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A Jewish museum exhibit features the Palestinian flag. Some visitors wonder if it belongs.
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Tucked in the far corner of a large, brightly-lit exhibition hall on the ground floor of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, there is a delicate-looking piece of art with a strong political message.
At first glance, it appears to be three circular vases with flowers in them. The ceramic vases sit on shelves attached to the wall, and colorful collages hang above them. On closer inspection, visitors will notice that the flowers are made out of paper and that affixed to each vase is an image of the Palestinian flag printed on foam board.
A nearby label written by the curators of the exhibit, titled “Tikkun: For the Cosmos, the Community, and Ourselves,” explains that the piece was inspired by a conversation the artist, Tosha Stimage of Berkeley, had with a Palestinian man. He told Stimage about the plants that are native to Palestine — “a place which he can no longer access due to the ongoing conflict in the region,” the curators write.
The label also includes a note about the flag: “Some may find its presence at The CJM troubling or confusing, while others may find it appropriate and forthright. Stimage recognizes the potential for these divergent responses and hopes to use them as a means of generating dialogue.”
On a Sunday afternoon in October, Maury Ostroff read the label and walked away without inspecting the artwork.
Visitors to the “Tikkun” exhibit are encouraged to share their responses to the artwork via comment cards. (Andrew Esensten)
Asked how the presence of the flag made him feel, Ostroff, who is Jewish and lives in Muir Beach, in Marin County, replied, “Unhappy.”
Why?
“It’s not offensive to me in the same way that a swastika is. My skin is a little bit thicker than that. But I wish it weren’t here.”
He added, “What’s so Jewish about this? What’s so ‘tikkun olam’ about all of this?”
For the “Tikkun” exhibit, which opened Feb. 17 and runs through Jan. 8, the CJM invited both Jewish and non-Jewish Bay Area artists to contribute new works on the theme of repair, however they chose to interpret it. “No one is listening to us,” the piece by Stimage, who is not Jewish, is the first work of art featuring the Palestinian flag to be shown at CJM in recent memory; the museum could not say when or if the flag has been displayed on its walls before.
The piece prompted several internal conversations among CJM staff when it was first submitted and, since it has been on display, has generated a variety of responses from museumgoers who have left comments in a box at the entrance to the exhibit. Intentionally or not, Stimage has raised numerous questions with the artwork, including: Does a work of art that is sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle for statehood belong in a Jewish museum? And what is the role of a contemporary Jewish museum, anyway?
“To truly be a contemporary art museum, meaning embedded in the contemporary issues of our day, our job is to provide a platform for dialogue and to share a diversity of perspectives on our walls,” said Chad Coerver, CJM’s executive director since September 2021. “If any institution [like ours] took the path of withholding artwork that troubled our staff, our board or our community, it would be very difficult to mount exhibitions.”
CJM is a member of the Council of American Jewish Museums, a network of 76 museums across the country. CAJM does not have guidelines about the kind of art its member museums can and cannot display, according to Executive Director Melissa Yaverbaum.
J. reached out to several CAJM member museums in New York, Los Angeles and other places by email to ask if they had ever shown artwork with Palestinian iconography or works by Palestinian artists. The museums declined to answer or did not respond.
In recent years, two Jewish museums have been embroiled in controversy over issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago staged an exhibit in 2008 on Israeli and Palestinian concepts of homeland that included maps and portraits of Palestinians. Following outcry from members of the local Jewish community who felt the exhibit presented Israel in a negative light, the museum decided to close the exhibit after only a few weeks. And in 2019, the director of the Jewish Museum Berlin resigned after the museum tweeted a link to a pro-BDS article in a German newspaper. (The museum previously came under fire for welcoming anti-Zionist scholar Judith Butler and representatives of Iran.)
In a joint interview with J., two CJM staffers who worked on “Tikkun” — co-curator Qianjin Montoya, who is not Jewish, and a Jewish senior curator who served in an advisory role, Heidi Rabben — shared the story of how Stimage’s piece came to be in the exhibit. (Montoya’s co-curator for the exhibit, Arianne Gelardin, no longer works at the museum.)
