Three Chabad rabbis (and Rob Reiner) banned from Russia, Kissinger's advice to Ukraine, Marjorie Taylor Greene wins primary, and a Gilbert and Sullivan opera gets translated to Yiddish. Plus: Play today's Vertl puzzle, the Yiddish Wordle |
A girl cries outside of a grief counseling center in Uvalde, Teaxs. (Getty) |
Opinion | When it comes to gun control, why can’t the U.S. be more like Israel? At least 19 children and two adults were killed in a shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday — less than two weeks after 10 Black people were murdered in a Buffalo supermarket. “There have been more mass shootings than days in the year,” said Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, where 26 people were gunned down at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. In a column published overnight, Rob Eshman argues that we should look to Israel for a better approach to gun control. Hurdles: Gun applicants in Israel must meet a long list of criteria, and about 40% are turned down. “You need a note from your doctor assuring you are in sound physical and mental health,” Eshman says. “You can’t have a criminal record. You must take a written and practical gun safety test.” Results: Israel had two gun deaths per 100,000 residents in 2019. The U.S. had 12. “Israel’s social reality – the large number of firearms on the country’s streets – may look like an American conservative’s utopia,” said Haviv Rettig Gur, “but it got there via a domineering statist regulatory regime that American gun control activists can only fantasize about.” Final thought: “The mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, makes me want to scream,” Eshman writes. “Maybe we all need to cry less, and scream louder.” Read his essay ➤ Elsewhere: |
From Israel: “Israel mourns together with the American people the horrific murder of innocent children and teachers,” said Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who attended a San Francisco elementary school for two years. “Our prayers are with the victims, their families and the American people.” From the Vatican: Pope Francis on Wednesday said he was “heartbroken” by the shooting and called for tighter gun control measures so that “tragedies like this cannot happen again.”
From our archive: “Make it your life goal” to challenge gun laws, the actress Mayim Bialik said after the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. “I’m ashamed at what has become normal in our country. It’s not normal. It’s enough.” Watch her video ➤
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A Palestinian family facing displacement from the village of Jinba in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. (Getty) |
A Palestinian was shot and paralyzed over a generator. Now Israel threatens to take his home: Harun Abu Aram’s spinal cord was severed by an Israeli soldier’s bullet as he was attempting to hold on to a generator, his family’s only source of electricity. Abu Aram lives in an area of the occupied West Bank near Hebron that has been fighting in the courts for permanent legal status for decades. Israel’s Supreme Court ruled earlier this month against the residents, leaving Abu Aram among 2,000 Palestinians who would be displaced to make way for a military training zone. Zak Witus, who previously lived in the area, writes: “Now it is incumbent upon us, the survivors of pogroms and genocide, to see ourselves in the stories of our supposed enemies.” Read the essay ➤ I’m not Jewish. But being called “dirty Jew” shook me like no other insult:When a panhandler in the New York City subway screamed antisemitic epithets at him, Alfred P. Doblin was floored, and not just because he’s not Jewish. Doblin, who is gay, is no stranger to bigotry, having had homophobic epithets hurled at him while walking with a date. But this felt different, reflecting the internalization of antisemitic conspiratorial tropes at the deep level. “While I have always understood where antisemitism can lead,” Doblin writes, “it had never reared its ugly face inches from mine.” Read the essay ➤
And one more: Look beyond the Buffalo murders. The extremists’ ideology is mainstream on the right.
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Marjorie Taylor Greene at an election night party in Rome, Georgia. (Getty) |
Former President Donald Trump was dealt a blow in the Georgia gubernatorial primary as Republican Gov. Brian Kemp trounced his Trump-backed challenger, former Sen. David Perdue, who built his campaign on the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Kemp will face Democrat Stacey Abrams in the fall, a rematch of their close 2018 battle. Meanwhile Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who Trump attacked for certifying that President Joe Biden won the state, defeated his primary challenger U.S. Rep. Jody Hice. And Herschel Walker, a former Heisman Trophy winner, became the Republican nominee to challenge incumbent U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock. In other primary races: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene beat her Republican challenger, Jennifer Strahan, by a comfortable 70-30 margin.
