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Jewish Life Stories: Hasidic filmmaker Menachem Daum, pioneering publisher Carol Hupping Fisher 

This article is also available as a weekly newsletter, “Life Stories,” where we remember those who made an outsize impact in the Jewish world — or just left their community a better or more interesting place. Subscribe here to get “Life Stories” in your inbox every Tuesday.

(JTA) — Filmmaker Menachem Daum, a member of Brooklyn’s Gerer hasidic movement whose documentaries challenged preconceptions about haredi Jews and Polish gentiles, died Jan. 7. He was 77.

A gerontologist by training, Daum and his frequent collaborator, Oren Rudavsky, made the 1997 PBS documentary, “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America,” which introduced many Americans to his community from a rare insider’s perspective. In “Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust” (2004), he traveled to Poland in part to dispel his religious sons’ mistrust of gentiles by finding the Polish family that helped save his parents during the Holocaust. And in “The Ruins of Lifta” (2016), he and Rudavsky documented the efforts of an Israeli-Arab group trying to prevent an empty Arab village from being demolished by Israeli developers.

Daum was born October 5, 1946 at the Landsburg Displaced Persons Camp in Germany, and lived in Brooklyn most of his life. Last year, Daum told the news site Shtetl that he made “A Life Apart” as a way to honor his father, a Holocaust survivor and devoted Hasid. And he made “Hiding and Seeking” to challenge his community’s discourse around gentiles. “As a Jewish filmmaker, I use film to challenge stereotypes,” he told the Jewish Standard in 2022. “If Jews thought that all Poles were incorrigible antisemites, I can show films about the Poles who protected my family, and Poles who now are going to great lengths to protect Jewish cemeteries.”

Author and filmmaker Eva Fogelman, whose advice Daum sought in making “Hiding and Seeking,” told JTA she appreciated his “courage to speak out against intolerance within a religious community that was healing itself from persecution and is not ready to embrace ‘the other.’”

A bat mitzvah at 91

Holocaust survivor Eugenia Unger, then 91, celebrates her bat mitzvah in Buenos Aires in 2017. (Facebook screenshot)

In 2017, after decades in which she shared her experiences of surviving the Majdanek and Auschwitz concentration camps, Eugenia Unger made national news in Argentina by celebrating her bat mitzvah at age 91. She was called to the Torah at the Herzliya Jewish community center and synagogue in Buenos Aires, which also organized a birthday celebration in her honor. She told Argentine media that “the culmination of my whole life is my bat mitzvah.” One of the founding members of the Holocaust Museum of Buenos Aires in 2000, she wrote three books about her experiences. Unger died Dec. 19 in a private hospital in Buenos Aires. She was 97.

A tireless defender of public health

Sidney M. Wolfe (1937–2024), physician who challenged drug companies. (Wikimedia Commons)

In 1967, the Cleveland-born physician Sidney Wolfe traveled to the South to provide medical care during voter registration drives. There he met the consumer activist Ralph Nader, and the two would go on to found Public Citizen. As head of its affiliated Health Research Group, Wolfe demanded accountability from the pharmaceutical industry and government regulators, leading campaigns to drive dangerous or mislabeled prescription drugs and devices off the market. His book “Worst Pills, Best Pills: A Consumer’s Guide to Avoiding Drug-Induced Death or Illness” was a perennial bestseller. In 1992, Manhattan’s Central Synagogue presented him with its annual Shofar Award, given to those “whose accomplishment, mission, and goals in pursuit of social justice are informed by the highest principles of Judaism and the Jewish people.” Wolfe died Jan. 1 at his home in Washington. He was 86.

A Jewish publishing pioneer

Carol Hupping Fisher of the Jewish Publication Society served as publishing director, managing editor and chief operating officer. (Courtesy Fisher family)

When Carol Hupping Fisher interviewed at the Jewish Publication Society in the late 1990s, it felt like a perfect fit. “I was pursuing my Jewish education as somebody getting ready to convert,” Fisher, who grew up Protestant, told the Jewish Exponent in 2016, “and I was in publishing, so it was a beautiful blend of my personal life getting to extend … into my professional life.” Fisher would go on to become publishing director, managing editor and chief operating officer for the Philadelphia-based JPS, shepherding over 100 books into print — including “Etz Hayim,” the Conservative movement Torah commentary — and overseeing a partnership between JPS and the University of Nebraska. Before joining JPS, she was the first female and youngest vice president of publishing at Rodale Press, a publisher of health and wellness magazines and books. Raised in Merrick, New York, she died Dec. 14 of glioblastoma at her home in Collingswood, New Jersey.

