WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION

Today: Harvard’s new hire • Cuomo gets key Jewish endorsements • Boulder Jewish Festival draws thousands one week after attack • And the Tony Awards.

POLITICS

Activists protesting immigration raids clash with law enforcement officers Sunday in Los Angeles. (Getty)

Meet the LA rabbis taking on the National Guard and immigration raids

The LAPD declared the city’s entire downtown an “unlawful assembly” overnight as tensions erupted in Los Angeles over immigration raids. On Sunday, protesters shut down a freeway after President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard to enforce his immigration crackdown. Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets. An interfaith rally planned for last night to support immigrant rights was abruptly canceled.

“Once again my city is burning,” Rob Eshman, our L.A.-based senior columnist, writes in an opinion essay this morning, spotlighting four synagogues that have joined forces with churches and mosques to defend immigrant communities.

At Nefesh, a congregation near downtown led by Rabbi Susan Goldberg, members have escorted immigrants to meetings with immigration officials and to doctors’ appointments. They have walked with parents and kids to schools so they could at least serve as witnesses to arrests.

“After Oct. 7, all of us were deeply concerned that we were not hearing from others who should have been noticing that we were suffering,” said Rabbi Ken Chasen of Leo Baeck Temple. “We do ourselves no service when we continue to appear parochial with regard to human suffering.”

Democratic candidates in the primary race for New York City mayor held a forum Sunday for the Jewish community at a Manhattan synagogue. (YouTube)

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is getting the jump on his rivals in the November mayoral race by adopting a controversial definition of antisemitism, a key issue in the crowded campaign. The definition labels most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic. Critics, including progressives and Jewish advocacy groups, warn it could chill free speech. (Forward)

Democratic candidates looking to replace Adams gathered Sunday evening at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side for a forum for the Jewish community. (X)

“I’m not even sure if I would be allowed to enter into Israel,” Zohran Mamdani, who previously called for boycotting Israel, said at the forum. (JTA)

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo received two new endorsements to be the next mayor of New York City, from the Bobov Hasidic sect and from a pro-Israel group made up of LGBTQ+ activists. (Jewish Insider / Jewish Insider)

Edan Alexander — the freed Israeli-American hostage who hails from New Jersey — and his family have endorsed Rep. Josh Gottheimer for governor of the Garden State. (Jewish Insider)

Our most-read story of the weekend was an opinion essay by Terrence Petty: If Trump is being compared to Hitler, who was Hitler compared to?

ISRAEL

An Israeli solder offered bread to activist Greta Thunberg after her arrest at sea off the coast of Gaza. (Israeli Foreign Ministry)

The Gaza flotilla…

Israeli forces intercepted an aid ship headed for Gaza on Monday, detaining Greta Thunberg and 11 other activists aboard the vessel, which aimed to challenge Israel’s blockade with a symbolic delivery. (NPR)

Israel’s defense minister instructed the army to screen a 47-minute film of the atrocities of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks for Thunberg and the crew. Israel said the activists would be deported and the aid rerouted through official channels. (JTA)

Israel called it a “selfie yacht” after Thunberg documented the journey to her more than 14 million social media followers. (New York Times)

Plus…

Israel recovered from Gaza the remains of Nattapong Pinta, a Thai farmworker abducted on Oct. 7, 2023. He had not previously been confirmed dead. (JTA)

The Israeli military said Sunday it found and identified the body of Mohammed Sinwar, a top Hamas military commander in Gaza, in an underground tunnel. Hamas has yet to publicly confirm his death. (BBC)

The ultra-Orthodox Shas party says it will vote to dissolve the Knesset on Wednesday, amid a coalition crisis over a bill to exempt yeshiva students from the draft. “We are disappointed in Netanyahu,” said the group’s spokesman. (Times of Israel)

TONY AWARDS

Jonathan Spector, in black hat, accepts the Best Revival of a Play award for Eureka Day. (Getty)

The 78th Tony Awards were live at Radio City Music Hall Sunday. Our culture reporter P.J. Grisar was watching for Jewish highlights…

Comedian Alex Edelman, who won a special Tony last year for Just For Us, appeared briefly backstage in the opening number holding Broadway’s newest star: the Aeonium Rose tree HwaBoon from the musical Maybe Happy Ending. Are they an item? Is our favorite bachelor finally putting down roots?

