This article is part of our morning briefing. Click here to get it delivered to your inbox each weekday. RFK Jr. said COVID-19 was ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare ‘Ashkenazi Jews.’ One rabbi came to his defense: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the vaccine skeptic making a quixotic challenge to Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024, was mired in controversy on Saturday after a video of his comments was reported. When Shabbat ended, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach joined Kennedy for a 30-minute YouTube conversation in which Kennedy talked about his support for Israel and Jewish people. Read the story ➤
Quotable ➤ “For the record, my whole family, who is Jewish, got COVID,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, posted to Twitter in response to Kennedy’s original comments. Memoirs of a confused yeshiva student: The principal of the Brooklyn yeshiva Yossi Newfield attended recently got some bad news: The New York City Department of Education had determined that his Haredi yeshiva in Brooklyn wasn’t teaching the state-mandated secular curriculum. Newfield was hardly surprised. When he attended the school, Tents of Torah, in the late 1980s, he writes, students were taught that secular studies was “detrimental to Jews.” Read the essay ➤ |
Abby Meyers, in black uniform, during a short stint last month in the WNBA. (Getty) |
From Maccabiah to WNBA: Will Abby Meyers be the next Jewish basketball star? Meyers, named Ivy League Player of the Year in her final season at Princeton, spent 10 days this summer playing for the Washington Mystics, mere miles from her childhood synagogue. The short contract was to fill in for one of two missing players. Now Meyers, who helped lead the U.S. team to a gold medal at last year’s Maccabiah Games in Israel, is hoping the experience leads to more time in WNBA. “When given the opportunity to educate people,” she said, “to talk about my Jewish heritage, and how I grew up, I don’t hesitate.” Read the story ➤
Opinion | Why do so many conversations about Israel exclude more than half of the Jewish population? Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of the rabbinic human-rights group T’ruah, argues that over decades of discussion, Israel has been “gendered as male” and the diaspora as female. “It is little surprise, then, that men are considered the only legitimate experts on Israel,” she writes, “and women who speak out are condescendingly — or violently — told to go back to their place.” Read the essay ➤ |
Twitter CEO Elon Musk at a business summit in May in Paris. (Getty) |
Plus… - Online trolls misidentified a young Jewish man as a government agent, a falsehood that prompted a flood of antisemitic tweets. After Twitter CEO Elon Musk joined in the discourse — and the man’s address was posted online — the man, who is 22, fled his home.
- Abe Foxman, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League, hopes the Israeli government fails to pass a judicial overhaul plan. “I am a cockeyed optimist,” he told our senior political reporter, Jacob Kornbluh.
- Johnny Bench, the Hall of Fame catcher, apologized for making what some deemed as an antisemitic comment on Saturday during the induction ceremony for the newest members of the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame.
- While visiting Tblisi to see Georgian women read Torah for the first time in 2,600 years of Jewish presence in the country, our editor-in-chief got an impromptu cooking lesson.
- The trial of the Tree of Life shooter, a controversial exhibit at the Jewish Museum, and the Israeli soccer team made history. Take our weekly news quiz.
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The Borscht Belt is Back! Join us for the day-long festival taking place in downtown Ellenville and featuring stand-up comedy, art, live music, film, educational programming – and of course food. Visit https://www.borschtbeltfest.org/ to purchase tickets to the ticketed events and get more info about the event. |
WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY |
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, outside the U.S. Capitol last week. (Getty) |
?? U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat, said she would skip Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, joining her leftist colleagues Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Jamaal Bowman, who represents the Bronx and parts of Westchester County. (NY Jewish Week) ? A Muslim man who got a permit to burn copies of the Torah and the New Testament in front of the Israeli Embassy in Sweden this weekend said it was a stunt, and that he never planned on going through with it. (JTA) ⚖️ The sentencing phase of the trial of the Tree of Life shooter begins this morning. The jury has convicted Robert Bowers of murdering 11 Jews in the worst antisemitic attack in American history, and last week found him eligible for the death penalty. Now it must decide whether to impose it. (CNN) ? The former leader of an Orthodox private security group in Brooklyn pleaded guilty to federal charges that he sexually abused a teenage girl. He faces a minimum prison sentence of 14 years. (JTA) ? The Seattle Times fired David Volodzko after he wrote a single column. The column itself, about a statue of Lenin, apparently wasn’t the problem; it was a tweet saying Hitler was not as evil as Lenin, which the paper said was “inconsistent with our company values.” (Daily Beast) ? Some theater people are upset that a non-Jewish actress has been cast as Jewish comedienne Fanny Brice in the national touring production of Funny Girl. If not for Brice “and her chutzpah, many of us Jewish women specifically wouldn’t be able to be performers,” said actress Jennifer Apple. “So it’s integral to this role, specifically.” (JTA) What else we’re reading ➤ Rachel Sharansky Danziger, the daughter of Natan Sharansky, has an essay in The New York Times about her friend and fellow daughter of Soviet refuseniks, Elizabeth Tsurkov, the Princeton graduate student being held by an Iran-backed Shi’ite militia. “If something seemed wrong to her, she fought to change it,” Sharansky said of Tsurkov, a past contributor to the Forward. “If something was immoral, she called it out, regardless of the cost.”
Shiva calls ➤ Marga Minco, a Dutch novelist who escaped the Nazis and chronicled Jewish life in wartime, died at 103 … Melvin Wulf, who led the ACLU and helped future Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg bring a landmark sex discrimination case to the Supreme Court in 1972, died at 95. |
‘A peasant with money’: That’s one of the ways Craig Newmark, the founder of craigslist and one of the top 50 philanthropists in the country, describes himself. Newmark joined our editor-in-chief Jodi Rudoren at the JCC-Chabad in Aspen, Colorado, yesterday for a candid conversation about journalism and antisemitism. He credited his Sunday school teachers in Morristown, N.J., — Holocaust survivors named Rafael and Rachel Levin — for teaching him, among other things, that “enough is enough” — hence, his decision to give most of his fortune away to nonprofits including the Anti-Defamation League; the Forward and other “trustworthy journalism” ventures; military veterans and pigeon rescue. On this day in history (1996): TWA Flight 800 crashed in the Atlantic Ocean en route to Rome, killing all 230 passengers and crew aboard the plane. Among them was Marcel Dadi, a guitarist born in Tunisia who was renowned for releasing records with instructions for how to recreate the tunes. He spent several years living in Israel, bringing his friend Eric Clapton to perform there, and is buried at the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Today in Arlington, Virginia: GOP presidential candidates Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley will address the Christians United for Israel annual summit. Follow @jacobkornbluh for live updates. In honor of World Emoji Day, we look back to 2018 when the bagel emoji was introduced. Our reporter called the plain, schmear-less dingbat a travesty, asking: “Haven’t we suffered enough?” |
Israel competed on Sunday at the World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka, Japan. The women’s artistic swimming team did not medal. — Thanks to Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Lisa Lepson, Rukhl Schaechter, Gall Sigler and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at [email protected]. |
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