Since 2009, CJM has invited local artists from different backgrounds to create new work as part of the museum’s annual Dorothy Saxe Invitational. The idea for “Tikkun” was hatched before the pandemic put the planning process on hold. Once the CJM and Saxe — a local philanthropist and art collector — agreed on the theme, the co-curators invited artists “already engaged in healing through their relationship to community or in their practice of daily life,” Gelardin told J. last February.
The 30 artists who accepted the museum’s invitation were given only four months to conceive of and submit new works. That was likely the shortest timeline in the history of the invitational, which has been held 11 previous times, according to the museum. Each artist received a packet of materials compiled by CJM staff, with input from the Shalom Hartman Institute, a non-degree granting Jewish education center, to guide their thinking on “tikkun.”
Stimage was invited to participate because she is “very active” in the Bay Area and because “her work reflects ideas of community and connection,” Montoya said.
The curators said Stimage’s inclusion of the Palestinian flag in her submitted piece came as a surprise and prompted challenging conversations. However, they noted that they found the content of some of the other artists’ work surprising, too, and that it’s not unusual for contemporary artists to push the envelope in their work.
“I wouldn’t say we expected to receive a piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but we weren’t steering anyone away from that, either,” Rabben told J., adding that the submission guidelines did not place any topic off limits. “That’s a commitment from the museum to authentically represent the creative spirit of the artists that we’re working with,” she said.
Still, the curators said they engaged in a dialogue with Stimage in order to better understand each aspect of her piece and her overall intentions. Through those conversations, the curators learned that Stimage wanted to explore a moment of “rupture,” and that through her piece she hoped to communicate “that before healing or repair might happen, you have to first acknowledge that rupture,” Rabben said.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco is showing “Tikkun,” an exhibit of works by Jewish and non-Jewish artists on the theme of repair. (Andrew Esensten)
Coerver, who was involved in some of the conversations, stressed that “careful consideration” was given to including the piece in the exhibit. “We felt an artwork addressing the plight of the Palestinians was appropriate in an exhibition on healing and repair,” he said. (No work submitted as part of the Dorothy Saxe Invitational has ever been outright rejected, the museum said.)
Stimage did not respond to interview requests from J. According to a CV on her website, she was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and earned an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2016. She is a past fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and was an artist-in-residence at Facebook in 2018. She also owns a floral gift shop in Oakland called Saint Flora.
Her work often touches on Black identity; she created a piece honoring Sandra Bland, an African-American woman whose 2015 arrest and death in a Texas jail cell sparked protests, and contributed to a 2019 San Francisco Art Institute exhibit on the Black Panther Party.
“I have a responsibility to create things that will, to the best of my present knowledge, do more good than harm, heal, inspire and uplift other humans,” she told the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper in 2015.
Stimage’s precise views on Israel are unknown. CJM referred J. to her artist statement for “No one is listening to us,” which reads: “Olive, sage, and sumac are flowering plants native to the Mediterranean (including regions of Gaza and the West Bank) that have a direct relationship to contested ancestral land and affect the livelihood of so many Palestinian farmers and families caught in the conflict. They are positioned in the space of The Contemporary Jewish Museum as a metaphor for the ongoing conflict over land rights and the desperate need for restoration and healing of an age-old wound.”
The curators told J. that during their conversations with Stimage about her piece, they asked her why including images of the Palestinian flag was important to her but did not request that she remove them.
“We determined that none of [the piece’s] components in and of themselves signified something problematic or concerning,” Rabben said. “Of course, we had the awareness that the symbol [of the flag] will be read in a variety of ways by a variety of people.”
(Rabben pointed out that the exhibit includes other works with national symbols rendered in provocative ways, such as a black-and-white photograph of an American flag that was torn apart and partially reassembled by Mexican-American artist Jose Arias.)
The Palestinian flag — which contains the Pan-Arab colors of black, white, green and red — was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964. Since then, it has been the primary symbol of Palestinian nationalism.
For decades, the PLO was considered an enemy organization by Israel, and anything associated with it “had no place in Israeli public life,” said Eran Kaplan, an Israeli-born professor of Israel studies at San Francisco State University. Israel never went so far as to ban the flag. However, during the First Intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993, Israeli soldiers sometimes followed orders to confiscate the flag from protesters in the West Bank and Gaza.
