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How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank
(JTA) — You’d think that in a country so closely identified with Anne Frank — perhaps the Holocaust’s best-known victim — cultivating memory of the genocide wouldn’t be a steep challenge.
That’s why a recent survey, suggesting what the authors called a “disturbing” lack of knowledge in the Netherlands about the Holocaust, set off alarm bells. “Survey shows lack of Holocaust awareness in the Netherlands,” wrote the Associated Press. “In the Netherlands, a majority do not know the Holocaust affected their country,” was the JTA headline. “The Holocaust is a myth, a quarter of Dutch younger generation agree,” per the Jerusalem Post.
“Survey after survey, we continue to witness a decline in Holocaust knowledge and awareness. Equally disturbing is the trend towards Holocaust denial and distortion,” Gideon Taylor, the president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which conducted the study, said in a statement.
Like other recent studies by Claims Conference, the latest survey has been challenged by some scholars, who say the sample size is small, or the survey is too blunt a tool for examining what a country’s residents do or don’t know about their history. Even one of the experts who conducted the survey chose to focus on the positive findings: “I am encouraged by the number of respondents to this survey that believe Holocaust education is important,” Emile Schrijver, the general director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, told JTA.
One of the scholars who says the survey doesn’t capture the subtleties of Holocaust education and commemoration in the Netherlands is Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College in Maryland. Contreras studies the historical memory of the Holocaust and Second World War in Holland. In a Twitter thread earlier this week, she agreed with those who say that “the headline that’s being plastered everywhere exaggerates the idea that young people in NL know nothing about the Holocaust.”
At the same time, she notes that while the Netherlands takes Holocaust education and commemoration seriously, it has a long way to go in reckoning with a past that includes collaboration with the Nazis, postwar antisemitism, a small but vocal far right and a sense of national victimhood that often downplays the experience of Jews during the Shoah.
“It’s such a complex issue,” Contreras told me. “There’s no one answer to how the Holocaust is remembered in the Netherlands.”
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I took the opportunity to speak with Contreras not only about Dutch memory, but how the Netherlands may serve as an example of how countries deal with Holocaust memory and the national stories they tell.
Our interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Tell me a little bit about when you saw the survey, and perhaps how it didn’t mesh with what you know about the Netherlands?
Jazmine Contreras: My major problem is that every single outlet is picking up this story and running a headline like, “Youth in the Netherlands don’t even know the Holocaust happened there. They cannot tell you how many people were killed, how many were deported.” And I think that’s really problematic because it paints a really simplistic picture of Holocaust memory and Holocaust education in that country.
There are multiple programs, in Amsterdam, in other cities, in Westerbork, the former transit camp. They have an ongoing program that brings survivors and the second generation to colleges, to middle schools and primary schools all across the country. And they also have in Amsterdam a program called Oorlog in Mijn Buurt, “War in My Neighborhood,” and basically young people become the “memory bearers” — that’s the kind of language they use — and interview people who grew up and experience the war in their neighborhood, and then speak as if they were the person who experienced it, in the first person.
You also have events around the May 4 commemoration remembering the Dutch who died in war and in peacekeeping operations, and a program called Open Jewish Houses [when owners of formerly Jewish property open their homes to strangers to talk about the Jews who used to live there]. It’s really amazing: I’ve actually been able to visit these formerly Jewish homes and hear the stories. And, of course, the Anne Frank House has its own slew of programming, and teachers talk a lot about the Holocaust and take students to synagogues in places like Groningen, where they have a brand new exhibit at the synagogue. They are taking thousands at this point. The new National Holocaust Names Memorial is in the center of Amsterdam.
I think, again, this idea that children are growing up without having exposure to Holocaust memory, or knowledge of what happened in the Netherlands, is a bit skewed. I think we get into a dangerous area if we’re painting the country with a broad brush and saying nobody knows anything about the Holocaust.
Have you anecdotal evidence or seen studies of Dutch kids about whether they’re getting the education they need?
