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Disney+ series ‘A Small Light’ tells the Anne Frank story from the perspective of the woman who hid her
(JTA) — The short life of Anne Frank has inspired generations of filmmakers and television producers. The list of past productions range from “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1959), whose director George Stevens witnessed Nazi occupation as a U.S. army officer, to the Academy Award-winning documentary “Anne Frank Remembered” — featuring the only known footage of Anne — to the Emmy Award-winning dramatized miniseries “Anne Frank: The Whole Story” (2001).
On Monday night, viewers will get another TV version. But “A Small Light,” an eight-episode series premiering on National Geographic and streaming Tuesday on Disney+, tells the story from a new perspective: through the eyes of the woman who hid the Frank family.
Miep Gies was an independent 24-year-old with a busy social calendar and a dance club membership when she began working for Anne Frank’s father Otto in 1933 at Opekta, his successful jam business in Amsterdam. As Jews were rounded up and deported from the Netherlands in 1942, her Jewish boss asked if she would be willing to hide his family in an annex above the office, and she did not hesitate.
“A Small Light” stars Bel Powley as Gies, Joe Cole as her husband Jan Gies and Liev Schreiber as Otto Frank. It’s named for a quote from the real Gies, who once said that she did not like to be called a hero because “even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can turn on a small light in a dark room.”
That metaphor had literal meaning for the Frank family and four others in the secret annex, who spent two years in a dark 450-square-foot space behind a hinged bookcase. Gies, her husband and four other employees of Otto Frank secretly kept eight Jews alive while running his business downstairs. Gies brought them food and library books, using black market ration cards and visiting several different grocers to avoid suspicion. Anne Frank said in her diary, “Miep is just like a pack mule, she fetches and carries so much.”
In the series, the “dark room” is seen less than Gies’ frenzied bicycle trips across Amsterdam, as she tries to sustain the appearance of a normal life. Her secret pushes her away from friends and family, while her marriage strains under the weight of ever-looming disaster. The creators of “A Small Light” sought to recreate a hero as a modern, flawed, at times even annoying person.
“She’s not some kind of saint,” executive producer Joan Rater told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “She had moods, she had a new marriage, she wanted to hang out with friends. She wanted to take a day off and she couldn’t.”
“I think everyone can relate to Miep,” said Powley, an English-Jewish actress known for starring in several British shows and in American films such as “The King of Staten Island.” “She was just an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances.”
Although “A Small Light” is rife with tense scenes and suspense, the producers fashioned it with young audiences in mind. The show conspicuously avoids the explicit violence and horror typically expected of its subject matter, leaving out concentration camps and murders. Rater and co-creator Tony Phelan wanted children like their own to watch the series. While they were writing it, their daughter was the same age as Anne was when she was writing her diary.
Some young viewers have seen Anne’s story being swept up in literary purges across U.S. school districts, as part of the debate over what should be taught in American classrooms. Earlier this month, a Florida high school removed an illustrated adaptation of her diary after determining that references to her sexuality were “not age appropriate.” The same edition was previously yanked from a Texas school district, although it was reinstituted after public outcry. Meanwhile, a Tennessee school board banned “Maus,” Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about his father’s experience in the Holocaust, after objections over curse words and nudity last year.
The name “Anne Frank” has long been synonymous with Holocaust education as her diary remains one of the world’s most-read books, with translations in over 70 languages. But the “relatable” rescuer presents another appealing way to teach children about one of the most wretched chapters in human history, said Brad Prager, a professor of German and film studies at the University of Missouri.
“It is the message that people like to hear,” Prager told the JTA. “If you ask a fourth-grader why we watch TV and movies — well, this is so that you can learn to do the right things, or you can learn that in certain circumstances anyone can be a hero.”
Liev Schreiber plays Otto Frank and Amira Casar plays Edith Frank in “A Small Light.” (National Geographic for Disney/Dusan Martincek)
A broader lens on the Netherlands during World War II is less palatable. The Germans and their Dutch collaborators implemented a highly effective system of persecution: Between 1942 and 1944, about 107,000 Dutch Jews were deported primarily to Auschwitz and Sobibor, then murdered. Only 5,200 of them survived.
