WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION

Good morning. Israel’s government pushed back on fears of a Gazan exodus into Egypt, and more hostages spoke out about their experiences in captivity, including allegations of sexual assault. Separately, the president of Harvard’s fate is uncertain after the president of the University of Pennsylvania resigned.

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ISRAEL AT WAR

Stickers on the mailboxes of Kibbutz Nir Oz residents mark those killed and kidnapped on Oct. 7. (Rina Castelnuovo)

Red stickers for killed, black for kidnapped: Bearing witness to the massacre at Kibbutz Nir Oz. One-fourth of the kibbutz’s residents were killed or kidnapped in the Oct. 7 attack — leaving survivors reeling, and the peaceful landscape littered with reminders of horror. “The first house we stopped at had a purple tricycle with its wheels melted off in the yard,” writes our editor-in-chief Jodi Rudoren, who visited the kibbutz last week. But some survivors have already returned to pick up the pieces of their shattered communal life, with one saying, simply, “I don’t have another home.” Read the story ➤

More of Jodi’s reporting from Israel:

• ‘People thought we were dead’: They spent 27 hours under fire from Hamas — then Netanyahu used their home for an Elon Musk photo op

  
  

• ‘We need a miracle’: Lighting Hanukkah candles with the family of Israeli hostage Uriel Baruch

  
  

• Every soldier has a mother. And each has her own story

  
  

• In wartime Israel, everyone does their part — even if that means cooking dinner in a parking garage

Israel Therapy: I’m in college, and I refuse to choose between #standwithIsrael and #freePalestine. With conflict over the war roiling college campuses — and, after last week’s controversial testimony of three college presidents before Congress, influencing national politics — one Columbia sophomore wrote to our advice column Israel Therapy to ask how to handle their desire to just stay out of it. “The way to fight the binaries and the polarization is not to argue them away,” our columnist writes. “It’s by creating an alternative that is humane, compassionate and clear.” Read the advice ➤

Israel authorities inspect the impact of a rocket attack from the Gaza Strip in Israel's central coastal city of Holon on Monday. (AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP via Getty Images)

Latest from the war…

• The U.S. State Department will sell $107 million of tank supplies to Israel without Congressional approval, after blocking a United Nations Security Council cease-fire resolution on Friday. Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said Sunday that the U.S. holds some responsibility for the civilian toll on Palestinians of Israel’s war with Hamas.

  
  

• Israel’s national security adviser responded to global outrage over photos of Gazan men stripped almost naked and blindfolded while under arrest, saying that strip searches are necessary to make sure detainees are unarmed but sharing photographs of them “serves nobody.” Hundreds were arrested, but an Israel Defense Forces spokesman said “dozens” had been transferred to authorities on suspicion of involvement in terrorism, raising concerns that troops are making broad arrests without concrete suspicions.

  
  

• A released Israeli hostage told Israel’s national broadcaster that three other hostages had told her they had been sexually assaulted by their captors in Gaza, and that she had been told a similar story about a fourth. Separately, a nurse released in the recent hostage exchange warned Israel’s war cabinet that hostages remaining in Gaza are suffering from extreme medical issues under “tough to impossible conditions.“

  
  

• Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said talks to reach a new cease-fire and release more hostages are ongoing, but said Israel’s continuing airstrikes on Gaza are “narrowing this window.” 

  
  

• Israel pushed back after U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres raised concerns of “increased pressure for mass displacement into Egypt” for Gazan civilians, with a spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying the idea that Israel intends to push Palestinians out of Gaza is “outrageous and false.”

New polls suggest Americans support Israel in its war with Hamas — but not President Joe Biden’s approach to the conflict. (Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Stateside…

• Two new polls found that a majority of Americans support Israel in the war. A Pew Center poll released Friday found that some 30% more Americans see Hamas as responsible for the war than say the same for Israel’s government, while a Wall Street Journal poll released Monday found that 55% of Americans think Israel’s military actions are necessary. Both polls also found that more Americans disapprove of President Joe Biden’s strongly pro-Israel response to the war than approve of it.

