 INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT. SINCE 1897.  Jewish voters may decide California recall election, why a city is spying on a synagogue, photographer recalls his famous 9/11 image, Barry Levinson's new Holocaust movie and more. OUR LEAD STORY 🇮🇱  Vermont’s largest city could become first in U.S. to endorse BDS
Burlington’s City Council could become the first in the nation to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel if it approves a resolution proposed by one of its members at a meeting this evening. While cities including Portland and St. Louis have divested from specific companies targeted by pro-Palestinian activists, Burlington would be the first to endorse BDS itself.
Jewish response: That prospect has alarmed some Jewish community leaders in Vermont, home to roughly 8,000 Jews, who say it will fuel antisemitism. “We’re scared,” Rabbi Tobie Weisman, director of Jewish Communities of Vermont, told our reporter Arno Rosenfeld. “There’s a feeling like this definitely could pass and it would be a terrible, terrible thing.”
Putting it in context: The BDS resolution comes after Ben & Jerry’s, which is based just outside Burlington, announced over the summer that it would stop selling its ice cream at Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Jewish students at the University of Vermont and Middlebury College, about an hour south of Burlington, say they have been harassed for supporting Israel.
Where’s Bernie? Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish and spent months volunteering on a kibbutz, did not respond to requests for comment on the resolution. He and the rest of Vermont’s Congressional delegation oppose BDS.
How likely is it to pass? Unclear. The 12-member council is made up of Democrats, independents and members of the Vermont Progressive Party. A UVM student advocating against the resolution said he had only heard back from two of the members, and they both oppose it. Late Sunday, Dillon Hosier, chief executive of the Israeli-American Civic Action Network said that the resolution’s sponsor, council member Ali Dieng, had decided not to move it forward on Monday; Dieng has not returned calls from the Forward.
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ALSO IN THE FORWARD 👋  Opinion: Observing Yom Kippur on the street:Tamar Manasseh, a Chicago anti-violence advocate who was recently ordained as a rabbi, plans to spend the Day of Atonement on a street corner in her neighborhood, surrounded by 600 yahrzeit candles, one for every person in her city who died from guns and other acts of violence this year. “As Jews, we have an obligation to give voice to the unheard,” she writes in our opinion section, “to represent those who are not seen, and yes, to mourn those who would otherwise die anonymously.” Read her essay >
How Israel’s new government is reaching out to American Jews: Israeli leaders are taking first steps toward what they describe as a reset of the U.S.-Israel alliance and the Israel-Diaspora relationship — both of which deteriorated in the 12 years Netanyahu was in power. Our senior political reporter, Jacob Kornbluh, talked with two Israeli cabinet members during a recent visit to Jerusalem. “We know that all of us have a shared destiny,” said Idan Roll, deputy minister of foreign affairs. Read the story >
WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY👇  CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR GAVIN NEWSOM AT A CAMPAIGN EVENT. (GETTY IMAGES) 🗳 The Jewish vote could be a deciding factor in tomorrow’s special election for California governor. “Jews vote, they largely vote for Democrats and they strongly oppose right-wing extremists,” said Halie Soifer, head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. President Biden is expected to campaign with Gov. Gavin Newsom later today. (Jewish Insider)
🚔 A Jewish cemetery in St. Paul, Minn. was targeted by vandals who knocked down more than 30 grave markers. And it wasn’t the only sign of antisemitism in the Twin Cities in recent days. A local synagogue canceled in-person services on Friday and Saturday after receiving a threat of violence. (KSTP News)
🕵️ Meanwhile, the Cleveland suburb of University Heights, which is involved in a zoning lawsuit with a synagogue called the Alexander Shul, sent a private detective to surveil people entering services on Rosh Hashanah. Let’s just say it didn’t go over so well. (Cleveland.com)
⚠️ An apartment building in the Tel Aviv suburb of Holon collapsed on Sunday, a day after its residents were evacuated. (Jerusalem Post)
🕯 The headstone for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Rosh Hashanah last year, has been unveiled. She is buried alongside her husband, Martin, at Arlington National Cemetery. (New York Post)
🎥 Barry Levinson is scheduled to debut “The Survivor” at the Toronto Film Festival today. The Oscar-winning director turned the incredible true story of a boxer haunted by guilt over fighting fellow Jews in Auschwitz (and later competing against Rocky Marciano) into a film about post-traumatic stress disorder. (Variety, The Hollywood Reporter)
Shiva call > Gilbert Seltzer, a soldier in the World War II “Ghost Army,” has died at 106. He was part of a team of military con artists who duped German forces with inflatable tanks and fake radio transmissions that distracted from real Allied forces coming from a different direction. “We are credited with saving as many as 30,000 men, which I think is an exaggeration,” Seltzer later said. “But if we saved one life, it was all worthwhile.” (NYT)
What we’re watching > “Scenes from a Marriage” on HBO, a modern update of the 1973 Ingmar Bergman miniseries, written and directed by Israeli Hagai Levi. The New York Times says it “feels less like a reimagining than like a highbrow stage revival.”
