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The mysterious disappearance of Yemenite children in Israel is the focus of a new play
(New York Jewish Week) — Shortly after the State of Israel was founded, Shanit Keter-Schwartz was born on a dirt floor, in a hut made of aluminum siding outside the burgeoning town of Tel Aviv. She was the second of six children, the daughter of Yemenite Jews who had recently immigrated to the new country. They’d faced discrimination and violence in their country of origin, so when Jewish emissaries turned up in 1949 to bring 50,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel as a part of “Operation Flying Carpet,” they were all in.
Unfortunately, Keter-Schwartz’s upbringing in Israel was no magic carpet ride. “[Yemenite Jews] were seen as savages, primitive, inferior in the eyes of the Ashkenazi Jews,” Keter-Schwartz recalled in an interview with the New York Jewish Week. “They were not sophisticated or educated. It was a cultural domination, a collective trauma in Israel. They faced war, hunger, poverty, and living in very harsh conditions.”
The worst, though, wasn’t near-starvation due to rationing, or the harsh conditions of the shanty towns that these new immigrants were placed in, or the way European children wrinkled their nose at her and called her smelly. No, the worst was when the government stole her sister, Sarah, whom Keter-Schwartz never saw again.
In what has become known as the Yemenite Children Affair, more than 1,000 children of Yemenite, Mizrahi and Balkan descent were separated from their children during the first decade of Israel’s existence. The families and their advocates have long insisted, over denials by officials, that the children were taken from their families by the Ashkenazi government during the first decade of Israel’s existence. More often than not, parents were told their children had died when they had, in fact, been given to families of European descent for adoption, according to Amram Association, one of several organizations dedicated to documenting these abductions and advocating for victims’ families.
Now, Keter-Schwartz — a writer and performer who lives in Los Angeles, and a mother to two grown daughters — has brought to life her family’s story and her search for her missing sister in the form of a one-woman show. Premiering on Thursday at New York City Center, and running through May 15, “Daughter of the Wicked” chronicles her family’s journey from the Yemenite ma’abarot (refugee camps) to shikunim (government housing projects), where they lived in a tiny two-room apartment amid a melting pot of Jewish immigrants who were often at odds with one another.
“It is overcrowded, and the people who live here come from many different places. In their countries they were… respected by their communities,” she says in the show, which is named after one of the many Yemenite curses her mother would hurl at her when she’d done something wrong. “But here [in Israel] they are forced into stereotypes.”
“Israel had no choice but to bring the Jews from the Arab countries because the European Jews population had been greatly diminished after the Holocaust, but they didn’t want us,” Keter-Schwartz told the New York Jewish Week. “They took control of our lives, tried to assimilate us, wanted the whole country to be secular and uniform. They made all the decisions for us.”
One such “decision” made by the government, she said, was to remove her oldest brother, Yossi, from the family home to “re-educate” him at an Ashkenazi kibbutz. It worked: Yossi returned as a proud secular farmer, disdainful and ashamed of his spiritualist, religious family and their traditional ways.
The disappearance of her baby sister, Sarah, inspired Keter-Schwartz’s play, which is also informed by the kabbalistic teachings of her father. (Russ Rowland)
In the case of Keter-Schwartz’s sister, the abduction occurred directly after she was born. “When my father went to the hospital to pick up the twins, my siblings, he returned only with David. They told him that the girl, Sarah, was sick, and he should come back the following day. But when he came back, they told him that she had died,” Keter-Schwartz said. “Being naive, he didn’t question this. He didn’t ask to see a death certificate. He didn’t even know [a certificate] existed. He didn’t demand to see her body, didn’t think to bury her or give her funeral rites. He never suspected for a minute they could deceive him.”
This story, and others, is conveyed in “Daughter of the Wicked” through a series of monologues, each tied to an idea from Kabbalah,the Jewish mystical tradition. Keter-Schwartz defines each concept — like ahava (love), metsuka (hardship), busha (shame) — then tells a personal story that relates to the topic.
With this framework, Keter-Schwartz pays homage to her father, a spiritualist rabbi who spent his days poring over holy texts and divining the true meaning of the universe. She reads from his writings — which were collected and published towards the end of his life as a book, “Nachash HaNechoshet” — detailing her complex relationship to a man who was both an inspiration and, at times, inscrutable to all around him.
