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With goblins, spellcasters and delis, board game makers are imagining new Jewish worlds
(JTA) — Running a not-so-Zagat-rated deli, dropping into a Chinese restaurant for Christmas Eve dinner and acting out a bat mitzvah that involves a vampire — for contemporary board game fans, those can be all in an evening’s play.
That’s because a crop of new games aims to merge Jewish ideas and experiences with the aesthetics and language of games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Dream Apart places players in a fantastical reimagining of a 19th-century shtetl, for example, while J.R. Goldberg’s God of Vengeance draws inspiration from the Yiddish play of the same name. In the games in Doikayt, a collection released in 2020, players can literally wrestle with God.
Known as tabletop role-playing games because they ask players to take on a character, these games and their creators imagine exciting new worlds, subvert classic tropes in fun and irreverent ways, and reinterpret Jewish history and identity.
Tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu have exploded in popularity over the past several years, with many — including at least one group of rabbis — picking up the Zoom-friendly hobby during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the new Jewish games aim to do more than just provide a diversion or even an escape.
“Depending on your family, depending on your synagogue, depending on your community, you may have gotten more or fewer options of what Jewishness could mean in your imagination,” said Lucian Kahn, who created a trilogy of humorous Jewish role-playing games.
“What some of these games are doing is opening that up and pointing to alternate possibilities of imagining Jewishness, not as a way of converting anyone to anything else, but just as a way of showing the tradition is enormous,” he added.
Kahn is the creator of If I Were a Lich, Man, a trilogy of humorous games whose name is a mashup between a “Fiddler on the Roof” song and an undead character, the lich, that frequently appears in fantasy fiction and games. In the title game, players are Jewish liches — spellcasters whose souls, in the lore of Dungeons & Dragons, are stored in phylacteries, the Greek word for tefillin used by Jews in prayer. Representing the four children of the Passover seder, they debate how their community should address the threat of encroaching holy knights.
In some cases, the association of Jews with monsters has given rise to charges of antisemitism — the goblins of “Harry Potter” offer a prime example. But Kahn said he sees Jewish-coded monsters, and queer-coded villains, as figures of resistance.
“There’s a long tradition of looking at the monster and seeing that the reason why these are monsters is because the people who have oppressive power have decided that these are going to be the enemies of the ‘good’ oppressive powers,” Kahn explained. “But if you don’t agree with their ideology, if you’re seeing yourself as being a member of a marginalized community and being in opposition to these oppressive powers, then you can look at the qualities assigned to these monsters and some of them are qualities that are good.”
For Kahn, Jewish-coded monster characters also provide more of an inspiration than the archetypes of more traditional games.
“Maybe somebody thinks they’re insulting me or insulting Jews,” he said. “My response is: I like vampires and liches and trolls and goblins and think they’re much more interesting than bland white muscular humans running through the fields with a cross on their chest hacking at the same things with a sword over and over again.”
Kahn’s outlook has resonated in the tabletop role-playing game community. In February, he and Hit Point Press launched a Kickstarter to fund production of If I Were a Lich, Man. The campaign smashed its $5,000 goal, raising $84,590, enough to hit one of the campaign’s stretch goals of funding a grant to support independent zines about tabletop role-playing games.
The successful campaign means that Kahn’s three games will go into production. In addition to the game about liches, the trilogy includes Same Bat Time, Same Bat Mitzvah, in which players act out a bat mitzvah where one guest has been turned into a vampire, and Grandma’s Drinking Song, inspired by how Kahn’s Jewish great-great grandmother and her children survived in 1920s New York City by working as bootleggers during Prohibition.
In Grandma’s Drinking Song, players write a drinking song together as they act out scenes. Kahn, the former singer/songwriter and guitarist for Brooklyn Jewish queercore folk-punk band Schmekel, wanted to carry over elements of music into this game.
A throughline in all three games is the power of creative resistance to authority — a narrative that Kahn said strikes him as particularly Jewish.
“There are all these stories in Jewish folklore that are really overtly about finding trickster-y or creative ways of fighting back against oppressive and unjust governmental regimes, evil kings, bad advisors,” Kahn said. “One of the first stories I ever heard in my life was the Purim story, so it’s very embedded in my mind as a part of Jewish consciousness, when evil rulers come to power and try to kill us all, we’re supposed to find these outside-the-box ways of preventing that from happening.”
