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Virginia antisemitism commission blasts Israel boycotts and indirectly critiques Trump
(JTA) — A Republican-led commission tasked with studying antisemitism in Virginia recommended a suite of actions, from improving Holocaust education to prohibiting Israel boycotts, while also referring to former President Donald Trump’s recent dinner with a pair of prominent antisemitic figures.
The Virginia Commission to Combat Antisemitism, established by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, also concluded in a report released earlier this week that “political advocacy in the classroom has been associated with subsequent antisemitic actions.”
The report, which Youngkin ordered on his first day in office in January, comes just weeks after the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation into allegations of antisemitic harassment at a Fairfax County school district, filed by the right-wing Zionist Organization of America. Congress has since 2004 mandated an annual report on antisemitism worldwide, and a number of states have commissions on how best to advance Holocaust education and broader anti-hate measures.
In Virginia, the state that hosted the deadly 2017 Charlottesville march that thrust right-wing white nationalism into the American consciousness, the forming of such a commission to fight antisemitism was a potential model for other states to follow. While the report does touch on Charlottesville, it lays as much blame for antisemitism on anti-Israel activists and the state education system as it does on white nationalists.
Mirroring Youngkin’s own language about what he refers to as liberal bias in public schools, the report encouraged Virginia’s legislature to pass laws “prohibiting partisan political or ideological indoctrination in classrooms and curricula at state-supported K-12 schools and higher education institutions.”
Jennifer Goss, the program manager for the Holocaust education group Echoes & Reflections who was on the commission’s education subcommittee, said those recommendations were born out of “some members of the commission feeling concern over reported instances of antisemitism of educators, particularly in higher education institutions, making comments related to the concurrent political situation in Israel.”
For examples of such instances of anti-Israel bias among college educators, the report cited a study from the conservative Heritage Foundation alleging that university administrators tweet more negative comments about Israel than about “oppressive regimes”; its other examples involved reports of antisemitism and anti-Israel activity among university students.
By making the topic a cornerstone of his successful gubernatorial campaign and current legislative priorities, Youngkin helped turn Virginia into a hotbed for Republican-led claims that public schools are indoctrinating students with “critical race theory,” an academic concept that analyzes different aspects of society through the lens of race and ethnicity. Legislative attempts to curb such classroom instruction nationwide have sparked controversy, including in the realm of Holocaust education; school officials and lawmakers have argued students should learn about the Holocaust from the Nazis’ perspective, and multiple incidents have resulted in schools briefly or permanently removing Holocaust books from their shelves.
Democratic Virginia legislators criticized the report for what they saw as leaning into one of Youngkin’s pet issues. “You can count on him to go to the lowest common denominator and then try to politicize our children’s classrooms,” the state’s House Minority Leader, Don Scott Jr., told The Washington Post.
The commission was chaired by Jeffrey Rosen, who is Jewish and served as the acting U.S. Attorney General in the final month of the Trump administration; his work as chair was highly praised by commissioners who spoke to JTA. The commission’s other members, all appointed by Youngkin, included representatives from B’nai B’rith International, local law enforcement and non-Jewish organizations such as defense contractor Vanguard Research Inc.
Without mentioning Trump by name, the report included the passage, “Even a former president recently met with two notorious antisemites,” referring to Trump’s recent Mar-a-Lago dinner with rapper Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, whom the ADL deems a white supremacist.
Trump’s name was not mentioned because “we didn’t want it to be partisan,” said Bruce Hoffman, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization and a member of the commission.
The report largely cited data from the Anti-Defamation League and the FBI’s hate crimes division when discussing antisemitism, but it also cited the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a pro-Israel legal group that frequently files challenges against U.S. universities. The AMCHA Initiative — which launches campaigns against supporters of the Israel boycott movement in higher education — along with prominent pro-Israel attorney and frequent Trump ally Alan Dershowitz are also quoted in the report, in sections on the rise of antisemitism on college campuses.
The report echoed some Brandeis Center language that some criticized as inflammatory, including its chair’s claims that the University of California-Berkeley had instituted “Jew-free zones” after some law students adopted a bylaw boycotting Zionist guest speakers.
The commission recommended that Virginia create a law prohibiting the state from doing business with entities that boycott Israel, similar to laws in several other states. It also recommended that Youngkin use an executive order banning “academic boycotts of foreign countries,” without specifying which countries.
The commission did not mention Youngkin’s own brushes with antisemitism controversies, including his 2021 assertion that Jewish Democratic megadonor George Soros was secretly inserting liberal operatives into the state’s school boards. His political action committee also financially supported a Republican state House candidate who in an ad depicted his Jewish opponent with a digitally enlarged nose, surrounded by gold coins.
“Hatred, intolerance, and antisemitism have no place in Virginia and I appreciate the committee’s hard work to highlight and grapple with these matters,” Youngkin said Monday in a statement.
Sam Asher, director of the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond, said his main contribution as a member of the commission was to push for the state to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which other states and countries have done. He also pushed for more Holocaust education across the state, and both of those recommendations made the final report.
“I think it’s a very good report,” he said. “Now we need to put things into legislation.”
The executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington told The Washington Post that he was generally “thrilled” by the report, but he added that he wants local Jewish leaders to get time to digest its recommendations.
“I would hope that the governor and legislative leaders would not take steps on any of these things until they’ve consulted with the people who it’s going to have the most impact on,” Ron Halber said.
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Bamba blankets NYC after Park Slope Food Coop vote to boycott Israeli products. What’s next?
(JTA) — Jewish institutions are responding to a boycott of Israeli products at a Brooklyn grocery store by buying up Bamba.
Four thousand free bags of the Israeli peanut butter-flavored snack made their way Sunday along the Celebrate Israel Day Parade route up Fifth Avenue, passed around by volunteers with UJA-Federation of New York.
It was the organization’s first response to a contentious election result at the Park Slope Food Coop, the members-only Brooklyn grocery store that last week voted to boycott Israeli products. Bamba is one of the products no longer sold at the coop as a result of the boycott and a symbol of the Israeli snack food industry.
The Bamba distribution was coordinated by UJA, which was a sponsor of the parade, and the nonprofit group Met Council, which will also be distributing bags across their network of food pantries. (An initial purchase of 20,000 bags was made by UJA in the wake of the coop vote last week.) The snacks were brought to UJA’s office by truck on Friday.
The Met Council will distribute the remaining Bamba to the hundreds of food pantries who receive its food deliveries, including the 14 it owns and operates, by next week, CEO David Greenfield told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“They smartly decided to make lemonade out of lemons,” Greenfield said of the UJA initiative. (Some of the pantries, he noted, may decline the Bamba anticipating clients with peanut allergies.)
The Bamba will be added as an additional free snack item to pantry clients’ usual takeaways. Some of it will also be delivered directly to Holocaust survivors within the Met Council’s network.
Sunday’s parade was a respite for members of the Jewish community who say they felt alienated in the wake of the coop vote Tuesday night. But it was also controversial due to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s decision not to attend — a mayoral first — and the surprise appearance of far-right Israeli Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich.
But why purchase the popular Israeli snack in bulk, as opposed to encouraging local grocery stores to stock up on it and other Israeli items?
“There are a bunch of ideas on the table,” Hindy Poupko, senior vice president of the UJA-Federation told JTA. “We wanted to do something in the immediate aftermath of the boycott to demonstrate solidarity with the anti-boycott members of the coop, and all the work that they put into it. We wanted to immediately demonstrate to our community that we are able to respond quickly when these things happen, and also demonstrate that we will always be on the side of coops working together — not engaging in boycotts.”
One option UJA is floating, Poupko said, is an Israeli fair at a number of Jewish community centers where visitors can purchase Israeli goods.
Some advocates have even begun taking legal action against the coop, hoping to see the items restored to the shelves.
A group of pro-Israel activists filed a cease and desist motion in response to the boycott, alleging that the boycott itself is illegal and discriminatory.
CUNY law professor Jeffrey Lax announced in a post on X Wednesday that he had filed a New York State Division of Human Rights complaint on behalf of his Jewish advocacy group alleging that the boycott violates a state law that prevents the boycott or blacklist of products based on protected classes, including national origin.
“Instead of bringing neighbors together, this community institution chose to alienate many of its longtime Jewish members and their allies by banning a handful of Israeli products,” the ADL of New York/New Jersey said in a Thursday statement on X. “This move does nothing to advance peace in the Middle East; instead, the heinous rhetoric about Israel and Jews invoked in the process to ban these products contributes to the intense climate of antisemitism in NYC.”
The coop itself has not responded to JTA’s requests for comment. Activists aligned with the boycott, which passed with a 67% majority, referred JTA back to a press release distributed immediately following the vote last week.
“Tonight’s win is proof that cooperative movements are powerful models for exercising solidarity and participatory democracy,” coop board candidate Taylor Pate said in the May 26 statement.
In addition to Bamba, a variety of bell pepper sold only in the winter, persimmons, olive oil, sesame products, and Dorot frozen herb cubes are affected by the Park Slope Food Coop boycott. Two of the brands, Al Arz Tahini and Equal Exchange olive oil, are made at least in part by Arab-Israelis.
Asked for comment in regards to the coop vote results, Jewish Community Relations Council CEO Mark Treyger, through a spokesperson, referred JTA to a May 9 sermon by Congregation Beth Elohim senior Rabbi Rachel Timoner, in which she called it “the hyper local example of a proxy war.”
“If the boycott was designed to change Israel’s policies or to create a Palestinian state, or if it had the goal of safety, freedom, and equality for both Israelis and Palestinians, many of us would support it,” Timoner added. “But the BDS movement is not that.”
Timoner clarified her stance on the boycott at the coop in a sermon days after the vote.
“I do think that there is a lot of antisemitism threaded through the entire conversation about Israel,” Timoner said in the May 29 sermon. “But the vast majority of people who voted for that boycott were simply trying to say that what is happening to the Palestinians is wrong.”
A representative for Nestlé, the parent company of Osem, which manufactures Bamba, did not respond to a request for comment about the boycott.