Although Gies did everything she could to save the Jews in her care, the unwritten ending to Anne’s diary is well-known. Three days after her last entry in August 1944, Dutch police officers led by SS officer Karl Josef Silberbauer raided the annex. Gies escaped arrest by observing that she and Silberbauer shared a hometown.
“My luck was that the police officer in charge came from Vienna, the same town where I was born,” she said in a 1997 interview with Scholastic. “I noticed this from his accent. So, when he came to interrogate me, I jumped up and said, as cheerfully as I could, ‘You are from Vienna? I am from Vienna too.’ And, although he got very angry initially, it made him obviously decide not to arrest me.”
In a valiant last-ditch effort, Gies walked into the German police office the next day and attempted to buy her friends’ freedom. She was unsuccessful.
Gies found Anne’s notebooks and papers strewn on the annex floor. Without reading them, she gathered and tucked the writings into a drawer, hoping to return them to their owner. Germany had all but lost the war already, with Allied troops less than 250 miles from Amsterdam.
The Franks were packed on the last train ever to leave the Westerbork transit camp for the Auschwitz extermination camp. Otto was separated from his wife Edith and daughters Anne and Margot on the Auschwitz platform. In October, the girls were transported to Bergen-Belsen, and Edith succumbed to starvation in January 1945. Her daughters died of typhus a month later, when Anne was 15 years old.
Some studies have suggested that knowledge about the Holocaust is diminishing. In 2020, the Claims Conference found that 63% of Millenial and Gen Z Americans (ages 18-39) did not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. More than 10% did not recall ever hearing about the Holocaust, while 11% believed that Jews caused it. Another Claims Conference survey reported that despite living in the country where Anne hid from the Nazis, a majority of Dutch people did not know the Holocaust took place there.
“In a time that antisemitism is on the rise and there are more displaced people in the world than there ever have been before, it couldn’t be a better time to re-explore this part of history, but through the lens of this ordinary young woman,” said Powley.
While “A Small Light” celebrates the power of the individual, the fate of Anne Frank also represents the failure of the whole world, said Prager. By centering Gies’ perspective, he said, the series risks making Anne a peripheral character in her own brutally aborted story.
“When you decenter Anne Frank, one thing is that you lose the Jewish perspective on the persecution,” he said.
Otto Frank, the sole survivor from the annex, appeared at Jan and Miep Gies’ doorstep after the war and ended up living with them for over seven years. In July 1945, Gies watched as he received the notice that his children were dead.
“He took it in his hands and suddenly he became eerily quiet,” Gies said in an interview for the Anne Frank House. “You cannot explain it, it was a silence that speaks. I looked up. He was white as a sheet. And he handed me the letter.”
Gies read the piece of paper, stood up and opened her desk drawer. “I took all the diaries, with all the separate sheets and everything and handed them over to Mr. Frank,” she said.
She told him, “This is your daughter Anne’s legacy.”
In 2010, Gies died at 100 years old. Every year on Aug. 4 — the day the Franks were arrested — she stayed at home, drew her curtains and did not answer the phone or doorbell.
Powley believes the show’s angle gives a fresh perspective on “your mom’s dusty copy of Anne Frank’s diary.” She approached the role of Gies with a heavy sense of responsibility.
“I feel a deeper connection to this story than I have with other projects,” she said. “This offer came to me on Holocaust Memorial Day and it immediately had that special feeling to it. My grandma, the Jewish matriarch of my family, died during COVID. I feel that she would be proud.”
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Michigan’s Senate race has become a referendum on Israel — and the future of the Democratic Party
Tuesday’s primary contest for an open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan has become a proxy fight over the Gaza war and a referendum on Israel supporters’ influence in Democratic politics. Democratic voters will decide whether to nominate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who is leading in the polls after assailing his opponent as beholden to the campaign fundraising group AIPAC, or Rep. Haley Stevens, a reliable supporter of Israel who has condemned what she called “inflammatory rhetoric” from El-Sayed.
Following a string of primary victories by insurgent Democrats who made condemning Israel central to their campaigns — from New York to New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Colorado — the outcome will become the clearest test yet of whether the vocally anti-Israel progressive movement may come to define the Democratic Party.
Recent polls show El-Sayed with growing momentum, leading Stevens by as much as 16 points.
Michigan, home to one of the country’s largest Arab-American communities, was already a national hot spot for voter pushback on pro-Israel politics as the birthplace of the 2024 “uncommitted” movement that protested President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza by submitting blank ballots in the presidential primary.
