This article is part of our morning briefing. Click here to get it delivered to your inbox each weekday. We’re starting this morning with some feature stories and, below that, we’ll get to the latest updates on the war…
American Jews grapple with how to donate to Israel and Gaza: More than $400 million in donations has been rushed to Israel over the last two weeks, though some are trying to make sense of how much of that aid should be going to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. “There’s a lot of feelings of being torn in two — being ripped in half — and perhaps people find something healing in the idea that you don’t have to choose which type of human you’re helping,” said Miriam Anzovin, a Jewish social media influencer who has won praise — and drawn hate — for spotlighting charities working with both groups. Read the story ➤ US Jewish day schools are enrolling Israeli children who have been displaced by war: New students have enrolled in schools in California, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and elsewhere. The usual admission process has been pared down; accommodations are made for those who don’t speak fluent English; tuition is charged monthly, if at all. Said one school leader: “Our parents are tripping over each other to try to make these families feel welcome.” Read the story ➤ |
The Jerusalem Youth Chorus performed a virtual concert Sunday, in lieu of a tour canceled due to the war. (Courtesy) |
More than 1,000 mostly Jewish demonstrators last week blocked entrances to the White House to protest Israeli violence in Gaza. (Matt Litman) |
Opinion | Jews you disagree with are still Jews — even if they feel differently about Israel: “Family can be estranged, it can be disinherited, it can be torn apart. And yet family remains family, stuck together,” writes Emily Tamkin, author of Bad Jews. But she would like to think that, “at a time of trauma, stress, sadness and uncertainty for many Jews,” we do not badmouth brothers and sisters. “All this rhetoric does is harm Jews.” Read her essay ➤ The IDF gave our reporter a tour of the carnage in the Israeli communities that border Gaza: Our Laura E. Adkins saw “stone walls pocked with bullets like a wedge of Swiss cheese” as “airplanes and the sound of rockets mingled with birds singing.” At Kibbutz Be’eri, “where Hamas terrorists set homes ablaze with people locked inside in their safe rooms,” she writes, “the stench of burned bodies and belongings that still hung in the air lingered in my nostrils and stuck to my hair for two days.” Read the story ➤ |
Yocheved Lifshitz speaks to the media Tuesday at Ichilov Hospital after being released by Hamas. (Getty) |
Plus… - Hamas released two elderly Israeli women on Monday. “I went through a hell that we’d never imagined,” said Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, describing being abducted from her kibbutz and taken on a motorcycle through a “spiderweb” of tunnels. Their husbands remain in captivity.
- Diplomatic talks to free 50 more hostages hit a snag on Monday, when Hamas conditioned the release on Israel allowing fuel into Gaza. Israel fears the fuel will be used for military purposes.
- Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch and a fierce critic of Israel, is now calling out the left for making excuses for Hamas.
- “One massacre does not justify another,” wrote more than a thousand Jewish academics, artists, clergy and others who signed an open letter demanding an “immediate ceasefire” in the war.
- More than 125 celebrities — including Gal Gadot, Chris Rock and Will Ferrell — shared on social media on Monday a letter thanking President Biden for his “unshakable moral conviction” and “support for the Jewish people.”
On campus… - Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan withdrew from a Harvard fellowship on Monday, citing the university’s tepid response to the Israel-Hamas war and the ensuing antisemitism on its campus.
- A Cornell professor who came under fire for calling the Hamas attacks in Israel “exhilarating” and “energizing” has taken a leave of absence from the school.
- Several universities across the country have hired armed guards to protect Hillels, Chabads and other Jewish spaces.
- An alum of the University of Pennsylvania and Yale Law School argues in an opinion essay that people on college campuses can “make grave moral errors not despite academic achievement, but because of it.”
Around the globe…
Stay informed: You can follow our partners at Haaretz for live updates throughout the day. And we’ve taken down our paywall for coverage of Israel’s war with Gaza. Read all of our stories here. |
Ruth Gruber was, at one time, the youngest Ph.D. in the world. (Courtesy) |
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WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY |
Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, left, and Jared Kushner. (Getty) |
? An aide to former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo alleges in a new book out today that Jared Kushner was behind the Orthodox protests in Brooklyn over COVID-19 restrictions. (Forward) ? Police in Detroit said it identified several people of interest and found no indication of a hate crime or antisemitism in their investigation of the murder of Samantha Woll, a prominent local Jewish leader found stabbed to death Saturday. (AP, JTA) ?? The second gentleman of the United States, Doug Emhoff, is traveling to Pittsburgh today to meet with survivors of the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue. Friday is the fifth anniversary. (New York Times) ? The Nazis turned a Polish synagogue into a swimming pool. The Jewish community reclaimed it 20 years ago, but sold it to a private developer to build a housing project. Now local residents are demanding that the authorities preserve it. (Haaretz)
Shiva call ➤ Martin Goetz, who received the first U.S. patent for computer software, died at 93. |
The Zone of Interest premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival to critical acclaim and won the Grand Prix. The movie, based on a novel by the late Martin Amis, is set at Auschwitz, and centers on a commandant of the Holocaust and his family who live in a house next to the concentration camp. It’ll be released in the U.S. on Dec. 15. Watch the trailer above. — Thanks to Nora Berman, PJ Grisar, Jacob Kornbluh, Lauren Markoe, Arno Rosenfeld 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. |
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