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How a Kentucky lawmaker’s friendship with a Jewish woman helped inspire her viral speech decrying anti-trans legislation
(JTA) — Pamela Stevenson, a Democratic state representative in Kentucky, was chatting recently with her friend Zahava Kurland about one of Kurland’s duties at her Orthodox synagogue: preparing the dead for burial.
“She was trying to explain to me certain things that had to be done,” Stevenson, who is also a Black Baptist minister, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last week. The seemingly esoteric topic was one of many the two women have discussed over more than a decade of weekly Friday-morning conversations — which cover anything from politics and friendship to faith and being one’s true self.
Stevenson said her conversations with Kurland have made her attuned to Jewish sensibilities. “She’s always listening for and giving me information” about Judaism and Jewish experiences, said Stevenson, who was first elected to the Kentucky legislature in 2020.
So Kurland was not surprised when, in a viral speech on Wednesday decrying her fellow lawmakers for signing off on a law that bans gender-affirming care for trans youth, Stevenson also centered antisemitism.
“First, you hated Black people,” Stevenson said, addressing the Republican lawmakers who voted for the legislation. “Then, you hated Jews. Now, you’re hating everybody. So the question is, when the only people left are you, will you hate yourself?”
Kurland said her friend is a listener and naturally empathetic, so she would be sensitive to how hatreds intersect.
“She’s truly well balanced,” said Kurland. “She truly cares about people.”
Stevenson says she looks forward to her Friday morning talks with Kurland. She said the conversations have helped give her a more expansive perspective on life, which drives her to fight bigotry.
“I really believe that I will never know as much as she knows,” Stevenson said. “But I can develop an appreciation for what it’s like and not use my view of the world as the only view of the world.”
What prompted Stevenson’s floor speech was the overwhelmingly Republican legislature’s override of Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of a law that bans a range of medical treatments and practices for trans youth. It outlaws doctors from providing gender-affirming treatment to youth; requires them to cease care if it has already begun; bans conversations in schools about gender identity or sexual orientation; bans school districts from allowing transgender students to use the bathroom aligned with their gender identity; and allows teachers to refuse to use a child’s preferred pronouns.
The bill was introduced weeks after state Sen. Karen Berg’s trans son, Henry Berg-Brousseau, died by suicide. Berg, who is Jewish, said that referring to the anti-trans bill as a parents’ rights bill is an “absolutely despicable affront to me personally,” according to The Washington Post. Stevenson, who has appeared alongside Berg at rallies, called her “phenomenal” and said, “This is infinitely more personal for her.”
Stevenson said that she mentioned anti-Jewish hatred in her speech because she believes hatreds are mutually reinforcing, and she connects the anti-trans sentiment she sees with rising racism and antisemitism.
“If you have a model where you have to hate somebody to win, then you always have to have somebody to hate,” she said. “People say it was out of nowhere, but it’s really out of somewhere. We’ve gone through the cycles of the Native Americans, the Black folks have been hated for a long time, the disabled. Everybody is always on the bottom of that model. And in just recent years, it was the Muslims, then it was the immigrants, and then it was back around the Blacks again. And so because of this overflow of hate, there’s been an uptick in antisemitic actions.”
Stevenson said her mission is to make people cognizant of the roots of hatred. “People want to say that all the attacks against the Jewish temples and the Jewish people in recent times came out of nowhere,” she said, referring to reports of a spike in antisemitic attacks. “No, it did not. We just have chosen not to pay attention to what’s been said.”
Kurland, who is a member of Congregation Beth Jacob in Atlanta, and Stevenson, a retired Air Force Colonel and an attorney who is running to be Kentucky’s attorney general, met in 2006 when Stevenson was serving in the Air Force and Kurland was working as an accountant in Atlanta. They attended a three-day course with Landmark, the personal development program that presses participants to face uncomfortable truths about themselves.
“When we were closer-in logistically she came over very often for Shabbos meals,” Kurland said. “I often invite people for Shabbos meals and the holidays and I love explaining, you know, how Judaism gave more to the world than anything, anybody, any person. Torah, Judaism has given the world its whole structure for society.”
