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WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION

Good morning. Today: Gaza death toll passes 40,000, Trump weighs in on antisemitism, and a renowned rabbi’s great-great-grandson makes a case for interfaith love on The Bachelorette.

ELECTION 2024

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff affixes a mezuzah at the vice president’s residence in Washington, D.C., in 2021. (Courtesy of The White House)

A mezuzah in a Harris-Emhoff White House? It might not be the first.

If Vice President Kamala Harris wins the presidency in November, would she and her Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff, install mezuzahs in the White House? We learned from a staffer in former President George W. Bush’s administration that it wouldn’t be the first time the Jewish ritual object was installed in the president’s headquarters.

The Naval Observatory mezuzah: When the Second Couple decided to hang a mezuzah at the vice president’s house, they enlisted Francesco Spagnolo, curator of University of California’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, to find the perfect totem. He presented them with one that had been a gift from Leah Rabin — wife of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin — to Rabin’s secretary, Alice Grossman. Its connection to the vice president, Spagnolo said, was “women in service.”

The White House: If elected, the Harris-Emhoff clan would have a herculean task on their hands. The Executive Residence where the president’s family lives has a whopping 412 doors. And the Committee for the Preservation of the White House might suggest using two-sided tape, rather than screws, on the portico’s sandstone facade.

Deeper meaning: A mezuzah would confer an important benefit for a president or her spouse: Every time you walk past it, said the Orthodox Union’s Rabbi Ari Zivotofsky, “it reminds you that there is a higher power.”

Plus:

• “We’re here tonight because we believe that this vicious outbreak of militant antisemitism must be given no quarter, no safe harbor, no place in a civilized society,” said former President Donald Trump at a Thursday night event for Jewish supporters.

  
  

• At the same event, a fly briefly rested on Trump’s face, recalling a similar incident during a 2020 vice presidential debate when a fly landed on former Vice President Mike Pence’s head. “Surely you noticed, have seen the memes, the analysis and the instant Twitter account — but did you relate it to an instance in the Talmud?” our PJ Grisar wrote back then, connecting Pence’s case to that of the biblical general Titus.

  
  

• The Jewish Democratic Council of America’s PAC unveiled a new ad campaign aiming to highlight Harris’ record supporting Israel and standing against antisemitism.

A screenshot of Barbra Streisand as she kicked off a virtual “Jewish Women for Kamala” fundraiser. (Courtesy of Jewish Women for Kamala/Screenshot via YouTube)

Barbra Streisand joins thousands at ‘Jewish Women for Kamala’ virtual fundraiser. “It’s been said that Jewish women are known to speak out and tell you what they think and I’m one of them,” Streisand said during the Thursday call, before lambasting Trump’s third presidential run as a “naked grab for power, a blueprint for dictatorship.” And she celebrated the “rebellious women” of Jewish tradition, including Esther and Miriam, in encouraging the call’s participants to support the same determined spirit in themselves, and in Harris. Read the story ➤

ALSO IN THE FORWARD

A brother, a sister, and a great divide over “anti-Jewish stupidity.” (Getty Images)

How ‘antisemitic morons’ tried to create a Jew-free world in Paraguay. A slice of history you might not have been taught about in school: The story of Nueva Germania, an area of Paraguay “formed as a German settlement in 1887 by teacher and antisemitic activist Bernhard Förster and his wife, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, sister of the philosopher” with the aim of creating “an area of Germanic development far from the influence of European Jews.” Among the project’s detractors: Nietzsche’s famous brother, who once wrote to her that “over the last six years you have lost all reason and all thoughtfulness.”

Transgression, dystopia and comedy reign at a Reform synagogue in a Toronto suburb. A new collection of linked short stories centering “the community, rituals, politics and internecine battles of a fictional Reform synagogue in a Toronto suburb” turns into an examination of the “struggle to define diasporic Jewish identity in a challenging world,” writes critic Julia M. Klein.

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WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

A girl comforts the grieving mother of a 23-year-old Palestinian man who was killed by Jewish settlers during an attack on a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank. (Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP via Getty Images)

On the war …

😨  Israeli settlers rampaged through the Palestinian West Bank village of Jit, killing one. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the incident and said those responsible would face legal consequences. Separately, an Israeli peace group claimed plans for a new Israeli settlement in the West Bank would encroach on a UNESCO World Heritage site. (Haaretz, New York Times)

😞  The Gaza Health Ministry said the war’s death toll now exceeds 40,000 people. Among them: Two 4-day-old twins killed by an airstrike while their father was procuring their birth certificates. (Washington Post, LA Times)

👀  The IDF said it has killed 17,000 terror operatives in Gaza, including members of Hamas and the territory’s separate, smaller terror groups. (Times of Israel)

🏠  Some 3,700 Israelis moved back to their homes near the Gaza border, some 10 months after Oct. 7, as the government decided to stop paying for them to be housed in hotels. More than 80% of those displaced from Israel’s south have now returned to their homes. (Times of Israel)

On everything else …

😧  A Brooklyn Jewish man was charged with attempted murder after attacking his Muslim neighbor. Izak Kadosh faces more than 40 charges related to months of harassment toward Ahmed Faycal Chebira. (New York Times)

🦟  The West Nile virus is surging in Israel, with more than 800 cases reported in the biggest outbreak in 20 years. (Times of Israel)

🌊  The Mediterranean Sea hit its highest-ever recorded temperature on Thursday, breaking a previous record established in 2023. (AFP)

Shiva call ➤  Producer, podcaster and pundit Adam Epstein died at 49 … The prominent Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi Shmuel Butman, who became a spokesman for Haredim during the 1991 Crown Heights riots, died at 81.

What else we’re reading ➤  Three sharp perspectives from our colleagues at The Atlantic: “Trump’s crocodile tears for the Jews” … “Does Kamala Harris have a vision for the Middle East?” … “A protest that’s drowning in its own tears.”

VIDEO OF THE DAY

On this week’s episode of The Bachelorette, one scene made this newsletter’s editor, Beth Harpaz, tear up. Jeremy Simon — the great-great-grandson of Avraham Dov-Ber Kahana Shapiro, the last chief rabbi of Kovno — and Jenn Tran discussed the importance of their respective Judaism and Buddhism, and how they might be able to build an interfaith future together. “I am a sentimental old fool” for being so affected, Beth wrote; well, if she’s guilty of that crime, so am I.

Thanks to Benyamin Cohen for contributing to today’s newsletter, and to Beth Harpaz for editing it. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com.

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