Uncategorized
‘Swastika boards’ and ‘surf Nazis’: New documentary explores surfing’s history of antisemitism
(JTA) — When he was 13 years old, Josh Greene moved with his family to San Clemente, California, a city known as one of the best spots for surfing on the West Coast. Greene quickly fell in love with the sport, even holding his bar mitzvah party at a local museum dedicated to it.
As a “skinny, very unathletic” teen, Greene said he endured a significant amount of bullying, including some that “extended itself into antisemitism.” Students at his school would compare his physique to that of a Holocaust survivor.
Surfing provided refuge.
“Surfing was my way to really carve my own niche and find the confidence, courage and physical strength I needed,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
But years after his bar mitzvah, Greene learned that his parents had arranged for the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center to remove swastika-engraved boards that were on display, to avoid disturbing the partygoers. Wanting to learn more, he discovered that the sport’s history is full of Nazi imagery: Particularly in the 1960s, seeing surfboards with swastikas or surfers giving “Sieg heil” salutes was commonplace. Serious surfers called themselves “surf Nazis” as a way to signal their intense dedication to the sport.
An aspiring filmmaker — he received his first “real camera” as his bar mitzvah present — Greene decided to combine his two passions and delve into the dark history.
The result, completed before he graduated from the University of Southern California in May 2022, is a documentary called “Waves Apart,” which chronicles the history of antisemitism in surfing. Directed by Greene, the student-produced film was a finalist in the fall for a Student Academy Award, given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
“Waves Apart” made its global debut at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on Thursday, before heading to other Jewish and documentary film festivals in California, Denver, Toronto and Maryland.
After chronicling his own journey with surfing and the bar mitzvah incident in the film, Greene interviews surf writer Dan Duane and Jewish history professor Steven Ross, who provide a fuller picture of Southern California’s history of both surfing and Nazism, and their unfortunate overlap. As Duane wrote in a 2019 New York Times article, that overlap runs deep — The first commercially made surfboards made in California are thought to be the “Swastika model,” sold in the 1930s by the Pacific Systems Homes company, which also made prefab houses. The 1960s surfer icon Miki Dora was known to have painted a swastika on at least one of his boards.
Duane cites arguments that claim early surfers, who wanted to be seen as a rebellious subculture, used the swastika only to irk members of mainstream society. But Duane argues back that their antisemitism was part of a clear culture of racism in the largely white surfer community.
“I’ve heard all the predictable excuses for this stuff, like that the swastika was an ancient Sanskrit symbol,” he wrote in The Times. “Putting a swastika on something to anger people means you know that it angers them and very likely why.”
In his movie, Greene also speaks with Jewish surfers, both his classmates at USC and Jewish surfing legends like Shaun Tomson and Israel “Izzy” Paskowitz. Paskowitz shares a story of encountering a surfer with a swastika spray-painted on his surfboard — which his father, the famous surfer Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, destroyed out of anger.
“Right as I was about to graduate, we had the first screening of our film, in our school’s theater,” Greene said. “We drew a packed crowd, and it was so rewarding and such a great sign of confirmation about the film’s message and connectivity with our audience. We saw people crying, people smiling at the end, with the way our film ends with a hopeful tone and message for the future.”
That hopeful message is where Tomson comes in. A former pro surfer and now a motivational speaker, Tomson reached the pinnacle of the sport by winning the 1977 World Surf League championship. He won 19 major professional surfing events in total and is a member of both the Southern California and International Jewish Sports Halls of Fame.
Shaun Tomson is a former world champion surfer. (Courtesy of Tomson)
Tomson, born in Durban, South Africa, also had a surfing experience tied to his bar mitzvah that would prove foundational. Tomson’s father took him on a surfing trip to Hawaii, which Tomson called “the Mount Everest of surfing.”
“For me, it was a total representation of what a bar mitzvah is — it’s coming into manhood,” Tomson told JTA. “And here I was, a young boy paddling out in a 25-foot surf in Hawaii, which was a moment for me that changed my life. I came back to South Africa, and my career and my role in surfing changed after that bar mitzvah present.”
