Ahead of my New Jersey synagogue’s first bar mitzvah this weekend, we learned that Sunkist Fruit Gems, the popular sacred confection lovingly lobbed at the end of many services to shower the b’nai mitzvah boy or girl with sweetness, had been discontinued by its candy maker.

I dreaded delivering this news to my son and daughter, Max and Rose, who are beginning to celebrate their classmates’ bar and bat mitzvahs and prepare for their own. For children, even those on the brink of adulthood, fruit-flavored gummies matter.

This also deals a blow to a silent protest that had already begun to percolate last spring when I celebrated my own bat mitzvah. When my classmates and I asked where we should take cover when our fans pelted us with the traditional fruit-flavored gummies, we were promptly informed that candy had been banned from the sanctuary.

A candy ban? I audibly gasped.

“This is unacceptable,” Rose declared when I told my kids the news. “We have to do something.”

The Los Angeles-based Ben Myerson Candy Company introduced Fruit Gems in 1955 after working with Sunkist on pectin candies, or natural fruit gels. Sunkist began putting its name on the label in 1966.

To focus more attention on wine and spirits, the Myerson family sold the candy business in 2006 to Jelly Belly Candy Co., which 17 years later was acquired by The Ferrara Candy Company. Apparently, Fruit Gems could not compete with Ferrara’s other products, which include Atomic Fire Balls, Fun Dip, Nerds, Pixy Stix and Lemonheads. And so, in May, Ferrara retired the Gems.

But an Atomic Fire Ball to the head is no way to celebrate a job well done. And lightweight Pixy Stix can not be lobbed hard enough to clear 10 rows of pews and hit their target. In fact, none of those confections can truly replace the sugar-coated, cellophane-wrapped Fruit Gem, which by the way, is also kosher.

While tossing sweets isn’t a sacred ritual, it does add a dose of cathartic joy for children at the end of a two-hour religious service and for the bar or bat mitzvah and their family at the end of a stressful occasion. Scholars trace the practice back to a passage in the Talmud, which mentions throwing grains and nuts at a couple during wedding celebrations.

As other milestones have taken on greater importance, a similar custom has spread to bar and bat mitzvahs in which jelly candy is used to bestow joy and sweetness on the teen as they transition into maturity.

I asked Kenneth Feibush, our temple’s former cantor, how the tradition there started. Now the cantor of Congregation Beth Israel in Houston where no one throws sweets, Feibush said it’s actually more common in Conservative and Orthodox congregations than Reform temples. But a handful of families at Temple Sholom introduced it on their own and it caught on. He had seen it before at a temple in Alaska where he had interned. There, the bar or bat mitzvah would don a helmet or open a parasol to shield themselves from the projectiles.

When I asked our spiritual leader, Rabbi Laurence Groffman, how the tradition ended, he said Temple Sholom prides itself on being an inclusive congregation but there are limits. “Unfortunately, ants don’t make the cut,” he said.

Turns out ants had infested the piano ahead of our Purim spiel last year. And as our temple readied for a costly renovation to our sanctuary, the powers-that-be said no more food fights.

So now that Sunkist Fruit Gems are no longer an option, is the protest against the candy ban a moot point? Is there a way to do a symbolic Gatorade dump to salute the sweat that went into the proverbial win? That’s precisely what our religious school director Cara Moroze recommended.

“I like a good compromise,” she said. “How ‘bout Rose dumps all the candy at once over her brother’s head? Then the kids come up to get the candy. No errant Twizzlers buried in a piano.”

I warned her that she had just reignited the protest movement.

The post A candy crisis has cast a pall on upcoming bar and bat mitzvahs appeared first on The Forward.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu turned the world’s biggest diplomatic stage into a platform for a blistering attack on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has repeatedly called the Israeli leader a war criminal and had called for his arrest while campaigning.

“Shame on you for distorting the facts,” Netanyahu said during a defiant, 40-minute address to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday. “Shame on you for spitting in the face of truth, Mr. Mamdani.”

Netanyahu addressed the mayor directly over his repeated accusations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and his calls for Netanyahu’s arrest under an International Criminal Court warrant. In July, Mamdani announced that his office acknowledged he lacks the power to arrest Netanyahu while visiting the city, a pledge he made during his mayoral election campaign.

“Mr. Mamdani, you tried to stop me from coming here,” Netanyahu said at the UN. “You tried to silence me. Well, you can’t silence me. You can’t silence the truth.”

Netanyahu also accused Mamdani of associating with people who have expressed support for Hamas or made inflammatory comments about Israel, describing him as the “antisemitic mayor” of New York and suggesting that his anti-Israel rhetoric has fueled antisemitism. The Israeli leader singled out Mamdani for his association with Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and for refusing to rebuke his wife, Rama Duwaji, for liking social media posts praising the Oct. 7 attack and saying Tel Aviv should not exist.

