Uncategorized
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.”
—
The post With goblins, spellcasters and delis, board game makers are imagining new Jewish worlds appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
For graphic novelist Joann Sfar, drawing after Oct. 7 was a way to put stones on Jewish graves
For many Jews, the morning of Oct. 7 remains seared into memory. In Joann Sfar’s case, it was also the day of his birthday party, which included “as many Muslims as Jews,” he told me. Amidst tragedy, Sfar felt a profound gratitude for life, which seemed especially precious. It was a day of fear and uncertainty, followed by many more over the following months. For Sfar, drawing was the only way out.
To Life is Sfar’s illustrated journal of his experience after Oct. 7, a reflection of his fierce peace advocacy coupled with a profound connection to Israel. It follows several previous books by Sfar, who is a French Jewish graphic novelist best known for The Rabbi’s Cat. His works touch on his Sephardic heritage, highlighting a history of friendship and brotherhood between Arabs and Jews.
To Life is the English translation of Nous Vivrons, which was published in June 2024 as the first of a three-part series. It was followed by Que Faire Des Juifs? (What To Do with the Jews?), a nearly 600-page graphic novel that chronicles the history of the Jewish people. Sfar concluded the series with Terre de Sang: Le Temps du Désespoir (Land of Blood: The Time of Despair), which shares Palestinian voices and which Sfar describes as the “saddest” volume of the trilogy.
I spoke with Sfar in July after reading To Life, which will be officially released on September 8. At present, the translations of the second and third volumes are not yet scheduled to be published. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Now that you’re expanding To Life’s audience to English speakers, what do you expect non-French audiences to learn? What do you hope that they take from your piece?
What I would really love is a new vision on the Middle East. I’m really surprised how New York has made the Middle East American, using it in the Trump and Mamdani debate, which I have to say has very little interest from Europe. What I would love is for people to see real lives from the Middle East to see how similar people are. I come from a part Ukrainian and part Algerian Jewish family. When I went to Palestinian cities, I was surprised how many Palestinian seniors look like my father, and how many Moroccan Jews from Israel look Palestinian.
These are people who are very similar and who are trapped in a conflict which is older than them. I really would love readers to dig into personal experience, rather than abstractions. I think embracing this region is really putting hope into individuals, because if you start to put faith into narrative, you’re lost.
In your work, you make an interesting distinction between individuals denying each other’s peoplehood on both sides — Israelis saying there was never a Palestine, anti-Zionists saying Israel never existed — and your emphasis on interviews in your piece. Why was it important for you to have such a connection to real humans throughout the process?
It’s a very strange thing to say because there was real tragedy, but it made me happy because I love these people. I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of time in Palestinian and Israeli cities. If you take it from an individual level, I believe in them and I have a hope for them. Something beautiful is that even if they don’t want it, they are interconnected. Their economies are interconnected; no one is going to exterminate anyone. They’ll be there still.
In this region, no one ever talks to me about Zionism. People deal with their everyday issues; they have no idea what’s going to occur in two months. I know people who are smarter than me have a big political essay about this region, but that’s not my job. My job is to do what I love, like an adventure novel, where you go to the place, you meet the people, and you bring back a story.
Were there any illustrations in the book that you found particularly interesting or meaningful?
There are some photographs that are so shocking you cannot see them in the news, and making a drawing makes it more acceptable. One picture that blew me away is the burial of a father who was killed during October 7. His kid is crying on the grave, and there are the small stones you put on Jewish Ashkenazi tombs. This kid is a Jew, but he could be an Arab, and he mourns his father with a stone. I did a very simple drawing, and somehow that’s what war is about. War is not about heroism, it’s not about glory, it’s not about victory, it’s about kids who are going to mourn their fathers or mothers or family.
This reminds me of a quote from the book where you say that your writing “is like putting little rocks on top of Jewish graves.” Are there any moments in the book that you feel are the most important to hear and remember?
In some fields of France today, and especially among artists, it’s almost forbidden to recall October 7 because of the mass murder of Gaza. But my feeling is you need to be able to cry for both. October 7 was the worst murdering of Jews after WWII, and the mass massacre in Gaza is something we shall remember in 100 years. We should be able not only to cry for both, but also to consider the situation as a whole and to say, okay, what’s next? Are we waiting for the next slaughter or can we do better than this?
As an American, I know about the Jewish experience in the U.S. over the past few years, but I didn’t know exactly what was going on in France and the antisemitism there that you described in your book. Can you tell me more about your experience?
I’m more worried about America because for French Jews, we never let people harass us without responding. We still have a very strong connection to the Arab world, so when people try to oppose Jews and Arabs in France, it somehow doesn’t work. I would love to say that in an optimistic way, but there’s also a lot of violence and harassment. The minute a Jewish artist starts to work, there’s a threat of boycott and everyone starts to treat him like a ‘genocidal Zionist.’
