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Jewish artists in Canada turned inward during 2024—and discovered bolder identities to share for 2025
Lelala Hewak has been taking portrait photos of hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews worldwide for a project called The J-Word, which is all about challenging assumptions about appearance.
“What we like to do, where we live, how we like to live, how we like to dress, how we like to worship—everything about us is different,” she said.
“It bothers me that people dare to make damaging generalizations, let alone slurs or attacks, and they don’t even know anything.”
She’s conscious that putting the spotlight on Jewish faces, right now, may “raise eyebrows” or encounter pushback, she says, but Hewak points to rising antisemitism as an issue on a worldwide scale.
“There’s plenty of people working on humanitarian and other political issues to do with how things are being handled by Israel in the Middle East. It’s not my area of expertise. Why would I dare go there?… Doesn’t mean I should be silent on this other problem.”
Hewak recently visited New York to take the portraits of freestyle rapper Kosha Dillz, and Rabbi Manis Friedman of Chabad Lubavitch—both of whom are familiar figures on social media. Her goal is not proving multiethnic Jews exist, she says.
“I’m not trying to say ‘Oh, look, we have different colour skin’,” but rather, that a Jew might wear, for example, anything from construction work clothes to the black suits of some religiously observant Jews.
Hewak’s playful, provocative art is one approach among many within Jewish creative circles, where artists have now contended for more than a year with a cultural world that often defaults toward overwhelming anti-Israel sentiment, and frequently poses litmus tests around it. Even artists who have refrained from commenting on the political situation post-Oct. 7 can find themselves under attack or cancelled.
Jewish arts events now tend to involve extra calculations about security for venues, audiences, and artists, causing artists to grapple with how much or in what capacity to identify Jewishly in their creative output.
What happens when you’re accused of disturbing public safety—just for showing up as Jewish cartoonist? Miriam Libicki illustrates her experience being banned from her hometown comic con (@theCJN): https://t.co/NRsrEQGOG9
Stay tuned for Miriam Libicki in Lilith’s new issue… pic.twitter.com/cAKcLlb5c4
— Lilith Magazine (@LilithMagazine) October 20, 2024
For some, this new environment has meant deliberately looking inward and making art that draws more explicitly on their tradition than ever before.
Toronto-based Tamar Ilana Cohen Adams, who performs Mediterranean music and dance, was in Izmir, Turkey on Oct. 7, 2023. Following the attack, her concerts, including one at a synagogue, were moved due to safety concerns, including fears of bomb threats.
“They took down the flyers that were all over Istanbul and Izmir, and we did private house concerts. Now that was the first time I felt that kind of need to hide as a Jew,” she said.
Tamar Ilana, as she’s professionally known, visited the region every summer growing up, with her mother, ethnomusicologist Judith Cohen, who immersed her in folk music traditions including Ladino and Sephardic songs. Now she’s the vocalist at the front of Toronto’s Jaffa Road, a Jewish/Middle Eastern fusion band, and leads Ventanas, her Mediterranean and world music project, in which she incorporates flamenco into her performance and composes new music using or referencing traditional forms.
The apprehensions have been a new experience within a musical and cultural world that was part of Tamar Ilana’s travels and upbringing.
“My whole life, it’s always been in the background. But I had never felt it myself until I was in Turkey. All the Jewish schools closed, Jews stayed home, Jews hid, and we hid our concert.”
During concerts in Spain after Oct. 7, she felt pressure to make statements related to the war, and decided to acknowledge the possibilities for coexistence that her music demonstrates, by closing out Ventanas shows with a Moroccan Sephardic number, or, with Jaffa Road, a tune in Hebrew and Arabic.
“This is music of the Sephardic Jews, Morocco, Arabic, Hebrew… an example of peace and how people can live together,” she’ll say.
But even absent political statements, audience members disrupted Jaffa Road’s performance six months ago at the 2024 Hillside Festival in Guelph, Ont., by yelling from beside the outdoor stage.
The band had to stop the show and she addressed the protesters.
“This isn’t how you do things. You do things through conversation,” she recalls saying.
