(New York Jewish Week) – When Jewish comedian Michael Hirsch took the stage in the Catskills last month, he quickly realized that the crowd was much older than his typical audience — people who may have gone to shows back when the area was a hotbed of Jewish comedy.

“It was really people who were there for the original run of that, when it was in its heyday,” Hirsch told the New York Jewish Week about the audience at Shadowland Stages in Ellenville, New York. “And me, coming in as a 26-year-old, like, ‘How can I relate to these people?’ was really interesting.”

Comedy used to be a mainstay in the Catskills, a mountainous region once filled with resorts and vacation bungalows across New York’s Sullivan, Ulster and Orange counties. Nicknamed “The Borscht Belt,” the area attracted throngs of Jewish visitors in the mid-20th century. Along with copious amounts of food and family-friendly activities, entertainment — especially comedy — was a central part of the experience: Comedians including Jerry Lewis, Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers, Jackie Mason, Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld performed there early in their careers.

The good times didn’t last — as times and tastes changed, the resorts closed. Today, many of the remaining structures are in disrepair and several have recently caught fire. As the area’s economy faltered, its comedy circuit disappeared.

Perhaps improbably, however, that’s starting to change: Hirsch’s performance last month was the first in a new series of comedy shows organized by the Borscht Belt Museum that aims to bring comedy back to the Catskills.

The movement to re-invigorate Catskills comedy started in earnest last summer with the museum’s inaugural Borscht Belt Festival, which included well-received comedy shows and inspired the museum to host standalone comedy events this year in partnership with the New York Comedy Club, a Manhattan venue with locations in Midtown and the East Village. The first two Borscht Belt Comedy Club shows, as they were called, were scheduled back-to-back on March 16 at Shadowland Stages, and both sold out.

During his set, Hirsch tailored his material to his audience. He dropped terms like “swag” and “Roblox” but decided to leave in the dirty jokes, including a quip about impotence among older people. The crowd went for it, said Hirsch. He got into a back-and-forth with an audience member, likening the exchange to the crowd work that distinguished Borscht Belt comedy in its prime, when comics would engage with audiences during their performances in resort dining rooms.

“This is a room filled with people in their 60s and 70s and 80s and I’m talking about this,” he said. “Making a bunch of old Jewish people laugh from a joke like that was like, ‘Oh yes, that was satisfying.’”

The Borscht Belt Museum’s programming explores the legacy of the region’s comedy and its “impact on mainstream American culture,” said Andrew Jacobs, the president of the museum’s board. The museum opened a pop-up exhibit in Ellenville last summer, and a full opening is slated for next year.

“That’s one of the themes of the museum, is tracing that evolution and helping people understand that these comedians from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s really laid the groundwork for the comedians that we know and love today,” he said. “They’re the inheritors of that tradition so we want people to see how that actually plays out.”

The comedy shows’ popularity demonstrated an interest in “contemporary living comedy,” Jacobs said. “We said, ‘This is something we should really pursue.”

The next Borscht Belt Comedy Shows in Ellenville are scheduled for April 27 and May 11, and the second Borscht Belt Festival will feature a comedy show presented by New York City’s Comedy Cellar on July 29. Meanwhile, the standup pipeline is also working in reverse: The Borscht Belt Comedy Club will make its New York City debut on June 2nd and 3rd at Theater 555 in midtown.

Both comedians and organizers said this new spate of shows — which mirrors a broader re-emergence of stand up in the region —  are an opportunity to celebrate an iconic era in American comedy. Emilio Savone, a co-owner of the New York Comedy Club, said it was a “real thrill” to collaborate with the Borscht Belt Museum on the stand-up shows.

“For us it was a no-brainer,” he said.

Most of the comedians booked for the shows are Jewish, like Hirsch, or have connections to the region. “We want to be mindful this is a proud, rich history of a Jewish community and we definitely want to provide solid comics that will connect with them and we think strong Jewish comedians will be able to do that,” Savone said, adding that the shows will bring in other viewpoints as well.

“At the end of the day,” he said, “funny is funny and people want funny.”

One of the comedians in the March show, Eitan Levine, said he often performs at Jewish institutions including Hillels, Chabad houses and synagogues, making his routines a good fit for the Borscht Belt. His sets include jokes about his Holocaust survivor grandmother, his dating life as an Ashkenazi Jew, and how Jewish law firms don’t use jingles in their advertisements.

“Every single Jewish law firm’s radio ad is just some dude yelling, ‘My name is Josh Lowenfeld and you’re entitled to compensation!’ They all sound like Bernie Sanders at every debate,” he said. “That feels kind of Jewy, kind of Borscht Belt-y.”

Of course, comedy has undergone a sea change since the 1950s. Savone said that Borscht Belt comedians typically took a traditional approach, with performers doing “typical set up, punch lines.” Today, however, many “podcast comics,” as he calls them, use a more personal and longform approach.

“The Borscht Belt style of going out there like Rodney Dangerfield and doing one-liners that don’t really feel super connected to the comic, I think that is definitely done,” Levine said. “I think that audiences want to see material that doesn’t just feel like someone is reading off a script that they took out of ‘How to be Funny 101,’ the textbook. They want material that is connected to the person.”

“There is a way to merge those two things,” he added. “There is still room for a new generation of comics, Jewish comics who identify and storytell in a specific way.”

Hirsch cited Jewish comedian Andy Kaufman, who performed in the Borscht Belt, as an inspiration, but agreed that comedy has since evolved into different styles “like a river delta with a bunch of tributaries.” He described his style of comedy as “kind of like if Spongebob came to life. Weird, goofy, fun, high energy.” The Catskills shows could provide a new outlet for younger comics from the city to get on the road and try their material in front of new audiences, he said.

Hirsch, who grew up in a Jewish household in suburban Detroit, said Jewish audiences tend to be more involved than others — and for comics, crowd work harkening back to to the Borscht Belt era was a “necessary skill.”

“It just keeps the crowd engaged and it makes it more personal for them,” he said.

The forthcoming Borscht Belt Comedy shows are curated by comics Alejandro Morales, Anddy Egan-Thorpe and David Lonstein, who all grew up in the region and will perform at the April show alongside Christian Finnegan, a well-known comic who has appeared on Comedy Central, VH1 and “Chappelle’s Show.”

Morales was born to immigrant parents from Chile who met while working in the dining room at the Nevele Grand, one of the more prominent resorts that has since been abandoned. He grew up in Ellenville and worked at the hotel in the 1990s and early 2000s as a busboy, bellhop and at the front desk.

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At the time, “the live entertainment of the heyday of the region was done,” he said. Live comedy was “only on television,” and the nearest club was a venue called Bananas in Poughkeepsie, over an hour away.

Despite missing out on the era’s peak, Morales rattled off a list of Jewish Borscht Belt performers that he looked up to: Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers, Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar, Jackie Mason and Carl Reiner.

“Stand-up comedy really gestated in the Borscht Belt,” he said. “Stand-up comedy as it exists today only exists because of all the artistic fires that blazed in the middle of the 20th century, so I think we owe a great debt to that region.”