A “rabbi’s rabbi” and scholar of Yiddish

Rabbi Emanuel S. Goldsmith was a professor, pulpit rabbi and co-editor of “Dynamic Judaism: The Essential Writings of Mordecai M. Kaplan.” (Queens College)

As a scholar of Yiddish literature, Rabbi Emanuel S. Goldsmith taught Jewish Studies at Queens College and other universities, and was the author, in 1997, of “Modern Yiddish Culture,” described as the first history of the 20th-century Yiddishist movement. As a pulpit rabbi he led congregations in Scarsdale, New York; Hyde Park, Massachusetts, and Halifax, Nova Scotia. And as a committed Reconstructionist Jew, he became an expert in the work of his teacher and the movement’s founder, Mordecai Kaplan. “Manny was a rabbi’s rabbi,” Mel Scult, co-editor with Goldsmith of the book “Dynamic Judaism: The Essential Writings of Mordecai M. Kaplan,” wrote in a tribute. “Manny’s scholarship was vast, and he was particularly proud of the contacts and articles he published making Kaplan known not only to the Jewish community but also to many Christian colleagues.” Goldsmith died Jan. 5. He was 88.

A rabbi’s son who helmed The New York Times

Joseph Lelyveld served as executive editor of The New York Times during a period of peak profits and expanding readership. (©Nita Lelyveld/Penguin Random House)

Joseph Lelyveld, a rabbi’s son who became a renowned foreign correspondent and who served as executive editor of The New York Times from 1994 to 2001 — a period of peak profits and expanding readership — died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 86. Lelyveld’s father, Arthur, was a leader of the Reform movement and a civil rights activist who helped influence President Harry S. Truman’s decision to recognize the State of Israel. In a 2005 memoir, Joseph recalled how his preoccupied parents shipped him off as a child to live with a Seventh-Day Adventist family and later his paternal grandparents in Brooklyn. As the son of a prominent Zionist, Lelyveld served as an intermediary with Jewish critics of the Times’ Israel coverage, but eventually lost his patience. “There has never been a Times correspondent who was considered honorable by the more extreme faction of pro-Israel readers,’’ he told a researcher in 2012.

Faces of Israel’s Fallen

David Schwartz, left, and Yakir Hexter were photographed learning together in the beit midrash, or study hall, of Yeshivat Har Etzion in Alon Shvut, in a program for Israeli soldiers. (Via Facebook)

Two Israeli combat engineers who were chevrutas, or study partners, at Yeshivat Har Etzion in Alon Shvut were killed Monday in a rocket-propelled grenade attack in the Gaza city of Khan Younis, the IDF said. David Schwartz and Yakir Hexter, both 26, were part of a paratrooper force, and, as the Times of Israel explained, “tasked with some of the most dangerous work as part of the IDF’s ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, scanning Hamas’s tunnel networks and destroying them, along with other sites, with explosives.”

Schwartz was married to Meital Schwartz, whose father Joseph Gitler is the founder and chairman of Leket Israel, the country’s largest food non-profit. David’s sister Shira Meirman is currently an Israeli emissary at the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto. Both soldiers, who studied together as part of an army program for religious troops, had family connections to Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a Modern Orthodox seminary in Riverdale, New York: Schwartz, from Elazar, was a nephew by marriage to YCT alumnus Rabbi Marc Gitler of Denver, Colorado; Hexter, from Jerusalem, was the nephew of YCT board member Rabba Yaffa Epstein of New York’s Jewish Education Project. Schwartz and Hexter were among nine Israeli soldiers killed in combat on Jan. 8, including six troops killed in an explosion in central Gaza. Their deaths raised the toll in Israel’s offensive to 185.