“The play is set in a hotel room, while I’m waiting for my sister to show up,” Keter-Schwartz explains. “As I wait, I tell my life. Behind me, on three screens, there’s archival footage from the 1950s that I got from Steven Spielberg’s archive. That footage tells the story, too, and so does the music.” The accompanying music, which transitions the audience from segment to segment, was written by Israeli composer Lilo Fedida, using traditional Yemenite melodies and instruments.
“We lived with this [tragedy] all my childhood, and I’ve been wondering all these years about my missing sister,” said Keter-Schwartz. “If I see her on the street, will I recognize her? Where does she live? Is she happy? I felt guilty that I never really tried to find her, I was so busy with my own life. But now I need to know.”
As a young woman, Keter-Schwartz said she went to great lengths to distance herself from her family’s tragedies. She lived in Amsterdam, London and New York, finally finding her footing in Los Angeles. She changed her name — from Shoshana to Shanit — and declared herself a new person in a new land. It was only when she lost all but one of her siblings, as well as both parents, that she felt an urge to revisit the past. When her last surviving sibling got so ill he almost died, she swore to search for Sarah. Initially, the idea was just to hire a private investigator to try to locate her. During her search, though, she began to feel an urge to share her story.
“I’d never written a play, so it took me two years [working] with coaches,” says Keter-Schwartz. “I’ve been an actress all my life, I’ve edited other people’s scripts, I produced movies, but to actually write — ha! I had amazing coaches. I’m especially grateful to Yigal Chatzor, the Israeli playwright. He brought the Israeli spice and the humor, which is wonderful now because now the play is balanced. It’s heart-wrenching and it’s hysterical. It’s everything, you know.”
The Yemenite Children Affair has never been formally confirmed by the state of Israel, which maintains the position that most of the babies died of malaria or malnutrition and were not, as some have proposed, sold to Ashkenazi families in exchange for donations to the young country. Several government-led commissions have claimed that there was no official wrongdoing, but testimonies continue to emerge that suggest otherwise. According to a 2016 article in Yediot Ahronot, a prominent Israeli news source, the government has sealed the official records of these disappearances until 2071, despite ongoing demonstrations and demands for actions.
In 2021, the Israeli government authorized tens of millions of dollars in reparations to families whose children disappeared while in government care. Nonetheless, no official admission of guilt or apology has been issued, a fact which caused many affected families to reject the plan, calling it “hush money.” Only a fraction of the affected families are eligible for these payments and, according to recent reporting, very few have claimed the money. Less than 1% of the allocated funds have been distributed thus far.
For Keter-Schwartz, no amount of money could compensate for the loss of her sister. She’s more interested in creating connections with others who lost family members and bringing awareness to this chapter in Israeli history. “Going back to my roots, revisiting the past, is an act of forgiveness,” Keter-Schwartz said in a statement. “By writing this play, I was able to forgive and accept the past. I hope that when audiences see my play they come to terms with their own history, and that they feel a sense of what it means to be free, and the challenges that confront us in maintaining that freedom.”
That is a major throughline of “Daughter of the Wicked”: Keter-Schwartz does not forsake the country that gave her her identity and childhood; rather, she insists on loving it while demanding recognition of past wrongs. Towards the end of her show, Keter Ashkenazi raises both arms to the sky and screams at those who wronged her: “My country! I blame you, shame on you for forsaking us, shame on you!”
But then, she lowers her arms and says, voice cracking with heartbreak: “I love you, I blame you, I love you. My country, I love you.”
—
The post The mysterious disappearance of Yemenite children in Israel is the focus of a new play appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Fatah and Palestinian Authority Celebrate Terrorist Mass Murderers on School Books
French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, Nov. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
As part of its “national and moral responsibility towards its student members,” the student movement of Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party distributed free notebooks to students at the Palestine Technical University-Kadoorie at the beginning of the academic year.
Seemingly, this was a praiseworthy act.
But whom did Fatah choose to adorn the cover of the notebook? Was it a Palestinian businesswoman, scientist, or artist?
No.
Terrorist murderer Dalal Mughrabi was the role model chosen to inspire students on the cover. She is, after all, a Palestinian hero according to the Fatah Shabiba Student Movement and the Student Union Council at the university.