Though Morales now lives in Philadelphia, he sees the Borscht Belt series as a homecoming, as well as an opportunity to reinvigorate the local economy.

“I feel hugely privileged to be able to take part in restoring the Hudson Valley, the Catskills, the Borscht Belt to its previous glory,” he said. “It would be such a dream come true to sort of reinvigorate the region to what it was before I was even around.”

Morales said that, as a queer Catholic-raised atheist from a South American family, he identifies with the Borscht Belt as a refuge for outsiders. Jews began traveling to the area because many hotels at the time barred Jewish visitors, and other groups also found refuge in the region — a bungalow colony called Casa Susanna hosted LGBTQ people in the 1960s, and the Peg Leg Bates Country Club catered to Black Americans.

In that vein, while most of the comics in the upcoming shows are Jewish, Morales is also seeking to bring in more diverse viewpoints.

“One of the aspects of the Borscht Belt that really resonates with me is that it started as an outpost for outsiders,” he said. “Jewish folks were not allowed to vacation anywhere else so they created a home for themselves, to feel welcome, to have their own entertainment and I love that idea of featuring and supporting outsiders.”

(New York Jewish Week) — My son is in town from California for Passover, and on Tuesday night he treated the rest of the family to a Mets game.

Before the first pitch, the Mets had a moment of silence for the pitcher Carl Erskine, who died that day at age 97. Erskine was a star of the storied Brooklyn Dodgers teams of the late 1940s and ’50s, when they won the National League pennant five times and the 1955 World Series. 

Erskine was also the last surviving Dodger to have been profiled in Roger Kahn’s classic 1972 book “The Boys of Summer,” a celebration of a team that included Jackie Robinson — the first player to break the major leagues’ shameful color line — and future Hall of Famers Roy Campanella, Duke Snider and Pee Wee Reese. (Sandy Koufax was a rookie on the 1955 team, but only came into his own after the team moved to Los Angeles in 1957.) 

Erskine’s death seemed to close a storied chapter in New York and, dare I say it, Jewish history. The Dodgers ruled the National League when the Jews ruled — or at least left an indelible cultural stamp on — Brooklyn. In 1950, one out of four Brooklynites — 561,000 — was Jewish. And often the fate of the team — scrappy strivers who rose from adversity — seemed to mirror the fate of the Jews themselves. 

“Arguably, no baseball team ever forged a closer relationship with Jewish fans than did the Dodgers during their Brooklyn years,” Bill Simon, co-editor of “The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture,” wrote in 2022. “In other New York City boroughs, the Yankees and Giants had their Jewish adherents, as did Major League Baseball teams in other cities, but in Brooklyn the Dodgers drilled deep into the social fabric.”

Kahn captures that connection in his book, which includes his own memories of growing up Jewish in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza section, the son of two teachers. Even mediocre Dodgers teams provided a distraction from conversations about “the Nazi-Soviet treaty, nervousness about the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and horror at Hitler’s pogroms.”

Philip Roth celebrated the team in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” when his Jewish protagonist fantasizes about playing center field for the Dodgers, “standing without a care in the world in the sunshine, like my king of kings, the Lord my God, The Duke Himself (Snider, Doctor, the name may come up again), standing there as loose and as easy, as happy as I will ever be, just waiting by myself under a high fly ball…”

Kahn describes an era in Brooklyn that began after World War II, when what had been a “heterogenous, dominantly middle-class community, with remarkable schools, good libraries and … major league baseball” was about to be riven by racial tension in the streets and white flight to the suburbs.

But with Robinson, Jews saw an avatar for their own acceptance in white society.

“It really delighted people, particularly Jewish Americans, that Jackie Robinson was on this team,” the novelist and historian Kevin Baker, author of the new book “The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City,” told me Thursday. “It seemed like another affirmation that this was going to be a fairer country, a country where they could get a fair shake.”

I reached Baker at Citi Field, the Mets’ home in Queens, shortly before an afternoon game against the Pittsburgh Pirates. In his book, the first of a projected two volumes, he punctures the myth that baseball is a “pastoral” game born in rural America, and writes that its real roots are in the streets of New York.

And as a city game, baseball reflected the ethnic diversity of those streets. “Starting in the 1930s, ethnic America, and particularly Jewish and Catholic America, were recognized as full Americans in politics, in the movies, in sports,” said Baker. “And Brooklyn was always kind of a cliche of that.”

That recognition didn’t extend to African Americans, but in the pre-Civil Rights era, Brooklynites could nonetheless imagine, thanks to Robinson, a more tolerant future. While players, umpires and journalists elsewhere were still viciously racist, Kahn writes, the Dodgers “stood together in purpose and for the most part in camaraderie… That spirit leaped from the field into the surrounding two-tiered grandstand. A man felt it; it became part of him, quite painlessly.”

One of those men was Erskine, a devout Christian from Indiana, who years after he retired wrote a book, “What I Learned From Jackie Robinson.” “Jackie made people look beyond race, inside their own souls, inside the depths that made them human, and see the light,” he wrote. Erskine, whose youngest son was born with Down syndrome, also credited Robinson with helping change perceptions about people with disabilities. 

Erskine never played for the Mets, but the team has always seen itself as the spiritual heirs to the Dodgers: the working-class foils to the blue blood Yankees (even as, Baker pointed out, the Yankees tended to recruit more players of color than the Mets starting in the 1970s). Citi Field even took its design cues from Ebbets Field, the old Flatbush home of the Dodgers. 

I’ve tried to explain this to my son, who wonders why Citi Field’s main entrance is named for Robinson when he never wore a Mets uniform (as far as I am concerned, every Major League stadium should have a Jackie Robinson Rotunda). I also explain how my mother, born and raised in Queens, was a die-hard Dodgers fan until they decamped to California, and embraced the Mets when they played their first dismal season in 1962. I’ll never forget her joy when the Mets sealed their first World Series in 1969.

I was shocked to realize that Kahn, who was 92 when he died in 2020, interviewed the Dodger greats less than 20 years after they retired, when they were only in their late 40s and early 50s. The book looks back on their era as if from a different century, not just two decades. But so much had changed that it might as well have been another century: Martin Luther King was dead. The Vietnam War was raging. Brooklyn’s “Jewish” neighborhoods were less so (this was years before gentrification, the mass immigration of Soviet Jews and the explosive growth of the haredi Orthodox community).

As a result, Kahn’s book is not only nostalgic, but elegiac. In writing about an aging baseball player, he might as well have been writing about a way of life: “As his major league career is ending, all things will end. However high he sprang, he was always earthbound. Mortality embraces him. The golden age has passed as in a moment. So will all things. So will all moments. Memento Mori.”

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The number of FBI investigations into anti-Jewish hate crimes tripled in the months after Oct. 7, FBI director Christopher Wray told Jewish leaders on a call Wednesday.

Wray also warned that, amid the Israel-Iran conflict, Iranian proxies could attack targets on American soil.

“For just a few days after the Oct. 7 attack, we’d already seen a rapid uptick in threats to Jewish people in the United States,” Wray said a call with Jewish community security officials and lay leaders.

