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Virginia cultural festival says it won’t hold a menorah lighting due to Israel-Hamas war
(JTA) – When the director of the Chabad-Lubavitch center in Williamsburg, Virginia, pitched a local arts and culture festival last month on the idea of holding a public menorah lighting to celebrate Hanukkah, he thought it made sense.
“We look to bring people together with Jewish pride and unity,” Rabbi Mendy Heber, of Chabad of Williamsburg, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Likewise, Second Sundays, a monthly cultural festival held in historic Colonial Williamsburg that features artisans and musical performances, also has a mission to bring about “peace for all humans everywhere”
So it seemed to Heber a natural fit to hold the menorah lighting as part of the next Second Sunday, which falls on Dec. 10, the fourth night of Hanukkah. In fact, Chabad of Williamsburg already had a months-long relationship with the festival, having sold challah as a vendor at prior installments.
And like the thousands of other Chabad outposts around the world, public menorah lightings are a big part of Heber’s mission; the Chabad Hasidic movement claimed to have staged 15,000 such events worldwide in 2021. When Heber proposed the lighting, he said, he and Second Sundays founder Susan Vermillion had a series of “positive communications” about the event.
Instead, the planned celebration turned into a debacle when Second Sundays leadership decided, on Nov. 16, not to hold the menorah lighting because they feared it would be seen as an endorsement of Israel during its war with Hamas in Gaza. Organizers then suggested that the lighting could go forward only if they could get an Islamic group to participate, or if they could hold it under a banner calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
“This hurt,” Heber said. “It was a kick in the gut, not just for the Jewish community here, not just for Jews throughout the United States, but for all decent people who believe in the American dream.”
Since the war began nearly two months ago, a range of American institutions have seen cancellations, protest and heightened rhetoric related to the debate over Israel and Hamas, from college campuses to cultural centers to local governments. But the Williamsburg incident is an example of how expressions of Judaism that are unrelated to Israel — from synagogues to kosher restaurants and, now, Hanukkah celebrations — are being implicated in the debate over the war.
Last week a Maine town removed a Star of David from its holiday lights display after a local resident had complained it was taking sides in the war, though officials insisted to JTA that the complaint was unrelated to the removal.
Unlike in those two incidents, it is clear that Israel was a direct factor in organizers’ decision not to hold the menorah lighting in Williamsburg. Vermillion, a dental hygienist who founded and oversees Second Sundays through her nonprofit LoveLight Placemaking, told Heber directly that she and her board did not want to be perceived as taking sides in the conflict.
The “National Menorah,” erected by Chabad-Lubavitch in front of the White House in Washington, Dec. 2, 2021. (Kerem Yucel/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
In a series of messages, portions of which were read to JTA and whose exact wording was confirmed by Heber and another local rabbi who received them, Vermillion wrote that the event wouldn’t happen “unless we can get an Islamic group to participate at essentially the same time,” adding, “We don’t want to make it seem we’re choosing a side.”
Vermillion went on to state that she wanted to avoid “letting a specific church or religion seeming to be supported” by her organization, and that “timing isn’t good or appropriate at this time.”
Heber insisted the event would have nothing to do with Israel or Zionism (Chabad is not an explicitly Zionist movement, though many of its adherents are Zionist and many of its chapters host pro-Israel programming) and would consist only of a few prayers. Vermillion wrote back, “Our board members said they’d be OK with proceeding if you do it under a ceasefire banner. Bombing and killing thousands of people isn’t spreading love and light, and we aren’t going to openly support any religious/cultural holidays/celebrations.”
“I’m really not sure why you guys are making it such a big deal,” Vermillion continued. “This is my event. My nonprofit. You guys are more than welcome to do whatever you want to do on your own.”
After Vermillion informed Heber that the menorah lighting would not move forward, the rabbi looped in the United Jewish Community of the Virginia Peninsula, a local communal organization that provides services to around 2,000 Jews between the communities of Williamsburg, Newport News and Hampton. (Williamsburg itself has only one Jewish congregation, apart from the Chabad and a Hillel that serves a few hundred students at the College of William & Mary.)
Vermillion did not respond to subsequent attempts by UJCVP to arrange a sit-down, leading the organization to make good on a threat that it would go public with the exchange on Sunday. In a statement, UJCVP asserted that it “is shocked and alarmed” by LoveLight Placemaking’s decision.