It also has an influential Jewish community that has become deeply invested in the race — and with some El-Sayed supporters among them.
Tuesday’s winner will have to prevail in the November general election, and success is not guaranteed: While Democrats are a majority of registered voters in Michigan, Republican President Donald Trump won the state in 2016 and 2024.
With Democrats counting on winning Michigan as they aim to retake the Senate, the questions looming over Tuesday’s primary aren’t just about the party’s direction on Israel — they’re also about whether running against Israel is a winning message in a swing state.
Democrats are facing a difficult path to winning Senate control even as polls show growing dissatisfaction with the Republican agenda.
A look at three possible scenarios shows the high stakes of the race for the Democratic Party and the place of Israel in U.S. politics:
An El-Sayed victory
An Emerson College survey of 700 voters shows El-Sayed leading Stevens by 16 points, despite more than $60 million of outside spending attacking him. AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, has spent $30.6 million backing Stevens, according to recent FEC filings. AIPAC also raised several million dollars for Stevens by directing its donors to online portals that funnel money directly to the candidate’s campaign. All in all, the Michigan contest is AIPAC’s largest investment this election cycle.
If El-Sayed wins, he would become the first Muslim nominated by a major party for the U.S. Senate and would immediately become one of the most prominent figures on the Democratic left. It would echo the victory of Zohran Mamdani in last year’s mayoral race as the city’s first Muslim mayor and the most prominent democratic socialist in office, with Jews divided between fierce opposition and fiery support.
But the immediate political meaning would be about AIPAC.
The progressive frontrunner has transformed AIPAC’s investment in the race into a centerpiece of his campaign message. Backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, El-Sayed used AIPAC as a political foil and a symbol of everything he says is wrong with Democratic politics: super PAC money, billionaire influence and demands for unconditional support for Israel. A poll of Michigan voters conducted by Data for Progress in April found that 64% of likely Democratic primary voters would be less inclined to support a candidate backed by AIPAC.
At a recent virtual town hall hosted by Progressive Democrats of America, El-Sayed compared his possible victory to David defeating Goliath. “AIPAC, if you’re listening, burn your money, come back and burn it again in the general,” he said. “I’m happy to burn your money for you, and then we can get onto the business of governing and asking whether or not our foreign policy ought to be dictated to us by the interests of a foreign government.”
An El-Sayed win would mark a reversal from AIPAC’s last confrontation with Stevens’ opponents in Michigan. In 2022, Stevens defeated Jewish Rep. Andy Levin by 20 points in a rare incumbent-versus-incumbent House primary after redistricting. Levin argued that the group was trying to punish him for criticizing Israeli policy and supporting Palestinian rights. AIPAC celebrated Levin’s defeat as proof that even a Jewish incumbent could not survive after crossing the organization. (Levin is supporting El-Sayed.)
It would also create immediate questions about how El-Sayed would operate in Washington.
Would he support Sen. Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in American history and one of Stevens’ most powerful allies, as Democratic leader if Democrats win the majority? And would he give Senate progressives new leverage over key votes on Israel?
What if El-Sayed loses the general election?
For Democrats worried about electability, the primary is only the first test.
The winner will face former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, who narrowly lost Michigan’s 2024 Senate election and is now running with a largely unified Republican Party behind him.
Michigan remains one of the country’s key battlegrounds. President Donald Trump carried it in 2016, lost it in 2020 and won it again in 2024. Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a moderate Democrat who was an intelligence analyst in the CIA and served three tours in Iraq, won her race even as Trump carried the state.
Recent polls found Rogers leading El-Sayed by single digits.
Some Michigan Jewish Democrats are already considering whether they could support El-Sayed, vote for the Republican, or leave their ballot blank in November. Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in the state.
Stevens has sharpened those concerns in the final days of the campaign. She accused El-Sayed of blaming “all of your problems on Jewish Americans,” warning that his rhetoric would lead to defeat in the face-off with Rogers. El-Sayed, who has courted Jewish voters without moderating his views on Israel, rejected accusations of antisemitism.
“I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people,” he said.
A November loss would have consequences far beyond Michigan.
Democrats are already facing an uphill battle for Senate control after the collapse of Graham Platner in the competitive Maine Senate race.
