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A Talmudic tale gets a 12th-century Chinese twist in children’s book aimed at diverse Jewish readers

TAIPEI, Taiwan (JTA) — Rabbi Akiva’s daughter was destined for death on her wedding day, at least according to the star-gazers. So the early Jewish sage seemed resigned to his daughter’s fate.

But on the wedding day, Rabbi Akiva’s daughter offered a poor old man her portion of the wedding feast. That night, before going to bed, she removed her hairpin and stuck it in the wall. In the morning, she discovered that the hairpin had pierced the eye of a poisonous snake, which trailed after the pin as she pulled it from the wall.

“Charity saves from death,” Rabbi Akiva declared.

Erica Lyons doesn’t remember the first time she heard this Talmud story, but she can’t forget its many strange omissions and inconsistencies. What rabbi listened to astrologers? Why wasn’t Rabbi Akiva worried about his daughter’s fate? And why didn’t Rabbi Akiva’s daughter have a name of her own?

“It sort of made me think of Jephtha’s daughter, this other girl who is going to potentially be sacrificed for the sake of a story, of a lesson of some sort,” said Lyons, referencing another biblical character from the Book of Judges.

Lyons’ new children’s book, “Zhen Yu and the Snake,” published last week with rich illustrations by Renia Metallinou, seeks to fill in those gaps — with a twist. The story is set in 12th-century Kaifeng, China, the city where Persian Jewish merchants established China’s first Jewish community. Its main characters are all Chinese Jews — Rabbi Akiva becomes Li Jian and his daughter finally gets a name, too: Zhen Yu, which means “precious jade” in Chinese. The astrologer in the story becomes a fortune-teller from the Chinese city of Chengdu, which was home to several famous fortune-tellers at the time.

At the time, Kaifeng was China’s vibrant Song Dynasty capital. Its location on the Yellow River, not far from the Silk Road, made it a commercial center bustling with merchants. The Silk Road trading route had attracted hundreds of Jews to China, who settled there around the 9th or 10th century and peacefully worshiped their own god for centuries.

In Lyons’ version of the story, Zhen Yu is the main character, who lives a life of virtue long before getting married. Common in Chinese culture, the presence of the fortune-teller feels natural in the Kaifeng market, where he reveals Zhen Yu’s fate to Li Jian on an afternoon before Shabbat.

Lyons stays loyal to the source text, highlighting the characters’ observance of Jewish law and the importance of Jewish values in their lives. But the setting and characters make the story more accessible to non-Ashkenazi readers, she said.

“The Talmud belongs to all Jews around the world,” said Tani Prell, creative director at Be’chol Lashon, a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness about the racial, cultural, and ethnic diversity in Judaism, primarily through education. Encouraging teachers to include diverse Jewish stories is “a hard thing to do” when those resources are limited, Prell said. “So I think it’s beautiful that Erica is creating the resources that do have such a direct impact on the lived experiences of young Jews of color.”

A page from “Zhen Yu and the Snake.” (Courtesy of Erica Lyons)

Lyons, who has been living in Hong Kong for over two decades, had always wanted to be a writer. In college, she majored in English and Jewish Studies but began her career as a lawyer for an insurance company in New York. When she moved to Hong Kong with her husband in 2002, she saw the opportunity to get back to her undergrad roots.

Today, she is deeply involved with Hong Kong’s historic Jewish community, whose foundations were built by Baghdadi-Jewish dynasties such as the Sassoons and the Kadoories in the 19th and 20th centuries. The city’s Jewish population has fluctuated over the years but remains about 3,000-4,000 strong today with six congregations to choose from. Lyons chairs the Hong Kong Jewish Historical Society and serves as the Hong Kong delegate to the World Jewish Congress.

As a Persian-Ashkenazi Jew who is raising Chinese children, Lyons has prioritized the inclusion of Jews of diverse experiences in her work in Hong Kong. As a journalist and founder of Asian Jewish Life, a magazine that spotlighted Jewish stories in Asia from 2008 until 2016, she has always been fascinated by “Jewish stories in the margins” — little-known bits of Jewish history or traditions that have gone overlooked by the Jewish majority living in the West.

Today, few families in Kaifeng still observe Judaism and those who do have been forced underground as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s policy of repressing and limiting a range of religions. Judaism is not one of the country’s five officially recognized religions (Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Daoism and Islam), and Kaifeng’s Jews are seen by the state as part of the Han Chinese ethnic majority — not Jews. Little Jewish iconography remains on the old streets of Kaifeng today, and a majority of the country’s Jewish population are expatriates living in commercial centers such as Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen.

