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Ann Arbor school board endorses call for ceasefire in Israel and Gaza
ANN ARBOR, Michigan (JTA) – The school board in this city endorsed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war early Thursday morning, more than five hours after convening for a meeting was expected to be contentious.
The vote made Ann Arbor Public Schools one of the only school districts in the United States to adopt such a stance, three months after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel ignited a war in Gaza and fierce debates in public bodies across the United States.
Several last-minute amendments tweaked the resolution’s language to note that the board has a “limited role in international affairs” and call for the “release of all hostages and unrestricted humanitarian aid at the levels recommended by the United Nations for the Palestinian people.” Another tweak condemned “discrimination against any individual based on personal background whether Israeli or Palestinian.”
The final version, after prodding from Jewish community members, also condemns both antisemitism and “anti-Jewish racism.”
The changes were enough to tilt the board to favor the resolution, which only three of the seven members had said before the meeting that they were committed to support. Four members backed the resolution, while one person voted against it, down from two who had said they planned to.
Two others abstained — a move that one board member said was not encouraged, but which another said was essential because the board was taking a stand on something outside its purview. Applause and cries of “Thank you” broke out in the high school auditorium after the motion passed.
“I’m very disappointed,” Eileen Freed, head of the Ann Arbor Jewish federation, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after the vote. “At the crux of it, it’s a political play. … The people who were pushing for this wanted to see the words ‘ceasefire.’ They were not focused on the needs of the students.”
Ceasefire calls have been a frontier of tensions across the United States since the early days of the war. Proponents say calling for a ceasefire represents a powerful symbolic stand against Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Critics of the calls — including Israeli leaders and many Jewish leaders in the United States — say they effectively deny Israel the right to defend itself.
Eileen Freed, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor, delivers public comments opposing a ceasefire resolution at a local school board meeting, Jan. 17, 2023. (Andrew Lapin)
At least one other school district has officially called for a ceasefire, the New Haven Unified School District in California’s Bay Area, as has Randi Weingarten, the progressive Jewish leader of the American Federation of Teachers union who also sits on the board of the liberal Zionist group J Street. Weingarten tweeted earlier this month that she believed it was “well past time for a ceasefire agreement.”
The vote capped a contentious period for Ann Arbor, a progressive Michigan community with sizable Jewish and Arab populations. The Ann Arbor City Council passed its own ceasefire resolution last week. The local Council on American Islamic Relations has filed a federal civil rights complaint with the Department of Education against the district, alleging that a middle school counselor called a student a “terrorist.”
And at the University of Michigan, the president halted two planned student government votes about Gaza, saying that they had stoked fear in the community. Meanwhile, dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested after storming an administration building, causing the Board of Regents this week to pass new free-speech rules.
For the local school board, the ceasefire vote followed a month of debate that occupied members even as they conducted a superintendent search and contended with longstanding equity issues. Both topics were raised briefly but not tackled at the board meeting; one member, making an unsuccessful case to table the resolution, said the tensions over Israel and Gaza were scaring away high-quality superintendent candidates.
“Where else have I heard people told, ‘Stay in your place’?” Jeff Gaynor, a Jewish board member who supported the resolution, told JTA before the meeting. He then quoted Martin Luther King Jr.: “The time is always right to do what is right.”
Gaynor and Rima Mohammad, a Palestinian board member whose term as president coincidentally ended during the meeting, were the most vocal advocates of a ceasefire. The two issued a joint statement in the days after the Oct. 7 attacks reading, “We stand together, as a Jew and a Palestinian, in the interest of our common humanity.”
During the meeting, Gaynor said his Jewish background led him to call for an end to Israel’s war in Gaza.
“During my five years of Hebrew School leading up to my bar mitzvah, I donated money to plant trees in Israel. Much of my moral compass is based on what I learned during sermons in synagogue every Saturday morning,” he said, adding, “I will not defend Hamas; it is not an agent for peace. Neither is Netanyahu’s government.” (During the public comment period, one Jewish speaker called Gaynor a “shonda,” the Yiddish word meaning shame.)
“I hope we continue the dialogue,” Gaynor told JTA after the motion passed. “There’s a lot of repairing to do, a lot of empathy to be had.” Asked what he thought of the resolution’s final wording after the amendments, he said, “It was fine.”
Mohammad argued sharply against the resolution to table the resolution, saying that doing so would harm families like hers and communicate to those who argued for the resolution in public comments that their voices do not matter.