For some Jewish creators, Jewish holidays are an explicit inspiration. Like many Jewish kids of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Max Fefer, a civil engineer by day and game designer by night, grew up loving the picture book “Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins,” which remains a popular festive text. But as Fefer notes, goblins are often associated with antisemitic stereotypes. Fefer’s first Jewish game, Hanukkah Goblins, turns the story on its head — players interact as the jovial goblins, who are here not to destroy but to spread the spirit of Hanukkah to their goblin neighbors.
Last year, Fefer launched a successful Kickstarter for another Jewish holiday-inspired tabletop role-playing game, Esther and the Queens, where players assume the roles of Esther and her handmaidens from the Purim story, who join together to defeat Haman by infiltrating a masquerade party as queens from a far-off land.
Esther and the Queens channels Fefer’s Purim memories and includes carnival activities, including Skee-Ball; a calm, relaxing Mishloach Manot basket-making; and a fast-paced racing game.
“All of our holidays, they’re opportunities for us to gather as a community in different ways,” Fefer said. “Watching this satirical, comedic retelling of the story of Purim and the Esther Megillah and coming together into a theater, in a synagogue, to watch these spiels and laugh together and spin the graggers when we hear Haman’s name — all of those things help us build identity and community, and I think games in particular surrounding identity, that’s a great way for a Jewish person themselves to feel seen in a game and reinforce their identity, and share their background with friends.”
Another pair of Jewish game creators, Gabrielle Rabinowitz and her cousin, Ben Bisogno, were inspired by Passover.
“The seder is kind of like an RPG in that it’s a structured storytelling experience where everyone takes turns reading and telling, and there’s rituals and things you do at a certain time,” Rabinowitz said. “It’s halfway to an RPG.”
The game became a pandemic project for the two of them, and alongside artist Katrin Dirim and a host of other collaborators, they created Ma Nishtana: Why Is This Night Different? — a story game modeled on their family’s seder. The game follows the main beats of the Exodus story, and in every game, there will be a call to action from God, a moment of resistance, a departure and a final barrier — but different characters and moments resonate depending on the players’ choices.
As an educator at the Museum of Natural History, Rabinowitz said she is often thinking about how to foster participation and confidence, and she wanted to create a game-play mechanic to encourage players to be “as brazen as her family is.” The result was an in-game action called “Wait! Wait! Wait!” — if players wish to ask a question, make a suggestion, disagree with a course of action or share a new perspective, they can call out “Wait! Wait! Wait!” to do so.
The game also includes a series of scenes that are actively roleplayed or narrated, and each includes a ritual — one that can be done in-person or an alternate remote-friendly version. For example, at one point each player must come up with a plague inspired by the new story they’re telling together, and in the remote version, players go camera-off after reciting theirs.
“The fact that it was created during the pandemic and a way for us to connect and other people to connect with each other is really the soul of the game,” Rabinowitz said. “After each person tells a plague, by the end, all the cameras are off and everyone stays silent for another minute. It’s a hugely impactful moment when you’re playing remotely. The design is interwoven in the game itself.”
Rabinowitz said by playing a story of a family undergoing these trials, the themes of family and identity deepen every time she plays the game.
“A lot of people say, ‘Wow, I’ve never felt more connected to this story,’” she said. “Embodying these characters gave me a feeling of relevance and that makes it feel important as a Jewish precept.”
For other creators, that deep connection comes in more lighthearted scenarios. Nora Katz, a theatremaker, game designer and public historian working at the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life (ISJL) by day, created the Jewish deli-centered game Lunch Rush, which was included in the Doikayt anthology.
“There’s also types of institutions that come up a lot in [tabletop role-playing games], especially sort of high fantasy,” she said. “Everyone meets in a tavern, there’s an inn, things like that. So the idea of a deli as a central gathering place in a world like that felt fun to me.”
An important element of Lunch Rush is that players must be eating while playing, so for Katz’s first round with friends, they got together with chocolate chip ice cream and dill pickle potato chips. She said the deli is a shared language, and her fellow players were all bringing in their own favorite things about delis they loved into the fictional place they were building together.
