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Social Studies 2024: Phobe Maltz Bovy’s year in nine big vibe-shifts
What happened in the past 12 months? Rather a lot! So to pare it down, I’m limiting this end-of-year recap to things that kept popping up on my own finite radar, with an emphasis on those with relevance to Jewish Canadians. I will not ask whether I missed anything; assume that I have missed—or skipped over—a ton. These are just a handful of the stories about our society I see as relevant going into 2025 and beyond.
Campus protest culture camps out
The encampment trend that took hold at Columbia University and wound up all over the place—including at numerous Canadian schools—became the big story of 2024 for Jewish media and points beyond, the bold, in-your-face sign that the next generation of cultural elites had made Palestine their cause. Or a sign of something else? Not all the student protesters were students; some were professors, others unaffiliated. And the students not on board with the goings-on were very possibly more likely to demonstrate this by going to class than by organizing a counter-demonstration, although the Jewish professor at least temporarily banned by Columbia showed up at the University of Toronto.
Columbia University temporarily banned Jewish Israeli professor-turned-activist Shai Davidai from campus.
Here, he speaks at the University of Toronto rally about antisemitism in academia and beyond.
His presence was denounced by local pro-Palestine groups.#cdnpoli #Toronto… pic.twitter.com/GjwoyWgsf9
— Caryma Sa’d – Lawyer + Political Satirist (@CarymaRules) October 22, 2024
Literary world is purging ‘Zionists’
First, a small magazine called Guernica had a meltdown when an Israeli writer, Joanna Chen, wrote an arguably pro-Palestinian essay, but did so while being, you know, Israeli. Chen had refused to serve in the IDF, but she was still too Zionistic for the pages in question. Next up, author Joshua Leifer tried to do a book event for his Tablets Shattered, but a Brooklyn bookstore employee cancelled it just as it was about to start.
I wrote this book to explore debates within American Jewish life, which of course includes many people who identify as Zionists. My biggest worry was about synagogues not wanting to host me. I didn’t think it would be bookstores in Brooklyn that would be closing their doors. pic.twitter.com/tcUOcXw2Ge
— Joshua Ort-Leifer (@joshualeifer) August 21, 2024
Why was this critical-of-Israel book a problem? The interlocutor was going to be a liberal Zionist and one can’t be having that. The books-and-essays world, once a place where Jewish authors once felt reasonably comfortable in North America, now had spreadsheets identifying authors based on indicators of their relationship to Israel.
Searching for signals of antizionism
Look, Diaspora Jews have gone off Israel! No, wait, they’re all-in on Israel, and that’s why they’re buying guns and going to vote for Donald Trump! But then we learned that Jewish Canadians—like our American counterparts—arevirtually unanimous in the belief that Israel should exist as a Jewish state.
79% of jews voted for Kamala Harris.
Trump received the lowest proportion of jewish votes in 24 years.
Why cater to people that HATE you? pic.twitter.com/pI4nykVI1q
— Stew Peters (@realstewpeters) November 6, 2024
(And in similarly shouldn’t-be-surprising news, American Jewish voters overwhelmingly preferred Kamala Harris.)
Tradwives are totally taking over
Her picture-perfect life as a Mormon farm wife has made Hannah Neeleman, the woman behind “Ballerina Farm,” a social media star and a lightning rod for every kind of opinion about how women should live. https://t.co/dpnzZa8KaU
— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 3, 2024
The concept went from a niche online subculture to mainstream news and just incessant critical coverage. Tradwife this, tradwife that, all to the bafflement of actual traditionalist brides, Jewish and otherwise, if they were even online enough to notice, that is. A tradwife, for the uninitiated, is a social media influencer who posts content wherein she performs being a gender-role-conforming old-school housewife. She’s in something low-cut and she serves her man, but to own the libs, not (allegedly) to titillate straight men of any which politics.
Challah baking has become political
Some baked it to connect with fellow Jews througn established community channels, while others took, shall we say, a different tack.
Hamas has used the inverted red triangle to mark Israeli targets for murder & has also been used by sympathizers to show support.