“I was trembling… it was pretty crazy.”
Tamar Ilana was also targeted with a threatening Instagram message ahead of a live show she was producing, earlier in 2024.
“I was throwing an event for Indigenous women… We got these messages about turning it into a Palestinian fundraiser ‘or else,’ basically.” She called security. (Tamar Ilana has Cree-Salteaux ancestry from her father Robert Adams, who’s a poet and photographer.)
“This is without me saying anything at all, all year, so I can’t imagine [where the threat originated]… This is from people reading my bio and seeing I’m Jewish, is the only thing I can gather.”
Tamar Ilana, who recently released Ventanas’ latest album, says she’s feeling a shift toward “looking inwards” that Jewish friends and colleagues in particular have observed.
“Friends sort of emerged who happen to be Jewish… suddenly we were looking for solidarity in each other, and just to be in a room where we felt safe and where we felt surrounded by people who understood us.
“We heard our whole lives about Jewish history, and I’ve always felt like it was like an extended Jewish family. It’s almost… the family coming together now, when we need each other—even people who you don’t know that well, but there seems to be this cord,” she said. “It’s comforting, but it’s also a little scary that we need it.”
Aaron Lightstone, the Jaffa Road bandleader and oud player, said they were performing music based on poetry by Israel ben Moses Najara, a 15th century rabbi who lived in Gaza, Safed and Damascus, when demonstrators interrupted.
“If you’re protesting Tamar and Jaffa Road, you’re either totally ignorant because you have no business protesting; don’t know what you’re talking about; or totally antisemitic.”
Lightstone is rethinking music festival submissions for 2025, and wonders if it’s safer to focus on bookings at Jewish venues exclusively.
“As much fun as they are, should I be chasing Canadian jazz and folk festivals?”
It’s an odd question, Lightstone says, for a band centring “coexistence, [and] pushing Jewish music into [the] mainstream.”
Still, he says, “it doesn’t take a lot of people to be disruptive.”
A new brand of unity
Jewish Futures, an arts and culture salon held on Nov. 24, offered conversational spaces to foster a sense of Jewish unity in the arts. (The CJN was a promotional partner for its second year.)
Kultura Collective, an initiative by UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, organized the day, including a session on exploring Yiddish cultural expressions, where visual artist Jonah Strub discussed making artwork “as accessible as possible,” often through humour. His ultimate goal is “to provide representation to other queer and Jewish people.”
During a panel discussion titled “Jewish Infusions,” four artists shared how they’ve incorporated their Jewish identity into their creative practices and output.
Erez Zobary, a Toronto singer and songwriter, was releasing her new album, which explores her identity through connecting to her Yemeni Mizrahi background and her grandmother’s story of leaving Yemen for Israel via Operation Magic Carpet. Zobary received a Canada Council for the Arts grant to visit family in Israel as part of the personal project.
The new album is a departure from her previous work, where her songs “[talked] about getting dumped on a Thursday,” she said.
Making new music that’s so “outwardly Jewish,” with Hebrew and English song titles, plus Yemeni Jewish cultural elements, allowed her to see the process in a new way.
“Before I was making music about coming of age… breakups and living in the city and trying to figure out who I am,” said Zobary. “With this one, it definitely feels different.”
In the months following the Oct. 7 attacks, Zobary says, her writing process for the new album shifted.
“’I [had been] so excited to write this project and to share my identity with people… and then I just became so afraid to do it, and I think it took me months and months to get to a point again when I [felt] good to share it.”
Some panellists said they braced themselves for a negative reception that thankfully never came.
Playwright and actor Jordi Mand described an unexpectedly warm reception to her own work In Seven Days from audiences in London, Ont., where her family lives. The play unfolds as a family contends with their father opting for Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), and includes a rabbi among the play’s five characters.
“The father goes through with ending his life … [it’s about] how we say goodbye to people we love, but it’s also about MAID in the context of Judaism.”
