 | WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION |  | | Good morning. Israel conducted airstrikes on Gazan refugee camps again this weekend, as the U.S. continued to push for a humanitarian pause. Separately, two IDF officers were stabbed and injured in Jerusalem this morning. That and more of the latest, below. | ISRAEL AT WAR |  | A woman prays while visiting the Lights of Hope installation in Jerusalem. (Getty Images) | For this unprecedented time of war and grief, new prayers for those held captive by Hamas. The phrase “Matir asurim,” which means “who frees the captives,” has echoed through Jewish prayers for many hundreds of years. With more than 200 hostages held in Gaza, and distress over their plight gripping the Jewish community worldwide, many rabbis are revisiting those words in updated or new prayers, our contributor Aviya Kushner writes. One rabbi said he was guided by a dual mission in writing a new prayer: “to express our helplessness on one side, and on the other side our determination to do everything we can.” Read the story ➤
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Opinion | What the ‘genocide’ charge in this war gets right — and wrong. Claims that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza capture an emotional truth, our contributor Jay Michaelson writes, although not a legal one, since genocide “requires the explicit intent to annihilate an ethnic group.” But that emotional truth — that, for many, the horror facing Gazan civilians seems too profound to be described with the ordinary language of war — risks complicating “a term that is a critical protection for vulnerable populations,” he writes, especially as some such populations, like the Massalit ethnic group in Sudan, are at risk right now. Read his essay ➤
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ICYMI: Last week, we dispatched reporters to 11 college campuses around the country to dig deep into what it’s like to be Jewish on campus amid rising antisemitism in the wake of the war. Here’s what they found. |  | People search through buildings destroyed in Israeli air strikes in the southern Gaza Strip on Monday. (Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images) | Plus … Two refugee camps in Gaza were hit by Israeli airstrikes yesterday, as Gaza’s communication systems went down for the second time during the war and the heads of 11 United Nations agencies called for a humanitarian cease-fire. The Israel Defense Forces said troops captured a major Hamas compound overnight, and that it had struck more than 450 Hamas targets in Gaza on Sunday.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani over the weekend, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed back on building U.S. pressure to enact a humanitarian pause late last week. Senior U.S. officials, including Blinken, are reportedly growing anxious over Israel’s perceived failure to establish an “exit strategy” for Gaza. Blinken also warned that further attacks by Iranian-allied groups on U.S. positions in the Middle East would meet a strong response after the U.S. struck a Syrian compound last week.
William Burns, director of the CIA, also arrived in Israel yesterday at the beginning of a Middle Eastern tour. The U.S. is looking to deepen its intelligence-sharing relationship with Israel after outcry over the intelligence failures that contributed to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.
Massive protests around the world, including in Washington, D.C., called for a cease-fire. The Gaza Health Ministry said more than 9,700 Palestinians had so far been killed in the war, including more than 4,000 children and minors.
A far-right member of Netanyahu’s cabinet, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, said yesterday that Israel had the option to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza; Netanyahu suspended Eliyahu from cabinet meetings in response. Separately, Netanyahu’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for buffer zones around Jewish settlements in the Israel-occupied West Bank, where tensions have skyrocketed since Oct. 7. He said Palestinians should not be allowed in such zones, including to harvest olives.
Two Israeli police officers were injured, one critically, in a stabbing in Jerusalem. The suspect, a 16-year-old Palestinian from East Jerusalem, was shot and killed.
Former President Barack Obama dug into the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a Friday speech to former staffers, saying, “What Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it,” and “what is also true is that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable.”
|  | Photos of hostages displayed at Israel’s consulate in New York. (Jodi Rudoren) | Siding with humanity means watching the horrific videos from Oct. 7 — and from the bombings in Gaza. Last week, our editor-in-chief, Jodi Rudoren, viewed a 43-minute video chronicling Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel at Israel’s consulate in Manhattan. The footage is a horrifying record of unthinkable crimes, she writes, “an illustration of pure evil beyond what I had ever imagined possible.” But it didn’t make her “feel better about the death of thousands of Palestinian civilians and the destruction of their homes, about whole extended families being felled by F-16s.” She writes: “We should feel terrible about all of it. It’s devastating. War is hell.” Read her essay ➤
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| | 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 |  | Seven Blessings is a lively drama about a Mizrahi family, and a dark family secret. (United King Films) | In Israel’s Oscar submission, a vibrant story of family, betrayal and forgiveness.Seven Blessings, a drama about a Mizrahi family, “is all about the lies we tell ourselves and the grudges that, if allowed to fester, can destroy us,” our PJ Grisar writes. It’s not about the current war at all, which may prevent it from finding much success with Oscar voters, but it’s still a timely examination of the “foibles and faultlines underpinning” Israel — and an important reminder of how unconcerned great Israeli films can be with “fears over international respectability.” | | A very untraditional bat mitzvah tallit holds the key to tradition. As artist Mindy Stricke helped her daughter, Noa, prepare for her bat mitzvah, she began crafting a one-of-a-kind tallis for her — one that wraps in references to “all the people and things that have, up to this point, formed Noa into who she is,” our Mira Fox writes. Currently on display in a Jewish art gallery in Toronto, the piece, titled Fringes, helped Stricke come to terms with “that uncomfortable uncertainty of watching” her daughter grow up, she said. | | | WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY |  | Hazmat teams responded to calls at three Seattle synagogues over the weekend. (Karen Ducey/Getty Images) | 😧 Three Seattle synagogues and an Omaha Jewish community center were targeted over the weekend with letters containing a powdered white substance later found to not be hazardous, leaving communities on alert amid rising antisemitism in the wake of the war. Separately, an Indianapolis woman drove her car into what she thought was a Jewish center, but turned out to be a building used by Black Hebrew Israelites. Police said the woman intended to attack the center over what she said was her anger at the war. (King 5, KETV7, Times of Israel)
😨 A French Jewish woman was stabbed and injured and a swastika found on her door in the city of Lyon on Saturday. Police are searching for her attacker. (JTA)
👀 A 2019 Trump executive order might pave the way for Jewish college students to take legal action against their universities, as campus antisemitism has spiked since Oct. 7. The controversial order instructed federal officials to expand Title VI protections to include “discrimination rooted in antisemitism.” (NBC News)
🤝 Pope Francis met with a group of European rabbis at the Vatican this morning; the pope, who was ill, presented the rabbis with a speech denouncing antisemitism, but did not read it aloud. (Associated Press)
😟 Thousands of Iranians chanted “death to Israel” during Saturday demonstrations marking the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. (Associated Press)
🙄 Seven Cuban officials were punished after helping organize a Halloween party where a Hitler costume won first place. The deputy director of the Cuban Rock Agency, a state-run music organization, was stripped of his role, and two other employees were fired. (Barron’s)
🕊️ An integrated Jewish and Arab school in Jerusalem won a top global prize for education; one school official, in a video responding to the award, said, “The fact that Jews and Arabs never meet each other from a very young age brings a lot of opportunity for racism, and this is something we do differently in the school.” (Guardian)
What else we’re reading ➤“Six members of my family are hostages in Gaza. Does anyone care?” … “How a century-old Jewish fire brigade processes grief over the war” … “‘I just couldn’t take it’: How a Jewish politician decided to confront left-wing antisemitism.” | | PHOTO OF THE DAY |  | (ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images) | A perfect New York City moment: An Orthodox man and child crossed the street yesterday behind three racers running the New York City marathon. | 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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