Anecdotally, yes. I was invited to attend a children’s commemoration that they do at the Hollandsche Schouwburg theater in Amsterdam, which is the former Dutch theater that was used as a major deportation site. And it’s children who put on a commemoration themselves. Again, not every child is participating in this, but if they’re not participating in the children’s commemoration, then they’re doing the “War in My Neighborhood” program, or they’re doing Open Jewish Houses, or they’re taking field trips. That’s pretty impressive to me, and it’s pretty meaningful. They want to help participate in it in the future. They want to come back because it leaves a lasting impression for them.
Let’s back up a bit. Anne Frank dominates everyone’s thinking about Holland and the Holocaust. And I guess the story that’s told is that she was protected by her neighbors until, of course, the Nazis proved too powerful, found her and sent her away. What’s right and what’s wrong about that narrative?
Don’t forget that Anne Frank was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands. And I think that part of the story is also really interesting and left out. She’s this Dutch icon, but she was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands, and the Dutch Jewish community was single-handedly responsible for funding, at Westerbork, what was first a refugee center. I think that’s really complicated because now we also have a discourse about present-day refugees and the Holocaust.
Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College, specializes in Dutch Holocaust memory. (Courtesy)
I’ve also never quite understood the insistence on making her an icon when the end of the story is that she’s informed on and dies in a concentration camp. The idea that the Franks were hidden here fits really well into this idea of Dutch resistance and tolerance, and her diary often gets misquoted to kind of represent her as someone who had hope despite the fact that she was being persecuted. In the 1950s, her narrative gets adopted into the U.S., and we treat it as this globalizing human rights discourse.
We don’t talk about the fact that she’s found because she’s informed upon, and we don’t talk about the fact that you had non-Jewish civilians who were informers for a multitude of reasons, including ideological collaboration and their own financial gain.
And when it was talked about most recently, it was about a discredited book that named her betrayer as a Jew.
That was a huge controversy.
I get the sense from your writing that the story the Dutch tell about World War II is very incomplete, and that they haven’t fully reckoned with their collaboration under Nazi occupation even as they emphasize their own victimhood.
On the national state level, they have officially acknowledged not only the extensive collaboration, but the failure of both the government and the Crown to speak out on behalf of Dutch Jews. [In 2020, Prime Minister Mark Rutte formally apologized for how his kingdom’s wartime government failed its Jews, a first by a sitting prime minister.] Now, the question is, what’s happening in broader Dutch society?
Unfortunately, there was an increase in voting for the Dutch far right, although they’ve never managed to get a majority or even come close to it.
Something else that’s happening is that many ask, “Why should Dutch Jews get separate consideration after the Second World War, a separate victimhood, when we were all victimized?” The Netherlands is unique because it’s occupied for the entirety of the Second World War — 1940 to 1945. There is the civil service collaborating, right, but there’s no occupation government. So it’s not like Belgium. It’s not like France, not like Denmark. And there was the Hunger Winter of 1944-45 when 20,000 civilians perished due to famine. You have real victimhood, so people ask, “Why are the Jews so special? We all suffered.”
And at the same time, scholarship keeps emerging about the particular ways non-Jewish Dutch companies and individuals cooperated with the Nazis.
The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, which has done so much of this research, found that Jews who were deported had to pay utility bills for when they weren’t living there. You have a huge controversy around the the Dutch railway [which said it would compensate hundreds of Holocaust victims for its role in shipping Jews to death camps]. The Dutch Red Cross apologized [in 2017 for failing to act to protect Jews during World War II], following the publication of a research paper on its inaction. A couple of decades ago, the government basically auctioned off paintings, jewelry and other Jewish possessions, and in 2020 they started the effort to give back pieces of art that were in Dutch museums. Dienke Hondius wrote a book on the cold reception given to survivors upon their return. Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans also wrote a book on postwar Jewish antisemitism.
So a lot has been happening, a lot of controversies, and, thanks to all of this research, a lot happening in order to rectify the situation.