So when a writer in @Chatelaine posed with the symbol, it was a warning sign that her piece would be an anti-Israel diatribe.https://t.co/aETX9zq68K
— HonestReporting Canada🎗️ (@HonestRepCanada) November 29, 2024
Yes, 2024 was the year Chatelaine, a Canadian general-interest women’s magazine, published, then quasi-unpublished, an article about baking challah to free Palestine. In an awkward twist, the personal essayist wore an inverted red triangle in the accompanying author photo. This—combined with the content of the essay in question, an essay that didn’t merely criticize Israel’s response to Oct. 7 (which, fair) but erase the fact that Oct. 7 even happened—suggested that maybe it was one of those red triangles. One gesturing at, perhaps, a spot of friendliness towards Hamas.
War of the sexes (cont’d.)
The latest discourse began with the revelation that young men world over are veering to the right, young women to the left. Had women all gone off men? No. But a bunch gestured at plans to do so once Trump won a second go at the U.S. presidency.
Use the promo code PHOEBE to get a month’s free access to Dan Savage’s podcast empire… including the Sex and Politics episode I was just on! https://t.co/GAMzhivZ63 pic.twitter.com/53zFn9deDF
— Phoebe Maltz Bovy (@BovyMaltz) December 20, 2024
And as someone who recently finished writing a book about straight women (to be published by Signal, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada), I have been kept plenty busy.
Reviving the concept of ‘shiksa’
As a busy woman, I play many roles: writer, podcaster, teacher, dog mom, Aquarius. But my most important role is and has always been shiksa and I was thrilled to speak my truth as a guest on @TheCJN‘s @BonjourChai with @BovyMaltz and Rabbi Avi Finegold. L’Chaim! https://t.co/Rd3K88eOzL
— Meghan Daum (@meghan_daum) October 11, 2024
Yes, the Netflix series Nobody Wants This offered a heartwarming rom-com treatment of the extremely adorable scenario of a Jewish man finally being spared the ghastliness that is Jewish women when a bubbly blonde comes his way. Can an ambiguously-Reform rabbi date a woman played by Kirsten Bell? In 2024, anything was possible.
The new death of wokeness
We are now officially living in the post-woke era.
I believe it ended just after October 7, 2023. But since November 6, 2024 it’s not up for debate.
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) November 8, 2024
Left-wing illiberalism of the sort that brought us cancel culture is officially passé according to enough big thinkers out there.
Wokeness ain’t actually over yet
There’s also enough evidence to suggest ‘woke’ didn’t go anywhere, but rather transformed and migrated. The transformed bit goes like this: In lieu of a series of current things—individual social-justice concerns that were suddenly the only thing that mattered, only to be displaced by a different one five minutes later—there’s now the omnicause. You can plaster your backpack or coffee shop window or social media bio with a potentially endless set of concerns, as long as they all align, omnicausally speaking.
Welcome to the Omnicause. If you protest one thing, you protest everything—intersectional inanity, writes @andykesslerhttps://t.co/YzaJRtm2Tq
— Wall Street Journal Opinion (@WSJopinion) June 24, 2024
The migrated one: In a sense, there may have been some geographic migration. Maybe you can’t be cancel-cultured in the States as much as was once the case, but in Canada there are still good old-fashioned campaigns to shut down literary magazines for purity-politics reasons. But when I speak of migration, I mean primarily virtual. Twitter begat X, which in turn begat Bluesky. In layman’s terms, a social media platform that had once been the preferred gathering space of journalists, academics, and sui generis social-media pundits ceased serving that function once Elon Musk took over in October 2022, not all at once but in stages. X, what Twitter is now called, because nigh unusable, a pay-to-play scheme wherein right-wing rage-bait rules the day.
So a bunch of old-Twitter’s so-called power users (dubious honour) migrated, no, fled to a Twitter clone called Bluesky. I wrote a less than rave review of it in the Globe and Mail, which caused the Good folks who love love love Bluesky to anoint me main character. I was even parodied by Canada’s persistent cousin to The Onion with the assumption that the readership understood who they were referring to.
Opinion: Bluesky is a dangerous echo chamber because no one wants to hear from me, specificallyhttps://t.co/FjHVW5l7La
— The Beaverton (@TheBeaverton) November 22, 2024
Shortly thereafter, everyone mad at me forgot about this, as actually prominent people arrived on Bluesky and became the source of fury that made what I elicited look like small potatoes (or perhaps I mean smol beans).
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at pbovy@thecjn.ca, not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai. For more opinions about Jewish culture wars, subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.