The Air Force started moving Stevenson around. “That’s when we started talking on the phone all the time, because we couldn’t get together,” Kurland said.
Stevenson is “a committed listener, someone who’s going to hear you and call you out on your stuff,” Kurland said. “It’s not a friendship where you massage each other’s egos. It’s a friendship where you hold each other to account for who you say you are.”
They each speak with outrage at the lawmakers who, they feel, would breach the relationship between a parent and a child.
“As a mother, how dare you interfere with one of the most intimate relationships?” Stevenson said two weeks ago during debate on the bill, addressing Rep. Jennifer Decker, a Republican who was its lead sponsor. “We have no right to interfere in the parental rights.”
Kurland agrees. “These are all decisions to be made between a child and his parents or her parents and their doctor,” she said. “It has no place for the government to have anything to do with anything.”
And both Kurland and Stevenson say religion is a key part of their identities.
“Judaism is the center part of my life,” said Kurland. “It’s what I am, it’s who I am, it’s what I’m about. And as a Jew, you cannot sit by and let another one of God’s human beings [be excluded]. I mean, when we honor other people, we are doing God’s work. We are honoring God. When we cut people out, then we’re not “
Stevenson likewise calls herself “a woman of faith.”
“I believe what is required, in almost every faith that I know of, is to love one another and take care of the people around us,” she said.
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The post How a Kentucky lawmaker’s friendship with a Jewish woman helped inspire her viral speech decrying anti-trans legislation appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘This is sort of their normal’: Israelis confront yet another wartime flare after Iranian fire
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — As missiles flew toward Israel on Sunday night, beleaguered Israelis once again took to Facebook from their safe rooms.
“Whoever is in charge of naming wars over here, please do not give it a fierce animal name this time,” one Israeli wrote in an English-language group. “The last military operation was called ‘Roaring Lion,’ and the Twelve Day War in June 2025, ‘Rising Lion.’”
Another replied with a suggestion: “I hope it’s something like ‘The One Day War.’”
The idea may not have been far off. U.S. President Donald Trump said early Monday that he hoped both Iran and Israel would halt their fire. By mid-morning, Iran’s military announced the strikes were on pause, saying it had sufficiently retaliated for the Israeli strikes in Beirut, a tit-for-tat exchange. By Monday evening Israel time, Netanyahu, too, said the fighting was halted, but warned that Israel would respond “with force” to any future attacks.
Despite the tenuous pause — not quite a ceasefire — Home Front Command restrictions remained in place by Monday evening, touching every layer of daily life in Israel. Schools were closed through at least Wednesday. Or Erez, head spokesperson for Clalit, Israel’s largest health care network, told JTA, “We will continue to remain operating in shelters until the Home Front Command restrictions change.”
By 10 p.m. Sunday, NICU infants and those in critical care were already being moved to bunkers beneath Beilinson hospital, home to the largest emergency room in the Middle East.
“This is the third time within a year that we have carried out such a transition,” said Dr. Erez Barenboim, director of Beilinson and Hasharon Hospitals.
Hospital staff were visibly fatigued but resilient. Soroka University Medical Center was struck by an Iranian ballistic missile during the June 2025 conflict, and as is standard during attacks, health care staff canceled non-essential visits and moved operations to shelters.
Alexi Wirpel, a student at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, was on a Birthright trip in the Galilee when the first sirens rang out. “We could hear the dome working, so we knew we were going to be relatively okay,” she said.
It was not Wirpel’s first trip to Israel, but it was her first time hearing sirens signaling incoming missiles. Others on the Birthright trip were more anxious and had to be consoled by staff, she said.
When word came of a tenuous pause, Wirpel said, she and others didn’t believe it would last long.
“All day today we’ve all kind of been just waiting for something to go off again,” she said. “It’s become a very real reality that this is something that my family has to go through instead of just hearing about it.”
Caroline Flannery manages an after-school program at a Tel Aviv middle school and has watched the cumulative toll of two and a half years of conflict reshape an entire generation of Israeli children. Added to the time lost during the pandemic, students in those grades have missed the equivalent of a year of school.
“We have kids in fifth and sixth grade that still don’t know the alphabet,” Flannery said.
