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In today’s edition: Joe Biden, Pope Francis, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Elon Musk, Benjamin Netanyahu, Gilda Radner, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Donald Trump — and the origins of Pastramakah.

ISRAEL

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu crossed the border into Syria on Tuesday. (Getty)

Let’s begin with Israel, where there’s a lot of news to start your day…

• Israel is among the U.S. allies who have expressed concern that Elon Musk could share sensitive data with others, with the Israeli Ministry of Defense calling him a “wild card.” President-elect Donald Trump has tasked Musk, whose SpaceX does business with governments across the globe, with helping in the new administration. (New York Times)

  
  

• A lawsuit filed by Palestinian families alleges that the U.S. State Department created exceptions for Israel, circumventing a law which restricts military aid to foreign units implicated in human rights abuses. (Times of Israel)

  
  

• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu crossed the border into Syria on Tuesday to visit Israeli soldiers stationed there following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. While there, he said that Israel would maintain forces in the buffer zone between Syria and the Golan Heights. (JTA, AP)

  
  

• The Bibi Files, the documentary we mentioned in Tuesday’s newsletter about Netanyahu’s corruption case, has been shortlisted for an Academy Award. Netanyahu took the stand Wednesday for the fourth day of testimony in the trial. (Hollywood Reporter, Times of Israel)

  
  

• Determined to cement his legacy in the final weeks of his administration, President Joe Biden is hoping to get a ceasefire in Gaza, according to his chief of staff. (New York Times)

  
  

• Hamas is reportedly worried that after the first phase of a hostage release agreement, Trump may allow Israel to resume military operations in Gaza, leading the group to insist on a permanent ceasefire in current negotiations. (Times of Israel)

  
  

• Most Israelis believe their country’s overall situation is “bad” or “very bad,” and 58% believe democracy is in danger, according to an end-of-the-ear study from the Israel Democracy Institute. (Haaretz, Times of Israel)

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CULTURE

(Illustration by Midjourney)

Merry Pastramakah

The whimsical Yuletide-meets-Yiddish tradition began, as such things do, in a Las Vegas saloon. It was 2004, and the bar’s owner flew in 30 pounds of pastrami from Katz’s Deli on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The party began in the afternoon and lasted well into the night, with bands playing and nomadic Jews who “found succor, as well as thick, delicious, artery-clogging sandwiches,” writes Charles Bock, who brought the made-up holiday back to his New York apartment, where he’s added new rituals and celebrated it each year since. Read the story ►

Related: Want potato pancake perfection? Here are four tips for making the best latkes in your neighborhood.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe in the 1970s in New York. (Getty)

Charismatic rebbe

A series of biographies of famous Jews — including the biblical Elijah and the mobster Bugsy Siegel — has a new addition to its canon: Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe. “How did this private scholar become one of the most charismatic holy men of the century?” asks the book’s author, Ezra Glinter, a former editor at the Forward. Go deeper ►

Jonathan Randell Silver and Jordan Kai Burnett star in Gene and Gilda. (T. Charles Erickson)

Plus…

• A new play recounts the story of the rocky six-year romance of Hollywood power couple Gilda Radner and Gene Wilder.

  
  

• Heinz Berggruen left Berlin with 10 German marks in his pocket. He came back with an art collection worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s now on display to the public.

  
  

• The LeeVees want to reinvent Jewish holiday music. Their Hanukkah repertoire includes “Gelt Melts,” “At the Timeshare” and “Apple Sauce vs. Sour Cream.”

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

Left to right: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Rabbi Levi Shemtov, a Chabad emissary in D.C., and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer during a Hanukkah reception Tuesday at the Capitol. (Getty)

👎  Congress unveiled a short-term spending bill to fund the government into March. As expected, the Antisemitism Awareness Act was not included, a blow to Sen. Chuck Schumer who had pledged to get it passed before the end of the year after a pressure campaign from Republicans and some Jewish groups. House Speaker Mike Johnson was against attaching extra legislation to the stopgap funding. (Forward, Jewish Insider)

😲  A former student filed a lawsuit this week against Oholei Torah, a yeshiva in Brooklyn, alleging he was sexually abused "nearly daily" for six months in 2004-2005 by an older student, claiming the school failed to protect him and enabled a decades-long patterns of abuse. (New York Post)

🪦  DNA tests performed on skeletal remains revealed it was Mitchell Mendelson, a Jewish man who had been missing for more than a decade. National Geographic is producing a documentary about the case. (Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle)

📿  Archaeologists discovered an 1,800-year-old silver amulet containing an 18-line text showing the oldest known devotion to Christianity north of the Alps. (Live Science)

🎭  Study up on your Yiddish! A play featuring three short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize winner and longtime Forward writer, is opening today off-Broadway. (Playbill)

Quotable ► “Irony is a medicine, not only to lift and brighten others, but also ourselves, because self-mockery is a powerful instrument in overcoming the temptation toward narcissism.” — Pope Francis in an essay about the power of humor, which references Jewish mothers. (New York Times)

Transitions ► Danny Cohn, formerly of the Birmingham Jewish Federation, will be the new CEO of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis … Jen Algire is joining the Union for Reform Judaism as its executive vice president … Christen Broecker is the new director of the American Jewish Committee’s Jacob Blaustein Institute.

What else we’re reading ► What it’s like to be a fashion designer in the occupied West Bank (The Cut) … How did Adolf Hitler's car end up in Ottawa? (CBC) … How two Israeli friends created a mashup of NBC’s The Office and Superstore (Haaretz).

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Another day, another Wicked parody: This time it’s the Maccabeats with their own version of “Defying Gravity.” The music video above somehow manages to include both the liberation of Auschwitz and Sandy Koufax. 🤷

Thanks to Jacob Kornbluh for contributing to today’s newsletter, and to Julie Moos for editing it. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com.

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