FROM OUR CULTURE SECTION 📚  Francine Prose would like to return to eavesdropping on strangers: The author of 22 novels has a new book, set in the aftermath of the trials of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Jewish-American citizens who were convicted of spying on behalf of the Soviet Union. “My mother knew Ethel in high school, so the case was always in my consciousness,” Prose told our Irene Katz Connelly. “But I could never figure out a way of writing about it that didn’t seem exploitative. It was only when I realized I could write about the exploitation that I was able to do it.” Read the interview >
Does ‘Hallelujah’ explain Leonard Cohen? A new movie thinks so:Debuting at the Venice Film Festival this month, the film is a wellspring of rare concert footage (Bob Dylan playing “Hallelujah”), archival interviews (Cohen kibbitzing with Richard Belzer) and never-before-seen notebooks in which the poet famously scrawled countless unused verses for the title song. Read the story >
Bonus tracks:
ON THE CALENDAR 🗓  PHOTO: J. DAVID AKE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES On this day in history: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with PLO chairman Yasser Arafat at the White House after signing the Oslo Accords in 1993. The behind-the-scenes story of how that peace plan was brokered was recently dramatized in the film “Oslo” on HBO. “If politics is the art of the possible,” our culture reporter PJ Grisar wrote, “the handsomely-mounted film shows that the unthinkable can sometimes happen when we least expect it.”
In honor of National Bald is Beautiful Day, we’ve got the answer to the world’s most confounding question: How does Naftali Bennett’s kippah stay on his bald head?
It’s also National Peanut Day which means it’s the perfect time to dust off this story from our archives: Why don’t Israeli kids have peanut allergies?
Today at 3 p.m. ET, our editor-in-chief, Jodi Rudoren, will be on a panel about the state of Jewish journalism. It is hosted by YIVO, moderated by Gal Beckerman of The Times (a former Forward editor) and includes our friends Alana Newhouse of Tablet Magazine and Philissa Cramer of JTA. Among the questions they’ll tackle: Given Jews’ assimilation into American society, what is the need for a Jewish press? Click here to join the virtual conversation.
THE STORY BEHIND THE PHOTO 📸  PHOTO: ROBERT A. CUMINS Robert A. Cumins, a documentary photographer who snapped one of the most famous images of a plane hitting the World Trade Center on 9/11, sent us this dispatch as he marked the 20th anniversary of the attacks this weekend…
“On that beautiful sunny September morning, while stopped at a red light just down the road, I made a split-second decision to turn my car around after a radio helicopter report mentioned smoke and fire at the World Trade Center. Months later, I would hear the original recording of that morning’s report and realize that as I was turning around, the anchor was saying, ‘WCBS News time, 8:58.’
“Unknowingly, within five minutes, I was about to take the photograph that would define my career and impact my life. It would be the photograph that would two days later appear on the cover of People Magazine as a double-page spread, as well as across two pages inside Paris Match Magazine.
“I sped up the hill to the apartment, parked in front, rushed to the elevator that happened to open immediately and made it quickly into the ninth-floor apartment with its clear view of Manhattan from 15 miles away in New Jersey to see the heavy plume of smoke pouring from the North Tower.
“Then came another fateful decision: to run down the stairwell, two floors, to another apartment where I kept my camera equipment; in full stride, back up two flights, quickly through the living room while replacing the film and changing the lens on my camera. It was at 9:03, about four-and-a-half minutes after I had turned around at the bottom of the hill, that I arrived on the balcony and immediately noticed a low-flying jet heading north across lower Manhattan, believing it was simply another plane taking off from nearby Newark Airport.
“On instinct, without much thought, I made three quick pictures of that plane – what I envisioned would merely be juxtaposed against the skyline before continuing its flight north. Then, a fireball appeared in my camera's viewfinder just as the jet disappeared.
“Not until the film was processed at my lab an hour later did I realize that the fireball was the plane, United 175. The first image on the roll of film, #00A, was the second jet I initially had thought was just passing by, but was actually a split-second away from hitting the South Tower.
“Had I done anything different that morning, had I so much as stopped to turn on the TV enroute to the balcony, I would have missed that shot. Even now, 20 years later, it is painful for me to tell a story that I have been asked about so many times. But as a documentary photographer for more than 50 years, having covered major events around the world and recorded many moments of historical significance, I believe it is my professional duty to have written this eyewitness to history.
“I photographed that morning in complete silence from the balcony with the wide-angle view of lower Manhattan, perhaps serving as the eyes for the rest of the world to witness that day from distant locations. And given the confusion that followed reports of the first plane’s impact and the hopes that it might have been a tragedy created by accident, perhaps in that instant what we really see is the final moment that forever shattered America’s sense of security.”
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