Should Ivanka Trump sit shiva for her mom? Plus: University removes antisemite's name from library, Jewish pitching phenom heading to draft, and Barcelona gets first Michelin-starred kosher restaurant. |
Carl Paladino at Trump Tower in December 2016. (Getty) |
Our senior political reporter, Jacob Kornbluh, shares what’s in his notebook… A Buffalo congressional candidate who expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler’s leadership style is backing a fellow Republican running in a heavily Jewish district. Carl Paladino, the Buffalo Republican, gave the maximum donation of $2,000 to the campaign of Michael Lawler, a Republican assemblyman trying to unseat six-term Democratic Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, in a Rockland Country district that includes sprawling Hasidic communities. Read the story ➤ In other midterm-election news, Maryland’s primaries on Tuesday offer another high-stakes test of AIPAC’s electoral muscle. The group’s Super PAC, United Democracy Project, has spent $6 million to defeat former U.S. Rep. Donna Edwards, a Democrat backed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Edwards, who held the seat from 2008 to 2017, faced criticism for voting against a resolution condemning Hamas rocket fire during the Gaza war in 2009.
Elsewhere in the state, three candidates who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement are competing for seats in the state legislature, including a Jewish progressive in a Silver Spring district with a sizable Jewish population.
Biden in the Mideast |
President Joe Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah on Saturday. (Getty) |
A dozen members of Congress have requested a White House briefing on the progress President Joe Biden made towards expanding the Abraham Accords during his trip last week. A Saudi minister told reporters that the country’s move to allow direct flights to and from Israel should not be interpreted as a precursor to opening diplomatic relations with the Jewish state, and said on CNN that there won’t be full normalization until a two-state solution is reached. Meanwhile, a senior U.S. administration official told the Forward that the Palestinian issue should’t be an obstacle to getting the Saudis to join the Abraham Accords. And Sen. Bernie Sanders criticized Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia, saying, “I just don’t believe we should be maintaining a warm relationship with a dictatorship like that.” After Biden confronted Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia over the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi during their meeting on Friday, the prince brought up the May killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while she was covering an Israeli military raid in the occupied West Bank. A group of more than 100 Jewish leaders and top defense and foreign policy experts signed a letter supporting the stalled nomination of Tamara Cofman Wittes to be assistant administrator for the Middle East at the U.S. Agency for International Development. During her confirmation hearing last month, Wittes faced tough questions from Republican members over past social media posts critical of the Abraham Accords. |
Conservative leadership candidate Penny Mordaunt speaks to the British media last week. (Getty) |
The road to Downing Street: Bob Blackman, a Conservative Party leader, vice-chair of the Conservative Party’s influential 1922 Committee, told the Jewish News that all the candidates vying for leader “are big supporters of the state of Israel and the Jewish community.” But one leading contender, Penny Mourdant, came under fire last year for meeting with the head of the Muslim Council of Britain, a controversial group the British government had boycotted over its support of Hamas.
No need to RSVP: Former Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who spends the summer at Martha’s Vineyard, complained in a TV interview that he was recently snubbed by Jewish Democrats who were meeting on the island because of his outspoken defense of former President Donald Trump.
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Ivana Trump with her three children at a 2011 event in New York. (Getty) |
Should Ivanka Trump sit shiva for her mother?Converts are not obligated under Jewish law to ritually mourn their non-Jewish parents. But some rabbis encourage converts to find Jewish ways to process their loss, such as reciting Psalms instead of kaddish. Some, like the comedian Yisrael Campbell, found himself experimenting with “upside-down shiva” – since it took more than a week to bury his father, visitors came to pay condolences before the funeral rather than after. Which might be what Ivanka is doing, since the service for her mother, Ivana, who died on Thursday, is not until Wednesday. Read the story ➤ 750 artifacts of the Holocaust, each with its own tale to tell:“The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do,” now at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, contains a Haggadah written from memory at a labor camp. It also has Himmler’s personal copy of “Mein Kampf.” And many everyday objects that Jews clung to in their final moments. Our PJ Grisar found, though, that the exhibition “feels hazy, somehow less than the sum of its many, poignant parts.” Read the story ➤
And one more: He’s the new middleweight champion of the Karate Combat League – and he’s Jewish.