Tomson said he has faced antisemitism before outside of the sport — he was called a “Jew boy” by a fellow member of South Africa’s army as a teenager — but never as a member of the surfing community in the 1970s onward.
“While it’s not an excuse, I think there’s just a lot of ignorance,” Tomson said. “When I say ignorance, perhaps it wasn’t actually directed at Jews, it was more just blatant stupidity, and a lack of awareness of what actually happened in the Holocaust.”
There weren’t many Jewish surfers in South Africa when Tomson grew up, but he said he feels a direct link between his identities as a Jew and as a surfer.
“When you’re out in the ocean, there’s certainly a spiritual and a religious connectivity there, which is totally aligned with Jewish values,” he said.
No experience exemplifies this connection more powerfully than the tragic death of Tomson’s son, Matthew, who died in 2006 at the age of 15 as a result of a schoolyard “choking game” gone wrong. Tomson tells the story in the documentary.
Tomson explained that his particular expertise is tube riding — the picturesque but challenging technique of riding inside a tunnel-like wave. Two hours before Tomson’s son died, he called his father to share an essay he had written about how in tube riding, “the light shines ahead.” Just hours later, Tomson received the devastating news.
“So when I was trying to make sense of the world and my life, and why God had done this to me, I went back to my old shul,” Tomson said. “The old shul where I’d had my bar mitzvah. And I look at that lamp of everlasting light that represents the hope and faith of Judaism. And I thought of the words that my son wrote, ‘the light shines ahead.’ And I realized that Judaism’s about hope.”
The film ends on that hopeful tone: The last scene features a group of Jewish surfers at a beach in Malibu, reciting the Shema prayer in the water, before hitting the waves as the sun begins to set. In the last shot, the group sits down to a Shabbat meal on the beach.
“Surfing can be seen as a microcosm for issues like that and I think we would be doing our sport a great disservice if we ignored our own signs of darkness,” Greene said. “I think that by making a film like this, we can dispel ignorance and divisiveness, and instead promote inclusivity, community and equality for all surfers and all people.”
—
The post ‘Swastika boards’ and ‘surf Nazis’: New documentary explores surfing’s history of antisemitism appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
The Nazis massacred innocents when their regime was crumbling. What does that say about Minneapolis?
“We are the strongest country in the world,” Scott Bessent, the United States’ treasury secretary, said recently on Meet the Press. “Europeans project weakness. We project strength.”
The events of this month in Minneapolis, culminating with the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents last weekend, show he is incorrect. Mass violence by the government against the people is not a sign of strength, but rather a sign of a nation dangerously divided. “Massacres seem, on one level, to be outcomes of power struggles within weak or crisis laden states,” writes Mark Levene, a professor of Jewish history, in The Massacre in History, adding that a massacre is “indicative not of power at the center but rather, of the lack of it.”
Here is one example from history: On June 10, 1944, days after the Allied invasion of Normandy, the German army entered the French village of Ouradour-sur Glane and rounded up 197 men and 445 women and children. They locked the men in a barn and the women and children in a church, and proceeded to kill them — 642 people, including seven Jewish refugees.
German military power made the massacre possible. But the slaughter took place while the Nazi state was disintegrating. The massacre projected weakness on the part of the failing German power, not strength.
More recent examples are also available.
Within the last month, the government of Iran has killed thousands of its own citizens who were protesting the oppressive regime — violence that has brought the country closer to regime change than at any point since the 1979 revolution.
Already weakened by its inability to protect itself from Israeli and American bombardment last summer, the government’s massacre of its own people has been broadly interpreted as a signal of profound instability. The “despotic regime is fragile and desperate,” Benjamin Wallace-Wells recently wrote in The New Yorker. When the government turns to violent repression, it gambles: It can provoke yet more outrage, or it can succeed in forcing calm — temporarily.
Which brings us to the U.S., which Scott Bessent has claimed is projecting strength. What has occurred in Minneapolis does not yet qualify as a massacre, despite the killings of Pretti and Renée Nicole Good. But our own country’s history provides a warning about the dire signal those killings send, and how much worse things could get.