The post Social Studies 2024: Phobe Maltz Bovy’s year in nine big vibe-shifts appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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‘The View’ Co-Host Sara Haines Honors Murdered Bibas Family While Whoopi Goldberg Accused of Generalizing Their Murder
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Kfir Bibas. Photo: Hostages and Missing Families Forum.
During Tuesday’s episode of the ABC talk show “The View,” co-host Sara Haines drew attention to murdered Hamas hostages Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas right before co-host Whoopi Goldberg attempted to generalize their barbaric murder and compare it to all human suffering.
“These two little boys, they became, with their mother, kind of the symbol of October 7th,” Haines said, during the Hot Topics segment of the show. She talked about Hamas having a staged ceremony to show off their dead bodies in the Gaza Strip during handing them over to the Red Cross, as part a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, and how the US-designated terrorist organization originally gave the incorrect body to Israel for Shiri, who was 32 at the time of her death.
Ariel, 4, and Kfir, 10 months old, along with their mother were brutally murdered in November 2023 by Hamas terrorists during their captivity. Shiri and her two red-headed young bodies were held hostage in the Gaza Strip for more than 500 days before Hamas returned their bodies to Israel. They were buried on Wednesday. Forensics examination of their bodies revealed that Hamas murdered Ariel and Kfir “were their bare hands” and afterwards “committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.”
Haines concluded her remarks during Tuesday’s episode of “The View” by acknowledging the 63 hostages who are still in Gaza, after being abducted by Hamas-led terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023. “There are 60 more remaining hostages in Gaza,” she said. “They’re still there and our hearts are with Israel and the families. This is the most heart-wrenching part for everything.”
Haines’ co-hosts on “The View” include Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin and Alyssa Farah Griffin.
After Haines concluded talking about the Bibas family and the remaining hostages, Goldberg made comments that equated the savage murder of the Bibas family by a worldwide recognized terrorist organization to suffering people are experiencing around the world, including in Russia. Her remarks, and the fact that she draw attention away from the murder of the Bibas family, have sparked outrage from Israel supporters, including celebrities, and pro-Israel organizations.
“There is nothing positive about any of this,” Goldberg said. “For everyone who’s affecting, our hearts should go out. All the families, all the children. This is horrifying. I find it so shocking that when we talk about things like Hamas, and I look at where we’re putting our energy, I think – well, who are the bad guys now?”
Her fellow co-hosts all replied at the same time saying Hamas is “the bad guy.” Goldberg quickly cut in and said, “Hamas is the bad guy, but what about Russia? Is Russia not bad with all they’ve been doing?” Hostin then reminded her co-hosts that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has an International Criminal Court arrest warrant issued against him, which the US House of Representatives has condemned.
“But there’s no equivocation of Netanyahu and Hamas,” Griffin reminded the ladies. “Hamas needs to be destroyed.”
Goldberg ended the Hot Topics segment of the show saying: “My point is, when do we stop saying, ‘It’s these folks, or these folks.’ When do we say, ‘Here’s the enemy. This is what the enemy does. This is what the enemy does to children in Africa, all over the world, because they’re the enemy.’ That’s what the enemies do. And why are we supportive of enemies? What’s happening? I don’t always get it right and they don’t always get it right. But we’ll figure out the answers at some point, I’m sure.”
Creative Community for Peace, a pro-Israel entertaining industry organization, said it is “deeply troubled” by Goldberg’s remarks. Others called her “despicable” for comparing “the depravity of Hamas to Russia,” for “marginalizing” the murder of the Bibas family, and needing to “generalize and universalize Jewish suffering,” as said by comedian and musician Ami Kozak. American actress Patricia Heaton, who is best known for her role on “Everybody Loves Raymond,” also blasted Goldberg in a post on X.
“Why do people like Whoopi seem to need to neutralize the murder of the Shiri, Ariel and Kefir [sic] by claiming ‘this is about everyone who is affected,’” Heaton wrote. “Isn’t that what you railed against when people said ‘all lives matter’ in response to BLM [Black Lives Matter]?” “Why do they have such a difficult time acknowledging that these babies were strangled to death because they are Jewish? It’s not the same as Gazan casualties of war. Not at all.”