In total, 122 people signed up to speak at the meeting, including the head of the local Jewish federation, which opposed the ceasefire call and said it had “created a hostile atmosphere” in the district; several Jewish parents who said they felt hurt by the resolution; and representatives of the Detroit chapter of the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace.
Jewish opponents of the resolution carried signs reading “Focus on Education” and “Slippery Slope,” while pro-Palestinian supporters held placards reading “Stop Funding Genocide” and “We Are Against U.S. Military Aid to Israel.”
“We feel marginalized, we feel scared,” Josh Rubin, a Jewish parent in Ann Arbor, said during his public comment period, adding that he and his family were planning to move away because they no longer felt safe sending their children to school.
Several times, two longtime local pro-Palestinian activists were reprimanded but not removed for interrupting speakers, insulting board members, and attempting to start chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”; others cheered or booed speakers on both ends of the debate.
Voices opposing the resolution were outnumbered by the pro-Palestinian speakers and supporters, including several district teachers who signed a petition supporting the resolution; some Palestinian-American students; a Palestinian district parent who said many of his relatives had been killed in Gaza; and a speaker who played an audio clip of what they said were children inside a hospital in Gaza being bombed.
“This is not helpful to anyone,” Marla Linderman Richelew, a Jewish local civil rights attorney and past president of the parent-teacher association of one of the high schools, told JTA before rising to speak against the resolution. Her daughter, she said, had been the victim of antisemitic bullying in the district when students filmed themselves telling her the Holocaust never happened, and she says the school district told her they didn’t have enough resources to address it.
“I think we are just confused. I think we’re all trying to figure out what to do and how to deal with this conflict that we did not even know we had,” she said about Jews in Ann Arbor. She added, “I think it’s going to be a learning experience for all of us.”
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The post Ann Arbor school board endorses call for ceasefire in Israel and Gaza appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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US House Education Committee Chair Denounces Biden Admin’s ‘Toothless’ Campus Antisemitism Settlements
Demonstrators take part in an “Emergency Rally: Stand With Palestinians Under Siege in Gaza,” amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Oct. 14, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
The new chairman of the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce has excoriated several recent civil rights settlements that, he says, allow colleges to evade accountability for being derelict in their handling of campus antisemitism after Hamas’s attack on Israel last Oct. 7.
“It’s disgraceful that in the final days of the Biden-Harris administration, the Department of Education is letting universities, including Rutgers, five University of California system campuses including UCLA, and John Hopkins, off the hook for their failures to address campus antisemitism. The toothless agreements shield schools from real accountability,” Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said in a statement issued on Thursday. “The Trump administration should closely examine these agreements and explore options to impose real consequences on schools, which could include giving complainants the opportunity to appeal these weak settlements. And certainly, no more complaints should be settled before President Trump takes office.”
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR), a division within the US Department of Education, has spent the past year and a half investigating universities accused of allowing an open season of hate on Jewish students. Such inquiries, if they are not closed due to insufficient evidence, may result in settlements in which higher education institutions admit to having violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and commit to enacting policies which remedy their noncompliance.
For example, Rutgers University recently agreed, as part of an OCR settlement, to train employees to handle complaints of antisemitism, issue a non-discrimination statement, and conduct a “climate survey” in which students report their opinions on discrimination at the school and the administration’s handling of it. In that case, OCR identified “compliance concerns” regarding the university’s handling of violent threats against Jewish students, the desecration of Jewish religious symbols, and discrimination targeting a predominantly Jewish fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi).
Additionally, Temple University agreed last month to implement “remedial” policies for past, inadequately managed investigations of discrimination and to apprise OCR of every discrimination complaint it receives until the conclusion of the 2025-2026 academic year. It also agreed to conduct a “climate” survey to measure students’ opinions on the severity of discrimination on campus, the results of which will be used to “create an action plan” which OCR did not define but insisted on its being “subject to OCR approval.”
In Thursday’s statement, Walberg denounced these and other similar settlements, which were spearheaded by a US presidential administration that refused to recognize anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, as little more than a pantomime.
“These so-called resolutions utterly fail to resolve the civil rights complaints they purport to address. The department is shamefully abandoning its obligation to protect Jewish students, faculty, and staff, and undermining the incoming administration,” he said.