Thank you to everyone who joined us for Jewish Futures 2024 on Sunday! It was a beautiful afternoon of conversations, art-making and connecting as a creative community. @thethmuseum @ProssermanJCC
Photos @shaymarkowitz_ pic.twitter.com/96tIa8Si0K— Kultura Collective (@kultura_TO) November 26, 2024
Mand lives in Toronto but says she remains connected to her synagogue in London, and was apprehensive when her play was mounted in a city where the Jewish community is less prominent.
“I was absolutely terrified about sharing an unabashedly Jewish story there,” specifically, when the show’s run started last February at the Grand Theatre.
But the London response was “overwhelmingly positive,” she says.
“It really taught me a lot about where we are in place and time… [with] stories where there is such universality.”
Painter and jeweller Edith Barabash, who had been working as a lawyer in Victoria, B.C., started making and selling art out of a camper van two years ago. While there wasn’t much Jewish content at first, she now makes earrings of challah, babka, and matzah, and paints shofar-blowing scenes.
She lost online followers after releasing work with Jewish symbols.
“People who didn’t resonate with that, just unfollowed me immediately as soon as I started posting anything related to Judaism, Israel… a lot of the following that I built up until then was gone. And then a new following came.”
Barabash says she now feels called to bring community connections to her work—and now, she tends to stick to Jewish markets. She agrees “we’re becoming more insular.”
She also finds beauty in Jewish artists leaning into Jewish culture.
“When the world is more ready to hear those stories and see that art, we’re going to be so much stronger as a community, and our stories are going to be stronger.”
Josh Saltzman, a screenwriter whose recent short film is a horror set at a shivah, said he encounters antisemitism constantly in his industry, including social media posts from his crew members. It has led him to prepare for potential disruptions at film festival screenings.
When asked later if the antisemitism has worsened, Saltzman wrote in response: “I do believe it’s been worse since Oct. 7. Although I can’t say if antisemitism is spreading or people are just emboldened to be louder about it.”
However, he remains unapologetic about making space for Jewish culture.
“Every culture should get to share their stories… if people are going to unfollow any of us, any artists … their loss. Let them unfollow.”
While antisemitism is probably making Jewish artists more insular, that shouldn’t silence them, he says.
“I don’t want to let that stop me from making Jewish stories, because some people hate Jews. That’s the history of the world. So keep making art.”
Saltzman’s uplifting tone closed out the panel with a call for collective support.
“I feel like more than ever, I want to be more provocative with my work… I encourage any of you that are artists or have anything to say or even just how you live your life to spread [your] wings more,” said Saltzman.
“I am scared to do it, but I’m trying to and I want to… I feel like if I see other people spreading their wings, I’m more encouraged to do it as well,” he said, to a room of nodding respondents.
In the concluding conversation at the salon, Indigenous and Jewish actor and director Jennifer Podemski called stories her bridge-building effort, including Little Bird, the TV series she co-created about a First Nations woman adopted by a Jewish family during Canada’s Sixties Scoop, who tries to reconnect with her birth family and heritage.
“I am fascinated and dedicated to sparking humanity through story… that sparks something in someone else that they connect to, that creates a bridge,” said Podemski. “And in that bridge, you can build a conversation and from that conversation, you can have a dialogue.
“As much as I really didn’t like or enjoy being Native and Jewish pretty much most of my life… I realized that it was on purpose that I was this thing at this time and doing this work… to find humanity in some way, and tell the stories that can connect people.”
Now more than ever, she said, Jewish expressions may be sparking difficult conversations.
“Nobody cared about it before. Right now people care about [Jewish identity] because they don’t like it, and they don’t want you to exercise your Jewishness anymore… so I want to exercise it more.”
Pride in the face of prejudice
Sam Mogelonsky is director of Arts, Culture and Heritage at UJA Federation of Greater Toronto and runs Kultura Collective, which has now produced two Jewish Futures conferences since Oct. 7.
“Everyone’s approaching this moment differently,” said Mogelonsky.
Pride in being Jewish might look different for each person: Self-identifying in a website bio, for instance, as a Jewish Canadian or Israeli Canadian artist, “where maybe that word Jewish wasn’t there before,” said Mogelonsky, although she notes “some people have taken that wording out of their bios.”