Lyons’ book comes at a time when Jewish stories from Asia — especially stories of Jewish escape and survival in China and Japan during World War II — are receiving a wave of attention. In this year alone, stories about Jewish refugees in Asia have been the subject of multiple novels, an exhibition in New York City, a musical and two high-profile symphony performances.

In these stories, China is often a temporary backdrop against which Western Jewish stories are set. There is less awareness of the history of the Chinese Jewish community in Kaifeng, Lyons said.

“In this way, I was able to educate people without being didactic in any way. I didn’t just pick a random city in China and plop my characters into it. I picked a Jewish community, and I think a lot of people are not aware that [Kaifeng] was a historic community,” she said.

Erica Lyons is also the chair of the Hong Kong Jewish Historical Society. (Courtesy of Lyons)

Books for young readers about Chinese or Asian Jews, in particular, have been rare. But the widening availability of literature about diverse Jews in recent years is creating more demand for these stories, said Prell. 

Nicholas Zane, a master’s student at Dartmouth University whose family immigrated to the United States from China with the help of a Jewish family in the Catskills, has been developing accessible information about the Kaifeng Jews through a website, nonfiction books and picture books in Chinese and English. “Two New Years,” a picture book published last month by Richard Ho, tells the story of a family that celebrates both Rosh Hashanah in the fall and Chinese New Year in the spring.

“There’s these stories that people don’t know, and to be able to tell them and bring them to Jewish children, and children generally, is really incredible,” Lyons said.

But there are still gaps, Lyons said, and she has been busy trying to help fill them with several other forthcoming picture books on the way. “Counting on Naamah,” also released on Sept. 5, turns Noah’s wife Naamah into a mathematical genius. In the coming year, her other releases will tell the stories of an 1881 Yemenite aliyah journey, the Indian Bnei Israel Jews (illustrated by renowned Indian-Jewish artist Siona Benjamin) and a Chinese-Jewish girl who must figure out how to celebrate Sukkot and the mid-Autumn festival on the same night.

“Racial diversity amongst the Jewish people is not a new thing. It has been there. That’s another reason why I also think it’s very, very cool for Erica’s books, that with ‘Zhen Yu and the Snake’ and ‘Naamah,’ it’s these stories that have been part of Jewish tradition over time,” said Prell.


The post A Talmudic tale gets a 12th-century Chinese twist in children’s book aimed at diverse Jewish readers appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Boston University Rejects Proposal to Divest From Israel

College students in the Boston, Massachusetts area hold dueling demonstrations amid Israel’s war with Hamas in April 2024. Photo: Vincent Ricci via Reuters Connect

Boston University has rejected the group Students for Justice in Palestine’s (SJP) call for its endowment to be divested of holdings in companies which sell armaments to the Israeli military, becoming the latest higher education institution to refuse this key tenet of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

“The endowment is no longer the vehicle for political debate; nevertheless, I will continue to seek ways that members of our community can engage with each other on political issues of our day including the conflict in the Middle East,” university president Melissa Gilliam said on Tuesday in a statement which reported the will of the board of trustees. “Our traditions of free speech and academic freedom are critical to who we are as an institution, and so is our tradition of finding common ground to engage difficult topics while respecting the dignity of every individual.”

Gilliam’s announcement comes amid SJP’s push to hold a student government administered referendum on divestment, a policy goal the group has pursued since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Its hopes were dashed on Tuesday when what SJP described as “technical difficulties” caused the referendum to be postponed indefinitely. However, SJP hinted that the delay may have been caused by its failing to draw a “representative sample of BU’s undergraduate population” to the polls.

SJP’s relationship with the university is poor, according to The Daily Free Press, Boston University’s official campus newspaper. In November, the Student and Activities Office issued the group a “formal warning” following multiple violations of policies on peaceful assembly. SJP, the Free Press said, occupied an area of the Center for Computing and Data Sciences for two days and tacked anti-Zionist propaganda — which included accusations that Boston University profits from “death” — on school property inside the building despite being forewarned that doing so is verboten. Following the disciplinary action, SJP accused the university of being “discriminatory towards SJP and our events.”

American universities have largely rejected demands to divest from Israel and entities at all linked to the Jewish state, delivering a succession of blows to the pro-Hamas protest movement that students and faculty have pushed with dozens of illegal demonstrations aimed at coercing officials into enacting the policy.

Trinity College turned away BDS advocates in November, citing its “fiduciary responsibilities” and “primary objective of maintaining the endowment’s intergeneration equity.” It also noted that acceding to demands for divestment for the sake of “utilizing the endowment to exert political influence” would injure the college financially, stressing that doing so would “compromise our access to fund managers, in turn undermining the board’s ability to perform its fiduciary obligation.”

The University of Minnesota in August pointed to the same reason for spurning divestment while stressing the extent to which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict polarizes its campus community. It coupled its pronouncement with a new investment policy, a so-called “position of neutrality” which, it says, will be a guardrail protecting university business from the caprices of political opinion.

