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‘An epidemic of hate’: Biden administration officials meet with Jewish leaders to tackle rising antisemitism
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Top Biden administration officials launched a roundtable on antisemitism on Wednesday by describing a “rising tide of antisemitism” and likening the atmosphere in the United States to that of Europe, where Jewish worship is held under lock and key.
“Right now, there is an epidemic of hate facing our country,” said Douglas Emhoff, the Jewish second gentleman, who convened and chaired the 90-minute session.
Jewish officials represented at the meeting were impressed by how comprehensive the meeting was, saying it went beyond the white supremacist threat that the Biden administration has focused on in the past to other sources, among them attackers who target the visibly Orthodox and Jewish students on campuses.
The meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, comes on the heels of weeks of antisemitic invective spewed by rapper Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, and the dinner attended last month by West, Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and former President Donald Trump at Trump’s Florida residence. The discussion also follows alarming spikes in antisemitic invective on Twitter and other platforms.
“In my experience, there’s nothing more vicious than what we’re seeing today,” said Susan Rice, President Joe Biden’s top domestic policy adviser, who described growing up in a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Washington, D.C.
Ten years ago, Rice said, when she was defending Israel against its many enemies as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, she did not imagine a threat to Jews domestically. Now she says she hears antisemitic expressions coming from elected officials, public figures and entertainers, calling it an “incredible rising tide.”
Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department envoy to monitor antisemitism, said she no longer has the luxury of her predecessors, who traveled abroad to assess antisemitism in foreign countries. Now, she said, she had to treat the problem as a domestic and a foreign one.
“I can’t go to these countries and say ‘You have a problem,’” she said. “Now I have to say ‘We have a serious problem.’”
After multiple attacks on synagogues stateside in recent years, she said, Jewish places of worship were becoming more visibly fortified than they were for years when security, if it existed, was unobtrusive and synagogues were welcoming.
“For decades, when we traveled in Europe, we used to identify synagogues by gendarmes,” she said. “Now we see police cars, now we lock the doors in the United States.”
The Kanye West episodes evidently helped spur the convening of the meeting. George Selim, the Anti-Defamation League senior vice president who was present, said the meeting came together within a week, unlike similar events which can take months to organize.
“The urgency was clear, the meeting needed to be convened, it needed to be in person,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview.
Representatives of the dozen or so groups that attended were impressed by the level of attention: in addition to Emhoff, Rice and Lipstadt, there were officials from the National Security Council, the Officer of Public Engagement, and the Office of Faith-based Partnerships.
The representatives were impressed by how personal Emhoff, who is married to Vice President Kamala Harris, made the battle. He described how moved he has been by American Jews who are proud of him — the first Jewish spouse of a president or vice president. “I’m in pain right now, our community is in pain,” he said.
Emhoff’s unabashed identification with the Jewish community helped elevate the issue of combating antisemitism, said Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad).
“He and I might see Jewish ritual and practice a little differently. But one thing Jewish people will remember forever in our history is that when the time came for him to make his decision, he decided to identify unequivocally as a Jew,” Shemtov said.
Amy Spitalnick, the executive director of Integrity First for America, the group that underwrote successful lawsuits against the neo-Nazis who organized the deadly 2017 march in Charlottesville, Virginia, said the officials closely listened to every presentation. (The media was present for opening remarks by government officials, and was ushered out so the representatives of Jewish groups could speak freely.)
“We were watching them take copious notes, they were genuinely listening,” she told JTA.
The range of invitees and the topics addressed also extended beyond the threat posed to Jews from the extreme right, an area that has until now been the Biden administration’s focus, through a summit on extremism in September and a speech Biden gave in Philadelphia last summer.
Speakers addressed antisemitic attacks on the visibly Orthodox which, particularly in the New York area, are most often not carried out by white supremacists. And there were officials from at least three groups that represent the visibly Orthodox: The Orthodox Union, which is Modern Orthodox, along with Agudath Israel of America and American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad), which are haredi Orthodox.
Speakers also were sensitive to the plight of Jewish students on college campuses, who often face hostility from peers whose sharp criticism of Israel can sometimes manifest as antisemitism.
“On college campuses, the supposed bastions of liberal ideas and ideals, many students believe it better to camouflage their Jewish identity,” Lipstadt said. One of the speakers was Julia Jassey, a senior at the University of Chicago who is the CEO of Jewish on Campus, a student group that tracks antisemitism on campuses.
The Jewish participants said they benefited from hearing how others experienced antisemitism. Abba Cohen, Aguda’s Washington director, said he found receptive listeners when he described an increased effort by local councils to limit the building of Orthodox communities. He and Nathan Diament, the Washington director of the Orthodox Union, also described the threat to the visibly Orthodox.