In response, Mamdani said in a statement that Netanyahu used his speech to “repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians.” The mayor added: “Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Many diplomats staged a walkout as Netanyahu rose to speak, while some of his supporters chanted, “The people of Israel live!”

Watching them from the podium, Netanyahu asked, “If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall, please do so now, thank you very much.” He almost seemed to be smiling as he surveyed the men and women streaming out the door.

Netanyahu flew to New York on Thursday for a brief visit that also included a number of meetings with heads of state, but absent from his itinerary was President Donald Trump. The US leader spoke at the UN on Tuesday and was in Washington when Netanyahu arrived, though he made time to meet with Mamdani while in New York.

Outside UN headquarters in Manhattan, hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets to rally against Netanyahu and his policies.

A familiar stage for a close campaign

For Netanyahu, the annual U.N. speech has long been about more than diplomacy. It is one of his favorite political stages, using it as an opportunity to speak in fluent English to the world while also projecting strength to voters back home as the Israeli leader willing to stand before an often-hostile international audience and defend his country.

Over the years, Netanyahu has turned those speeches into carefully produced performances. In 2012, he famously held up a cartoon drawing of a bomb and drew a red line to warn about Iran’s nuclear program. In 2014, he displayed a photograph of Palestinian children playing near what he said was a Hamas rocket launcher. Four years later, he presented aerial photographs he said showed a secret Iranian nuclear site. In 2023, he held up a map of what he called “The New Middle East.”

Last year, Netanyahu arrived with another prop: a QR code pinned to his suit jacket. The code directed viewers to a website showing graphic images from the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. This year, he waved a beeper, reminding viewers of the attack against Hezbollah terrorists and left on the podium a Starlink device for the Iranian delegation to watch the protests in their country.

Thursday marked Netanyahu’s 15th General Assembly address since 1998. This one came at a particularly important political moment.

Netanyahu is campaigning for a seventh term by asking Israelis to judge him not only on the failures surrounding the Oct. 7 attack, but on what came afterward: Israel’s military campaign that killed Hamas leadership and dealt major blows to Iran and its regional network. At the same time, Netanyahu portrayed himself as fighting a global political and public-relations battle against what he described as lies and efforts to isolate Israel.

Mamdani, who made Netanyahu a political target for nearly two years, has now become a useful face of Netanyahu’s campaign.

The Netanyahu-Mamdani UN connection

The Netanyahu-Mamdani confrontation also has an unusual connection to the UN stage.

When Netanyahu delivered his UN speech in 2024, Israeli warplanes were sent to strike Hezbollah’s underground headquarters in Beirut, killing its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah and much of the group’s senior command. A photograph released by Netanyahu’s office showed the prime minister on the phone approving the mission ahead of his address.

Mamdani later cited that episode while explaining his pledge to arrest Netanyahu if he returned to New York. “What troubles me greatly is that Benjamin Netanyahu has also issued military commands from this very city when visiting it,” Mamdani said at a UJA-Federation town hall during the Democratic primary. “I do not want our city to be party to those kinds of decisions.”

After becoming mayor, Mamdani ordered a legal review that concluded New York City did not have the authority to execute the ICC warrant. He conceded that point in July but continued to use his platform to call Netanyahu a war criminal and say he was not welcome in New York. Netanyahu has denied committing war crimes.

Mamdani has been more careful about Netanyahu’s actual visit this week. He said he would not participate in demonstrations against the prime minister and insisted that he had never encouraged New Yorkers to protest him, but defended their First Amendment right to do so.

Netanyahu’s visit was also designed to leave little opportunity for a confrontation.

In contrast to past weeklong visits, Netanyahu was scheduled to spend less than eight hours in the New York area — one of his shortest foreign trips as prime minister. Netanyahu left Israel early Thursday and flew to a military facility in upstate New Jersey rather than landing at a New York airport. Israeli officials have cited security concerns surrounding the trip, including protests and the threat of drone attacks. He was expected to return to Israel Thursday night, without spending the night in New York.

But the audience that may have mattered most was watching from television monitors back home in Israel.

Speaking to the Israeli audience

Netanyahu’s Likud is locked in a competitive election with opposition parties seeking to end his long tenure. Recent polling has shown the anti-Netanyahu bloc slightly ahead of his bloc, though the fragmented opposition could still face difficulty assembling a governing coalition.

Netanyahu has survived political obituaries before. His appearances at the United Nations have helped cultivate the image at the center of his political identity: the Israeli statesman who can speak directly to an American audience and confront Israel’s critics.

On Thursday, he got to play that role once again. Whether he gets another turn at the podium next September will be decided not in New York City, but by Israeli voters next month.

JTA contributed to this report.