Directly after the end of the Civil War, Memphis, Tennessee received a flood of immigrants, particularly Black citizens newly freed from slavery. The U.S.army occupying Memphis as part of Reconstruction reacted by arresting many of those free black citizens, and forcing them to work in the cotton fields outside the city. Major William Gray ordered that the streets be patrolled by soldiers from Fort Pickering, tasked with making arrests and forcing those they detained to accept exploitative labor contracts with local planters.
Similarly, the Memphis police, all white, took to beating black people in the street for the crime of “insolence.” After a white policeman was shot during an altercation in 1866, a white mob made up in large part by the municipal police and fire fighters ransacked Black homes and killed 46 Black people.
That massacre took place at a time when the United States was bitterly divided. The Civil War had just ended. The President had been assassinated. In Memphis, federal forces rubbed shoulders uneasily with municipal police. Local and national political powers were profoundly at odds.
The massacre in Memphis offers both an explanation and a warning about what is happening today in Minneapolis — and what could still be in store.
Just as our military kidnapped people off the streets of Memphis, forcing them into inhumane conditions, so ICE is kidnapping people in Minneapolis today. Just as children were arrested in Memphis, children as young as 5 have been detained in Minneapolis.
These parallels are evidence of a weak and woefully unpopular government. What is happening in Minneapolis is appalling; the example of Memphis gives us reason to fear that the stage is being set for something worse.
That said, there are no laws of history. Not every weakened or divided society results in a massacre. But there is an alarming resonance between the legacy of the Nazi massacre in Ouradour-sur Glane; the Iranian regime’s massacre of civilian protesters; the 19th-century massacre in Memphis and the outbreak of official violence in Minneapolis. It is that of a radically divided society, with a weakened government, falling prey to horrendous violence.
The post The Nazis massacred innocents when their regime was crumbling. What does that say about Minneapolis? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Orthodox Jewish groups have been quiet about ICE. This Minneapolis rabbi wasn’t.
When the heads of major Jewish denominations co-signed a letter last week criticizing “in the strongest possible terms” the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minneapolis, Orthodox Judaism was conspicuously absent. Neither the Orthodox Union nor Agudath Israel of America — the two leading Orthodox umbrella organizations — has commented on the mass deployment of ICE and Border Patrol officers to the city.
There’s a reason Orthodox leaders might be choosing their words carefully — condemning ICE would put them at odds with not only a sizable chunk of their membership. Unlike members of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements, Orthodox Jews — who represent about a tenth of the American Jewish population — lean heavily conservative, with about three-quarters supporting President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. (The Orthodox Union and Agudath Israel did not respond to separate inquiries.)
There was, however, at least one Orthodox rabbi willing to criticize ICE in public. Rabbi Max Davis, who leads the Minneapolis synagogue Darchei Noam Congregation, was one of 49 Jewish leaders to sign a Jan. 16 letter from the Minnesota Rabbinical Association, which said ICE was “wreaking havoc across our state” and which resolved to “bear witness and make a difference.”
I called Davis to learn more about why he signed and what he’s seeing on the ground. He also spoke about congregants who have been pepper sprayed or arrested at protests, how he approaches politics at the pulpit of an Orthodox shul, why he rejects the Holocaust comparisons some are making and how he’s tried to make a difference.
The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.
The Forward: Why did you sign this letter?
Rabbi Max Davis: It felt like a very reasonable, very carefully thought out response to the present situation. I know that there are many within the shul who are looking for some leadership in this moment, and signing was a drop in the bucket compared to what some people are doing.
By the same token, I know that there are other perspectives within my own shul and certainly within the broader Orthodox community, and I strongly believe that it’s not the role of a rabbi to police his congregants’ politics. In our shul, we learn from and respect each other, and there’s an incredible amount of wisdom and life experience beyond my own. So I signed with caution, but with quite a feeling of disappointment and anger in the events unfolding downtown, and the loss of life in particular.
I’m probably the only Orthodox rabbi in the Minnesota Rabbinical Association, and there have been statements issued that I have not signed. But this one was an opportunity I was not going to miss.
What’s been the reaction at Darchei Noam to your signing the letter?