“Since then, we’ve seen the threat elevated,” he added. “So to be more specific, between Oct. 7 and Jan. 30 of this year, we opened over three times more anti Jewish hate crime investigations than in the four months before Oct. 7.”

That message came a day after an annual report by the Anti-Defamation League likewise showed a surge in antisemitism following Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked Israel, launching the ongoing war in Gaza.

World leaders have worried that the war could expand into a regional conflict. That threat that increased last weekend when Iran directly attacked Israel with hundreds of drones and missiles in retaliation for an Israeli strike on Iranian military officials in Damascus. Israel and its allies repelled Iran’s attack and it is now discussing how to respond.

President Joe Biden has tried to dissuade Israel from ramping up the conflict. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We will make our decisions ourselves. The State of Israel will do whatever is necessary to defend itself.”

But in the call, Wray cautioned that the Iran-Israel conflict may not stay limited to the Middle East, and could spark an attack by Iranian proxies in the American “homeland.”

“Following Iran’s direct and brazen attack on Israel over the weekend, and given the what I would say is just the sheer volatility and fluidity of the environment abroad, we are urging all of our partners here and around the world to stay vigilant and on also their feet when it comes to potential for threats that may emerge from Iran, or its proxies, both overseas and even here in the homeland,” Wray said.

Wray did not say there was any indication that Iran would directly attack the U.S. Jewish community. Michael Masters, the director of the Secure Community Network, the Jewish security agency that organized the call, also said there were no known specific threats on the community.

“We are not aware at this time of any direct known threat to the Jewish community or any of our institutions domestically,” he said.

Wray said Iran has previously tried to execute attacks in the United States.

“Back just over the past few years, Iran has brazenly planned or attempted several assassinations of former U.S. officials, U.S. journalists here on U.S. soil,” he said, apparently referring to active threats against John Bolton, the former National Security Adviser, and Masih Alinejad, a journalist who has been critical of the country. “A lot of Iranians actions have been motivated by a desire to retaliate.”

Wray added the Iranian threat to others potentially targeting U.S. Jews, including “lone wolves,” violent individuals motivated by hate speech doctrines, and specific threats by foreign terrorist groups, including ISIS and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He said the FBI is “increasingly concerned” about terror attacks following the recent attack by a branch of ISIS on a Russian concert hall.

Masters in an interview after the call described the threat following the Iran attack as “escalated.”

“We have been and we remain concerned with the threat from Iran and its proxies, particularly post-April 13,” he said. “And you know, this is on top of an already elevated threatened environment. This is, as the director clearly pointed out, a rogues’ gallery. Unfortunately, the rogues’ gallery is united in their desire to undermine if not end or attack the Jewish community. So it really is a time of escalated threat.”

He warned communities not to engage with protesters. “The best way to avoid a confrontation is not to enter one,” he said.

(JTA) — When the question came, Columbia University’s president was ready. Her answer was “Yes.”

Just minutes into a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism on Wednesday, Nemat Shafik had been asked, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia’s code of conduct?”

It was a knowing repeat of the now-infamous question that cost the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania their jobs. When those two leaders faced the same House panel in December amid rising antisemitism on their campuses, they hedged in their answers. This time a Democrat, Oregon Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, posed the question, defanging it before it could be claimed by Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, who posed it in December. 

Shafik, who assumed the presidency days before the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, avoided the December hearing owing to her travel schedule. On Wednesday, she and her three co-panelists — two of whom are Jewish and all of whom are in positions of senior leadership at Columbia — answered in the affirmative. 

Their responses led one Republican to sarcastically congratulate them on “beating” Harvard, Penn and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose president also spoke at the last hearing. 

The exchange demonstrated how the discourse on campus antisemitism has changed since the December hearing — as well as how Shafik aimed to distinguish herself from the three university presidents who testified then. Columbia, like other schools across the country, has had a volatile climate surrounding the Israel-Hamas war (as Shafik prepared to testify, competing pro-Palesitinan and pro-Israel protests were taking shape on campus). 

But over the course of the hearing, Shafik pointed to actions she’s taken to curb antisemitism, such as suspending pro-Palestinian student groups; agreed that some professors had crossed the line with their rhetoric; and in general avoided the kinds of viral stumbles that doomed her counterparts at Penn and Harvard. 

“One of the things I’ve said over and over is that antisemitism isn’t a problem for Jewish people to solve,” Shafik said. “It’s actually a problem for all of us.”

Shafik’s effort to show that she was on top of the issue was countered at times by Republicans and a few Democrats. They instead sought to advance the narrative that Shafik and her leadership had been negligent in their handling of antisemitism on campus since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.

“You have no action, no disciplinary action,” Stefanik told Shafik, accusing her and Columbia of being too lenient on faculty who have made comments supporting the Oct. 7 attacks. Hearing that one of the disciplinary steps taken against Joseph Massad, a professor who praised the Hamas attacks, included a stern discussion, Stefanik added, “Speaking to these professors is not enough. And it’s sending a message across the university that this is tolerated, these antisemitic statements from a person with a position of authority in this classroom is tolerated.”

Shafik and the other administrators said they would not grant Massad tenure today knowing his history of praising groups like Hamas.

Shafik addressed a series of contentious questions surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian campus debate. She called various pro-Palestinian chants “incredibly hurtful” and “upsetting,” including “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which many Jews interpret as calls for violence against them. 

She hedged on the campaign to boycott Israel, calling it “a political movement,” as well as on the term “globalize the intifada,” which she said “some people don’t” hear as antisemitic. 

And she defended the school’s course offerings on Israel and Jewish history by pointing to its academic partnership with the Jewish Theological Seminary, a Conservative Jewish institution that runs an undergraduate college whose students study at Columbia.

She stated that faculty on campus who have praised Hamas since Oct. 7, as well as at least one pro-Israel faculty member — outspoken university critic Shai Davidai — are currently under investigation, and that several students have been disciplined or suspended for participation in antisemitic and harassing incidents. 

Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, a prominent critic of Israel, asked Shafik directly about attacks from Davidai, a business school professor who has condemned the university since shortly after Oct. 7 for not doing enough, in his view, to protect Jewish students. Pro-Palestinian students have accused him of targeting them.

“As president, I’m used to being attacked,” Shafik responded. “But attacking our students is unacceptable, and in that case, we’ve had more than 50 complaints about that professor.”

On X, formerly Twitter, Davidai accused Shafik of lying. 

“The President of Columbia knows for a FACT that I’ve never attacked any of our students,” he wrote. “She knows I have been only speaking out against pro-Islamic Jihad organizations, their radical leaders, and terrorist-loving professors. She lied under oath.”

Shafik also highlighted measures Columbia has taken to try to curb antisemitism on campus, including restricting non-student access to campus, and suspending the anti-Zionist groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine when they failed to follow rules governing student protest on campus. 

“I think that was a very powerful symbol, to say if students don’t abide by the rules there will be consequences,” she said about the suspensions.

