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92NY implodes over cancellation of Israel-critical author event

(JTA) — It took less than four days for 92NY to go from having a packed calendar of literary events and a full team to a depleted schedule and staff resignations.

The dramatic shakeup at the venerable New York Jewish cultural center came after the institution scrapped a planned talk Friday by Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, after Nguyen signed an open letter in the London Review of Books that pushed for “an end to the violence and destruction in Palestine,” accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and condemned “the deliberate killing of civilians” — without denouncing Hamas specifically.

Staff at the 92NY told the press it had made the decision out of concern for its Jewish audience.

Following the decision, which 92NY’s leaders made only hours before Nguyen’s planned talk, a slew of other authors pulled out of its upcoming programming slate. On Tuesday, staff at the center began resigning over the controversy, including poetry center director Sarah Chihaya and senior program coordinator Sophie Herron.

The blowback led the organization to announce Monday it was pausing its current poetry reading series.

The fallout came amid a series of Israel-related clashes at cultural centers and within the arts and entertainment world at large since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. Disputes over the attacks and Israel’s retaliation have also spilled into sports, academia, government, tech, business and law.

As Israelis and Palestinians bury their dead, both sides are demanding major institutions pick sides. And for some Jewish institutions, reeling from a Hamas attack that killed 1,400 Israelis and saw 200 others taken hostage, their usual rules of pluralism and commitment to fostering diverse opinions are harder to apply.

“It’s certainly challenging to navigate this moment as a cultural organization (much less a Jewish one) and ensure that we are remaining mission-aligned even in complicated situations,” said Naomi Firestone-Teeter of the Jewish Book Council, which books Jewish authors at JCCs and other venues around the country. “We are hearing from new authors every day who need an outlet to share their experience and ensure our global readership is aware of the pain and suffering in the Jewish community — in Israel and the Diaspora.”

Andrea Grossman, founder and director of the influential Los Angeles literary nonprofit Writers Bloc, recently canceled a planned book talk with the Jewish author Nathan Thrall because Thrall’s new nonfiction book, “A Day In The Life of Abed Salama,” deals critically with Israel’s military occupation.

Released days before Hamas’ attacks and dealing with the aftermath of a 2012 bus explosion in the West Bank, the book has become one of many Israel-related political footballs in the arts arena: American Public Media, a national content distributor for public radio and TV stations, recently told The New York Times it had pulled ads for Thrall’s book, saying they would be “insensitive in light of the human tragedies unfolding.” Thrall has undertaken his book tour alongside his subject, Abed Salama, a Palestinian father of a five-year-old boy who died on the bus in 2012.

“How does one promote a program on this subject to a largely Jewish audience when people on all sides are being bombed, killed and buried? The community is deeply polarized,” Grossman told the Guardian.

Thrall, who lives in Jerusalem, called the cancellations “outrageous.”

“There’s an atmosphere that is wholly intolerant of any expression of sympathy for Palestinians living under occupation, any discussion of the root causes of the conflict,” he told the Guardian. “My book is not a polemic. It’s been praised for showing characters, both Jewish and Palestinian, in an empathetic way.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen speaks at the PEN/Hemingway 2019 Award Ceremony at The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library And Museum on April 7, 2019 in Boston. (Paul Marotta/Getty Images)

Questions of “polarization” and “sensitivity” also seemed to be on the mind of the organizers of the Frankfurt Book Fair, a major global publishing gathering held last week in Germany. Hundreds of authors and literary professionals objected last week after organizers announced that, owing to “the war started by Hamas,” they would no longer host a prize ceremony for Palestinian author Adania Shibli.

In a statement last week, the fair’s prize affiliate, Litprom, said that it would not hold the ceremony at the Frankfurt fair as planned, “due to the war started by Hamas, under which millions of people in Israel and Palestine are suffering.” Organizers said they planned to hold the event in “a suitable format and setting” at “a later point,” and that they still intended to give it to Shibli, whose novel “Minor Detail,” released in English in 2020, recounts the 1949 gang-rape of a Bedouin Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers.

