining a visa.

The officials said they anticipate that Israelis will be able to travel to the United States visa-free by November 30.

The final decision came hours after an Arab-American civil rights organization, alongside several Palestinian-American citizens, sued the U.S. government for allegedly endorsing discrimination against Palestinian and Arab Americans.

The post In historic move, Israel accepted into U.S. Visa waiver program appeared first on The Forward.

This article originally appeared on Haaretz, and was reprinted here with permission. Sign up here to get Haaretz’s free Daily Brief newsletter delivered to your inbox.

For months now, dual Israeli-American citizen Gal Luft has been touting himself as a whistleblower against alleged corruption by Hunter Biden, the son of the U.S. president. Luft, a former lieutenant colonel in the Israel Defense Forces, says the Biden administration is targeting him for providing evidence that incriminates Hunter, triggering the November 2022 indictment against Luft.

The U.S. Justice Department says the Haifa-born think-tank director broke the law by not registering as an agent of the Chinese government. He also acted as “a broker in deals for dangerous weapons and Iranian oil; and he told multiple lies about his crimes to law enforcement,” the U.S. authorities say.

But according to conversations that Luft had in 2020 whose content was reviewed by TheMarker – the business section of Haaretz – Luft was not happy about the Trump administration’s pressure he claimed he faced that year to provide information implicating Hunter before the November elections.

It emerges from these conversations that in early 2020, when Luft left Israel on a visit to Turkey, he wasn’t only there to secure masks for Israel and Italy during the coronavirus crisis, a trip that has been previously reported. And he didn’t return to Israel – because he feared he would be handed over to the U.S. authorities.

According to Luft’s comments in the conversations, the Turkish government granted him protection, and he maintained contact with a very close associate of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to Luft, sources in the presidential palace told him about recurring pressure from Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, to meet with Luft to gain information implicating Hunter Biden.

It emerges from the conversations that the decision about whether to set up a meeting wasn’t up to Luft but to his Turkish hosts. And he was glad to hear that O’Brien wouldn’t be coming.

TheMarker’s sources declined to be named or allow the publishing of direct quotes from them or Luft.

Luft, meanwhile, has been in an undisclosed hiding place for six months. According to his lawyer, Mordechai Tzivin, Luft’s “actions are unblemished,” and Luft “has a full arsenal of evidence” exculpating him.

Hired to promote Chinese national interests

Luft, 57, is a veteran of the Israeli army’s Artillery Corps. After he left the military around two decades ago, he obtained advanced degrees from Johns Hopkins University in international economics, strategic studies and Middle East studies.

About 15 years ago, Luft and Anne Korin founded the Maryland-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. Luft became a sought-after speaker at conferences on energy, infrastructure and national security.

According to the U.S. indictment, Luft was hired to promote Chinese national interests through an entity linked to the Chinese energy company CEFC, which he formally served as a consultant. Luft was compensated in the form of donations to the research institute by CEFC.

As Haaretz and TheMarker reported in July, Luft promoted meetings between senior members of the Chinese Communist Party and Israeli officials, both at conferences and in meetings that he arranged in Israel.

Luft would call himself “the most connected Israeli in China,” one of his Israeli acquaintances says. In his academic capacity, he would promote China’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, whose loans have been criticized as an attempt to subjugate resource-poor countries to Chinese interests. According to the indictment, Luft also promoted arms deals for Chinese companies in Libya, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar without the appropriate licenses.

Little of this would have interested the average American or Israeli if the company that Luft advised hadn’t allegedly paid money to Hunter Biden, and, according to Luft, to the president’s brother James.

Earlier this month, David Weiss, the U.S. special counsel investigating the president’s son, indicted him on suspicion of making false statements in purchasing a gun and illegally obtaining a gun while addicted to drugs. Weiss might also charge Hunter Biden for failing to submit his income tax returns on time.

It is not disputed that firms in which Hunter Biden played a role received millions of dollars from companies, including in Ukraine and China, for opening doors in Washington when his father was vice president, and even during the Trump presidency.

So far no evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s business affairs has been uncovered, unlike the son’s use of the father’s position to impress clients. In a confidential hearing of the House Oversight Committee whose contents were made public in late July, Devon Archer, a former business partner of Hunter Biden, testified that Hunter routinely spoke to his father in front of clients with the phone on speakerphone. According to Archer, the two did not discuss business matters but rather topics such as the weather or fishing.

The Republicans hope that evidence linking President Biden to assistance for his son’s business affairs will be uncovered before the November 2024 elections, and if possible, for the impeachment trial they hope to launch in the coming months. The comments by Luft and his lawyer form part of the basis for those hopes.

Pressure from the White House

Luft has become a hero on the populist right in the United States, especially after The New York Post released a video in July where Luft says his indictment is designed to silence him as a witness in the Hunter Biden investigation.

Though filed in November 2022, the indictment was published during the week the video was released. “No one should be surprised here. I don’t trust the DOJ or the FBI. They are trying to silence our witnesses,” Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, told Fox Business in July.

