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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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The post A Jewish museum exhibit features the Palestinian flag. Some visitors wonder if it belongs. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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In ‘31 Candles,’ a manchild becomes bar mitzvah to court his crush
In the thick of 31 Candles, a cockeyed rom-com about a 30-something’s ploy to become an adult bar mitzvah to get closer to a childhood crush, a one-night stand observes a jar of pickles in the kitchen of our hero’s Brooklyn apartment.
“Really?” she asks.
“I’m embracing cultural stereotypes,” he tells her, “What do you want me to do?”
To speak for myself: less.
Entering a now crowded field of rabbinically-inspired romantic comedies, the film — written, directed and edited by Jonah Feingold who also stars — wears its influences on its snide sleeve. A Nora Ephron autumn. Woody Allen-esque narration and titles. New York is a character!
Feingold plays Leo Kadner, a director for Lifetime and Hallmark Channel-coded Christmas films (Feingold, in real life, helmed the 2023 streamer EXmas). When he reconnects with an old flame from camp at his nephew’s bris, and learns she tutors b’nai mitzvah, he decides it’s finally time to become a man and make falling in love his bar mitzvah project.
There’s only one snag, beyond the obvious ick of the subterfuge: Feingold’s tutor, Eva (Sarah Coffey) is not the least bit interested. While the two have some kidding chemistry, it’s not a love match. The movie knows it — but the audience catches on quicker than it does.
There’s an element of subversion in Feingold’s approach, but the humor is packed in the same old schmaltz.
Leo’s mom (Jackie Sandler) somehow orders an off-the-menu martini at Barney Greengrass, while his father mentions a great uncle who invested with Jeffrey Epstein. Zabar’s black-and-white cookies play a featured role. Caroline Aaron (who already starred in a much better adult bar mitzvah film) as Leo’s grandmother, listens to his spiel on dating apps and the etiquette of Instagraming with your “situationship” at a shiva.
Watching Feingold confide in Aaron, I wondered who this movie was for. Its weekday screenings at Quad Cinema in the Village and at Movies of Delray in Florida would suggest an older crowd. A seminal discussion of an OTPHJ (over the pants handjob) and the celebrity dating app Raya suggests a younger audience that would likely groan at this sub-Apatowian dialogue.
One could contend it is for young Jews with old souls or older people who are young at heart. I kinda consider myself both and rolled my eyes throughout.
That it belongs to a growing school of self-aware comedy writing wherein every character seems to have taken at least a level one improv class, is irksome, but its use of Judaism is perhaps most objectionable.
Nothing in the film is glaringly wrong — though how Leo could struggle with basic brachas after having spent many summers at a Jewish sleepaway camp raises eyebrows — but it resists its natural endpoint of finding the rite of passage meaningful for its own sake.
Leo learns a lesson on love, and offers it in the form of his drash on his Torah portion, Jacob and Rachel’s meet cute at the well, but he finds no deeper significance in his tradition, beyond a largely played-for-laughs visit to the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust with his situationship.
A connection to peoplehood is not Leo’s consolation prize. The bar mitzvah process turns out to be a vehicle for his pathetic epiphany that she’s just not that into him. (The logic of 31 Candles calls to mind a better treatment of manhood and entitlement on an episode of Seinfeld where the bar mitzvah boy has eyes on Elaine.)
If there were now a dearth of Jewish content, Feingold’s film might be a refreshingly frothy entry to the American Jewish pantheon. As it stands, though, it feels like we’re being served Shiva Baby and Bad Shabbos’ reheated leftovers with more jokes about product placement and AI.
Like 31 candles glowing on a cake, the film is eye-catching and ultimately excessive. And, like the cake itself, it’s a confection that goes down easy enough — even if it may give you a stomachache.
The post In ‘31 Candles,’ a manchild becomes bar mitzvah to court his crush appeared first on The Forward.
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In Gaza, It’s Déjà vu All Over Again
A Red Cross vehicle, escorted by a van driven by a Hamas terrorist, moves in an area within the so-called “yellow line” to which Israeli troops withdrew under the ceasefire, as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages seized during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in Gaza City, Nov. 12, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alk
Eleven years ago, the 2014 Hamas rocket war against Israel ended in a ceasefire.