Still, Shafik and the other panelists — Columbia antisemitism taskforce co-chair and former law school dean David Schizer, and board of trustees co-chairs David Greenwald and Claire Shipman — acknowledged that antisemitism has been a problem on campus and they have more work to do to fix it.

At various times, Stefanik — a Donald Trump ally who became an unlikely hero to many Jews after her December grilling of the university presidents — tried to catch Shafik in the act of changing her testimony. 

After Shafik stated that she has not seen any campus protests “against Jewish people,” in the words of Omar, Stefanik pushed her on whether she believed that various chants caught on tape at campus protests, including “F–k the Jews,” were antisemitic. Other Republicans questioned Columbia’s commitment to diversity by suggesting that pro-Israel students were repressing their views.

Holding up a dog tag, which pro-Israel activists have taken to wearing to signify the plight of Israeli hostages in Gaza, Republican Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan suggested that, as a student, he might have to “quietly take it off so my professor wouldn’t see it, a professor who holds my academic career in the palm of his hands. That’s free speech? That’s diversity?”

Other lawmakers, including Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens, a Democrat, also cited the Anti-Defamation League’s recent “D” grade for Columbia’s approach to antisemitism — in a report card released by the antisemitism watchdog that many Jewish campus leaders have criticized as too blunt an instrument.

Brian Cohen, executive director of Columbia/Barnard College Hillel, attended the hearing and praised Columbia’s performance in an email to his community after it ended. 

“The transparency demonstrated today by University leadership must continue,” Cohen wrote. But, he added, “We should not need a Congressional hearing to know that the University is holding accountable those members of the community who violate policies and that the University is ensuring that Jewish students ‘can continue in their academic pursuits without fear for their personal security or other serious intrusions on their ability to teach and to study.’”

The hearing came during a particularly sensitive moment for Columbia, which has faced multiple Title VI discrimination investigations and lawsuits over how it has addressed activism surrounding Israel. 

One of those lawsuits was referenced during the hearing: an anonymous Israeli student sued the university for suspending and publicly reprimanding him after he sprayed pro-Palestinian protesters with what Shafik referred to as “an odorous substance.”

At times, some representatives suggested that protests at Columbia may have especially high stakes. Quoting a passage from the Bible about the “covenant” between God and Israel, Georgia Rep. Rick Allen asked Shafik whether allowing negative dialogue about Israel at the university would set them on a path to damnation.

“Do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God?” the Republican asked.

“Definitely not,” Shafik replied.

Jackie Hajdenberg contributed reporting.

(JTA) — The mother of 23-year-old Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7, is one of nearly a dozen Jews on Time Magazine’s 100 “Most Influential” list, couched among comedians, writers, music producers, athletes, business executives, and politicians.

Since Oct. 7, Rachel Goldberg-Polin has become one of the most prominent and indefatigable voices advocating for the release of Israeli hostages held captive in Gaza. She has attended an audience with Pope Francis, Zoomed with President Joe Biden and spoken at the United Nations, in addition to cultivating a devoted following on social media.

“I want to thank TIME for my inclusion on the TIME100 and for recognizing the significance and gravity of the hostage crisis and the need for the world to advocate on their behalf, until each one is returned home,” Goldberg-Polin said in a statement.

“I pray this platform will help compel the world not to forsake these remaining 133 souls, who hail from 25 countries, 5 religions and range in age from 15 months to 86 years old, and who have now been held captive in Gaza for 194 days,” she added. “We must not turn a blind eye to the suffering of these human beings, along with the suffering of all innocents in Gaza.”

Other Jewish figures on this year’s list include comedian Alex Edelman; author James McBride; Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle; and musician and producer Jack Antonoff. Here’s what you need to know about this year’s Jewish notables (and catch up on last year’s list here).

• Jack Antonoff is a music producer known for his work with artists such as Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, The Chicks. He’s also a musician himself, as the lead singer of The Bleachers and the former guitarist and drummer in the band Fun.
• Yoshua Bengio is a Turing Prize-winning Canadian computer scientist specializing in the social and ethical impact of artificial intelligence. He was born in France to a Moroccan Jewish family, including a father who performed in Judeo-Arabic.
• Tory Burch is a New York-based fashion designer whose designs popularized the travel ballet flat in the 2010s and whose brand has seen a renaissance of cool in the past year. The Tory Burch Foundation has also provided more than $100 million in loans to women entrepreneurs and promotes gender equality.
• Alex Edelman, who grew up Orthodox in the suburbs of Boston, has had a banner year, with his standup special “Just for Us,” about his infiltration into a white supremacist meeting in New York, premiering on HBO earlier this month after seven years of touring, including on Broadway. Edelman has said he is considering making his next special about Israel, but the past six months have affected his thinking.
• Larry Ellison is the co-founder of software company Oracle, currently serving as its chief technology officer. He famously refused to have a bar mitzvah because Hebrew school conflicted with baseball practice.
• Ynon Kreiz is the Israeli-born CEO of Mattel. His recognition that the company possessed intellectual property geared to children “second only to Disney,” as he told the New Yorker, paved the way for the mega box office hit “Barbie” in 2023.
• James McBride, the son of a Jewish mother and African-American father, won two National Jewish Book Awards for 2023 for “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store,” a book about Black and Jewish residents in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. His 2013 novel “The Good Lord Bird” about abolitionist soldiers at Harpers Ferry in 1859 was adapted for a miniseries in 2020, and starred Ethan Hawke, who wrote McBride’s entry for the Time 100.
• Maya Rudolph is a comedian and actress and “Saturday Night Live” alum. She learned via a 2016 episode of PBS’ “Finding Your Roots” that her great-grandfather moved to Pittsburgh from Vilna in 1902 and was a founding member of a synagogue in his new city.
• Norah Weinstein is the co-CEO of Baby2Baby, a nonprofit organization that provides items like diapers to parents in financial need. Her own children attended a Jewish preschool in Los Angeles and she has said she is inspired by the Jewish concept of tikkun olam.

Not Jewish but … Javier Milei is the recently elected president of Argentina. He is Catholic but recently said at an event in Miami that his grandfather was told he was Jewish. Milei is close with Rabbi Shimon Axel Wahnish, whom he has nominated to be Argentina’s ambassador to Israel, and has said he hopes to convert to Judaism one day.

(JTA) — As Jews around the world read the haggadah at their seder tables every year, they encounter a passage instructing them to see themselves as if they personally left Egypt. This year, some of them will also have on their seder tables a symbol of the perseverance of women traumatized in captivity.

In light of testimony that Israeli women have suffered rape and sexual assault at the hands of Hamas, Rabbanit Leah Sarna is encouraging seder participants to connect with the Israelite women of long ago by putting a mirror on their tables.

Those women, according to Jewish tradition, used mirrors in the course of reempowering themselves after facing sexual trauma — a way, Sarna wrote in the Jewish publication Lehrhaus, of “fighting to create Jewish babies” and reclaiming their autonomy.

“Recall the historic suffering and endurance of Jewish women past and present, and let us hope and pray that that same healing will someday be found by our brothers — and especially sisters — in Gaza being tortured today,” Sarna wrote.