It sounds like a mixed story, of resistance and collaboration, and of rewriting the past but also coming to terms with it.
There’s a really complex history here of both wanting to present it as “everybody’s a victim” and that the resistance was huge. In fact, the data shows 5% of the people were involved in resistance and 5% were collaborators. So it’s not like this wholesale collaboration or resistance was happening. It was only in 1943, when non-Jewish men were called up for labor service in Germany, that they got really good at hiding people and by then it was too late.
Right. My colleagues at JTA often note that the Nazis killed or deported more Dutch Jews per capita than anywhere in occupied Western Europe — of about 110,000 Jews deported, only a few thousand survived.
Yes, the highest percentage of deportation in Western Europe.
A room at the Anne Frank House museum where she and her family hid for two years during the Holocaust in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (Photo Collection Anne Frank House)
Since this week is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let me ask what Holland gets right and wrong compared to maybe some other European countries with either similar experiences or comparable experiences.
The framing of that question is difficult because there’s so many unique points about the Holocaust and the occupation in the Netherlands. Again, it was occupied for the entirety of 1940-45. You have a civil service that was willing to sign Aryan declarations. The queen, as head of a government in exile in London, is basically saying, “Do what you need to just to survive.”
One of the big problems is there are people like Geert Wilders [a contemporary right-wing Dutch lawmaker] who practice this kind of philo-Semitism and support of Israel, but it’s really about blaming the Muslim population for antisemitism and saying none of it is homegrown. They don’t have to talk about the fact that there was widespread antisemitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In the Netherlands they’re not instituting laws around what you can and can’t say about the Holocaust like in Poland [where criticizing Polish collaboration has been criminalized]. There are so many amazing educational initiatives and nonprofit organizations that are doing the work. And even these public controversies ended up being outlets for the production of Holocaust memory when survivors, but mostly now the second and third generations, use that space to talk about their own family Holocaust history.
Tell me about your personal stake in this: How did the Holocaust become a subject of study for you?
I specialize in Dutch Holocaust memory. I’m not Jewish, but my grandparents on my mother’s side are Dutch. For my first project I looked at relationships between German soldiers and Dutch women during the war during the occupation, and I eventually kind of made my way into the post war, when these children of former collaborators were still very marginalized in Dutch society. It ties into this. I do interviews with members of the Jewish community, children of resistance members and children of collaborators and how these memory politics play out.
What is the utility of events like International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the major Holocaust memorials in educating the public about the Holocaust and World War II?
International Holocaust Remembrance Day and May 4 result in the production of new memories about the Holocaust and the Second World War. I was at the 2020 International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration when the prime minister formally apologized. It was a really big moment, and it allowed the Jewish community, and the Roma and Sinti community, a space to remember and to share in that and to speak to it as survivors and the second and third generation.
Unlike the United States, the Netherlands is a small, insular country, so the relationship between the public and the media and academics is so close. So in the weeks before and the weeks after these memorials, academics, politicians and experts are publishing pieces about memory. That’s useful to the production of new memories and information about the Holocaust.
But what about the other days of the year? Will putting a monument in the center of Amsterdam actually change how people understand the Holocaust? That is a question that I think is harder to answer. The new monument features individual names of 102,000 Jews and Roma and Sinti and visually gives you the scope of what the Holocaust looked like in the Netherlands. But does that matter if somebody lives outside of Amsterdam and they’re never going to see this monument?
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The post How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The Art of the Heart: A Message From Israel for Valentine’s Day
As Valentine’s Day, celebrated on Feb. 14, approaches, preparations are seen underway in the markets in ghodbander road, Thane, on Feb. 12, 2026, in Mumbai, India. Photo: Praful Gangurde/Hindustan Times/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
In the weeks before Valentine’s Day, hearts appear on everything: cards, shop windows, menus, and messages. It’s sweet and familiar. We use the heart as a symbol for love because it’s the body’s center for the emotion of love.