Their accounts moved others present who do not live the Orthodox lifestyle. “We all have different experiences with antisemitism and clearly for someone who’s Orthodox, it might feel different than for someone who’s not,” said Sheila Katz, the CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women.
Katz said the meeting was a relief because she often has difficulty explaining to her progressive allies why antisemitism persists as a threat.
“I feel like in the last, you know, year, I’ve been saying over and over again, this is getting worse. This is getting amplified, people are emboldened,” she said. “And there are a lot, particularly in the progressive community that would say, ‘No, no, that’s not what’s happening.’”
Some practical proposals were discussed, including a letter this week from a bipartisan slate of lawmakers advocating for a cross-agency “whole of government” task force to combat antisemitism, and an expansion of federal funding that currently underwrites security upgrades for Jewish institutions to include paying for extra police patrols.
The meeting did not result in concrete decisions, but participants said they left with the impression that the federal government was ready to dive deep into finding practicable solutions.
“For me, this is not the end. This is just the beginning of this conversation,” Emhoff said.
Other groups represented included the American Jewish Committee, Hillel International, the Jewish Federations of North America, the Reform and Conservative movements, and Secure Community Network, the security consultancy for the Jewish community.
“It sends a very important message that the sort of rampant antisemitism we’re seeing is unacceptable and that the highest office in the country is doing something about it,” Spitalnick said.
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The post ‘An epidemic of hate’: Biden administration officials meet with Jewish leaders to tackle rising antisemitism appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Why is this chef opening a kosher Israeli restaurant in LA right now?
How do you explain Malka, the new kosher Israeli restaurant in Beverly Hills?
I’m not talking about the food — I haven’t eaten there yet — I’m talking about the fact that it’s opening at all. Why would Eyal Shani — many of whose restaurants worldwide have faced protests, vandalism and physical attacks — dare to open another restaurant at this particularly fraught time?
“The whole situation is leading me to open more, more, more,” Shani told me when we met last week. “That is my reaction as a Jewish man. If they are trying to kill you, you should make a lot of children. And these are my children.”
We were sitting in the empty restaurant on the ground floor of the boutique SIXTY Hotel. Shani, who is 67, wore a T-shirt and dark khakis. With his stubbly beard and unruly gray hair, he could pass for an intense, very post-grad philosophy major. He put a plate of farmers market green grapes between us.
The night before, at a pre-opening event for journalists, influencers and, it seemed, models, the same space was packed. Piles of fresh raw vegetables — a Shani signature — filled the long bar counter along with perfect rectangles of toasted focaccia topped with either steak tartare or smoky eggplant caviar. The crowd swelled, the music blared, trays of mojitos and palomas disappeared. It was signature Shani — a frolic of nature, noise and Israeli food.
Now, the large, modern space — a rare high-end restaurant in Los Angeles’ ever-struggling kosher restaurant scene — was quiet. Shani leaned back into an earth-toned banquette and reflected for a moment on how those two words, “Israeli food,” have become so toxic, especially following Oct. 7.
Demonstrators accuse Israeli chefs of passing Palestinian food off as Israeli and of being complicit in their government’s actions. Shani’s business partner, Shahar Segal, did engage in marketing work with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the controversial U.S.-Israeli organization established to feed Gazans. But Israeli restaurants around the world with no such involvements have faced similar protests, as have Jewish-owned restaurants with no ties to Israel.
Malka’s opening follows the closure of Shani’s restaurants Miznon in Melbourne and Gila & Nancy in Berlin, both targeted by mobs chanting anti-Israel slogans.
The rioters in Melbourne entered MIznon, threw chairs, chanted “Death to the IDF!” and only stopped when the two owners of a nearby pizza place — both Lebanese — confronted them.
“In the end, they succeeded to kill the restaurant,” Shani said. “They almost killed our staff there.”
Shani happened to be at the restaurant in Berlin when dozens of protesters surrounded it, shouting, “Stop feeding genocide!”
He raced into the kitchen, put together some food platters and went outside to offer the demonstrators the opportunity to eat and talk.
“They didn’t want to eat,” he said. To them, he added, “Eating from an Israeli is like eating from Satan.”
Shani rejected the charge commonly leveled at Israeli chefs — that they have stolen Palestinian foods and recast them as Israeli.
“I always declare that I took a lot of inspiration from the Palestinians,” he said.
In 1989, Shani opened his first restaurant, Oceanus in Jerusalem. He was 29 and, he said, he knew nothing about food except that he loved bringing people together around it. He wanted to make something like the fresh focaccia an Italian Jewish neighbor once served him. The closest thing to it was the Arabic laffa Shani would buy from a closet-sized bakery in West Jerusalem.
“I had a cook, a Palestinian man from Hebron, a very talented man,” Shani said. “I loved him. He said, ‘Eyal, no problem, my grandmother makes it every day.’ He showed me.”