Losing the seat being vacated by Sen. Gary Peters would further divide Democrats. Party leaders would almost certainly blame El-Sayed’s ideology, his vocal opposition to Israel and the progressive groups that elevated him for losing a swing state. AIPAC, meanwhile, would claim vindication despite losing the primary.
Speaking with reporters on Sunday, El-Sayed said he’s confident Democratic voters will rally behind his candidacy as they reckon with what is at stake.
What if Stevens survives?
A Stevens victory would offer a very different lesson.
It would show that experience, establishment support and a strong general-election argument can still overcome anger about AIPAC, even in the state where the uncommitted movement began. Even a narrow victory would preserve AIPAC’s reputation as one of the most effective forces in Democratic primaries.
But it would say more about Stevens and her personality. She first entered Congress in the 2018 Democratic wave, capturing a Republican-held suburban district. She then survived redistricting and defeated Levin in the bruising 2022 primary.
Stevens has the backing of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Schumer and much of Michigan’s Democratic establishment. And she leads Rogers in a November matchup.
By Wednesday morning, Democrats will know who won Michigan. It may take until November or even longer to know whether Tuesday’s vote marked the beginning of a new era in Democratic politics or another chapter in the party’s divide over Israel. Nonetheless, Democratic leaders still have to reunite a coalition fractured over Gaza and manage a growing progressive wing in the House.
The fight extends down the ballot
The Senate contest is not the only Michigan race testing the strength of the progressive left.
In Detroit’s 13th Congressional District, state Rep. Donavan McKinney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is challenging incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar with the support of Justice Democrats. The group, which helped launch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the Squad, made McKinney its first congressional endorsement in four years.
In Michigan’s 7th District, former climate activist William Lawrence is running against two centrist Democrats in the primary, making an end to all U.S. military aid to Israel a key part of his campaign. The seat was previously held by Slotkin.
On a state level, Abbas Alawieh, one of the leaders of the uncommitted movement in Michigan, is running for a seat in the state legislature in a Dearborn-area district with a large Arab and Muslim population. In a sign of his growing profile, Alawieh recently met with former Vice President Kamala Harris.
AIPAC and the debate over Israel is also spilling into a neighboring state Senate race. Pro-Israel donors are spending heavily to back Justin Onwenu against former State Rep. Abraham Aiyash, an outspoken critic of Israel’s war in Gaza.
It has also reached the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents. Michigan Democrats nominated Amir Makled, an attorney who represented pro-Palestinian protesters, after he defeated incumbent Regent Jordan Acker at the party convention. Makled faces scrutiny for past Hezbollah praise and antisemitic posts. Republican regent candidates Lena Epstein and Michael Schostak, both Jewish, have campaigned on antisemitism and campus safety. That race will be decided in November.
The post Michigan’s Senate race has become a referendum on Israel — and the future of the Democratic Party appeared first on The Forward.
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Suspected arson gutted Montreal’s trendiest kosher restaurant. The city’s Jews say they saw it coming
Howard Szalavetz’s phone buzzed around 3:15 a.m. Saturday, startling him awake. It was news no landlord wants: a retail building he owned was on fire. Nöam, the kosher restaurant that anchors it, was burning.
He threw on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and hopped into his daughter’s Ford Bronco. The drive was only five minutes, but each one felt like an eternity. Police and fire crews had cordoned off several blocks around Montreal’s Décarie Boulevard, forcing him to abandon the car and run the rest of the way on foot. Eventually, they let him through.
“It was insane,” he recalled in an interview Sunday. “There were 80 firemen.” The building he’s owned since 1987 — home to a car wash, an auto repair garage, and Nöam — was engulfed. The restaurant’s section, a wood-frame extension, “went up pretty quickly.”
By the time the fire was under control around 8 a.m., the restaurant was gutted top to bottom. The car wash and auto repair suffered less damage and plan to reopen this week.
Video of the fire that burned down Noam, a popular Kosher restaurant in Montreal pic.twitter.com/gVvvTVvcRQ
— Benyamin Cohen (@benyamincohen) August 2, 2026
Szalavetz and police were able to pull footage from a security camera mounted to the exterior of the auto repair shop. In it, a figure appears on the restaurant’s wood deck, bends down and lights a fire with what looks like a can of accelerant. The man’s face wasn’t hidden, but the footage was too poor in quality to make out much more.