Nothing short of a revolution of the current habits and ideas which constitute the current higher education regime can prevent antisemitism and extreme anti-Zionism on college campuses, the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce has previously argued. An overturning of the current order, it wrote in a report published before the winter holidays, would involve reforming aspects of the campus culture which do not appear immediately connected to the issue of antisemitism. Fostering “viewpoint diversity,” for example, would prevent echo chambers of ideological zeal which justify hatred and violence as a means of overcoming one’s political opponents, the report said. It also argued that restoring “academic rigor,” undermined by years of dissolving educational standards for political purposes, would guard against the reduction of complex social issues into the sloganeering of “scholar activism,” in which faculty turn the classroom into a soapbox.
In lieu of so momentous a change, the report encouraged the executive branch of the US government, which is awaiting the arrival of a new administration headed by President-elect Donald Trump, to enforce colleges’ applying Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to incidents of antisemitism and punish those that do not by, for example, freezing their access to federal funds.
Nearly two years of an epidemic of campus antisemitism unlike any ever seen in the US is what has caused Walberg and his committee colleagues to be suspicious of resolutions which maintain the status quo in American higher education. Since Oct. 7, 2023, anti-Zionist activity on college campuses has increased by 477 percent, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — a trend which has resulted in Jewish students being spit on, assaulted, and pelted with hate speech not uttered openly in the US since the 1950s at America’s most prestigious universities. Holding them accountable, the committee has said, has been difficult due to their ability to mobilize their immense legal and social capital against any action which threatens their power.
“Rather than treat the antisemitic hate plaguing their campuses as a serious problem, they handled it as a public relations issue,” the committee said in its report, citing one example of the corruption it identified. “Penn [University of Pennsylvania] administrators [tried] to orchestrate media coverage depicting members of Congress as ‘bullying and grandstanding’ and Columbia Board of Trustees leaders dismissing congressional oversight on campus antisemitism as ‘capital hill [sic] nonsense.’”
Moreover, it added, university leaders have heaped opprobrium on those who investigate campus antisemitism and openly wished that the Democratic Party would win a majority in the US Congress, an outcome they believed would quell any further inquiries into the matter.
“The findings expose a disturbing pattern of defensiveness and denial among institutions,” the report concluded. “Rather than confronting the severity of the problem, many institutions have dismissed congressional and public criticism and abdicated responsibility for the hostile environments they have enabled. This refusal to acknowledge or address the issue has allowed antisemitism to root and thrive in spaces that contravene the values of this great nation.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post US House Education Committee Chair Denounces Biden Admin’s ‘Toothless’ Campus Antisemitism Settlements first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israeli Defense Chief Orders IDF to Plan for Hamas Defeat if Hostage Talks Fail
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz looks on, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
JNS.org — Defense Minister Israel Katz has instructed the Israel Defense Forces to urgently develop a plan for a decisive victory over Hamas in Gaza if a hostage deal is not finalized before US President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated for a second term on Jan. 20.
“If the hostage deal does not materialize by the time President Trump takes office, Hamas in Gaza must face complete defeat,” Katz stated in a release issued by his office on Friday.
The statement emphasized that Israel must avoid being drawn into a prolonged war of attrition, which would be costly and fail to deliver a strategic victory or end the conflict in Gaza. Katz called for a plan ensuring Hamas’s total defeat, which the IDF is expected to present during upcoming security assessments.
During a meeting on Thursday night attended by IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi and other senior officials, Katz reiterated that securing the release of the hostages remains the top priority of the defense establishment. “Everything must be done to bring them home,” he said.
Katz also instructed the IDF to identify potential challenges to implementing the plan, such as humanitarian concerns, and to leave those decisions to the political leadership. He emphasized that discussions on Gaza’s political future are irrelevant to the current military strategy, saying that no Arab or other party would assume responsibility for Gaza’s civilian affairs while Hamas remains intact.
Israeli forces target Hamas leadership, kill key terrorists
The IDF and Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) announced on Thursday the elimination of key Hamas figures involved in attacks on Israeli forces.
In a series of airstrikes, Osama Abu Namos, the commander of the “Sabra” Battalion in Hamas’s Gaza City Brigade, and his deputy Mahmoud Al Tarq were killed. Both men were responsible for directing attacks on Israeli troops and civilians.
Additionally, Mahmoud Shaheen and Hamada Diri, company commanders in the battalion, were eliminated for their roles in coordinating attacks and supplying weapons.
