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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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Manhattan Central Synagogue attacker faces federal hate crime charges
(JTA) — The man accused of disrupting Shabbat services at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue last week now faces federal hate crimes charges in addition to the state ones leveled against him immediately after the attack.
“These charges serve as notice that the Department of Justice will intervene to protect the public in the face of antisemitic and racially motivated attacks,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement on Tuesday.
Larry Montes, 46, of the Bronx, New York, was charged with two counts of committing hate crimes, each of which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, and one count of damage to religious property resulting in bodily injury, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
During the attack last Friday at the Reform synagogue in Manhattan, Montes, who was sitting near the front of the sanctuary, allegedly stood up nine minutes into the service and began shouting, “You know who the f–ck I am.”
Montes then approached the stage of the synagogue and knocked over two ceremonial silver candle sticks, causing them to be damaged, according to the complaint filed by an FBI agent investigating the case.
As the synagogue’s head of security attempted to remove Montes from the sanctuary, he then said “F–ck you people” and “I don’t f–ck with you people” before punching a 63-year-old congregant in the face and knocking her to the ground.
While Montes was handcuffed and arrested in the lobby of the synagogue, he then allegedly told a security guard “F–ck you [n-word]” and headbutted him near his left eye socket.
During his subsequent interview with NYPD officers following his arrest, he allegedly told officers, “F–ck the Jews. … It’s racial” and “I will never affiliate with no filthy f–cking synagogues, either here or in fucking Israel.” Montes allegedly told officers that he had felt disrespected at the service, so he “got up, start[ed] some sh–t, [and] smacked somebody around.”
When asked by NYPD officers why he felt disrespected at the service, Montes allegedly replied, “it’s all a racial thing” and that it was “all religious motivated.” Montes also stated during his post-arrest interview that he identified as Jewish, according to the complaint. Montes’ aunt previously told the New York Post that he was “mentally traumatized because of his desire to belong to that religion [Judaism].”
Montes has been in custody since his arrest immediately after Friday’s attack. He was arraigned that same night and is due in Manhattan Criminal Court on Thursday.
The federal charges come as the attack has sparked widespread condemnation from New York leaders, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and spurred a Jewish security watchdog group to call on the NYPD to place more officers in hotspots for potential hate crimes.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Manhattan Central Synagogue attacker faces federal hate crime charges appeared first on The Forward.
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He’s campaigning to regulate Texas oil and gas. Why is he linking his Jewish opponent to the Bolshevik Revolution?
A Texas race that would normally focus on oil wells, pipelines and energy policy has spilled into accusations of antisemitism.
In a fundraising email last month, Bo French, the Republican nominee for the powerful Texas Railroad Commission, circulated an AI-generated image of Jon Rosenthal, his Jewish Democratic opponent, smiling inside the room where Russia’s Romanov royal family was killed after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Rosenthal has “much in common with the Marxist revolutionaries who brutally executed the Romanov family,” the email reads. “My opponent has spent his time in office mocking Christianity, the Virgin Birth, and Christian Communion, while voting against religious liberty and for the spread of Islam.”
The text “Radical Rosenthal” with a blood-red outline overlays the black-and-white image.
“I do see it as antisemitic,” Rosenthal, the only Jewish member of the Texas statehouse, told the Forward. “Look at the history of the Bolsheviks and how the Jews were scapegoated. To invoke that here and now is disturbing.”
French did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
The message echoes the antisemitic conspiracy theory “Judeo-Bolshevism” that Jews created or controlled communism to undermine Western society. It became central to the Nazi propaganda used as a justification for violence against Jews. The fundraising email was first reported by Texas Monthly magazine.
“This is something that Jews have faced in the arena forever,” said Arthur Pronin, the Jewish president of the Meyerland Area Democrats Club in Houston. “This sort of thing that ‘They’re not one of us. They’re communists. They don’t have allegiance to the values of this country.’ It has a very specific resonance.”
