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A year after the LA fires, the lesson is clear: Our greatest disasters are often self-inflicted
LOS ANGELES — “The Palisades was this idyllic community,” Jeremy Padawer said. “People actually knew each other. They talked to one another. You knew your neighbors. It was exactly what I needed to provide for my children.”
Padawer, an entrepreneur, lost his home in the fire that tore through the Pacific Palisades, an affluent Los Angeles neighborhood, a year ago. That fire was not a natural disaster; instead, an arsonist lit the original fire in a brushy area beyond Palisades Drive. Then, after firefighters extinguished it, we know from a tireless Los Angeles Times investigation, their senior officials failed to order further monitoring of the burn area, which reignited.
Nature provided 80-mph winds on Jan. 8, 2025. But human incompetence and hubris fed the flames.
The result? 12 people died. More than 6,500 local homes were destroyed, 25,000 people were displaced, and 37 square miles were burned or covered in toxic ash. The economic loss is estimated at $250 billion.
A year after the fire, I visited one of the most iconic buildings affected by the fire: Villa Aurora, once owned by the German Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, who fled Nazi Germany after the Nazis declared him “enemy of the state number one.”
There, the lessons of this unnatural disaster became clear.
‘Everything you see now was burned’
It’s not an especially brilliant insight to point out that most of the tragedies that beset us, with the exception of the body’s natural decay and demise, are of our own making.
But that insight rang true to me as I stood on the balcony of Villa Aurora two weeks ago and looked out over the Palisades.
The sprawling, Spanish Revival hillside mansion was built in 1928 as a model home by a consortium of investors that included the Los Angeles Times, and came into Feuchtwanger’s hands after he fled southern France — where he had been in exile — in disguise as an old woman. Eventually, he reached Los Angeles as a refugee.
In his novel The Oppermans, published in 1933. Feuchtwanger detailed the persecution of a highly assimilated German Jewish family like his own. “The Oppermanns were clever people, they understood the world,” he wrote. “The world at large was indifferent.”
But in Villa Aurora, he and his wife Marta founded a refuge from indifference: a center of intellectual and cultural life for his fellow refugees, including the German Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, who found refuge in his own home, six miles east.
The 2025 fire came within a few feet of the villa, and while the flames didn’t claim the structure, they did infiltrate and pollute the precious books and furnishings with smoke and ash.
The fire torched the landscaping right up to the house. “Everything you see now was burned,” said Claudia Gordon, the director of Villa Aurora, which was bought by the German government in 1989 and eventually converted, along with the Thomas Mann House, into a retreat center for German artists.
Gordon let a group of us into the home last month. Industrial air purifiers were still churning, the last signs of an extensive year-long smoke remediation process.
The fire came so fast that Gordon was able to flee with only a few rare books and a Renaissance-era Purim scroll.
“It stopped there,” she pointed to a spot just a few feet from the balcony. “We were very lucky. This was all burned.” Houses on either side of the villa went up in smoke.
I stood on the balcony and looked down at the yard that a year earlier had been blackened. Now, I watched butterflies and hummingbirds flit over clusters of bright yellow and orange flowers, amid the deep green bushes that covered the hillside.
“The place is a monument to endurance in the face of exile and disaster,” wrote Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano after his recent visit.
True, but it is also a reminder of the stubborn permanence of human folly.
Feuchtwanger’s refuge at Villa Aurora was marred by more inhumanity after the end of World War II. Because he had flirted with communism, he became a target of a new wave of American intolerance: that of McCarthyism. After the war, he couldn’t go abroad to take advantage of his best seller status, for fear of not being allowed to return.
Mann’s refuge was even more impermanent. Targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee for his left-leaning associations, he left Los Angeles and moved to Switzerland, where he died.
“Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency.’ That is how it started in Germany,” Mann said in 1947.
None of these tragedies had to be, I reflected. Whether fleeing fascism, weathering McCarthyism, or watching a preventable fire consume a neighborhood, the human capacity for self-inflicted tragedy is as enduring as Villa Aurora itself.
The missing deputy mayor
Several hundred homeowners have filed a lawsuit against the state and city for negligence leading up to the fire. In a phone interview, Padawer, the entrepreneur who lost his home, outlined some of their claims.