“We should be very clear: it is antisemitic to hold Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s policies and actions, and to require a political litmus test for Jews’ participation in community events that have nothing to do with Israel,” the statement read.
A Chabad menorah, distinguished by the diagonal—rather than curved—arms. (Mindy Schauer/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images)
In text messages with JTA, Vermillion said, “It’s sad that the most inclusive organization and event in Williamsburg is being targeted for trying to stay neutral.”
In Vermillion’s telling, the menorah lighting “was proposed but was not consistent with the purpose of this non-religious, community art and music festival, and the proposal was denied.”
She continued, “It feels very wrong to label anyone associated with this as an antisemite when the rejection of this religious programming was entirely consistent with our decision to keep our gathering focused on music and art, rather than religious ceremonies.” She added that she has received “some threats” over the matter and would be reporting them to the local police.
Speaking to other media outlets, Vermillion seemed to reaffirm that she and the board viewed a menorah lighting as akin to making a political statement on Israel. In an interview with a local newspaper, Vermillion said that the event “seemed very inappropriate” given the situation in Gaza, and added, “The concern is of folks feeling like we are siding with a group over the other.”
As of Monday, a posted online schedule for the Dec. 10 Second Sundays made no mention of a menorah lighting. Videos for the event, posted to the Second Sundays Facebook page, include montages of Christmas tree ornaments, wreaths and other Christmas-related paraphernalia, and are set to the songs “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” and “Deck the Halls.”
UJCVP’s executive director, Eric Maurer, did not return JTA requests for comment. But another UJCVP member said he was troubled by the incident.
“It came across to me as ignorant, in the most literal sense of the word: just not understanding what this was about,” Rabbi David Katz, who leads Temple Beth El in Williamsburg, told JTA.
Katz, whose unaffiliated congregation uses a Reconstructionist prayer book, was not involved in Heber’s efforts to hold the menorah lighting — and was out of town for a bar mitzvah as the weekend’s controversy was unfolding. He told JTA that he lives close enough to the Second Sundays festivities that “there’s a decent chance I might have walked over there this Sunday.”
But as a member of UJCVP, he read and relayed the text and email exchanges to JTA and says that, in a small community with few Jews, an incident like this can travel and is most likely born out of “a lack of knowing, of being connected to Jews.”
“This form of underlying antisemitism is in so many places where a lot of us wouldn’t expect,” Katz said. “If you want to protest the IDF, that’s not the same thing as protesting Jews lighting the menorah.”
Heber, who has been in Williamsburg for two years, agrees. “Giving American Jews a political litmus test is just discriminatory, ugly and un-American,” he said. “And doing it with Hanukkah, which symbolizes liberty, is just ironic, especially during these times when Jews are facing tremendous amounts of antisemitism.”
The controversy seemed poised to continue to snowball Monday, as Heber said he has been in communication with the Virginia attorney general’s office and its antisemitism task force. This summer the state commissioned the task force, unique among state attorneys general offices, which includes representatives of groups including the Anti-Defamation League, regional Federations, and Hillel International. The task force’s establishment followed a lengthy report on antisemitism in the state commissioned by Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin last year. The attorney general’s office did not return requests for comment.
Jewish Council for Public Affairs CEO Amy Spitalnick, who is working with UJCVP on its response to the incident, said it was “such a clear cut example of antisemitism.”
“We were horrified by the festival’s decision to cancel the menorah lighting — so clearly seeking to collectively blame the Jewish people for Israel’s actions and create poltical litmus tests for events that have nothing to do with Israel,” she told JTA in a text message.
Another public menorah lighting is still on the table in Williamsburg, as the Chabad will also be holding one Thursday on the William & Mary campus. Scheduled before the Second Sundays controversy and primarily intended for Jewish students, Heber said Thursday’s lighting would now become a much larger communal event. He has also received words of sympathy from some non-Jews who have said they will now light menorahs in their own windows in solidarity.
“We’re going to make this Hanukkah bigger and brighter than ever,” he said. “That is how we respond to darkness.”