Sarna’s mirror custom is one of many that rabbis, educators and Jewish organizations have put forward as Jews seek to use the ritual canvas of the seder as an opportunity to grapple with the Oct. 7 attack, the Israel-Hamas war and the estimated 130 hostages still held captive in Gaza.

The holiday, which begins Monday evening, comes as the war has passed the six-month mark, while Iran’s unprecedented attack on Israel has raised alarm throughout that country and beyond. Meanwhile, there is no immediate prospect on the horizon for the hostages’ release. In response, some of the new rituals add to the seder’s symbolism, while others seek to adapt age-old practices to the present day.

“Something that’s helpful and so beautiful about the seder ritual is this feeling of contextualization of Jewish oppression,” Sarna, a rabbi and educator at the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education in New York City, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The oppression and resistance of Jewish women, she said, “has to be a part of that story.”

She added, “It’s a part of our story now. And it’s been a part of our story, I would say, since Egypt, and I think we need to write it in more explicitly than we ever have before.”

Sarna isn’t the only one placing women at the center of her ritual innovation. This year, Jewish Women International is encouraging families to add flowers to their seder plates, “as a way to stand in solidarity with the women of Israel — to honor the memory of those who we lost at the hands of Hamas and other terrorists, to give hope to those who survived, and to share our strength with those who are still held hostage.”

One Jewish website suggests adding pomegranates to the seder plate “as a symbol of standing with Israeli women” and offers a free two-page haggadah supplement on the topic. The practice of adding new items to the seder plate has been adopted in the past to draw attention to issues ranging from feminism to unjust labor practices.

Some are adapting rituals created for crises of recent decades. Next week, many seder tables will include an empty seat to represent the hostages — a gesture that was made last year on behalf of jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and, before that, for Soviet Jewry. Some families will place a yellow ribbon on their tables, a symbol that has come to represent advocacy for the hostages’ release, while some will also wear yellow.

Others hope to allude to the hostages by taking away from the seder table, rather than adding to it. In an essay for JTA, Rabbi Elie Kaufner suggests using less matzah at seders this year to draw attention to the feeling of absence.

“With more than 130 of our people literally in captivity, the shock of seeing fewer matzot at the table, when we are used to seeing plenty, is appropriate,” Kaufner wrote.

The new rituals come alongside the perennial bevy of supplements to the traditional haggadah text that seek to make the holiday’s themes relevant to the present day. This year, a number of haggadah supplements aim to help families discuss Oct. 7 and its aftermath during their seders — from reimagining the “Four Questions” to reflections on other central Passover texts like “Dayenu” or the admonition that in every generation an enemy will attempt to destroy the Jewish people.

Rabbi David Lau, the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel, shared a Passover prayer for the release of the hostages, meant to be recited before that passage. The prayer asks God to “bless and protect our captive brothers and sisters,” return them “in peace to their families and homes” and “plant brotherhood, peace and friendship in the heart of all.”

Others encourage adding new meaning to existing Passover customs.

In a blog post for the site Ritualwell, Rabbi Judith Edelman-Green suggests inviting seder attendees to write their own interpretations of the Ten Plagues. For blood, Edelman-Green writes, one could think of “the young women and men who were brutally murdered at the Nova Festival” on Oct. 7. For darkness, “Where has Hope gone? Where is the Holy work of peace between peoples? Where is the government who takes care of her citizens?”

Edelman-Green also offers a new way to think about the four children discussed during the seder. Instead of the traditional characterizations — wise, wicked, simple and the child who does not know how to ask — she suggests others, including a brave child to represent those who fought in the war, or “the daughter who could not scream” for the victims of Hamas’ sexual abuses.

The iCenter, a nonprofit focused on Israeli education, offers an online guide to 12 different moments in the seder, adapted for this year. “From a reflection of a mother and daughter who have just returned to their home in Kibbutz Sa’ad, to an exploration of art created to remember the hostages,” the website reads.

The hagaddah’s text recognizes that Jewish history repeats itself, something that Rabbi Danielle Upbin says makes new rituals superfluous.

“Regarding the current crisis in Israel, no additional items are necessary,” Upbin wrote in the Jewish Press of Tampa Bay. “The traditional Passover Seder already speaks volumes. The Haggadah itself is a flavorful dissertation on the dichotomy between destitution and resilience, darkness and light, captivity and freedom. The Haggadah calls us to read the current crisis into its pages.”

Sarna agreed that the seder is an inviting setting to discuss thorny topics. She said she recently heard from a friend who recalled being at a family gathering when two sisters began to argue about Israel.

“And then they said, ‘Oh, forget it. Let’s leave it for the seder,’” Sarna recounted.

“The seder itself describes, through the four sons, but also in other ways, groups of people who sit around having a seder arguing with each other and approaching things from really different perspectives, but they all come back to the table every year,” Sarna added. “And that’s the best we can hope for this year.”

This story is part of an occasional series examining life during wartime at Israel’s northern border.

MAJDAL SHAMS, Israel (JTA) — For each of the last four winters, Mount Hermon ski area CEO Refael Nave spent practically every day at the mountain whose peaks straddle the borders of Syria, Lebanon and Israel.

As the only place in Israel to see regular snowfall, the Hermon’s Israeli recreation area drew 400,000 visitors in the winter of 2022-’23. Some skied, but most came simply to experience snow, ride a gondola up to a lookout point at an altitude of 7,300 feet, sled and ride the Hermon’s mountain coaster. Over the summer, management invested in myriad upgrades in anticipation of even more visitors.

But this winter not a single paying visitor was able to come to the year-round attraction in the northern Golan Heights. The Hermon was shut down by military order on Oct. 7, the day Hamas terrorists flooded into southern Israel and set off a war that quickly spread to northern Israel. The mountain still hasn’t reopened to the public.

Nave still spent much of this winter shuttling back and forth between the Hermon and his home in Neve Ativ, the alpine-style village that is the highest-altitude Jewish town in Israel. Except he did so armed with an automatic weapon and wearing military fatigues as a soldier in the reserves and a member of Neve Ativ’s security squad.

The Hermon, which doubles as a military zone and even in normal times has soldiers stationed at chairlifts, has come under frequent attack by Hezbollah over the last six months – including during Saturday’s attack by Iran. Nave is at the mountain almost every day, supervising maintenance work and coordinating with the army.

“The outposts in the Hermon come under fire all the time,” Nave said in an interview in Neve Ativ, his automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. “We’ve had winters before with a day closed here or there, but not like this.”

This is the first time since the ski mountain opened in the winter of 1968-’69 after Israel captured the area from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War that the Hermon has missed an entire season. As a consequence, the entire economy dependent on the mountain is suffering, affecting not just the 300 Hermon employees who have been furloughed but also the hotels, restaurants, sports shops, roadside vendors and other area businesses that depend on tourists.

“We’re 100% down from a regular year,” said Talia Welli, the owner of a sports store in the nearby Druze town of Mas’ade that sells sleds, winter coats, gloves and ski hats in addition to bicycles and other year-round equipment.