A Palisades water reservoir was empty, he said; fire hydrants lacked pressure; state environmental regulations prevented adequate fire abatement measures in the initial burn area; and the city failed to field enough fire engines despite the imminent threat.
It didn’t help that a key city post was unfilled after a bizarre fake antisemitic bomb threat. On Oct. 3, 2024, Brian K. Williams, then Los Angeles deputy mayor of public safety, reported receiving a bomb threat against City Hall. It was the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and the caller said he was tired of the city’s support for Israel, according to Williams.
“In light of the Jewish holidays,” Williams’ memo to Mayor Karen Bass at the time read, “we are taking this a little more seriously. I will keep you posted.”
An investigation found that Williams himself made the threat. He was arrested by the FBI and removed from his position in December 2024. Williams, who said he acted out of “anxiety,” pleaded guilty to making a bomb threat and was sentenced to one year probation and a $5,000 fine. Bass left his position empty.
The Deputy Mayor for Public Safety specifically oversees crisis and disaster response, including wildfires, according to the city. Which meant that when the fires came in January, Los Angeles had no official overseeing the LAPD, LAFD, emergency management or disaster response. Bass didn’t appoint a replacement for Williams until April 2025, months after the city burned.
“These deputy mayors have real jobs,” said Padawer. “The mayor didn’t replace him.”
‘They Let Us Burn’
One year later, I drove down Radcliffe Ave., in the heart of the Palisades, where two dear friends once lived. I couldn’t figure where their houses had stood. It was all just empty land..
On many of the burned out buildings, someone had affixed posters with the words, “THEY LET US BURN,” in stark red and black.
The posters were part of a neighborhood movement, launched by Padawer, to hold officials accountable for the fire and the rebuilding.
“The damage is done. The city is gone,” reads an entry on the movement’s website. “Let’s keep politicians, builders, banks, insurance companies and all key stakeholders honest as we rebuild together. So that this NEVER happens in Los Angeles again.”
The motto for Padawer’s website? “News for Our Unnatural Disaster.”
“The first day after the fire, you have the mayor and the governor, saying, natural disaster, climate change,” said Padawer. “And why would they do that? They don’t want the liability associated with all of the failure. But everything about it was unnatural.”
Driving out of the Palisades, I thought back to Villa Aurora and the streets where my friends’ homes once stood. The exiles understood that while nature can be cruel, humans pose the greater threat. The empty lots prove them right.
The post A year after the LA fires, the lesson is clear: Our greatest disasters are often self-inflicted appeared first on The Forward.
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Debating Zionism is good for Jews, actually
A group of Jewish Theological Seminary students were furious with the chancellor’s position on Jewish statehood. In protest, they draped flags around campus before graduation, which the administration removed before the ceremony.
The year was 1948. The flags were Israeli. And the dissenting students were protesting Chancellor Louis Finkelstein’s refusal to make support for Jewish statehood part of academic commencement. Some students even arranged for the bells at nearby Union Theological Seminary to play “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, after JTS officials declined to include it in commencement.
As a historian of American Zionism, I have been thinking about that episode while reading the many vitriolic reactions to a few JTS undergraduates who spoke out in opposition to the seminary’s decision to welcome Israeli President Isaac Herzog as this year’s graduation speaker. Once again, a JTS commencement has become a battleground over Israel, but the sides are now reversed.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether this was the right moment to extend an invitation to Herzog to speak at commencement. What deserves attention is the outraged reaction to a group of students raising objections, and the speed with which those students’ concerns have been cast as a deviation from the historical contours of mainstream American Jewish politics.
A recent Times of Israel blog post, for example, argued that the mere fact that JTS students raised concerns about Herzog was a rupture with Judaism. “Jewish survival without sovereignty is fragile,” wrote the author, Menachem Creditor, adding that “the founders of JTS did not need to debate the necessity of Jewish self-determination,” and that Herzog “represents the state of Israel and the Jewish people.”
These claims erase JTS’s long and sophisticated engagement with Jewish nationalism and the conception of Jewish peoplehood. Reading American Zionism backward risks collapsing peoplehood and statehood, and creating traditions to ratify present assumptions out of a past that never existed.
