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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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Antisemitic flyers turn up in Ontario neighborhood where a man charged at a synagogue two weeks ago
(JTA) — Police in the Ontario town where a gunman charged the Sons of Jacob synagogue on Yom Kippur are investigating antisemitic flyers distributed around the synagogue’s neighborhood..
In an Oct. 1 press release, Belleville, Ontario, police encouraged those with tips or video evidence to contact police.
“We recognize that incidents such as this can cause concern within our community,” the police said. “Hate has no place in Belleville, and the Belleville Police Service remains in contact with community leaders and are taking proactive steps to support the safety and well-being of residents.”
Police have not identified the distributor of the flyers, and no arrests have been made.
The Canadian Jewish News published photos of the flyers, which included antisemitic conspiracy theories, such as “every single aspect of the Covid agenda is Jewish” and “every single aspect of abortion is Jewish.”
Coming so soon after the attack, the flyers rattled Sons of Jacob congregant Sari Watson, 40. “It’s so incredibly concerning to see this sort of antisemitic rhetoric surface, less than two weeks after the shooting,” said Watson, who skipped attending services the night of the shooting because she was wary of the increase in antisemitic violence in Canada. “This is a sign that this sort of hatred has infiltrated the public consciousness here.”
Belleville police chief Murray Rodd has confirmed the Sept. 20 attack was deliberate.
“This was an exclusive threat to our Jewish community,” he said soon after the attack. “There is no indication there was a threat to any other population or segment of our community, and it was a hate-motivated crime.”
According to police and Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit, the shooter, identified as 29-year-old Sean Ward of nearby Quinte West, Ontario, opened fire on Const. Jeff Smith, who was stationed outside the synagogue as security. Smith, who was seriously wounded, returned fire, and another officer who arrived at the scene also fired at Ward. Ward later died of his injuries. Smith remains hospitalized.
A GoFundMe site dedicated to Smith’s recovery has raised nearly $1 million on behalf of the Canadian Jewish community.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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From ‘false flag’ to ‘Bibiwood’: flydubai attack spawns conspiracy theories
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – A young girl steps out of the bathroom on a flight and glimpses a bloody scene unfolding in the cockpit: the co-pilot is attacking the pilot with an axe. She screams for help.
A handful of unarmed passengers, still tanned from their vacations in Thailand, rushes by her, successfully grabbing the control wheel as the plane plunges 17,000 feet. They also manage to save the life of the bloodied pilot.
It sounds like the climactic scene from a high-stakes action movie, yet by now most people know that this is what happened last week on a Tel Aviv-bound flydubai jet.
Or did it happen? It is so fantastical that maybe it is just a fabricated story or an event staged by Israel’s Mossad? That is what millions of people on social media seem to be suggesting in online posts.
Even after nonstop media interviews with the hero pilot or with the ordinary passengers who took control of the plane, conspiracy theories about the attempted hijacking are swirling. Some mockingly insist the event never happened. Others say it was a false flag operation. And many of the comments invoke deep-rooted antisemitic tropes.
Some accuse Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of staging the incident for political survival or to divert attention from the war in Gaza. Others say it was an attempt by Israel to play the victim or garner global sympathy.
“Brought to you by Bibiwood Productions,” wrote one person commenting on a CNN report posted on Facebook.
“Just stop already,” wrote another person beneath CBS’s clip of interviews with the men who fought the rogue co-pilot posted to Instagram. “It’s seriously embarrassing at this point. We didn’t believe it when the news broke; we didn’t believe it the first time you aired this interview. Reposting clips will not convince anyone with half a brain.”
“Bulls–t,” wrote another person.
Monitoring online responses as the attempted hijacking was unfolding last Wednesday, the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Antisemitism Research Center found that the first conspiracy theories were posted just 67 minutes after the plane sent its first distress signal.
Within five hours, the ARC documented 1,000 hostile posts, and after 12 hours, 2,963 posts. The posts generated at least 30,000 likes and more than 3 million views.
