(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to distance himself Thursday from a Knesset vote that granted preliminary approval to a bill annexing the West Bank, after the measure drew strong condemnation from the White House.

At the same time, a far-right Israeli lawmaker apologized after making a dismissive and, some said, offensive comment about Saudi Arabia, putting him at odds with the White House’s goal of brokering relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The backtracking comes at a time when the Israelis are facing fierce pressure from President Donald Trump and his administration not to jeopardize a fragile Gaza ceasefire that took hold earlier this month.

“The Knesset vote on annexation was a deliberate political provocation by the opposition to sow discord during Vice President JD Vance’s visit to Israel,” wrote Netanyahu’s office in a post on X.

His post came soon after Vice President J.D. Vance, who departed from Israel on Thursday after a visit to “monitor” Israel’s ceasefire with Hamas, said the vote amounted to an “insult,” adding that if it was a political stunt, then “it was a very stupid political stunt.”

Trump has vowed not to allow Israel to annex the West Bank, a goal of the Israeli right that is seen as a red line for Arab states hoping to see an independent Palestinian state in the future.

“It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries,” Trump said in an interview with Time magazine published Thursday. “Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”

The exchange comes days as Israeli settlers launched a volley of attacks on Palestinian activists and olive harvesters this week, leaving one woman in the hospital, adding to growing violence in the West Bank.

Netanyahu’s distancing from the Knesset bills told only part of the story. He claimed that the “Likud party and the religious parties did not vote for these bills,” two parties from his coalition, but while it was true that his Likud Party did not back the bills, others in his coalition, including Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionists, did and represented the majority of their support. Still, the bills cannot achieve full passage without Netanyahu’s buy-in, which he said he would not give.

Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister who leads the Religious Zionists, was at the center of the other flareup on Thursday when he declared at a conference, “If Saudi Arabia tells us ‘normalization in exchange for a Palestinian state,’ friends — no thank you. Keep riding camels in the desert.”

Smotrich’s remarks were made ahead of a planned meeting between Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House next month to discuss normalization between Arab countries and Israel.

After drawing public criticism from others in Israeli politics, Smotrich later apologized for the remarks in a post on X, writing, “My statement about Saudi Arabia was definitely not successful and I regret the insult it caused.

But he said he would not retract his concern about Palestinian statehood, which the Saudis support. “However, at the same time, I expect the Saudis not to harm us and not to deny the heritage, tradition and rights of the Jewish people to their historic homeland in Judea and Samaria and to establish true peace with us,” he wrote.

Israeli Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli also appeared to criticize Smotrich’s comment in a post on X, writing, “I firmly oppose the establishment of a Palestinian State. That said, it does not mean we should insult a potential ally🇸🇦.”

He then extended an invitation of his own for a new relationship — ending the week after he brought a far-right British personality to Israel against the objections of Britain’s organized Jewish community.

“Incidentally, we’re also pleased to be hosting a unique camel race in the Negev together with the Bedouin community in just a few weeks — and we warmly invite our Saudi friends to join us,” Chikli wrote.

The post Netanyahu and far-right ministers do damage control on West Bank vote and Saudi Arabia comments that angered Trump appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — More than 30 years ago, a colorful little eight-legged spider named Sammy made his picture book debut and scurried into the homes of Jewish families across the country.

Sammy Spider and his mother live in a house with a young Jewish boy named Josh Shapiro and his family. Starting with “Sammy Spider’s First Hanukkah,” he romped through Jewish holidays, prayers and practices across more than two dozen books — all illustrated with bright watercolor collages that have made the books instantly recognizable to generations of Jewish children.

That was the work of Katherine Janus Kahn, who died Oct. 6 at age 83.

Janus Kahn, a fine artist also noted for her works on political justice and women’s issues, illustrated more than 50 books for Kar-Ben, a publishing house for Jewish children’s books that counts the “Sammy Spider” franchise as among its best-selling.

“We are heartbroken,” Kar-Ben said in a Facebook post, adding, “We are profoundly grateful for her legacy, and for the countless stories and memories she leaves behind.”

David Lerner is the CEO of Lerner Publishing Group, the parent company of Kar-Ben, the country’s largest publisher of Jewish children’s books.

“Katherine’s art and storytelling helped shape the landscape of Jewish children’s literature,” he said in an email. “Her books have been recognized with many national awards, honoring her creative vision and her lasting impact.”

Kar-Ben was a tiny company when it first connected with Janus Kahn in the early 1990s. She had drawn attention with her paper-cut illustrations for “The Family Haggadah,” which became a bestseller when it was published in 1987, and the publisher wanted to pair her with an author named Sylvia Rouss who had dreamed up a little spider with a big Jewish future.

