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| JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT. Give a tax-deductible donation Katie Couric reveals her mom was Jewish, Dr. Jill Biden speaks at yeshiva dinner, the religious philosopher on the Houston Astros and how a church ended up hosting a bar mitzvah. OUR LEAD STORY Charlottesville neo-Nazi trial to start today with Lipstadt as key witness
Jury selection is slated to start today in the trial surrounding the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, where neo-Nazis shouted “Jews will not replace us.” Nine plaintiffs injured at the 2017 event in Virginia are seeking financial compensation from some two dozen of the nation’s most notorious alt-right figures and groups. The rabbi of Charlottesville’s only synagogue said “it’s disturbing” that “this way of thinking” is once again “right here walking on our streets.”
Meet the legal team: The lead plaintiff’s attorney in the federal civil case is Roberta Kaplan, a crusading feminist and gay-rights activist who was honored at the Forward’s gala in 2019. The case is being backed by Integrity First for America, a civil rights group led by another Jewish woman, Amy Spitalnick, who said the goal is to expose white supremacists and antisemites and “to bankrupt these groups.”
A key witness: The plaintiffs plan to call Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust historian who President Biden has nominated to be his global antisemitism czar. She is expected to discuss, among other things, the so-called Great Replacement Theory, which Spitalnick said “illustrates that you can’t take on white supremacy without taking on antisemitism and vice versa.”
The case: The crux of the plaintiffs’ case is the Enforcement Act of 1871, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, which was designed to hold Klansmen accountable for their actions. Kaplan will argue that the defendants conspired to hurt Jews and people of color. The attorneys have uncovered a “mountain of evidence illustrating what we scraped off their phones and computers showing the racial animus that fueled it,” Spitalnick said.
It’s personal: Spitalnick, speaking about the case at a conference of the Jewish Women's Foundation of New York last week, said working on the case has been the honor of her life, and that, as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, “it’s also incredibly personally meaningful.” Read our profile of Amy Spitalnick, a 21st century Nazi hunter Our reporter Arno Rosenfeld will be at the trial. Follow him on Twitter for the latest updates.
ALSO IN THE FORWARD A village for second chances: There are 115 tiny homes along the Arroyo Grande Freeway between Pasadena and Los Angeles that weren’t there a month ago. Each took only 90 minutes to build, and together they will soon offer 230 unhoused people immediate shelter, food, and health and occupational services. After our national editor Rob Eshman got a tour from the pastor who runs the place, he asked an obvious question. Why isn’t L.A. building thousands of these? Read the story >
Catch 22: Jewish teenagers are stuck between their youth group’s vaccine mandate and their states’ anti-mandate laws. The Conservative movement’s youth group, USY, has a rule requiring vaccination to attend its events across the country. So where does that leave chapters in Florida, Georgia, Texas and other states that bar vaccine mandates? On Sunday, one in Coral Gables, Fla., had to cancel a planned mini-golf outing. Read the story >
WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY 📚 Katie Couric revealed in her new memoir that she has both Jewish (on her mother’s side) and Confederate (on her father’s side) ancestry. Speaking of her mom, who died in 2014 at 91, Couric said, “We have no idea how many micro-aggressions she experienced as a Jewish person in a world that was rife with antisemitism.” The highly anticipated autobiography is set to be released on Tuesday. (NY Mag, JTA)
🗳 Josh Mandel, a Jewish Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio, said at a debate Sunday night that his “personal feeling is, there’s no such thing as separation of church and state.” He was also critical of George Soros, a Holocaust survivor who funds Democratic causes, and religions like Islam that are not based on Judeo-Christian ethics. (AP, Twitter)
⚡️ Staying on the topic of Congress … Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia apparently got into a shouting match with Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Jamie Raskin of Maryland at a House Judiciary Committee hearing. The topic? Jewish space lasers. (The Hill)
🇪🇸 A man known as the “Spanish Schindler” rescued more than 5,000 Hungarian Jews by issuing them fake passports during World War II. Now Spain wants to find their descendants to help make their stories known. (The Times of London)
🎉 When international tourism vanished during the pandemic, a Christian guest house in Israel began wooing locals. That’s how a church-owned building ended up hosting its very first bar mitzvah. (Haaretz)
🏀 Dolph Schayes, the Jewish basketball legend, was named one of the NBA’s 75 best all-time players. Schayes, who died in 2015 at age 87, spent most of the 1951 season playing in a cast after he broke his arm. It forced him to learn to shoot with his left hand, which made him even more of an offensive threat. (JTA)
Shiva call > Jay Black, frontman for the 1960s pop-rock hitmakers Jay and the Americans, has died at the age of 82. In a 2014 interview with the Forward, he said that his singing career started in the choir of Temple Beth-El in Borough Park. His voice was good, though he got kicked out of three yeshivas. “I was always a trouble maker,” he said.
What we’re watching > Dr. Jill Biden’s Sunday night speech at the Yeshiva Beth Yehudah annual dinner in Detroit (and some of the entertainment from the boys choir).
FROM OUR CULTURE SECTION Paul Auster, one of America’s greatest Jewish storytellers, has just published a doorstop of a novel, at 880 pages. Our Irene Katz Connelly (who writes a great monthly newsletter about books) spoke with Auster about his writing routine. For starters, he doesn’t use a computer. Read the story >
Can a Jewish girl do ‘Christian Girl Autumn’? A tongue-in-cheek response to rapper Megan Thee Stallion’s “hot girl summer” of excess and debauchery, “Christian Girl Autumn” has been a meme since 2019, criticizing Instagram profiles featuring pumpkin spice lattes and chunky sweaters. But since the pandemic, the twee aesthetic has been unironically embraced — and culture writer Mira Fox wanted in. How Christian does “Christian Girl Autumn” have to be? Read the story >
ON THE CALENDAR On this day in history: Adam Goldberg, an actor with more than 75 TV and film credits, was born on Oct. 25, 1970. He is most known in Jewish circles for his titular role in “The Hebrew Hammer,” the 2003 comedy where he saves Hanukkah from an evil son of Santa Claus, who had flooded Jewish neighborhoods with bootlegged copies of “It’s A Wonderful Life” to brainwash the children into celebrating Christmas. Our reviewer wrote that the film has “near-perfect zaniness.”
It’s also the birthday of the Rev. Charles Coughlin, a populist radio priest who was eventually forced off the air for his antisemitic and fascist rhetoric. Our friends over at Tablet Magazine have just released “Radioactive,” an eight-episode podcast about the rise and fall of Father Coughlin.
In honor of National Greasy Food Day, our food editor Rob Eshman offers up the secret to legendary latkes. I know it’s not yet Halloween, but Hanukkah is early this year, starting on Thanksgiving weekend.
AN ANIMATED HISTORY OF THE FORWARD The Forward is 124 years old, and most of our early years were before the advent of moving images. So how do you tell our storied history? With an animated video, of course. We debuted the above at our gala last week and wanted to share it here with our “Forwarding” readers. Watch now >
PHOTO OF THE DAY (Photo: Herzog & de Meuron; Mann-Shinar Architects, Executive Architect) Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel never knew the real name of perhaps his most influential teacher, “Mr. Shushani,” who reportedly knew the entire Bible, Talmud and many other texts by heart, as well as many languages. Now, 50 of Shushani’s handwritten notebooks have been donated to the National Library of Israel and will be open to the public for the first time. Scholars believe the enigmatic writings contain potentially groundbreaking ideas in the realms of Jewish thought. Find out more >
Thanks to Mira Fox and Deena Kuperman 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.
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