Uncategorized
Judy Heumann, Jewish disability advocate who spurred a movement, dies at 75
(JTA) — In Judith Heumann’s 2020 memoir, the lifelong advocate for people with disabilities describes feeling shocked upon being invited to read from the Torah at her synagogue in Berkeley, California. Not only were women permitted to carry out the sacred task, unlike in the Orthodox synagogue of her Brooklyn childhood, but the bimah, or prayer platform, had been made accessible just for her.
“Oh my God, I thought, I’ve never been asked to do an aliyah,” Heumann wrote, using the Hebrew word for the ritual. “I learned how to do it.”
The moment was just one of many when Heumann, who died Saturday at 75, charted ground that had previously been off-limits to wheelchair users like her. Since contracting polio as a toddler, Heumann broke down barriers for disabled children and educators in New York City schools, protested until federal legislation protecting people with disabilities was passed and advised multiple presidential administrations on disability issues.
A cause of death was not immediately given for Heumann, whose website announced her death on Saturday in Washington, D.C. Heumann had lived there for 30 years, since being tapped by the Clinton administration to serve as assistant secretary of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services.
Heumann was born in 1947 to two parents who had separately fled Nazi Germany as children in the 1930s; all of her grandparents and countless other family members were murdered in the Holocaust.
She said she believed it was her parents’ experience that led them to reject doctors’ advise to have their daughter institutionalized after she contracted polio and lost the use of her legs. “They came from a country where families got separated, some children sent away, others taken from their families by the authorities and never returned — all part of a campaign of systematic dehumanization and murder,” she wrote in her memoir, “Being Heumann.” “Their daughter, disabled or not, wasn’t going anywhere.”
Instead, her parents and in particular her mother, Ilse, set about to advocate for her. When the city school system said Judith could not attend her neighborhood school, Ilse got a rabbi to agree that she could attend his yeshiva if her daughter learned Hebrew. Judith did, but the rabbi did not keep his word. Instead, Ilse lined up an array of activities for Judith, including thrice-weekly Hebrew school classes accessible only if her father carried her in her chair up a flight of stairs, until the city opened a program for children with disabilities.
Judy Heumann attends the 2022 Women’s Entrepreneurship Day Organization Summit at United Nations in New York City, May 20, 2022. (Chance Yeh/Getty Images)
There, Heumann wrote, she first encountered “disability culture” — what she described as “a culture that has learned to value the humanity in all people, without dismissing anyone for looking, thinking, believing or acting differently.” She would experience and then help craft this culture during a decade at summer camp, in a movement captured in the 2020 documentary “Crip Camp,” and then throughout a lifetime of advocacy that earned her the moniker “mother of the disability rights movement.”
One notable win came in 1970, after Heumann graduated from college with a degree in speech therapy. Told that she could not teach in New York City schools because she could not help children leave in case of fire, Heumann sued. She was represented in part by an attorney who would argue Roe v. Wade in front of the Supreme Court, and the case came before Judge Constance Baker Motley, the only woman on the NAACP legal team that argued Brown v. Board of Education. The city quickly settled and Heumann ultimately got a job at her old elementary school.
The public fight propelled Heumann into the leadership of an inchoate disability rights movement. Two years later, she participated in New York City protests in favor of federal anti-discrimination laws that President Richard Nixon ultimately signed. In 1977, she was one of dozens of disability advocates to occupy a federal building in San Francisco in a demonstration calling for enforcement mechanisms. Their advocacy led to Section 504, a federal statute that requires entities receiving government funds to show that they do not discriminate on the basis of disability.
The episode was dramatized on Comedy Central’s “Drunk History.” Heumann was played by Ali Stroker, a Jewish actress who was the first wheelchair user to perform on Broadway. Heumann was also recognized as Time Magazine’s 1977 Woman of the Year in a 2020 retrospective.
Heumann was a cofounder of the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley before returning to the East Coast and the government advisory roles. Through it all, Heumann remained involved with the Jewish communities where she lived, including by having a bat mitzvah ceremony as an adult. In Washington, she was a member of Adas Israel Congregation.
In 2016, she cited tikkun olam, the ancient rabbinical imperative to repair the world, during a 2016 White House event during Jewish Disability Awareness and Inclusion Month. “The Jewish community has an obligation, I believe, to be leaders,” said Heumann, then special advisor for international disability rights in the State Department.
She also traveled as an adult to her father’s hometown in Germany, Hoffenheim, where she was taken to the site of the synagogue that the Nazis destroyed but noted that no one there spoke openly about what had happened to the local Jews.