In an incumbent-vs.-incumbent primary northeast of Atlanta, Rep. Lucy McBath, who was backed by AIPAC and the Democratic Majority for Israel, beat Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux, who had the support of J Street.
For the open Senate seat in Alabama, Mo Brooks, a Republican congressman who once compared Democrats to Nazis and had his endorsement rescinded by Trump, secured his place in a June 21 runoff.
In Texas, Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat backed by traditional pro-Israel groups, was holding onto a narrow lead over Jessica Cisneros, a human-rights lawyer endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and J Street. AIPAC’s Super PAC spent $1.8 million on the race, while J Street’s Action Fund invested $50,000 in get-out-the-vote efforts. |
WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY |
A Palestinian artist paints a mural in Gaza City of Shireen Abu Akleh, the slain journalist. (Getty) |
🇮🇱 The Palestinian journalist killed while covering an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank earlier this month was most likely killed by an Israeli bullet, according to separate investigations published Tuesday by the Associated Press and CNN. Meanwhile, Israel’s own investigation is ongoing; the authorities have asked the Palestinian Authority to turn over the bullet that killed the popular Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, but it has so far refused (JTA) 🇺🇦 Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger urged Ukraine to end the war by giving up land to Russia, and warned against humiliating President Vladimir Putin with defeat. Ukraine rejected the suggestion. (Washington Post) 🚫 Among the list of 963 Americans that the Kremlin has permanently banned from traveling to Russia are President Joe Biden; Rob Reiner, the Jewish movie director; former U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, who died last month; and three Chabad rabbis who have spent decades trying to recover books and artifacts stolen during the Soviet era.(JTA) 🪦 Many Jewish soldiers killed in World War II were given Christian burials for a variety of reasons. Their descendants are now rectifying the situation by putting up Jewish tombstones. (New York Times) 🎬 Anthony Hopkins and Anne Hathaway play the descendants of Ukrainian Jews grappling with racial and social injustices in 1980s New York in a new film that debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. It is among 21 candidates for the festival’s top prize, which will be awarded on Saturday. (AFP) What else we’re reading ➤ When your job fills in for your faith, that’s a problem … San Antonio rabbi sanctifies Shabbat with Texas-style BBQ brisket … Neil Lane, official jeweler of ‘The Bachelor,’ is designing ketubahs.
What we’re listening to ➤ The latest episode of the Milk Street Radio podcast in which Mary Giuliani, a celebrity chef, talks about growing up Italian in a Jewish neighborhood, giving herself a bat mitzvah and becoming a Shabbos goy.
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William Gilbert (left) and Arthur Sullivan. (Wikimedia) |
On this day in history: Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta “H.M.S Pinafore” opened at London’s Opera Comique on May 25, 1878. Set on a navy ship where the captain’s daughter falls in love with a sailor, the show quickly became one of the longest-running operas of its time, beloved for lightly poking fun at classism and patriotism. In 1994, the Long Island-based Yiddish Light Opera Company premiered an adaptation of the opera, “Der Yiddisher Pinafore.” In this version, the star-crossed lovers were separated by religion, not class. “When the Captain confronts Rokhl and Labe in Act II,” one review noted, “Labe exclaims not that he is an Englishman, but that he is a Guter Yid.”
Last year on this day, we reported that the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers picked a Jew of color to lead its diversity efforts.
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Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt was formally sworn in Tuesday as the U.S. special envoy to combat and monitor antisemitism by Vice President Kamala Harris. A visibly emotional Lipstadt took the oath on a copy of the ”U.S. Army Talmud,” which was printed in the U.S. Zone of Allied-occupied Germany in 1948 on behalf of Holocaust survivors housed in displaced persons camps, as well as a Book of Psalms that belonged to her mother. ––– Thanks to Nora Berman, Rob Eshman, Jacob Kornbluh, Amanda Rozon and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at [email protected]. |
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