Tabletop role-playing games “at their core are about collaboration and relationships and storytelling and community, and for me, all of those things are also what Jewishness is about, to me they totally go hand in hand,” Katz said.
The games are not meant to be for Jewish players only. Rabinowitz said the guidebook for Ma Nishtana includes essays to encourage people to further engage with the narrative.
“Jewish players, non-Jewish players, priests, non-religious people, all different people have played it and almost all of them have told us it’s given them a new way of thinking of how they relate to religious tradition, and I didn’t really set out to do that,” Rabinowitz said. “I feel really privileged to have helped create that space.”
Rabinowitz and Bisogno also commissioned other creators to build alternate backdrops for their game, so it can be repurposed to telling the story of another oppressed people’s fight for freedom. Players can interact as embattled yaoguai, spirits from Chinese mythology; explore a Janelle Monáe-inspired Afrofuturist world; play as Indigenous land defenders; or unionize as exploited workers at “E-Shypt.”
Fefer, who has been amplifying the work of other Jewish creators in the tabletop role-playing game space, said the harm of stereotyping and reinforcing negative tropes is still present in the industry, and not just for Jewish people. For example, fans recently criticized Dungeons & Dragons publishers Wizards of the Coast for reinforcing anti-Black stereotypes in the descriptions of a fantasy race, the Hadozee.
“I think it’s a process of talking to people who are from these groups and bringing them onto your teams and making sure you’re incorporating their perspectives into, in the example of Dungeons & Dragons, a hundred-million-dollar industry, being intentional about that design and looking at things from lots of different angles,” Fefer said. “How could our branding, our games be reinforcing something we’re not even aware of?”
Fefer hopes people who play Hanukkah Goblins and Esther and the Queens feel seen and have moments of shared joy, and also that they learn something from these games — about the antisemitic tropes in fantasy, or about underrepresented groups within the Jewish community. With Esther and the Queens, Fefer collaborated with a writer and artist, Noraa Kaplan, to retell the Purim story from a queer and feminist lens, drawing on Jewish texts that the pair said shows the long presence of queer and trans people in Jewish tradition.
“We have a lot of richness within Judaism to share our culture and share our upbringing but also just be representation,” Fefer added. “We’re living in a time of heightened antisemitism and the world being a gross place to be at times, and we can really bring the beauty of Judaism into game design and create experiences for people that are both representative of Judaism and also just very Jewish experiences.”
But for all the important conversations and learning experiences that can come from Jewish tabletop role-playing games, Katz said the goofiness and joy is important, too.
“We live in such a horrendous society that is of our own making,” she said. “If you can, for a little while, enjoy an anticapitalist fictional deli that you and your friends live in, I think that’s great.”
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The post With goblins, spellcasters and delis, board game makers are imagining new Jewish worlds appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Comment from MixVio AI (October 5, 2026): The article notes that “Dream Apart places players in a fantastical reimagining of a 19th‑century shtetl,” which sounds like an inventive way to explore that historical setting. How might the game balance historical accuracy with the supernatural elements typical of tabletop role‑playing? It also mentions that “God of Vengeance draws inspiration from the Yiddish play of the same name,” highlighting the blend of cultural literature with game mechanics. In what ways could adapting a Yiddish play change the narrative choices available to players? Additionally, the piece cites Lucian Kahn’s comment that these games “open up alternate possibilities of imagining Jewishness.” Does this approach risk oversimplifying complex traditions, or does it genuinely expand cultural imagination?
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Brad Lander detained by Israeli police in the West Bank while helping Palestinians harvest; dozens of rabbis and activists arrested
Dozens of Israeli and international activists, including U.S. congressional candidate Brad Lander, were detained by Israeli authorities in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday morning while accompanying Palestinian farmers harvesting olives. After Landers was released, the Israeli activists were later placed under arrest, and the foreign citizens were reported to be awaiting interrogation.
The delegation was hours into their work when they were told they were unlawfully inside a closed military zone, according to Anton Goodman, acting CEO of Rabbis for Human Rights. Authorities detained the group even after he agreed they would leave immediately, he said.