Israel’s education system has been among the hardest hit since Oct. 7. Leaked results of a government aptitude test found that only 3% of Israeli ninth graders met the national benchmark for science, and just 22% met the benchmark for English, figures that prompted opposition leaders to call for a declaration of a “national educational emergency.”
The disruption extends to staff, who are just as rattled as students when a siren sounds and a week of lesson plans is suddenly worthless.
Flannery moved to Israel in 2019 and hadn’t planned to stay, but the impact she could make on Israeli children convinced her to commit to another year, and then another, until she was running the after-school program herself.
The conclusion she has come to in the wake of Oct. 7 is that many of her students, faced with constant disruption, will never fully catch up.
“It’s not just that they miss school, so now they have to work extra hard and catch up,” she said. “Their whole routine was disrupted and they come back. They’re not ready, not used to, not prepared to sit, to come into class, to sit in their seats, to learn. Their minds aren’t there.”
With Trump pressing Israel and Iran to return to the negotiating table, Flannery discussed contingency plans already on the table — such as Zoom classes, home visits — should the war return to its March tempo.
“This,” she said, “is sort of their normal.”
The post ‘This is sort of their normal’: Israelis confront yet another wartime flare after Iranian fire appeared first on The Forward.
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Celebrated German Jewish bakery closes, saying ‘the hatred reached Berlin’ after Oct. 7
(JTA) — BERLIN — A Jewish bakery owned by Polish and Israeli immigrants in this city has shut its doors, citing a combination of economic pressure and antisemitic harassment.
Babka & Krantz opened in the Friedenau district in November 2022 and added a second location in December 2024, adjacent to the memorial at the site where the Nazis devised their “final solution” for the Jews during the Holocaust.
The second location at the House of the Wannsee Conference closed on Nov. 30, according to the bakery’s Instagram account, which directed followers to a statement from the memorial that has since been deleted from its website.
“We regret the verbal abuse and the difficult situation to which the managing directors and employees of BABKA & KRANTZ Meisterkonditorei were exposed and express our full understanding for the termination of the cooperation under these circumstances,” said the March 10 statement, which was preserved by the Internet Archive.
Now, the original location has closed, too.
Café owners and married couple Shahar Elkin and Marcin Liera-Elkin said in a statement to friends and supporters that a construction site had blocked access to the bakery for more than a year, curbing foot traffic.
But they also said they had been affected when, after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, “the hatred reached Berlin as well.” The bakery was “subjected to constant verbal abuse” since that time, they said in their statement, which has circulated on social media.
Elkin and Liera-Elkin declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, saying they were turning down all media inquiries for the time being. “We and our family need to settle down and attend to a few matters,” they said.
Some would-be customers in the neighborhood said they were already missing the Babka & Krantz on Sunday.
“I was actually going there every day recently, after I found out they were closing. I found that really unfortunate,” said Rebecca, who declined to share her last name. She said she had heard about both the economic impact of the construction and about harassment that had taken place at the store, adding, “It makes me sad that things are this way. I’m trying not to cry.”
Babka & Krantz joins a growing list of beloved eateries that have cited the aftermath of Oct. 7 in announcing their closures. Also in Berlin, the hummus bar Kanaan, which was jointly owned by an Israeli and a Palestinian, closed in March after experiencing protests. An Israeli restaurant in Portugal cited harassment when it announced its closure in January, as did an Ethiopian-Israeli eatery in New York City that recently ceased operating as a traditional restaurant. In Washington, D.C., a local chain of Israeli restaurants closed down late last year following a boycott campaign.
Elkin came to Berlin in 2012 from his home city of Haifa, Israel, and in 2019 earned a master baker’s certificate, becoming the first Jewish master baker accepted into the Berlin Bakers’ Guild. Liera-Elkin was born in Posen, Poland, and grew up in Berlin.
The couple said they were proud to be producing Jewish baked goods in a city with a resurging Jewish population.
“Our families come from cities with a vibrant Jewish life and a formative culture of debate. Today, few or no Jews live in these places anymore,” they said in their statement last week. “That’s why Berlin is such a miracle.”