The post Jewish Life Stories: Hasidic filmmaker Menachem Daum, pioneering publisher Carol Hupping Fisher  appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Greta Thunberg, Fellow Activists on Gaza-Bound Flotilla to Be Shown Oct. 7 Footage, Israel’s Defense Minister Says

An Israeli solider passes a bun to Greta Thunberg onboard the Gaza-bound British-flagged yacht “Madleen” after Israeli forces boarded the charity vessel as it attempted to reach the Gaza Strip in defiance of an Israeli naval blockade, in this still image released on June 9, 2025. Photo: Israel Foreign Ministry via Reuters

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and the group of international activists traveling with her on a boat to the Gaza Strip will be shown footage of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorist attack after Israeli forces intercepted their vessel, Israel’s Defense Minster Israel Katz said on Monday.

Katz also called Thunberg an antisemite in a post on X and described all those aboard the ship as supporters of Hamas, the internationally designated terrorist organization that has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades and initiated the current war raging in the Middle East after massacring 1,200 people, wounding thousands more, and taking 251 hostages during its invasion of southern Israel.

The Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists also perpetrated widespread sexual violence, including torture and mass gang-rape, against Israelis during their onslaught.

“I instructed the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] to show the flotilla passengers the video of the horrors of the October 7 massacre when they arrive at the port of Ashdod,” Katz wrote. “It is appropriate that the antisemitic Greta and her fellow Hamas supporters see exactly who the Hamas terrorist organization they came to support and for whom they work is, what atrocities they committed against women, the elderly, and children, and against whom Israel is fighting to defend itself.”

“The IDF will continue its war against the Hamas murderers with all its moral righteousness until they are subdued, all the hostages are released, and the security of the State of Israel is ensured,” Katz added.

Israeli forces boarded and seized the Madleen, operated by the pro-Palestinian Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FCC), during the early hours of Monday morning after Thunberg, 22, and the others on board tried to break the naval blockade of Gaza. Katz said on Sunday he instructed Israeli forces to stop the Madleen flotilla from reaching Gaza “and to take whatever measures are necessary to that end.”

“Israel will act against any attempt to break the blockade or assist terrorist organizations – at sea, in the air, and on land,” he added.

Israel imposed a naval blockade on Gaza in 2007, after Hamas seized control of the coastal enclave, in an effort to stop the Palestinian terrorist organization from obtaining weapons. The blockade has remained in place throughout the Israel-Hamas war that started 20 months ago, but in March, Israel also sealed off Gaza by land to further cut off Hamas from obtaining aid. Israel has let into Gaza some food to be distributed to civilians over the past two weeks.

The group of activists aboard the Madleen said they hoped to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza and raise international awareness about the humanitarian crisis there. Israel dismissed their efforts, described them as merely a stunt.

“While Greta and others attempted to stage a media provocation whose sole purpose was to gain publicity — and which included less than a single truckload of aid — more than 1,200 aid trucks have entered Gaza from Israel within the past two weeks, and in addition, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has distributed close to 11 million meals directly to civilians in Gaza,” said Israel’s Foreign Ministry. “There are ways to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip — they do not involve Instagram selfies.”

Israel released a video showing Israeli naval forces handing out water and sandwiches to those aboard the FCC after seizing the vessel. Among those on board was Rima Hassan, a French member of the European parliament. The Jewish community in France lambasted Hassan last year for arguing that French-Palestinians must be able to join the “Palestinian armed resistance” if their French-Israeli counterparts are allowed to serve in the IDF.

“The ‘selfie yacht’ is safely making its way to the shores of Israel … The passengers are safe,” read a post on Israel’s official account on X. The post also noted that the “tiny amount” of humanitarian aid aboard the vessel, that wasn’t consumed by the activists on board, will be transferred to Gaza “through real humanitarian channels.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said that when the yacht arrives at the Israeli port, arrangements will be made for the activists to return to their home countries.

Hassan posted on X that the crew on the ship were “arrested by the Israeli army in international waters around 2 am” on Monday. She shared a photo of all the crew members wearing orange life vests with their hands in the air as Israeli forces seized control of the ship.

“If you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by Israeli occupational forces or forces that support Israel,” Thunberg, said in a video released by the FCC, filmed before the vessel was captured. “I urge all my friends, family and comrades to put pressure on the Swedish government to release me and the others as soon as possible.”