The boycott means Brooklynites will have one fewer place to buy Bamba, the now ubiquitous snack that has been sold at Trader Joe’s for the last decade and is credited with reducing the prevalence of peanut allergies in Israel.
There’s at least one other place in New York City where Bamba was once available and no longer is. In March 2021, at the opening of baseball season, Bamba and the New York Mets announced a partnership in which the snack would be sold at the stadium in the main snack kiosks. The following year, the baseball team and the snack launched a sweepstakes for children to win free tickets to a game.
Since a March 2023 announcement that the brands would partner again for the season, Bamba has not publicly commented on their partnership. The Mets did not respond to a request for comment.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Bamba blankets NYC after Park Slope Food Coop vote to boycott Israeli products. What’s next? appeared first on The Forward.
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Hezbollah rejects US-brokered ceasefire deal struck by Lebanon and Israel
(JTA) — Hezbollah appears to have rejected a ceasefire that the United States brokered between Israel and Lebanon, where the Iranian proxy is based.
The deal reportedly would have allowed Israel to remain in southern Lebanon, where it has established a buffer zone, but not permit any attacks in Beirut unless Hezbollah attacked Israel within its own borders. It would also have required Hezbollah fighters to leave the buffer zone.
A top Hezbollah leader said accepting a demand to leave southern Lebanon would amount to “surrender” for the group.
“What we are concerned about is an end to the aggression, ceasefire and Israel’s withdrawal,” Secretary-General Naim Qassem said in a televised statement on Thursday, the Associated Press reported. “We did not make any commitment to any party to stop resisting as long as there is occupation.”
Dozens of Israeli soldiers have died in the fighting, which Hezbollah is increasingly prosecuting with the use of drones.
The rejection comes as the U.S. House of Representatives voted to rebuke President Donald Trump and his war on Iran on Wednesday, narrowly passing a resolution that limits Trump’s power to continue the war without congressional approval.
Four Republicans voted with Democrats on the bill, in a sign of how opposition to the war, which Trump launched jointly with Israel in February, is crossing party lines ahead of high-stakes midterm elections in the United States.
The bill would not require presidential signoff but is seen as unlikely to substantively change Trump’s handling of the war, which he has insisted does not require congressional approval.
Trump called the vote “meaningless” in a post on Truth Social on Thursday morning.
“Yesterday, in a meaningless vote, the House voted, 4 bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats, to limit my War Powers, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote. “Who would do such an unpatriotic thing.”
The bill now goes to the Senate, where a similar measure has advanced in recent weeks, also with support from a handful of Republicans. It comes at a delicate time, as an uncertain ceasefire struck in early April has now stretched on without a resolution for longer than active hostilities unfolded. Trump has failed to achieve the terms for a deal to permanently end the war that he said he wanted, and this week said he thought the constant negotiations had grown “very boring.” Hezbollah’s apparent rejection of a ceasefire deal is another setback.
Iran has continued to battle during its ceasefire with the United States, though not against Israel: On Wednesday, it struck Kuwait’s main airport, killing one and injuring 60.
Also on Wednesday, Trump confirmed reports that he had called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “f—ing crazy” during a call on Monday in which Trump pressed Netanyahu to strike a ceasefire with Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon. Trump told a New York Post podcast that he was “a little perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon” but that he liked Netanyahu and worked well with him.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Hezbollah rejects US-brokered ceasefire deal struck by Lebanon and Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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A Yiddish favorite is among the top baby names in New York
Each year around this time, the Social Security Administration releases a list of the most popular baby names for the past year. This year, New York state’s list includes the Yiddish name Gitty, as well as five other traditional Ashkenazi names: Chana, Chaya, Rivka, Chaim and Moshe.
According to this interactive list in the Times Union, 43 of every million babies in the U.S. were given the name Gitty in the past six years.
The vast majority of these babies were apparently born in either Yiddish-speaking Hasidic families or in non-Yiddish speaking Haredi families (often referred to as “Yeshivish”) who maintain the tradition of giving their children Biblical and other traditional Jewish names, often after a deceased relative.
Although some people may be surprised to hear a Yiddish name like Gitty making the list, it lines up with the most recent statistics on language use. According to this study, in households with children aged 5 and under, Yiddish ranks as the third most common home language in New York (spoken by roughly 3% of young children), trailing only English and Spanish.
It also makes sense in light of the most recent demographic breakdown of Jewish families in the New York area. According to this 2023 UJA study, Orthodox families represent about 19% of Jewish households (approx. 430,000 individuals, including children) — a group that’s growing rapidly due to higher birth rates and younger average ages, with about two-thirds identifying as Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) and the rest as Modern Orthodox.
The name Gitty is a variant of the name Gitl, which means “good” in Yiddish. Why then are these babies called Gitty instead of Gitl? This is part of a trend that began years ago, when Haredi children’s names adopted a “y” at the end, apparently mimicking the old American tradition of ending children’s names with a “y” (think Tommy instead of Thomas). As a result, Rivka became Rivky; Moshe (or Moishe) became Moishy and Gitl became Gitty.
The post A Yiddish favorite is among the top baby names in New York appeared first on The Forward.