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Penn’s Jewish students — preparing for finals — say problems remain after president resigns
PHILADELPHIA (JTA) — On Monday afternoon, as the front page of the student newspaper broadcast that the school’s president had resigned, Elan Roth was sitting at the University of Pennsylvania Hillel studying for finals.
It had been a whirlwind few days for Jewish students at the Ivy League campus. The previous Tuesday, their president, Liz Magill, had declined to say clearly that calls for the genocide of Jews violated school rules. On Saturday, she stepped down. Monday was the last day of classes, and exams begin Thursday.
Amid all of that, Penn’s Jews have had to contend with a swarm of journalists asking for their thoughts on antisemitism at their university. Students told JTA that at the end of Shabbat, after the news of Magill’s exit broke, a crowd of reporters was waiting outside of Hillel to get students’ reactions. Roth appeared on CNN the next day.
“At the end of the day, it’s just been really distracting,” Roth, a junior majoring in mathematical philosophy, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It’s been unfortunate that we have to put a lot of mind power and effort into figuring out why there’s these feelings of antisemitism on campus. It’s been really difficult to concentrate on school normally.”
Magill’s resignation is the latest stage of a rolling antisemitism controversy that has been brewing at the school for months — and Jewish students were still digesting it. Roth feels it will be, “hopefully, a step in the right direction,” while other students mentioned fears of backlash or averred that they feel safe on campus. But all who spoke with JTA said that they’re more concerned about antisemitism from their peers than the question of who sits in the president’s office.
“It’s a little bit of a weight off to know that there’s accountability going on now,” said Sadie Waldbaum, a junior at Wharton studying finance and business analytics. “At least that’s being seen. However, I wouldn’t say I feel safer, because the problem is the professors and students on campus who are perpetuating these ideas and false narratives.”
She added, “Even though she’s resigned, there’s still a lot of work to be done to just change the trajectory of Penn as well as schools across the country.”
Magill’s response to antisemitism has been in the spotlight all semester. In September, the Penn administration drew criticism for a Palestinian culture festival that included speakers accused of antisemitism, such as Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters. The campus also experienced antisemitic vandalism. The school announced policy changes, but days afterward, Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and ensuing student activism drew a fresh wave of attention to campus antisemitism, placing renewed scrutiny on Magill and the administrations of other elite schools.
Penn formed an antisemitism task force, and soon afterward was hit with a federal complaint alleging that the university was an unsafe environment for Jewish students. Then Magill was invited to testify on the issue before Congress along with the presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All three said their response to calls for genocide of Jews would depend on “context.” Days of criticism from students, alumni and Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor — and a donor threatening to withdraw a $100 million contribution — preceded Magill’s announcement.
(Penn’s board chair, Scott Bok, also resigned on Saturday. Bok’s position will be filled in the interim by Julie Platt, a Penn alum who also serves as chair of the Jewish Federations of North America.)
Maya Harpaz, a junior at Penn, member of the Hillel executive board and member of Penn’s antisemitism task force, wrote in an email to JTA that she welcomed the resignation and “will continue to monitor the situation.”
“The change in leadership is a good start to restoring our campus community, but there is much more that needs to be done to ensure that the Jewish community at Penn is safe,” she wrote.
In the meantime, Jewish life at the school — which has 1,600 Jewish students among a total undergraduate population of about 10,000, according to Hillel — is continuing apace. On Monday on Locust Walk, the main campus thoroughfare, Jewish alumni and parents handed out jelly donuts for Hanukkah just feet away from a student distributing copies of the Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper, featuring a front-page spread on Magill’s resignation.
The previous night, the Penn Jewish a cappella group, the Shabbatones, performed a traditional Jewish prayer for peace at the White House in Washington, D.C.
Akiva Berkowitz, an Orthodox student who wears a kippah, told JTA he feels “completely safe on campus.”
“I do think it’s important for people to recognize that campus remains safe, and people continue to go to Hillel and proudly be Jewish,” Berkowitz said. “And it’s not as if we’re cowering down because of what’s happening around. We’re standing up proudly, and we’re on Locust and we’re doing our own rallies and we’re out there.”
Berkowitz agreed that the focus needs to be on changing policies to address what he views as threatening chants. He hopes to see “better guidelines of what constitutes open expression and what constitutes hate speech.”
“I’m less interested in the administrative and who’s in charge and more about: are the issues on campus being addressed, and are we able to really crack down on people who are calling for Intifada, calling for genocide against Jews?” Berkowitz said. “Can we really address that and make sure that they mete the punishments that they deserve?”
Waldbaum added that she’s worried about the trajectory of events — Magill resigning following a threat from a donor — playing into antisemitic stereotypes.