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The post Virginia cultural festival says it won’t hold a menorah lighting due to Israel-Hamas war appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The Right to Exist
Peter Beinart. Photo: Joe Mabel via Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – Liberal and left-wing adversaries of Israel indulge in an abiding fantasy that one day the Jewish state, which they falsely regard as an ethnostate built upon an ideology of Jewish supremacy, will be replaced by a single state of Palestine. They fancifully believe that it will be a multiethnic democracy granting equal rights to all its citizens, regardless of religion or national origin.
As fantasies go, this one has enjoyed a good deal of mileage, surfacing every few years at times of tension in the Middle East and gripping the attention of a handful of intellectuals. More than 20 years ago, as the Second Intifada raged in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the late historian Tony Judt caused waves with a New York Review of Books essay titled, “Israel: The Alternative,” which depicted the Israeli polity as a nationalist anachronism that needed to be dismantled. This week, Peter Beinart, one of the more cloying Jewish adversaries of the Jewish state, did much the same with a New York Times piece titled “States don’t have a right to exist. People do,” treading on similar ground.
As depressing as it is to admit, it’s important to push back against these arguments—not because they hold any intrinsic worth but because they provide, at least on the surface, a framework for anti-Zionist arguments to be articulated by those who are too embarrassed to scream “Go Back to Poland!” at Jews waving Israeli flags, yet who essentially sympathize with that sentiment.
Beinart, who excels at presenting commonplace ideas as his own unique insights, argues that states have no innate worth, but that the people who live under their rule certainly do. The origins of this idea of the state lie with the thinkers of the classical liberal tradition—from Immanuel Kant to John Stuart Mill to Isaiah Berlin, who countered the emphasis on human beings as servile to the state found in the writings of thinkers like the 17th-century English philosopher Hobbes and the 19th- century German philosopher Hegel.
While the goal of a minimal, legally accountable state is a laudable one, like most ideas, it can evolve in bizarre directions unanticipated by its formative thinkers; in this case, that out of more than 200 states in the international system, the existence of only one of them—the State of Israel—is up for debate.
Beinart is vexed by the consensus among US politicians that the right of the State of Israel to exist needs to be unashamedly upheld. He cites China and Iran as examples of states whose forms of government—Communist and Islamist—are regularly attacked by Americans. If it’s legitimate to advocate for the dismantling of these regimes, then why doesn’t the same principle apply to a state run by a regime that stresses Jewishness over everything else?
The comparison is a false one.
There is a key distinction between the concept of a “state” and that of a “nation,” but the two are often conflated because the independent, sovereign state has been the most enduring aim of advocates of national self-determination. The Soviet Union disappeared, but its constituent nations did not (Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to crush Ukraine notwithstanding), while much-welcome regime change in China and Iran would not result in the elimination of those nations either. It also implies a knuckleheaded moral symmetry between a country like China, which incarcerates its Muslim Uyghur minority in concentration camps, forcing them to eat pork and drink alcohol, and Israel, where core human and civil rights are guaranteed under the law for all citizens, Jewish or not.
In the formula that Beinart recommends, however, there is no guarantee that the Jews of Israel would survive as a national group once the name “Israel,” which for Beinart and other anti-Zionists is the ultimate symbol of Jewish supremacy, was wiped from the map. Indeed, it’s far more likely that Israeli Jews would confront mass expulsion and genocide at the hands of Hamas and its allied factions than be welcome participants in a multinational “Palestine.”
Beinart fails to grasp that the Oct. 7, 2023 pogrom by Hamas, which he writes about in a creepily dissociative manner, remarking merely that “Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters killed about 1,200 people in Israel and abducted about 240 others,” is regarded by the vast majority of Israelis as a sign of what the terrorists have in store for all of them. The recent scenes in Gaza, where baying, hysterical Palestinian mobs have surrounded women hostages being released from Hamas captivity under the current ceasefire deal are a testament to that.
Beinart argues that the question of whether Israel has a right to exist is irrelevant. It is more appropriate to ask, “Does Israel, as a Jewish state, adequately protect the rights of all the individuals under its dominion?” Actually, the more pertinent question is this: Can Palestinians, nurtured on a diet of dehumanizing antisemitic hatred that expressed itself with perfect horror on Oct. 7, agree to a living arrangement with Israelis—one state, two states, a federation, some other model of governance—that is secure and sustainable? Or is some kind of deprogramming, akin to the denazification of Germany after World War II, a necessary first step?