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WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY |
Louisiana State University's Jewish pitcher, Eric Reyzelman, has his sights set on Major League Baseball. (Courtesy) |
⚾ Eric Reyzelman, who has shown his pitching prowess at Louisiana State University by throwing balls at 100 mph, is expected to be drafted into the major leagues this week. The 21-year-old credits his resiliency to his Jewish immigrant parents, who hail from Ukraine and Moldova, where they struggled financially. “Family-wise,” he said, “I come from the best and learn from the best.” (JTA) 😮 A county Republican group in Kentucky has taken down a Facebook post that said “the Jewish junta is getting stronger.” The post came after the confirmation of Steve Dettelbach, President Biden’s choice to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who the group described as “a Jewish anti-gun activist.” (Louisville Courier Journal) 🗣️ The Anne Frank Trust is investigating how a speaker who once said Israel is committing a Holocaust against the Palestinians was invited to lead a children’s workshop. “What’s sad,” poet Nasima Begum tweeted in 2011, “is that the Jewish population faced genocide themselves in Hitler’s Germany but they’ve implemented the same on Palestine.” (Jerusalem Post) 📚 The California State University Board of Trustees voted to remove the name of an antisemite from the main library on its Fresno campus. The library had been named for Henry Miller Madden, a historian who served as the university’s librarian for 30 years. Madden had written about wanting to drag barefoot Jews into a remote area, where “target practice will be permitted twice weekly, with explosive bullets to be used on Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Purim, etc.” The library will be called the Fresno State Library until a replacement name is chosen. (J, the Jewish News of Northern California) 🖼️ The head of a major modern art show in Germany resigned on Saturday after an exhibit featuring antisemitic elements prompted an outcry at the event’s opening last month. The exhibit included a banner by an Indonesian art collective that showed a soldier with the face of a pig wearing a neckerchief with a Star of David and a helmet inscribed with the word “Mossad.” (New York Times) 💻 Goyim TV, an antisemitic video-sharing site, was taken down by its web-hosting company after a flood of complaints. The site’s owner redirected his followers to a similar site based out of the United Kingdom. (J, the Jewish News of Northern California) Sh’koyach ➤ To Sue Fishkoff, who is retiring after 11 years as editor of J, the Jewish News of Northern California. Fishkoff was previously a reporter at JTA and the Jerusalem Post. “She has made a lasting mark,” wrote Sue Barnett, her managing editor and interim successor.
Shiva call ➤ René Slotkin and his sister, Irene, were one of 200 sets of twins to survive the experiments of Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. Slotkin, a physical education teacher who told their story over and over, including in a 2005 documentary, has died at 84. (Irene died in 2019.)
What else we’re reading ➤ Barcelona gets world’s first Michelin-starred kosher restaurant … The richest man in Asia bought Israel’s Haifa port … Billy Crystal’s Broadway musical “Mr. Saturday Night” to close in September. |
Rescue workers sift through the rubble after the Jewish community center was bombed in Buenos Aires. (Getty) |
On this day in history (1994):A bombing at a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires killed 87. It was the second such attack on the community in two years. The first, which hit the Israeli Embassy in 1992, killed 29 and injured 242. Scrutiny increased after the second attack, and investigations revealed the second bombing was planned and executed by the Hezbollah movement. Last year on this day, we reported that Pope Francis restricted the use of the Latin Mass, a form of the liturgy that called for the conversion of Jews. On the Hebrew calendar, it’s the 19th of Tammuz, the yahrtzeit of Rabbi Yitzhak Herzog, who was chief rabbi of both Ireland and Israel and died in 1959.
July 28 at 7 p.m. ET: How are millennials building community in, and outside of, traditional Jewish spaces? Join us for an evening of conversation, in-person or online. Register here ➤
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With summer camp in full swing, we’re heading back in time to revisit Camp Hemshekh, a Yiddish camp founded in 1959 and closed in 1978. It was located in an old hotel half a mile from a chicken farm owned by the camp’s director. In the video above, part of an oral history project at the Yiddish Book Center, former campers and counselors recall the camp’s glory days. ––– Play today’s Vertl puzzle, the Yiddish Wordle Thanks to PJ Grisar, Jacob Kornbluh, Amanda Rozon, Rukhl Schaechter, Rina Shamilov and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at [email protected]. |
Support Independent Jewish Journalism The Forward is a non-profit 501(c)3 so our journalism depends on support from readers like you. You can support our work today by donating or subscribing. All donations are tax-deductible to the full extent of US law. Make a donation ➤ Subscribe to Forward.com ➤ "America’s most prominent Jewish newspaper" — The New York Times, 2021 |
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