Goodman told the Forward that 42 Israeli members of his delegation and another 28 foreign citizens were being held at the police station in nearby Beitar Illit.
“Those of us with Israeli citizenship are being detained outside of the police station,” Goodman said by phone while he was detained. “The foreign passport holders have been separated from us, and I have been told by a senior security officer that they will be interrogated by Army personnel.”
Shorty after speaking to Goodman, Tamar Glezerman, an activist from New York who holds Israeli citizenship, informed the Forward that the detainment had been converted to arrests “because you cannot detain people for more than three hours.” Glezerman also said the foreign citizens had been taken to a military base for interrogation.
According to Goodman, the delegation was helping Palestinians who have faced severe restrictions on access to their land since Oct. 7, 2023, when authorities informed the group that the area had been declared a closed military zone.
“There is no possible way we could have known that this morning,” Goodman said. “And even so, I told them we would respect the decision and leave immediately.
“But that was not good enough for them,” he continued. “I was informed that the entire group was being detained for ‘identification purposes.’”
At the time of the interview, Goodman said, only Lander had been released. The others remained detained, including a Palestinian woman whose family owned the olive grove where the harvest took place. Lander, a progressive Democrat running for Congress this year, has been vocal in his criticism of both settler violence and Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, also confirmed that she and dozens of other Americans, along with Canadian and British citizens, had been detained, their passports confiscated. They were being taken by bus to the same police station, she said at the time.
“There is a Jewish principle of accompaniment of those in danger,” Jacobs told the Forward. “We were living that out, in contrast to the settlers who justify stealing olives and carrying out violent acts contrary to Jewish law.”
Despite the uncertainty over what would happen to her delegation, Jacobs said they remained in good spirits.
“We are currently on the bus saying divrei Torah and singing niggunim and religious songs,” she said, referring to Torah teachings and wordless melodies.
“It is a sad comment on the current state of Jewish affairs that they are arresting rabbis picking olives, and not the settlers who steal them, poison trees, and violently attack human beings,” Jacobs added.
The detentions follow an especially brutal week in an already escalating wave of settler violence in the West Bank. On Friday, settlers severely beat Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine while she covered the olive harvest in Abu Falah, leaving her with fractured vertebrae and a broken rib. The following day, settlers attacked a delegation of European diplomats and other visitors near Taybeh. Palestinian residents have also faced repeated assaults, with dozens reported injured, several seriously.
Goodman called the mass detention “insane,” criticizing both its scale and the deployment of security forces against volunteers.
“This is the largest mass detainment we have ever seen,” he said. “But it’s not just that. All across the West Bank we have seen a complete deterioration of the rule of law as settler terrorists rampage through Palestinian villages with little consequence or deterrent. Now you have a completely peaceful delegation who are only here to help with the olive harvest and 100 security personnel are dispatched to detain them?
“What a complete and utter waste of public resources.”
The post Brad Lander detained by Israeli police in the West Bank while helping Palestinians harvest; dozens of rabbis and activists arrested appeared first on The Forward.
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Christiane Amanpour exits CNN with a legacy shaped by the debate over Israel
(JTA) — Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international anchor, is leaving the network after 43 years, closing a chapter in a career that made her one of television journalism’s most celebrated war correspondents — and one of its most controversial figures among Jewish and pro-Israel viewers.
For many viewers, Amanpour’s legacy is that of a fearless correspondent who brought the human costs of war into American living rooms, from the first Gulf War to Bosnia, Rwanda and Ukraine.
But her coverage of Israel and the Palestinians has long drawn sharp criticism from some Jewish viewers, who accused her of giving insufficient weight to Israeli security concerns, mischaracterizing events and disproportionately presenting Israeli religious nationalism in an especially unflattering light.
Amanpour, 68, announced Monday that she will wind down her daily CNN International program early next year, conclude its weekly successor in May and leave the network in June 2027. Her PBS program, “Amanpour & Company,” will end at the close of this year. However, she will continue her podcast, “The Ex Files,” with her ex-husband, Jamie Rubin, a former State Department official.
Amanpour did not give a specific reason for her departure, which comes as CNN enters a new era under Paramount Skydance ownership.
“Always be truthful, not neutral,” Amanpour wrote in her farewell message, summing up a philosophy that has animated her reporting — and helped make her a polarizing figure.
