Uncategorized
A Jewish museum exhibit features the Palestinian flag. Some visitors wonder if it belongs.
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Tucked in the far corner of a large, brightly-lit exhibition hall on the ground floor of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, there is a delicate-looking piece of art with a strong political message.
At first glance, it appears to be three circular vases with flowers in them. The ceramic vases sit on shelves attached to the wall, and colorful collages hang above them. On closer inspection, visitors will notice that the flowers are made out of paper and that affixed to each vase is an image of the Palestinian flag printed on foam board.
A nearby label written by the curators of the exhibit, titled “Tikkun: For the Cosmos, the Community, and Ourselves,” explains that the piece was inspired by a conversation the artist, Tosha Stimage of Berkeley, had with a Palestinian man. He told Stimage about the plants that are native to Palestine — “a place which he can no longer access due to the ongoing conflict in the region,” the curators write.
The label also includes a note about the flag: “Some may find its presence at The CJM troubling or confusing, while others may find it appropriate and forthright. Stimage recognizes the potential for these divergent responses and hopes to use them as a means of generating dialogue.”
On a Sunday afternoon in October, Maury Ostroff read the label and walked away without inspecting the artwork.
Visitors to the “Tikkun” exhibit are encouraged to share their responses to the artwork via comment cards. (Andrew Esensten)
Asked how the presence of the flag made him feel, Ostroff, who is Jewish and lives in Muir Beach, in Marin County, replied, “Unhappy.”
Why?
“It’s not offensive to me in the same way that a swastika is. My skin is a little bit thicker than that. But I wish it weren’t here.”
He added, “What’s so Jewish about this? What’s so ‘tikkun olam’ about all of this?”
For the “Tikkun” exhibit, which opened Feb. 17 and runs through Jan. 8, the CJM invited both Jewish and non-Jewish Bay Area artists to contribute new works on the theme of repair, however they chose to interpret it. “No one is listening to us,” the piece by Stimage, who is not Jewish, is the first work of art featuring the Palestinian flag to be shown at CJM in recent memory; the museum could not say when or if the flag has been displayed on its walls before.
The piece prompted several internal conversations among CJM staff when it was first submitted and, since it has been on display, has generated a variety of responses from museumgoers who have left comments in a box at the entrance to the exhibit. Intentionally or not, Stimage has raised numerous questions with the artwork, including: Does a work of art that is sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle for statehood belong in a Jewish museum? And what is the role of a contemporary Jewish museum, anyway?
“To truly be a contemporary art museum, meaning embedded in the contemporary issues of our day, our job is to provide a platform for dialogue and to share a diversity of perspectives on our walls,” said Chad Coerver, CJM’s executive director since September 2021. “If any institution [like ours] took the path of withholding artwork that troubled our staff, our board or our community, it would be very difficult to mount exhibitions.”
CJM is a member of the Council of American Jewish Museums, a network of 76 museums across the country. CAJM does not have guidelines about the kind of art its member museums can and cannot display, according to Executive Director Melissa Yaverbaum.
J. reached out to several CAJM member museums in New York, Los Angeles and other places by email to ask if they had ever shown artwork with Palestinian iconography or works by Palestinian artists. The museums declined to answer or did not respond.
In recent years, two Jewish museums have been embroiled in controversy over issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago staged an exhibit in 2008 on Israeli and Palestinian concepts of homeland that included maps and portraits of Palestinians. Following outcry from members of the local Jewish community who felt the exhibit presented Israel in a negative light, the museum decided to close the exhibit after only a few weeks. And in 2019, the director of the Jewish Museum Berlin resigned after the museum tweeted a link to a pro-BDS article in a German newspaper. (The museum previously came under fire for welcoming anti-Zionist scholar Judith Butler and representatives of Iran.)
In a joint interview with J., two CJM staffers who worked on “Tikkun” — co-curator Qianjin Montoya, who is not Jewish, and a Jewish senior curator who served in an advisory role, Heidi Rabben — shared the story of how Stimage’s piece came to be in the exhibit. (Montoya’s co-curator for the exhibit, Arianne Gelardin, no longer works at the museum.)