I got several yasher koachs (plaudits) privately. Those who may disagree, I think were and are being polite. There’s definitely been some pushback about politics entering our shul. But I haven’t heard much about the letter specifically. I don’t think anyone was terribly surprised that I signed it.
More broadly, what are things like in your community right now?
Within our kehilla (congregation), there’s a diversity of opinion. But mostly what I’m hearing is deep sorrow and frustration and anger and pain — particularly from those who watch the videos, who are acquainted with individuals suffering directly from the ongoing operations, or who have watched what the operations have been doing to our city and to our community.
Have you seen what’s happening firsthand?
There’s someone in our extended community who just got out of jail and called me about 10 minutes ago to give me a heads up. We have a couple of people in the community who have been pepper sprayed. We have people in the community who have been very active in supply drives and driving children to school because their parents are afraid to come out.
Instead of buying stuff at the sort of generic supermarket I thought I might as well make the money count where people are hurting the most. So I went a couple weeks ago to try and pick up some kiddush supplies down at one of the large Latino markets that I know has taken quite a hit. I was pretty much the only customer. It was a very sad place.
So in those regards, I’ve seen what’s going on. I was down at the march last Erev Shabbos (Jan. 16). It was minus-10 degrees. There were 50,000 people out there in the streets and thousands more in the skyways and in the buildings that we could see. You see banners and signs hanging onto highways. You see people clustered at intersections with signs and upside-down American flags. There’s a tremendous amount of anger out there.
What’s it like to be living through that?
It’s heartening and it’s disheartening. It’s disheartening that it feels necessary; it’s heartening to see community coming together. It’s disheartening to see signs comparing the federal government and ICE to Nazi Germany; I find that, as a Jew, deeply offensive and ignorant. And by the same token, I find all of the messages around community and common decency to be a beautiful sight.
It’s not to say that I have any solutions to the more fundamental politics. I’m not saying that the country doesn’t have an immigration problem. But I do know that you can’t watch the video of Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse from the VA hospital, you can’t watch the video of Renee Good in her car and how that unfolded — shootings on streets and in neighborhoods that I know — you can’t watch that and not be highly disturbed and moved.
Have you addressed this moment at all from the pulpit?
I have definitely mentioned it in a couple of drashos (sermons). A couple of weeks ago, I spoke about ignoring the broader humanity and the plight of our neighbors at our own moral peril. Nechama Leibowitz sees a progression in Moshe’s interventions, first on behalf of another Jew against the Egyptian, then for a Jew against another Jew, and finally, with the daughters of Yitro at the well, between two non-Jewish parties. It was a good base for talking about doing what we can, when we can, to be an ohr l’goyim (a light unto the nations). I don’t think I said the word “ICE,” but there was no mistake about the subject matter — I think Renee Good had been shot like two days earlier.
With drashos, I’ve tried to be a little bit more tempered and restrained, because I think a lot of people come to hear Torah and inspiration and political issues are risky business. I’m also careful because I don’t want to ruin people’s Shabbos in other ways. Everyone has so much of this all week long, and I know some people look forward to Shabbos just to take a break. I’ve been told by some people that I’ve been too pareve, and by others that it’s been too much. So maybe I’m succeeding or failing everybody at the same time.
You mentioned the Nazi comparisons. Why do you take offense to those in this context?
That was industrialized murder, and concentration camps — there’s not a word to describe the evil of what that was. That was just exponentially more horrific. And it disturbs me to no end — although I am not surprised to see people make this comparison and I get where they’re coming from — how lightly the Holocaust and the evils of Nazi Germany seem to be treated when people want to trot out a paradigm of evil.
Why did it feel important to you to patronize the Latino grocery store?
I feel for these communities, where these are honest, legitimate, hard working businesses, and they watch their customer base all but dry up — that includes people who are here legally, employees who are here legally. But there are so many stories of individuals who are being racially profiled or being picked up by mistake.
I was very angry about the story of a Laotian man who, in front of his family and children, was pulled out of the shower into 10-degree weather and bundled off into an ICE vehicle and driven around for an hour before they figured out that he was here legally and had no criminal record. He was let go without so much as an apology. He’s got a wife and small children — and I’ve got a wife and kids, you know? This kind of thing is absolutely unacceptable. And unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like that was such an outlier case. And that’s not an America that I believe in.