Graphic artist Miriam Libicki has been banned by Vancouver Comics Arts Festival due to her past service in the IDF https://t.co/pJpK5tYTc7 h/t @JesseBrown
— The Canadian Jewish News (@TheCJN) May 29, 2024
There’s a sense of seeking out “like-minded creatives,” she says, which runs parallel with fears about “how you are going to be perceived by the wider community… that potentially, doors might close on you if you are outward with that identity.”
It’s both a complicated moment, and a sad one, says Mogelonsky, with fears about additional security needs, or perceptions that venues aren’t interested in Jewish cultural content.
“There’s many reasons why people may not want to be as open about their connections to being Jewish,” she said. “At the same time that we’re finding so much pride and joy in sharing these Jewish stories… we’re also finding moments of complication around that.”
Jewish Futures, she hopes, offered inspiration, helped grow connections, or simply allowed artists to hear “that other people are feeling the same way that you are.”
Mogelonsky developed the cultural salon concept following discussions she and UJA colleagues were having with artists during a previous event series called Art Schmooze, where informal gatherings—usually held at art galleries—brought artists together over wine and cheese.
Now, in some pockets of Toronto, gallery events are helping Jewish artists forge new connections outside the fraught, one-sided alignment of many left-leaning elements of independent arts communities.
Gillian Lahav and Zack Rosen were booking a show at a Dundas Street West gallery when the venue declined to host a Jewish-themed show. The painter friends instead ran a cat-themed exhibition, and invited friends for an Art Shabbat evening on a Friday in November. (The gallery says it’s open to hosting more Shabbat events.)
“It’s kind of difficult to find homes for Jewish work right now,” said Rosen. “There’s a sense in the broader world that to engage with Jewish work right now is unsafe for the venue holding it.”
He says the explicitly Jewish gathering provided an important—if also informal—Jewish community space.
“The scariness… some of the heaviness of the world around us now has brought us together,” says Rosen. “And that’s not a terrible thing.”
Lahav says Jewish artists have experienced a level of fear around how they will be received in such spaces.
“[People] are very quick to jump to one side of a binary that we know is nuanced but unfortunately the broader art world forgets is nuanced,” she said.
“When [they] go out of their way to assert which side [of the] boundary they land on,” that can alienate Jewish community members.
“At the same time, it’s an opportunity to see where we are welcome.” Community-based art galleries are where she feels “everyone knows they can have a home.”
Art Shabbat was a way to gather without “the weight we carry around all week.”
Petrina Blander launched her photo exhibition at the She Said Gallery, housed inside a laundromat at 384 Roncesvalles Ave., with a Friday night candle-lighting and challah blessings.
Shabbat Shalom Toronto, which continues to Jan. 8, is not an explicitly Jewish-themed exhibition, she says, although some of the images relate to Judaism, and Blander’s artist bio references her Israeli background.
But the photos were secondary to the gathering itself, according to Blander.
“The primary purpose was to bring people together… a safe space to break bread and connect.”
It’s a community where a nearby viaduct had been spray-painted “Fuck Zionists” in huge letters in the weeks after Oct. 7, as Israel’s military attacked Hamas in Gaza.
Blander says she isn’t religious, but found resonance in the idea expressed via the Netflix show Jewish Matchmaking, about how “‘there’s 15 million Jews and there’s 15 million different ways of being Jewish.’”
“I can’t tell you what part of this is Jewish [to me], because to me it doesn’t really matter… we all connect to it in a different way,” she said.
“There was prosciutto on the table… and two ginormous challahs, and they were blessed.”
Blander’s co-organizer Elise Kayfetz, who’s also the thrifting proprietor behind Vintage Shmatta, said Shabbat Shalom Toronto brought together “all walks of life, from Israel to down the street.”
“I haven’t been in a room with this many Jews since my bat mitzvah,” she said at the gathering.
Blander leaned over to Kayfetz: “This is my version of a shtetl in the heart of Toronto.”
The post Jewish artists in Canada turned inward during 2024—and discovered bolder identities to share for 2025 appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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‘Valid For All Countries Except Israel’
US passport. Photo: Pixabay.