The relationship between Zionism and JTS was nuanced from the start. Both founding president Sabato Morais and the seminary’s third chancellor, Cyrus Adler, opposed Zionism on religious grounds. Morais believed the restoration of Jewish sovereignty could only come through divine intervention at the dawn of a messianic era. Adler thought of the growth of a non-religious community in the land of Israel “as the greatest misfortune that has happened to the Jews in modern times.”
Solomon Schechter, as chancellor, brought a measure of support for the Zionist movement to JTS; shaped by the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha-am, Schechter insisted that Zionism transcended statehood. Its primary aim, he argued, was the national regeneration of global Judaism, not the creation of a secular state that would hollow out Jewish life from within.
And the controversies over the 1948 graduation exercises revealed how far Louis Finkelstein stood from political Zionism, even after the establishment of Israel. Where some Zionists celebrated sovereignty, Finkelstein remained focused on the Jewish character of the land and its people. That orientation drew him toward Judah Magnes’s binational vision — that of a federated framework in which Jews and Arabs would each hold recognized rights and a measure of national autonomy within a single shared political entity.
This reticence to conflate Judaism, Zionism and Jewish sovereignty was not limited to the seminary’s chancellors.
Henrietta Szold, JTS’s first female student, a central figure in its intellectual orbit, and the founder of Hadassah, similarly supported a binational vision from her new home in Jerusalem. Mordecai Kaplan — a longtime JTS faculty member, committed Zionist, and one of the most influential American Jewish thinkers of the 20th century — expressed concern throughout his career about the mistake of equating Jewish nationhood with Jewish statehood. In Judaism as a Civilization, he called for a “more ethical conception of nationhood fundamentally as a cultural rather than as a political relationship.”
After Israel’s founding, Kaplan went further, arguing to David Ben-Gurion in 1958 that “the basic assumption that the state of Israel is a Jewish state is itself open to question.” The Israeli government’s task, he insisted, was to establish “a modern state, not a Jewish state, an Israeli state, not a Jewish state.”
These questions did not disappear even as JTS evolved under new leadership.
Gerson Cohen, whose chancellorship beginning in 1972 marked a shift toward a more pro-statist posture, embraced the state’s significance for Jewish life and identity in ways his predecessors had not. Yet even Cohen insisted that commitment to Judaism must rest “not on political statehood or upon geography but solely on the idea of covenant and commitment to ethos.” He argued that a flourishing diaspora was a necessity for Jewish civilization as a whole, not adjunct to Israeli interests.
His successor, Chancellor Emeritus Ismar Schorsch, was more direct, saying in a recent warning that Jews must ensure that “Judaism qua religion is not submerged and shredded by the power of the Jewish state.”
One can disagree with any of these perspectives. In fact, the disagreement itself is the point.
The leaders who built JTS debated Jewish self-determination, Zionism and statehood while living through the Holocaust, the collapse of European Jewish life, existential danger in Palestine, and the precarious birth of the state of Israel. They were not naïve about antisemitism, indifferent to Jewish survival, or ignorant of Jewish sources. Nor were they unsophisticated about Zionism.
Instead, they offered a more demanding account of Zionism: one that affirmed a Jewish homeland and insisted that Jewish power remain answerable to Jewish ethics, all without diminishing Jewish life in the diaspora.
This is precisely the perspective that has been crowded out of our contemporary discourse, not because these questions were answered, but because the space to ask them has collapsed. As the boundaries of acceptable Zionist discourse have narrowed, issues that arose from within Zionism itself — the potential dangers of equating the Israeli state with the Jewish people, the risks of elevating political statehood above other ethical and communal commitments, and the need to have diaspora Jewish life be seen as carrying independent religious and moral weight — have come to be treated as anti-Zionist rather than part of a living internal debate.
The furor over the JTS undergraduates’ letter objecting to Herzog is a troubling sign that, across American Jewish life, it has become harder to think honestly about the risks of treating support for the state of Israel not merely as a Jewish commitment, but as one that takes precedence over other all other Jewish commitments. When the past is rewritten so that the equation of peoplehood and statehood appears inevitable, American Jews are left with a false choice: either embrace the state as an unquestioned and unquestionable expression of Jewish identity, or abandon Jewish life altogether.