In the video, Luft claimed he revealed incriminating information against members of the Biden family in a meeting with members of the Justice Department and the FBI in Brussels in March 2019. He calls this the mistake of his life.

In the indictment, Luft is accused of making false statements at this meeting when he denied that he promoted deals with an Iranian energy company. This contributed to an additional indictment of violating U.S. sanctions on Iran.

In Luft’s 2020 conversations whose content was reviewed by TheMarker, Luft claims that he had daily contact with Ibrahim Kalin, at the time a close adviser and spokesman to Erdogan, and also the deputy head of the president’s Council of Security and Foreign Policy. Since June, Kalin has been Turkey’s intelligence chief. Luft says Kalin briefed him on repeated requests by O’Brien.

According to Luft, around September 2020, O’Brien pleaded to be allowed to come to Turkey to meet with Luft secretly, with the intention of obtaining information on Hunter Biden’s links to CEFC, the Chinese company. Luft believed that O’Brien sought to provide Trump with weapons to attack Joe Biden in the run-up to the elections.

According to Luft, such requests began weeks before the October 2020 leaking of emails showing payments that Hunter received from CEFC. Luft says his Turkish hosts rejected O’Brien’s requests, and he was pleased with this decision.

A public official’s use of a diplomatic channel to achieve a political goal may constitute an abuse of power under U.S. law. This case joins the pressure that Trump applied, including on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a 2019 phone call, when Trump wanted Ukraine to launch an investigation against the Kyiv-based company Burisma, which employed Hunter Biden as a director. The affair was at the center of Trump’s first impeachment trial, which concluded in early 2020 with his acquittal by the Republican majority in the Senate.

According to Luft, another person who asked for permission to visit Turkey was Jared Kushner. Luft said his hosts believed that Trump’s adviser and son-in-law sought to visit because of Luft’s presence in Turkey, though Kushner did not explicitly state this. According to Luft, Kushner’s request for an urgent visit was denied.

O’Brien and Kushner declined to comment, while the Turkish government did not respond to TheMarker’s request for comment.

In Luft’s 2020 conversations whose content was reviewed by TheMarker, Luft said that information regarding his 2019 meeting with the FBI and Justice Department had also reached the Biden family. He said appeals were made to officials at Erdogan’s palace by a lawyer who, Luft said, represented Hunter Biden.

The lawyer was allegedly aware of the pressure from the White House and threatened legal action if Luft did not remain silent. The lawyer’s name was not mentioned in the conversations. Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, did not respond to the TheMarker’s questions on the matter.

Arrest in Cyprus

Luft’s 2020 conversations whose content was reviewed by TheMarker give no indication of Luft’s response to Biden’s election victory, but his actions may indicate he felt relieved.

Only after the vote did Luft leave Turkey and return to Israel, where his family lives, after many months away. Between 2021 and his disappearance six months ago, Luft divided his time between Turkey, China and Israel, presenting himself as a researcher at Ostim Technical University in Ankara.

Luft, however, was arrested in February during a visit to Cyprus, on the back of a U.S. extradition request because of the indictment filed in November.

After being detained in Cyprus for several days, Luft was released on bail but was forbidden to leave the country. In March, awaiting his extradition hearing in the southern city of Larnaca, he fled Cyprus and his whereabouts remain unknown.

Tzivin, Luft’s lawyer, has visited Turkey at least six times since his client’s disappearance, but Tzivin says these trips were not for meetings with Luft, whose whereabouts he declined to comment on.

In his statement, Tzivin reiterated a comment he gave to Haaretz and TheMarker in July. He said that Luft “has been persecuted by the U.S. law enforcement authorities due to political interests. The U.S. authorities are afraid of the information he possesses, which could undermine President Biden’s political standing.

According to Tzivin, “It’s enough if we mention an email in which Hunter writes to the Chinese oil company that he is sitting and waiting with his father for a phone call. And surprise, surprise: A few days after the email, $5.1 million was transferred to a bank account connected to the Biden family.”

For this article, Tzivin added: “Luft was asked only once by a licensed arms dealer to check prices for certain transactions. Therefore, the suspicion that he sold illegal weapons is completely unfounded, and there is no basis for it.

“All other matters mentioned in the article are part of a web of lies intended to undermine Luft’s credibility as a witness against the U.S. president. Mr. Luft has decided not to go to the United States because he believes he will not receive a fair trial there. Any reasonable person in his situation would make the same decision.”

The post In the Hunter Biden case, a shadowy Israeli witness faces a crucial dilemma appeared first on The Forward.

(J. Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune who is a philanthropist and nonprofit founder, is running for mayor of San Francisco.

Lurie is seeking to lead the California city at a time of great challenge. San Francisco experienced a steep population decline during the pandemic; the tech economy on which much of its tax base rests is shaky; and high rates of property crime, homelessness and drug abuse have troubled locals and undercut perceptions nationally.

Lurie will challenge Mayor London Breed, who will be running for a second full term next year. This is Lurie’s first campaign for public office, and in a video announcing his campaign, he highlighted public safety, affordable housing and combating “the era of open-air drug dealing.”