When nearby shops that were closed over the weekend reopen Monday, investigators hope to gather additional footage. Szalavetz said a camera damaged in the Nöam fire might also contain more information.
Szalavetz’s father survived three concentration camps and lost much of his family in the Holocaust. He died in 2021. “Thankfully he didn’t see this,” Szalavetz said, “because this is how Europe started.”
The Nöam fire is the latest in a rapid drumbeat of attacks on Jewish targets in Canada. Last week, in Toronto, a gunman fired at the windows of one branch of Kiva’s Bagel Bar, a Jewish-owned bakery chain, about an hour after vandals had shattered the glass front of another location. In June, a man smashed a window at Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, a Reform congregation in Montreal, and tried to start a fire inside.
That same month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney acknowledged that two-thirds of all religion-motivated hate crimes in Canada are directed at Jews. “Canada’s civic compact,” he said, “is failing Jewish Canadians.” B’nai Brith Canada recorded 27 violent antisemitic incidents in the first six months of 2026 — nearly triple the count for all of 2025.
Deborah Lipstadt, the noted Holocaust historian and former U.S. special envoy to combat antisemitism during the Biden administration, said the Nöam fire was “utterly predictable.” Carney, she said, “does not have the chutzpah” to stand up and declare, without qualification, that antisemitism has no place in Canada.
“If this is not a wake-up call, I don’t know,” Lipstadt said. “Do more people have to die for it to be a wake-up call? How much more do you need? Spare me your pious sympathies and sincere regrets.”
A vigil and a crowdfunding campaign
By Saturday, Szalavetz said he’d fielded some 150 calls — more, he said, than he gets on his birthday. Montreal is home to an estimated 90,000 Jews, but Szalavetz said it still has the feel of a “shtetl,” and word traveled fast: a vigil drew a crowd outside the burned restaurant Saturday night, and the community plans on launching an online crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the two owners and roughly 30 employees, since insurance can’t cover the full scope of the loss.
Brothers-in-law Meir Azerad and Ynon Cohen opened Nöam in August 2024, transforming what had been little more than a car wash’s waiting room into a polished, sit-down kosher restaurant. They named it for Cohen’s brother, Noam, who had died years earlier and had dreamed of opening a restaurant of his own.
They turned out wood-fired pizzas at 1,000 degrees, two minutes a pie. Expanding the menu to include Mediterranean and Italian, Nöam grew to a following that surprised even its owners, and had a waitlist most weeknights. The partners had just spent a year renovating a second floor to keep up with demand.
Among the social media posts circulating Saturday morning was one from Francine Goldberg, a lifelong Montrealer, that quickly went viral. The fire broke out on Shabbat — the one day, she wrote, “we are forbidden to kindle a flame. Somebody kindled it for us.”
Politicians were quick to respond. Anthony Housefather, a Jewish member of Parliament who represents the area, demanded the fire be investigated as a hate crime. Police say they have not yet established a motive.
The Mamdani angle
But for many Montreal Jews, official statements have started to feel beside the point. Goldberg calls them “the typical Hallmark pleasantries: ‘Oh, it’s horrible, and it should never happen.’”
Goldberg, who works at a medical clinic in downtown Montreal, said she’s received more hate mail this year than at any point in her life. She doesn’t think Carney is an antisemite — just a politician counting votes. “There are far more of them than there are of us,” she said. Jews make up approximately 1% of the Canadian population.
Jesse Brown, a Canadian Jewish journalist who has tracked the country’s antisemitism surge since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust, sees the same pattern from a different angle.
When Carney announced a new council to combat hate this summer, Brown called it “disingenuous” — the council had already existed for months, under a different name, and included members with histories of anti-Israel advocacy. More pointedly, Brown said, Carney has refused to name the actual cause. “This is happening because of this global movement against Israel,” he said. “Jews in Canada are being targeted in the name of targeting Israel.” Naming antisemitism, he argued, is easy. Naming anti-Zionism as its engine is the part no Canadian politician has been willing to do.
Goldberg sees this dynamic playing out beyond Canada’s borders. In New York, Zohran Mamdani was elected the city’s first Muslim mayor in January and recently to called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide.” His win in the U.S. city with the largest population of Jews has been widely read as evidence that anti-Zionist politics can win elections across the country.