“In a regular winter there’s nonstop traffic here every morning and evening,” said a Welli employee who identified himself only as Hamed. “There would be lines at the restaurants. The Friday outdoor market that sells tourists everything from perfume to vegetables would be packed. This year there was nothing. Even the snow didn’t come.”

Instead of looking for snow, residents of Mas’ade scan the skies for attacks by rocket or drone. Authorities installed concrete shelters on some streets to provide protection to the residents of Mas’ade, who typically don’t have bomb shelters in their homes, but during attacks most bystanders stay outside looking up, according to Hamed.

“People go outside to see what will fall,” he said. “A month ago we saw a drone shot down.”

On Saturday night, when Iran used over 300 ballistic missiles, drones and cruise missiles to attack Israel, the air raid siren in Masa’de sounded four times over the course of 10 minutes, all around 2 a.m. And on Wednesday, 18 people were injured in an Arab town in Israel’s north, though 60 miles west, when a rocket fired by Hezbollah from Lebanon struck a community center.

Closer to the Hermon, the town of Majdal Shams serves as the capital of the Golan’s Druze. According to the dictates of their opaque religion, Druze pay fealty to their home country — and because the Golan was seized from Syria during the 1967 war, local Druze ostensibly remain loyal to their “native country” of Syria. (Druze who live elsewhere in Israel are loyal Israelis, and many serve in the country’s military.)

But over the decades and particularly since the Assad regime stepped up its killing of Syrian civilians in that country’s civil war, enthusiasm for the principle of loyalty to Damascus has dwindled. Many Golan Druze, especially young people, have taken Israeli citizenship.

Shahbaa Abu Kheir runs the View Hotel in Majdal Shams, a two-year-old boutique hotel that overlooks small agricultural fields, cherry orchards and the Syrian border. Last winter, the 13-room hotel was fully booked almost every night, with rooms going for over $350 per night, including breakfast.

Then came Oct. 7.

“I had full bookings and everyone canceled to run to reserve duty that very day,” Abu Kheir recalled. Since then, the hotel has seen very few guests.

“People are scared to come here because it’s a border area,” she said. “We have sirens only about once a week but there’s frequent booming from Israeli artillery fire toward Lebanon.”

As she was speaking, a Druze family of 10 from Daliyat al-Carmel, just south of Haifa, arrived for check-in. They were the only guests expected that night.

“The Druze are the only ones who come now,” Abu Kheir lamented. “We have no way of moving forward. It’s horrible.”

Israel’s government provides some compensation for some affected businesses and residents. However, eligibility and the amount depends on a number of factors, including location and type of business, and the compensation often is minimal, nonexistent or late to arrive.

For example, only in early April did the government announce it was extending its business compensation program for the months of January and February. Tourism- and agriculture-related businesses have easier eligibility requirements than other businesses. Businesses in the Golan aren’t eligible for the same compensation levels as businesses in the evacuation zone of the northern Galilee. Other determinative location criteria include what kinds of Homefront Command restrictions are in place there, the quantity of military activity, road closures, the presence of artillery batteries in the area and more.

At the Hermon, any government aid that the furloughed workers receive constitutes only a fraction of their regular salaries, according to Nave.

“It’s a small amount. It’s not enough to live off of,” Nave said. “I just received my own payments for November and December and it barely covers my property taxes.”

In Nave’s case, he is able to receive the balance of his regular compensation because he is in active army reserve duty. That’s not the case for the vast majority of the Hermon’s regular workers, most of whom are Druze.

For these workers, as for everyone in northern Israel, the economic future is uncertain. It’s not clear how long the war and its aftereffects will last, and the government’s compensation criteria are in constant flux.

Sania Abu Saleh has a Druze restaurant in Majdal Shams at one of the last bends on the windy road that leads to the Hermon, next door to a ski equipment rental shop that stayed closed throughout this winter.

“Normally everybody stops by here to buy Druze pita. They eat hot corn. They sip tea and buy warm sachlav” — a thick milky drink made from corn starch, sugar and spices. “Now I have nothing. There are no people. There’s no work. Soldiers stop in from time to time but not many,” she said.

The gate to the Hermon sits just a few hundred yards up the road, and the military traffic in and out is constant.

The Hermon doesn’t use snowmaking equipment, so skiing depends entirely on the fickle weather. Last winter the mountain was able to open its ski runs for 27 days during the season. This winter, the chairlifts ran only when members of the Israel Defense Forces’ alpine unit needed to train. When a fierce snowstorm hit, members of the unit went out in the driving wind and snow to practice reaching their outposts by foot in the harshest conditions.

By early April, the only snow left on the mountain was at high altitude and mostly in Syrian territory, but the snowy summit was visible from most of the Golan and a big chunk of the northern Galilee. Because of the terrain, there’s no actual border fence in the area separating Israel from Syria and Lebanon.

At a ski expo in Europe that the Hermon’s CEO attended a couple of years ago, a snowmaking equipment company invited him to dinner along with some ski industry people from Lebanon. At first the Lebanese were taken aback to be dining with Israelis, Nave recalled, but they warmed up over the course of dinner.

After a long meal, Nave said, the Lebanese confessed that they had been taught from birth that Jews are evil and should be hated but that the experience of the evening had showed them otherwise. They finished the night with a l’chaim toasting a vision that one day peace might enable a joint ski pass connecting ski mountains in Lebanon, Israel and Syria.

These days Nave isn’t sanguine. On Saturday night during Iran’s attack, Israel took fire both from Lebanon and Syria.

“We want peace, but the reality is we have neighbors who don’t want us,” he said. “They’ve been training for years and years for this — to conquer all of the Galilee.”

Nave still has big dreams for the Hermon, the most ambitious of which would be the opening of a ski-in/ski-out hotel so guests can stay in the area overnight. But for now he’s setting his sights on something more mundane: reopening. It doesn’t seem like it will happen anytime soon.

“In my conversations with the military command I was told, ‘Let’s talk after the summer,’” Nave said. “How can we go on like this?”

(JTA) — The hearing in Congress on Dec. 5 could hardly have been more consequential: Two of the three elite university presidents who testified about antisemitism on their campuses soon resigned, while their leading interrogator, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, morphed into an unlikely hero for American Jews, including many who tend to lean liberal.

Now, the congressional panel investigating antisemitism on college campuses is, for the first time, reconvening to grill another college president about what’s been happening at her school amid protests over the Israel-Hamas war. They have subpoenaed Nemat Shafik, president of Columbia University, which has been a hotbed of tensions since the war’s start with Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

Shafik, an Egyptian-born economist who goes by the first name Minouche, had only been formally in charge of the Ivy League university in New York City for three days at the time. Since, she has navigated thorny questions about who can protest, and how, in a setting that is devoted to the contesting of ideas while also seeking to assure Jewish students that the campus is safe for them.

Here’s what to know about Shafik, what has happened at Columbia and what to look for during Wednesday’s hearing.