“When I say I’m going to do something, I get it done and I bring everyone along with me,” Lurie, 46, said in the video, posted on Tuesday. “I love this city, but what we are seeing on the streets of San Francisco is not progressive.”

Though Lurie is not widely known by San Franciscans, his family’s roots are deep and their wealth has made them prominent in the Jewish community locally and beyond.

His mother, Mimi Haas, is a billionaire, according to Forbes, who owns 16% of Levi Strauss & Co. and for years sat on its board. Her second husband, from 1981 until his death in 2005, was Peter E. Haas, the great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss.

Mimi is also president of the Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, a grant-making organization focused on early childhood education. The Haas family has donated massive sums to institutions across the Bay Area, much of it anonymously.

A version of this story originally appeared in J. Jewish News of Northern California and is reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Daniel Lurie, Jewish Levi Strauss heir and philanthropist, is running for San Francisco mayor appeared first on The Forward.

This article originally appeared on Haaretz, and was reprinted here with permission. Sign up here to get Haaretz’s free Daily Brief newsletter delivered to your inbox.

Sixty-three Ethiopian Jews fleeing war in their country are stuck in Addis Ababa waiting for Ethiopian authorities to complete security checks, which have lasted weeks, despite being entitled to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return.

The Ethiopian Embassy in Tel Aviv confirmed the delays and promised that the security checks would be completed soon. They are checking to ensure that there are no extremists among them who fought in the 2021 civil war.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said “The delay in the exit of these families is due to waiting for approvals from the Ethiopian authorities, not from Israel. The issue in question is known and handled at the highest levels in the Foreign Ministry.”

In the interim, the Jewish Agency put up the families at an Addis Ababa hotel.

The group includes 44 people who were rescued from the Gondar region of Ethiopia on August 10. Another 28 have received approvals but are still waiting to leave. Half of them are minors, and the oldest is 80.

Last Wednesday, nine Ethiopians with travel documents or passports, flew to Israel.

Former MK Shlomo Molla, who works to uplift Ethiopian Jews, believes Israel can do more. “Ethiopian immigrants always have to dust, beg, demonstrate and say ‘father and mother’ in front of the Prime Minister’s Office until they let them exercise their rights,” he said. “We will continue to fight with determination as always until the last Ethiopian Jew realizes his right.”

Talking about the delay, a top Israeli official involved in the affair told Haaretz that “They have little appetite or desire right now to help us. We brought them to Addis and got them out of the war zone, but in order for them to leave Ethiopia, they still need to get approval and Ethiopian [government] papers that confirm their identities.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said it had appealed to the Ethiopian government at the highest levels requesting that they be allowed to facilitate the exit process. One source said that Foreign Minister Eli Cohen was personally involved.

“In diplomacy, when you get no answer, that in itself is an answer,” said an Israeli Foreign Ministry source involved in the affair.

An Ethiopian Embassy official said that “we don’t want this to happen again,” referring to the 2021 controversy in which 77 Ethiopians from the Tigray war zone were brought to Israel despite some of them being wanted by the Ethiopian authorities for their part in the civil war.

“We will allow them to leave, but they need to be checked. It takes time, but they are working on it, and they will soon arrive in Israel. The government has no reason not to allow them to board. This is an intelligence matter. In the end, they will reach Israel,” said an embassy source.

The post Ethiopian Jews fleeing war stuck in Addis Ababa, await local security checks appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — More than 100 Jewish activists have signed a letter appealing to major advertisers to end their relationship with X, the platform previously known as Twitter that is owned by Elon Musk, calling it “a breeding ground for antisemitism” that “represents one of the largest dangers to Jews in years.”

The signatories are also calling on Apple and Google to remove the platform from their app stores, which would effectively make X’s app inaccessible to the vast majority of mobile users.

The call, issued Tuesday, comes after weeks during which Musk has interacted with white supremacists and written a stream of posts attacking the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil rights organization that has criticized his removal of hate speech guardrails on the site. The ADL also called on advertisers to pause their spending on the platform last year, and Musk has threatened to sue the group for, in his view, tanking X’s ad revenue.

“We have watched in horror as a new stage in antisemitic discourse has spread like wildfire on one of America’s largest social media networks,” said the letter, spearheaded by Elad Nehorai, a progressive Jewish activist. “All of this has been facilitated and enabled by its owner: Elon Musk.”

Many of the more than 120 signatories are progressives, among them cartoonist Eli Valley and Ruth Messinger, the former Manhattan borough president and onetime Democratic nominee for New York City mayor who later led the American Jewish World Service, a global aid group.

But a number of prominent Jewish thinkers and activists from across the political spectrum have signed on as well, including David Hazony, a conservative editor who just published “Jewish Priorities,” a collection of essays; Archie Gottesman, who sits on the board of the Democratic Majority for Israel and co-founded JewBelong, a group that aims to combat antisemitism and reinforce Jewish identity; and Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, a longtime leading Orthodox Jewish scholar. The letter was also signed by Rabbi Rebecca Sirbu, the executive vice president of the Jewish Funders Network, and Rabbi Isaiah Rothstein, a scholar and public affairs adviser at the Jewish Federations of North America, though neither listed their organizational affiliations.

