WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION

Today: Trump administration amps up attacks on Columbia and Harvard • Jewish surgeon sues for defamation • Palestinian essayist wins Pulitzer • and Gal Gadot to fight Nazis in next film.

CONCLAVE

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa after a College of Cardinals meeting last week in Rome. (Getty)

Will the next pope be good for the Jews?

Starting Wednesday afternoon, Roman Catholic cardinals will enter the Sistine Chapel — surrounded by secrecy and Michelangelo’s iconic frescoes — to begin voting on the next pope. The list of likely candidates feature several who are known for speaking out against antisemitism and for their involvement in Middle East affairs.

Among them is Pierbattista Pizzaballa, a 60-year-old fluent in Hebrew who has served in Jerusalem since 1990. “His experience navigating one of the holiest, and most difficult, roles in the Catholic church has made him perhaps the frontrunner,” writes our Mira Fox.

► She’s rounded up the candidates here.

Cardinals at the funeral of Pope Francis last month in Vatican City. (Getty)

Mira has been following the buzz around the upcoming conclave almost nonstop since Pope Francis’ death. In one of my favorite pieces, she tackles a question I’ve long pondered: Cardinals are not Jewish — so why do they all wear yarmulkes?

As she explains, the tradition dates back to monks who shaved part of their heads — and wore a cap to keep the bald spot warm in chilly, drafty churches. Much like in Judaism, though, the style, color, and fabric of the head covering carry symbolic significance.Go deeper ►

Also from Mira: President Donald Trump posted an A.I. image of himself dressed as the next pope. For Christian nationalists, it was not a joke: They already see him as the God-given leader of the church of the United States. Go deeper ►

Related...

During his 2014 visit to Bethlehem, the traditional birthplace of Jesus, Pope Francis toured the city in a custom-made popemobile designed for the occasion. The car is now being turned into a mobile health clinic to treat Palestinian children in Gaza, per the pope’s final wishes before he died. (CNN)

Font fanatics are freaking out over the odd letter spacing on Francis’ tomb. “Why does it look like pressing on the letter ‘A’ will open a secret chamber where the ark of the covenant is stored?” asked one grammarian. (New York Times)

A website allows lay Catholics to “adopt a cardinal” to pray for at the conclave. (Religion News Service)

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CAMPUS

Linda McMahon, the education secretary, at a cabinet meeting last week at the White House. (Getty)

Campus protests are colliding with courtroom battles and federal crackdowns, as the Trump administration turns up the heat on elite universities.

The Trump administration proposed terms for federal oversight of Columbia University to ensure “viewpoint diversity.” The move is part of a broader attack by the administration over claims of campus antisemitism, among other things. (Wall Street Journal)

Linda McMahon, the education secretary, told Harvard Monday that it is no longer eligible for federal research grants, an escalation in the ongoing fight between the university and the Trump administration. (Crimson, New York Times)

“It’s not that the goal, for example, of increasing ideological diversity on campus is one that I disagree with,” Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, said in a new interview. “It’s the means of achieving it.” (Wall Street Journal)

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy retracted his offer to send a Temple University student to Auschwitz, because he said the 21-year-old no longer took responsibility for a “F--- the Jews” sign at a Philadelphia bar. (JTA)

More than two dozen pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested Monday after taking over an engineering building at the University of Washington, calling on the school to cut ties with Boeing over its military contracts and involvement in the Gaza war. (CNN)

An Atlanta Jewish surgeon who volunteered with the Israeli Defense Forces after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks is suing several anti-Israel groups, after an Emory University medical student accused him of supporting genocide in Gaza and claimed he was unfit to practice medicine. (Jewish Insider)

A Central Park concert by Kehlani, an R&B singer who has expressed sympathy for Palestinians, was cancelled amid pressure from Mayor Eric Adams’ administration. This comes two weeks after Cornell University dropped its plans to host a Kehlani performance. (New York Times)

George Washington University suspended Students for Justice in Palestine until May 2026, citing a series of unauthorized events the group held on campus this semester. (GW Hatchet)

A Jewish nonprofit may have accidentally caused state prosecutors on Monday to drop all charges against seven pro-Palestinian demonstrators arrested last May at the breakup of an encampment at the University of Michigan. (JTA)