Germany is home to an estimated 200,000 Jews, including many from the former Soviet Union and a large contingent of Israeli expats. The bakery catered to them, offering special menus for Jewish holidays, devising baked goods that reflect diverse Jewish traditions and even bringing in a rabbi to answer visitors’ questions.
But the bakery catered not only to Jewish customers. According to the owners, non-Jewish locals learned about Jewish culture at their tables. “Our neighbors have seen that different people can eat together at one table and speak to each other,” they wrote in their goodbye note.
The business also won professional recognition, earning a Craftsmanship Award sponsored by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs last year.
The couple said the good relations they had built as unofficial ambassadors of Jewish culture – introducing Berliners of all backgrounds to Jewish culinary specialties – were endangered when the construction site went up in their neighborhood, blocking the street view of their business. They lost customers and money, they said, and their anxiety was increasingly visible on their Instagram account, where they chronicled their fruitless efforts to make their story accessible again.
Speaking to the Berliner Morgenpost in November, Liera-Elkin hinted that the two-pronged pressure — economic and harassment — might force them to close. He reported that their vehicle had been vandalized and that they had “experienced numerous verbal and even physical attacks in our private life, received hate-filled letters and calls.” The couple said they had even sent their daughter to stay elsewhere for a time.
“We are just a bakery that wants to offer great products. But now we are only confronted with problems and politics that leave us in despair,“ he told the Morgenpost. “We really don‘t know if Berlin is still the right place for us.”
The post Celebrated German Jewish bakery closes, saying ‘the hatred reached Berlin’ after Oct. 7 appeared first on The Forward.
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Dave Matthews pushes back on claims his criticism of Israel is antisemitic
(JTA) — Dave Matthews, the frontman of the American rock band Dave Matthews Band, pushed back on allegations Friday that his vocal criticism of Israel in recent years had crossed into antisemitism.
Reading his remarks from a sheet of paper on stage at the Coastal Credit Union Music Park in Raleigh, North Carolina, Matthews, whose criticism of Israel has drawn backlash from some Jewish and pro-Israel voices, pushed back on accusations of antisemitism.
“It’s no secret, at least I don’t try to make it a secret, that I disagree with the policies of Israel and the United States, and their treatment of the civilian population in Gaza and the West Bank,” Matthews said. “But that should by no means be twisted into anybody thinking that I am bigoted or antisemitic in any way at all.”
Matthews continued: “On the contrary, I have a deep respect and love for all of my life that I can remember, and an admiration for the culture and history of the Jewish people.”
The frontman of the band continued to list a host of prominent Jewish figures he admired, including Albert Einstein, George Gershwin, Hannah Arendt and Anne Frank, and described being at a friend’s son’s bar mitzvah on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel.
“I hold the Jewish people in the highest regard, and it breaks my heart that my opinions born out of deep commitment to nonviolent resolution and resistance can be twisted to serve any hateful or racist or bigoted ideas,” Matthews said.
Matthews’ remarks come after years of outspoken criticism of Israel, including in 2024 when he joined a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Washington, D.C., against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress.
“I’m ashamed that my tax dollars are going to the brutalizing of an entire people,” Matthews told Al Jazeera at the time. “It’s shameful. And I’m ashamed that our government is welcoming him here.”
At a New Jersey concert last year, Matthews also donned a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headscarf, and held up signs reading “Stop The Genocide” and “Stop Killing Children.”
A representative for Matthews did not immediately respond to a request for clarification of what prompted his remarks Friday.
Matthews is among a growing number of prominent artists who have become outspoken critics of Israel in recent years, including Macklemore, the Irish rap group Kneecap and the British punk band Bob Vylan.
Matthews’ statement Friday was not the first time the artist has defended his rhetoric. In a December 2023 letter to his Jewish fans obtained by JNS, he also assured fans that he “strongly and unequivocally condemn the horrific events of Oct. 7.”
“I will never stop calling for an end to the violence in Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon, and for that matter, the Congo and Sudan and Ukraine, or the violence, or the horrific violence against immigrants and their neighbors in our country,” Matthews concluded during his remarks Friday.
The post Dave Matthews pushes back on claims his criticism of Israel is antisemitic appeared first on The Forward.
