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A Jewish dad says he’s afraid to light a menorah this Hanukkah. So he’s asking non-Jews to display them in solidarity.

(JTA) — When Adam Kulbersh’s 6-year-old son Jack asked when they would be putting up their Hanukkah decorations this year, Kulbersh wasn’t sure if it was such a good idea.

With reports of antisemitism on the rise — exacerbated by the war between Israel and Hamas — Kulbersh, an actor and single father who lives in Los Angeles, said he was afraid to publicly identify his family as Jewish. In the past few months alone, multiple antisemitic incidents have rattled the L.A. Jewish community — including a home invasion in which locals believe the house was targeted because of the mezuzah signifying that Jews live there.

When Kulbersh relayed his concerns to his friend Jennifer Marshall, who is not Jewish, he recalled that her response was immediate: “She said, ‘We’re not Jewish, but we’ll put a menorah in our window for you as a show of solidarity, and in the hopes that it gives you whatever you might need in order to put one in yours,” Kulbersh told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The gesture moved Kulbersh — so much so that it inspired him to launch an online campaign he’s calling “Project Menorah,” which encourages non-Jews to display menorahs, or photographs of them, in their windows during Hanukkah and to share photographs online to show solidarity. The campaign began last week, ahead of the holiday, which begins Thursday night. It has quickly spread on social media, where people are tagging Project Menorah in pictures of their holiday displays featuring newly added menorahs.

“I think right now people want to help but they don’t know what to say,” Kulbersh said. “People are afraid of saying the wrong thing, being canceled, of not knowing what they should say or how to say it. But what this friend did, out of love, a simple gesture, meant so much to me.”

For Marshall, a longtime friend of Kulbersh who lives nearby, it was an easy decision.

“I was just sad that Jack and Adam couldn’t celebrate Hanukkah the way that they wanted to,” Marshall told JTA. “Part of me felt like there wasn’t really much I could do. And I thought, I’m going to get a menorah, and I’m going to put it in my window and I’m going to take a picture of it and I’m going to send it to Jack. It was actually very simple. I just wanted Jack to know — and Adam, but Jack, this young boy — that his celebration of Hanukkah was important.”

Marshall, who runs an advertising agency and has helped out Kulbersh with his son since Jack was young, said emulating the Jewish custom of placing menorahs in the window — in public view — was “the most natural thing to do to say ‘I stand with you.’”

Jennifer Marshall posing with her menorah; an Instagram graphic advertising “Project Menorah.” (Courtesy of Jennifer Marshall; screenshot from Instagram)

She also views it as an important conversation starter.

“It’s an opportunity for the people who walk by my house or come to my house to have a conversation,” Marshall said. “I wanted it to be something private for Jack, and at the same time, I wanted it to be something public for every Jewish person.”

Kulbersh said the response to his campaign, including from rabbis, has been overwhelmingly positive. He’s seen posts from dozens of U.S. states — he said he stopped counting after 22 — as well as from Australia, Germany, Italy, Canada and the United Kingdom. In one representative Facebook post, an orthodontist in Dallas shared the project and offered to buy menorahs for any of his non-Jewish friends who wanted to participate.

“We’re in a time of awful antisemitism, historic levels,” Kulbersh said. “I think the idea of inviting our non-Jewish allies to add their light to ours in a time of darkness has really moved people.”

Kulbersh’s campaign is the latest instance of non-Jews using Jewish symbols to express solidarity.

In a famous example from Billings, Montana, in 1993, thousands of people displayed menorahs in their windows after a brick was thrown through the bedroom window of a 5-year-old Jewish boy who had a menorah displayed. The episode inspired the award-winning documentary “Not In Our Town” along with campaigns preaching tolerance.

And just last month in Los Angeles, non-Jews offered to put mezuzahs up on their doorposts to show solidarity with their Jewish neighbors after the antisemitic break-in rattled the community.