In “Being Heumann,” she connected the experience to her own efforts to bring people with disabilities into the mainstream. “What a pervasive influence silence and avoidance have had on my life,” she wrote. “Why wasn’t I in school? Silence. Why aren’t we allowed on buses? Silence. Why can’t disabled people teach? Silence. Where are all the Jews going? Piercing silence.
“I refuse to give in to the pressure of the silence,” she concluded.
Heumann’s allies in the Jewish disability advocacy community mourned her death.
“So sad to learn of Judy Heumann’s passing,” tweeted Jay Ruderman, whose family foundation has been a leader in supporting Jewish disability inclusion. “She was one of the preeminent disability rights leaders in our country’s history and her accomplishments made our world a better place. I’ll miss you Judy and may your memory be a blessing.”
—
The post Judy Heumann, Jewish disability advocate who spurred a movement, dies at 75 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Jewish Migration as an Oracle: What Jewish Migration Tells Us About the Fate of Nations
Masked radial pro-Hamas demonstrators in France on November 16, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect.
For generations, the movement of the Jewish people has served as a silent barometer for the stability of certain countries. It is a phenomenon that transcends simple demographics. When the Jewish community begins to leave a country where it had been settled for some time in significant numbers, they are not merely seeking better economic utility or responding to spiritual yearnings; they are signaling a major cultural and political shift that can precede a wider systemic failure.
To understand the future of Europe, Russia, and elsewhere, we must look at the benchmark of migration — and what it tells us about the crises of today.
How so?
When significant developments occur in the political arena, leaders and journalists often scramble for insights into whether a major shift is on the horizon. The Jewish community, however, asks a more visceral set of questions: What does this new reality promise? Is this the end of the chapter for Jews in this place? What is the right time to leave? Because Jews historically link uncertainty and suspected danger to migration, their movement becomes a signal — a mirror reflecting the strength and timing of a major political crisis.
History confirms that Jewish migration is not just a reaction to a crisis, but a predictor of its depth. It is a “canary in the coal mine.”
It is important to distinguish between routine migration and a mass migration, an avalanche. It is a sudden and unusually looking mass migration that is a signal of a terminal societal breakdown. And to capture that, we must establish a benchmark.
Historically, when a society is on the brink of or undergoing a total transformation or failure, we have seen between 50% and 75% of the Jewish population migrate within a five-to-ten-year window. The sample is small, but these figures are not speculative. They are the markers of history’s most significant ruptures:
- Nazi Germany (1933–1939): In the seven years following the rise of the Third Reich, 50% of the initial 503,000 Jews left the country.
- The Former Soviet Union (1989–1995): As the Soviet empire crumbled, 53% of its 1.5 million Jews migrated within seven years.
- North Africa (1960–1969): In Morocco and Tunisia, 72% of the Jewish population departed within a decade. In Algeria, that figure reached a staggering 75%.
These numbers represent more than just a move; they represent the liquidation of a presence. When 50% to 75% of a community leaves in a single decade, it is a definitive statement that the social contract in that nation has been broken. This is the benchmark against which all modern migration must be measured.
What does the oracle say about today’s realities then? In the aftermath of the October 7 attacks and the subsequent surge in global antisemitism, the media has often spoken in apocalyptic terms about the future of Jews in Europe and the West.
Questions like “Could it happen here?” have returned to the forefront of communal discourse across all Diaspora communities. Yet, if we look at the hard data of actual migration toward Israel, the “oracle” is telling a surprisingly different story.
Despite the ongoing conflicts and the visible rise in hostility, we are not seeing a mass movement of Jews of the Diaspora out of their countries at mass levels.
In Western Europe, the numbers of Jewish immigrants, to Israel and elsewhere, remain remarkably low. As of 2025, the projected percentage of would-be migrants over a seven-year period for the United Kingdom is only 3%. In France, a country often featured as the epicenter of European Jewish anxiety, the figure is 7%. Germany and the Netherlands sit at a mere 2% and 1% respectively. These figures are a far cry from the 50-75% threshold that signaled the end of Jewish life in 1930s Germany or 1960s Algeria.
In Russia, the initial shock of 2022 saw a spike where 68% of the population were considered would-be migrants — a figure that sat squarely within the benchmark of collapse. However, by 2025, that number had plummeted to 17%. Similarly, in Ukraine, the 2022 figure of 62% has dropped to just 7% by 2025.
All of this suggests that, for all the very real anxieties and the genuine rise in antisemitic incidents, the Jewish communities in the West still perceive a level of underlying stability in their host nations that is not reflected in the headlines.
If Jewish migration is a mirror of world peace, the current data suggests that while the mirror is cracked, the frame has not yet shattered. The mass exodus that characterizes the end of a chapter is simply not happening in London, Paris, or Berlin.
