8th grader forced to draw pro-Nazi poster + President Zelenskyy to speak to Israeli Knesset

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Supermodel compares Ukrainian plight to Palestinians, Orthodox girls basketball team headed to California state championship, and why Jerusalemites are so good at Wordle.

FROM THE FORWARD

Gladys Shelby is an eighth grader at Eliza Chappell Elementary, a public school in Chicago.

Chicago 8th grader says she was made to draw pro-Nazi poster: Gladys Shelby, 14, thought it was weird when her social studies teacher at a public school assigned “Mein Kampf” as part of a unit on the Holocaust. Then things took a turn for the worse: the class had to make Nazi propaganda posters. After Gladys expressed discomfort with the assignment, she said, the teacher told her she didn’t have to put a swastika on hers. Read the story ➤

In the face of tragedy, Rep. Jamie Raskin is an optimist: The Jan. 6 insurrection was a horrifying day for the whole country, but particularly personal for Raskin. He had just lost his son, Tommy, to suicide, and his daughter Tabitha was at the Capitol with him during the attack. Days later, he became an impeachment manager charged with trying to remove President Donald Trump from office, a doomed battle. But when our Mira Fox spoke with Raskin recently, he stubbornly resisted pessimism, insisting that “when everything looks hopeless, you’re the hope.” Read the story ➤

In two rarely-shown films, a different view of Israel:“The Great Sadness of Zohara” and “Dissolution,” directed 30 years apart by Nina Menkes, are studies in contemporary alienation. The first, shot in vivid color, chronicles the journey of a young woman through Jerusalem and North Africa. The second, in black and white, follows a murderer’s unraveling and redemption. Menkes, now the subject of a retrospective at BAM, finds a dream logic in the Jewish State, capturing its mystical potential – and also its dark underbelly to craft, as PJ Grisar writes, stories about “not belonging anywhere.” Read the story ➤

Farewell Mr. Entenmann, your cookies and cakes live on: I didn’t realize until I was curating yesterday’s newsletter that there was an actual person behind Entenmann’s, the supreme synagogue snack and a staple of my childhood. That man, Charles Entenmann, died at 92, and when the boss heard that I grew up with a separate freezer full of Entenmann’s, she pressed me into writing about it. My rabbinic dad ran a synagogue out of our suburban Atlanta home, so we needed a stock of sweets for the weekly kiddush after Shabbat services. Each Thursday, my mom and I made a pilgrimage to the Entenmann’s outlet to pick up discounted danish and donuts. Some families had swimming pools or premium cable, we had loaf cake. Read the essay ➤

THE WAR IN UKRAINE

A Ukrainian serviceman says goodbye to his girlfriend before departing the train station in Lviv on Wednesday. (Getty)

Talks crumble: The foreign ministers of Russia and Ukraine met on Thursday in Turkey as the war entered its third week. It was the highest-level contact between the two countries since Russia’s invasion, but there was little progress toward a deal to end the conflict. “They seek a surrender,” said Ukraine’s foreign minister. “This is not what they’re going to get.”

Sanctions: Roman Abramovich, the Russian Jewish billionaire with close ties to President Vladimir Putin, has been sanctioned by the United Kingdom where, last week, he announced that he would be selling his West London soccer team. Some nonprofits in Israel are concerned that sanctions against Abramovich would harm their bottom line, as he is a major philanthropic supporter across the country.

First person | My Jewish family is being bombed in Ukraine:The trauma of war is all too familiar for Osnat Ita Skoblinski. “This week, I woke up to a new nightmare,” she writes. “My elderly aunt, my cousin and her husband have been under heavy Russian bombardment.” Skoblinski shares accounts of her family: stuck in the middle of war, a rush to find safety and a will to stay. “Some family members in Israel don’t understand why my cousin’s husband has refused to leave. I remind them that they never thought about leaving through all the wars in Israel.”Read her essay ➤

And more…

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

🤔 Jerusalem was ranked the second-best city in the world at solving Wordle, the popular online puzzle. The city’s many English speaking expats may help account for its high-standing. Some have conjectured that the Jewish custom of daf yomi – in which people study a page of Talmud a day – provides a text-based gamified template for Wordle. Perhaps they should try our Yiddish version of the game. (New Hampshire Union-Leader)

📸 Gigi Hadid, a supermodel with 72 million followers on Instagram, is stirring controversy for posting that Palestinians are “experiencing the same” as Ukrainians during the Russian invasion. Vogue magazine initially shared Hadid’s thoughts on its own Instagram feed, but later removed the post after a backlash. (Ynet News, Algemeiner)

🕍 Jewish roots in Iraq date back thousands of years, but its ancient heritage is now at risk, with its synagogues falling into ruin. Only a few dozen of the hundreds of sites still exist. Those that do have been converted into warehouses, private residences and, in one case, a trash dump. (AFP)

🏀 The Shalhevet High School girls’ basketball team plays for the California state championship Friday at 10 a.m. PT. Shalhevet, an Orthodox school in Los Angeles with a 22-6 record, won the Southern California regional title for its division on Tuesday. The championship game will be broadcast locally on Spectrum SportsNet. (Los Angeles Times)

Shiva call ➤ Inge Deutschkron, a Holocaust survivor who published a memoir called “I Wore the Yellow Star,” has died at 99. “Despite everything that was done to her by Germans, Inge Deutschkron did not turn her back on Germany,” said the country’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. “As a contemporary witness, she helped keep the memory of those persecuted and murdered alive and helped form a generation of witnesses of the witnesses.” (AP)

What else we’re reading ➤ This Twitter account, called “Random Forverts,” which spits out random scans of pages from back issues of our Yiddish edition.

What we’re watching ➤ The trailer for Mayim Bialik’s directorial debut, a film called “As You Make Us.” As our friends at Kveller note, “Bialik’s first film looks like the sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes heartwarming exploration of family, boundaries and mental health we all need.”

ON THE CALENDAR

On this day in history: Myer Prinstein, who once held the world record for the long jump, won three gold medals at two Olympic Games – in Paris in 1900 and St. Louis in 1904. After retiring from the sport, Prinstein, a graduate of Syracuse University, operated a stationery business, a real estate company and a law practice. He died, at 46, on March 10, 1925, and was posthumously inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

Last year on this day, we reported about a kosher grocer in Dallas that removed its mask mandate and the backlash that ensued.

FROM OUR ARCHIVES

Drag performers Peppi Litman (left), circa 1910, and Murray Hill, in 2018.

Chana Pollack, the Forward’s archivist, sent in this dispatch: Peppi Litman and Murray Hill, now there’s a drag shidukh for you! Hill, billed as “the hardest working middle-aged man in show business” is now also the hardest working middle-aged man on HBO Max’s “Somebody Somewhere.”

Hill’s character, Fred Rococo, not only MC’s the local choir practice/cabaret in a mall church (this takes place in Kansas, so, you know) but teaches agriculture at the local college. So that’s Professor Rococo please!

And as for Littman, well, they were performing their bawdy skits and ballads around Galicia and downtown New York (as advertised in the Forverts) long before drag bingo and Hill were a thing. Check out our archival photo of Littman and see if Murray Hill can’t claim them as their ancestral drag mispokhe?

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Thanks to Mira Fox, PJ Grisar, Louis Keene, Chana Pollack and Amanda Rozon for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at [email protected].

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