The IDF and Shin Bet affirmed their commitment to continuing operations against Hamas terrorists.
The post Israeli Defense Chief Orders IDF to Plan for Hamas Defeat if Hostage Talks Fail first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Wildfires are impacting the Jewish community in Los Angeles—with one synagogue completely destroyed
Philissa Cramer reports for JTA.
Daniel Sher’s voice broke as he related the latest to members of his Pacific Palisades synagogue. Kehillat Israel had just sent a message saying that its building had so far survived the devastating Palisades Fire, but, the associate rabbi noted, so much had been lost.
“I cannot begin to describe the feeling that I am currently holding as I hear from so many beloved community members who’ve lost their home—while my family has found out that we’ve lost our home,” Sher said in a video he posted to Instagram on Wednesday afternoon. “Our community that we love so dearly is in disarray.”
Sher later shared a picture taken by his wife of what remained of the home they lived in with their three young children and pets. Only a fireplace and chimney could be distinguished from a sea of ashes—one of thousands of structures that have burned in the last two days as fires rage across the Los Angeles area.
At least one historic synagogue, the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, was completely destroyed by fire, but not before community members battled challenging conditions to remove the Conservative congregation’s 13 Torah scrolls.
#BREAKING Chabad of the Pacific Palisades has safely evacuated all the Torahs from their building.#PalisadesFire pic.twitter.com/A5ngbIbigH
— Frum TikTok (@FrumTikTok) January 8, 2025
Los Angeles’ Jewish community—the second largest in the United States—has swung into action, attempting to provide relief and reassurance at a volatile time. Synagogues and Jewish community centers in safe areas are opening their doors to those who have fled their homes. A Jewish loan society is doling out funds to people who must start from scratch. And local Jewish eateries are fanning out to distribute free food to firefighters who have been battling blazes for days, with no end in sight.
“We have bagels. We have food trucks. We want to pull up to any safe zones to feed firefighters or anyone displaced from their homes,” Yeastie Boys Bagels posted on Instagram on Wednesday. Soon after, it announced that it would be distributing bagels at several evacuation centers. On Thursday, the pop-up shop announced, it would partner with Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen, known for its work in disaster zones, to do even more.
At least five people have died and more than 100,000 have been ordered to evacuate the fires, the worst in L.A. history, burning mostly uncontained in multiple locations across the region. Many others, lacking power and reliable water, have preemptively left their homes for areas with clean air and less risk.
Among those who have lost their homes are the Jewish celebrities Billy Crystal, Adam Brody and Eugene Levy. Meanwhile, a local newscaster encountered Steve Guttenberg, a Jewish actor who belongs to Kehillat Israel, as he sought to help people who had to abandon their cars in gridlock while evacuating the Palisades Fire.
Some of the new fires have cropped up in densely populated areas closer to the city’s core, including Hollywood. The city continues to experience high winds and low humidity, creating conditions for continued spread. Firefighters have reported a shortage of water in hydrants, leaving their hoses less than full.
While the region has always been prone to wildfires, the risk has historically been low in the winter. But this year, little rain has fallen, drying out vegetation fueled by last year’s historic rainfall, creating optimal conditions for a winter blaze that watchdogs say is a perfect example of the kind of “compound climate disaster” that is becoming more common.
“Now is the time to rally support for the communities being ravaged by these ferocious fires,” Rabbi Jennie Rosenn of Dayenu, a group that aims to mobilize Jews on climate issues, said in a statement. “It is also the time to use our radical imagination to envision and build a different future—one that is just, livable, and sustainable—free of this kind of rampant and devastating destruction.”
For now, many in the region are focused on immediate, practical concerns. The Jewish Free Loan Association announced $2,000 no-interest loans that do not require guarantors for all Angelenos with emergency needs, such as replacement clothing and hotel stays. The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles compiled a list of more than a dozen Jewish institutions providing refuge and emergency assistance to people from across the region, while also looking ahead toward the long recovery process the region will require. And community members are taking stock of what has been lost, even as the risk remains for more devastation to come.
“I do know that we will continue to care for one another, to reach out to one another, and we will rebuild,” Sher said in his video. “So many of us are experiencing heartbreak. But when a community experiences heartbreak together, it means we can mend our hearts together as community as well.”
The post Wildfires are impacting the Jewish community in Los Angeles—with one synagogue completely destroyed appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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