“We are alarmed by his targeting of the ADL: not because of our views of the organization (we represent a wide range of views, including some who fundamentally oppose the ADL as well as staunch supporters), but because of the way he has used the organization as a very clear stand in for an antisemitic representation of Jewish power,” the open letter said.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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(JTA) – The Biden Administration’s new point person for combating book bans at school districts and public libraries across the country is a gay, Jewish progressive activist who has served as a government liaison to the Jewish and LGBTQ communities.

The appointment of Matt Nosanchuk comes as the thousands of book challenges nationwide have focused on books with LGBTQ as well as Jewish themes, in addition to works about race. Nosanchuk was named a deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Education’s civil rights office earlier this month. In that role, he will lead training sessions for schools and libraries on how to deal with book bans — and warn districts that the department believes book bans can violate civil rights laws.

An Education Department official recently told the 74, an education news site, that the bans “are a threat to students’ rights and freedoms.”

“I am excited to return to public service to work on behalf of the American people,” Nosanchuk posted to LinkedIn earlier this month. “There is a lot of important work to do!”

The Education Department declined to make Nosanchuk available for an interview. He has already taken heat from conservative outlets, which have pushed the narrative that the books being removed from schools and libraries are too sexually explicit for children. Kayleigh McEnany, the Fox News host who served as Donald Trump’s press secretary, called him a “porn enforcer” on-air.

But his appointment has been celebrated by librarians and book access activists. “This is a step forward for the Biden Administration, who has heard the concerns of parents and taken action, but it is just the beginning,” the National Parents Union, a progressive parental education activist group, said in a statement.

Nosanchuk’s career has largely focused on working with the LGBTQ and Jewish communities. In 2009, after serving in a number of roles in Washington, D.C., Nosanchuk was appointed as the Department of Justice’s liaison to the LGBTQ community — a position he held while Obama was still publicly opposed to same-sex marriage. He later worked on the Obama administration’s opposition to a law barring same-sex couples from receiving federal benefits.

He subsequently served as the White House liaison to the Jewish community during Obama’s second term, and in 2020 was the Democratic National Committee’s political organizer for Jewish outreach and LGBTQ engagement. That same year, he cofounded the New York Jewish Agenda, a progressive policy group that he led until earlier this year.

Nosanchuk’s first webinar in his new role was held Tuesday in partnership with the American Library Association, an organization with which a number of Republican-led states have recently cut ties. He begins his work after a year that has seen several school districts take aim at books focused on Jewish experiences or the Holocaust.

Two weeks ago, a Texas school district fired a middle school teacher reportedly for reading a passage from an illustrated adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary to eighth-grade students. Other schools’ removals of “The Fixer,” a Jodi Picoult novel about the Holocaust and other texts have been likened to Nazi and Stalinist book burnings —  comparisons that proponents of the book restrictions reject.

Democratic politicians, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, have accused Republicans of wanting “to ban books on the Holocaust.” A recent Senate hearing on book bans included testimony from Cameron Samuels, a Jewish advocate for access to books, along with numerous references to “Maus,” a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman about the Holocaust that was pulled from a Tennessee middle school curriculum last year.

PEN America, a literary free-speech advocacy group, welcomed Nosanchuk’s appointment.

“Book removals and restrictions continue apace across the country, as the tactics to silence certain voices and identities are sharpened,” the group said in a statement. “Empowering the coordinator to address this ongoing movement is critical.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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(JTA) — A high school football coach in suburban Cleveland has resigned after his team used the word “Nazi” in addition to racial slurs in its play calling during a game on Friday against a team in a heavily Jewish town.

Tim McFarland, the coach of Brooklyn High School in Brooklyn, Ohio, submitted his resignation Monday and apologized via a statement written by the district, the Cleveland Jewish News reported. Local Jewish groups have also reached out to district officials, who have indicated a willingness to work with them.

Brooklyn was playing the team from Beachwood, a suburb with the second-highest rate of Jewish residents in the country.

The offensive play calls were first flagged by Beachwood’s head coach, Scott Fischer, at halftime, the school’s athletic director told parents in an email after the game.

“During my discussion with Coach Fischer at halftime, we agreed that if these actions continued we would pull our team off the field,” wrote the school’s athletic director, Ryan Peters, as reported by the Cleveland Jewish News. Peters said that McFarland admitted to using the “Nazi” play and agreed to change the name of the play for the game’s second half. The mother of a Beachwood cheerleader told the Cleveland Jewish News they couldn’t hear the offensive language in the stands.

The language was also condemned by the mayor and city council of Beachwood.