JNS.org – There’s an unwritten rule among governments in many Muslim countries—when things go wrong at home, turn on the State of Israel.
Bangladesh, one of the poorest and most densely populated countries in Asia, provides the latest example of this tactic. Last week, the authorities in Dhaka announced that they were reintroducing what is essentially a disclaimer on the passports issued to its citizens: “Valid for all countries except Israel.” That shameful inscription was abandoned in 2021 by the government of recently ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, although it was never followed up with diplomatic outreach to Israel, much less recognition of the Jewish state’s right to a peaceful and sovereign existence.
The rationale for the move in 2021 was that Bangladeshi passports had to be brought up to date with international standards. However, the war in the Gaza Strip triggered by the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has apparently canceled out that imperative.
“For many years, our passports carried the ‘except Israel’ clause. But the previous government suddenly removed it,” Brig. Gen. Mohammad Nurus Salam, passports director at the Department of Immigration, told the Arab News. Somewhat disingenuously, he added: “We were used to seeing ‘except Israel’ written in our passports. I don’t know why they took it out. If you talk to people across the country, you’ll see they want that line back in their passports. There was no need to remove it.”
It’s been 25 years since I was in Bangladesh, where I spent several months as a BBC consultant assisting with the launch of the country’s first private TV news station. One of the aspects that struck me profoundly—in contrast to Salam’s claim that the people want their passports to preclude travel to Israel—was the lack of hostility towards Israel among the many Bangladeshis I met and worked with, and I have no reason to believe that this attitude has fundamentally shifted. Most Bangladeshis are consumed by their own country’s vast problems, and the distant Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not impinge in any way on the resolution of those.
When I told people that I was Jewish, had family in Israel and had spent a great deal of time there, the most common response was curiosity. For the great majority, I was the first Jew they had ever met, and they eagerly quizzed me about the Jewish religion, often noting the overlaps with Islamic practices, such as circumcision and the prohibition on consuming pork.
“What is Israel like? What are the people like?” was a conversation I engaged in on more than one occasion. I remember with great affection a journalist called Salman, a devout Muslim who invited me to his home for an iftar meal during Ramadan. Salman was convinced that there were still a couple of Jews living in Bangladesh, and he combed Dhaka trying to find them so that he could introduce me (he never succeeded because there were no Jews there, but I appreciated his efforts.) I also remember members of the Hindu community, who compose about 8% of the population, drawing positive comparisons between Bangladesh’s Indian-backed 1971 War of Independence against Muslim Pakistan and Israel’s own War of Independence in 1947-48.
To understand why Bangladesh has taken this regressive decision requires a hard look at its domestic politics. In August of last year, the government of Sheikh Hasina—the daughter of independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the dominant political figure over the past 30 years—was overthrown following a wave of protest against its well-documented corruption, discriminatory practices and judicial interference. Her downfall was accompanied by a surge of sectarian violence against Hindu homes, businesses and temples, with more than 2,000 incidents recorded over a two-week period. In the eyes of many, Hindus were associated with Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League Party, and the violence against them suggested that Islamist positions were making headway in a country that flew the banner of secular nationalism in its bid to win freedom from Pakistani rule.
The passport decision can be viewed in a similar light: Bangladesh asserting its identity as a Muslim country standing in solidarity with the Palestinians, the Islamic world’s pre-eminent cause, at the same time as breaking with the legacy of Sheikh Hasina’s rule. Yet that stance will not alleviate the fiscal misery of Bangladeshi citizens, with more than one in four people living below the poverty line. Nor will it address the chronic infrastructure problems that plague the country’s foreign trade, or tackle the bureaucracy and red tape that crushes entrepreneurship and innovation.
In short, supporting the Palestinians brings no material benefits for ordinary Bangladeshis, who would doubtless gain from a genuine relationship with Israel that would introduce, among many other advantages, more efficient water technology to counter the presence of arsenic and the lack of sanitation that often renders Bangladesh’s large reserves of water unusable and undrinkable.