The heart is not just a Valentine’s Day symbol, however. It’s an organ that works without stopping, and it responds, quietly and powerfully, to the way we live — how and what we eat, how much stress we carry, how well we sleep, how often we move, and whether we feel connected or alone.
I came to Israel from Los Angeles in 1983 with a mission that has guided me ever since: “Healing Ourselves; Healing the Planet.” A few years later I founded what became Reidman College, beginning with a small school for holistic massage. Back then, my belief was simple: When you touch someone, you touch their soul. Done with care and respect, touch can ease pain in the body, and it can also soften something deeper: the constant bracing that so many people carry without even noticing.
What I’ve seen through the clinical training our students provide across Israel is that people don’t arrive with only a physical complaint. They arrive with a full life behind the symptom. The body is not separate from the person. The heart is not separate from the story.
That is why Valentine’s Day can be more than a commercial holiday. It can be a useful mirror. Not because everyone needs romance, but because everyone needs and wants love in the wider sense: connection, belonging, steadiness, and the feeling that I am not carrying everything alone.
Heartbreak is not just the aching heart in a Country Western song. The emotions of prolonged stress, grief, anxiety, and loneliness often show up physically in the heart. A tight chest. Shallow breathing. Poor sleep. A nervous system that never truly calms down.
When stress becomes chronic, the body behaves as if danger is always close. That affects how we breathe, how we digest, how we rest, and how we make decisions. We reach for quick comfort because the system is asking for relief. Over time, those patterns shape the habits that can protect or damage heart health: movement, sleep, food choices, emotional regulation, and the ability to recover after difficult days.
In integrative medicine, we know that changing only one habit doesn’t solve everything. We also don’t separate a person into compartments — heart here, mind there, life somewhere else. At Reidman, we teach that real care is both responsible and grounded, and that integrative approaches work best; that is, conventional medicine alongside Natural Medicine, and not instead of it. If someone has symptoms that worry them, whether that be chest pain, shortness of breath, dizziness, unusual fatigue, or unusual palpitations, they should get checked. Only with a clear diagnosis can one then begin to take the right path toward better health.
For many people, the most meaningful change for better heart health begins with a question: What does my heart need from my daily life right now?
Usually, the answer is not dramatic. It starts with the nervous system. Many adults live in a state of constant tension — shoulders lifted, jaw tight, breath held, like we are bracing for impact. You don’t have to change your whole life to change that message. Even a small daily practice of slowing the breath, especially lengthening the exhale, can help the body come down from alert mode. I’ve seen again and again in our teaching clinics: When the breath settles, the person settles. And when the person settles, the heart doesn’t have to work as hard just to keep them emotionally afloat.
Then there is movement. A short walk most days is one of the simplest ways to support circulation, mood, and sleep. It also gives stress a place to go. So many people are trying to “think” their way out of tension. But the body often needs a physical release. A 10-minute walk after a meal, a few minutes in fresh air, small things, repeated, can shift the baseline.
Sleep matters more than people like to admit. When sleep is poor, everything becomes louder: worry, cravings, irritability, sensitivity. A tired nervous system is fragile. A rested one is resilient. The heart is part of that story. If Valentine’s Day is a time for gifts, then let this message be a gift to you: Protect your evenings from constant stimulation. Create a softer landing. Less screen. Lower light. A warm shower. A few quiet minutes before bed because your body repairs itself at night and your heart benefits when you respect that repair.
And then there is the most overlooked “heart health” factor of all: connection.
Love is not only romance. Love is the person who checks in. The friend who answers. The community that makes space for you and perhaps having a pet. It is known that people with pets to care for and receive love from live longer and happier than most others. Dogs, in particular, are renowned for giving unconditional love.
Valentine’s Day can unintentionally reflect to single people, widows and widowers, the divorced, the grieving, and the lonely that they are “outside” the story. But the heart doesn’t only respond to couple-hood. The heart responds to belonging. To the feeling that you matter to someone, and someone matters to you.