It was not the first time in recent memory a high school football team employed antisemitic language in its play calling. In 2021 a Boston-area school was found to have used terms including “Auschwitz,” “yarmulke” and “rabbi” in its own plays for at least a decade, part of what an investigation revealed was a long history of antisemitic and homophobic behavior. That school’s football coach was also fired, and the state of Massachusetts soon passed new laws to require genocide education in high schools in response to that and other antisemitic school sports incidents in the state.

In recent months, Jewish high school sporting events in Miami and Los Angeles were home to alleged antisemitic taunts. Both were alleged to have come in response to antagonistic or even racist behavior by Jewish students, according to local reports. Another high school in the Sacramento area is investigating reports that four students made Nazi salutes on social media earlier this month.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Ohio high school football coach resigns after players use ‘Nazi’ in play calls appeared first on The Forward.

When Lore Segal first started writing, she had a single purpose in mind. Soon after arriving in England in 1938 on the Kindertransport from Nazi-occupied Vienna, the 10-year-old girl launched a letter-writing campaign to get her parents out too. It worked: Within a year, they were reunited. Now 95, Segal has four novels and dozens of short stories to her name and is one of the oldest active American writers. Though her stories may be fictional, they’re often informed by her own life and infused with the urgency of that first, all-important project.

Her latest collection, Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories, features a group of five erudite, sharp-witted nonagenarians, all longtime New Yorkers, who have maintained a regular — if chaotic — schedule of get-togethers for the past 40 years. “We are the people to whom we tell our stories,” one reminds the group, outlining a project that can only grow more pressing as memories fade and death — or worse, the nursing home — threatens.

Segal’s great themes are friendship, family, and growing old, but the memory of the Holocaust often looms over these seemingly domestic concerns. Sometimes clocking in at fewer than 1,000 words, her stories are minimalist in style but monumental in feeling, capturing the rich yet ephemeral texture of ordinary lives haunted by a catastrophic past. And as the title suggests, she also sets out to rescue the concept of “ladies who lunch” — not just from the Sondheim song that popularized the phrase, but from the derision with which many male writers and younger people have treated groups of old women.  

Segal began publishing stories in the Ladies’ Lunch series in 2007. The newly issued collection, which combines new and previous work, brings the indefatigable ladies into the pandemic era. Her stripped-to-the-bone style in these pieces conveys the intensity of writing toward the end of life: Shorn of fancy words and writerly affectation, her paragraphs sometimes approach the starkness of Greek tragedy. Adjectives, it would seem, are best left to younger writers. She uses them sparingly, parceling them out like WWII rations.

In “Soft Sculpture,” a woman named Ilka (a recurring character in Segal’s work who is sometimes a stand-in for the author) takes a walk with her friend Bridget and recalls a childhood birthday that was memorable for two reasons: She received a pet turtle as a gift, and Nazi storm troopers evicted her family from their Vienna apartment.

Naturally, Bridget wants to know what happens next. But Ilka can’t quite recall. She can only remember seemingly irrelevant details: the bathroom with a wall-mounted gas heater and tub where her mother set the turtle; her father’s razor and leather strop; and, in a twist that brings the story closer to the present, a turtle hand puppet she bought for her own children years later, after she had resettled in New York. 

Ilka’s forgetfulness might signal that memory loss is coming for her, as it has for so many of her peers. She may be unable, even after so many years, to discuss her childhood. Perhaps Segal is simply drawn to the sensory qualities of daily life, so much so that the sounds, shapes and colors of Vienna “before Hitler” can outlast the trauma of exile.

An only child born in 1928 to upper-middle-class Jewish parents, Segal made her name by turning her eventful life into memoir and autobiographical fiction. Her 1964 debut novel, Other People’s Homes, was based on her experiences living in five foster homes after arriving in Great Britain as part of the effort to rescue children from Nazi-occupied territory. She has since written four other works of fiction, including the Pulitzer-nominated story collection Shakespeare’s Kitchen, and a slew of essays, children’s books and translations.

In her late work, the inexorable process of growing old threatens a different kind of annihilation than the Holocaust. In the story “Ladies’ Zoom,” the women struggle to recall words that have simply dropped out of their minds. “What do they call the kind of — the — what do you call the living for old people that Lotte’s son moved her into,” Bessie says, referring to a friend who has died. Conversations like these tell the reader that even as the ladies blithely discuss Lotte’s fate, they’re keenly aware of their own limitations.

Naturally, the ladies lunch virtually during the coronavirus pandemic, when “their several children’s anxieties” prevent them from meeting in person. And naturally, being a jousting bunch, they quarrel about the technology. In these newest stories, Segal gently satirizes the ladies’ technological incompetence while emphasizing the intellectual acumen they’ve retained despite the many indignities of lockdown and old age. When one character grumbles that they’re talking “to little movies of ourselves instead of with each other,” another defends “this blessed technology,” which allows her to carry around the entire works of Jane Austen and “make the letters large enough to read.”

The appointed topic of discussion at the meeting — because every lunch needs an agenda — is the impossibility of leaving things in order for one’s children when one dies. That’s because in order to do so, they would have to get rid of old papers, old pictures, even decades-old address books, which they can’t bear to do. “Dead or alive,” one says, “it turns out one cannot throw people away.”