In the ensuing years, Israel and the United States should have learned something about “ceasefires” as opposed to “peace.” President Donald Trump’s ceasefire plan, however, has the flaw that every single such plan has had (in the territories and in Lebanon): the failure of anti-terror forces to control territory and enforce the rules. In the absence of that, Hamas has reemerged and is rearming in Gaza.
As I wrote in 2014:
The Hamas rockets have, for the time being, stopped; the current cease-fire is holding. The tunnel threat, a strategic one most Israelis had not understood until several days into the war, has been alleviated; many Hamas rocket manufacturing facilities have been destroyed; a substantial percentage of the Hamas arsenal has been used up; and Hamas achieved none of its strategic goals — not large-scale Israeli casualties or physical destruction, an airport, a seaport, or the opening of border crossings. Israeli children have returned to school and, after a brief dip, the Israeli economy is expected to grow for the year.
Those were the days of “mowing the grass.” Eliminating the visible threats.
As I asked at the time:
To the extent that the Israeli public wanted the destruction or elimination of Hamas, or an end to the rocket threat, it was doomed by its unreasonable expectations. Americans suffer similarly. Having understood the Islamic State [IS] as a threat not only in Syria and Iraq, but also to our interests and potentially to our own country, they want it gone. The question for the American government, as it is for the Israeli government, is: “How do you defeat an armed ideological movement with a territorial base if you are unwilling to fight in that territorial base?”
President Barack Obama spoke of “degrading, dismantling, and destroying” ISIS. He never said how — and neither has President Trump.
Try this:
Control of territory and the ability to subject one’s enemies to enforceable rules is the only known mechanism for ending, rather than managing, a war. Despite the Western propensity for “peace processes” and negotiations, it is hard (impossible?) to find a historical example of one side simply agreeing to give up its mission, arms, ideology, or interests without a forcing mechanism — military defeat.
We don’t like to talk about “winners” and “losers,” preferring to “split the difference” or find a “win-win” formula. But “peace” itself was defined by Machiavelli as “the conditions imposed by the winners on the losers of the last war.” There are different iterations of “peace,” depending on whether the winners institute good or bad conditions. There can be a cold peace, a warm peace, or the peace of the dead. The peace that followed WWI contained the seeds of WWII; the peace after WWII produced the German economic miracle.
Even when wars aren’t “won,” control of territory and enforceable rules can make the difference between long-term success and failure – the US military has been in South Korea since the 1953 Armistice, allowing a democratic, technologically advanced society to emerge despite the continuing threat from the impoverished, heavily armed, and dangerous North. The withdrawal of American forces from South Vietnam within months of the armistice there allowed North Vietnam to capture territory and impose a communist government on a single Vietnamese entity. Although NATO faced Russia across the Fulda Gap, there is no denying that the Allied presence also enforced anti-Nazi rules in West Germany.
October 7, 2023, brought about a change in Israeli military thinking. A ceasefire is no longer enough. Hamas, in Israel’s view, has to be disarmed and ripped out of the territory in a verifiable and enforceable manner. The IDF is making plans to reassert itself across the yellow line. The US appears more interested in bringing Turkish troops into Gaza, a move rejected not only by Israel but, oddly, by Egypt. Qatari troops are no better. Both are Muslim Brotherhood partners of Hamas.
As I wrote:
The enemies of Israel and the West are similar. Ideological similarities aside, both are vicious and absolutist, and neither plays by Western rules regarding women, children, religious diversity or war crimes. Both rely on the relative gentility of their adversaries — Israel and the West — to protect them from ultimate defeat. Thus far, theirs is the correct bet.
Or at least it was.
The difficulty now will be bringing the US and Israel to the meeting point. President Trump was there. He called for ,“Hell to rain down on Hamas.” But now he appears to have changed his mind. Talk, negotiate, promise, offer, talk some more. This simply provides time for Hamas to rearm and reassert itself among the people of Gaza. And Hamas is using the time.
