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A children’s book about Shabbat was returned to a Florida district’s shelves after year-plus ‘review’
(JTA) – Mara Rockliff’s “Chik Chak Shabbat” has become a standard for Jewish children since its 2014 publication. The picture book intended for young readers tells a whimsical story about a group of diverse neighbors who help an observant Jewish woman make her cholent — a stew traditionally served on the Sabbath — when they realize she doesn’t feel well enough to cook it herself.
So why did a school district in Jacksonville, Florida, purchase copies of the book only to keep it from students for 15 months?
That’s what happened at Duval County Public Schools. The district initially ordered Rockliff’s book for its students in July 2021 as part of a larger diversity-themed collection of books called “Essential Voices,” which is offered to educators by Iowa-based educational company Perfection Learning.
The books were delivered last winter, but remained “under review” as of September, when the literary free-speech activist group PEN America published a report on banned books in the United States. PEN’s report alleged Duval County had “effectively banned” Roclkiff’s and other books.
One month later, the district released many of them, including “Chik Chak Shabbat,” to students. At least one book with Jewish themes, “The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher” by Jewish author Dana Alison Levy, remains “under review.”
“We retrieved 179 titles from the Essential Voices collection for further review at the district level,” Duval County Public Schools spokesperson Tracy Pierce told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an email this week. “Of those 179, we determined that 106 meet statutory guidelines and are useful toward our reading goals. Those were distributed to classrooms in October.”
School reading materials are under increasing scrutiny amid conservative parent groups’ pressure to remove material they define as “critical race theory” and “gender ideology.” In an increasing number of places, books about Jews have gotten caught in the dragnet, including at a Tennessee district that removed “Maus” from its curriculum earlier this year; a Texas district that briefly removed an adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary; and a Missouri district that briefly removed history books about the Holocaust.
Florida in particular has become a major rallying spot for challenging material in public schools, with its Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, a likely presidential hopeful, signing the “Stop WOKE Act” earlier this year restricting how race and gender concepts are taught in schools. DeSantis-endorsed school board candidates who are so-called parental rights advocates — conservatives pushing for an end to “critical race theory” and materials dealing with gender and sexuality in the classroom — currently hold a majority on Duval County’s board. Elsewhere in the state, the picture book “The Purim Superhero,” which features gay Jewish parents, was removed from a Panhandle-area district in April amid a larger purge of books with LGBTQ+ and gender-identity themes.
Pierce defended the length of time the district took to review the material: “The district will always take the time necessary to make sure the resources we provide for our students are appropriate for each grade level and meet the requirements of state statute.”
The district said 47 titles from the collection were returned to Perfection Learning, while another 26 remain under review. Among those still under review is Levy’s “Family Fletcher,” about a multicultural family that celebrates Jewish holidays. The family has two dads.
The district said Levy’s book was under review “while we await guidance from the state.” Levy did not return a JTA request for comment.
Unlike “Maus,” “The Purim Superhero” and “Family Fletcher,” “Chik Chak Shabbat” does not mention the Holocaust, feature any LGBTQ+ characters or contain any imagery that could be construed as sexual. The book’s most defining characteristic is that it’s about Jews.
Indeed, the book’s depiction of observant Judaism has made it a frequent favorite of the Jewish Book Council and of PJ Library, the literary nonprofit that distributes free Jewish-themed books to children nationwide. The group has distributed a parents’ reading guide to the book, noting, “After reading this story, you and your child may be inspired to make cholent together.” PJ Library declined to comment to JTA for this story.
Rockliff did not return a JTA request for comment, but told the Forward last week, “I doubt that anybody at this school district found [“Chik Chak Shabbat”] objectionable, or even read it.” (The book’s illustrations are by Kyrsten Brooker.)
A customer service representative for Perfection Learning, the company that distributes the Essential Voices collection, promised to forward a request for comment to the company’s CEO, but no comment was provided to JTA.
The district did not broadly communicate that most of the Essential Voices books had been released to students. Last week, apparently under the impression that none of the books had yet been released, several authors (including Jewish writer Ami Polonsky, author of the trans-themed young adult novel “Gracefully Grayson”) spoke out against the review policy at a school board meeting and signed an open letter circulated by PEN America and We Need Diverse Books.