In the months since his election, antisemitic hate crimes in New York have climbed sharply: NYPD data show Jews, roughly 10% of the city’s population, were targets in 55% of all confirmed hate crimes in the first half of 2026, with anti-Jewish incidents up 182% year-over-year in January alone.
Goldberg sees that rhetoric traveling regardless of the border. “That has a trickle-down effect on Montrealers,” she said. She’s watched a segment of the city’s progressive activists argue that Montreal’s own mayor should “follow Mamdani” and formally declare that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Her worry isn’t that Israeli policy is off-limits for criticism — she says she criticizes the Netanyahu government herself — but that mainstreaming anti-Zionism as just another respectable political position is what’s fueling the rise in antisemitism she’s living through.
Goldberg said that people keep telling her to consider moving to Israel. She isn’t interested. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “It’s exactly what they would want, so I’m not going to clarify their mission.” That doesn’t mean the fear isn’t real, she added: “It’s very, very dark. It’s dark times for us.”
‘A lot of gaslighting’
Brown pointed to a pattern that predates the fire at Nöam. Last August, an Orthodox man was beaten in a Montreal park in front of his three children; his attacker tore the kippah from his head and threw it to the ground. Quebec prosecutors ultimately determined it wasn’t a hate crime — the attacker was found not criminally responsible due to mental illness.
When pro-Palestinian protesters marched down Toronto’s “hospital row” in February 2024 and mobbed Mount Sinai Hospital, organizers said the hospital hadn’t been targeted; it just happened to be along the route. Brown calls this a recurring dynamic. “There’s a lot of gaslighting that occurs,” he said.
He expects something similar will happen with the Nöam investigation: police have video of the fire being set, but Canadian hate-crime charges require proof of motive that’s notoriously hard to establish. More likely, he said, if the suspect is charged with arson alone “then people who want to deny what is happening will say, well, ‘We have no proof that was antisemitism.’”
There’s already a template for how that skepticism plays out. In December 2024, a man threw a Molotov cocktail into Montreal’s Beth Tikvah synagogue; windows were smashed the same night at a nearby Jewish federation office. The man who pleaded guilty to three of six arson-related charges, Mohamed Ilyes Akodad, testified this summer that he’d been paid $15,000 through an anonymous contact on Signal to firebomb two buildings and torch a car, and that he didn’t know one of them was a synagogue. Prosecutors are seeking a two-year sentence; his lawyer is asking for a suspended sentence and home confinement. A judge is expected to rule Sept. 10.
Rabbi Lisa Grushcow of Montreal’s Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, which experienced its own firebomb attack this June, has seen the pattern up close. “At this point, none of it feels surprising,” she said, “and that in itself is quite sobering.” Protective coatings on the synagogue’s windows kept the firebomb from getting through, and police apprehended the suspect that night. It could have been far worse, she said, “but we can’t just say ‘This is not who we are,’ because clearly this is who our society is right now.”
Still, she pointed to what happened the day after her synagogue was attacked: so many families showed up for a scheduled service that the congregation had to run two instead of one. She saw the same instinct play out in Toronto, where customers lined up outside Kiva’s Bagel the morning after the shootings there. “It shouldn’t take resilience to live as a Jew,” she said. But if the choice is between resilience and retreat, her community has made its decision: “We’re not going to give up or move away.”
Lipstadt’s message to Jews was also one of resilience, not despair. Asked whether Canadian Jews should consider leaving the country, she declined to answer directly. “That’s not my place,” she said. But she was unequivocal that Jews would endure. “We have survived worse,” she said. What worries her isn’t whether Jews will survive — it’s whether the societies around them will. “Will democratic society, writ very large, be okay?” she said. “I’m not so sure.”
Nöam’s owners Azerad and Cohen have said little publicly since the fire. Szalavetz described them as “very camera shy,” agreeing only reluctantly to a brief interview with a local reporter after Szalavetz pushed them to speak. “The world needs to know,” he told them. For now, what’s certain is the plan: rebuild in the same spot and reopen “bigger, better, newer” than before, said Szalavetz. He estimates that could take six months to a year. In the meantime, he said, he’s working on finding them a temporary home so the restaurant can remain open.