  
  

• Harvard president Claudine Gay’s future is uncertain after University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill resigned Saturday. Both Gay and Magill came under scrutiny over testimony in front of Congress last week; Gay remained in her role after a Sunday meeting of Harvard’s board of directors, as more than 500 faculty members signed a letter in support of her.

  
  

• New York State increased security outside of Jewish institutions after shots were fired at an Albany synagogue late last week. Separately, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul warned state universities of legal consequences if they are found to violate discrimination laws in the wake of rising antisemitism.

  
  

• Steven Spielberg said that the USC Shoah Foundation, which he founded and which records contemporary experiences of antisemitism alongside Holocaust narratives, is working on a project to document the horrors of the Oct. 7 attack through interviews with survivors.

  
  

• The owners of a coffee shop in Oakland, California, apologized after employees were filmed temporarily stopping a woman from filming anti-Israel slogans in a bathroom, with one saying, “I know Israel loves taking private property and saying it’s their own.” The owners said the workers in the video are no longer employed at the business.

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ALSO IN THE FORWARD

Bernstein, conducting the New York Philharmonic in the 1970s. (Getty Images)

Leonard Bernstein was far more Jewish than you’d know from Maestro. Bradley Cooper’s biopic, which is generating Oscar buzz, nods at Bernstein’s close affiliation with Judaism in a single scene — a choice by which the film “loses so much of who Bernstein was, how he understood himself, and how he understood his role in the world,” our Mira Fox writes.

A Yiddish Hanukkah song ponders the meaning of the candles. The little-known holiday tune “O ir Kleyne Likhtelekh” — which translates to “Little Candles” — draws a contrast between the story of the Maccabees and the oppression experienced by Russian Jews under Czar Alexander III. Amid a sea of Hanukkah songs beloved by American Jews that take a more secular approach to the holiday, writes Yiddish editor Rukhl Schaechter, the song deserves attention for its celebration of a win in a “struggle for religious — not necessarily political — freedom.”

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

Orthodox Jews walking in Brooklyn. (CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images)

😧  Two attacks against Jews took place in Brooklyn over the weekend. One victim was beaten by an attacker who reportedly yelled antisemitic slurs during the assault, and the other was robbed of his $2,500 shtreimel, a traditional fur hat worn by some Haredi men. (New York Post)

😨  A Jewish man was beaten with a belt on his way to shul in Beverly Hills on Saturday. The assailant allegedly also yelled at the man’s wife, “Give me your earrings, Jew.” (KTLA)

😰  Two teenage girls were arrested in the assault and robbery of a Jewish woman in London, an incident police are treating as a possible hate crime. Separately, a former local Labour politician suspended from the party in 2019 over a social media post seen as antisemitic apologized after calling for someone to “blow up the venue” of a planned Jewish political meeting. (Guardian, BBC)

😓  A 16-year-old was arrested in Austria over alleged plans to attack a Vienna synagogue; his home contained instructions for making bombs and other weapons. (Washington Post)

🇦🇷  Argentinian President Javier Milei cited the story of the Maccabees in his inaugural address. Milei, who has shared plans to convert to Judaism, said Hanukkah celebrates “the weak over the powerful, of the few over the many, of the light over darkness and overall of the truth over untruth.” (JTA)

🥹  President Biden attended a shiva for Norman Lear, the Jewish American sitcom giant who died last week at 101. (Deadline)

🕎  Biden will hold a Hanukkah celebration at the White House tonight, after second gentleman Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, presided over the lighting of an enormous menorah in front of the White House last week. (Associated Press)

What else we’re reading ➤ “Why a 123-year-old Jewish nonprofit won’t choose sides in Gaza” … “Who is putting anti-Israel stickers on packs of hummus” in Brooklyn? … “How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today.”

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Saturday Night Live’s opening skit lambasted both the testimony of college presidents in front of Congress last week, and the questions posed to them by Rep. Elise Stefanik.

Thanks to Beth Harpaz for editing this newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com.

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