Ten years ago, after Philip Roth and Alice Munro announced they had stopped writing fiction, an interviewer asked Segal if she planned to do the same. Her reply? “What would I do with my hands, mornings from 8 to 1? And won’t some thing that I think, or see, or hear turn itself into words?”

Reading Ladies’ Lunch, one can only be thankful that Segal has not “thrown away” her people or her memories, which have given us this indispensable road map of our final journey. 

The post Haunted by the Kindertransport and COVID-19, this 95-year-old Jewish writer chronicles a changing world — over lunch appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Juan Bradman was still in his twenties when he became a circuit judge in rural Cuba, traveling among the provinces. 

 But in1962, after the communist takeover by Fidel Castro, he and his wife Pola fled Cuba for the United States with their daughter Miriam, who had just celebrated her first birthday.

 Years later, Miriam Bradman Abrahams would remember her parents’ story of exodus and exile in the forward to a novel inspired by their lives. “The Incident at San Miguel,” written by A.J. Sidransky, was published in March.

“They would leave behind all they knew for another climate, language and culture,” she wrote of her parents. “They could barely imagine the enormity of what faced them. This leaving and arriving, setting down roots and then suddenly having to pull them up to survive, has been part of Jewish DNA for millennia. It is the biblical story of Abraham, Noah, Joseph and Moses.” 

Juan Bradman, who lived in Brooklyn, died Sept 23, at the age of 90.

In many ways, Bradman’s was an archetypal story of the more than 90% of Jews who, having found a refuge in Cuba from hardship in Europe, fled once again after Castro’s revolution. After leaving Cuba and putting down roots first in Yonkers, New York and later Brooklyn, Bradman refused to return to Cuba, harboring fears about his safety and his family’s in the country from which he fled. Yet he remained connected to the country by his brother, Salomon, who supported the revolution and chose to remain after the communist takeover. 

Despite their political differences and years of estrangement, when the Cuban government opened travel for Cuban citizens to the United States in 2001, Juan sponsored Salomon and his wife for a month’s visit in Brooklyn. (Salomon died in 2012.)

A fictionalized version of their reunion, as well as Juan’s brief encounter with Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, are featured in ”The Incident at San Miguel.”

Bradman never lost his bitterness over Castro’s takeover of the country, which replaced the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista with years of deepening repression and economic malaise.

“Fidel was a ruthless Stalinist dictator with a charismatic personality,” Bradman told his daughter after Castro’s death in 2016. “He destroyed the island, running it as his own personal domain. I thank Castro for being the reason we came here. We would not have lived the same quality of life, had we stayed there. History should remember him as a tyrant rather than as a hero or savior. There is an end to everything, and I hope this is the beginning of the end of communism in Cuba.”

Juan Bradman was born on June 24, 1933, the son of Rifka and Yechezkiel Bradman. He and his wife Pola’s parents were refugees from Poland and Belarus. Bradman studied law at the Universidad de Havana before it was closed by the government; he later completed his law degree through the “back door,” according to his family. A stint as a lawyer at the National Bank of Cuba was cut short by political upheaval in Cuba, and in 1959 he was appointed a traveling judge for constituents in the Cuban countryside. 

In 1962, he, his wife and daughter fled Cuba “with nothing but six cigars in his pocket, one suitcase of clothes, and a smuggled law degree,” according to a family obituary. “On arriving in Miami, Juan was questioned by immigration authorities to clear up a case of mistaken identity of a cousin with the same name.”

The family continued on to the Yonkers home of an aunt who served as their sponsor, and later settled in Midwood, Brooklyn. Unable to practice law in the United States, he earned a degree from Columbia University, and later a master’s degree in social work. After retiring as a social worker he trained as a docent at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, where he taught about the Holocaust and shared his immigrant background with visitors.

Bradman was an active member of his synagogue’s Men’s Club and served on the board of his children’s school, Yeshiva Rambam.

Survivors include his wife and his daughters, Sheila Feirstein and Miriam Bradman Abrahams.

In her forward to the novel based on her parents’ lives, Bradman Abrahams wrote about the ways their parents’ Cuban, American and Jewish identities shaped the lives of their daughters.

“My parents valued education above all else,” she remembered. “Brooklyn’s public schools were not the best back then. Our parents chose to enroll my sister and me in Jewish day school. How I think, speak and react today, what I cook and eat, how I communicate with my parents, my husband, grown kids, and community are a direct result of being tri-lingual and tri-cultural.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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Three Jewish writers of young-adult fiction are among the 10 most-banned authors on a new list of every book banned in the U.S. 

The list also includes Maus and a graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, along with stories from the Old Testament and nonfiction books about the Holocaust.

“People often say ‘Good for you!’ when they hear one (or several) of my books have been banned,” said Elana K. Arnold, who is one of the Jewish writers on the most-banned list, along with Sarah J. Maas and Jesse Andrews. “I always reply: No. Not good for me. Shame on them, those fear mongers, those haters of liberty, those who seek to ban books.”