Widely known for her campaign to end climate change, Swedish-born Thunberg has increasingly become a vocal anti-Israel activist, expressing solidarity with “Palestine and Gaza” less than two weeks after the Oct. 7 massacre, before the Israeli military even launched its ground offensive in Gaza. Thunberg did not denounce Hamas or mention the Palestinian terrorist group’s atrocities.

Then in November 2023, the young activist encountered a storm of criticism from politicians and Jewish leaders, some of whom accused her of being antisemitic, over a speech she delivered to a rally in Amsterdam that sought to insert opposition to Israel’s defensive war in Gaza into the environmentalist movement’s agenda.

Last year, Danish police detained Thunberg at a Copenhagen protest against the war in Gaza and Israel’s presence in the West Bank.

The post Greta Thunberg, Fellow Activists on Gaza-Bound Flotilla to Be Shown Oct. 7 Footage, Israel’s Defense Minister Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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The Student Intifada Escalates at the University of Washington

ILLUSTRATIVE: Demonstrators march in support of Palestinians, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, U.S., February 5, 2025. (There is no indication any of these students are members of SUPER UW — the group referenced in this article.) REUTERS/David Ryder

A suspended student group is supporting an organization that the United States and Canada have deemed a terrorist entity, taking over an engineering building at the University of Washington.

Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return at the University of Washington (SUPER UW) was suspended from campus after refusing to cooperate with university administrators who were investigating vandalism after demonstrations in 2024. However, that suspension seems to be in name only, as SUPER UW has been allowed to hold tabling events on campus, with some reportedly handing out Hamas’ pamphlets (according to a Canary Mission video) and selling t-shirts promoting “resistance.”

On May 5, SUPER UW published a manifesto stating, “WE DEMAND: UW will no longer be complicit in genocide.” SUPER UW explained they were answering “the call” and entered “a new global phase of repression and resistance, both in the international student movement and on the ground in Palestine.” It is even more concerning who may have issued the call.

In May 2024 Samidoun published “A call from the Palestinian student movement in Gaza: Time for revolutionary escalation of the global intifada.” Samidoun is not limiting their call to university students but is also calling for high school students to participate in the “global intifada.” This is another example of university campus influence on K-12 education, demonstrating the need for transparency, not only in higher education, but in K-12 schools.

Today we turn to high school students all over the world to participate widely in the struggles and activities of the university student movement, organizing demonstrations, sit-ins, and vigils, writing petitions and letters, and organizing educational days about the Palestinian struggle and the goals of the Palestinian people for liberation and return. Secondary schools constitute a strong fortress and a great support for university students everywhere,” the statement said.

SUPER UW explicitly supports Samidoun, issuing a “Solidarity Statement with Samidoun Against Ongoing Repression” after the terrorist designation by the governments of Canada and the United States.

More recently, SUPER UW shared their desire to “build a revolutionary culture in the West, bridging the Palestinian resistance back home and the Palestinian solidarity movement here in the imperial core to contribute to the global Camp of Resistance.” After the murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim by a man yelling “free, free Palestine” — and after the fire-bombing of American Jews marching for the return of Israeli hostages in Colorado — SUPER UW’s call to “build a revolutionary culture” in the United States could be seen as a call for more violence against Jews and other Americans.

During a February 2025 rally organized by SUPER UW, the group’s media liaison admitted, “Our fight was never about the ceasefire, the fight is for a single Palestinian state, from the river to the sea.” The suspended group was protesting the Boeing-UW partnership on the construction of the Interdisciplinary Engineering Building on the university campus.

The response to a suspended campus group organizing a demonstration on campus was lackluster. UWPD Chief Craig Wilson stated, “We welcome and honor everybody’s freedom of speech, and we are here to support that. As long as people don’t violate either university rules and regulations or state law, we’re here to support everybody’s first amendment right to have freedom of speech.”

It should not be surprising that the University of Washington has been occupied by rioters and arsonists. The UW administration has ceded responsibility by allowing SUPER UW to continue to operate on campus, after being suspended.

According to a Forbes article published in 2023, UW receives approximately $1.56 billion Federal dollars for research and development. An institution that receives that type of Federal investment should do everything in its lawful power to ensure that groups are not handing out terrorist propaganda on campus.

The US Department of Education should require detailed disclosures on funding for departments, professors, centers, and student groups, including line-item reporting on how those funds are used.