If you want a simple Valentine’s practice that is actually meaningful, it’s this: Reach out in a real way. Not a reaction emoji. Not a forwarded video. A sentence that carries warmth. “How are you, really?” “I’m thinking of you.” “Do you want to take a walk together?” It sounds small, but small acts of connection are often what keep people steady.
Judaism understands something essential here: We are not meant to live as isolated individuals. We are built for community. Even the rhythm of Shabbat — pausing, disconnecting from constant doing, returning to family and to presence, is, in its own way, a heart practice. It reminds the body that life is not only pressure. There is also rest. There is also meaning. There is also relationship.
And there is touch, appropriate, respectful touch, which is increasingly missing in modern life. We live in a world that is both touch-starved and touch-confused. But the body still needs safe contact: a hug that is asked for, not taken; a hand held; a massage given with dignity. This is one reason I began in massage all those years ago. Because when touch is done properly, it can communicate something words often can’t: “You are safe, you are seen, you are not alone, and I am here with you.”
At Reidman, we speak a lot about dignity. And that includes the way we treat ourselves. Many people live at emergency speed. The heart doesn’t respond well to constant stress. It responds to steadiness. To daily care. To a life that is livable.
So yes, enjoy Valentine’s Day. Enjoy the sweetness. Send the heart emoji, send the flowers, book that romantic dinner.
But if you want the holiday to mean something deeper, let it be a reminder that your real heart is listening to your life. This month, give it more than a symbol. Give it calmer breathing, steadier sleep, gentle movement, and real connection — because love is not only what we celebrate. Love is also what we practice. Love is the most powerful healer of all. Loving ourselves; and loving others. Perhaps the Beatles were right: “All we need is love, love. Love is all we need.”
Sally Reidman, who immigrated to Israel in 1983 from Los Angeles, is the founder of Reidman College, Israel’s largest institute for complementary and integrative medicine.
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Israel’s bobsled team is chasing more than medals in its first Olympic outing in Milan
(JTA) — No matter what happens when Israel’s bobsled team hits the ice next week at the 2026 Winter Olympics, team captain Adam “AJ” Edelman has already had a year for the history books.
The 34-year-old Brookline, Massachusetts, native is the first Orthodox Jewish athlete to compete at the Winter Olympics, and now the first Israeli to qualify for the Games in two sports. He placed 28th in skeleton at the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea.
But for Edelman, the 12-year journey that culminated in Israel’s first-ever Olympic bobsled appearance — which he has nicknamed “Shul Runnings,” a spin on the 1993 movie about Jamaica’s bobsled team — is about more than success on the track.
“The Olympics were never a goal,” Edelman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview prior to the Games. “The Olympics were the tool, or the stepping stone, to get to the goal, which was to fundamentally redefine, or change, how our community — both the Israeli and the Jewish one — view investment into and the role of sport.”
Edelman’s journey began in 2013, when Israel attempted to recruit him to play for its national hockey team. Hockey had been Edelman’s first sport, which he played through college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was the first Shabbat-observant player in program history.
Edelman discussed the idea with the long-time alumni director of his Jewish day school, Brookline’s Maimonides School. Mike Rosenberg pointed something out to Edelman that ultimately sparked a calling.
“AJ, no one from this school has ever gotten to the level of sport beyond high school that you’ve gotten to that didn’t go to, let’s say, [Yeshiva University] or Brandeis,” Edelman recalls Rosenberg, who died last year, telling him about the two historically Jewish colleges.
Edelman couldn’t believe that. Out of thousands of Maimonides alumni (including his older brother, Emmy award-winning comedian Alex Edelman), only Edelman — who called himself “not a very gifted athlete” — had reached that level? He had a theory as to why that might be.
“I came to the conclusion that it had to be a self-selection process,” Edelman explained. “That people were selecting out of sport as a journey before they got to that level. And why were they doing it? Because there was no priority placed on sport. It wasn’t something people in our community aspired to do or invest in.”