“Coming back is the goal,” Szalavetz said. “It’s my goal as a proud Jew. You’re not going to take us down.”
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Heeding a Saudi plea, Trump says he canceled a joint U.S.-Israel assault on Iran
(JTA) — President Donald Trump said he canceled at the last minute a planned joint assault with Israel on Iran’s energy infrastructure at the behest of Saudi Arabia, which feared the war blowing up into a wider conflict.
The U.S. alerts over the weekend warning citizens to evacuate the Middle East and then Trump’s announcement late Saturday that he was canceling the planned strike appeared to catch Israel off guard. It undercut Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim last week that he and Trump were in lockstep on Iran.
“The U.S.A. is locked and loaded and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran, at levels of Military Terror, Strength, and Power not seen since World War II,” Trump said on Truth Social, the social media platform he owns.
“Despite this, we have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to,” he said. “This would include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran’s nuclear threat.”
Saudi Arabia’’s official news agency confirmed that Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince who has close business and personal ties with Trump and his family, appealed to the U.S. president to stand down.
“The Crown Prince stressed the need to prioritize dialogue to reduce escalation and the importance of making every possible effort to achieve calm that paves the way for diplomatic solutions, preserves the region’s security and stability, and prevents a wider conflict whose repercussions would affect regional and international security and stability,” the Saudi Press Agency said.
Iran disputed Trump’s claim, instead saying that it was ready to respond to any attack on the country.
“The Iranian Foreign Ministry vowed that Tehran will use all means at its disposal to exercise its inherent right of self-defense in the face of the United States’ ongoing violations against the Islamic Republic,” the Fars News Agency said.
Fars, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps – the principal power in Iran since the war began – denied any stand-down on Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz.
“Iran’s Armed Forces have staged uncompromising retaliation in the face of each instance of violation, including those taking place in support of illegal vessel movement in the waterway,” the agency said.
The waterway is critical to the passage of a fifth of the world’s petroleum. Iran has asserted control of the waterway in the wake of the war the United States and Israel launched in February.
Trump’s statement came after CBS News reported on Saturday that the United States and Israel were set to attack Iran’s energy infrastructure, which would substantially escalate the war. The State Department put out a security alert advising Americans in the region to leave if they could, and to cancel plans to enter it.
Regional media reported that Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, conveyed warnings through Turkey and Pakistan to regional U.S. allies that it would hit back hard if the U.S.-Israel attack went through.
Israel appeared to be caught off guard both by the planned escalation and by Trump’s stand-down. “Israel is unaware of a decision to restart full military operations, nor has been requested of Israel to join any military actions against Iran,” CBS News quoted an Israeli official as saying – even as it quoted U.S. officials as saying that Israel was coordinating with the United States.
Israel’s government had no comment on Trump’s reported plan to attack the infrastructure, or his stand-down. Flights in and out of Ben Gurion Airport were unaffected. In his Truth Social statement, Trump said, “The Country of Israel joins me in this commitment.”
Trump has multiple times since the war’s launch threatened to escalate the war only to retreat at the last minute, something the Fars news agency noted in a sardonic tone.
“This narrative seems familiar and repetitive,” it said in a separate report on bin Salman’s appeal. “Every time Trump has made serious threats against Iranian infrastructure in the past, after Tehran has not backed down, he has claimed that friendly countries have asked him not to do anything.”
Trump escalated his rhetoric last week as Iran continued to attack ships attempting to transit Hormuz. “We’re going to beat the f***ing s**t out of them,” he told Fox News.
Trump has since the tentative signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran in mid-June asked Israel to stay out of the conflict – including in the wake of the resumption of fighting on July 13.
Netanyahu, facing a tough reelection in October, has in recent weeks sought to allay any perceptions in Israel that he had been sidelined by Trump. He met with the president last week.
“I just finished an excellent meeting with President Trump,” he told Israeli reporters after the meeting. “And when I say excellent, it’s not lip service – a conversation with full cooperation, with mutual support, with the understanding of the joint goal to ensure that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon, and other goals.”
The roller-coaster ride appeared to unsettle Netanyahu’s colleagues in his Likud Party. “You can say ‘no’ to Trump,” Knesset member Amit Halevi told Kan Reshet Bet, the government-run radio station. “Our commitment is to the security of the state.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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