Since 2009, CJM has invited local artists from different backgrounds to create new work as part of the museum’s annual Dorothy Saxe Invitational. The idea for “Tikkun” was hatched before the pandemic put the planning process on hold. Once the CJM and Saxe — a local philanthropist and art collector — agreed on the theme, the co-curators invited artists “already engaged in healing through their relationship to community or in their practice of daily life,” Gelardin told J. last February.
The 30 artists who accepted the museum’s invitation were given only four months to conceive of and submit new works. That was likely the shortest timeline in the history of the invitational, which has been held 11 previous times, according to the museum. Each artist received a packet of materials compiled by CJM staff, with input from the Shalom Hartman Institute, a non-degree granting Jewish education center, to guide their thinking on “tikkun.”
Stimage was invited to participate because she is “very active” in the Bay Area and because “her work reflects ideas of community and connection,” Montoya said.
The curators said Stimage’s inclusion of the Palestinian flag in her submitted piece came as a surprise and prompted challenging conversations. However, they noted that they found the content of some of the other artists’ work surprising, too, and that it’s not unusual for contemporary artists to push the envelope in their work.
“I wouldn’t say we expected to receive a piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but we weren’t steering anyone away from that, either,” Rabben told J., adding that the submission guidelines did not place any topic off limits. “That’s a commitment from the museum to authentically represent the creative spirit of the artists that we’re working with,” she said.
Still, the curators said they engaged in a dialogue with Stimage in order to better understand each aspect of her piece and her overall intentions. Through those conversations, the curators learned that Stimage wanted to explore a moment of “rupture,” and that through her piece she hoped to communicate “that before healing or repair might happen, you have to first acknowledge that rupture,” Rabben said.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco is showing “Tikkun,” an exhibit of works by Jewish and non-Jewish artists on the theme of repair. (Andrew Esensten)
Coerver, who was involved in some of the conversations, stressed that “careful consideration” was given to including the piece in the exhibit. “We felt an artwork addressing the plight of the Palestinians was appropriate in an exhibition on healing and repair,” he said. (No work submitted as part of the Dorothy Saxe Invitational has ever been outright rejected, the museum said.)
Stimage did not respond to interview requests from J. According to a CV on her website, she was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and earned an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2016. She is a past fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and was an artist-in-residence at Facebook in 2018. She also owns a floral gift shop in Oakland called Saint Flora.
Her work often touches on Black identity; she created a piece honoring Sandra Bland, an African-American woman whose 2015 arrest and death in a Texas jail cell sparked protests, and contributed to a 2019 San Francisco Art Institute exhibit on the Black Panther Party.
“I have a responsibility to create things that will, to the best of my present knowledge, do more good than harm, heal, inspire and uplift other humans,” she told the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper in 2015.
Stimage’s precise views on Israel are unknown. CJM referred J. to her artist statement for “No one is listening to us,” which reads: “Olive, sage, and sumac are flowering plants native to the Mediterranean (including regions of Gaza and the West Bank) that have a direct relationship to contested ancestral land and affect the livelihood of so many Palestinian farmers and families caught in the conflict. They are positioned in the space of The Contemporary Jewish Museum as a metaphor for the ongoing conflict over land rights and the desperate need for restoration and healing of an age-old wound.”
The curators told J. that during their conversations with Stimage about her piece, they asked her why including images of the Palestinian flag was important to her but did not request that she remove them.
“We determined that none of [the piece’s] components in and of themselves signified something problematic or concerning,” Rabben said. “Of course, we had the awareness that the symbol [of the flag] will be read in a variety of ways by a variety of people.”
(Rabben pointed out that the exhibit includes other works with national symbols rendered in provocative ways, such as a black-and-white photograph of an American flag that was torn apart and partially reassembled by Mexican-American artist Jose Arias.)
The Palestinian flag — which contains the Pan-Arab colors of black, white, green and red — was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964. Since then, it has been the primary symbol of Palestinian nationalism.
For decades, the PLO was considered an enemy organization by Israel, and anything associated with it “had no place in Israeli public life,” said Eran Kaplan, an Israeli-born professor of Israel studies at San Francisco State University. Israel never went so far as to ban the flag. However, during the First Intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993, Israeli soldiers sometimes followed orders to confiscate the flag from protesters in the West Bank and Gaza.