Maybe Happy Ending, about two abandoned helper robots, won pretty big by the way, with book writers Will Aronson and Hue Park, director Michael Arden (who shouted out “Daddy Sondheim”) taking home a Tony, as well as lead actor Darren Criss and the show itself winning Best Musical.

Playwright Jonathan Spector won best revival for his play Eureka Day, about a mumps outbreak in a Berkeley Day School — and the heated meetings about vaccine requirements. (Spector also wrote a new play, Birthright, about the aftermath of October 7 and its effect on a group of birthright alumni, that debuted in Miami in April.)

Best actress in a musical and best revival went to Sunset Boulevard, based on Billy Wilder’s classic film.

Jak Malone won for featured actor in a musical for his role in Operation Mincemeat, a musical farce about fooling Hitler. (Playbill, Forward)

Daveed Diggs reprised his performance as the Marquis de Lafayette in a Hamilton reunion, and heartthrob Jeremy Jordan appeared in that least-Jewish of musical theater roles, doomed Kentucky spelunker Floyd Collins.

Among the list of notable deceased people in the lyrics to a song from David Yazbek, Erik Della Penna and Itamar Moses’ Dead Outlaw are John Gotti, Tupac and, uh, Anne Frank?

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

Rabbi Shaul Magid is the author of eight books, including The Necessity of Exile. (Annette Yoshiko Reed/Courtesy Harvard)

On campus…

🏫 Harvard Divinity School named Rabbi Shaul Magid — known for advocating for Jews to live outside of Israel — its first Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence. He has previously taught at Dartmouth, Indiana University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. The Divinity School suspended one of its programs in March in part over accusations it was biased against Israel. (Harvard, Forward)

🩺 The University of California, San Francisco fired a medical school professor accused by Jewish colleagues of repeatedly posting antisemitic content, over a year after the complaints began. (Jewish Insider)

🧑‍🏫 A tenured Jewish professor at Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College, where about 20% of the students are Jewish, was accused of being anti-Zionist and a self-hating Jew. She was fired for her politics, she says, worrying others in academia. (New York Times)

And elsewhere…

🇫🇷 French police arrested a man originally from Gaza who attacked a rabbi in a Paris suburb. It was the second time in a week the rabbi was assaulted. (JTA)

🎤 A Brazilian comedian was sentenced to eight years in prison for “bigoted and discriminatory” jokes about Jews, Black people and the LGBTQ+ community, among other groups. (Washington Post)

🦈 A rare whale shark — the largest fish in the world — was seen swimming Sunday among Red Sea coral reefs off the southern coast of Israel. (Times of Israel)

✡️ Julie Platt’s three-year tenure as board chair of the Jewish Federations of North America is ending this summer; the period was marked by the end of the pandemic, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and a rise in campus antisemitism. “We don’t have the luxury in this moment to be divided,” she said in an exit interview. (eJewishPhilanthropy)

Shiva calls ► Jillian Sackler, a philanthropist and a member of the Sackler family at the center of the Purdue Pharma OxyContin scandal, died at 84 ... Sonia ​“Sunny” Jacobs, a for­mer death row inmate whose sto­ry of wrong­ful con­vic­tion was fea­tured in the off-Broadway play ​The Exonerated, died at 78.

VIDEO OF THE DAY

The 30th annual Boulder Jewish Festival took place as planned on Sunday, one week after a man firebombed a group rallying in support of Israeli hostages. Watch a 20-minute special report from CBS News Colorado.

Mohamed Sabry Soliman appeared in federal court Friday on hate crime charges. Prosecutors are hoping he gets life in prison. (AP)

Democrats are divided over a congressional vote to denounce the attacker’s call to “Free Palestine” as antisemitic and also praise the efforts of immigration authorities. (Axios)

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