“The fact is that internet companies have promoted a much more open free-speech policy these days, especially on Instagram and X,” said Sacha Roytman, CAM’s Chief Executive Officer, adding that it’s not just the posts that are problematic but also the comments they generate.
“They [the social media platforms] don’t control information anymore; they don’t want to control it,” he said.
Roytman added that another factor is that agitators – likely from Russia or Qatar – have learned how to build an effective bot network to spread misinformation. When the first post appeared after only 67 minutes, he said, “we knew it was not a human posting because no one cares to go online and start posting [that fast].”
“They were activated extremely fast and set up the stage to create an environment that’s toxic enough for other users to be inspired to find the stories they need to build their own claims,” Roytman said.
Amit Cohen, a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies and an expert in cyberattacks and digital fraud, said that during such events, “there is often a gap between what the public wants to know and the amount of verified information available at that moment.
“That is exactly the kind of environment in which rumors and conspiracy theories can develop very quickly,” she said. “In this case, claims appeared online within a short period of time suggesting that the event did not happen as reported, that the videos were fake, or that the incident was staged or a false flag.
“Posts like these are not necessarily the original source of the conspiracy theory,” she said, “but they can function as ignition points.”
Cohen said it was important to distinguish between those who “deliberately create disinformation and those who spread it.”
“Someone may share misleading content simply because it fits what they already believe, because it provokes a strong emotional reaction, or even because it seems interesting or ‘worth looking into,’” she said. “They do not need to know where the message originated, and they certainly do not need to be part of any coordinated campaign.”
Gal Yavetz, a senior lecturer of Artificial Intelligence at Bar-Ilan University, said the flydubai story was so incredible, it left many people “looking for answers.”
“Inevitably, some people will accept more natural explanations, and others, who are more extreme, will go and blame the Jews for it,” Yavetz said, pointing out that similar conspiracy theories arose over the summer when thousands of Moroccan nationals flooded Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta in July.
“Every time there is something that we can’t really understand, that we can’t really explain, we blame the usual suspects — the Jews, the Jews who control the world, the Jews who are the natural scapegoat,” he said, adding that since the Oct. 7, 2023, deadly Hamas raids in Israel, conspiracy theories have become commonplace and all it takes is for a handful of people to start questioning the veracity of the events.
Posts by Egyptian-born, LA-based political satirist Bassem Youssef, known for his controversial comments about Israel and Jews, are a good example. In a series of videos, he mocks the flydubai event and raises suspicions about what really happened.
In one clip posted on X and viewed 130,000 times, Youssef, whose career was supercharged in 2012 when he was boosted by Jewish comedian Jon Stewart, even terms it a “Hollywood production,” drawing on what critics say are familiar antisemitic conspiracy tropes about Jewish control of Hollywood and, by extension, the world.
“I wish it was chatbots, but the truth of the matter is that social media is a breeding ground for this kind of discourse,” said Yavetz, who specializes in social media, political communication and the spread of misinformation and disinformation online.
“They are definitely helping to spread and to reshare most of this misinformation and disinformation, but we know from previous studies that it is really just a negligible number compared to just regular people who are going to the more extreme sides and just taking their own outrageous opinions to social media just because it is now so easy to do so,” he said.
“You don’t really need to do much; you just need to make sure that you can stand behind your claims, and all of a sudden an outrageous post will have 1,000 likes, then 10,000 likes, and these comments are just circulating again and again, going from Facebook to WhatsApp to Messenger and back to Twitter with screenshots and back to Instagram… It’s a flood that you can’t really stop by taking out an umbrella,” Yavetz said.
INSS’s Cohen, who is also a national security expert with the Dvorah Forum, a group that promotes women’s voices in foreign policy, said that “conspiracy theories are not new, but the digital environment has changed their speed, scale, and the ability to obscure where a message originally came from.”
She explained that “in the past, there were more intermediaries between the person producing information and a large audience. Today, a single account can post a claim and reach very large audiences within a very short time.”
And, Cohen added, AI has made the problem worse.
“Mainly because it has dramatically reduced the time, cost, and skill required to create convincing content,” she said.
It has also made it harder for people to believe what appears on their screens.
