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Author Seeks to Combat Misperceptions About Orthodox Jewish Community With New Novel
Accurate representation of the religious Jewish community is more important now more than ever amid a record surge in antisemitism since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, according to the author of a new fiction novel about an Orthodox Jewish man who discovers in middle age that he is not Jewish.
“Accuracy is so important to me,” Goyhood author Reuven Fenton told The Algemeiner. “People assume that the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community is the Jewish version of the Taliban and that’s not true at all.”
“Whenever you see anything media-oriented that has to do with Orthodox Jews, if you’re part of that world in any way, you look at it and roll your eyes because they never get it right. It’s full of flaws, exaggerations, and misinformation,” added the first-time author, who is also the only Orthodox Jewish reporter on staff for the New York Post. “I felt it was my obligation, [and] that the least I could do in writing this novel was to get everything on the money.”
Goyhood revolves around the story of Mayer, who formerly went by “Marty” before becoming religious. Mayer fled his small town in Georgia for Brooklyn, New York. He is now a devout yeshiva-learning kollel man who is married to the daughter of a well-respected rabbi and has not left the confines of the ultra-religious Jewish community in years. His twin brother, David, is not religious at all and lives a hedonistic lifestyle, constantly pursuing pleasures such as women and cars. The brothers are middle-aged and after their mother dies, they find out they’re not in fact Jewish at all.
Mayer’s only solution is to convert to Judaism, but the earliest appointment he can get to finalize the conversion is days away. In the meantime, the estranged brothers decide to embark on a road trip together, along with their mother’s ashes. Along the way they pick up two tagalongs: an Instagram influencer named Charlayne Valentine and Popeye, a one-eyed dog. During the course of their trip, the twin brothers face a number of situations and make revelations about themselves and their relationships with God. They come to terms with how spirituality and religion plays a role in their lives.
Goyhood is described in the novel as “the state of rebounding from one travesty to the next.”
“Mayer’s big realization has to do with ‘I may not have been living my life a proper way because essentially I have been living this ultra-cloistered life,’” Fenton explained. “During the book, he comes to understand that there are other ways to be a Jew than to be one who spends the entirety of his waking time in a yeshiva. That there’s a virtue in participating in the world and being involved with people and contributing to the world, and not simply thinking yourself for the purpose of collecting schar [merit] that you can redeem in the afterlife. That life is meant to be lived here on earth and he lives that life in the course of three days. He does some major living in a very short amount of time and comes out a different person.”
The author added, “While Mayer ends up loosening up and being more into participating with the world, David actually wants to go the opposite route and be more introspective and learned, spiritual and explore the deeper kind of cerebral things in life.”
Fenton told The Algemeiner that the brothers represent “a duality of one person” and depict two “dueling sides” of Fenton himself — one secular and one religious. Growing up, Fenton’s family was traditional but not particularly religious. When he was around 12 years old, they abruptly adopted an Orthodox religious lifestyle.
Fenton had a secular audience in mind when writing Goyhood and said that’s why he was so focused on giving readers an “authentic experience” when it came to his depiction of Orthodox Jews. He even showed the finished manuscript for Goyhood to his brother, a rabbi, to get a “seal of approval” and make sure the book correctly portrays all aspects of the Orthodox Jewish lifestyle.
“I just think that there’s just a lot of ignorance about the [Orthodox] Jewish people, how they function,” the author said, adding that even at work, “most of my colleagues are not as familiar with the Orthodox world as I am and I’m constantly correcting misperceptions.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported last month that it recorded a total of 8,873 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2023, marking a 140 percent increase from the prior year and the highest level ever recorded by the civil rights organization since it began tracking antisemitic activity in 1979. The majority of the incidents, 5,204, occurred in the last quarter of the year, following the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, when the Palestinian terrorist group invaded southern Israel, murdered 1,200 people, and kidnapped 253 others as hostages.
Fenton said it’s hard for a Jewish author to push for their work to get published, especially if it has Jewish themes, while Jews around the US are facing an uptick in antisemitic incidents. He explained that authors who also express solidarity with Israel are being targeted by the “TikTok mob” of anti-Israel activists, who “review bomb” books on websites, such as GoodReads, and bring a novel’s rating down by giving it one-star reviews “on mass.”
“If you so much as mention the word ‘Israel,’ you’re really screwed,” he added.
Nevertheless, Fenton insisted it’s extremely important following the Oct. 7 attacks to share any Jewish-related content and show solidarity with the Jewish community. For that reason, he was determined to wear a Jewish skullcap, also known as a kippah, in the author photo included in Goyhood. The picture was taken after the Oct. 7 attacks, and Fenton said that although he is normally self-conscious about displaying his Judaism, when it came to taking the photo, “because of Oct. 7, I wanted to wear my Judaism proudly.”
He added, “Jews are being silenced right now. Jews are afraid to walk around in public and express Judaism openly. More than ever, right now is the time to say, ‘I’m a Jew. I’m a proud Jew [and] I’m proud to be supportive of Israel as the Jewish homeland.’ Just to announce yourself as a Jew right now is very important.”
“Any kind of exclamation of Judaism right now is important,” he concluded.
Goyhood will be released on May 28 but is available for pre-order now.
The post Author Seeks to Combat Misperceptions About Orthodox Jewish Community With New Novel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
The post Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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