Colleges and universities will lose tens of billions of dollars collectively from their endowments if they capitulate to demands to divest from Israel, according to a report published in September by JLens, a Jewish investor network that is part of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Titled “The Impact of Israel Divestment on Equity Portfolios: Forecasting BDS’s Financial Toll on University Endowments,” the report presented the potential financial impact of universities adopting the BDS movement, which is widely condemned for being antisemitic.

The losses estimated by JLens are catastrophic. Adopting BDS, it said, would incinerate $33.21 billion of future returns for the 100 largest university endowments over the next 10 years, with Harvard University losing $2.5 billion and the University of Texas losing $2.2 billion. Other schools would forfeit over $1 billion, including the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and Princeton University. For others, such as the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College, the damages would total in the hundreds of millions.

“This groundbreaking report approached the morally problematic BDS movement from an entirely new direction — its negative impact on portfolio returns,” New York University adjunct professor Michael Lustig said in a statement extolling the report. “JLens has done a great job in quantifying the financial effects of implementing the suggestions of this pernicious movement, and importantly, they ‘show their work’ by providing full transparency into their methodology, and properly caveat the points where assumptions must necessarily be made. This report will prove to be an important tool in helping to fight noxious BDS advocacy.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Boston University Rejects Proposal to Divest From Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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American Jews Believe Republicans Handling Antisemitism Better Than Democrats, Poll Finds

US Nominee for Ambassador to the United Nations Elise Stefanik addressing the Israeli parliament on May 24, 2024. Photo: Office of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik.

American Jews believe the Republican Party is handling antisemitism better than the Democratic Party, according to a new poll conducted by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). 

The poll, which collected responses between Oct. 8 and Nov. 29 but was released on Wednesday, revealed that Jewish Americans hold widespread skepticism about how US politicians are handling the ongoing surge in antisemitism across the country.

Among respondents, only 39 percent indicated support for how the Democratic Party “is responding to antisemitism in the United States.” In comparison, 59 percent responded that they were “dissatisfied” with how the Democrats are handling the problem.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party performed better among Jewish American respondents, with 45 percent indicating “approval” and 54 percent indicating “disapproval” with how the GOP has handled antisemitism

Democrats have found themselves embroiled in controversy over their party’s handling of antisemitism following the Hamas-led massacres across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Democratic leaders were harshly criticized for adopting what they deemed a soft approach to combating the rising tide of anti-Jewish hate within left-wing circles. High-profile progressive Democratic lawmakers such as Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Summer Lee (D-PA), have spent the past year launching a barrage of insults against Israel, oftentimes accusing the Jewish state of committing a “genocide” against Palestinians as retribution for the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks.

In November, 17 Democratic senators voted to implement a partial arms embargo against Israel, incensing many Jewish American organizations and pro-Israel supporters who view deep hostility and the application of double standards to the world’s lone Jewish state as an indicator of antisemitism.

Republicans in the US Congress have generally adopted a more hardline stance against antisemitism, launching congressional investigations against anti-Jewish bigotry on college campuses and presenting state-level legislation to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

High-profile Republican politicians such as Elise Stefanik, the nominee for US ambassador to the United Nations, have also been elevated into powerful positions within the new Trump administration in part for their strident pro-Israel positions. US President Donald Trump, a Republican, recently passed an executive order to crack down on antisemitism at universities and punish the harassment of Jewish students, including by deporting non-Americans on campuses who promote terrorism and hatred against Jews.

However, conservatives have struggled with surging antisemitism within their own ranks in the 16 months following the Oct. 7 atrocities. Popular conservative podcasters Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have circulated antisemitic content to millions of their subscribers, oftentimes outright accusing Israel of committing “genocide” against Palestinians and promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories about the Jewish people. Both Carlson and Owens have indicated support for the “Christian Nationalist” movement — a form of religious nationalism which seeks to enshrine Christianity’s dominance in American cultural life. According to the AJC poll, 79 percent of American Jews believe Christian Nationalism is an “antisemitic threat.”

An almost identical number of American Jews perceive left-wing and right-wing political extremism as an “antisemitic threat.” According to the poll, 78 percent believe that the “extreme political left” and 79 percent believe that the “extreme political right” are threats to the Jewish community.

The poll also found that 54 percent of American Jews believe antisemitism is a “very serious problem,” a sharp increase from previous years, and another 39 percent said it was “somewhat of a problem.”

More than half, 56 percent, of Jews have also avoided publicly identifying as Jews to shield themselves from dealing with antisemitism, an 18-point increase from 2022. 

