 | WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION |  | | Good morning. As some Gazans crossed into Egypt after weeks of negotiations, Israel struck a refugee camp for the second time in two days, and released new data on the number of soldiers so far killed in the conflict. Outside the war, a beloved Jewish activist died from complications of ALS. | ISRAEL AT WAR |  | “The Terrorist Attack at Nova Music Festival,” 2023. (Courtesy of Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi and Fort Gansevoort) | In painting the horrors of both Ukraine and Israel at war, an artist finds echoes of Picasso’s ‘Guernica.’Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi, who fled Kyiv for Israel in 1991, has made a practice of painting war since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Now, Cherkassky-Nnadi, who left Israel for Berlin shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack and has long been outspoken about her opposition to Israel’s government, is turning her brush to atrocities on the soil of her second home. “Guernica,” which Pablo Picasso painted in response to the 1937 bombing of a town during the Spanish Civil War, was “the first image that my memory brought to me,” she told our editorial fellow Sam Lin-Sommer. “Because it’s so similar: it’s just a massacre of innocent people. And something that we didn’t believe could happen in Israel.” Read the story ➤
And:
Cornell engineering student charged in court in threats against Jewish students. Patrick Dai, a 21-year-old junior at Cornell, was charged in federal court yesterday after being arrested Tuesday night; he faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Dai, whose parents described him as battling a profound depression that left them concerned he was suicidal, reportedly admitted to posting violent threats against Jews on campus in a social media forum. He will remain in jail until his next hearing on Nov. 15. Read the story ➤
And:
|  | The aftermath of an Israeli strike on Gaza’s Jabalya refugee camp. (AFP via Getty Images) | Plus… Israel conducted an airstrike on the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza for the second time in two days. The Israel Defense Forces said the attack successfully targeted a Hamas command and control complex built underneath the camp, and criticized Hamas for building such infrastructure under civilian areas. A doctor said the airstrike killed at least 80 and injured hundreds; the Gaza Health Ministry said that more than 9,000 Palestinians have died in the course of the war.
An Israeli man in his 30s was shot and killed in the Israel-occupied West Bank, prompting a manhunt for his assailant. Separately, the IDF announced that 17 Israeli soldiers had so far died in and near Gaza this week.
A senior Hamas official threatened further attacks on Israel in an interview with a Lebanese TV station last week, new translation efforts revealed. “We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do it twice and three times,” said Ghazi Hamad, calling the Oct. 7 attack “just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.”
A rabbi in Minneapolis interrupted a speech by President Joe Biden to press him to take a stronger line on Israel’s actions in Gaza, saying, “Mr. President, if you care about Jewish people then, as a rabbi, I need you to call for a cease-fire now in Gaza.” Biden responded by saying he favors “a pause” for time “to get the prisoners out.”
A vote in the House of Representatives to censure Democratic Rep. Rashia Tlaib over her activism around the Israel-Gaza war, put forward by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, failed, with more than 20 Republicans voting to reject the resolution.
Israel spoke out against three South American countries, Chile, Bolivia and Colombia, after they made diplomatic moves in protest of the war with Hamas. Chile and Colombia have both recalled their ambassadors to Israel after Bolivia severed all diplomatic ties.
Houthi rebels, who control Yemen’s capital, launched missiles at Israel this week, but Yemen’s internationally recognized government has not declared war.
Concerns about spiking antisemitism in Europe persisted, as police in at least three European countries have arrested suspects allegedly plotting terror attacks related to the war. Antisemitic graffiti appeared across one Paris neighborhood; a fire was set in the Jewish section of Vienna’s main cemetery and swastikas spray-painted on walls; and sidewalk plaques commemorating Nazi victims in Rome were vandalized.