Rosenthal, 63, was raised as a Reform Jew in an interfaith family, with a Jewish father and Christian mother. When Rosenthal was 14, he spent a year in Israel attending school in Hebrew and learning to speak the language while his father taught at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He later became a mechanical engineer and worked in the oil and gas industry for 30 years before entering politics in 2017. In 2018, Rosenthal was elected to the state legislature, taking his oath of office on a Torah he received as a bar mitzvah gift.
In an interview with the Forward last year, Rosenthal said that he has at times faced antisemitic comments from members in the state legislature, including stereotypical remarks about Jews and money.
“Antisemitism is alive and well in Texas,” Rosenthal told the Forward.
Last year, he led opposition to a bill requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom, which was signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in May 2025.
To underscore what he considered hypocrisy of self-identified Christian nationalists who supported the legislation, Rosenthal introduced an amendment to require the display of both the Jewish and Roman Catholic versions of the Ten Commandments, a measure that failed.
Rosenthal ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination for Railroad Commissioner. He is seeking to become the first Democrat in more than three decades to win a seat on the three-member commission, created in 1891, that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry. (Despite its name, the Railroad Commission stopped regulating railroads in 2005.) Members are elected to serve six-year terms.
Rosenthal, who previously flipped his district in northwest Houston from red to blue, is making a case that his victory would “rebuke the politics of hate.”
A recent poll of 1,200 likely voters, with a reported margin of error of plus or minus 2.8%, showed French with a slim three-point lead over Rosenthal. Rosenthal could benefit from the competitive U.S. Senate race, as other polls show Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton locked in a dead heat.
French’s past antisemitism accusations
It’s not the first time French, who previously served as a GOP leader in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, has been accused of antisemitism. Last June, he posted a social media poll asking “Who is a bigger threat to America?” and gave two options: “Jews” or “Muslims.”
After backlash, French deleted the poll and apologized, writing that “Some people clearly misunderstood the intent.” Ignoring calls to resign from high-ranking Texas Republicans, he announced in November 2025 that he was stepping down to run for railroad commissioner.
He narrowly won the Republican primary in May against the incumbent railroad commissioner, Jim Wright, with 50.5% of the vote.
Rather than focus solely on traditional regulatory issues in his campaign, French has infused culture war themes. His campaign website says he will end “the influence of radical Islam and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) in Texas oil” and strengthen the railroad commission’s “partnership with our allies like Israel.” In March, French called on the U.S. to deport 100 million people and for Texas Republicans to more openly condemn Islam.
“To be fair, he seems to be a pretty equal opportunity hater,” Rosenthal told the Forward. “He says antisemitic stuff, but he’s also Islamophobic and anti-immigrant.”
The state’s top Republicans — Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows — had all endorsed Wright in the primary. Now, all three are backing French.
Others won’t embrace French but see his victory as inevitable. Fred Zeidman, a Houston-based Jewish Republican donor who supported French’s rival in the primary, said the controversial campaign talking points are unrelated to the commission’s work on regulating gas and oil.
“I mean, I’m dead set against all that, and that’s why I worked against him,” said Zeidman, who serves as chairman of the board of Petroflow Energy, an independent oil and gas production and consulting firm. “Would I vote for him? Probably not. But he’s going to win. He might be effective at what he’s doing.”
The GOP support for French alarms Jewish Texans like Pronin, who said the candidate’s social media poll alone should have disqualified him.
The July fundraising email “should be roundly condemned by the Democratic Party, but also by Republicans,” Pronin said. “They’ve had a history of saying French is not acceptable. So why is it acceptable now?”
The post He’s campaigning to regulate Texas oil and gas. Why is he linking his Jewish opponent to the Bolshevik Revolution? appeared first on The Forward.
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‘An Israel run by undereducated Haredim risks being overrun by its enemies’
There is something surreal about Israel’s confrontation over Haredi education, which is rapidly coming to a boil. A dispute that has simmered for decades over whether ultra-Orthodox schools should be required to provide a basic secular education has become a test of something much larger: whether the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is still capable of governing in the interest of society when doing so threatens his own political survival.
At the center of the fight are the two major Haredi education networks, which educate most Haredi elementary-school children and receive full state funding in return for an obligation to teach the full core curriculum. For years, however, the state has largely failed to enforce that bargain, and the schools taught mainly religion.