Though Kulbersh’s campaign resembles the response in Montana, neither he nor Marshall had heard the story until he launched Project Menorah. Kulbersh said he chose the symbolism of the menorah because of Marshall’s reaction — had she offered to display a dreidel, he said, the campaign would have been centered around that instead.

“What I love about the story of Billings is it proves the point that in every era, the bigots find a reason to hate us,” he said. “And in every era, the Jewish people find the courage to stand up to it. And in every era, there are allies who find the compassion to stand with us.”

For some, the initiative is raising uncomfortable questions, including about whether relying on non-Jews to create real or perceived security is healthy for Jews, and whether it is appropriate to give non-Jews license to use Jewish symbols.

“I believe relying on camouflaging your Jewish identity and plausibly denying your Jewishness, or in this case having our non-Jewish neighbors light menorahs to help us do so, to survive, is spiritually damaging,” wrote one man in Austin, Texas, on Facebook after the Jewish communal organization there, Shalom Austin, promoted Project Menorah.

Kulbersh acknowledged that some view the use of Jewish religious symbols by non-Jews as problematic — or even cultural appropriation. He emphasized that Project Menorah is different.

“This is an act of solidarity in a time of historic antisemitic violence. We are not asking anyone to perform a religious ritual,” Kulbersh said. “We’re asking people to take an easily recognizable symbol of a Jewish holiday and put it in their window to show their friends and neighbors that they’re safe.”

Wil Gafney, a pastor, activist and professor at Brite Divinity School in Texas, told JTA she is worried about Christians using Jewish symbols without proper approval from Jews, a trend that has included Passover seders and the use of shofars in right-wing rallies.

“There is a swath of Christianity, primarily evangelical and sometimes fundamentalist, that appropriate Jewish holidays, rituals and ritual objects in a way that the majority of Jewish voices in the public and social media spaces I inhabit and the persons in my extended community and family find extraordinarily objectionable,” Gafney said in an email to JTA.

“My first thoughts about this project when I saw it on my social media was that this contradicts the message of Christians leaving Jewish things alone and may well embolden some who now feel they have license and permission to use Jewish ritual objects.”

Marshall said she doesn’t know if it should be considered appropriation but said she has not received any pushback for her menorah.

“If anybody knows me, they know that it would just come from a place of love,” she said. “It was a very simple gesture of love for Jack and the Jewish community.”

For Rabbi Emily Cohen, who leads the Reconstructionist West End Synagogue in New York City, the idea of non-Jews using a Jewish ritual object without a full understanding of it, or without a connection to a Jewish community, is troubling. She does, however, like the idea of non-Jews displaying photographs of menorahs.

“That’s something that makes it clear, I’m not actually lighting a menorah, but I am putting up this photo that shows that I care about the Jewish community and I don’t want them to feel alone at this season,” Cohen said.

Cohen added that to her, the best forms of solidarity are ones that are grounded in relationships, not just a simple social media post. In other words, she said, the best way for non-Jews to show they care about their Jewish friends and neighbors is to support them as they “do Jewish with other Jews,” Cohen said.

She cited the example of a group of Muslims who, after the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018, gathered outside Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the prominent LGBTQ synagogue in New York.

“They were not going to the service, they were just standing outside to offer that solidarity and protection for their Jewish neighbors as they were going through this horrible moment after this attack,” Cohen recalled. “That’s the thing with solidarity: if you’re engaging in solidarity without actually engaging in relationship, that doesn’t feel as valid as if you’re engaging in relationship as part of your show of solidarity.”

Kulbersh said he welcomes the dialogue about whether non-Jews should display menorahs. “I love that about Judaism — we debate, we discuss,” he said.

But ultimately, Kulbersh added, he wasn’t looking to start a movement. In fact, he said his hope is that “there is no future for Project Menorah, because there will be no need for it again.”

—
The post A Jewish dad says he’s afraid to light a menorah this Hanukkah. So he’s asking non-Jews to display them in solidarity. 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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