With the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993, Israel and the PLO recognized each other as negotiating partners. Yet the Palestinian flag remains a contentious symbol in Israel today. Kaplan noted that it recently served as a flashpoint during the funeral procession of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian American broadcaster who was killed in the West Bank in May. (The IDF conducted a review and admitted that the Israeli soldier who shot her had most likely misidentified her as an armed militant.) After warning Abu Akleh’s family not to display the flag, Israeli police attacked mourners in East Jerusalem, ripping flags out of their hands and off of the vehicle carrying her casket.
Today, the flag holds different meanings for Israelis and American Jews from different generations and political persuasions.
“There are large segments in Israeli society who view any form of Palestinian national identity as a threat to the existence of Israel,” Kaplan said. “There are others who view the PLO as legitimate partners in any form of negotiations [over the creation of a Palestinian state], but there’s an absolute split over those questions.”
Given the sensitive nature of Stimage’s work and others in the exhibit, the curators decided to solicit feedback from visitors via comment cards available at the entrance to the hall. Rabben said the museum has received a number of comments specifically about “No one is listening to us,” most of which were positive. “The majority of those comments were ‘Thank you for offering space for this topic at the museum,’” she said.
Last month, a security guard sitting in the “Tikkun” exhibition hall told a reporter that he had not witnessed any expressions of outrage or protest through the first nine months of the exhibit. “When we opened we were afraid of negative reactions, but they’re not stressed about it,” he said of visitors. “We have shown worse things here.” The guard, who has worked at the museum since it opened in 2008, mentioned a 2010 exhibit, “Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf,” which included a copy of Hitler’s autobiography. “Some people were cussing us out” for displaying the book, he recalled.
Meanwhile, on the same floor as “Tikkun,” there is another, smaller exhibit containing potentially offensive art. A sign outside of the room warns visitors that inside is a Hitler marionette created by the parents of puppeteer Frank Oz. “Our intention in displaying this object is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the objects and firsthand stories of those who experienced its persecution, and to encourage conversation and education about the ongoing horrors of antisemitism and authoritarianism today,” the sign says.
Coerver, CJM’s executive director, said he was proud that the museum’s three current exhibits — “Tikkun,” “Oz is for Oznowicz: A Puppet Family’s History” and “Gillian Laub: Family Matters,” which includes photographs that Laub took of her Trump-supporting relatives — are raising “challenging questions” and providing opportunities for both visitors and museum staff to “expand our horizons.”
“We’ve been wading into some issues that I think are a little thicker than maybe we’ve been confronting in the past,” he said, “and I hope that continues.”
A version of this piece originally ran in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and is reprinted with permission.
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Howard Zinn: a radical historian with a Jewish conscience
“I am a sportswriter by trade,” Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation, told me. Zirin has written 11 books, all of them dealing with the knotty and oft-controversial politics of sport, coming at the games he loves — and the machinations behind them — from a progressive position. His previous subjects have included Colin Kaepernick, Barry Bonds and John Carlos.
But Zirin’s latest book, The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, is not that. It’s a biography of the late Boston University professor and self-described “radical historian,” best known for the long-running bestseller, A People’s History of the United States, which was first published in 1980.
“I never would have thought in eight trillion years that I was ever going to write a book about Howard Zinn,” Zirin, 52, told me by phone from Washington, D.C.. “He was a hero of mine, a great influence, and I would have thought it presumptuous to even think about it, not just to mention that I never gave thought to writing a non-sports book.
“But I just had so many people in recent years want to engage me in this discussion of ‘What would Howard say about these incredible demonstrations in 2010 of the Black Lives Matter movement, and, especially, in the age of Trumpism, the rise of neo-fascism, not just in this country, but abroad?’”
If Zirin couldn’t divine an exact answer, he was at least in a position to hazard an educated guess. Turned on to an abbreviated 20th century-focused version of A People’s History as a high school graduation gift by his sister, Zirin became a history major at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. Much later in life, Zirin found himself hosting Q & A sessions with Zinn at venues throughout the country.
Zirin says that the events of the two Trump terms made people wonder: “‘Would that have shaken Howard’s faith in the power of the people to make positive change and the ability for people to bend the arc of history, as they say, toward justice?’ That made me want to write the book.”
When he started work on the biography, Zirin knew the basics of Zinn’s public trajectory: his service in WWII as an Air Force bombardier; his stint teaching at Spelman College and his role in the Civil Rights movement, his protests against the Vietnam War, his ongoing conflict with Boston University president John Silber, his work as a playwright, the Hollywood actors and rock musicians who read his prose and wanted to meet and work with him. The bottom line: Zinn had an unwavering commitment to unions and organization, the power of the people.