“How dare you both-sides the Bibas family and use them as a prop in your dangerous propaganda narrative,” Jewish award-winning radio talk show host and columnist Dahlia Kurtz wrote in a social media post addressed to Goldberg. “A mother and her babies were — barbarically — executed by a terror organization. Then held in captivity for ransom. This while her husband and the babies’ father was held hostage — and savagely tortured. Three generations of the innocent Bibas family were murdered. Plus their beloved dog. This is not about everyone’s suffering. This is about the Bibas family.”
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New York Times Praises ‘Charm’ of Hezbollah Terrorist Leader
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The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
A New York Times news account of the funeral of Hezbollah terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah refers to his “charm” and “charisma.”
“He served many roles in the lives of Hezbollah members, acting as a religious leader, political strategist and commander in chief,” the New York Times reporters Christina Goldbaum and Euan Ward wrote in a dispatch that the Times labeled as coming from Beirut, Lebanon. “His charm — a rarity among leaders in the region — was also key to unifying Hezbollah’s followers. The group’s current leader, Mr. Qassem, does not share Mr. Nasrallah’s stature or charisma.”
The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, noted, “Nasrallah deserves no reverence, only the cold judgment of history. His hands were covered in the blood of innocents, his legacy is little more than death and suffering.” Greenblatt described Nasrallah as a “murderous terrorist” and as “a fanatic who spread anti-Semitism, extremism, and violence across the Middle East and beyond. His enduring legacy is one of death – thousands of Jews, Israelis, Lebanese, Syrians, Yemenis, and others fell victim to his reign of terror.”
I emailed Goldbaum and asked her: “I noticed in your NYT story today on Nasrallah’s funeral you refer to his ‘charm.’ What did you mean by that exactly? How would you respond to families of victims of Hezbollah-sponsored terrorism who did not find it charming to have their loved ones killed by Hezbollah?”
I also inquired, “Given that you are in Lebanon with a lot of armed Hezbollah people about, are you able to write the truth about Hezbollah or do you have to write nice things, like that Nasrallah was charming, because you are afraid of being kidnapped or killed if you tell the truth?”
She did not respond.
My Webster’s Second defines charming as “pleasing in a high degree; delighting; fascinating; of attractive character and personality.” It offers as synonyms “delightful, amiable, lovely, pleasing.”
When Nasrallah was killed, President Biden issued a statement noting that “his many victims” included “thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians.”
The New York Times article from the funeral that discussed Nasrallah’s supposed “charm” made no mention of those victims. Nor did it mention Nasrallah’s notoriously threatening comment, as translated by Prime Minister Netanyahu, that “If all the Jews gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of chasing them down around the world.”
The Times did not mention the 12 Druse children killed by a Hezbollah rocket strike on a soccer field in Majdal Shams in 2024 while Nasrallah led the terrorist group.
The U.S. State Department says Hezbollah “is responsible for multiple large-scale terrorist attacks, including the 1983 suicide truck bombings of U.S. Embassy Beiruit and the U.S. Marine barracks; the 1984 attack on the U.S. Embassy Beirut annex; and the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847, during which U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem was murdered.” It says the group “was also implicated, along with Iran, in the 1992 attacks on the Israeli embassy in Argentina and the 1994 bombing of the Argentine‑Israelite Mutual Association in Buenos Aires.” Some “charm.”
The Times article misleadingly refers to “Hezbollah’s raison d’être: armed resistance against Israeli occupation.” That understates Hezbollah’s true objective, which is subjugating Lebanon to Iranian control as part of the Iranian campaign to extend fanatic revolutionary Islamist clerical rule worldwide and put America and Israel to death along the way. In fact, the Times sanitized its report of the Nasrallah funeral by omitting from the account the violent chants heard there of “Death to America, Death to Israel.” The Times deceives readers by claiming Hezbollah is all about “Israeli occupation,” when it’s actually about “death to America.”
In addition to the bylines of Goldbaum and Ward, the Times article extolling Nasrallah’s “charm” also says “Dayana Iwaza and Jacob Roubai contributed reporting.” Iwaza’s Linked In and Instagram profiles identify her as a part time or free-lance contributor also to Aljazeera, a network controlled by Qatar that Israel says has served as cover for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists.
The Times article already carries one correction: “A correction was made on Feb. 23, 2025: An earlier version of this article misidentified the newly appointed president of Lebanon. He is Joseph Aoun, not Michel Aoun, a former president of the country.”
