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Jewish caricature in Ukrainian Christmas tradition resurfaces at New Jersey church, drawing criticism
(JTA) — It had all the trappings of a conventional Christmas pageant: the three wise men, Christmas carols, and children dressed as angels.
But there was a twist: This pageant, performed on Sunday in New Jersey, also included a Hasidic Jewish caricature, carrying a sack of coins and dancing with the devil.
Earlocks swaying, the character called Moshko entered the room to the tune of “Hava Nagila,” offered a greeting in mock Yiddish, and announced that he was selling liquor, in a brazen effort to distract the Christians from reverence about the birth of Jesus.
The pageant that took place at St. Mary Protectress Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Clifton, New Jersey, is known as a vertep — a form of theater prominent in Slavic Christmas celebrations. Caricatures of Jewish figures that promote stereotypes about Jews and greed are a longstanding and frequent feature.
Especially as Ukraine has sought to shed any association with antisemitism amid its ongoing conflict with Russia, calls to remove the vertep’s antisemitic components have gained traction. In recent years, some have replaced Jews with Russians as the villainous characters.
But some communities have continued to embrace the Jewish caricature — leading Lev Golinkin, a Jewish author born in Ukraine who has written about antisemitism there, recently to call out the importation of antisemitic stereotypes from the old country to Ukrainian diaspora communities, usually under the auspices of the Catholic church.
Golinkin said in an interview that seeing the Clifton pageant on Facebook, where the church posted a video, was a “jarring” reminder of antisemitism he experienced as a child.
“It feels like a betrayal,” Golinkin said. “America should be where things are left behind and there are new starts — and there you have this show, this pageant that it seems like it’s a new generation of mockery, teaching kids to mock.”
The Anti-Defamation League condemned the pageant’s contents after learning about it from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“There is no place for antisemitic stereotypes in any religious celebration,” Scott Richman, the regional director of ADL New York and New Jersey, said in a statement. “At a time when antisemitism is surging to alarming levels, continuing harmful stereotypes — even in the context of traditional religious customs — undermines the efforts built to understand and maintain safety for Jewish communities.”
Richman said his office was reaching out to “local leaders to discuss the harm these portrayals cause” but said he had not yet been in touch with St. Mary Protectress, a small church in a suburb with a growing Orthodox Jewish population.
“We hope future celebrations will focus on the joy of the holiday season and the shared values that bring us together, rather than reviving centuries-old stereotypes that have no place in today’s society,” Richman said.
St. Mary Protectress, which had invited members to the pageant by saying on Facebook that it would “take us back to our childhood Christmas,” did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did two organizations serving Ukrainians in the United States, the Ukrainian Institute of America and the Ukrainian American Cultural Center of New Jersey.
Ukrainians have addressed the vertep’s portrayal of Jews in the past. In a 2017 interview with Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, a nonprofit aiming to build bridges between Ukrainians and Jews, the writer and art critic Diana Klochko explained that antisemitism was long baked into Ukrainian society.
“There was also a lot of it in everyday Ukrainian life, and this was fed by unacceptability, negligence, or threat,” Klochko said. “There were very many situations that constantly spilled over into what is, one way or another, a very strong antisemitic motif in Christianity itself. And it exists in the vertep, too.”
But she added, “You have to understand that this is history, and it is not mandatory to drag this from tradition, from history, into the contemporary world.”
The St. Mary Protectress pageant conformed to the patterns that make up the traditional vertep: a retelling of the Christmas story (sans a Jesus character) blended with a satirical take on Ukrainian issues of the day. After discovering that his prospective customers prefer Jesus to alcohol, the Jewish character reports to King Herod, the Roman Jewish king overseeing Jerusalem, about the threat to his power. Herod dispatches soldiers to kill Jesus.
The arc amounts to a romp through antisemitic tropes, from the charge that Jews killed Jesus to the theories that Jews are greedy, use Christian blood in their rituals and exercise inordinate power. The tropes have been used to justify centuries of violent antisemitism, including but not only by the church.