I’ve been talking of Palestine for 30 years, doing reporting in Palestinian towns for two years, but somehow it’s not enough. But we really fight back, because violence here is very often. I had a performance in Marseille, and people gathered at the front to prevent me from drawing on stage. Luckily, many people showed up to defend me, because they knew my show was humane, about peace. At some point, it’s because I’m a Jew that pisses them off. But we know it’s a fight, and we’re ready for it.
What were people’s reactions to your book when it first came out in France? I’m especially curious about the non-Jewish and anti-Zionist population, and whether they read your work.
Everything online is hell. In bookstores, it’s heaven. For To Life, it’s been two years of performing in huge bookstores. I also went to all the universities in France which were blocked by the pro-Gaza crowd, like Columbia, but in France I went to talk in front of them and they were very nice talks. The book sold more than 60,000 copies in France, which is huge. It has a very mainstream audience, not just a Jewish audience. When you go to bookstores, people are very okay to talk, and especially when you go to my meetings, it’s okay to disagree. At my meetings, you can be pro-Palestine — you’re welcome. You can be pro-Israel — you’re welcome, and you can know nothing and you’re welcome also.
I’ve been dealing with Arab and Jewish topics for more than 30 years, and I have a huge amount of readers in France. The Arabs and Jews of my age know what they lost, in the real brotherhood and friendship we had fighting against the extreme right party. We have political history together, and many people remember that. I have a lot of hope, but we need to stay vocal.
Since the book was written in 2023, are there any moments that feel surprising or strange for you to read today?
One thing which is really surprising is that October 7 is less than three years ago, and it’s almost as if everyone forgot. Somehow, people have made political use of this slaughter by any means. The historical moment is almost forgotten. If my book is worth something, it is as an immediate report on the immediate aftermath of October 7 on site. I was in the south of Israel, I was with kibbutzniks, I was with the military, I was with Arab people. One thing we risk is to forget what occurred on October 7, and then forget what occurred during the Shoah, because in France today all the memory sites for WWII are being attacked as pro-Israel. So, we need to keep our memory. Without memory, there’ll be no peace.
One moment in your book that I found very powerful was when you parallel a famous image of Jews being shot in the Holocaust to one of two teenagers being killed on October 7. I’d love to hear more about your thoughts connecting October 7 to previous tragedies, especially with how you refer to the events as a pogrom.
In France, most of the people don’t know about the Jewish oppression in the Arab world, how many of us had to leave the Arab countries after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. When October 7 occurred, in many Sephardic families and Jewish families from Israel, it recalled what occurred in many oriental countries. There’s a history of killing Jews in the Arab world, and it’s as if people awake to that. We have memories — nothing is the same — but we have a history. Amongst the things that really terrify me today is the dislocation of the link between Israeli Jews, American Jews, and European Jews. I was sad to see how many young American Jewish readers have no connection at all to Israel. You can criticize Israel, it’s okay, but pretending you have no connection to Israel is a lie to the face of your family.
In your opinion, why do you feel like this is the case for so many American Jews? Is there a way that you feel like this changes?
I would say Israel is also to blame because Israel has taught the diaspora Jews that it should be a constant exchange. You cannot raise a child making him guilty about not being pro-Israel enough. I’m not asking anyone to be pro-Israel — it’s a very dysfunctional country with an extreme right government. But the connection exists through your parents, your grandparents, their history. Pretending there is no connection is a lie. In the Jewish story, every moment a Jew tries to pretend he’s not part of the Jewry is going to be the first to be slaughtered. I’m not an Israeli, but I’m part of this history and I’m really proud to be part of this history.
Throughout the book, you imagine many conversations with your late grandfather, and I was interested in why this was something that felt so connected to you at this time. Why did you want to include this dialogue in your book?
He really raised me, and everything I do or say is considering what my grandfather would have said. He did not believe in any narrative. He was not a nationalist; he would not believe in all the right wing crap about pride, country, anything. It was only about survival. Regarding Europe, he was very pessimistic. He was saying that we’ll have some decades of peace after Auschwitz, and then it’s going to go back to normal Jew hatred. I’m afraid to say he was right.
The post For graphic novelist Joann Sfar, drawing after Oct. 7 was a way to put stones on Jewish graves appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Christian lawmakers want Trump to fast-track Jewish Canadians to the U.S. Tulsa says it’s ready.
Eitan Israelov, 34, was noshing on bagels and coffee at a co-working space in downtown Tulsa, when he met the city’s mayor, Monroe Nichols.
Israelov and his family — wife, Nicole, 31, and their two children, Liam, 10, and Melody, 8 — were among nearly 50 Canadian Jews who traveled to Oklahoma in February, part of an audacious recruitment trip to lure Jews worried about rising and often violent antisemitism north of the border, to leave Canada and move to the U.S.