With the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993, Israel and the PLO recognized each other as negotiating partners. Yet the Palestinian flag remains a contentious symbol in Israel today. Kaplan noted that it recently served as a flashpoint during the funeral procession of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian American broadcaster who was killed in the West Bank in May. (The IDF conducted a review and admitted that the Israeli soldier who shot her had most likely misidentified her as an armed militant.) After warning Abu Akleh’s family not to display the flag, Israeli police attacked mourners in East Jerusalem, ripping flags out of their hands and off of the vehicle carrying her casket.
Today, the flag holds different meanings for Israelis and American Jews from different generations and political persuasions.
“There are large segments in Israeli society who view any form of Palestinian national identity as a threat to the existence of Israel,” Kaplan said. “There are others who view the PLO as legitimate partners in any form of negotiations [over the creation of a Palestinian state], but there’s an absolute split over those questions.”
Given the sensitive nature of Stimage’s work and others in the exhibit, the curators decided to solicit feedback from visitors via comment cards available at the entrance to the hall. Rabben said the museum has received a number of comments specifically about “No one is listening to us,” most of which were positive. “The majority of those comments were ‘Thank you for offering space for this topic at the museum,’” she said.
Last month, a security guard sitting in the “Tikkun” exhibition hall told a reporter that he had not witnessed any expressions of outrage or protest through the first nine months of the exhibit. “When we opened we were afraid of negative reactions, but they’re not stressed about it,” he said of visitors. “We have shown worse things here.” The guard, who has worked at the museum since it opened in 2008, mentioned a 2010 exhibit, “Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf,” which included a copy of Hitler’s autobiography. “Some people were cussing us out” for displaying the book, he recalled.
Meanwhile, on the same floor as “Tikkun,” there is another, smaller exhibit containing potentially offensive art. A sign outside of the room warns visitors that inside is a Hitler marionette created by the parents of puppeteer Frank Oz. “Our intention in displaying this object is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the objects and firsthand stories of those who experienced its persecution, and to encourage conversation and education about the ongoing horrors of antisemitism and authoritarianism today,” the sign says.
Coerver, CJM’s executive director, said he was proud that the museum’s three current exhibits — “Tikkun,” “Oz is for Oznowicz: A Puppet Family’s History” and “Gillian Laub: Family Matters,” which includes photographs that Laub took of her Trump-supporting relatives — are raising “challenging questions” and providing opportunities for both visitors and museum staff to “expand our horizons.”
“We’ve been wading into some issues that I think are a little thicker than maybe we’ve been confronting in the past,” he said, “and I hope that continues.”
A version of this piece originally ran in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and is reprinted with permission.
—
The post A Jewish museum exhibit features the Palestinian flag. Some visitors wonder if it belongs. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Left-wing Argentine lawmakers pledge allegiance to ‘free Palestine’ in their oaths of office
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES — As 127 newly elected Argentine lawmakers took the oath of office in Buenos Aires last week, several departed from the standard formula to pledge allegiance to a “free Palestine.”
The demonstration by the left-wing elected officials transformed what is typically a boilerplate ceremony into a political showdown over Israel, with shouting on the floor of the legislature as well as a wave of criticism from both pro-government and opposition voices.
Argentina’s main Jewish umbrella organization filed a formal complaint over the incident, which took place on Wednesday.
At least four lawmakers participated. When left-wing deputy Nicolás del Caño was called to the podium, he used his brief time to swear on behalf of “the boys and girls massacred in Gaza.”
Another leftist lawmaker, Nestor Pitrola, took the oath wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh draped like a scarf and swore “for an end to the Zionist genocide and a free Palestine.”
Wearing a T-shirt with a large watermelon print — now used as a Palestinian symbol — Romina Del Plá took the oath declaring that she did so “for Palestine’s right to exist from the river to the sea.”
And Myriam Bregman, a Jewish socialist, swore “against the genocide in Palestine.” She also protested the U.S. threat to Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, saying, “Yankees out of Venezuela.”