It’s instructive that as Beinart’s essay was being published, Donald Trump raised the idea of resettling Gaza residents in other countries, a solution that right now is more palatable to Israelis than trading more land for a non-existent peace. There are, of course, an equal mix of advantages and problems associated with such a radical move, but if the Palestinians want to remove it from the table, then they need to focus on subjecting their own society to fundamental reform. Because that’s another aspect that Beinart is unable to grasp; patience is at an end, despair is rising, and measures previously beyond the pale now look feasible and, dare I say so, desirable on many levels.
As the philosopher Karl Popper—another advocate of the minimal state bound by the rule of law—put it: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. We must therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate intolerance.”
The post The Right to Exist first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Trump Slams Tariffs on Imports from Canada, Mexico & China
Then-Republican presidential nominee and current US-President-elect Donald Trump looks on during a rally at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, in Uniondale, New York, US, Sept. 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
i24 News – US President Donald Trump signed an executive order late Saturday for tariffs to be placed on all imports from Mexico, Canada, and China, risking a trade war.
Naming the influx of illegal aliens into the US, as well as the rising fentanyl crisis, as reasons for the 25 percent tariffs on the neighboring countries, he also raised existing tariffs on China by 10 percent.
In addition to the economic costs of illegal workers coming in, the order said “gang members, smugglers, human traffickers, and illegal drugs and narcotics of all kinds are pouring across our borders and into our communities.”
More than 21,000 pounds of fentanyl was seized last year at US borders, which is estimated to represent “a fraction” of what enters.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed Americans after imposing sanctions in kind against US imports: “Tariffs against Canada will put your jobs at risk, potentially shutting down American auto assembly plants and other manufacturing facilities. They will raise costs for you including food at the grocery store and gas at the pump. They will impede your access to an affordable supply of vital goods crucial for US security such as nickel, potash, uranium, steel and aluminum.”
The tariffs “violate the free trade agreement that the president and I along with our Mexican partner negotiated and signed a few years ago,” Trudeau said.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum also announced a similar moves, although it was not yet detailed how exactly Mexico will respond. “When we negotiate with other nations, when we talk with other nations,” she said, it was “always with our heads held high, never bowing our heads.”
She rejected the suggestion that her government was in any way allied with criminal organizations, hitting back that US armories have sold weapons to these gangs.
China’s foreign ministry said it would file a complaint with the World Trade Organization and “take corresponding countermeasures. On the issue of fentanyl, it said it “provides support to the US on the issue of fentanyl,” but that is was ultimately a US problem.
The post Trump Slams Tariffs on Imports from Canada, Mexico & China first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Freed Palestinian Prisoner Criticizes October 7: ‘The Price is Too High’
The logo of the Palestinian Fatah movement includes the territory that is now Israel. Image: Palestinian Media Watch.
i24 News – In an interview given last week to the Emirati Al Mashhad Media, Mohammed a-Tus, a former Fatah militant from Bethlehem, criticized the October 7 attack and called for the prioritization of the diplomatic route over armed actions against Israel.
A-Tus, who spent four decades in Israeli prisons for his participation in several attacks in the 1980s, spoke on Tuesday from Egypt, where he was deported after his release as part of the hostage exchange agreement.
“I tell my grandchildren not to carry out military actions against Israel,” he said. “At this stage, we must focus on diplomatic actions rather than military ones.”
Referring to the Hamas attack of October 7 that indirectly led to his release, a-Tus was particularly critical, even though the interviewer attributed armed violence as what ultimately got him released.
“The price is very high, we will not accept that the price of our liberation is a drop of a Palestinian child’s blood,” he said.
The former prisoner also shared his experience of the October 7 attack from his cell: “We turned on the television and saw alerts asking Israelis to go to shelters. We understood that something major was happening.”
“The next day, the attitude towards us changed 180 degrees,” he continued. “They removed the televisions and radios, informing us that we were in a state of war. Those with experience understood that the response would be harsh.”
While maintaining a certain distance from Hamas, a-Tus highlighted the ties that unite the various Palestinian factions. “Hamas members are brothers of the homeland, of the shared path and of the future,” he said.
That being said, he warned against continued armed resistance. “Any leader who contemplates undertaking a major action must know the price to pay for what he wants to achieve and if the goal justifies the sacrifices,” he concluded.
The post Freed Palestinian Prisoner Criticizes October 7: ‘The Price is Too High’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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