Other Jewish-themed books in the collection include Ruth Behar’s “Lucky Broken Girl,” a coming-of-age autobiographical novel about a Cuban Jewish girl who experiences a car accident while adapting to her new life in New York; that book was also returned to Duval County students in October, Pierce said.
“As an author and a cultural anthropologist, I think young readers should have the freedom to read widely about the human condition to develop empathy and compassion and tolerance,” Behar, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan who also signed the petition circulated by PEN America and We Need Diverse Books, told JTA. She added that she has not heard of any schools or individuals objecting to the book’s content.
The Essential Voices collection also includes a book by Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o; an entry from the “Berenstain Bears” series; books about Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson; and a book supporting interfaith dialogue called “Celebrating Different Beliefs.”
The district’s reasoning for its review process was insufficient in the eyes of the Florida Freedom to Read Project, an activist group in the state that pushes for increased student access to books. The group has filed Freedom Of Information Act requests in an effort to get the district to disclose its reasoning for reviewing the books.
“We argue there was never a reason to remove the entire collection of books,” the group’s founders told JTA. “No one in the community complained about what their child was reading in their K-5 classroom.
“If there were only a few titles of concern because they were popping up on challenge lists in the state, they could have reduced the amount of time needed to complete a thorough review by reviewing only those titles while the entire collection remained in the classrooms. Instead, they pulled the entire collection and questioned the professional expertise of those that created it.”
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The post A children’s book about Shabbat was returned to a Florida district’s shelves after year-plus ‘review’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israel to Sue New York Times Over Article Alleging Widespread Rape of Palestinian Prisoners
The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Israel on Thursday announced that it plans to sue The New York Times, after the newspaper published a column earlier this week alleging widespread sexual abuse and rape against Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
“Following the publication by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times of one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press, which also received the backing of the newspaper, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar have instructed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry posted on social media.
On his personal X account, Netanyahu wrote that he has instructed his legal advisers “to consider the harshest legal action against The New York Times and Nicholas Kristof,” the columnist who authored the article, which was published on Monday.
“They defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel’s valiant soldiers,” Netanyahu stated. “Under my leadership, Israel will not be silent. We will fight these lies in the court of public opinion and in the court of law. Truth will prevail.”
Israel’s Foreign Ministry has accused the Times of deliberately timing the column to “undermine” Tuesday’s publication of an extensive Israeli report detailing how Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists used sexual violence as a weapon of war against both those attacked in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the hostages kidnapped and held captive in Gaza.
The Civil Commission on Oct. 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, an Israeli NGO established to document the atrocities, drew on substantial evidence to expose the Palestinian terrorists’ use of mass rape, torture, and other forms of sexual violence, explaining the atrocities were not incidental but “systematic, deliberate, and embedded in the attack itself.”
The commission approached the Times months ago regarding its then-forthcoming report, but the publication “said it was not interested,” according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
“This comprehensive and well-documented report was published this morning by CNN and other international outlets. Aware of the report and its release date, the night before its release the NYT ran a shameful attack on Israel, belittling Hamas’ sexual crimes. That tells you everything about the NYT’s agenda,” the ministry added.
“Built on unverified claims and Hamas-linked sources like EMHRM [Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor]. No evidence. No verified complaints. A politically driven smear campaign by a biased paper designed to support efforts to blacklist Israel,” the ministry further said of the column, which it described as “Hamas propaganda, a distortion of the truth and the facts all serving an anti-Israel agenda.”
“This disgusting shameful piece must be removed immediately,” the ministry added.
Kirstof’s article described “brutal sexual abuse [of Palestinian prisoners] at the hands of Israel’s prison guards, soldiers, settlers, and interrogators.” The journalist quoted Palestinians who said they had been regularly stripped naked in prison, forcibly penetrated with various objects, and even raped by specially trained dogs — a claim that multiple dog trainers have said on the record this week is not possible.
Beyond the fierce denials of Israeli officials, several experts and commentators have noted that many of the “14 men and women” interviewed by Kristoff have ties to Hamas or anti-Israel activism, calling the report into question. Media watchdog groups have questioned the integrity of the sourcing and whether the Times lowered its rigid editorial standards to publish the article.
On Wednesday night, the Times issued a statement defending Kristof’s column. A spokesperson for the publication said the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist “draws together on-the-record accounts and cites several analyses documenting the practice of sexual violence and abuse conducted by various parts of Israel’s security forces and settlers.”