Edelman said the lack of investment in sports led to a lack of infrastructure and a dearth of role models for Jewish kids to look up to. He set out to change that — to “be the change.”
“The only way to do that was a certificate, so to speak, of excellence in sport, and that’s the Games,” he said. “The Games are essentially the certificate of, ‘you did something.’ So in that way, the Olympics became very, very much the tool for which I wanted to make the change.”
Edelman began training in skeleton after graduating from MIT in 2014. His initial scouting report was not promising: he was told he was “not athletic, would never make the Olympics, and would never be competitive in sliding sport.”
That did not deter him. Edelman moved to Israel in 2016, where he kept training, teaching himself the sport on YouTube when he couldn’t afford a coach. He ultimately clinched Israel’s first sliding sport Olympic appearance in 2018.
Then the pandemic hit. Edelman was pursuing an MBA at Yale University when classes were suspended. Edelman was visiting Jordana Balsam, a close friend who is an attorney in New York City, when the Olympics came up.
“He was telling me about his history with skeleton, and how he competed in the 2018 Games, and how he was actually really intrigued by bobsled,” Balsam recalled. “And in an offhand comment, I’m like, ‘Well, why don’t you pursue that, since you have this time off from Yale?’ And I guess something clicked in his brain, where he was just like, ‘Yes, I’m gonna do that.’ And the rest is history.”
Edelman began working toward bringing Israel to the Olympics in bobsled. Again, there were hurdles. He had to recruit a team from scratch. Israel’s own athletic authorities were skeptical — its Olympic committee almost didn’t accept an invitation to the 2026 Games. Funding was practically non-existent. Still, the team continued training, ultimately missing out on Olympic qualification for the 2022 Games by 0.1 second.
Then came Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent Gaza war, in which five members of the team were called into combat and multiple team sponsors backed out. Still, Edelman kept his eye trained on the 2026 Games. He used Instagram DMs to recruit a new team — most of whom play other sports and had never been in a bobsled — which also features Israel’s first Druze Olympian, Ward Farwasy.
Israel ultimately qualified in late January at an event in Lake Placid, the same location where Edelman had been told 12 years ago that he’d never make it. The team often trains there, as well as in Park City, Utah, British Columbia and elsewhere. Edelman said he is rarely in the same place for more than a few weeks at a time.
“Once he had something in his head — an idea, a concept, a goal that he has — he dives into it 200%, and it’s something that I admire greatly,” Balsam said. “I’ve never seen anyone so dedicated to their craft, to their sport, to their goal. It really is inspirational.”
But even qualifying for the Games didn’t end the obstacles. Due to Olympic security, Edelman said his team’s training time in Cortina was limited. Then the team’s apartment in the Czech Republic, where they were training prior to leaving for Italy, was robbed on Feb. 7. Edelman said thousands of dollars in personal belongings, including passports, were stolen.
Throughout the process, Edelman said the wave of support, particularly from American Jews, has been “pleasantly surprising” — especially compared to the reaction after he qualified in 2018, which he called more of a “blip.”
That support has manifested through donations and merchandise sales, with Edelman fundraising to support the team’s Olympic costs. There has also been ample news and social media coverage, inside the Jewish and Israeli communities and out. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has given the team a shoutout, too.
Edelman said the positive response has been all the validation he needed.
“There was a constant question of, at the end of the road, you’re doing this for a reason, right?” he said. “ And the only reason to do this is for the goal, the goal of making a change. Of people caring about sport. Of being the change. So if the change doesn’t come and it doesn’t make an impact, then all of it is irrelevant… I think that, from what we’ve seen in the last [several weeks], the answer is an unequivocal yes. It was 100% worth it.”
In Israel, sports fans are proud of the historic nature of the bobsled team’s Olympic appearance, but the story has not broken through to the same extent, according to David Wiseman, who lives in Jerusalem and runs the popular “Follow Team Israel” Facebook page that tracks Israeli sports.