Shani brushed the finished bread with olive oil and showered it with fresh rosemary.
I told Shani that I ate at the now-closed Oceanus at the tim and to this day remember being served, when we sat down, fragrant sheets of his focaccia-laffa.
“It was a hybrid,” Shani said, “Palestinian, Italian and new Israeli. Each one is getting influenced by the other. You can’t do it with just one brain.”
Malka, a strictly kosher restaurant, presents a different kind of challenge to Shani, who is not an observant Jew. His Michelin-starred Manhattan restaurant Shmone offers, for instance, “A mountain of grilled calamari, okra, tomatoes and yogurt.”
But the chef who turned flour, yeast and water into a hybrid Palestinian-Israeli-Italian flatbread revels in facing constraints like kashrut.
“Each culture leads with its limitations,” he said. “These limitations are a blessing — they’re shaping your creation.”
The kosher stricture against cooking meat together with dairy products didn’t faze him.
“Take me off dairy, put a beautiful bottle of olive oil in front of me — what are the limitations?” he said. “And if there would be no olive oil anymore in the world, I would quit, I would not cook.”
Beyond the kitchen, Shani said he wanted to reach more Israelis with his food. About 70% of Israelis are strictly kosher or prefer it.
“So how can it be that we’re only cooking for the hipsters in Tel Aviv?” Shani said. “It’s unfair.”
The marketplace has rewarded Shani’s ability to combine local ingredients and techniques with creativity and showmanship. The chef has around 70 restaurants — neither he nor his publicist knew the exact number — including Malka’s in Tel Aviv, Miami and New York.
And the backlash isn’t close to stopping him. Shani just announced a new restaurant project in, yes, Melbourne.
“It doesn’t make me frightened,” he said. “It’s the way my personality reacts. I think it’s the instinct of survival. You just keep going.”
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An unvarnished look at Polish Hasidic life before the Holocaust
In the decades before the Holocaust, Warsaw still teemed with Hasidim. Muranowska Street was virtually lined with shtiblekh (prayer and study houses), each with its own dynastic affiliation. But one day, a young man established a new shop on the street and brazenly kept it open on the Sabbath. Modernity had arrived.
Some Hasidim didn’t seem too concerned. As we read in the new English translation of Yechiel Hofer’s Hasidic Warsaw: Reb Zalmen and the Aleksander Shtibl, the protagonist, Reb Zalman, dismissed the whole scandal. The Sabbath, he shrugged, was simply too holy to be violated by people so unworthy. And in truth, Warsaw’s Hasidic enclaves continued to thrive, albeit in a more concentrated form.
Most Yiddish authors assumed the inevitable demise of Jewish tradition. In story after story, we read about pious, aging parents watching helplessly as their sons and daughters reject their ancestors’ ways to become Zionists, revolutionaries, assimilationists and, of course, Yiddish writers. Nobody, it seemed, could hold back the tide of progress.
But many interwar Polish Hasidic leaders were actually galvanized by the challenge of secularization. They launched ambitious, transnational fundraising initiatives, refurbished thousands of heders [traditional primary schools], and built hundreds of Hasidic yeshivas and Bais Yaakov girls’ schools. And as Hofer’s book shows, their shtiblekh recovered and proliferated down to the bitter end.
Hasidic Warsaw is one of the few works of modern Yiddish literature to present Hasidism as something other than moribund. Reminiscent of I.B. Singer’s In My Father’s Court, but more gracious, Hofer’s stories bring us into one corner of this impossibly thriving world: a Warsaw shtibl attended by followers of the Aleksander Rebbe. Reb Zalman, an irritable luftmensch (unemployed dreamer), is the shtibl’s most zealous member and the Hofer family’s most frequent Sabbath guest.
Reb Zalman’s pauper’s arrogance exasperates even his fellow Hasidim, who cannot resist pranking him. They appoint him “Purim Rabbi,” ply him with liquor, and get him to accept bribes. They lure him out of his Hasidic enclave to experience Gentile taunts and glares. Some try to help him gain a livelihood, but he proudly self-sabotages. Their most lucrative scheme, a tavern in the shtibl, fails because Reb Zalman decides to give all the liquor away.
Then there is Reb Zalman’s misogyny. He disdains his kind host, Hofer’s mother, who is “strictly observant, pious and indeed a Hasid in her own right.” She tactfully challenges his prejudices by recounting stories of her Grandmother Brayndl, a passionate follower of a Hasidic group called the Porisover Hasidim, who used to travel regularly to see the Rebbe, Reb Yankev Hersh [and] was deeply respected at the Rebbe’s court.” Yet Reb Zalman scoffs at even the most revered Hasidic women.