Evolved from puppet theater, the vertep includes a cast of Ukrainian folkloric characters such as the Cossack, the Pole, the Muscovite, the Lithuanian, the Roma and the Jew — referred to in the story as Moshko the “zhyd,” a derogatory term for “Jew.”
In the St. Mary vertep, Moshko introduces himself as a “zhyd,” and Sarah introduces herself as a “zhydivka.”
Though the word was once an acceptable word for “Jew” in Ukrainian, it is widely considered a slur today. Still, it remains contested in Ukraine: In 2012, a member of an antisemitic political party in the Ukrainian government referred to Ukrainian-American actress Mila Kunis as a “zhydovka” on a Facebook post, causing immediate backlash from the Jewish community. The country’s justice ministry ruled that the use of the word was acceptable because it appears in the official Ukrainian dictionary.
Hearing the slur being used in his own state felt especially distressing to Golinkin.
“‘Zhyd out’ was ‘kike out’ — just a slogan in my childhood. I saw it written in alleyways, and in bathroom stalls, and it was a call to cleanse Ukraine. When things go bad and things fall apart, the solution is ‘Jew out,’” Golinkin said, adding, “We left everything in Ukraine to have a life in which you don’t hear ‘Jew, out.’”
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Golinkin wrote about how his sense of identity as a Ukrainian was deepening. The pageant in Clifton, he said, would not erase all that is positive about Ukrainian culture.
“Choosing this filth is just a shameful thing to do,” Golinkin said. “It doesn’t do justice to Ukraine which has so much more than this.”
The post Jewish caricature in Ukrainian Christmas tradition resurfaces at New Jersey church, drawing criticism appeared first on The Forward.
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‘This is sort of their normal’: Israelis confront yet another wartime flare after Iranian fire
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — As missiles flew toward Israel on Sunday night, beleaguered Israelis once again took to Facebook from their safe rooms.
“Whoever is in charge of naming wars over here, please do not give it a fierce animal name this time,” one Israeli wrote in an English-language group. “The last military operation was called ‘Roaring Lion,’ and the Twelve Day War in June 2025, ‘Rising Lion.’”
Another replied with a suggestion: “I hope it’s something like ‘The One Day War.’”
The idea may not have been far off. U.S. President Donald Trump said early Monday that he hoped both Iran and Israel would halt their fire. By mid-morning, Iran’s military announced the strikes were on pause, saying it had sufficiently retaliated for the Israeli strikes in Beirut, a tit-for-tat exchange. By Monday evening Israel time, Netanyahu, too, said the fighting was halted, but warned that Israel would respond “with force” to any future attacks.
Despite the tenuous pause — not quite a ceasefire — Home Front Command restrictions remained in place by Monday evening, touching every layer of daily life in Israel. Schools were closed through at least Wednesday. Or Erez, head spokesperson for Clalit, Israel’s largest health care network, told JTA, “We will continue to remain operating in shelters until the Home Front Command restrictions change.”
By 10 p.m. Sunday, NICU infants and those in critical care were already being moved to bunkers beneath Beilinson hospital, home to the largest emergency room in the Middle East.
“This is the third time within a year that we have carried out such a transition,” said Dr. Erez Barenboim, director of Beilinson and Hasharon Hospitals.
Hospital staff were visibly fatigued but resilient. Soroka University Medical Center was struck by an Iranian ballistic missile during the June 2025 conflict, and as is standard during attacks, health care staff canceled non-essential visits and moved operations to shelters.
Alexi Wirpel, a student at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, was on a Birthright trip in the Galilee when the first sirens rang out. “We could hear the dome working, so we knew we were going to be relatively okay,” she said.
It was not Wirpel’s first trip to Israel, but it was her first time hearing sirens signaling incoming missiles. Others on the Birthright trip were more anxious and had to be consoled by staff, she said.
When word came of a tenuous pause, Wirpel said, she and others didn’t believe it would last long.
“All day today we’ve all kind of been just waiting for something to go off again,” she said. “It’s become a very real reality that this is something that my family has to go through instead of just hearing about it.”
Caroline Flannery manages an after-school program at a Tel Aviv middle school and has watched the cumulative toll of two and a half years of conflict reshape an entire generation of Israeli children. Added to the time lost during the pandemic, students in those grades have missed the equivalent of a year of school.