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has documented that Dalal Mughrabi — who led the attack that, until Oct. 7, 2023, was the most lethal terror attack in Israel’s history — has been turned into a role model for Palestinians by the PA. In the 1978 attack, known as the Coastal Road massacre, Mughrabi and other Fatah terrorists hijacked a bus on Israel’s Coastal Highway, murdering 37 civilians, 12 of them children, and wounding over 70.
Murderer Mughrabi’s picture is also included in a display of drawings of various prominent Palestinian figures at a current exhibition at the Yasser Arafat Museum in Ramallah:
In the front row of figures on the left wearing a keffiyeh (Arab headdress) is terrorist Dalal Mughrabi. Directly above Mughrabi is Fatah terror leader Abu Ali Iyad, above him is terrorist Khalil Al-Wazir, “Abu Jihad,” who was responsible for the murder of 125 people. To the left of “Abu Jihad” is Yasser Arafat, and to the left of Arafat is head of the Black September terror organization Salah Khalaf, “Abu Iyad.”
[Official PA TV, Palestine This Morning, Nov. 11, 2025]
Young Palestinian children are also fed a diet of violence and terror promotion.
At the National Book Fair organized by the PA Ministry of Culture at the Arab American University in Jenin, young schoolgirls read books written by terrorist prisoners at a booth in which the PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs “presented the literary and intellectual works” of terrorists and released terrorists.
One book cover in the center of the table pictured below features a picture of terrorist Marwan Barghouti, who orchestrated three attacks in which five people were murdered:
[PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs, Facebook page, Nov. 4, 2025]
The presentation of terrorists as important cultural and “intellectual” figures at schools, universities, museums, and book fairs follows PA policy of celebrating imprisoned and released terrorists who have written books in prison as esteemed writers
Official PA TV glorified released terrorist Osama Al-Ashqar, who was responsible for the murder of eight people, at an event in Cairo [Official PA TV, Palestine This Morning, Sept. 10, 2025]. Meanwhile, Fatah Movement Deputy Chairman Mahmoud Al-Aloul attended and signed books at the launch ceremony of a book written by released terrorist Raed Abd Al-Jalil, who was involved in the murder of five people:
Fatah Deputy Chairman Mahmoud Al-Aloul signs the book “Love and a Rifle” by released terrorist prisoner Raed Abd Al-Jalil. [Fatah Movement – Nablus Branch, Facebook page, Nov. 5, 2025]
Al-Aloul also stressed another PA ideology — non-recognition of Israel in any borders — presenting the terrorist murderer’s family with an honorary plaque that features the PA map of “Palestine” that presents all of Israel together with the PA areas as “Palestine.”
The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this story first appeared.
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As Fall Semester Ends, the March of Antisemitism Continues on Campus
A Palestinian flag flies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Photo: Students for Justice in Palestine/Instagram
Heading into the new year, the campus situation continues to be a complex one for Jewish students and faculty. Most universities continue to reject the compacts offered by the Trump administration, which would restore Federal funding in exchange for changes in DEI and other policies. But other institutions have reached settlements with the government, notably Cornell University, which will pay $30 million and invest an additional $30 million for agricultural research. The university will also provide the government with data regarding admissions, conduct campus surveys, and comply with Federal law. The settlement was strongly opposed by Cornell faculty.
Elsewhere, Columbia University’s Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing rejected a series of Israel divestment proposals. The committee determined that the proposals did not meet the standard of broad consensus within the university community.
Despite the Gaza ceasefire, Israeli academics report intensifying boycotts particularly among European faculty and institutions. At least 1,000 incidents have been recorded with approximately 25% occurring since the summer of 2025. Spain has halted academic collaborations almost completely, with Belgium and the Netherlands following behind. Israelis also report a quiet boycott by American colleagues. Warnings regarding the erosion of Israel’s economic and strategic positions as a result of academic boycotts continue to be sounded.
Student associations and governments continue to be the focal point of anti-Israel and antisemitism on campuses.
In a reflection of elite British student politics, after a debate, the Oxford Union overwhelmingly voted in favor of a resolution that Israel was a “greater threat to regional stability” than Iran. Pro-Hamas students attending the debate displayed red hands, a reference to the lynching and mutilation of Israeli soldiers.