• Shafik has previously worked at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Her track record means she has more, and recent, experience in public diplomacy than the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, both career higher education administrators, when they stumbled before the panel in December. At the same time, Shafik cautioned in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, “It is essential to remember that universities and their presidents aren’t politicians.” 
• Shafik also has the advantage of going second and has already gotten ahead of the question that tripped up the other university presidents: whether calls for the genocide of Jews violate their schools’ codes of conduct. In the Wall Street Journal op-ed, titled “What I Plan to Tell Congress Tomorrow,” Shafik wrote that calling for genocide “has no place in a university community. Such words are outside the bounds of legitimate debate and unimaginably harmful.” The other presidents declined to offer a clear answer to the question, saying that their responses would depend on “context.” 
• But Shafik did not spell out a position on one of the most divisive phrases associated with pro-Palestinian protests, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Many critics of the phrase argue that it is antisemitic because it amounts to a call for the destruction of Israel; 70 Democratic lawmakers explicitly called it “a rallying cry … for the genocide of the Jewish people” in advance of a Republican-led congressional vote to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar for using the first half of the phrase. We can expect to see Shafik asked for details here.  
• Under Shafik’s leadership, Columbia has taken steps to blunt the most disruptive protests. It has defined a limited space for protest and penalized students who rally outside it. Two student groups that have led pro-Palestinian protests, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, were suspended in November for what the school said were violations of protest rules; they remain suspended at present. The university also frequently closes its urban campus to outsiders when disruptive protests are anticipated, including when thousands of activists descended on the campus to protest the treatment of the pro-Palestinian groups. And this month, it suspended four students who participated in a “Resistance 101” event that praised Hamas.
   
• After early incidents in which a swastika was found on campus and a Jewish pro-Israel student was allegedly assaulted, Columbia has also taken active steps to address antisemitism on campus. Shafik convened an antisemitism task force after the war began, and last month, the task force released its first report, concluding that Jewish students on campus feel “isolation and pain” and that the university was not consistently enforcing rules barring unauthorized protests. The task force’s chair, David Schizer, is a law professor and former CEO of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee who will also be testifying; expect to hear him asked about the committee’s work and conclusions. 
• Not everyone on campus is satisfied with the university’s efforts to constrain protests and make Jewish students feel safe. In addition to those who argue that the limits on protest inappropriately curtail free speech, one Jewish professor in particular has emerged as a leading figure criticizing universities for permitting anti-Israel sentiment to flourish and bleed into antisemitism. Shai Davidai, an Israeli who teaches in Columbia’s business school, broke into public view just weeks after Oct. 7, when a video of an impassioned speech he gave denouncing Columbia and saying that its Jewish students are not safe went viral. He maintains a national audience and continues to sound the alarm about what is happening on campus, giving potential fodder to those at the hearing who may want to embarrass the school. 
• Shafik appears prepared not just to defend herself against aggressive questioning but to present her own views about how to balance free speech and student safety on college campuses, a tradeoff at the heart of contemporary culture wars surrounding higher education. In her Wall Street Journal op-ed, she outlines four lessons she has learned since Oct. 7, writing, “My own view is that official university statements should be limited to issues that speak directly to life on campus. The university should return to its core mission of fostering a range of perspectives and the scholarship, discoveries and good citizenship that flow from it. At the same time, students and faculty should feel unconstrained in developing their own opinions. … we should become models for how people grow and thrive when they live side by side with others who are different.” 
• This is not the first time Columbia has been in the spotlight for allegations of campus antisemitism. A controversy over the treatment of pro-Israel students on the campus two decades ago made national headlines and brought Bari Weiss, then a student activist, to prominence; Weiss’ Free Press publication has advanced the antisemitism case against higher education since Oct. 7  Years later, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, a Holocaust denier, spoke on campus. In the years since the school, which has a large Jewish population including students from Israel, has been the site of ongoing protest surrounding Israel.

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Biden administration does not want tensions between Iran and Israel to “escalate” after Iran’s massive attack on Israel over the weekend, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told American Jewish leaders.

Blinken called the meeting at the State Department on Tuesday morning as Israel contemplates how and when to retaliate against Iran. Blinken underscored how eager the Biden Administration is for the Israel-Hamas war not to spread across the region.

“We understand and appreciate why the Israelis feel like they must respond,” Blinken said according to the notes of one participant, confirmed by three others. “In our estimation, it is not in Israel’s interests or in America’s interest for this to escalate. However, that is a decision for Israel to make. We would never tell Israel what to do — we just give the best advice we can.”

That message came after reports that President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States would not participate in or support an Israeli attack on Iran. The United States did help defend Israel from the Iranian attack, shooting down missiles and drones fired by Iran. It was part of a coalition of countries that came to Israel’s defense, including the United Kingdom, France and Jordan.

Tuesday’s meeting was off the record, but a number of participants agreed to describe it on condition they not be identified. Groups represented included the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, J Street, the Orthodox Union, theReform movement, the Jewish Democratic Council of America, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Jewish Federations of North America, the Israel Policy Forum, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the American Jewish Committee, the Conservative movement, Hadassah and the Anti-Defamation League.

Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s envoy to combat antisemitism, moderated the gathering. The State Department did not return a request for comment.

There was some pushback from the centrist and right-wing Jewish officials present, who called on the United States to support whatever decision Israel makes. “If and when and how Israel responds, we said it’s very important for that to be backed up by the United States, so that Iran and others see that the coalition [that repelled Iran’s attack] will stay together and remain a deterrent to Iran,” one of the participants said.

Overall, the Jewish leaders evinced gratitude, with the word “miracle” used multiple times to describe the relief that Israel and its allies downed most of the missiles and that no one was killed by the attack. There was relief, too, the U.S.-Israel tensions over the Gaza war, intensifying in recent weeks, appeared to dissipate for the time being. “The alllyship solidified this weekend,” a participant said.

The centrist and center-right officials also decried the tensions between Israel and the United States prior to the Iran attack over Israel’s prosecution of the war against Hamas. They said that divisions between Israel and the United States should remain private, and that creating public “daylight” between the countries encourages their enemies and spurs antisemitism.

Blinken said he too preferred to keep disagreements private, and noted that most leaks regarding U.S.-Israel disagreements come from the Israeli side. No one in the room argued with that.

Others in the room, representing the more liberal groups, were sympathetic to the Biden administration’s pressing Israel to facilitate the entry of more aid into the Gaza Strip, which is experiencing a humanitarian crisis.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East lobby,  praised the Biden Administration for sanctioning Jewish extremists the Biden Administration says are terrorizing West Bank Palestinians.

The atmosphere was warm despite the pushback on Israel’s potential retaliation against Iran, all participants said; the hour-long meeting opened and closed with the Jewish groups lavishing praise on the Biden Administration for rapidly coming to Israel’s assistance to repel the attacks.

“While there might be specific policy disagreements, everyone there was also coming from the same fundamental place, having the same fundamental values and the same fundamental concern for the safety of the Jewish people and the safety of the Israeli people,” Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the JCPA, a liberal-leaning public policy group, said in an interview.