The list was compiled by PEN America, a nonprofit organization advocating for free expression, for a report called “Banned in the USA: The Mounting Pressure to Censor.” The report documented 3,362 instances of book bans in U.S. public school classrooms and libraries in the 2022-2023 school year, an increase of 33% from the previous school year. 

The lastest bans took 1,557 titles off the shelves. Many of the targeted books feature content related to race or racism, LGBTQ+ themes or characters, physical abuse, health, grief or death. Work by the three Jewish writers on the top 10 list is not explicitly Jewish in theme or content, but Andrews described her next book, The Blood Years, due out in October, as her “most overtly Jewish book,” historical fiction inspired by her grandmother’s teenage years in Romania. 

Anne Frank and ‘Maus’

While the classic text edition of Anne Frank’s diary, The Diary of a Young Girl, does not appear on the list, Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, does. That adaptation, by David Polonsky and Ari Folman, has been criticized for panels that show Anne walking in a park looking at nude statues and suggesting to a friend that they look at each other’s breasts. 

NBC News reporter Ben Collins posted a short video about the Anne Frank controversy called “How Anne Frank’s diary became porn in Texas.” Collins said the graphic adaptation was banned at a Texas school because it described “a 13-year-old girl’s desire to kiss someone” and used the word “penis.” Collins’ video has been viewed 1 million times. 

Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about his parents’ experiences during the Holocaust, The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, has been repeatedly targeted in recent years for including an image of a naked woman and use of the phrase “God damn.”

A number of books on the list tell stories from both the Old and New Testaments, including books about Moses, Noah, Jonah, Job, Daniel, Miriam, Joseph, Jesus, Mary, Easter, Exodus and Christmas. The basis for those bans were unclear. 

The banned nonfiction books included Life in a Nazi Concentration Camp by Don Nardo and Hitler’s Final Solution by John Allen. 

Who’s banning books?

The report attributed the bans to “coordinated campaigns by a vocal minority of groups and individual actors and, increasingly, as a result of pressure from state legislation.” PEN cited three national advocacy groups as among the most active in seeking book bans: Moms for Liberty, Citizens Defending Freedom and Parents’ Rights in Education. 

More than 40% of all book bans occurred in school districts in Florida, followed by Texas, Missouri, Utah and Pennsylvania. The Daily Beast reported that one individual, Bruce Friedman, is responsible for hundreds of book challenges in Clay County, Florida, including a complaint about a children’s book featuring Arthur the aardvark. (The school ultimately rejected his concerns about Arthur.) The Jerusalem Post identified Friedman as Jewish. 

Friedman, a former New Yorker, declined an interview request from the Forward in a cellphone text. 

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Newly acquitted on election-related offenses, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton blamed George Soros, the Jewish liberal billionaire, for his recent troubles. 

Soros, a Hungarian-born Democratic megadonor and Holocaust survivor, has long been the subject of antisemitic attacks from the far right. 

In a series of interviews on conservative media outlets, Paxton suggested Soros has attempted to rig the judicial system by backing Democratic candidates in local district attorney races and attempting to influence Republican justices in his state. 

A frustrated AG

Paxton has been investigating alleged election-related misconduct since assuming office in 2015. In recent years, his office initiated over 300 inquiries into potential incidents by voters and election officials, according to ProPublica, an investigative news site. They have resulted in only a handful of convictions.

He also failed to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Last year, the all-Republican Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the state’s Constitution forbids the attorney general — an elected member of the executive branch — to unilaterally pursue cases of election law violations without permission from local county prosecutors. 

In a video interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Twitter, now rebranded as X, Paxton — without evidence — said the justices were “put there by George Soros” to restrict his powers, calling it a “genius move.” 

He repeated the claim in a radio interview the following day. “I am convinced that this was an effort by George Soros who got his DAs in all these counties, who now it’s up to them to prosecute,” Paxton said on the Michael Berry Show. 

‘Scapegoating the Jewish people‘

Republicans have repeatedly blamed rising crime on local district attorneys to whom Soros has donated.  According to the Anti-Defamation League, casting a Jewish individual as a puppet master who manipulates politics for malign purposes is a common antisemitic trope. 

Philip Shulman, a spokesperson for American Bridge, a Democratic Party-funded research group, said Paxton should support the values and laws he swore to uphold as the state’s top law enforcement officer “instead of scapegoating the Jewish people for all of his problems.”

Paxton, an ally of former President Donald Trump, has faced criminal investigations in recent years and was charged in 2015 with felony securities fraud. He was recently acquitted by the Texas Senate on 16 impeachment articles that accused him of misconduct, bribery and corruption, after a trial that divided Republicans.

The embattled attorney general said in another interview that the refusal of his fellow Republicans to overturn the court ruling and the efforts to impeach him are all tied to Soros. “The third strategy was, get rid of me,” Paxton told conservative radio host Glenn Beck. “And then there’s no hope. There’s nowhere to go. So that was the goal. They didn’t get rid of me.” 