“We have kids in fifth and sixth grade that still don’t know the alphabet,” Flannery said.
Israel’s education system has been among the hardest hit since Oct. 7. Leaked results of a government aptitude test found that only 3% of Israeli ninth graders met the national benchmark for science, and just 22% met the benchmark for English, figures that prompted opposition leaders to call for a declaration of a “national educational emergency.”
The disruption extends to staff, who are just as rattled as students when a siren sounds and a week of lesson plans is suddenly worthless.
Flannery moved to Israel in 2019 and hadn’t planned to stay, but the impact she could make on Israeli children convinced her to commit to another year, and then another, until she was running the after-school program herself.
The conclusion she has come to in the wake of Oct. 7 is that many of her students, faced with constant disruption, will never fully catch up.
“It’s not just that they miss school, so now they have to work extra hard and catch up,” she said. “Their whole routine was disrupted and they come back. They’re not ready, not used to, not prepared to sit, to come into class, to sit in their seats, to learn. Their minds aren’t there.”
With Trump pressing Israel and Iran to return to the negotiating table, Flannery discussed contingency plans already on the table — such as Zoom classes, home visits — should the war return to its March tempo.
“This,” she said, “is sort of their normal.”
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Celebrated German Jewish bakery closes, saying ‘the hatred reached Berlin’ after Oct. 7
(JTA) — BERLIN — A Jewish bakery owned by Polish and Israeli immigrants in this city has shut its doors, citing a combination of economic pressure and antisemitic harassment.
Babka & Krantz opened in the Friedenau district in November 2022 and added a second location in December 2024, adjacent to the memorial at the site where the Nazis devised their “final solution” for the Jews during the Holocaust.
The second location at the House of the Wannsee Conference closed on Nov. 30, according to the bakery’s Instagram account, which directed followers to a statement from the memorial that has since been deleted from its website.
“We regret the verbal abuse and the difficult situation to which the managing directors and employees of BABKA & KRANTZ Meisterkonditorei were exposed and express our full understanding for the termination of the cooperation under these circumstances,” said the March 10 statement, which was preserved by the Internet Archive.
Now, the original location has closed, too.
Café owners and married couple Shahar Elkin and Marcin Liera-Elkin said in a statement to friends and supporters that a construction site had blocked access to the bakery for more than a year, curbing foot traffic.
But they also said they had been affected when, after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, “the hatred reached Berlin as well.” The bakery was “subjected to constant verbal abuse” since that time, they said in their statement, which has circulated on social media.
Elkin and Liera-Elkin declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, saying they were turning down all media inquiries for the time being. “We and our family need to settle down and attend to a few matters,” they said.
Some would-be customers in the neighborhood said they were already missing the Babka & Krantz on Sunday.
“I was actually going there every day recently, after I found out they were closing. I found that really unfortunate,” said Rebecca, who declined to share her last name. She said she had heard about both the economic impact of the construction and about harassment that had taken place at the store, adding, “It makes me sad that things are this way. I’m trying not to cry.”
Babka & Krantz joins a growing list of beloved eateries that have cited the aftermath of Oct. 7 in announcing their closures. Also in Berlin, the hummus bar Kanaan, which was jointly owned by an Israeli and a Palestinian, closed in March after experiencing protests. An Israeli restaurant in Portugal cited harassment when it announced its closure in January, as did an Ethiopian-Israeli eatery in New York City that recently ceased operating as a traditional restaurant. In Washington, D.C., a local chain of Israeli restaurants closed down late last year following a boycott campaign.
Elkin came to Berlin in 2012 from his home city of Haifa, Israel, and in 2019 earned a master baker’s certificate, becoming the first Jewish master baker accepted into the Berlin Bakers’ Guild. Liera-Elkin was born in Posen, Poland, and grew up in Berlin.
The couple said they were proud to be producing Jewish baked goods in a city with a resurging Jewish population.
“Our families come from cities with a vibrant Jewish life and a formative culture of debate. Today, few or no Jews live in these places anymore,” they said in their statement last week. “That’s why Berlin is such a miracle.”