The High Court in February demanded that the government explain why full funding continues despite failures to teach the required subjects. Still waiting for an answer, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara several days ago took the next logical step, declaring that continued funding will depend on schools actually teaching the core curriculum, employing qualified teachers, participating in national assessments and accepting meaningful state supervision.
The immediate fight is about schools and money, but there is a larger story.
The stakes are considerably larger than the argument over a few hours of mathematics or English. They concern whether Israel can remain the kind of modern state it has spent three-quarters of a century building.
Haredim already constitute almost a sixth of the population, their fertility rate remains around six and a half children per woman, and they account for more than a quarter of elementary-school pupils. On current demographic projections, their share of the population will continue rising dramatically for decades.
That might not in itself pose a national problem if the community were being equipped to participate fully in a sophisticated 21st-century economy. But among Haredi men especially, low employment, low earnings and weak proficiency in the basic skills demanded by the modern labor market remain profound problems.
A smaller proportion of highly productive workers would increasingly be asked to finance a larger population, sustain an advanced technological economy, support an expensive welfare state and pay for one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world.
At some point the math becomes strategic. An Israel that becomes substantially poorer will find it harder to finance cutting-edge weapons, intelligence, research, universities and the other institutions on which its military superiority depends. An Israel run by undereducated Haredim risks being overrun by its enemies.
Clearly this cannot continue. But the Likud-led right has spent years avoiding decisions that might antagonize indispensable Haredi coalition partners. When the moderates were in power they had little stomach for this fight, preferring to kick the can down the road as they focused on a resolution with the Palestinians.
That left the attorney general, the courts and the civil service to enforce rules that elected politicians have proved unwilling to defend.
It is important to note that in Israel the attorney general is a very powerful civil servant. Indeed, curtailing this power has been at the center of Netanyahu’s attempted “judicial reforms.”
Baharav-Miara has effectively ruled that one cannot demand the full financial benefits of the state system while rejecting the obligations that accompany them.
For years Israel has managed to avoid confronting this contradiction by maintaining requirements on paper while tolerating a political system in which they were weakly supervised, inconsistently enforced or simply ignored.
The numbers suggest how hollow enforcement became. Research by the Israel Democracy Institute found that only a small fraction of Haredi boys’ schools failing to meet core-curriculum requirements actually suffered budget reductions. It was a failure to make the rules mean anything.
The political explanation is not difficult to discern. Haredi parties have become indispensable to governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who became Israel’s longest-serving prime minister by cementing this alliance. Thus their bargaining power has allowed questions of education, avoiding military service and ever-growing public subsidies to become matters of coalition arithmetic rather than coherent national policy.
Governments understood that enforcing requirements could provoke a confrontation with parties on which their parliamentary survival depended, while postponing enforcement carried almost no immediate political cost – until now. It is the demographic reality caused by the Haredi birthrate that is transforming the argument over mathematics and English into an argument about Israel’s future.
Judging by statements from Israel’s leading opposition politicians, a new Israeli government led by them would address the issue of a core curriculum and take significant steps to end the Haredi draft evasion.
Meanwhile, even if Netanyahu somehow wins, continuing the status quo will be hard, as the High Court and the Attorney-General are now forcing the issue. The rulings mean that schools must demonstrate that they are teaching the required curriculum, employ appropriately trained teachers, participate in assessment programs, cooperate with supervision and enforcement mechanisms and comply with reporting requirements.
This, of course, intersects with Israel’s larger and increasingly poisonous argument about the power of judges, legal advisers and civil servants. There is a legitimate democratic concern when unelected officials acquire enormous influence over public policy. Neither judges nor attorneys general should be treated as infallible guardians whose decisions are beyond criticism. But there is another danger, and Israel has spent years demonstrating it: elected politicians can become so dependent on organized political interests that they cease to perform some of the basic functions for which they were elected: to protect the country from great dangers. In this case the dangers are internal – and for all the regional wars of the past several years, the main coming conflict in Israel will be the one within.
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