Even so, ideology and Muslim identity may not be the only explanations for the Bangladeshi decision. It can also be seen as a gesture towards Qatar, the wealthiest country in the Islamic world, which has artfully cultivated trade and diplomatic ties with a slew of less developed countries, Bangladesh included. Last year, Qatar’s ruler, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, paid a two-day state to Bangladesh that showcased Doha’s contributions in the form of bilateral trade worth $3 billion as well as millions of dollars in Qatari grants for school and higher education. Such largesse on the part of the Qataris is a critical means of ensuring that governments in Bangladesh and other Muslim nations stay away from the Abraham Accords countries that have made a peace of sorts with Israel.
Bangladesh is not, of course, the only country to prevent its citizens from traveling to Israel or denying entry to Israeli passport holders. A few days after the Bangladeshi decision, the Maldives—another Muslim country that enjoys close relations with Qatar—announced that Israelis would no longer be permitted to visit. None of these bans is likely to be lifted as long as Israel is at war with the Hamas terrorists in Gaza, Iran’s regional proxies and the Iranian regime itself.
The ripple effects of that war—antisemitic violence in Western countries, cold-shouldering of Israel by countries without a direct stake in the conflict—will continue to be felt. None of that changes the plain fact that this remains a war that Israel must win.
The post ‘Valid For All Countries Except Israel’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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US, Iran Set for Second Round of Nuclear Talks as Iranian FM Warns Against ‘Unrealistic Demands’
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi attends a press conference following a meeting with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, April 18, 2025. Tatyana Makeyeva/Pool via REUTERS
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said a deal could be reached during Saturday’s second round of nuclear negotiations in Rome if the United States does not make “unrealistic demands.”
In a joint press conference with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, Araghchi said that Washington showed “partial seriousness” during the first round of nuclear talks in Oman last week.
The Iranian top diplomat traveled to Moscow on Thursday to deliver a letter from Iran’s so-called Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, briefing Russian President Vladimir Putin on the ongoing nuclear talks with the White House.
“Their willingness to enter serious negotiations that address the nuclear issue only, without entering into other issues, can lead us towards constructive negotiations,” Araghchi said during the joint press conference in Moscow on Friday.
“As I have said before, if unreasonable, unrealistic and impractical demands are not made, an agreement is possible,” he continued.
Tehran has previously rejected halting its uranium enrichment program, insisting that the country’s right to enrich uranium is non-negotiable, despite Washington’s threats of military actions, additional sanctions, and tariffs if an agreement is not reached to curb the country’s nuclear activities.
On Tuesday, US special envoy Steve Witkoff said that any deal with Iran must require the complete dismantling of its “nuclear enrichment and weaponization program” — reversing his earlier comments, in which he indicated that the White House would allow Tehran to enrich uranium to a 3.67 percent threshold for a “civil nuclear program.”
During the press conference, Araghchi also announced he would attend Saturday’s talks in Rome, explaining that negotiations with the US are being held indirectly due to recent threats and US President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran — which aims to cut the country’s crude exports to zero and prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
“Indirect negotiations are not something weird and an agreement is within reach through this method,” Araghchi said.
He also indicated that Iran expects Russia to play a role in any potential agreement with Washington, noting that the two countries have held frequent and close consultations on Tehran’s nuclear program in the past.
“We hope Russia will play a role in a possible deal,” Araghchi said during the press conference.
As an increasingly close ally of Iran, Moscow could play a crucial role in Tehran’s nuclear negotiations with the West, leveraging its position as a veto-wielding member of the UN Security Council and a signatory to a now-defunct 2015 nuclear deal that imposed limits on the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
Known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Trump withdrew the US from the deal in 2018.
Since then, even though Tehran has denied wanting to develop a nuclear weapon, the UN’s nuclear watchdog – the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – has warned that Iran has “dramatically” accelerated uranium enrichment to up to 60 percent purity, close to the roughly 90 percent weapons-grade level and enough to build six nuclear bombs.
During the press conference on Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov said that “Russia is ready to facilitate the negotiation process between Iran and the US regarding Tehran’s nuclear program.”