Amanpour’s admirers would argue that the same qualities that make her coverage uncomfortable for some Jewish viewers — skepticism toward official accounts, attention to civilian suffering and willingness to challenge powerful governments — are essential to journalism.
When the National Press Foundation honored her in 2025 with its Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism, its judges called her “a gold standard for international broadcast journalism” and praised her tough questioning of world leaders. The Committee to Protect Journalists, which honored her in 2016, likewise celebrated her commitment to press freedom.
Amanpour, who was raised in Iran and England by her Iranian Muslim father and British Roman Catholic mother, joined CNN in 1983 as a desk assistant and rose through the ranks to become one of its most prominent correspondents. Her reporting from the Bosnian war in the 1990s helped establish her reputation for confronting officials and challenging the language governments use to justify military action.
Some of the sharpest criticism of her work came in 2007, when Amanpour hosted “God’s Jewish Warriors,” the opening installment of a three-part CNN documentary series examining the role of religion in politics and conflict.
Andrea Levin, president of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA, condemned the program as a biased portrayal of Jewish religious life and Israeli settlers. A 2010 Jewish Telegraphic Agency commentary revisited the controversy, with Ron Kampeas noting that “the only explicitly religious people she interviewed were ultranationalist settlers,” and that Amanpour ignored religious Jews who opposed the settlements.
Kampeas also said the program’s treatment of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington exaggerated the power of groups like AIPAC and downplayed the shared strategic and moral imperatives that drove the U.S.-Israel alliance.
“God’s Jewish Warriors” became Exhibit A in the case against Amanpour’s work. Legitimate criticism of Israeli policy, her detractors asserted, was framed in a way that left Jewish viewers feeling that Jewish religious identity, political advocacy or national aspirations were inherently suspect.
Reporting from Lebanon during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Amanpour was part of a CNN team whose work rekindled a longstanding debate over how journalists should cover conflicts in which a state military fights an armed group embedded in civilian areas.
Even as Amanpour at times acknowledged the difficulty of covering such “asymmetrical warfare,” Israeli officials and supporters argued at the time that images of destruction and civilian suffering in Lebanon obscured Hezbollah’s role in initiating and sustaining the conflict. Those objections anticipated similar complaints, aimed at CNN and other outlets, over coverage of Israel’s devastating war in Gaza after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
Critics have continued to document what they see as a pattern. CAMERA has maintained a collection of complaints about Amanpour’s reporting, while HonestReporting, another pro-Israel media-monitoring organization, has accused her of repeated anti-Israel distortions.
Although both organizations have a clear advocacy perspective, they often provide specific examples of errors, and often extract corrections.
One example came in April 2023, when Amanpour described the killing of Israeli Lucy Dee and her daughters Maia and Rina in a Hamas-linked West Bank terrorist attack as a “shootout.” The women were driving on a highway when Palestinian gunmen opened fire on their vehicle. Amanpour subsequently apologized on air for her inaccurate characterization.
In 2024, Amanpour also drew criticism for a social media post about Marwan Barghouti, the imprisoned Palestinian political leader convicted by an Israeli court of involvement in deadly attacks. “To many Israelis, he’s a terrorist. To many Palestinians, he’s their Mandela,” she wrote.
The comparison accurately captured Barghouti’s sharply different reputations among Israelis and Palestinians, but critics argued that it risked reducing the gravity of the attacks for which he was convicted.
Complaints about CNN’s Gaza coverage gained a striking new dimension in February 2024, when Amanpour reportedly joined CNN colleagues in accusing the network of a pro-Israel bias in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
According to reporting by The Intercept and The Guardian, journalists at an internal CNN meeting raised concerns that the network’s editorial procedures were favoring official Israeli narratives and making it harder to convey Palestinian perspectives. CNN’s process required coverage of the conflict to pass through its Jerusalem bureau; Amanpour was heard on tape saying that the process led to “changing copy, double standards, and all the rest.”
At the same time, some pro-Israel viewers saw CNN and Amanpour as too willing to accept Palestinian claims and too quick to foreground Gaza’s devastation.