Equally importantly, the predictive power of this data remains a warning. The benchmark exists so that we can recognize the abnormal when it arrives. The fact that we have not reached the 50% threshold in Europe is categorically not an invitation for complacency; it is a baseline for measurement.
By monitoring these levels and intensities of migration and societal turmoil, we gain the ability to see the strength and timing of political shifts before they fully manifest. The oracle may be quiet for now, but its history tells us that when it speaks, the rest of the world ignores it at its own peril. Because Jewish migration is not about Jews, it is about the rest.
Dr. Daniel Staetsky is an expert in Jewish demography and statistics. He is based in Cambridge, UK.
Uncategorized
Israel Remembered the Shoah; Fatah Glorified a Palestinian Mass Murderer
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas attends the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, April 28, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed
Earlier this week, Israel remembered the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust, along with those who valiantly fought the Nazis.
Israel learned from the Holocaust that we must always remain vigilant, and this remains an absolute survival directive, living as we do next to the Palestinian Authority (PA), which, like the Nazis, celebrates the murder of Jews and Israelis.
One of the terrorists released by Israel in exchange for Israeli hostages in last year’s Hamas extortion deal was a Palestinian terrorist who murdered 12 people. He was expelled to Egypt, where he died from an illness last week. The mass murderer is now being eulogized by Palestinian Authority and Fatah officials as exemplifying the values cherished by all Palestinians.
The terrorist, Riyad Al-Amour, was no exception.
The PA honored the terrorist with a “mourning tent” — which was visited by top officials, including Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub.
Official PA TV reporter: “The Fatah Movement, the Ramallah and El-Bireh District, the [PA-funded] Prisoners’ Club, the [PLO] Commission of Prisoners’ [Affairs] … set up a mourning tent for Martyr and released prisoner deported to Egypt Riyad Al-Amour, who died as a Martyr…”
Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub: “The most sacred thing in the eyes of the Palestinians is those who sacrificed their lives and their freedom – our Martyrs.”
[Official PA TV News, April 9, 2026]
Fatah issued an official statement revering the terrorist as “an example of sacrifice, courage, and perseverance” who was imprisoned by Israel since he “did not hesitate to fulfill his national duty.” [emphasis added]
Posted text: “Fatah announces with sorrow the death of released deported prisoner Riyad Al-Amour…
Al-Amour died while being distanced from his homeland, after a path of struggle in which he constituted an example of sacrifice, courage, and perseverance.…
Martyr Al-Amour joined Fatah in his youth and added that he did not hesitate to fulfill his national duty against the occupation until he was imprisoned in the occupation’s prisons, where he spent 23 years.
Fatah expressed its sincere condolences to the family…
High-level Fatah officials also mourned the terrorist on social media:
Posted text:“Fatah Central Committee members Abbas Zaki and Tawfiq Tirawi expressed their condolences over the death of released prisoner Riyad Al-Amour during a visit to the mourners’ house in Bethlehem.
The delegation expressed its deep sorrow over the death as a Martyr of Al-Amour, and emphasized that the sacrifice of the prisoners [i.e., terrorists] will remain present in the hearts of our people and that the struggle for freedom and independence must continue.”
[Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki, Facebook page, April 5, 2026]
The family of Al-Amour — a “Pay-for-Slay” millionaire — will now have to wait and see if they will qualify for continued payments as family members of a “Martyr killed resisting the occupation,” since many PA officials also libeled Israel as being responsible for his death.
The Palestinian salute to Al-Amour is shameless, but as we have seen time and time again, for the PA and its leadership, terrorism is never something to be embarrassed about or part of one’s past to run away from.
On the contrary, in the PA’s “terrocracy,” the more you kill, the greater the respect you are given in life — and in death.
An additional homage to Al-Amour was made by Fatah’s “Shabiba” youth movement:
Fatah Deputy Chairman and Fatah Central Committee member Mahmoud Al-Aloul: “These Martyrs, Rashida [Mughrabi], and Riyad [Al-Amour], are among the patient ones fighting for their people, seeking freedom and independence for this Palestinian people.” …
Fatah Shabiba Youth Movement Nablus District Coordinator Rawhi Oudeh: “The message is a message of loyalty to their sacrifices, and a message of loyalty to keep their wills, and it is also a message that if Rashida and Riyad have departed in body, they will remain as a path, an idea, and an essence in the eyes, hearts, and conscience of the Fatah youth.”
[Official PA TV News, April 4, 2026]
Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Ahron Shapiro is a contributor to PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.