“The media are very football [soccer] and basketball-centric, so they get all the headlines,” Wiseman said. “Someone like Deni Avdija gets significantly more coverage. They know of him being the first Israeli to play in the [NBA] All-Star game far more so than this. They think it’s cool that [Edelman] made it, but they don’t devote any more thought to it. Independent of Israel, bobsled is a niche, niche sport.”
Still, Edelman and some of his supporters have seized on the narrative draw of Israel’s underdog bobsled story — not to mention the apartment break-in and other obstacles — to amplify an almost muscular form of pro-Israel advocacy. Edelman commonly uses the phrase “victors, not victims,” in reference to his team and to Israel’s spirit more broadly.
Jared Firestone, who is representing Israel in skeleton in Italy, said there was “no chance I’d be here without AJ’s guidance.” Edelman helped coach Firestone in skeleton after he made aliyah in 2019, and the pair co-founded the nonprofit Advancing Jewish Athletes to support other Jews in sports.
“I think it means so much to Israelis and to the Jewish community at large to see, with a little investment, how much can be accomplished,” Firestone said. “Unfortunately for me and AJ, we’ve had to dedicate so much of our time that could’ve gone to training and progressing on the ice to fundraising, but hopefully we’ll be inspiring people who could help to create that infrastructure so the next AJ and Jared could just focus on sport and being even better than we are.”
Balsam, who also serves as a director of Advancing Jewish Athletes, said it’s hard to articulate how meaningful Edelman’s achievement of making the Olympics is to him, and to her.
“AJ has been very, very passionate about trying to cultivate the idea that sports can be a career path for Jewish kids,” she said. “He wanted to make it to the Olympics. He wanted to show that this is possible. So for him to combine both of his passions and achieve his dream, I think is something that he can’t put into words, that I can’t put into words, but it’s just immense pride.”
Now comes the actual tournament. Israel will compete in the two-man races on Feb. 16 and 17 and in four-man on Feb. 21 and 22, with Edelman piloting the sleds. His Shiba Inu Lulu, the team’s mascot, is staying with Balsam in New York, where they’ll be cheering him on.
But no matter where Israel places, Edelman has one more box to check to fully accomplish his mission to change Israeli sports.
“There is one thing that I wish beyond anything, and it’s that I’m not the only one to do it,” he said. “ What I really wanted to accomplish through it was that someone else saw it and decided to do it themselves. That they saw that pathway opened by someone who was less than stellar, who was not, like, a God-gifted athlete, and went, ‘You know what? I’m pretty good at what I do. I can do that.’
“You have to leave it better than you found it, and it has to be for a purpose, and that purpose is always going to be to inspire someone to do it better than you did.”
The post Israel’s bobsled team is chasing more than medals in its first Olympic outing in Milan appeared first on The Forward.
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Debate over the Blue Square Super Bowl ad is fading. The racist responses from my fellow Jews will be felt longer.
(JTA) — Days after the Super Bowl, I am still reeling from how a moment designed to confront antisemitism — a 30-second ad from Robert Kraft’s Blue Square Alliance — shined a light on the hate within some corners of our own community.
The ad spurred debate over its effectiveness — a worthy conversation. But what immediately struck me was how quickly and prominently anti-Black responses played a role. I realized once again that American Jews are not only experiencing hate but must confront it within our own ranks as well. As a community, we will not succeed in combating antisemitism if we allow anti-blackness to live within our movements.
The ad, called “Sticky Note,” featured a non-Jewish Black child showing kindness to a Jewish child who was the victim of antisemitic bullying.
It spurred legitimate criticism about how to best fight antisemitism. But layered throughout was casual racism cloaked in the language of Jewish advocacy — even glee in an opportunity to engage in anti-Blackness under the guise of combating antisemitism.
Online, one person dedicated time to remaking the ad with AI so the bullies were darker-skinned and then had the Jewish child attack them.
Another person wrote that the bullies in the ad needed to be recast, because “most of our enemies aren’t white.”