“A lot of the reactions that I’ve seen have been like, ‘The Jewish donors control the school’ and just feeding into antisemitic tropes of, ‘Jews control the media’ and ‘Jews control this’ and stuff like that, which is definitely not great either, because, while obviously the donors do have influence, this was a broader moral issue that needed to be dealt with,” she said.
Still other Jewish students oppose the resignation. Hilah Kohen, an Israeli-American doctoral student enrolled in the comparative literature and literary theory program, told the Daily Pennsylvanian, “Far-right political figures who align themselves with actual neo-Nazis may use these resignations to repress campus protests against the active, blood-curdling genocide of Palestinians.”
Waldman, who wears a small Star of David necklace, said the Penn Jewish community is “incredible” and that she feels safe on campus, even though this semester has been tense. She added that generally, a lot of her energy is taken up not with fighting bigotry but with the everyday concerns of student life.
“I have to deal with it. And I have to go to school and I have to do my classes,” she said. “When I went home for Thanksgiving, I think I realized, ‘Wow, I’ve really been dealing with so much and I don’t even realize it because I’m just going through the day-to-day and dealing with it.’”
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The post Penn’s Jewish students — preparing for finals — say problems remain after president resigns appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Treasure Trove remembers how Jewish Canadians reached out to rebuild poor neighbourhoods in Israel
Canadian Jewry should be proud of the support it has given to Israel during this very difficult time in its history. The outpouring of love and support is nothing new: it is something we have been doing since long before Israel was born.
To cite one example, this is a street sign in Jaffa that reads that the street is dedicated to the Canadian charities that donated funds to rehabilitate the neighbourhood.
The neighbourhood is Jaffa Dalet, which was built in the 1950s for new immigrants. By the 1970s it was a down-and-out area, one of the poorest in Israel, which had streets with numbers and no names.
Jaffa Dalet was one of 160 distressed neighbourhoods throughout Israel that prime minister Menachem Begin announced in 1978 would be rehabilitated in a joint project between the government of Israel and world Jewry. Named “Project Renewal”, the Jewish Agency joined as a partner, and undertook to twin Jewish communities around the world with specific neighbourhoods in Israel.
Jaffa Dalet was twinned with Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Regina and Saskatoon, and it is the support from these communities, and donations from other Canadians, that is memorialized in this street sign. Other Canadian Project Renewal twinnings were Montreal with Yerucham, Toronto with Beit Dagan, and unfederated communities in Ontario and the West with Or Yehudah.
Today, Jaffa is a mixed community of Jews and Arabs and includes many Falash Mura who arrived from Ethiopia about 20 years ago. The area is again going through a phase of urban renewal (Pinui Binui in Hebrew, literally “evacuation and construction”) in which old apartment buildings are being demolished and replaced with more modern and larger buildings. The process allows existing residents to enjoy new and more spacious apartments without having to leave their neighbourhood, while the area’s infrastructure is updated and more residential units are built.
Jewish Canadians responded when the call came from Israel in the 1970s to help build the country. There is much rebuilding required now as a result of the wars Israel has fought since Oct. 7, 2023, and no doubt Canadian Jewry will continue to respond to the call. Our actions today will long be remembered, whether in the name of a street or in the knowledge that when help was needed, we were there.
Here’s hoping that 2025 finally brings a quick return of the hostages, safety for Israel’s soldiers, comfort to those who have lost so much, and peace for Israel and the entire region.
The post Treasure Trove remembers how Jewish Canadians reached out to rebuild poor neighbourhoods in Israel appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Shabbat Mikeytz: The Power of Dreams
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Dreams play a very important part in the Biblical narrative. We have read in recent weeks about Yaakov’s dream of angels going up and down a ladder. Yosef dreamt about his own future — as well as the dreams of the baker and the butcher and those of Pharaoh. The implication is that these dreams were all reliable messages, coming as Yosef says, from God.
The question we have to answer is to what extent dreams should be relied on. To this day, there are people who make a living out of interpreting dreams. Are they charlatans taking advantage of the credulous, or are they onto something?
When it comes to Yosef and Pharaoh, they both had dreams which came true. In the case of Yosef, it’s his turning from a victim in a pit to the ruler of Egypt. In the case of Pharaoh, it’s a premonition of seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. But later on, when the Torah talks about false prophets, it’s talking about dreamers who should not be relied on (Devarim 13).
It will come as no surprise that the Talmud has pages about how to react to dreams and interpret them. Most take dreams very seriously, but disagree over interpretations and their validity. Others do not. The variety and disagreements that you can find in the Talmud are proof of how controversial dreams were then — and indeed, remain so for many people now.
