Israel News Today

LOS ANGELES ( JTA ) — Today’s understanding of Hollywood — the glitz, the glam, the red carpets and paparazzi — are a far cry from the film industry’s humble beginnings, when a group of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe laid the groundwork for what would become an epicenter of American and global culture. Such is the story told by a new exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which opens Sunday. “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital” traces the history and legacy of early 20th century Jewish Hollywood pioneers like the Warner brothers, Louis B. Mayer, Adolph Zukor and others. It is the museum’s first permanent exhibit. The exhibit’s debut comes two and a half years after the museum’s opening, which sparked controversy among supporters and visitors for not including the industry’s Jewish beginnings. Jacqueline Stewart, the museum’s director and president, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that community feedback helped the

At a Seder at Yale’s protest encampment this spring, students put their arms around each other and swayed. “If we build this world from love, then God will build this world from love,” they sang, gathered around a sheet painted as a Seder table. The words are lyrics from Olam Chesed Yibaneh , a Hebrew folk song composed by Rabbi Menachem Creditor, who wrote it for his oldest child’s naming ceremony in 2002. But despite the fact that Creditor himself has a long history of progressive activism, he was irate to see his tune sung at a pro-Palestinian protest. In an interview with the Forward , he said that the students were “ misappropriating its message of love and support for Israel,” using his song about peace to obscure the antisemitism that he believes lies at the heart of the pro-Palestinian protests. Yale Jews for Ceasefire, the group hosting the Seder, in a statement responding to Creditor, said that, for them, the song imagines “a future where Israelis and Palestinians can l

( JTA ) — Karen Frostig stood on a grassy patch of land near the Daugava River outside Riga in 2007 searching for a sign, a plaque, any marker acknowledging the thousands of Jews whom the Nazis murdered in and around the adjacent woods of towering fir trees over 60 years earlier, including her Austrian grandparents. There was nothing. Instead, she walked past broken toilets, scraps of metal and bags of trash. The former site of Latvia’s Jungfernhof concentration camp was a dumping ground. Frostig, an artist and art professor at Boston’s Lesley University, had recently learned from archival documents that her grandparents, Moses Frostig and Beile Samuely, likely perished at Jungfernhof and not in the Riga ghetto as she long thought. It was the end of March, and Frostig and her guide had bundled up in winter coats. “I was terrified to go there,” Frostig told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I felt like I was walking into extreme danger. But then there was this magical experience. All of

For close to 60 years, the poet Jerome Rothenberg collaborated with the composer Charlie Morrow, creating avant-garde art that mined both their Jewish roots and the deep connection to the Indigenous world they shared. After Rothenberg passed away in late April at the age of 92, it would seem that partnership has come to an end. But Morrow is planning to set some of Rothenberg’s poetry to music posthumously. “There is no end to our long collaboration,” he declared. The composer is hopeful that their most recent collaboration, an opera titled Abulafia Visits The Pope , will find an audience after a staged reading May 25 at the University of California, Irvine. “Jerome’s work is luminous and it will be meaningful to people in future generations,” said Morrow, 82, who divides his time between Helsinki, Finland and the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The opera is based on the true story of the Spanish Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia traveling to Rome in the year 1280 hoping to get Pope Ni

Freud mavens may have to reconsider their idol once again. Early experts on the German Jewish founder of psychoanalysis, such as Ernest Jones and Ronald Clark, saw him as an assimilated Jew with little ethnic identity. Others, like Marthe Robert and Marianne Krüll, looked to Freud’s Reform Jewish family to explain his attitudes about Yiddishkeit. More recently, Emanuel Rice and Yosef Yerushalmi implied that Freud may have concealed the true extent of his closeness to Hebrew and Yiddish roots. Now, Translating the Jewish Freud , by Naomi Seidman, offers a compelling, quasi-sociological view of how Freud’s Jewish admirers translated his works as a sign of prideful acceptance, which Freud himself valued. Seidman argues that Freud wrote prefaces for the Yiddish and Hebrew editions of his works, which were accomplished not by trained psychoanalysts, but rather ardent devotees who aspired to draw Freud closer to the mishpocheh , especially as Fascist antisemitism overwhelmed 1930s Eur

The rally, scheduled for Saturday night, is hosted by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum and will highlight that Hamas is holding hostages from 24 different countries from ynet - News https://ift.tt/oGfzUju

( JTA ) — The union representing workers at the University of California system has voted to authorize a strike over the system’s handling of pro-Palestinian protests on its 10 campuses. The majority vote Wednesday by the UC union, which represents 48,000 academic student employees and researchers, does not mean that the union will actually strike. Still, the vote is the first by any labor union over Israel-related matters since the outbreak of the war in Gaza. The vote came amid activist calls to divest from Israel at the UC system’s Board of Regents meeting this week. It also came days after UC Berkeley’s encampment, like several others across the country, dismantled in exchange for administrators agreeing to explore divestment options — an example of recent dealmaking that has been harshly criticized by some Jewish groups for imposing no consequences on protesters who contributed to what they call a hostile environment for Jewish students. (Also this week, the president of Sono

A breakthrough in the discussions was reached as Wilders toned down anti-EU and anti-Islam rhetoric, and dropped opposition to all military support for Ukraine;  from ynet - News https://ift.tt/sV5I2yn

The war may still be raging, but small communities in the vicinity of Gaza are absorbing members, new and old, in an effort to go back to their daily lives; 'It's a strong feeling that we are in a region that is important to settle,' said a member from ynet - News https://ift.tt/YopSW7e

( JTA ) — A middle school teacher in Connecticut was reportedly suspended following a lesson on the Holocaust in which they asked students to draw a swastika in their notebooks, list positive things Adolf Hitler did for Germany and comment on a baby photo of the Nazi leader that the teacher described as “cute.” And this week, a private middle school outside Atlanta faced criticism after asking students to rate Hitler “as a Solution Seeker” and “as an Ethical Decision Maker.” The incidents are the latest in a string of grade-school lessons on the Holocaust that have invited students to evince sympathy for the Nazis, and come as the Israel-Hamas war has prompted concerns of rising antisemitism at K-12 schools nationwide. The teacher at the public Middlesex Middle School in Darien, Connecticut, identified only as a “veteran” social studies teacher, did not make any comments supporting Hitler or Nazism during the lesson last week, beyond the content of the assignment. But students in t