“The power of tyranny is overestimated (not in the short run, but in the long run),” Zirin quotes Zinn as saying in his preface, “and can be overcome by the unity, the determination, of apparently powerless people.”
“When we were on stage,” Zirin told me, “he would speak about things he was a central player in, but he would kind of leave himself out of the narrative, partly out of humility but I also think that’s the political training of people who came up in the 1930s during the Depression. They’re always thinking about the movement, not about themselves.
Still, Zirin added, “Howard had so many great stories that he would tell about his life offstage. So, I really wanted to tell his story because I felt truly that it hadn’t been told and I wanted to learn about him. I wanted to invest in it.”
What did Judaism mean to Zinn and, now, to Zirin? “Judaism was expressed through the pursuit of knowledge, of questioning established truths, and always standing with the underdog,” said Zirin. “It is why he felt strongly that Jews of conscience needed to advocate for the Palestinian people. I am inspired by this commitment to tikkun olam and I share his approach to how we need to apply our faith: as voices against apartheid and genocide.”
Zinn’s cultural identification as a Jew often emerged in his sense of humor that Zirin calls his “secret sauce.”
“It’s not like I think Howard Zinn was like Billy Crystal with a history book,” Zirin said. “His ability was to keep an audience listening through humor. [He could] apply history to the present and make people think about it, bring it alive in present terms and then Howard had that third layer, that third gear, where he could be funny and affable and work that twinkle in his eye and that smile and keep an audience focused. I think that allowed him to speak in a lot of diverse circumstances.”
Zinn, of course, attracted negative heat, too. In 2020, President Donald Trump said, “Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.” Zinn caught flak not just from the expected bastions of the far-right but also from other historians. The latter, Zirin says, were critical of Zinn mostly out of jealousy. Zinn was popular and well-read; they were not.
“He was able to break out of the academy and impact the world,” Zirin said, “He saw academic praise meaning very little relative to the world. He took greater joy in writing 800-word columns that spoke to what was happening rather than writing another 800 -page book the likes of which a lot of academics write, these things that no one reads.”
As to the right-wing trolling, Zirin said, “I think he would have just taken that as a badge of honor. I think for Howard that just rolled off his back because of his interests, which was in teaching and seeing how what he was teaching applied to the world — he loved bringing the lessons of the street into the classroom and he loved seeing what was in the classroom applied to the streets. He was blessed to have lived in interesting times and in important places.”
The book explores Zinn’s family life, too. Zirin got co-operation and input from Zinn’s son Jeff, an activist-playwright, and his daughter, Myla, an educator and environmental advocate. Some of those stories involve their upbringing. Howard was on the road frequently, and Zirin writes that his wife Roslyn (Roz) had to play good cop and bad cop, neither role she relished.
Roz Zinn, who died at 85 from ovarian cancer in May 2008, was also an activist and artist, and though the couple remained happily married for 64 years, she lived, to an extent, in his shadow. Her death crushed him.
“Howard stayed extremely active after Roz passed and in many ways that was his therapy,” Zirin said. “He took to email voraciously. He traveled, he spoke, he did events like the ones I did with him where he could sit because, while he was still sharp, he didn’t want to stand that long. The twinkle would go out during those moments when the warmth of a crowd, or a friend, would leave the stage or his presence.”
“At the very end,” Zirin said, “he had these moments of looking very sad. How do you comprehend what it’s like to lose someone you’ve been married to for 64 years? Incomprehensible.”
Zinn died from a heart attack at 87 on Jan. 27, 2009. He’d been in a swimming pool in a Santa Monica, California hotel. He was not, as some said, swimming laps; he didn’t have the strength for that. At the memorial service at the Arlington Street Church in Boston April 23, 2010, Myla said he was standing in the pool. A pool worker pulled him out of the water and asked if Zinn wanted an ambulance. He reportedly said, “No, I’m OK.”
Zinn’s friend Noam Chomsky spoke at the service, as did Matt Damon — whose family grew up next to the Zinns in Newton, Mass. — and poet Martín Espada, who read a tribute poem written for Zinn. Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon — founding member of the SNCC Freedom Singers and Sweet Honey in the Rock, cultural historian and activist — led the crowd in singing “This Little Light of Mine” and “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho.”