Despite the continuing failure of student divestment measures to prompt university action, Harvard’s undergraduate assembly voted on a poll regarding divestment. Reporting was especially convoluted, but the poll apparently showed that 63% of respondents (1,055 of over 7,000) want Harvard to divest from Israel; the precise results were kept secret.
The student government at the University of Maryland unanimously voted to bar Israeli soldiers from speaking on campus. The vote came after an event sponsored by Students Supporting Israel (SSI) was protested by pro-Hamas students. The student government also voted to demand an apology from the university after two student protestors were detained. An event sponsored by SSI at Tulane University was forced off campus by threats of violence, while another at Louisiana State University was met with a violent protest.
Another BDS resolution was narrowly approved by the University of Michigan student assembly, which was then vetoed by the assembly president. The resolution calls on the university to investigate and divest from its financial ties to the Israeli government. The authors of the resolution later accused opponents of doxxing them.
CAIR has been central to both continuing campus pro-Hamas unrest and resulting lawfare. New reports have shown that CAIR provided financial support to pro-Hamas students who had been suspended by their universities for violence and harassment during protests.
In an example of the extremism that characterizes unionized students and potentially the next generation of faculty, the Cornell graduate student union approved a BDS resolution, which included support for terrorism. The resolution stated, “Standing with the strength of Palestinians resisting a genocide, and their unequivocal human right to resist oppression by any means necessary, workers around the world are building power through the belief that we free Palestine, and Palestine frees us.”
The resolution went on to claim that 680,000 Gazans had been killed, ten times the number that Hamas claims, and stated that, “The perpetuation of racist and anti-Muslim rhetoric is part of a broader doctrine of state-sponsored white supremacy that justifies Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians.”
Finally, at Catholic University, the student government debated, “A Resolution to Advocate For A Ban on Clubs in Support of a Nation(s) Commissioning a Genocide.” The resolution targeted the school’s SSI chapter, charging it was supporting “a Nation or organization that is actively pursuing inexcusable evil, such as genocide or terrorism, acts in a way that is contrary to the faith of the Catholic Church.”
In the K-12 sphere, the direct fealty of teachers unions to pro-Hamas causes continues to cause concern. In one case, the Chicago Teachers Union hosted the National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression annual conference and featured speakers who praised Hamas and “armed resistance,” and called for the downfall of the US. A representative of the union also spoke at the American Muslims for Palestine conference.
Examples continue to multiply regarding individual teachers who promote anti-Israel narratives in classrooms, for example in an Oakland, CA, high school where Palestinian flags were displayed along side posters which decried “genocide” and which praised Cuba.
The pervasiveness of anti-Israel and antisemitic bias in public schools was also documented by a report from the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism.Hearings and investigations noted that bias was systemic through all of K-12 education including educational materials, teachers, and classroom behavior. Jewish students, teachers, and staff also reported growing harassment and ostracization, with many opting to hide their identity.
Examples of direct harassment and abuse of Jewish students continue to accumulate. In one recent case from Seattle, a Jewish family has sued the public school system alleging that their daughter was exposed to antisemitic abuse from fellow students to the point of being locked in a classroom by a teacher, in order to shelter her from an angry mob.
Arab and Muslim groups have reacted strongly to efforts that combat antisemitism and anti-Israel bias in public schools. In one case, CAIR and other groups blocked the appearance of Luai Ahmed, a gay, pro-Israel influencer, at Bay Area high schools, which accused him of “pinkwashing.”
Responses to antisemitic bias also came under fire in California, where the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has sued over a new law establishing an Office of Civil Rights and an antisemitism monitor. The group claimed that combating antisemitism undermined the First Amendment rights of children and “hands classrooms to a foreign agenda.” The claim is yet another that essentially declares that antisemitism is protected speech. Members of the California Faculty Association, including ethnic studies faculty who develop anti-Israel and anti-Western curriculum, have also called the bill “racist.”
In response to growing reports on the antisemitism crisis in K-12 education, the House Education and Workforce Committee has launched an investigation of the Berkeley Unified School District in California, Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, and the School District of Philadelphia. In each case, there are numerous documented incidents of harassment and intimidation led by staff, teachers, and students, as well as the use of biased educational materials. These include student walkouts, staff endorsements of violence, partnerships with CAIR, a reenactment of October 7, and harassment of Jewish students.