All of them replaced the formula for the oath of office — “Sí, juro” (I swear) — with political statements, triggering an immediate backlash in the chamber.
Lawmakers from President Javier Milei’s right-wing and libertarian coalition interrupted with boos and shouted insults, arguing that the oath should not be used for foreign-policy slogans. Lila Lemoine, a member of Milei’s party, rebuked Bregman, to whom she was formerly close, saying, “You must swear for your country.”
While largely left-wing lawmakers in countries around the world have sought to demonstrate their solidarity with the Palestinians or advanced legislation on their behalf, the show in Argentina represented an unusual level of intrusion for the cause into a government’s regular operations.
After these oath-taking ceremonies — broadcast nationwide by major media outlets — political analysts and journalists strongly criticized the lawmakers who departed from the established protocol. Later in the week, a legislator introduced a bill that would prevent those who do not take the oath in accordance with the chamber’s regulations from assuming their seats.
“Let’s put an end to this circus,” said the lawmaker, Sabrina Ajmechet, who is Jewish and from a right-wing political party. She added, “That there are members of parliament who have taken office swearing allegiance to another territory … it’s more than just ugly, it’s problematic.”
Whether the lawmakers who made the unusual oaths will face consequences is not clear. The Argentine government adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which defines some forms of Israel criticism as antisemitic, in 2020, adding to an anti-discrimination law that has been on the books since 1988. There is already one lawmaker facing prosecution over antisemitic posts.
Argentina’s Jewish political umbrella, DAIA, said in a statement that the oaths, particularly those using the phrase “from the river to the sea,” which many Jews interpret as a call for Israel’s destruction, were inappropriate for the occasion and amounted to discrimination.
“This expression is neither a neutral slogan nor a simple protest chant. It is a phrase of hate, used to call for the destruction of a sovereign state and the elimination of its Jewish population. It promotes violence, legitimizes terrorism, and fuels an atmosphere of hostility toward Jews everywhere,” the statement said. “By using it, one makes an openly anti-Jewish declaration, incompatible with democratic values and with respect for pluralistic coexistence.”
The pro-Palestinian lawmakers were not the only ones to depart from the standard oath, which is taken over the text of the Bible. Patricia Holzman, a newly elected Jewish deputy who has been the executive director of a Jewish community organization founded in the wake of the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, adjusted her wording to say “Sí, prometo” (I promise) instead of “Sí, juro,” and she pledged her oath on a Tanakh.
The swearing-in ceremony was also derailed when a left-wing lawmaker, Juan Grabois, made what resembled a Nazi salute toward Milei, who was present. People close to Grabois said the gesture was meant to evoke the salute in “The Hunger Games,” the young-adult series about protagonists defying an oppressive regime.
The post Left-wing Argentine lawmakers pledge allegiance to ‘free Palestine’ in their oaths of office appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
In defense of the Sarah Hurwitz we know — and the nuance we all need in this moment
(JTA) — Over the course of the Obama and Biden administrations, each of us served as the White House liaison to the American Jewish community. In that role, we were responsible for reaching out to Jewish Americans from across the political and denominational spectrum, listening to their concerns, understanding their needs, and representing their voices in the White House.
Over the past couple of weeks, we were stunned to watch as our friend and former colleague, Sarah Hurwitz, became the subject of a mob attack on social media.
It is hard to watch anyone you care about be savaged online, but it was particularly painful to see this happen to Sarah. In the White House, where she served as a speechwriter first for President Barack Obama and then for First Lady Michelle Obama, Sarah was known for her kind heart, integrity and fierce loyalty to her colleagues and the leaders she served. We often marveled at the compassion she wove into the speeches she wrote for our bosses. Her empathy for the plight of Americans of every background and her commitment to social justice and equality were evident in her devotion to serving our country.
We watched with pride as she went on to write widely acclaimed books about Jewish ritual, tradition, and spirituality and about the effects of antisemitism on Jewish identity. Meticulously researched, her books are an exercise in nuance, empathy, and complexity as she articulates and wrestles with competing viewpoints. In her most recent book, for example, she both passionately defends Zionism, the national independence movement of the Jewish people, and also fiercely criticizes the current Israeli government.