Nichols greeted the group like a host welcoming guests into his home. “As a Black man in America,” Nichols said, “I can identify with some of the hate that you all have felt.” Then he used a word that landed differently in a room full of people who’d begun to wonder whether they still belonged where they came from.
“Tulsa,” he said, “is a refuge.”
For Israelov, the words spoke volumes. “For us,” he said, “it’s a piece of heaven.”
Six months later, it sounds prescient.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt sent a letter to Trump in July, pledging that “Oklahoma would proudly welcome” any Jewish families who “lawfully come to the United States in search of safety and opportunity.”
Now a group of Christian lawmakers are appealing to President Donald Trump to fast-track immigration for Jewish Canadians, touting Tulsa as a destination of choice. “These individuals and families should not be viewed merely as people fleeing hatred,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter last week. “They are prospective neighbors.”
Trump shared the letter in a social media post on Sunday, signaling his support, but did not commit his administration to anything specific — no order, no directive, no timeline. But for Canadian Jewish communities that have spent three years watching antisemitism intensify with little response from Ottawa, the presidential spotlight was still notable.
Since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish schools, synagogues and businesses across Canada have faced harassment, vandalism, bomb threats and violence. B’nai Brith Canada counted 27 violent antisemitic incidents in just the first six months of 2026, nearly triple all of 2025.
In early August, an arsonist gutted Nöam, a kosher restaurant in Montreal. Even Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has acknowledged the scale. Jews, he’s noted, are roughly 1% of Canada’s population but the target of two-thirds of its religiously motivated hate crimes.
“Canada’s civic compact,” he said, “is failing Jewish Canadians.”
The letter Trump shared was drafted by Jason Rapert, founder of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, asking Trump to “establish an appropriate lawful immigration and humanitarian pathway for Jewish Canadians who are experiencing persecution.”
Fifty-four people signed it including sitting state legislators from across the country, as well as Sam Brownback, the former U.S. ambassador for international religious freedom.
The letter cited Tulsa as an example of where a “willingness already exists,” and which has spent the better part of a decade building exactly the kind of pipeline that letter is describing.
Tulsa Tomorrow is a Jewish community-run recruitment program that started in 2017. It flies prospective transplants in for a weekend of house tours, meet-and-greets and a pitch for why they should relocate. So far, 144 people have come through, and 113 have stayed.
Lately, more of them have been Canadian. Of 52 people on a trip in February, 41 came from Canada, and organizers expect the roughly 50 people signed up for another trip in October to skew just as heavily north of the border.
Two people helping with that pitch are Canadian transplants themselves. Joe Roberts, who leads Jewish Tulsa — the umbrella organization overseeing the city’s federation, JCC and Jewish museum — moved there in 2024 from Ontario. Michael Sachs, senior director of the Jewish Federation of Tulsa, moved from Vancouver last year.
“Oklahoma is a state where these people can feel openly Jewish, and feel that as a Jew they’re valued,” Sachs said.
The families waiting
Getting there is another story. Israelov works in IT for a mining company headquartered in Canada, and he said the company won’t let him work remotely from the U.S. — closing off the route that would let an employer sponsor his visa. Another route, a visa that would require Israelov to invest $800,000 in a U.S. business, is out of reach financially.
Fear compounds the financial obstacles. In January 2024, someone was caught on the Israelovs’ home security camera cutting an Israeli flag off their front porch and fleeing into the night.
Later, a neighbor told Israelov, “I heard you’re Jewish,” and that “your kind is in the wrong place.” He belonged in Israel, the neighbor said, “but not here.”
Not everyone watching this unfold from inside the Canadian Jewish community is rooting for the exodus. Jesse Brown, a Canadian Jewish journalist who has spent years documenting the country’s rising antisemitism, says he fears “the next Bondi Beach massacre,” the December 2025 Hanukkah attack in Australia that killed 15 people, “is going to take place in Canada.”
But watching fellow Jews plan their departure unsettles him in a different way. “There’s a sadness,” he said. “I’m not enthused or compelled by what I see as a re-shtetling.”
A murkier picture
It’s hard not to notice the echo of last year’s program resettling white South Africans as refugees, which critics called selective and its architects called a response to persecution. Roberts sees Canadian Jews less as refugees than as candidates for what he calls “a legal humanitarian pathway that’s expedited.”
The timing also invites skepticism. The NACL letter and Trump’s post came in the middle of a trade war between the U.S. and Canada. Fifty percent tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods took effect Aug. 22. Canada has announced a matching retaliation.
Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, visited Ottawa in early August and said: “You need to do better,” citing 788 antisemitic hate crimes reported to Canadian police in 2025, up from 492 in 2021.