Uncategorized
Proposed Antisemitism Laws in France, Italy Stir Free Speech Debate
Procession arrives at Place des Terreaux with a banner reading, “Against Antisemitism, for the Republic,” during the march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
French and Italian lawmakers are due to vote on new laws defining antisemitism, proposed in the wake of a surge in anti-Jewish incidents but which critics say could be used to censor criticism of Israel.
The French law, which is scheduled to be debated on Thursday, proposes to sanction “implicitly” justifying terrorism, calling for the destruction of a state recognized by France, and comparisons of Israel to the Nazis.
The Italian bill, if adopted, would make Italy the first country to write into law the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which lists certain criticisms of Israel as examples of antisemitism.
DEFINING ANTISEMITISM IN LAW
Proponents of the laws point to the historic rise in antisemitism after Israel began its military campaign in Gaza following the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Critics – including some rights groups, academics, and left-wing politicians – say that they will censor legitimate activism for Palestinian rights and contribute to conflating Jews with the state of Israel.
“The [IHRA] definition confuses what is permitted speech – and that is criticism of Israel as a state – with what is prohibited speech, which is antisemitism and racial and religious incitement to violence,” UN special rapporteur on free speech Irene Khan said.
The French law, which references the IHRA definition without fully adopting it, contained vague language, she added.
The Italian bill was approved by a large majority in the Upper House last month and is expected to begin its passage through the Lower House on Thursday. The French law has lost some political backing following a petition on the French parliamentary website signed by more than 700,000 people.
SHARP RISE IN INCIDENTS SINCE OCT. 7 MASSACRE
In Italy over two years from 2023, antisemitism rose by 100 percent to a record 963 incidents in 2025, according to the Italian Antisemitism Observatory. By comparison, there were 877 recorded incidents in 2024, preceded by 453 such outrages in 2023 and just 241 in 2022.
In France, antisemitism remained at alarmingly high levels last year, with 1,320 incidents recorded nationwide, according to the French Interior Ministry. Although the total number of antisemitic outrages in 2025 fell by 16 percent compared to 2024’s second highest ever total of 1,570 cases and 2023’s record high of 1,676 incidents, the ministry warned that antisemitism remained “historically high.” There were 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022, before the Oct. 7 atrocities.
France’s human rights commission, the CNCDH, has said that antisemitic acts in France regularly peak in relation to operations carried out by the Israeli army.
The commission, which was not consulted for the law, wrote to MPs and the prime minister in January to warn of the dangers of conflating “the hatred of Jews and the hatred of the state of Israel.”
Responding to this warning, Caroline Yadan, the French MP proposing the law, said that her text aimed to tackle “new forms of antisemitism” and that the “essentialization that Jews equal Israel exists in today’s society.”
The Israel-Hamas war has led to a wave of anti-Israel, pro-Hamas demonstrations around the world, which Israel and its supporters say are antisemitic.
Protesters say their criticism of Israel and its actions in Gaza should not be conflated with antisemitism.
Livia Ottolenghi, representative of the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy, said the new law was necessary and did not prevent criticism of Israel.
“In Italy, we do not live well,” she said. “Our children have bars on their school windows; when they go out, they must be escorted.”
IHRA DEFINITION OF ANTISEMITISM
The IHRA working definition of antisemitism has been adopted by 45 countries as a guide but has not previously been written into law anywhere.
IHRA — an intergovernmental organization comprising dozens of countries — adopted the “working definition” of antisemitism in 2016. Since then, the definition has been widely accepted by Jewish groups and lawmakers across the political spectrum, and it is now used by hundreds of governing institutions, including the US State Department, European Union, and United Nations. Law enforcement also uses it as a tool for matters such as hate-crime investigations and sentencing.
According to the definition, antisemitism “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
It provides 11 specific, contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere. Beyond classic antisemitic behavior associated with the likes of the medieval period and Nazi Germany, the examples include denial of the Holocaust and newer forms of antisemitism targeting Israel such as demonizing the Jewish state, denying its right to exist, and holding it to standards not expected of any other democratic state.
The Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner Michael O’Flaherty said he viewed the IHRA definition as a useful tool but was concerned about its application, especially in Germany.
“To somehow attribute responsibility for the actions of a government to the Jewish community in Europe is totally unacceptable, and indeed, it does raise the specter of antisemitism,” he said. “But to somehow conflate any criticism of Israel with antisemitism is ridiculous.”
Sarya Kabbani, a French-Syrian woman, was put on trial under existing laws on antisemitism over carrying banners that drew parallels between Israeli politicians and Nazi Germany at a protest in Paris in December 2023. The 67-year-old, whose husband is Jewish, was later acquitted by a court.
“It is freedom of expression to be able to say that Israel is committing war crimes, is committing genocide, is carrying out ethnic cleansing, is occupying,” said the activist, who will join demonstrations against the French law this week.