“The accounts of the 14 men and women he interviewed were corroborated with other witnesses, whenever possible, and with people the victims confided in – that includes family members and lawyers,” the spokesperson added. “Details were extensively fact-checked, with accounts further cross-referenced with news reporting, independent research from human-rights groups, surveys, and in one case, with UN testimony. Independent experts were consulted on the assertions in the piece throughout reporting and fact-checking.”
The Times had issued a separate statement on Tuesday that also voiced support for Kristof and the accuracy of his article. The publication additionally claimed it “never passed” on the Israeli commission report and “wasn’t told about its completion or the timing of its release.”
“Once the report was made public, we covered its findings. The commission’s work also had no bearing on Nicholas Kristof’s opinion column or its publication timing,” said a Times spokesperson.
Kristof’s column has been criticized by the Embassy of Israel to the United States and Ambassador Yechiel Leiter, former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, Jewish organizations, and fellow journalists. CNN commentator Scott Jennings described the piece as “journalistic atrocity” in a post on X. “If everyone at the NYT who is responsible for this is not fired, then the publication will lose whatever shred of credibility it has left,” he added.
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Alex Soros commits $30 million to organizations fighting antisemitism — and its weaponization
The Open Society Foundations, founded by Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros and now led by his son Alex, announced that it would give $30 million to organizations fighting antisemitism and Islamophobia.
“As the son of a Holocaust survivor and a Jew, I am acutely aware of the dangers of antisemitism,” Alex Soros said in a video announcing the campaign Wednesday.
The grants, which will be rolled out over the next three years, represent a major infusion of cash for organizations approaching antisemitism with a more progressive framework than establishment Jewish groups.
Many of those receiving funding — including Bend the Arc, the Nexus Project and New Jewish Narrative — have focused much of their efforts on countering what they see as efforts to restrict legitimate speech criticizing Israel under the guise of countering antisemitism. That work also involves attempts to recalibrate how incidents get counted.
Open Society said in a press release that it is committed to “distinguishing antisemitism from legitimate criticism of Israeli government policies that violate international human rights and humanitarian law.”
The Nexus Project, for example, was significantly expanded in 2024 after creating an alternative to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which classifies much criticism of Israel as antisemitic and continues to be promoted by the country’s largest Jewish groups.
Several of the organizations being funded as part of the new $30 million commitment had received one-off Open Society grants in the past, including Nexus and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
Kevin Rachlin, Washington director for Nexus, said its new funding from Soros will be directed toward the launch of an antisemitism research center, led by a former senior analyst from the Anti-Defamation League who has sought to show how the ADL’s “messaging doesn’t always match with what their data shows.”
While the ADL continues to produce the most detailed accounting of antisemitic incidents in the U.S., it has changed its methodology in recent years to count certain political expressions of anti-Zionism as forms of antisemitism. For example, Aryeh Tuchman, director of the Nexus research center, said in a recent interview that 20% of the 600 campus incidents tallied by the ADL in its count released earlier this month referred to students using slogans like “from the river to the sea.”
“When the audit puts contested incidents like that in the same report as a neo-Nazi putting a swastika on a synagogue and it’s just presented in a topline number — that number can perhaps distort our understanding of what is actually happening,” said Tuchman, who until recently helped oversee the ADL’s annual audit.
But even with the new dollars, organizations that contend anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism, and that have accordingly sought to crack down on campus protests against Israel, retain a large funding advantage. Annual budgets for the ADL and the American Jewish Committee, for example, each exceed $100 million.
Soros grants come with ‘baggage’
The Soros grants also come with some controversy attached. Open Society has long funded Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups as well as pro-Palestinian organizations in the United States, including Al-Haq, B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence.
It has also supported Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a major source for the recent New York Times column that alleged Israeli prison guards have used dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners — a report condemend as a “blood libel” by the Israeli government.
George Soros and Open Society have also been the subject of many far-right conspiracy theories, some of which have relied on antisemitic claims — including that Soros was supposedly taking over the world on behalf of, variously, socialists, Jews or “globalists.” George Soros, a Holocaust survivor born in Hungary in 1930, invested heavily in projects promoting democracy behind the former Iron Curtain, making him a target for oligarchs as they consolidated power.