Paxton has in the past invoked Soros to blast decisions he disliked. Earlier this year he lashed out at a “Soros-backed” prosecutor in Travis County after a jury found Daniel Perry, a U.S. Army sergeant, guilty in the deadly shooting of an armed protester in Austin, Texas, during demonstrations in 2020 in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He also joined other backers of Trump in accusing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg of orchestrating a campaign backed by Soros to undermine the former president. 

A spokesperson for Paxton didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post Newly acquitted Texas attorney general blames George Soros for his troubles appeared first on The Forward.

The speaker of Canada’s House of Commons resigned on Tuesday amid a spiraling scandal over his having led Parliament in a standing ovation Friday for a 98-year-old Ukrainian immigrant who turns out to have fought in a Nazi unit during World War II.

Since the Forward reported Sunday morning on the background of the 98-year-old veteran, Yaroslav Hunka, Jewish groups and Canadian lawmakers have condemned the ovation, and the Polish minister of education said he had “taken steps” toward an extradition of Hunka for atrocities committed against Poles and Jews during the war.

House Speaker Anthony Rota had already apologized for inviting Hunka to Parliament and honoring him after an address by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — as did Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — but he nonetheless stepped down after a meeting Tuesday with leaders of the government and opposition.

“It is with a heavy heart that I rise to inform members of my resignation,” Rota, who has been speaker since 2019 and a member of Parliament since 2015, told the body. “The work of this House is above any of us,” he added. “I reiterate my profound regret.

Hunka’s “public recognition has caused pain to individuals and  communities, including the Jewish communities in Canada and  around the world, and survivors of Nazi atrocities in Poland, among other nations,” Rota continued. “I accept full responsibility for my actions.”

Hunka was a soldier in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, also known as SS Galichina, or SS Galizien. Created by the Third Reich in 1943, the unit was composed of soldiers from the Galicia region who were trained and armed by Germany and under command of SS officers.

It is believed responsible for war crimes including the Huta Pieniacka massacre in 1944, in which 500 to 1,000 Polish villagers were burned alive.

Rota’s resignation came after Poland’s minister of education, Przemysław Czarnek, joined his country’s ambassador to Canada as well as numerous Jewish organizations and Canadian lawmakers in condemning Friday’s ovation.

“In view of the scandalous events in the Canadian Parliament, which involved honouring, in the presence of President Zelenskyy, a member of the criminal Nazi SS Galizien formation,” the minister tweeted on Tuesday, “I have taken steps towards the possible extradition of this man to Poland.”

The post included a screenshot of a letter on the minister’s stationery addressed to the head of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance asking that its researchers “urgently examine documents” that could show Hunka’s involvement in “crimes against Poles or Poles of Jewish origin.” It adds: “Any evidence of such is a basis for getting in touch with Canada to ask for his extradition.”

Canada’s CBC news agency first reported on the extradition possibility. The CBC said that Canada’s attorney general declined to comment because no formal extradition request or outreach has come from the Polish government.

Zelenskyy has not commented on the situation. Canadian Jewish organizations have criticized the decision to celebrate Hunka.

“While we appreciate the apologies of the Canadian government, this should have never happened in the first place,” a spokesperson for the Anti-Defamation League said on Tuesday.

“We cannot stand by and allow the whitewashing of history,” they added. “We echo our partners in Canada: the public and Jewish community is owed a detailed explanation as to how this could possibly have taken place and what steps are being taken to ensure it never happens again.”

The Polish minister’s call for extradition reflects broader tension between Kyiv and Warsaw over what happened in World War II. Ukrainian paramilitaries in addition to SS Galichina carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Poles, with the worst atrocities happening during the Volyn massacres of 1943, when between 70,000 and 100,000 Polish civilians were murdered.

In recent years, Ukraine has sometimes celebrated the units and individuals that perpetrated the slaughter, whitewashing the history as a kind of Ukrainian nationalism.

Poland is one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies in its ongoing war against Russia. But earlier this year, Warsaw denounced the Ukrainian parliament for tweeting out a quote by the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose men were responsible for carrying out the Volyn massacres. The tweet was subsequently taken down.

Hunka’s past with the Waffen-SS was initially reported on Twitter by historian Ivan Katchanovski. The Forward was the first news outlet to report on it.

A spokesperson for the Royal Canadian Legion — the country’s main veterans’ organization — said Tuesday that the group agreed with Trudeau that the Hunka ovation “is a profoundly embarrassing situation,” adding, “this was preventable, and we expect to see new measures such that a shocking scenario like this does not occur again.”

Trudeau’s office referred inquiries to Canada’s Minister of Heritage, who said in a statement, “Hate has no place in our communities.”

“We stand with all those who face violence, loss of dignity, and repression from authoritarian and totalitarian regimes,” the office said in a statement. “We will honour victims as well as survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants by continuing to fight hate and intolerance, protect the most vulnerable, and work to make Canada and the world a safer and more secure place for everyone.”

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