Hofer, in short, doesn’t romanticize interwar Hasidism. But he doesn’t dismiss it either. His family’s Sabbath table, he writes, provided even the ungrateful poor with a slice of Heaven. In the Aleksander shtibl, “deep seriousness combined with high-minded joy reigned.” Reb Zalman’s gift for quirky storytelling almost redeemed him in Hofer’s eyes.
Jonathan Boyarin is among the few scholars able to grasp not only the external, quantitative significance of the Polish Hasidic shtibl but its inner life: imperfect men swaying in prayer, chants, and study, occasionally halting to make a toast with vodka and herring or recount another edifying story. Yet Boyarin remains deeply attuned to Hofer’s gentle irony.
Hasidic Warsaw, with its multitude of stories-within-stories, is in a sense a work of collective authorship. We behold a community of storytellers constantly striving to make each other better by means of humorous, cautionary tales. Secularist Yiddish writers drew liberally from such stories, stylizing and serializing them to great acclaim while assuming the demise of the very movement that sustained them. But only physical annihilation could do that.
The reader of Hasidic Warsaw is left with a deep sense of loss. Without storytelling, how can we hope to regain that kind of connectedness? How can future Jewish literature emerge as easily and naturally? In honoring the art of storytelling, Hasidic Warsaw reminds us of yet another world that was lost in the Holocaust.
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Peter Lorre, decades after ‘Casablanca,’ is the breakout star of ‘Coyote Vs. Acme’
The character actor Peter Lorre died in 1964. The doctor Peter Lorre is alive, quite possibly immortal and has never looked better.
In Coyote Vs. Acme, the long-awaited legal comedy in which Wile E. Coyote sues the mega-corporation behind all his contraption needs for decades of grievous injury, the Good Doctor is seen smuggling evidence outside of Acme labs. Soon thereafter, the company’s security forces him to step into a black hole in the ground that is then rolled up like an old carpet.
As a man who knows too much, he’s a threat to the business.
If it seems strange that the Hungarian-born Jewish performer known for his turn as a child murderer in M and black market peddler Ugarte in Casablanca should be revived as a whistleblower, you may be forgetting his earlier appearances in the Looney canon.
The first was as himself, voiced by Mel Blanc, sitting with a crowd of celebs in Ciro’s nightclub and admiring an oversized bubble covering up a burlesque performer. That short from 1941 scans as uncomfortably close to the house style of the Der Stürmer cartoonists. In subsequent episodes, Lorre was caricatured as a mad scientist, though shrunk down considerably even as his role grew.
In Hair-Raising Hare, Dr. Lorre lures Bugs Bunny into his castle in the hopes of feeding him to the gargantuan red monster Gossamer. (A flashing neon sign on his lair indicates that he is an “Evil Scientist.”) Bugs gets the upper hand by providing a manicure to the tennis-shoed behemoth, jousting him into a tin can and ultimately spooking him by drawing his attention to the fourth wall.
When Daffy Duck tricks his way into Lorre’s suburban home in Birth of a Notion, the diminutive doc tries through a series of booby traps to recover his wishbone for a science experiment. (Stan Freberg voices Lorre in this one.) When Daffy manages his escape, Lorre’s eyes turn toward his dog, Leopold, prompting the pooch to make his exit.
In these treatments Lorre is a lonely, depressive psychopath of the sort Lorre excelled at playing. His revival for 2003’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action reimagined him as a different sort of villain: an underling for the Acme Corporation.
What Coyote Vs. Acme does is revolutionary not just for exploring the liability implications of cartoon case law, but for the redemption it offers Lorre, a kind of fitting tribute to a Hollywood legend whose life and career was cut tragically short by chronic pain and addiction.
This Lorre, who’s had a bit of a glow-up, sacrifices himself to sound the alarm for Acme’s evil R&D methods. It’s an apt arc for a refugee from Nazi Germany, among whose most recognizable work is his role in perhaps the greatest anti-fascist film of all time. While Ugarte takes advantage of refugees desperate for exit visas in Casablanca, the real Lorre helped many flee Europe ahead of World War II, just as cartoon Lorre works on behalf of his fellow toons. (His role as a complicit scientist also recalls his lone directorial effort, The Lost One, in which he plays a Nazi chemist haunted by the war.)
Coyote Vs. Acme’s Lorre also plays piano — not with a disembodied hand — and is revealed to be in a long-lasting — 80-plus years! — marriage with Tweety’s doting owner Granny.
With the film marking the largest-ever opening for Ketchup Entertainment, which snagged the distribution rights after Warner Bros opted to ditch the flick for a tax write-off, it’s too soon to tell if it will herald a Looney Tunes renaissance. However it shakes out, it has singlehandedly upped Peter Lorre representation in the films of 2026.
For those who don’t despise him — or who give him any thought — that’s victory enough.
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