“The problem is no longer only that AI can create fake content that looks real. It also makes it easier to dismiss real content by claiming that it is fake,” said Cohen. “Once the public knows that convincing images, audio, and video can be artificially generated, the existence of visual evidence no longer necessarily ends the debate.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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The new U.S. passport design is fueling a Star of David conspiracy theory. Here’s what’s really there.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled a new U.S. passport design last week, online sleuths zeroed in on a curious detail: “Is that the star of david???” one TikTok user commented on a video of Rubio showing off the document’s revamped look.
“Why do we rock the Star of David on American passports?” asked an X user in a post that garnered 1.6 million views.
The symbol was not, in fact, the Star of David, but rather 13 stars arranged in a hexagram, representing the original 13 colonies. The design is part of the official Great Seal of the United States, approved by the Continental Congress in 1782 as the official symbol for the newly sovereign country.
The hexagram shape wasn’t a new addition to the passport, either. The Great Seal has long been a fixture of the U.S. passport cover; the new design just enlarges it. The seal — including the cluster of 13 stars in a hexagram — appears on all sorts of government materials, including military uniforms, official presidential documents, and the dollar bill.
The shape’s resemblance to the Magen David, however, has long fueled conspiracy theories about secret Jewish or Israeli influence over the U.S. government. To some online commentators, the redesigned passport was fresh confirmation of that belief.
“It’s a colony of israel (sic) so it makes sense to pay homage to their owners,” a TikToker commented about the new design.
The seal’s history
Shortly after they adopted the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers had another important matter to attend to: appointing a committee to design a seal for the United States.
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams made up the all-star team. Franklin suggested an image of Moses parting the Red Sea. Jefferson wanted “the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.” Adams preferred an image of Hercules, the Greek hero known for his strength.
Evidently, none of them had a great eye for graphic design. Congress tabled their proposals.
Two more committees took up the project. In 1782, Secretary of the Continental Congress Charles Thomson integrated the various committees’ ideas into a new design, which featured a bald eagle, a shield, an olive branch and arrows, and a constellation of 13 stars. Congress approved the seal that year.
Thomson described the design as featuring “thirteen stars forming a constellation”; he did not specify a hexagram or six-pointed star. Original sketches, in fact, show the stars in a seemingly random arrangement.
Robert Scot, the chief engraver of the United States Mint, is credited with arranging the 13 stars into the six-pointed geometric star.
According to legend, George Washington ordered the 13 stars arranged as a Star of David as a tribute to Haym Salomon, a Jewish financier who aided the Revolutionary cause. But there’s no historical evidence of that, nor that Washington or Salomon had any role at all in designing the seal.
One plausible theory is that Scot may have simply been emulating the arrangement of stars on the American flag at the time, rearranging the 13 stars to fit symmetrically inside a circular field.
Even so, the myth of the Star of David intentionally appearing on the seal has reached as far as former presidential candidate Ben Carson, who in 2015 suggested that “Salomon gave all his funds to save the U.S. Army and, some say, no one knows for sure, that’s the reason there’s a Star of David on the back of the one dollar bill.”
Historians were quick to correct the record.
“If you squint, you can say there’s some resemblance but that certainly was not the intention of the designers, that we’re aware,” Wayne Homren of the Numismatic Bibliomania Society, which studies currency, told ABC News.
The theory behind the theory
Kent Harber, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University who studies conspiracy theories, said the passport claim fits within the emerging zeitgeist, in which “conspiracy beliefs about Jews and Israel are getting an increasing amount of currency.”
In this case, gaps in the historical record surrounding the hexagram’s design may have helped the theory take hold.
“We can’t take ‘no reason’ for an answer,” Harber said. “We have to have an explanation, and we will fill in that blank with other explanations, even bogus, sometimes sort of seemingly silly ones.”
Harber’s research has found a strong relationship between conspiracy theories, antisemitic attitudes, and hostility toward Israel.
Conspiracy theories are like “epistemological junk food,” he said. “They satisfy this craving by giving you exactly what you want, even though it’s not particularly good for you or for society.”
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