Some exotified the Black child and leered at his natural hair, his height, his walk and his apparent “coolness.” People wrongfully claimed that the scenario was entirely unrealistic because Black people — at the individual or the organizational level — never stand against antisemitism.
Even more bizarrely, others claimed that the ad was somehow a tacit endorsement of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“There is a very casual and thoughtless ‘why the hell was a Black person shown being nice to a Jew, how dare they’ view being expressed here, and it’s not right,” tweeted Ben Badejo, who is both Black and Jewish.
“I am not asking Jews on X to like Kraft’s ad,” he added. “But I am definitely asking Jews on X to stop saying that a black person would never befriend a Jew and that it was wrong for the ad to depict this.”
Indeed, the downright racist responses from some parts of our community hurt Jews, our allies in Black communities, and the fight against antisemitism at a moment when the stakes couldn’t be higher. They highlight just how much work remains in fighting our own anti-Black racism.
None of the critics who were so furious about the inclusion of a Black child acknowledged a basic fact: There are hundreds of thousands of Jews of Color in the United States. The child in the ad — who approaches the Jewish protagonist and says he has experienced hatred too — could easily be Jewish himself, or have Jewish family members. Yes, his name is later revealed to be Bilal, but names do not always reliably map onto religious, racial or ethnic identity.
And that matters.
I know because I feel it personally. I am married to a Jew of Color, and we have two Black Jewish kids.
The claim that it is impossible, outrageous or ideologically suspect to depict Black people as allies in the fight against antisemitism does something deeply harmful: It erases the existence of Black Jews. That erasure is itself both antisemitic and racist. You cannot claim to defend the Jewish community while denying the reality of over 200,000 Black Jews in America. That number will only grow. Those numbers come from a 2020 Pew survey — my youngest wasn’t born yet.
You cannot fight antisemitism while actively and purposefully hurting Jewish kids — including my kids.
The claim also erases important alliances with members of the non-Jewish Black community.
In both my professional and personal life, I have experienced profound moments of solidarity and kindness in the fight against antisemitism from non-Jewish Black Americans. As director of Advocacy for One Mitzvah A Day, a project of Jewish Federations of North America that mobilizes communal gratitude to those who support us, I witness daily acts of courage and moral clarity from people of all backgrounds who choose to stand against antisemitism. Through our daily texts highlighting these moments of solidarity, our subscribers have sent more than 1.5 million messages of gratitude. We have thanked artists, elected officials, government leaders, and civil rights activists — many of them Black — who have spoken out loudly against antisemitism and stood with the Jewish community. To remain silent in the face of racism would be a betrayal of the kindness, solidarity, and moral leadership they have shown.
I felt compelled to post something on X on Sunday to push back against the racism I was seeing online: “You’re not making Jews safer. You’re hurting Jews. You’re not fighting antisemitism — you are hurting your community.” The backlash was swift and predictable. The rage didn’t stop at disagreement — it turned personal, aimed at me and at anyone who pointed out that being racist does nothing to combat antisemitism in American society. Within hours, I was branded an enemy of Israel, a self-hater, an apologist, and accused of being paid to tweet.
It’s important to emphasize: Debate is core to Jewish culture – it has kept us a strong, vibrant community for over 3,000 years. Debates about this 30-second spot are happening around Shabbat dinners, shul lunches and friendly coffees. All of this is fair game, healthy even. Criticize the ad. Debate Jewish professionals and how we are fighting antisemitism. It’s our job to serve the community. But hatred is not a productive form of debate. I know these spaces intimately. I’ve been a full-time Jewish professional since 2019 and have been active in Jewish advocacy long before that. As the mother of Black children and wife to a Black Jew, my commitment to normalizing Jewish life as multiracial is non-negotiable.
Still, I mostly responded with humor. When you’ve walked these lines long enough, none of it is surprising.
That, perhaps, is the saddest part of all.
How completely predictable it was.
The Super Bowl is over, and the controversy around the ad will soon fade, replaced by the next hot topic. But the effects of the racist posts are forever and leave an ugly, enduring stain that harms us all.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
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