Zirin told me that Zinn’s writings and words have made him less pessimistic about the world. “It irrevocably changed me,” he said. “The main effect that Howard had on my own outlook was that there are answers in history. Howard imbued me with this idea that you had to be more than angry. You had to have a sense of the world if you wanted to change it. I also really thought about how we could not just be objects but subjects of history.”
“So many people out there want the world to be a different place and are disgusted by the state of things, of what Naomi Klein describes as ‘end times fascism,’” Zirin said. “You try to imagine a sense that if you can root your ideas and even your anger in history, there’s a path out, there’s a road map out.”
The post Howard Zinn: a radical historian with a Jewish conscience appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel is revoking entry permits for U.S. activists involved in West Bank
Hannah was on her way to class on Jan. 8 when she opened her inbox and found an email from Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority. Due to a change of circumstances, it said, her authorization to enter Israel had been revoked.
“I had to read it a few times, honestly, and then I Googled it and just started crying. I was on my way to class. I was bawling,” Hannah told the Forward. Hannah asked that her last name not be published because she fears that speaking to the media could affect her ability to visit Israel in the future.
Hannah, whose boyfriend lives in Israel and who has family there, has spent almost every summer of her life in the country. She was left dumbfounded by the email. There was no explanation of the reason for the revocation, and nothing about how, or whether, she could appeal.
The closest thing to an incident she can point to came the previous July, when she joined her rabbi and a group of volunteers accompanying a Palestinian farmer during the grape harvest — a practice known as protective presence, in which foreign witnesses aim to deter settlers and soldiers from interfering. Israeli soldiers stopped the group and held them for hours. “They asked to see my passport and said they were looking to see if there was any reason to deport me,” she said. They found none, and told her she was free to go.
Hannah came up through the institutions Israel counts on to keep American Jews attached to it. In high school, Hannah was involved with hasbara fellowships, and her mother is active in her local Jewish federation. “It’s so odd that almost the more I become familiar with the place in ways that I wasn’t as a kid, and maybe less naive about it, now I don’t have the ability to be there,” she said. “I’m not welcome there anymore.”
Hannah is one of seven American Jews who told the Forward that Israel had revoked their electronic travel authorization, or ETA-IL, after they participated in protective presence activities in the West Bank.
A loose network of Jewish organizations recruits diaspora Jews for the work and frames it as an expression of Jewish values. Programs range from 10-day delegations to seasonal olive-harvest cohorts to Hineinu, Hebrew for “here we are,” a three-month placement in Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta that the Center for Jewish Nonviolence launched in 2021.
According to figures from the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, dozens of participants in its Hineinu program and other protective presence initiatives have had their authorizations revoked since the system took effect.
Israel launched ETA-IL as a pilot in June 2024 and made it mandatory for travelers from visa-exempt countries, including the United States, on Jan. 1, 2025. The application is a brief online form, usually approved automatically within minutes, that allows visa-free entry for tourism or business. It functions as Israel’s counterpart to the U.S. ESTA system, and followed Israel’s admission to the American Visa Waiver Program in 2023.
A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on individual cases or on the department’s discussions with Israeli officials, but said the Department of Homeland Security, in consultation with State, regularly reviews whether Visa Waiver Program participants meet program requirements.
Israel was admitted to the program in 2023 only after signing a memorandum of understanding committing it to treat all American citizens equally at its borders, a longstanding program requirement that had kept Israel out for years over its treatment of Palestinian American travelers.
None of those who spoke to the Forward had been arrested or charged with a crime. Some received no notice at all, which Daniel Roth, executive director of the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, said has become increasingly common. Those who did get revocation emails received identical notices citing a change of circumstances, with no explanation of the duration of the ban.
By the letter of the law, all of those whose authorizations were revoked remain eligible to make aliyah — immigrate to Israel — unless they are deemed a security threat under a provision of the Law of Return. Neither of two immigration attorneys who spoke with the Forward could recall any applicant being blocked as a security threat.
The visitors could open a file with the group Nefesh B’Nefesh and, in theory, be Israeli citizens within months. For now, they are barred from entering.