ISRAEL

Palestinians line up for a portion of hot food distributed by a charity kitchen at a refugee camp in Gaza on Monday. (Getty)

Israel plans to occupy and flatten all of Gaza if no hostage and ceasefire deal is reached by the end of President Trump’s trip to the Middle East in two weeks. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the country is “on the eve of a forceful entry.” Here’s the latest…

A Hamas official said it makes “no sense” to engage in ceasefire talks while there is a “hunger war” happening in Gaza. Israel paused aid into the area on March 2, after the first phase of a ceasefire deal ended. (Guardian)

Amihai Eliyahu, Israel’s far-right heritage minister, said that Israel should bomb Gaza’s food and fuel supplies to starve civilians as a way to pressure Hamas. He previously floated the idea of a nuclear attack on Gaza. (Times of Israel)

Israel issued an “urgent” evacuation of Yemen’s airport, after launching airstrikes Monday night in the country, targeting Houthi forces. It was a response to the group’s missile attack on Ben Gurion Airport the day before, which injured several people. (Reuters, Times of Israel)

Netanyahu denied a report that President Trump fired Mike Waltz, the former national security adviser, for allegedly coordinating with him on an Israeli attack on Iran. Waltz has since been nominated as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. (JTA)

A record 238,000-plus people voted in the World Zionist Congress election in a race that helps shape how billions in global Jewish and Israeli funding gets distributed. The final outcome may depend on several thousand mailed-in paper ballots; the results are expected to be released in the coming weeks. (Times of Israel)

Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian contributor to The New Yorker, won a Pulitzer Prize for essays documenting his experience in Gaza. Two other works about the war were finalists: breaking news pictures taken by Palestinian photographers in Gaza and a play about campus Israel tensions. (JTA)

A Vice News documentary about the survivors of the Nova music festival, two projects by Al Jazeera English covering Gaza, and a This American Life episode on Gaza all won Peabody Awards. (Peabody)

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

Ed Martin, Trump’s pick to be U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, faces congressional scrutiny. (Getty)

🤔 Despite pleas from the president, the Senate delayed the nomination process of Ed Martin, Trump’s pick to be U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. If he is not confirmed by May 20, his interim role in the position will end. Martin has come under fire for comparing former President Biden to Hitler and for his conversations with a Nazi sympathizer. (Forward, CNN, Punchbowl News)

🍑 Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, decided not to run against Sen. Jon Ossoff, the Jewish Democrat who is up for reelection next year. The decision leaves an opening for other candidates to court voters who may be dissatisfied with Ossoff’s stance on the Israel-Hamas war. (Jewish Insider)

👮 Police arrested five faith activists — including Ariel Gold, a longtime member of Jewish Voice for Peace — who gathered in the U.S. Capitol on Monday to pray and protest the Republican-led budget bill, which they say harms low-income Americans. (Religion News Services)

🎬 Gal Gadot is set to star in a new film as a former concentration camp prisoner who forms an alliance with a German soldier after WWII to take revenge on the Nazis. (Hollywood Reporter)

Shiva call ► Bob Filner, who served in Congress and as mayor of San Diego before leaving amid scandal, died at 82.

What else we’re reading ► Philadelphia’s forgotten history as a hub of anarchism with a thriving radical Yiddish press (Conversation) … Americans used to be steadfast in their support for Israel. Those days are gone (BBC) … The Forward’s Talya Zax reviews a new stage production of The Picture of Dorian Gray (Atlantic).

PHOTO OF THE DAY

Jeff Goldblum at last night’s Met Gala in an ensemble from fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner. (Getty)

It’s a bird, it’s a plane … it’s Jeff Goldblum. The beloved Jewish actor, apartment pitchman and ye old Wizard of Oz, strutted the red carpet in a white fur-collared cape Monday in Manhattan at the Met Gala, one of fashion’s biggest nights of the year. “‘Subtle’ is not in Jeff Goldblum’s vocabulary,” British GQ remarked on social media.

👋 Before we go: Shoutout to Sarah-Kay Lacks and Tamara Fish, two loyal readers of this newsletter, who introduced themselves last night in Baltimore to our publisher, Rachel Fishman Feddersen, at the JPro conference for Jewish professionals.

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