“We liked her many styles and thought the collage work would be fun for Sammy’s Hanukkah,” Judye Groner, Kar-Ben’s founder, wrote in an email. “We had no idea that Sammy would become a children’s favorite character featured in over 20 books.”

In that first title, the curious little arachnid spies the young Josh celebrating Hanukkah, wishes he could warm his spider legs on the menorah and wants to spin the colorful dreidels that Josh gets every night.

“Silly Sammy. Spiders don’t light Hanukkah candles. Spiders spin webs,” his mother tells the disappointed Sammy. The catchy refrain repeats for Hanukkah’s eight nights when his mother gives Sammy eight spider socks spun with colorful dreidels, just like the ones Josh gets.

Over the next three decades, Sammy learned about empathy in “Sammy Spider’s First Mitzvah,” celebrated the entire Jewish holiday cycle from Rosh Hashanah to Shavuot and stowed away in Josh’s luggage in “Sammy Spider’s First Trip to Israel.” The most recent book, “Sammy Spider’s Big Book of Jewish Holidays,” came out this year and compiles many of the classic stories that are now widely distributed to Jewish families through PJ Library.

Janus Kahn’s art brought the characters sparkling to life, according to Heidi Rabinowitz, past president of the Association of Jewish Libraries and host of the Book of Life Podcast about Jewish children’s literature.

“Her rainbow-soaked collage artwork give the Sammy Spider books a huge advantage,” Rabinowitz wrote in an email. “They make Sammy and Mrs. Spider friendly and even beautiful, completely removing the ‘ick factor’ from their arachnid identity.”

For Janus Kahn, who studied art at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy after graduating from the University of Chicago, the work connected to her core identity. In a 2017 watercolor essay, she said her study at Bezalel came after she volunteered to support Israel during the Six-Day War in 1967 and headed to Israel, where she said “reconciliation felt possible,” even after the war’s end.

“My Judaism and my books are tied together so integrally that I don’t think I could ever untie them,” she said in a 2013 video with Rouss that showed her demonstrating her artistic techniques in her home studio.

Among her other titles was “The Hardest Word: A Yom Kippur Story,” published in 2001, the first in a series written by Jacqueline Jules about a Ziz, a large, magnificently colored Jewish mythological bird. Like Sammy Spider, the Ziz books struck a chord and are now part of the canon of Jewish children’s books.

“She was just so creative,” recalled Jules, who had multiple books illustrated by Janus Kahn. Their first book together, “Once Upon a Shabbos,” published by Kar-Ben in 1998, was about a bear who gets lost in Brooklyn just before the start of Shabbat. Jules was struck by how Janus Kahn’s illustrations added new texture to a story inspired by an Appalachian folktale.

She and Janus Kahn realized they lived near each other in the Washington, D.C., area. After meeting at an event for the book, they headed to a coffee shop for a two-hour conversation that launched a decades-long professional relationship and close friendship. They socialized together, along with Groner, who also lived nearby.

The two were paired up for the Ziz books, another series that has charmed generations of Jewish children. For those books, Janus Kahn created a fanciful creature using paints rather than collage.

“She borrowed different characteristics from a variety of birds. The legs were from a flamingo, the feet were from a rooster,” Jules said.

Now, the Ziz has taken on a life of its own, making appearances in synagogue plays and other programs based on the books. Just a few weeks ago, Jules saw a photo of someone who dressed up as the Ziz at a synagogue event for Yom Kippur, in keeping with the first book’s theme.

Janus-Kahn would often join Jules for a Ziz storytelling at Jewish venues, bringing a feltboard to embellish the Ziz props and a hand-made Ziz puppet that Jules used. At one memorable event, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Janus Kahn arrived with two colorful feather boas, Jules recalled.

“She made the Ziz come alive,” she said.

With Janus Kahn’s death, Jules, Groner and Rouss not only lost the gifted master illustrator for their books. They have also lost a treasured friend of many decades.

“Kathy was a gift and our friendship was a gift,” Jules said.

Janus Kahn is survived by her husband, David Kahn, and a son, Robert.

The post Katherine Janus Kahn, illustrator of ‘Sammy Spider’ Jewish children’s books, dies at 83 appeared first on The Forward.

A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.

In “Anthem,” a song from his 1992 album The Future, Leonard Cohen sang: “There is a crack, a  crack in everything — that’s how the light gets in.” Beautiful words, if somewhat haunting.

They echo the words uttered decades earlier by another Cohen — the first Chief Rabbi of modern Eretz Yisrael, Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook: “Out of the wreckage of destruction, the light of redemption will shine forth.” Never in recent history has this sentiment felt more piercingly true.

Rom Breslavski, who was on duty as a security guard at the Nova music festival on October 7th and was kidnapped into Gaza by terrorists, spent two years in solitary confinement under Islamic Jihad. He never saw daylight. He was starved, beaten, and terrorized. The guards forced him to sleep beside the bodies of murdered hostages. They tried to force him to convert to Islam. They taunted him with lies — that Israel had been destroyed, that his family was dead, that the war with Iran had wiped out everything he loved.