Carney’s office said new laws and funding show the government is responding. A spokeswoman said officials want “a country where our differences are honored and where Jewish Canadians can live visibly, fully, and joyfully in public life.”
But Rapert, who is based in Arkansas, sees things differently. When Trump shared the letter on Sunday, Rapert was leading a delegation of U.S. elected officials on a tour of Israel. They had just visited the Ghetto Fighters’ House Holocaust museum, which has on display the glass booth used in the trial of Adolf Eichmann for his role in the Holocaust.
Canada’s climate, he said, is “not unlike what you were beginning to hear in the early days of Germany, that led to government decisions that brought forward what we now all know is the Holocaust.”
Rapert’s letter is far from his final push. He hopes to persuade U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and U.S. Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana to hold congressional hearings on the issue. And he’s working on setting up a meeting with Trump.
“My prayer is that Donald Trump paves the way for the people that want to come, to come,” he said. “But what would be even better is if Prime Minister Carney apologized and repented.”
The post Christian lawmakers want Trump to fast-track Jewish Canadians to the U.S. Tulsa says it’s ready. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
California lawmakers pass bills to address antisemitism, deem ‘Jewish’ an ethnicity, and protect religious observance
(JTA) — California is poised to become the first state to deem “Jewish” an ethnic and racial identity, after lawmakers gave final approval to the groundbreaking legislation on Monday.
The SB 1387 bill, which would expand the definition of ethnicity “to include Jewish identity” in demographic data collection, will now head to the governor’s desk. If the legislation becomes law, state agency forms that allow for voluntary disclosures of ethnicity or race would also need to offer a “Jewish” option.
Both the State Assembly and Senate granted final approval to the bill in the last few hours of California’s 2026 legislative session, which concludes at the end of the day on Monday. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has until Sept. 30 to sign bills into laws or veto them.
The SB 1387 ethnicity legislation has been a priority among many California Jewish organizations, who argue that Jewish peoplehood should be connected to much more than just religion — and that the law should reflect that understanding.
This bill, which would take effect in 2030, would affect forms issued by agencies ranging from public schools to unemployment offices to prisons. Data collected would serve to inform research initiatives, identify disparities and guide policy decisions, while banning the disclosure of personal information, per the bill.
Joining SB 1387 in heading to the governor’s desk are five other bills that are relevant to the state’s 1.2 million Jews and that had the support of the Jewish California coalition.
On Sunday, the legislature passed AB 1853, a bill that bars threatening false and misleading information from California voter guides. Jewish California, which represents 43 organizations, praised the legislation’s advancement, stressing that 54 Jewish groups voiced their support for the bill within 48 hours of its introduction.
“Hate speech does not belong in a state-approved document paid by tax dollars,” David Bocarsly, CEO of Jewish California, said in a statement.
“AB 1853 boldly declares that our state’s official election documents can’t be used to spread conspiracy theories and bigotry,” added Bocarsly, whose coalition was not only a sponsor of this bill but also of SB 1387.
Also on Sunday, lawmakers approved AB 2664, the Safe Worship Zone Act, which would create a 100-foot zone around the entrances of houses of worship, where no one would be able to come within 8 feet of a congregant without their consent.
The bill, which received the backing of a wide-ranging interfaith coalition, is modeled after Colorado’s bubble zone law that offers patients protection around reproductive health clinics.
“The rise of antisemitism is undeniable, and our communities must be protected,” Democratic Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, the bill’s author, said in a statement.
“AB 2664 gives communities an important tool to push back against harassment and intimidation and protect the sanctity of our houses of worship,” Bauer-Kahan added.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, the legislature approved AB 395, which would require government agencies, K-12 schools and public universities to avoid scheduling major events or meetings on days “that members of the public would be unable to participate or be present due to the ritual observance of a religious, cultural, or ancestral holiday.”
Among the Jewish observances that would be codified on a list of such holidays are Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and the first and last two days of Passover.
“For too long and in too many communities, religious minorities and other people of faith have been asked to make difficult choices on the days that matter most to them,” Democratic Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, the bill’s author, said in a statement.
“This legislation would help to prevent that injustice and ensure that Californians of all backgrounds can fully participate, particularly when important decisions are being made,” added Gabriel, who chairs the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.
Lawmakers on Thursday also approved another Gabriel bill, AB 1836, which seeks to close a gap in the current structure of the California State Nonprofit Security Grant Program. Because the program allocates security funds only for a nonprofit’s physical building, off-site events like menorah lightings on Chanukah were not eligible.
A fifth bill relevant to the Jewish community, AB 1763, is also heading to Newsom’s desk, after passing in the legislature last Tuesday. This bill would include religious holiday observance as a type of excused absence in schools, without requiring a written request from a parent or guardian.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post California lawmakers pass bills to address antisemitism, deem ‘Jewish’ an ethnicity, and protect religious observance appeared first on The Forward.