The Forward asked the Population and Immigration Authority how many ETA-IL authorizations have been revoked and on what legal basis, and the Israel Police asking whether it recommends revocations. Neither responded.
The Jewish Agency, which facilitates immigration by Jews to Israel under the Law of Return, said in a statement: “There is no connection between the ETA process and the Aliyah process. Regardless, we cannot comment on ETA refusal because we do not handle any part of that process. The criteria for eligibility for Aliyah remain unchanged.”
Change of circumstances
That Israel’s government sees protective presence workers as an adversary and target for law enforcement is no secret.
In April 2024, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ordered the creation of a police task force to handle foreign and Israeli left-wing activists in the West Bank, which he described as a team for dealing with “anarchists.”
The unit sits under the West Bank district police and works in coordination with the Population and Immigration Authority. Ben-Gvir publicly credited the immigration authority for its role in deporting 32 foreign activists in October 2025 following an olive harvest action in the northern West Bank.
Of the Jews the Forward interviewed, one described himself as an anti-Zionist. The others were liberal Zionists who said they are concerned about the rise of settler violence in the West Bank and the preservation of Israel as a liberal democratic state. They were day school and summer camp alumni. Most have family in Israel and visit regularly.
Sam Sherman, an actor and writer who lives in New York City, was in Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the southern West Bank, when he opened an email telling him that his ETA-IL had been revoked due to a change of circumstances.
He was about seven weeks into his stint with a Hineinu group, and he was not the only one. “It happened to me and a few others in my cohort … within the same hour,” Sherman said. “A few of us got the same email within minutes of each other.”
Sherman was never arrested. He describes one incident that he believes amounts to a detention in place, and otherwise a pattern of identification, soldiers, police and armed settlers photographing his passport during confrontations he says were initiated by settlers.
“We were just there hanging out with people, essentially,” he said. “But we were treated as if it was almost criminal for us to be there.”
His first reaction was confusion. “I was like, what does this mean?” he said. More experienced activists told him what it meant: once he left Israel, he would be unable to return unless he chose to make aliyah. “If I’m the wrong kind of Jew for Israel,” he said, “sure. Great.”
Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the CEO of T’ruah, a rabbinic human rights organization that has been sending American clergy to the West Bank for years. She said the revocations cut against Israel’s founding promise.
“The promise of Israel is that it’s going to be a refuge and a home for Jews everywhere in the world, not just for Jews with certain political opinions,” said Jacobs. “Israel should be the place in the world that is safest for Jews, no matter what your religious practices are, what country you’re coming from and what your political views are.”
Another participant in Hineinu said she never received an email at all.
Nina, who asked to be identified by her first name only, had a valid authorization when she left the country for a weekend in Cyprus to reset her tourist visa. When she tried to re-enter Israel, she said, she was held at the border and denied entry.
“I never got an email that my ETA had been revoked,” she recounted. “I never got any correspondence at all, and I never got anything written, that said that ETA had been canceled or revoked or anything.” Hours later she resubmitted the application from her phone and got an automatic rejection.
‘Nothing’s out of the question’
Critics of the volunteers say it is simply a law enforcement matter.
Naomi Kahn, director of the international division at Regavim, a right-wing Israeli legal advocacy group that campaigns against unauthorized Palestinian construction in the West Bank and lobbies for demolitions, said some of the accompaniment activity takes place in closed military zones and active IDF firing zones.
“It should not be considered unusual when a sovereign state chooses to deny entry to people whose declared intention is to break the law,” Kahn said. “It should come as no surprise when tourists are disinvited when they break the law. I don’t think this raises eyebrows anywhere else in the world.”
Closed military zones have become a point of contention between activists and the Israeli military. In late October 2025, two American Jewish women, Rachel Beth Flamholz and Leila Stillman-Utterback, were deported and banned from Israel for 10 years after entering a closed military zone imposed on the Palestinian village of Burin the same day they had arranged to pick olives there.
“In my experience, closed military zones are used as a tool to clear Palestinians and those supporting Palestinians, including us, from an area,” Roth said, “and by and large, to leave space for Israeli settlers to do whatever it is they want.”
Jacobs draws a distinction between conduct and status. A tourist who commits a crime in Israel is subject to Israeli law, she said, as a tourist would be subject to the law of any place they were visiting. That, she argues, is not what is happening here. None of the volunteers were charged with anything.