Shibli’s English-language publisher called the decision “cowardly” and accused the fair of lying about the author’s willingness to agree to the plan.

The cancellation happened only days after the fair’s organizers had vowed on Instagram to “make Jewish and Israeli voices especially visible at the book fair.” Hundreds of authors and publishing industry professionals charged in a letter that organizers had made an inappropriate judgment in “closing out the space for a Palestinian voice.”

Among the signatories were the Man Booker Prize finalist Sarah Bernstein, who is Jewish, and the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, whose most recent novel “The Books Of Jacob” is a deep dive into Jewish history.

PEN America, the literary and free speech nonprofit, weighed in on the Nguyen and Thrall controversies in a statement also noting “events canceled or postponed due to security concerns, including Jewish cultural events in Sweden; an exhibition of Hebrew manuscripts in Australia; and The Witness Palestine 2023 Festival in Rochester, New York.”

PEN was founded, its statement said, “on the idea that writers could play a role in preventing future wars; that when governments are locked in conflict, writers and literature can provide comfort, a bridge to empathy across divides, even a roadmap toward the faraway horizon of understanding. At a moment of great anguish, we urge the literary community to double down on that essential potential.”

The 92NY in particular has sought to operate as both a major nonsectarian cultural institution and an organization proud of its roots in the Jewish community. Formerly known as the 92nd Street Y, the institution recently rebranded itself to emphasize its outsized role in the general New York City cultural community, while also making some hires and programming moves to make its Jewish connections more explicit.

“92NY is a Jewish institution that has always welcomed people with diverse viewpoints to our stage,” 92NY said in a statement. “The brutal October 7th attack by Hamas on Israel and the continued holding of hostages, including senior citizens and young children, has absolutely devastated the community. As a Jewish organization we believe the responsible course of action right now is to take some time to determine how best to use our platform and support the entire 92NY community, so we made the difficult decision to postpone the October 20th event.”

But while its leadership seemed to want to put the Nyugen’s event on hold until it could figure out how to orient itself in the wake of Hamas’ attacks, some writers who pulled out of events there saw darker motives. The critic Andrea Long Chu called the group a “pro-war nonprofit.”

Meanwhile Nyugen, whose event was staged at a different location Friday evening, considered the 92NY’s decision a “cancellation.” 

“I have no regrets about anything I have said or done in regards to Palestine, Israel, or the occupation and war,” he wrote on Instagram.

—
The post 92NY implodes over cancellation of Israel-critical author event appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies

i24 News – The IDF released on Tuesday the investigation into the murder of six abductees at the end of August: Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi,

Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lubnov, Almog Sarusi, and Sergeant Ori Danino.

According to the findings of the investigation, when the IDF operation began in the area of the tunnel, Major General Nitzan Alon did not believe abductees would be in the area. As the operation continued, the military assessment said the probability was even lower.

The abductee who was extricated, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was found alone, as neither he nor additional terrorists taken from the area provided indications to the additional abductees.

In the absence of new information, the operation continued in the area, the investigation said. Only then did the forces locate the bodies of the six abductees. In addition, forensic findings were found indicating that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had been there. It remains unclear whether he gave the order to murder the abductees himself. No signs of struggle during the murder were found in autopsies.

IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagri visited the tunnel and described the harsh conditions in which the six abductees endured. “They were heroes who were cold-bloodedly murdered by terrorists who build tunnels under children’s rooms,” he said. “We will hunt them down and know exactly who they are, we will find the one who murdered them. The teams here collect all the evidence from the scene.”

“We didn’t know the exact location of the hostages in the tunnel. They were killed before we could reach them. We are investigating the incident of their names being leaked prior to their rescue. This is a very serious event that is harmful to the families and the security of the forces on the ground.”

The post IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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