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I have seen NAZA and I am shook. Not simply because of what the film reveals about how Israel is waging the war in Gaza, but because of what it reveals about how a society becomes capable of doing this at all. And as I’ve watched the reaction in Israel since the film’s premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, I’ve come to see that the reaction itself reflects the very systems the film exposes.

There are two systems at the center of NAZA, which opens Sept. 30 in New York City. The first is the technical one: the surveillance, targeting, artificial intelligence and military technologies that allow the Israeli army to identify and kill people at enormous scale. The second is the psychic and narrative system that makes the first one possible. It allows people inside the military to participate in this machinery, and journalists, filmmakers, politicians and ordinary people outside it to absorb what is happening, rationalize it, defend it or simply carry on.

The reaction to the film has become part of the evidence. That is what has shaken me.

The film, by Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, takes us inside the systems of surveillance, targeting and killing used by the Israeli military in Gaza. But it is also an investigation into the people inside those systems and the stories they tell themselves about what they are doing.

Some of the officers interviewed are members of Israel’s elite military and intelligence units. They speak about their work with an almost surreal normalcy. One talks about coming home after his work and continuing to work on his Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Another talks about going to Poland on a Holocaust trip in high school, being taught that the Nazis were pure evil, and now understanding them.

Abraham asks those they interview whether anyone questions what they are doing. No one.

This blindness doesn’t stop with the military.

It lives in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what we are defending, whose lives we are responsible for, and whose suffering can be pushed outside the frame. It lives in the deep Israeli and Jewish memory of vulnerability and annihilation, in the knowledge that Jewish safety is not an abstraction. It lives, too, in what happens when that memory becomes so consuming that another people’s suffering becomes something we can only see through our own fear.

I have watched that dynamic reveal itself over and over since Venice.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has attacked the film and announced plans to pursue legislation that could strip citizenship from Israelis who “defame” Israeli soldiers abroad, explicitly citing NAZA and its filmmakers. Culture Minister Miki Zohar has called Abraham and Szor traitors and sought to have their citizenship revoked.

Protesters have gathered outside Szor’s parents’ home for multiple nights, chanting “death sentence for traitors.” Demonstrators have sought out the offices of Local Call, where Abraham works, and activists have threatened to track down the filmmakers and their families. Graffiti depicting the filmmakers as traitors has appeared on the streets.

And all of this is happening before almost anyone in Israel has even seen the film. The film has not even been released in Israel — but the fury has not waited for a screening.

I cannot get past that.

The reaction is not some separate story happening around NAZA. It is part of what NAZA is showing us.

Attack the person asking the question. Question their loyalty. Invoke existential danger. Change the subject. Make the person holding the mirror into the threat.

This is where Oct. 7 enters the story.

Of course Oct. 7 happened. Israelis were murdered and kidnapped. The trauma is real. The responsibility of journalists to verify serious allegations is real.

But there is a difference between acknowledging Oct. 7 and requiring every critique of Israel’s military actions to pass through it before it can be heard.

I watched veteran journalist Raviv Drucker’s interview with Abraham and found myself increasingly disturbed by the frame. The questions repeatedly returned to whether the film was sufficiently balanced, whether Abraham had sufficiently accounted for Oct. 7, whether his sources could be trusted.

These are not illegitimate questions. But when they become the ritual through which every serious critique of Israel’s military actions must pass, something else is happening. The burden keeps shifting onto the person asking the question: Prove that you understand us. Prove that you see our pain. Prove that you are not erasing us. Prove that you are still one of us.

Only then can we begin to talk about what Israel is doing.

And then there was something that happened to me personally. The head of one Israeli film forum told me it would be better not to defend Abraham and Szor publicly because it could cost “us” the elections.

I understood exactly what she meant. And that is what frightened me. Don’t make things harder. Don’t give ammunition to the other side. Don’t jeopardize the political outcome. Don’t defend these two young filmmakers too loudly. The instinct is the same: don’t disrupt the story that allows us to keep going.

The kind of collective psychosis allows my people, including my people in Tel Aviv, to go about their lives as if things are normal while Gaza is being destroyed is not separate from what NAZA describes. It is part of it.

I am my grandfathers’ granddaughter. One was killed in 1948 fighting for the creation of Israel. The other survived the Holocaust and became a human rights activist. I have spent my life carrying these two parts of Jewish history inside me: the absolute necessity of Jewish safety and the absolute necessity of human rights. I don’t experience those things as contradictions.

What NAZA has forced me to confront is what happens when one of those truths becomes a shield against the other.

That is what shook me about NAZA. Not only what it shows us about Gaza. Not only what it shows us about the technology that makes killing possible, or the people who learn to participate in it. But what it shows us about the stories we need to tell ourselves in order not to see what is happening in front of us.

And what happens when someone holds up a mirror and refuses to let us look away.

The post I’m an Israeli who watched ‘Naza.’ And I am shook.  appeared first on The Forward.