“These are the best of the best,” Jacobs said. “These are people who are devoting, in some cases, months or more of their lives, that they could be spending doing anything, to trying to make Israel a more just place for both Jews and Palestinians. And that’s exactly who Israel should want to be standing by and supporting.”
This fall, some will head to the West Bank as part of Protect the Harvest, an initiative run by an international coalition of Palestinian, American, Israeli and Jewish organizations responding to an invitation from Palestinian farmers. The campaign runs in week-long cohorts from mid-October through mid-November.
T’ruah is bringing a clergy delegation from Oct. 18 to 23, ending four days before Israel’s national elections. Jacobs expects many American rabbis on the ground, some bringing their own congregants.
“I don’t know what the Israeli government is going to do,” she said. “But I think if they decide they’re going to start deporting American rabbis, that would basically be picking a very big public fight with the American Jewish community.” Even people who haven’t been paying attention, she said, will be furious.
Asked whether she thought it was actually possible that an American rabbi could be deported during the harvest, she did not rule it out. “Nothing’s out of the question,” she said.
The post Israel is revoking entry permits for U.S. activists involved in West Bank appeared first on The Forward.
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A Jewish philanthropist funded this pioneering school for Black students. Now it’s getting a second life.
A small Kentucky town has saved a piece of Black history, with a little-known Jewish connection.
This summer, Sadieville, Kentucky — population 320 — opened an exhibit in a one-room schoolhouse that served Black students during segregation.
Built between 1917 and 1920, the school was partly funded by Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, an owner of Sears, Roebuck and Company who gave much of his fortune away as part of a collaboration with the influential Black educator Booker T. Washington.
The Sadieville school was one of 5,000 schools for Black students across 15 states that Rosenwald helped fund. The schools transformed Black education across the rural South during the Jim-Crow era, dramatically improving students’ literacy rates and economic mobility.
But today, many of the schoolhouses are in danger of abandonment. As preservationists seek federal recognition of Rosenwald schools in Congress through a proposed national park, the residents of Sadieville took matters into their own hands.
“It is one of our little special treasures that we have here, because there are so few of them remaining in the United States,” Laura Centers, Sadieville’s city clerk, told the Forward. “We want to protect our history.”
Recently introduced legislation in both the House and Senate would help protect that history nationally, but both bills have languished in committee. To pass, they will need Republican support — at a time when the National Park Service is already dealing with staffing shortages and a slim budget. So far, Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia is the only Republican to sign on.
Sadieville would not be included in the proposed national park, which would initially cover three schools in Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia, along with a headquarters in Chicago. But Dorothy Canter, a retired biophysicist who leads the Rosenwald national park campaign, said local preservation efforts are still essential to the broader movement.
“It helps the campaign because it’s a part of history,” Canter said. “It’s part of Sadieville history.”
As one of more than 150 Rosenwald schools in Kentucky, the Sadieville school operated until integration in 1954 — the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Pioneering journalist Alice Allison Dunnigan, the first Black woman to receive White House press credentials, taught at a Rosenwald school in New Hope, Kentucky.
Getting the Sadieville school in shape for visitors was not easy. During a 14-year renovation of the schoolhouse, the town dealt with termite damage, replaced the pine floors, restored the building’s foundation, patched the drywall on the walls and ceiling, rehabbed windows, and replaced doors.
The town also added historically accurate furnishings, including a chalkboard, desks scattered across the room, and a coal stove for heat. Because the school lacked electricity, large windows provided natural light. The sparse decor includes a photo of Abraham Lincoln and a book about Nicodemus, Kansas, a Reconstruction-era Black farming town founded by a group of formerly enslaved people who fled Kentucky seeking land ownership.
The project was funded by a combination of community donations and national support, with a $10,000 grant from Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, $7,000 from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and $2,000 from Friends of Sadieville, Inc.
Staffing the exhibit in such a small town is also a challenge, Centers said. The school opened to the public for only two days this summer. After the initial unveiling on June 19 — in honor of Juneteenth – it will open again on August 15.
But Centers hopes those two days will generate enough interest to justify opening for more days next summer.
The exhibit is meaningful for the entire town, she said, but especially for Rosenwald students’ descendants.
“We just want to get the word out there that we do have this,” Centers said. “It’s important to a lot of people’s history.”
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