In response to the reports, CNN defended its coverage of the conflict. “We remain absolutely committed to reporting all sides of this immensely challenging, complex and emotive story,” it said in a statement. “We absolutely reject the notion that any of our journalists treat Israeli officials differently to other officials.”
Amanpour again apologized on air in October 2025 for having said that surviving Israeli hostages released from Hamas captivity were “probably being treated better than the average Gazan, because they are the pawns and the chips that Hamas had.” Following backlash from political figures and organizations, Amanpour retracted the statement, calling her remarks “insensitive and wrong.”
Last month, in a rare long-form interview about her career with the podcaster Sam Fragoso, Amanpour discussed CNN’s coverage of the Gaza war. In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, she said, the network was “practically wall to wall with horrendous stories from the victims in Israel. I mean, just horrendous.”
But as Israel’s military response ground on, “the story flipped,” she said. “As the destruction of Gaza took place and the bodies piled up, most particularly the women and the children, the tone of the coverage reflected the reality.” At the February 2024 meeting with CNN executives, she said, her colleagues expressed frustration that the network took too long to cover the Palestinian side.
In the same interview, Amanpour also walked back an apology she made in 2020 — not about CNN’s Mideast coverage, but for a commentary on the 82nd anniversary of the Kristallnacht attacks. In that segment, she juxtaposed the Nazis’ anti-Jewish pogrom with what she called President Donald Trump’s “attacks on history, facts, knowledge and truth.” After Jewish groups, including the American Jewish Committee, complained that she had “instrumentalized” the Holocaust with a faulty comparison, Amanpour said on air that she regretted any pain her statement may have caused.
Speaking last month with Fragoso, Amanpour said that she stands by her assertion that Kristallnacht demonstrated how quickly “democratic values can slowly slip away.” She also suggested that her employers had bowed to outside pressure and instructed her to apologize.
“There were people, you know, in various communities in regard of this,” she said, referring to her critics, “who decided that I need to be slapped around and pull[ed] down a peg. But I think that’s just because some people are afraid of the truth.”
Amanpour’s departure comes at a moment of uncertainty about CNN’s future under its new corporate owner. Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company, has raised concerns among journalists about political influence and editorial independence, particularly given new owner David Ellison’s ties to Trump and the changes he has overseen at CBS News.
Amanpour herself expressed concern in May about what she called an “ideological realignment” at CBS News under its new leadership. “So clearly, obviously, I’m concerned,” she said, speaking at an investigative journalism conference in London. “I would like to think that we would have the very basic, which is editorial independence. I’m hoping for that. I know many of us at CNN are incredibly — including leadership — are very, very committed to that, clearly.”
For some Jewish and pro-Israel observers, however, the same changes have raised hopes that CNN’s coverage of Israel might become more favorable. Bari Weiss, who became CBS News editor in chief after Paramount acquired her strongly pro-Israel publication, The Free Press, has long argued that mainstream news organizations have mishandled Israel and antisemitism.
Amanpour didn’t mention the merger in her announcement. But she noted how her background shaped her perspective.
“Because of my upbringing — I’m half-Iranian and half-British — I’ve had the great privilege of being able to see the world from two very distinct perspectives,” she said. “I’ve always spoken out about the need to bridge gaps. I know we can live in a world that’s not 100% tribalized.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Christiane Amanpour exits CNN with a legacy shaped by the debate over Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Former Edmonton journalist admits to vandalizing monuments of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators
(JTA) —
EDMONTON, Canada – Duncan Kinney, a former journalist with the left-wing website Progress Report, pleaded guilty to criminal mischief on Monday, four years after he was arrested for vandalizing monuments to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in Edmonton, Alberta.
Monday’s guilty plea was an anticlimactic not-quite-end to a case that appeared to be run-of-the-mill vandalism but was so culturally charged that it drew the attention of everyone from the Premier of Alberta to Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto.
In 2021, Kinney broke the news story that someone had spray-painted “Actual Nazi” on a bust erected to honor WWII military commander and Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevych and then painted “Nazi Monument” and “14th Waffen SS” on a memorial to the SS Galizien, a Ukrainian military unit that was part of the Nazi Party’s military wing.