They tried to break him, body and soul, and came close to succeeding. Now Rom is home. He stands for hours every day by the window, just looking at the sky. His sad eyes betray the broken spirit of someone who has been to hell and back. He doesn’t say much.

His freedom is real, yes – but it doesn’t yet feel like freedom. For now, there is a crack — and we can only hope that through it, the light is beginning to get in. That out of this wreckage of destruction, the light of redemption will, at last, shine forth.

The look in Rom’s eyes is the same exact look you see in those haunting photographs of Holocaust survivors taken in early 1945 – men and women stepping through the gates of Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, technically free but hollow-eyed and gaunt, their spirits shattered.

They are alive, but not yet living. One nightmare has ended, but another is only beginning – the long, slow struggle to feel human again.

Liberation is never a single moment. It’s a process – slow, uneven, and often painfully drawn out. The first breath of freedom is always jagged and uncertain. Trauma doesn’t evaporate when the door opens – it lingers in the air for a long time after, and truthfully, it never entirely disappears. As Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor, later wrote, liberation was not the euphoric experience he and his fellow prisoners imagined it would be.

When the camp gates finally opened, many felt strangely numb, unable to rejoice. They walked out, Frankl said, “like sleepwalkers,” their souls lagging behind their bodies.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl describes how the sudden transition from horror to safety left survivors bewildered, and even depressed. Their horrific experiences under the Nazis had stripped them of their ability to feel. They were conditioned to expect pain or betrayal at every turn. Which meant that freedom was not the end of their suffering — it was the beginning of their healing.

And it’s in exactly this fragile space — the uneasy aftermath of catastrophe — that the Torah offers one of its most poignant symbols. Towards the end of the story of Noah’s flood, after months sealed inside the ark while the world drowned beneath torrential waters, the storms finally subsided. Hoping their ordeal was over, Noah sent out a dove to see whether the earth had begun to dry. The bird returned with something small and unexpected — “an olive leaf torn off in her mouth” (Gen. 8:11).

It was the first sign that the world outside the ark was beginning to heal, that life after the flood might once again be possible. But, as the commentaries note, the olive leaf was hardly a symbol of complete restoration.

The Ramban sees the olive leaf as proof that the world was only beginning to heal, but was not yet fully ready. Some land had reemerged, and hardy trees like the olive had started to sprout leaves – but the earth was still soggy and unstable, not yet ready for cultivation. The message was not “It’s over,” but rather, “It’s time to begin again.”

The Kli Yakar makes a striking observation: Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves after their sin – symbols of shame. But the dove brought Noah an olive leaf, a symbol of light and atonement; olive oil would one day fuel the pure flame of the sacred Menorah. Here was the light shining through the crack – a hopeful beginning, even if the world wasn’t quite ready to be whole.

The Zohar, sourcebook of Jewish mysticism, adds another layer: an olive yields its oil only when it is crushed. So it is with humanity, which often produces its greatest illumination only after being broken. The olive leaf was not meant to be a token of comfort or triumph, but a reminder that most often, it is from brokenness that light will emerge.

Noah’s emergence from the ark wasn’t the end of the story — it was the start of a long, difficult climb. The flood may have symbolically washed the world clean, but it hadn’t cured the human heart. Within the next few chapters, we encounter the Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, jealousies and betrayals within families, and eventually Egypt’s enslavement of Jacob’s descendants. The story of humanity after the flood was a catalogue of all kinds of failure and failings, one generation after another.

The olive leaf that the dove carried to Noah as the trauma of the flood drew to a close was not a declaration of victory. It was a divine whisper: the worst of the nightmare is over, but don’t celebrate just yet — there’s still a long way to go. It reminded Noah, and every generation after him, that rebuilding the world is never a single act of survival, but a lifelong process of reconstruction. Every step along the way must be seen for what it is — a platform for growth, a chance to reach higher, and an opportunity to shape a better future.

Rom Breslavski, like those Holocaust survivors before him, knows this truth instinctively. Freedom isn’t a doorway you walk through into sunshine — it’s a staircase you ascend, one painful, uncertain step at a time. The dove’s olive leaf wasn’t telling Noah that the storm was over — Noah already knew that. It was reminding him that the healing had only just begun.

That’s how God redeems the world: not in an instant, but through slow, deliberate rebirth. The cracks remain, but through them — as Leonard Cohen says it — the light gets in.

That’s what the dove offered Noah. It’s what God offered the survivors of the Shoah. And it’s what He is offering us today, after two years of trauma following October 7th — a tiny olive leaf, a call to rebuild, and the promise that even through the cracks, His light still finds a way in.

The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.