The US and its allies have to acknowledge the original flaw in the plan — both in 2014 and 2025. Without a military presence determined to uproot and destroy Hamas in whatever manner the military deems necessary, “peace plans” and “ceasefires” are simply wishes and, with due respect to Yogi Berra, “Déjà vu all over again.”
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly magazine.
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Bias and Distortion: When the BBC Becomes the Story
The BBC logo is displayed above the entrance to the BBC headquarters in London, Britain, July 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams
“Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation” (Micah 4:3).
That is unironically the official motto of the British Broadcasting Company, otherwise known as the BBC. And yet in recent weeks, the world has watched the opposite unfold: a state-funded broadcaster selectively edited footage to falsely imply that President Trump was actively inciting the January 6th Capitol riot. Presumably done because they believed the “truth” of their worldview mattered more than the truth of the footage.
This rightfully ignited an international scandal and a crisis of legitimacy. The BBC has offered a terse apology — but that apology rings hollow, given that the BBC has engaged in this behavior for decades — especially when it comes to covering the Jewish State.
The same editorial scalpel that carved Trump’s words, has for decades, performed cosmetic surgery on Middle Eastern reality. This stems from their belief that narrative truth supersedes factual truth — and that the BBC are the arbiters of all things truth.
The BBC represents the old-school institutional brand of nuanced antisemitism: never say explicitly what can be more effectively implied.
Israel is forever the aggressor and villain. Anything that contradicts that reality in any way whatsoever — from Palestinian terrorism, to Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas’ constant rejection of an Israeli state — is simply ignored.
Things simply happen, without agency, causality, or perpetrators — at least for one side of the conflict.
This is antisemitism through narrative staging. Israel is the intentional actor; its enemies are organisms responding to their environment. Israel’s choices are scrutinized; Hamas’ choices are naturalized.
To the BBC, Israel becomes a narrative accelerant while its enemies are granted the dignity of inevitability. The BBC does not invent the facts; it simply removes context. In the absence of evidence, it encourages audiences to “draw their own conclusions” — because, after all, the network is “just asking questions.” The result is reflexive antisemitism, an atmosphere rather than an argument.
According to a recent report in The Telegraph, the BBC has been forced to correct, on average, two anti-Israel Gaza stories a week since October 7th. This is not journalism; it is groupthink manipulation funded by the British public.
The ancient Greeks had a word for speech that abandons truth while avoiding outright lies: sophistry. Protagoras defined this worldview when he said, “Man is the measure of all things.” Truth becomes subjective, determined by what you want your audience to believe. Sophists mastered narrative manipulation and engineered entire populations with it.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle held a unanimous antipathy for all things sophistry. They believed the sophist class posed a greater threat to the republic than foreign invasion.
Plato warned that democracy becomes theatre when society loses the ability to distinguish between truth and plausibility. He could have been describing the 21st-century BBC.
The BBC has become the global engine for adjusting the Overton window — not just disparaging President Trump and American relations, but normalizing sympathy for terrorist groups, and delegitimizing Israel’s sovereignty. What are the effects of these manipulations on world events and British relations? The BBC is no longer a news organization; it is a mood architectural firm.
The Greeks understood the peril to democracy when sophistry overwhelmed truth. Throughout history this pattern has repeated itself for civilizations that ignored the early warning signs. Those signs are flashing again — and not merely at the fringes, but at the very apex of Britannia’s most trusted institution.
There is always a moment before the point of no return when better angels can still prevail. This is that moment. If “Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation” is to retain any meaning, it must begin with truth. Peace built on sophistry is merely sophistry.
Britain’s closest ally is the United States, and its most besieged ally is Israel. The BBC chose to malign both, not accidentally, but institutionally.
You cannot claim moral authority while eroding the foundations of your own alliances. You cannot claim neutrality while waging narrative warfare. And just as the Greeks warned — so it begins.
Philip Gross is a London-based American businessman and writer whose work focuses on politics, culture, and Jewish history. Born in New York and living in Britain for three decades, he writes from a transatlantic perspective shaped by a career in global commodities and a lifelong engagement with Jewish thought and contemporary affairs.