|  | A Palestinian nurse attended to a little girl with a head wound at Gaza’s Nasser hospital last week. (MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images) | My mother taught me Jews are above vengeance. The Israel-Hamas war is finally making me doubt her. “I was instructed by my mother in the conviction that, as Jews, we always held ourselves to a higher moral standard than that exercised by much of the rest of the world” — a conviction, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi writes, she now finds herself revisiting. After all, calls to vengeance resonate across Jewish literature, liturgical and lay, from the Haggadah read during Passover seders to the post-Holocaust work of Elie Wiesel. It’s essential to remember that justice and vengeance are not one and the same, she writes, arguing, “it is vengeance, not justice, that is taking the lives of innocents on both sides.” Read her essay ➤
And:
Dept. of corrections: Yesterday’s newsletter misstated the name of Lior Sapan, whose son is a lone soldier fighting in Israel, as Lior Satan.
| | The Forward is made possible by readers like you. | Support our work with a donation of any size. | | Want more Forward? Explore all our newsletters at forward.com/newsletters | | ALSO FROM THE FORWARD |  | Alexandra Tatarsky’s Sad Boys in Harpy Land runs at Playwrights Horizons through Nov. 26. (Maria Baranova) | ‘Always making demented performances’: Meet the professional clown with a show about the Holocaust. Last spring, I profiled Alexandra Tatarsky, the theater artist behind Sad Boys in Harpy Land, a surreal exploration of what it’s like to be “a Jewish woman who thinks she’s a German boy who thinks he’s a tree.” Now, Tatarsky is remounting the show in New York in a monthlong run at the off-Broadway theater Playwrights Horizons, which opens tonight. “What inspires me is that humor is a survival mechanism,” Tatarsky told me, “a very Jewish survival mechanism.” | | A polarizing tale of the Lodz Ghetto, retold as horror story and farce. Also on in New York’s theater world: Leslie Epstein’s King of the Jews, his adaptation of his own 1979 novel, which sparked controversy for bringing a farcical framework to the horrors of the Holocaust. The story, writes our PJ Grisar, was “inspired by the figure of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the Lodz Ghetto elder who fancied himself the patron protector of his city’s Jews but was in fact a power-mad functionary of Nazi genocide” — but while the play provokes, it doesn’t always land its punches. | | | WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY |  | Activist Ady Barkan has died at 39. (Kisha Bari) | 😔 Ady Barkan, an activist who spent years battling ALS, died of complications from the disease at 39. “Ady understood intuitively the power of his grueling and emotionally difficult experience to shape a political narrative,” one filmmaker told the Forward of his legacy. (X, Forward)
👀 Biden’s administration announced that it is planning a national strategy to combat Islamophobia, as Muslim leaders have told Biden in recent days that his stance on the Israel-Hamas war risks deteriorating his political support within their communities. (Associated Press, Reuters)
📖 Georgette Heyer, the novelist known as the Queen of Regency Romance, is the latest author whose work will be posthumously revised to removed racial and ethnic stereotypes — in her case, a portrayal of a money lender long viewed as invoking antisemitic stereotypes. (New York Times)
😓 Two Jewish Long Island politicians blasted Republicans for ads they say are antisemitic, with Republicans denying any bias. Nassau County Legislator Josh Lafazan described the ads as including “the widening of the nose, the yellowing of the teeth, the horns” — all aesthetic tropes long associated with antisemitism. (ABC7)
🇲🇽 Claudia Sheinbaum, the Jewish frontrunner for Mexico’s presidency, holds an 18-point lead per the latest polls from the country, which votes next June. (Reuters)
What else we’re reading ➤ “What should American Jews do with our fear?” … “Israel is in crisis. These authors see reason for hope.” … “Angry and tired, Gazan mothers stuck in Israel after medical care want to get home.”
| | PHOTO OF THE DAY |  | (Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images) | A Hanukkah menorah seen in a house in Kissufim, Israel, that was destroyed during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. Israeli authorities say just over half of the attack’s victims have now been laid to rest, with more than four-fifths so far identified. | Thanks to Beth Harpaz for editing today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at [email protected]. | | | Support Independent Jewish Journalism | Without you, the Forward’s stories don’t just go unread — they go untold. Please support our nonprofit journalism today. | | | | |
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