Moscow has previously said that any military strike against Iran would be “illegal and unacceptable.”
Russia’s diplomatic role in the ongoing negotiations could also be important, as the country has recently solidified its growing partnership with the Iranian regime.
On Wednesday, Russia’s upper house of parliament ratified a 20-year strategic partnership agreement with Iran, strengthening military ties between the two countries.
Despite Tehran’s claims that its nuclear program is solely for civilian purposes rather than weapon development, Western states have said there is no “credible civilian justification” for the country’s recent nuclear activity, arguing it “gives Iran the capability to rapidly produce sufficient fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons.”
The post US, Iran Set for Second Round of Nuclear Talks as Iranian FM Warns Against ‘Unrealistic Demands’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Reps. Dan Goldman and Chris Smith Issue Statement Condemning Shapiro Arson Attack As ‘Textbook Antisemitism’
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) holds a rally in support of US Vice President Kamala Harris’ Democratic presidential election campaign in Ambler, Pennsylvania, US, July 29, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Rachel Wisniewski
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) and Rep. Chris Smith (D-NJ) issued a statement condemning the recent arson attack against Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) as a form of “textbook antisemitism.”
“Governor Shapiro is the Governor of Pennsylvania and has nothing to do with Israel’s foreign policy, yet he was targeted as an American Jew by a radicalized extremist who blames the Governor for Israel’s actions. That is textbook antisemitism,” the statement read.
Shapiro’s residence, the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion, was set ablaze on Sunday morning, hours after the governor hosted a gathering to celebrate the first night of the Jewish holiday of Passover. Shapiro said that he, his wife, and his children were awakened by state troopers knocking on their door at 2 am. The governor and his family immediately evacuated the premises and were unscathed.
Goldman and Smith added that the arson attack against Shapiro serves as “a bitter reminder that persecution of Jews continues.” The duo claimed that they “strongly condemn this antisemitic violence” and called on the suspect to “be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”
Pennsylvania State Police said that the suspect, Cody Balmer set fire to Shapiro’s residence over the alleged ongoing “injustices to the people of Palestine” and Shapiro’s Jewish faith.
According to an arrest warrant, Balmer called 911 prior to the attack and told emergency operators that he “will not take part in [Shapiro’s] plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people,” and demanded that the governor “stop having my friends killed.”
The suspect continued, telling operators, “Our people have been put through too much by that monster.”
Balmer later revealed to police that he planned to beat Shapiro with a sledgehammer if he encountered him after gaining access into his residence, according to authorities.
He was subsequently charged with eight crimes by authorities, including serious felonies such as attempted homicide, terrorism, and arson. The suspect faces potentially 100 years in jail. He has been denied bail.
Shapiro, a practicing Jew, has positioned himself as a staunch supporter of Israel. In the days following Hamas’s brutal slaughter of roughly 1,200 people across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Shapiro issued statements condemning the Palestinian terrorist group and gave a speech at a local synagogue. The governor also ordered the US and Pennsylvania Commonwealth flags to fly at half-mast outside the state capitol to honor the victims.
Shapiro’s strident support of the Jewish state in the wake of Oct. 7 also incensed many pro-Palestinian activists, resulting in the governor being dubbed “Genocide Josh” by far-left demonstrators.
US Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) chimed in on the arson attack Thursday, urging the Justice Department to launch a federal investigation, claiming that the incident could be motivated by antisemitism.
Schumer argued that the arson attack targeting Shapiro, who is Jewish, left the Pennsylvania governor’s family in “anguish” and warned that it could serve as an example of “rising antisemitic violence” within the United States. He stressed that a federal investigation and hate crime charges may be necessary to uphold the “fundamental values of religious freedom and public safety.”
Thus far, Shapiro has refused to blame the attack on antisemitism, despite the suspect’s alleged comments repudiating the governor over his support for Israel. The governor has stressed the importance of allowing prosecutors to determine whether the attack constitutes a hate crime.
The post Reps. Dan Goldman and Chris Smith Issue Statement Condemning Shapiro Arson Attack As ‘Textbook Antisemitism’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.