“Antisemitism has reached a tipping point in America, threatening the freedoms of American Jews and casting an ominous shadow across our society,” AJC CEO Ted Deutch said in a statement. “This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for leaders across the US. We must act now to protect Jews — and America — from rising antisemitism. That one-third of American Jews have been the target of antisemitism in the past year should raise red flags for every American and our leaders.”

The survey also revealed that there is still widespread support for Israel among the Jewish community in the United States. According to AJC, 81 percent of American Jews stated that they cared about Israel because it was “important.” The poll also indicated rising pro-Israel sentiment among younger generations, with 40 percent of those aged 18 to 29 claiming Israel was “very important” to them, an 11-point surge from the previous year.

The post American Jews Believe Republicans Handling Antisemitism Better Than Democrats, Poll Finds first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Irish Leftist, Nationalist Party to Boycott St. Patrick’s Day Events at White House Over Trump’s Gaza Plan

Anti-Israel demonstrators stand outside the Israeli embassy after Ireland has announced it will recognize a Palestinian state, in Dublin, Ireland, May 22, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Molly Darlington

A prominent left-wing and nationalist political party in Ireland has confirmed that it will not attend St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in Washinton, DC next month due to “incompatible values” with US President Donald Trump following the announcement of his plan to “take over” Gaza and rebuild it into an economic hub.

Claire Hanna — leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), the once dominant party of Irish nationalism in Northern Ireland — announced the decision as a stance against Trump’s proposal for the Palestinian enclave, where Israel and the terrorist group Hamas have been fighting for 16 months.

“The SDLP’s values are incompatible with what we are seeing and hearing, and we won’t be endorsing it on St Patrick’s Day,” Hanna, a member of the British parliament, said in a statement on Tuesday. “We understand the importance of the relationship between the US and this island [Ireland], but the politics of the current US administration mean it is essential that we stand up for what is right, and when it comes to Gaza, what is wrong.”

Last year, Hanna’s predecessor also refused to attend the White House festivities as a protest against US support for Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza.

At the time, then-party leader Colum Eastwood accused Washington of having an “atrocious” response to the Middle Eastern conflict — which began with Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — and refused to celebrate “while the civilian population in Gaza lives in constant fear of eradication.”

In line with her predecessor’s stance, Hanna justified this week’s decision by saying the SDLP “could not endorse the US government while it armed and supported the bombardment of Gaza.”

“We hope the fragile ceasefire will deliver a lasting peace and the return of hostages to their families, but the rhetoric of Donald Trump, around the displacement and ethnic cleansing of millions of people, is absolutely beyond the pale,” she said. “We can’t in good conscience attend parties hosted in that context.”

The SDLP also posted on social media announcing its decision, writing, “Ireland has a proud history of solidarity with Palestine.”

Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists started the war in Gaza when they murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages during their Oct. 7 onslaught. After 16 months of fighting, both sides agreed to a ceasefire and hostage-release deal last month, with the first phase set to last six weeks.

Trump last week proposed resettling Gaza’s Palestinians in Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab countries while the US “takes over” the coastal enclave and builds it up into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” His comments have been met with immense backlash, with some observers accusing him of supporting an ethnic cleansing plan. However, proponents of the proposal argue that it could offer Palestinians a better future and would mitigate the threat posed by Hamas.

Northern Ireland’s First Minister, Michelle O’Neill, and Deputy First Minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, have yet to announce whether they will attend St Patrick’s Day events in Washington next month.

Traditionally, political leaders from Ireland take part in celebrations at the White House each March, when the Irish premier usually presents a bowl of shamrock to the US President.

Even with its decision, Hanna said the SDLP will maintain relationships with US officials, “particularly with those trying to resist and combat the overreach of the current administration.”

Since the aftermath of the Oct. 7 atrocities, Ireland has been a fierce critic of the Jewish state.

Last month, Irish President Michael D. Higgins used his platform speaking at a Holocaust commemoration to launch a tirade against Israel’s military campaign targeting Hamas terrorists, seemingly drawing parallels between Israel’s war in Gaza and the Nazis’ genocide of Jews.

Amid a downward spiral in relations between the two countries, Ireland joined South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

In December, Israel closed its embassy in Dublin, accusing the Irish government of undermining Israel at international forums and promoting “extreme anti-Israel policies.”

Irish leaders have previously called on the EU to “review its trade relations” with Israel after the Israeli parliament passed a law banning UNRWA activities in the country due to its ties to Hamas.

Last year, Ireland officially recognized a Palestinian state, claiming the move was accelerated by the Israel-Hamas war and would help foster a two-state solution, which Israeli officials described as a “reward for terrorism.”

The post Irish Leftist, Nationalist Party to Boycott St. Patrick’s Day Events at White House Over Trump’s Gaza Plan first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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