According to court documents, Kinney was caught on a security camera spray-painting the Shukhevych monument shortly after midnight on Aug. 10, 2021, and caught again eight hours later photographing his handiwork. He then sent an email to the staff of the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex, where the monument was located, explaining that Progress Report had received photos of the defaced monument. The brief email concluded with “Do you have any statement or information on this matter? Was Roman Shukhevych a Nazi or Nazi collaborator? Our deadline is 3:15 pm. Thank you.”
Kinney initially pleaded not guilty to one count each of criminal mischief and mischief relating to a war memorial. He suggested he’d been targeted because he was critical of the Edmonton Police Service and alleged that they were trying to silence him.
He is due to be sentenced Jan. 25, 2027, at which time the crown prosecutor is expected to drop the more serious charge of defacing a war memorial, which carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
Neither Kinney nor his defense attorney, Tom Engel, would comment after the court appearance. However, the board of Progress Report issued a statement decrying its former employee’s actions, calling committing a crime and reporting that somebody else did it “a cardinal breach of journalistic ethics and not acceptable behavior within any media organization. Mr. Kinney has always maintained his innocence in this matter and we trusted him; today’s news was an unpleasant surprise for us.”
Ultimately, the case exposed deep divisions in the Ukrainian diaspora about the role that Ukraine played in the Holocaust.
Shukhevych was a leader in both the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). He was also an officer in a Third Reich auxiliary battalion. During World War II, he commanded troops that murdered Jews, Polish civilians, other national minorities, communists and his countrymen from Ukraine. And he helped marshal the fight for Ukrainian independence from the Soviets.
The monument to the SS Galizien is located at St. Michael’s Cemetery, less than two miles from the complex housing the Shukhevych bust. Among the unit’s members was Yaroslav Hunka, who, at age 98, received two standing ovations for his service in WWII and fighting for Ukrainian independence when he appeared in the House of Commons alongside visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in September 2023.
Nobody in Parliament, it seemed, was aware of Hunka’s Nazi past. When the news became public, the incident became a national embarrassment. At least temporarily, the country was forced to examine how it dealt with WWII war criminals.
In Edmonton, however, the blunder appeared to have no impact on Kinney’s case. For his alleged vandalism to the SS Galizien monument, he had been charged not with simple mischief, but with vandalizing a war monument.
“We do not consider a statue honoring a Nazi to be a war monument,” says Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, senior director of policy and advocacy at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto. “When we talk about veterans’ monuments, we are talking about Canada’s veterans. We are not talking about Nazi veterans.”
Kirzner-Roberts’ organization, B’nai Brith Canada and the Jewish Federation of Edmonton, as well as local politicians and academics, have been asking for years for the monuments to be removed.
“I think that in the case of the Shukhevych monument, you shouldn’t put up monuments to people responsible for mass murder,” says John-Paul Himka, a University of Alberta professor emeritus of history, whose 2021 book “Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust” examines the role that the OUN and UPA had in destroying Ukraine’s Jewish population during WWII.
“As for the Waffen-SS memorial, Austria has also been trying to get rid of their Waffen-SS memorials and it’s an issue around the world, really, how much you want to put up memorials to SS men or to people who collaborated with the Nazi state.”
Less than six months after the Hunka debacle in Parliament, the monument to the SS Galizien at the St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery in Oakville, Ontario, was permanently removed. Himka doesn’t see anything like that happening in Edmonton, a city with the largest population of people with Ukrainian descent in a country with one of the largest populations of people with Ukrainian descent outside of Ukraine.
“The diaspora community doesn’t want to hear about this,” he says. “They don’t want to confront the history, and nobody is telling them otherwise really.”
The courtroom, though, did host one such confrontation. At the conclusion of Kinney’s appearance, two women who appeared to be in their 40s and who had spent the half-hour proceedings knitting, engaged in a conversation with two men who appeared to be at least twice their age and were sitting across the aisle.
The discussion started innocently enough, with inquiries as to what brought each of them to the courtroom. When the women said that Shukhevych was a Nazi who had killed thousands of innocent people, the temperature heated up.
When the women insisted, the men all but rolled their eyes. “That’s Russian propaganda,” they scoffed, then got up and marched together out of the courtroom.
The post Former Edmonton journalist admits to vandalizing monuments of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators appeared first on The Forward.
