Threads is a Twitter alternative. Will Jews switch platforms?

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis of the crisis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

When Meta launched its new app earlier this month, it came as a relief to people weary of Twitter’s recent decay — including antisemitic comments by its owner, Elon Musk. But the Jewish community on Twitter has roots stretching back more than a decade, and its members are split on whether to jump ship. Our Louis Keene spoke to a few who are staying put. 

Last public square: Twitter could lend itself to pettiness, bickering and just plain obnoxiousness. (See subtweeting, a term added  to the dictionary in 2018.) It’s also where Emily Tamkin, the author of Bad Jews, met her husband. “While there were days that I was like, ‘I’m so angry about this tweet,’” Tamkin said, “it’s also brought a lot into my life.”

Can we talk? Twitter’s essential product — a chronological feed of updates from accounts you choose to follow — made it both a great source of breaking news and a place to discuss it. Threads’ algorithm-based feed, on the other hand, seems less suited to shaping discourse: It offers a non-chronological mix of your friends, brand accounts and viral content.

Be nice: A few of those Louis spoke to doubted that a new social media app would be able to avoid interpersonal nastiness for long. “It was never about the platform,” said Rabbi David Bashevkin, who downloaded Threads, the new Meta app, but stopped using it after a few posts. “It was us the whole time.”

ALSO IN THE FORWARD

Andrew Ridker and the cover of his new novel. (Courtesy Viking Press)

How I tracked down the greatest bar mitzvah photo of all time: When Andrew Ridker stumbled across the picture of two gawky teenagers sharing a slow dance at a bar mitzvah in the 1990s, he knew it had to be the cover of his new novel. But he needed to figure out who those gawky teenagers were in order to get their permission to publish. It was “a search that would demonstrate the power of Jewish geography,” Ridker writes of the quest. “And it taught me, too, something about the state of Jewish-American identity today.” Read the essay ➤

Opinion | Israel is in a moment of crisis. Why was the speech its president gave to Congress so out of touch? You’d think anti-government protests that include Israelis locking themselves inside the Knesset, blocking the airport’s runways and refusing to do military reserve duty would be Isaac Herzog’s top concern. Yet his address to Congress was filled with dated talking points and a “greatest hits” of American Judaism. “Instead of using this opportunity to acknowledge and grapple with existential challenges to the U.S.-Israel relationship head-on,” writes Nora Berman, our deputy opinion editor, “Herzog came across as tone deaf and unequipped to handle the emergency in which Israel finds itself.” Read the essay ➤

An exhibit on the Sassoon family is at the Jewish Museum in New York through Aug. 13. (Courtesy/Kris Graves)

Opinion | The Sassoons derived most of their wealth from China’s opium trade. Now the Jewish Museum is honoring them: “Increasingly, museums are choosing not to separate artists from their art, or collectors from their artifacts,” writes Elizabeth M. Lynch, an expert on human rights issues in China. She argues that a new exhibit fails “to fully revisit and re-contextualize opium’s toll,” and that the museum “missed an opportunity” to “address the horrors of a collectors’ wealth.” Read the essay ➤

Meet the queer theater nerd who just won the national Jewish Playwriting Contest: So much Jewish theater right now is about antisemitism — think Parade and Leopoldstadt. But Alexa Derman is bored by all of that. Instead, her plays confront touchy contemporary issues like Jewish institutions’ fraught relationship with Israel, and do so “far more nimbly than any article or book,” writes our culture reporter Mira Fox. Read the story ➤

And one more: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. aggressively pushed back against his critics, telling a House subcommittee Thursday that he’s “never uttered a phrase that was either racist or antisemitic.”

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

Mounted police confront anti-government protesters Thursday night in Tel Aviv. (Getty)

??  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a fiery primetime address Thursday, promising to move forward with his judicial overhaul plan. The Knesset is expected to vote on the controversial measure next week. Meanwhile, mounted police clashed with protesters marching down Tel Aviv’s main highway. (JTA)

?  Former President Donald Trump will return a set of ancient ceramic oil lamps to Israel, after the Israel Antiquities Authority had tried unsuccessfully to get the items back for months. Read Rabbi Jay Michaelson’s take. (JTA)

✈️  Israel said it would, for the first time, allow Palestinian-Americans to travel through Ben-Gurion airport, rather than forcing them to go through Jordan to visit the West Bank or Israel. The change comes as part of Israel’s ongoing effort to qualify for a waiver program that would allow its citizens to travel in the U.S. for 90 days without a visa. (JTA)

??  An Orthodox rabbi in Cleveland was sentenced to 10 days in jail for stealing a pro-Palestinian banner from a student group at a local university in January. (JTA)

?   An Israeli nonprofit is working on training artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT to be less antisemitic. “It is one of the best forms of hate speech to start training generative AI on,” the group’s CEO said, “because it’s so nuanced.” (Axios)

?️  What happened to the 37 people who signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence 75 years ago? A new podcast, Signed, Sealed and Delivered, speaks to their descendants to discover if the ideals set forth in that original document were achieved. (JTA)

☠️  A family escaping the Nazis brought to America what they said were skull fragments of Beethoven. A descendant is now returning the fragments — obtained when an uncle was part of an exhumation of Beethoven in 1863 — to Vienna, where the composer is buried. (AFP)

Long weekend reads ➤  At the heart of the film Oppenheimer is a clash between real-life Jews … Inside America’s failed, forgotten conference to save Jews from Hitler … After decades of struggle in Israel, dozens of African Hebrew Israelites face deportation.

ON THE CALENDAR

Jean Daniel, the French journalist and author, photographed in 1967. (Getty)

On this day in history (1920): Jean Daniel, a French journalist, was born. A friend of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, the self-identifying non-communist leftist was critical of Israel’s seizure of territories in the 1967 War. In his book The Jewish Prison, Daniel argued that the affluent Jews of the West “have imprisoned themselves” by believing in the notion of God’s “chosen people” and offering unequivocal support to Israel. Upon his death in 2020, Benjamin Ivry wrote that Daniel was an “inward-looking journalist of unshakeable distinction and personal integrity.”

VIDEO OF THE DAY

See a Borscht Belt more marvelous than Mrs. Maisel ever knew: The documentary film The Catskills draws on archival footage, photos, home movies and contemporary interviews with former guests and employees of the Jewish resorts of New York to trace the development of the iconic vacation destination. The film will be shown this Saturday, July 22, and again on Sunday, Aug. 6, at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Read more about the movie from our colleagues at J. The Jewish News of Northern California.

—

Thanks to Nora Berman, Mira Fox, Louis Keene, Rukhl Schaechter, Gall Sigler and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at [email protected].