“Obviously, for any funding, there’s baggage,” said Rachlin. “There are those who are going to hate Soros.”
The decision to funnel the $30 million to not only combating antisemitism but also fighting anti-Muslim hate emphasized what the foundation sees as the need for Jewish and Muslim organizations to work together. “We’ve seen this alarming intensification of antisemitism over the past few years, and at the same time the explosion of anti-Muslim hate,” said Sean Savett, a spokesperson for Open Society. “It just feels like we’ve gone back 10 or 15 years in this country.”
Alex Soros is married to Huma Abdein, a longtime advisor to Hillary Clinton, who is Muslim, which he referenced in his announcement video. “Discrimination and hate aren’t abstract concepts to me or my family,” he said.
The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, another one of the grantees, helped organize a statement from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a major coalition of legacy civil rights groups, following the firebombing attack in Boulder, Colorado, last spring, and has partnered with the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
“Post-Oct. 7, we’re seeing extreme voices on both ends of the political spectrum exploit the conflict to pit our communities against each other,” said Amy Spitalnick, CEO of JCPA.
Open Society is also funding the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, a coalition of nearly 70 mostly progressive Jewish organizations that executive director Abby Levine said had recently focused more specifically on addressing antisemitism.
The post Alex Soros commits $30 million to organizations fighting antisemitism — and its weaponization appeared first on The Forward.
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Here Are Some Positive Local Developments in Support of Israel You Haven’t Heard About
Tennessee State Capitol Building in Nashville. Photo: Andre Porter/Wikimedia Commons.
On April 27, 2026, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee (R) signed legislation requiring state agencies to use the geographic name “Judea and Samaria” instead of “West Bank” in official state materials. Known as the “Recognizing Judea and Samaria Act,” the law asserts that these terms are historically and Biblically accurate.
Just the week before, the members of the Arizona House passed a nonbinding resolution saying the same thing, after the Arizona Senate approved the legislation in February.
These pro-Israel bills earned little press in the Jewish community and even less in the general media outside of Tennessee and Arizona. Americans of all faiths who support Israel should applaud the lawmakers in both Arizona and Tennessee for their leadership and commitment to historical truth. At a time of increasing misinformation and the targeting of Israel, this bill sends a clear message about the significance of recognizing the Jewish people’s deep ties — dating back to Biblical times — to the Land of Israel.
The city of Hebron is in Judea and is the ancient resting place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah. There are so many other links and ties proving the deep and continuous Jewish presence in the land, and these bills acknowledge that.
What’s more, this is a defeat for anti-Israel radicals in Tennessee who fought against the bill. The New York Times reported about those efforts: “The day of lobbying this month in the State Capitol in Nashville, coordinated by the American Muslim Advisory Council, attracted more than 100 Muslim students and community leaders.”
One year ago, Arkansas state legislators passed their “Recognizing Judea and Samaria Act,” following a 2023 Arkansas General Assembly resolution urging the use of the term “Judea and Samaria” instead of “the West Bank” in official state language.
While it can be argued that Arkansas, Tennessee, and Arizona are right leaning states, they often have Democratic or moderate trends and representatives. For example, from December 2020 through the beginning of 2023 neither of Arizona’s two senators were Republican. While Arizona Republicans control the state legislature, the margin is far from wide with just a handful of seats separating the parties.
Given the unprecedented levels of anti-Israel activity in both parties and the fact that anti-Zionists radicals are winning the anti-Israel legislation fight in far too many parts of the country, the question of how these seemingly symbolic wins matter is a legitimate one to ask.
Tip O’Neill, the Speaker of the House from 1977 to 1987, is remembered for coining the saying that “all politics is local.” From Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama, how many politicians serve early in their careers in their state legislatures? What’s more, these efforts force anti-Israel activists to play defense and occupy their time with things other than BDS, as was the case in Tennessee.
These are the kinds of innovative, accessible, and positive initiatives that the pro-Israel community should pursue much more frequently. Our confidence has been shaken by the harsh criticism of Israel from far too many on Capitol Hill, and these local efforts have been missing from our playbook for much longer than may have been reasonable. If only a handful more states enact such legislation, it will still be well worth it. Correcting false narratives and fighting for a cause you believe in is always worth it.
Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel, AFSI, (www.AFSI.org), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.