JTS has offered its students a richer education because, in its halls, the relationship between the Jewish people and the Jewish state has been debated and contested. That discourse is not a failure of Jewish commitment, but an expression of it. The sustained engagement with the hardest questions of Zionism is one of the best things JTS has given American Jewish life, and one of the most important gifts it still has to offer.
The post Debating Zionism is good for Jews, actually appeared first on The Forward.
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ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Sidesteps ‘Genocide’ Accusations Against Israel
International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan speaks during an interview with Reuters in The Hague, Netherlands, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
Karim Khan, the embattled chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has cast fresh doubt on accusations that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza, arguing in a new interview that no legal conclusion has yet been reached in the ongoing legal battle.
In a lengthy interview with anti-Israel journalist Medhi Hasan this week, Khan refused to engage in the popularized rhetoric labeling Israel’s military campaign against Hamas terrorists in Gaza as genocidal, even as pressure mounts on the ICC by activists to pursue more sweeping charges against Israeli officials.
When asked directly whether Israel’s conduct amounted to genocide, Khan emphasized the need for sufficient evidence to level charges against Israeli officials and that prosecutors must follow evidence and legal standards rather than political narratives.
“So, you’re not ruling out that there could be a warrant in the future?” Hasan asked.
“Everything is a function of evidence,” Khan responded, arguing that accusing Israel of genocide for political purposes would be “reckless.”
“You’re saying in the past three years there hasn’t been evidence of genocide in Gaza?” Hasan asked, visibly flummoxed.
Khan lamented the “suffering” in Gaza but reaffirmed that the ICC could not proceed in making final judgements about the nature of Israel’s military operations in Gaza without sufficient evidence. He asserted that officials within the ICC are vigorously analyzing the case and that he cannot reveal more about the nature of the investigation.
“So, genocide is not off limits?” Hasan pressed.
“No crime is off limits if the evidence is there,” Khan responded.
Khan has come under fire for making his initial surprise demand for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on the same day in May 2024 that he suddenly canceled a long-planned visit to both Gaza and Israel to collect evidence of alleged war crimes. The last-second cancellation reportedly infuriated US and British leaders, as the trip would have offered Israeli leaders a first opportunity to present their position and outline any action they were taking to respond to the war crime allegations.
Nonetheless, Khan’s latest remarks are likely to reverberate through international legal and diplomatic circles, where the genocide accusation has become one of the most contentious aspects of the war between Israel and Hamas. Over the past two years, an array of humanitarian organizations and human rights experts have accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza. These accusations have been controversial and widely contested, with critics alleging these groups and individuals lack sufficient evidence.
Khan’s comments come as the ICC faces intense scrutiny over its investigation into the conflict. In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication.
Another challenge for Israel is Hamas’s widely recognized military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
Genocide is among the most difficult crimes to prove under international law because prosecutors must establish specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Hasan, one of the most prominent anti-Israel critics in media, has spent the past two years unleashing an unrelenting barrage of criticism against the Jewish state, repeatedly accusing the Israeli military of pursuing a “genocide” in Gaza.
In the interview, Khan also forcefully denied allegations of sexual misconduct that have engulfed his office in recent months, accusing critics of politicizing the claims amid the ICC’s high-profile investigations into Israel, Russia, and other global conflicts. He dismissed suggestions that his pursuit of Israeli leaders was intended to distract from the allegations against him, saying that he did not have evidence to substantiate the claim.
Khan further alleged that senior Western officials attempted to pressure the ICC over its investigation, including what he described as warnings from prominent American and British political figures about the geopolitical consequences of targeting Israeli officials.
The ICC’s investigation has placed the court at the center of an increasingly bitter international divide over the Gaza war. Khan’s comments won’t settle the debate, but the ICC prosecutor appeared to signal a more cautious legal approach than some of Israel’s fiercest critics have demanded.
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UK Police Charge Two Men in Connection with Filming Antisemitic TikTok Videos
The TikTok logo is pictured outside the company’s US head office in Culver City, California, US, Sep. 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS
British police have charged two men with religiously aggravated harassment offenses after they were alleged to have traveled to a Jewish area of north London to film antisemitic social media videos.
The two men, Adam Bedoui, 20, and Abdelkader Amir Bousloub, 21, are due to appear at Thames Magistrates’ Court, a statement from the Crown Prosecution Service said on Saturday.