Rav Chisdah said a dream that’s not interpreted is like a letter that’s not read. So if you ignore it, you’re not going to get any message. He also said that neither a good nor a bad dream is entirely fulfilled. On the cynical side, Rav Yochanan said that there’s no such thing as a dream without idle information — which is about right for most of my dreams.
The Gemara deals with the charlatans who make a living out of interpreting dreams. Rav Akiva said that there were 24 interpreters of dreams in Jerusalem, and each one disagreed as to what the interpretation was. Bar Hadaya, a popular interpreter, would give a good interpretation of a dream to anybody who paid him money and a bad interpretation if they did not. One rabbi who had a bad interpretation because he wouldn’t pay the first time, came back with money and then got a good interpretation. Plenty of those are still around today.
Then you have what I might call the Freudians. Shmuel bar Nachmani said that a person is shown in his dream only the thoughts of his own heart (i.e., mind). In other words, dreams are a reflection of the subconscious, which sounds as though it was written by Sigmund Freud himself. Of course they didn’t use those terms at that time. Rava said that one is neither shown a golden palm tree nor an elephant going through the eye of a needle in a dream. Dreams only contain images that a person has actually seen.
Nevertheless, these pages are full of all kinds of attempts to interpret what one dreams. I have to say that after a year of almost constant nightmares, I’m at last beginning to have sweet dreams. And so I wish you all a very happy Hanukkah and may all your dreams be sweet and amusing.
The author is a writer and rabbi, currently based in New York.
The post Shabbat Mikeytz: The Power of Dreams first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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How the Media Blamed Israel for Ruining Bethlehem’s Christmas (Again)
Tourists walk in Manger Square outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Dec. 2, 2019. Photo: Reuters / Mussa Qawasma.
Once again, it’s that time of the year. But we won’t repeat the obvious: the media love blaming Israel for ruining Christmas in Bethlehem.
We will, however, point at the strategy they use to achieve this.
Here is the issue: The media need to cover what they see. And in Bethlehem, they see a baby Jesus doll placed in rubble; no foreign tourists; and protests in solidarity with Gaza. It is undoubtedly a somber Christmas in Jesus’ traditional birthplace, and it should be reported.
But the media should and can apply critical thinking in their choice of interviewees and background material. And they are not doing so.
The Only Priest in Bethlehem?
The media star of the season, except for Jesus, was (again) Munther Isaac, a pastor at Bethlehem’s Lutheran Church.
Outlets like Reuters, BBC, ABC News, and NBC News were happy to quote Isaac for a simple reason: His church was responsible for the media stunt showing baby Jesus as a Palestinian child amid Gaza rubble.
Fair enough. But nowhere did these outlets mention that Isaac has also justified the October 7 massacre, and has been described as “the high priest of antisemitic Christianity.”
Respected news outlets should not fall prey to the manipulations of one priest. Professional coverage should have bothered to contrast his view with that of other voices in the local Christian community.
But the problem runs deeper. These media outlets rely on Palestinian producers in Bethlehem who would never undermine — out of fear or bias — this anti-Israeli narrative. And their foreign bosses would not dare question their work, because they need their connections.
Selective Background
More proof of the media’s seasonal bias against Israel can be gleaned from the background information provided in certain stories.
Instead of reminding news consumers about the Palestinian Authority’s responsibility for the dwindling numbers of local Christians, many outlets include lengthy background paragraphs about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
In Reuters‘ story, for example, a whole section is dedicated to Israel’s settlement activity. One exceptionally irrelevant passage reads:
Israel has built Jewish settlements, deemed illegal by most countries, across the territory. Israel disputes this, citing historical and biblical ties to the land. Several of its ministers live in settlements and favour their expansion.
Similarly, the AP’s “Christmas in Bethlehem” photo collection includes a picture of the security barrier that partially surrounds the city, as a man just happens to walk past graffiti that reads: “Walls are meant for bombing.” Never mind that this wall stood there when Bethlehem enjoyed crowded and celebratory holiday seasons.
And let’s not forget that this bias is not limited to the Christian holidays. Every holiday celebrated by Palestinians in the region — from Ramadan to Easter — gets automatically evaluated based on Israel’s actions.
It never works the other way around, making it seem that Palestinians bear no responsibility whatsoever. For example, the media never outright blamed Hamas for ruining the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, which was deliberately chosen as the date for the October 7 massacre.
For the media, it seems, the “oppressed” Palestinians are granted automatic virtue, while the Israeli “oppressors” are seen as innately evil. The holiday season is just another opportunity to show it.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
The post How the Media Blamed Israel for Ruining Bethlehem’s Christmas (Again) first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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