So you can imagine our dismay when several far left and far right X accounts posted and retweeted a video clip of remarks she made at a recent Jewish conference that was selectively edited to cut off the actual point she was making. What followed was a torrent of outrage from people who claimed Sarah was arguing that we shouldn’t teach Holocaust education because doing so makes young people think the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza is a genocide. Others claimed she was saying that genocide only matters when it’s perpetrated against Jews.
Such sentiments would obviously be obscene, and we were shocked that people would attribute them to Sarah, someone who just published a book in which she expressed profound anguish about the unbearable deaths of civilians in Gaza. And we were appalled when people began circulating more out of context videos of Sarah with the intent of portraying her as callous and cruel.
Those who took the time to track down and watch the entire original video, including the part that was cut off, would have seen the actual points Sarah was making about antisemitism education, which were as follows: Some forms of prejudice are about a majority dominating a minority whom they see as inferior — a kind of “punching down.” But as many scholars have noted, antisemitism is about “punching up.” The Holocaust happened in part because the Nazis insisted that the Jews, who were 1% of the German population, were actually the powerful ones and were using their power to harm ordinary Germans. They accused Jews of undermining Germany’s World War I efforts and destroying the German economy. The Nazis claimed that killing Jews was therefore a form of self-defense, that they were protecting themselves against a powerful, depraved enemy.
Sarah was also conveying that, contrary to the impression young people get on social media, what happened in Gaza is not analogous to the Holocaust. It was a devastating war that does not fit neatly into a simplistic frame of oppressor versus oppressed. That black and white paradigm disregards the complex challenges that continue to stymie a resolution to this heartbreaking conflict.
But just try having this kind of complex discussion on social media where algorithms are designed to prize outrage and gin up hatred and too often amplify dissension sown by foreign actors.
Sarah certainly could have been more sensitive in the language she used, but the points she was actually making are worth considering.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
The post In defense of the Sarah Hurwitz we know — and the nuance we all need in this moment appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Rep. Ilhan Omar says Stephen Miller’s comments on immigrants sound like how ‘Nazis described Jewish people’
Rep Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, on Sunday likened the Trump administration’s immigration rhetoric to Nazi depictions of Jews.
“It reminds me of the way the Nazis described Jewish people in Germany,” Omar said in an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, commenting on a social media post by Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s senior adviser, in which he suggested that “migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” Miller, who is Jewish, is the architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policy.
Omar called Miller’s comments “white supremist rhetoric” and also drew parallels between his characterization of migrants seeking refuge in the U.S. to how Jews were demonized and treated when they fled Nazi-era Germany. “As we know, there have been many immigrants who have tried to come to the United States who have turned back, you know, one of them being Jewish immigrants,” she said.
Now serving as Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, Miller is central to the White House’s plans for mass deportations and expanded barriers to asylum. During Trump’s first term, Miller led the implementation of the so-called Muslim travel ban in 2017, which barred entry to the U.S. for individuals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, and pushed to further reduce a longtime refugee program.
Rep. Ilhan Omar: “When I think about Stephen Miller and his white supremacist rhetoric, it reminds me of the way the Nazis described Jewish people in Germany.” pic.twitter.com/GAjIMqFq26
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 7, 2025
Miller’s comments echoed similar rhetoric by Trump after an Afghan refugee was accused of shooting two National Guard members near the White House last month, killing one.
Trump told reporters at a cabinet meeting last week that Somali immigrants are “garbage” and that he wanted them to be sent “back to where they came from.” The president also singled out Omar, a Somali native who represents Minnesota’s large Somali-American community. “She should be thrown the hell out of our country,” Trump said.
In the Sunday interview, Omar called Trump’s remarks “completely disgusting” and accused him of having “an unhealthy obsession” with her and the Somali community. “This kind of hateful rhetoric and this level of dehumanizing can lead to dangerous actions by people who listen to the president,” she said.
The post Rep. Ilhan Omar says Stephen Miller’s comments on immigrants sound like how ‘Nazis described Jewish people’ appeared first on The Forward.