Germany is home to an estimated 200,000 Jews, including many from the former Soviet Union and a large contingent of Israeli expats. The bakery catered to them, offering special menus for Jewish holidays, devising baked goods that reflect diverse Jewish traditions and even bringing in a rabbi to answer visitors’ questions.
But the bakery catered not only to Jewish customers. According to the owners, non-Jewish locals learned about Jewish culture at their tables. “Our neighbors have seen that different people can eat together at one table and speak to each other,” they wrote in their goodbye note.
The business also won professional recognition, earning a Craftsmanship Award sponsored by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs last year.
The couple said the good relations they had built as unofficial ambassadors of Jewish culture – introducing Berliners of all backgrounds to Jewish culinary specialties – were endangered when the construction site went up in their neighborhood, blocking the street view of their business. They lost customers and money, they said, and their anxiety was increasingly visible on their Instagram account, where they chronicled their fruitless efforts to make their story accessible again.
Speaking to the Berliner Morgenpost in November, Liera-Elkin hinted that the two-pronged pressure — economic and harassment — might force them to close. He reported that their vehicle had been vandalized and that they had “experienced numerous verbal and even physical attacks in our private life, received hate-filled letters and calls.” The couple said they had even sent their daughter to stay elsewhere for a time.
“We are just a bakery that wants to offer great products. But now we are only confronted with problems and politics that leave us in despair,“ he told the Morgenpost. “We really don‘t know if Berlin is still the right place for us.”
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Dave Matthews pushes back on claims his criticism of Israel is antisemitic
(JTA) — Dave Matthews, the frontman of the American rock band Dave Matthews Band, pushed back on allegations Friday that his vocal criticism of Israel in recent years had crossed into antisemitism.
Reading his remarks from a sheet of paper on stage at the Coastal Credit Union Music Park in Raleigh, North Carolina, Matthews, whose criticism of Israel has drawn backlash from some Jewish and pro-Israel voices, pushed back on accusations of antisemitism.
“It’s no secret, at least I don’t try to make it a secret, that I disagree with the policies of Israel and the United States, and their treatment of the civilian population in Gaza and the West Bank,” Matthews said. “But that should by no means be twisted into anybody thinking that I am bigoted or antisemitic in any way at all.”
Matthews continued: “On the contrary, I have a deep respect and love for all of my life that I can remember, and an admiration for the culture and history of the Jewish people.”
The frontman of the band continued to list a host of prominent Jewish figures he admired, including Albert Einstein, George Gershwin, Hannah Arendt and Anne Frank, and described being at a friend’s son’s bar mitzvah on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel.
“I hold the Jewish people in the highest regard, and it breaks my heart that my opinions born out of deep commitment to nonviolent resolution and resistance can be twisted to serve any hateful or racist or bigoted ideas,” Matthews said.
Matthews’ remarks come after years of outspoken criticism of Israel, including in 2024 when he joined a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Washington, D.C., against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress.
“I’m ashamed that my tax dollars are going to the brutalizing of an entire people,” Matthews told Al Jazeera at the time. “It’s shameful. And I’m ashamed that our government is welcoming him here.”
At a New Jersey concert last year, Matthews also donned a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headscarf, and held up signs reading “Stop The Genocide” and “Stop Killing Children.”
A representative for Matthews did not immediately respond to a request for clarification of what prompted his remarks Friday.
Matthews is among a growing number of prominent artists who have become outspoken critics of Israel in recent years, including Macklemore, the Irish rap group Kneecap and the British punk band Bob Vylan.
Matthews’ statement Friday was not the first time the artist has defended his rhetoric. In a December 2023 letter to his Jewish fans obtained by JNS, he also assured fans that he “strongly and unequivocally condemn the horrific events of Oct. 7.”
“I will never stop calling for an end to the violence in Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon, and for that matter, the Congo and Sudan and Ukraine, or the violence, or the horrific violence against immigrants and their neighbors in our country,” Matthews concluded during his remarks Friday.
The post Dave Matthews pushes back on claims his criticism of Israel is antisemitic appeared first on The Forward.