Brandy Shufutinsky is the director of Education and National Security at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which examines the threats and vulnerabilities within America’s education system. Follow Brandy on X @76brandy76.  Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

The post The Student Intifada Escalates at the University of Washington first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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The Only Pro-Israel Argument That Works

A room full of Torah scrolls in Miami. Photo: Pini Dunner.

Baruch Hashem, this is the only pro-Israel argument that works:

There is a Creator
Who made the universe,
And gave a slice of it to the Children of Israel,
As an everlasting inheritance.

This is how every Jew should begin their conversations about Israel, because this is how Judaism’s most sacred text begins her magnum opus. (And check out the very first Rashi commentary on the very first verse of the very first chapter of the Five Books of Moses).

Indeed, it is specifically the Torah that records the name “Zion” 154 times, “Jerusalem” 669 times, and “Israel” 2,319 times. And it does so not with a pandering, insecure Zionism of recent man-made construction — but with an unstoppable, proud 4,000-year-old territorial right of an eternal people, gifted with an eternal land, by an Eternal G-d.

And yet our enemies — terrorists and terrorist sanitizers around the globe — all have the same criminal solution to the Jewish problem. To use politics, economics, and downright violence to steal an indigenous land from her indigenous people, Israel from the Children of Israel.

But there exists no one — not a single man nor a group of people — who has the right to trade, barter, occupy, or negotiate away a homeland that is the birthright of every single Jew — no matter who, no matter where, no matter when.

Paper mandates are worth less than the paper they were written on.

Ceasefires enable the fires of terrorism to never cease.

And dangerous idiots on college campuses, in the hallowed halls of government, and in anti-Jewish hate mobs everywhere refuse to answer one simple question: Where does the name “Jew” come from?

Once again, the answer comes from the Torah. From the “Kingdom of Judea” — the tribe of King David — the geographical origin point of all the Jews you know today.

As desperately as the propaganda pundits try to poison your brain, we are not “West Bankers” from the “West Bank.” We are Judeans from Judea and Samaria. Our indigenous right to our homeland is embedded in our very name itself. And no matter what lies the media tries to force down your brain, it’s impossible for us to “occupy” our own land.

It is the only land of the Jewish people.

Always has. Always will be.

And whoever gives up an inch of it is robbing the Jewish Nation.

And yet, since the destruction of our Holy Temple in Jerusalem over 2,000 years ago by the Roman Occupation of Israel, their subsequent iterations have raped, pillaged, murdered, pogromed, crusaded, inquisitioned, holocausted, and tried to wipe us off the face of the earth and make us forget our Judean identity.

But they have gloriously failed.

As Mark Twain declared in 1899, “The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

The secret is simple.

It is the Torah.

The Torah is the secret to our immortality.

As the Talmud states, we are like fish in water. And no matter what the clever foxes of time whisper to us through their shiny teeth, our only way to survive is to stay in the “waters of Torah.” This is what Rabbi Akiva told Pappus Ben Judah in the time of the Roman Occupation of Israel. This is what our people’s leaders have told us throughout all the hard times since then. And this is what the Lubavitcher Rebbe has told us in our own time.

Torah isn’t just how we survive.

It’s how we thrive.

Why is this?

Because the Torah is not some history book or even a collection of religious rituals. It is a sacred book of Divine lessons, the ultimate frame-changer for all humanity. And it is exactly what we need more of right now.

So pick up a Torah book,  download a Torah podcast, join a Torah class or simply call your rabbi.

The chapters of history don’t lie. We are the indigenous natives of Israel and we must always be proud of that immutable, immortal truth.

This is why the Shulchan Aruch opens her magnum opus of Jewish law with the teaching of the Talmudic scholar Yehudah ben Teima, who said, “Be as bold as a leopard … to do the will of your Father in Heaven.” The very first step of our legal system, of the pathway to justice and spiritual development, is the simple fact that it is only the proud Jew who studies Torah and cherishes her Mitzvot who passes on an unbreakable and undeniable Jewish identity to our children’s children’s children — and ensures we stand strong against all oppression and persecution, as demanded by our Torah.

Levi Y. Welton is a rabbi, stand-up comedian, and Lubavitcher Chossid. He can be reached at rabbiwelton@gmail.com

The post The Only Pro-Israel Argument That Works first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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