If the Times took its journalistic credibility more seriously, maybe it would add a second correction, or an editor’s note, to the effect that it was a ridiculous mistake to describe Hassan Nasrallah as “charming.” It’s one thing to quote someone as saying that, it’s quite another for the newspaper to report it as fact, unattributed, in the newspaper’s own voice. Where were the Times editors?
And what were the reporters thinking? If in fact they were intimidated by the tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters, maybe the best thing for the Times to have done on this one would have been to write the story from somewhere safe, or at least to disclose to readers that the story was affected by a threat of violence.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.
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Late Jewish Actress Michelle Trachtenberg Wore Her Star of David Proudly, Says Jessica Seinfeld in Touching Tribute
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FILE PHOTO: Actress Michelle Trachtenberg poses at the party for the launch of the Blackberry Torch in Los Angeles August 11, 2010. Photo: REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni/File Photo
Author and executive producer Jessica Seinfeld, who is also the wife of Jerry Seinfeld, shared a heartfelt tribute to Jewish actress Michelle Trachtenberg on Wednesday, the same day that the “Gossip Girl” star was found dead at age 39 in her New York City apartment.
Jessica posted a photo of Trachtenberg on her Instagram Story and in the caption, she talked about the actress’ affinity to wear a Star of David and display Jewish pride.
“Michelle and I communicated recently about all she was doing to help the victims of the fires in Los Angeles. Last year she said, ‘I wear my David star proudly and my mom is worried,” wrote Jessica, who is the executive producer of the documentary “Daughters” on Netflix. Jessica added the acronym for “Baruch Dayan Emet,” the Hebrew phrase typically said to mourn someone’s death, and used emojis to describe Trachtenberg as a Jewish queen before calling her someone “who never stopped living out our Jewish values to do good things for others.”
Trachtenberg was found “unconscious and unresponsive” in her apartment on Wednesday morning and was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the New York Police Department. While an investigation remains ongoing, no foul play has been suspected. The actress recently had a liver transplant but it unconfirmed if the transplant played a role in her death. A source told People magazine that she was “really down emotionally” and had been dealing with “health issues” over the last year.
As a child actor, Trachtenberg starred in Nickelodeon’s “The Adventures of Pete & Pete” and the soap opera “All My Children” in 1993. In 1996, she played the title character in “Harriet the Spy.” She then joined season five of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and stayed on until the show’s finale in 2003. From 2008 through 2012, Trachtenberg played Georgina Sparks on the television series “Gossip Girl.” She reprised the role in 2023 for two episodes of the HBO Max reboot of the same title, and that was her last onscreen appearance.
Several of Trachtenberg’s former costars from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” paid tribute to her following her death, including Sarah Michelle Gellar. On “Buffy,” Trachtenberg played Dawn Summers, the younger sister to Gellar’s character, Buffy Summers. When Gellar’s character sacrificed herself in the season five finale, she told her kid sister, “Dawn, the hardest thing in the world is to live in it. Be brave. Live — for me.”
On Thursday, Gellar shared in an Instagram post a carousel of photos from her time with Tracthenberg on the set of “Buffy.” In the caption, Gellar quoted from the season five finale episode of “Buffy” and wrote to Trachtenberg: “Michelle, listen to me. Listen. I love you. I will always love you. The hardest thing in this world, is to live in it. I will be brave. I will live… for you.”
Fellow “Buffy” star Alyson Hannigan also honored Trachtenberg’s memory in an Instagram post. She wrote, “I am deeply saddened by the news of Michelle’s passing. She brought a loving energy to the set of ‘Buffy.’ My thoughts are with Michelle’s family and friends.” “Buffy” star David Boreanaz shared his condolences in an Instagram Story and James Marsters, who played the vampire Spike on the television show, praised his costar in a statement given to People magazine.
“My heart is heavy today. We have lost a beautiful soul,” he said. “Michelle was fiercely intelligent, howlingly funny and a very talented person. She died much too young, and leaves behind scores of people who knew and loved her,” he continued. “My heart goes out to her family, who are good people and are suffering the greatest loss anyone could bear. I hope everyone can give them space to heal in this most difficult time. Godspeed Michelle. You are missed.”
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