The author is a contributor to SPME, where a completely different version of this article appeared.
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The Annual ‘Jesus Was a Palestinian’ Christmas Lie Is Back — and It’s Antisemitic
Worshipers pray ahead of Christmas morning mass at Saint Catherine’s Church, in the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem in the West Bank, December 25, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Mussa Qawasma
Each December, as holiday decorations go up and familiar music fills the air, another relatively new holiday ritual returns with equal predictability — social media fills with declarations that “Jesus was a Palestinian,” often joined by the equally fictional assertion that he was a “Palestinian refugee.”
These claims appear every Christmas season as reliably as ornaments and carols, as though the propagandists believe that repeating the lies might someday transform fiction into fact.
But this isn’t just a harmless anachronism — like depicting Moses checking Google Maps while wandering in the Sinai. It is part of a longstanding effort to erase Jews from their own history, an effort that has resurfaced in recent years precisely because it is politically useful.
The Truth Has Never Been in Dispute
Jesus lived and died as a Jew from Judea. He was born into a Jewish family, observed Jewish law, taught in synagogues, quoted Jewish scripture, and was addressed as “Rabbi” by his followers. Christian scripture traces his lineage directly to the kings of Judah.
No credible historian debates this. There is not a single academic school, anywhere, that regards Jesus as anything other than a Jew living in the Jewish homeland.
Denying the Jewishness of Jesus is not a new mistake. It is part of a familiar form of appropriation — including supersessionism (replacement theology) — that has targeted Jews for centuries.
The Colonialist Name Activists Pretend Was Ancient
The assertion that Jesus was “Palestinian” collapses instantly under the simplest timeline. During the first century CE, the land was known as Judea, Samaria, the Galilee, or the Land of Israel. At that time, there was no place or nation called “Palestine,” no “Palestinians,” and no political or cultural identity by that name. No person during Jesus’s lifetime ever referred to himself as a “Palestinian.” Claiming otherwise is like insisting that a Pilgrim stepping off the Mayflower in 1620 called himself an “American.”
Notably, the first political or national entity in history to use the word “Palestine” emerged nearly 2,000 years after Jesus, in 1920, when the British Empire established the “British Mandate for Palestine.”
And the Roman Empire only introduced the geographic term “Syria Palaestina” in 135 CE — a century after Jesus’ death — to punish Jews for the Bar Kokhba revolt and to try to break their connection to their own land.
Today, anti-Israel activists echo that Roman attempt at erasure and call it solidarity.
The “Refugee” Myth Is Modern Politics Masquerading as History
Equally absurd is the claim that Jesus was a “Palestinian refugee.” The concept of refugee status did not exist in the ancient world. Applying modern political labels to a first-century Jewish family living in Judea under Roman control is not historical analysis. It is propaganda designed to map today’s conflicts onto a completely different era.
It is emotional manipulation masquerading as moral clarity.
This annual rewriting of Jesus’s identity is not isolated. It fits alongside ongoing efforts to detach Jews from their history: branding Jews as “colonizers” in their indigenous homeland; denying Jewish archaeological sites; questioning whether the Jewish Temples ever existed; claiming Jews descend from Khazars; and appropriating Jewish holidays and symbols.
The logic behind this pattern is straightforward: rewrite the Jewish past to delegitimize the Jewish present.
Why Jews Push Back Every December
When Jews correct these narratives, it is not pedantry. It is protection. Jewish history is not a suggestion. It is documented, excavated, remembered, and lived.
Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel. Our language, traditions, texts, and collective memory all originate in the same land where Jesus lived and died as a Jew. To strip Jesus of his Jewish identity is to participate in the same erasure Jews have resisted for centuries.
This is not an academic disagreement. It is not merely historically illiterate. It is an antisemitic political act.
The facts remain simple:
Jesus was a Jew.
From Judea.
Living in the Jewish homeland.
He was not Palestinian.
He was not a “Palestinian refugee.”
These claims are not mistaken; they are deliberate. And when they return this Christmas season, they should be called out for what they are: an attempt to erase Jews from their history and replace fact with ideology.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.