Spitalnick thanked Blinken for the work the Biden Administration was undertaking to identify foreign-sourced misinformation in an election year, noting how the toxicity in the misinformation often morphs into bigotry and antisemitism, which spreads.

“We see how post-Oct. 7, antisemites of all stripes are being empowered and emboldened and amplified by a number of these foreign bot farms and disinformation campaigns,” she said. “And it’s having very real impacts on Jewish safety.”

(JTA) – A Holocaust research center founded by Steven Spielberg has gotten embroiled in a drama over campus Israel speech that is dividing the University of Southern California, where it is housed.

The USC Shoah Foundation is downplaying its role in the school’s academics after the university’s valedictorian, a pro-Palestinian student who earned a minor in “resistance to genocide,” touted her ties to the center.

After USC announced last week that Asna Tabassum would be the valedictorian, pro-Israel groups mounted a campaign against her, citing content on her Instagram page harshly criticizing Israel and Zionism. On Monday, USC’s provost barred Tabassum from delivering a commencement address, a move the campus head of security said was related to specific threats that people would attempt to disrupt the event if she spoke.

In a statement decrying the decision, Tabassum, who majored in biomedical engineering, highlighted one specific aspect of her academic career.

“I am a student of history who chose to minor in resistance to genocide, anchored by the Shoah Foundation, and have learned that ordinary people are capable of unspeakable acts of violence when they are taught hate fueled by fear,” she wrote. “And due to widespread fear, I was hoping to use my commencement speech to inspire my classmates with a message of hope. By canceling my speech, USC is only caving to fear and rewarding hatred.”

The foundation says that it wasn’t involved in her minor.

“Despite suggestions to the contrary, our Institute is not an academic unit within the university and we do not play a formal role in the degree path of any student,” a representative for the USC Shoah Foundation told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement Tuesday. “Recent claims of association with the USC Shoah Foundation are inaccurate and have led to confusion about our role, values, and mission.”

The uproar at USC is the latest in a series of lightning-rod campus controversies related to the Israel-Hamas war that broke out Oct. 7. North America’s biggest and most prominent universities have struggled to respond to inflamed tensions between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students and faculty. Critics have claimed that campus administrations have frequently buckled to pressure to silence speech on the topic. The president of Columbia University, whose responses to pro-Palestinian protests have frequently made headlines, will testify before Congress on Wednesday.

Now, with graduation season nearing and student honors events already serving as venues for disruptive pro-Palestinian protests, commencements are promising to be one final frontier for Israel debates as this contentious school year draws to a close.

USC seemingly hoped to blunt this confrontation when announcing it would not allow Tabassum to speak during the May 10 ceremony, owing to what its provost said were safety concerns. The unprecedented move came after Jewish pro-Israel groups on campus and beyond, including the campus Chabad, the USC student club Trojans for Israel and national pro-Israel activist groups, including the tens of thousands of members of the Mothers Against College Antisemitism Facebook group, put pressure on the school to disinvite Tabassum.

Some cited links to posts Tabassum shared — but did not compose — on her Instagram profile that called Zionism a “racist settler-colonial ideology,” advocated for a single, binational Israeli-Palestinian state and said that “antisemitism is weaponized against Palestinians and allies … by Zionists as a way to shut down criticism of Israel.”

Responding to the posts, We Are Tov, an activist group that promotes Zionist social media content for college students, declared on Instagram that Tabassum “promotes antisemitic views” and mused, “What will she say at the podium?”

Some of these groups celebrated USC’s decision to cancel Tabassum’s speech. “Jew-hatred has consequences,” End Jew Hatred, a pro-Israel activist group, declared. The student’s speech, the group claimed without evidence, “was anticipated to be harmful to Jewish students and even potentially agitate anti-Jewish activists.”

Trojans for Israel had petitioned for USC to “reconsider” their selection of valedictorian, claiming the student “openly traffics in antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric” that would turn commencement into an “unwelcoming and intolerant environment for Jewish graduates and their families.”

But there was also a fierce, growing national backlash to the decision, which according to its critics amounted to silencing of pro-Palestinian speech and Muslim voices (Tabassum is a South Asian Muslim). The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group, called USC’s move “cowardly”; Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar called it “shameful”; and Pulitzer Prize- and MacArthur-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, who is on the faculty at USC, also eviscerated the decision.

“I am disgusted and angered by this failure of courage and commitment on the part of the administration,” Nguyen, whose own Israel speech-related controversy led to tumult last fall at the historically Jewish cultural center 92NY, wrote on Facebook. Citing the pro-Israel groups that had targeted Tabassum, Nguyen added, “I have a hard time believing that if a Jewish student was receiving similar threats, that the university would back down.”

He concluded by questioning why any USC faculty would attend the commencement.

The USC Shoah Foundation did not directly weigh in on the controversy in its statement, which also didn’t name Tabassum directly. But it used the opportunity to decry any attempt to use the Holocaust to “dehumanize” Jews and Israelis.

“When used responsibly, survivor testimony can be a cornerstone of civil dialogue, learning, and understanding,” the statement said. “We have a sacred obligation to safeguard the memory and importance of the Holocaust. We must ensure this history is not distorted or used to dehumanize anyone, including the Jewish people and those living in the state of Israel. This requires we continue to foster and sustain informed discussion on this history, today and in the future.”

A review of the requirements for the resistance to genocide minor on USC’s website shows that it would be possible though difficult to obtain the minor without taking any courses focused at least in part on the Holocaust. The Shoah Foundation says its participation is largely limited to providing survivor testimonies, the core of its activities.

Spielberg initiated the Shoah Foundation in 1994 in connection with his Oscar-winning “Schindler’s List” Holocaust drama, and USC absorbed it in 2006. During a speech at USC last month, Spielberg decried “the machinery of extremism… on college campuses.”

For campus administrators, the pushback against Tabassum’s selection — from among more than 200 students with nearly perfect GPA’s — represented a striking form of activism.

“No one could ever remember these kinds of grievances coming to us,” Errol Southers, the school’s senior vice president who oversees security, told the New York Times about Tabassum’s critics. “They had identified our valedictorian. They were significant in terms of the specificity of the person, the event, meaning our commencement, and their intent to disrupt our commencement.”

In a statement to the campus community announcing the move, USC provost Andrew Guzman said that “discussion” about the valedictorian “has taken on an alarming tenor,” and that “tradition must give way to safety.” He added, “This decision has nothing to do with freedom of speech. There is no free-speech entitlement to speak at a commencement.”

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Guzman also denied that the university’s decision was based on Tabassum’s speech or social media presence.

The comments angered Rabbi Dov Wagner, who runs USC’s Chabad. He wrote on Instagram that the school’s citing of unspecified “security concerns,” instead of explicitly denouncing Tabassum’s social media activity, was a problem.

“This statement conveys the idea that the university supports the hate speech, and in fact creates the impression that it is our community that poses a security threat, rather than the ones being maligned,” Wagner wrote.

He added, “USC’s Jewish students are now being portrayed as threatening the safety of the valedictorian, and as silencing Muslim voices — when nothing could be farther from the truth.”