The post Orthodox Jewish groups have been quiet about ICE. This Minneapolis rabbi wasn’t. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Stories of ghosts, grief and Shabbat gladness win top prizes in Jewish children’s literature
(JTA) — Anna is a misunderstood sixth-grade girl who communicates with the ghosts of her Jewish ancestors. Teased by her classmates and worried-over by her family, she finds comfort and understanding with her Bubbe and her beloved Jewish traditions.
“Neshama,” Marcella Pixley’s lyrically written novel-in-verse, won the gold medal for Jewish children’s literature for middle-grade readers from the Association of Jewish Libraries. Its Sydney Taylor Book Awards were announced today in a virtual livecast from Chicago.
The award committee called Pixley’s “a lyrical, deeply Jewish story about identity, grief, and resilience.”
The annual award, named in memory of Sydney Taylor, the author of the “All-of-a-Kind Family” series, “recognizes books for children and teens that exemplify high literary standards while authentically portraying the Jewish experience,” according to the award committee’s announcement.
Other winners include “D.J. Rosenblum Becomes the G.O.A.T,” a coming-of-age mystery by Abby White, which won in the young adult category, and “Shabbat Shalom: Let’s Rest and Reset,” a lively board book written and illustrated by Suzy Ultman, which won the picture book award.
The Sydney Taylor committee named Uri Shulevitz, whose 2008 book “How I Learned Geography” drew on his boyhood experiences fleeing Poland after the Nazi invasion in 1939, as the winner of its Body-of-Work award. Shulevitz, a multi-award winning storyteller and illustrator, died last year.
In addition to the top winners, the Sydney Taylor committee named five silver medalists and nine notable titles of Jewish content.
“This year’s winners and honorees exemplify excellence in Jewish children’s literature through vibrant storytelling and rich perspectives that foster empathy, understanding, and a deep appreciation for culture and community,” said Melanie Koss, chair of the award committee.
Winners will receive their awards in June in Evanston, Illinois at the AJL’s annual conference.
In “D. J. Rosenblum Becomes the “G.O.A.T,” an about-to-be bat mitzah-age girl is determined to prove that her beloved cousin did not die by suicide. Abby White lightens the emotional subject with a teen’s authentic, humorous voice.
“She wrestles with her Torah portion and faith, finding strength to face loss and begin moving forward,” the committee noted.
“Shabbat Shalom” may be the first board book to garner the award, Heidi Rabinowitz, a long-time podcaster about Jewish children’s books, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“The sophisticated board book combines succinct text with playful art,” the committee wrote in its release.
In awarding its Body-of-Work award to Shulevitz (1935-2025), who lived with his family in Israel before settling in New York, the committee recognized him as a “foundational voice in Jewish children’s literature.” His books “illuminate Jewish culture and reflect universal experience,” the committee wrote.
Many of Shulevitz’s titles reflect his Jewish roots, including “The Golem,” by Isaac Bashevis Singer and “The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela,” an illustrated travelogue for children based on the real-life voyages of the 12th-century Jewish traveler who visited Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad and Jerusalem. Shulevitz garnered the Caldecott medal, children’s literature’s top honor for illustrated books, for “The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship.”
Earlier, the AJL announced that Jessica Russak-Hoffman, a journalist for Jewish media outlets, won the organization’s new manuscript award for “How to Catch a Mermaid (When You’re Scared of the Sea),” a novel set in Israel for ages 8-13.
Last week, the AJL named Jason Diamond as the 2026 winner of its Jewish Fiction award for his novel, “Kaplan’s Plot.”
At Tuesday’s event, the Youth Media Awards hosted by the American Library Association, the winners were also announced for the Caldecott, Coretta Scott King, Newberry and Printz awards, among others. The Asian American Picture Book award went to “Many Things All At Once,” by Veera Hiranandani and illustrated by Nadia Alam, the story of a girl with a Jewish mother and a South Asian father.
The post Stories of ghosts, grief and Shabbat gladness win top prizes in Jewish children’s literature appeared first on The Forward.