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A new children’s book will depict the Jewish Theological Seminary’s devastating 1966 library fire — and how its neighbors responded
(JTA) — Just before locking down in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, children’s book author Caroline Kusin Pritchard was waiting to pick up her two toddlers from preschool at Congregation Beth Am in Palo Alto, California, when she saw a thin volume poking out of a shelf in the synagogue library.
The 56-page book, called “Fire! The Library is Burning,” by Rabbi Barry Cytron, detailed a historical event she had never heard of before: the 1966 library fire at the Jewish Theological Seminary, in the Manhattan neighborhood of Morningside Heights.
The fire was a devastating event for the seminary, the flagship institution of Conservative Judaism. It destroyed some 70,000 books and 40 Torahs in the library’s collection, some of which had been saved from Poland. No people were hurt and few rare books were burned, but because of the way the library was constructed, in a windowless tower, the only way to put it out was to dump water from above, resulting in sweeping damage even to volumes that escaped the flames.
What grabbed Kusin Pritchard’s attention was not the fire itself, but the way New Yorkers who lived and worked near the school responded to it — volunteering to evacuate books from the library and protect them from lasting damage.
That response is the focus of her upcoming children’s book, “The Keeper of Stories,” announced this week and due out in the fall of 2024. The episode, Kusin Pritchard said, feels all the more meaningful at a time when activists and local governments across the country are banning books — including some about the Holocaust — and restricting them from school library shelves.
“I just never thought a story about saving books would feel radical in 2023,” she said. “People are proactively going out of their way to strip books from public libraries and school shelves.”
The message of “The Keeper of Stories,” Kusin Pritchard added, is that “it didn’t matter to people what necessarily was in the books. They just knew there was inherent value and the story is being told and to save and protect books more generally, like these sacred gatekeepers of our humanity.”
The book is on the road to publication at a time of significant change for the JTS library, a large and storied institution with 400,000 volumes that includes a notable collection of rare Jewish books. The library downsized its space after a 2015 real estate deal and has more recently drawn scrutiny for auctioning some of its rare books. The longtime lead librarian who led the efforts to recover from the fire, Menahem Schmelzer, died last year.
Schmelzer, a Holocaust survivor born in Hungary who served as JTS’ head librarian from 1964 to 1987, spoke to Kusin Pritchard about his recollection of the fire, which happened to occur on his birthday.
“He was able to share just gorgeous, textured memories about what the experience was like for him,” she recalled.
“There’s a refrain throughout about ‘the keeper of stories,’” Kusin Pritchard added, referencing the book’s title. “This idea of, ‘who are the keepers of stories?’ Is it the building involved? Is it the pages of the book?”
Kusin Pritchard is the author of other children’s books with Jewish themes. “Gitty and Kvetch,” released in 2021, features a character who is always complaining; “Where is Poppy?”, out next year, is about a girl’s first Passover after her grandfather’s death. The new book, meant for readers in elementary school, will be illustrated by Selina Alko, who is Jewish and has previously illustrated books about interfaith holiday celebrations and the effort to save Czech children from the Nazis.
“The Keeper of Stories” will depict the steps that JTS’s neighbors took to save the books that didn’t burn. They formed an impromptu chain to pass books out of the library, pack them in boxes and, in turn, clear the boxes out to make more space for additional evacuated books. Volunteers also mobilized to place paper towels between each page of books soaked by the firehoses that were in danger of growing mold.
“These volunteers came from across the city and dried these books with paper towels and you can still see the places where they taped them and glued them back together on some of these actual books, on the pages.” Kusin Pritchard said. “Their stories still kind of exist in person.”
Initially, Kusin Pritchard wrote the draft from the perspective of the person who came up with the idea of using paper towels to preserve the books — an effort that caused a run on the towels nearby. But she soon realized that the story was about more than one individual’s efforts to save the contents of a library, so none of the characters is named.
“This wasn’t about this one person,” Kusin Pritchard said. “It was about how everyone came together. Preschoolers, students down the street, the pastors, the company that heard about this and sent paper towels, or General Foods who had these freeze dryers and they sent their food scientists to try and freeze dry the books. It was a collective.”
Kusin Pritchard said she usually writes lighter fare, but as the parent of three young children — 6, 4 and 2 years old — she said she isn’t worried about frightening readers.
“Kids can take on and handle a lot more than we give them credit for,” she said.
She also hopes to show her young readers that they can play a role in safeguarding books, too.
“In a world where book banning seems more and more normalized,” she said, “a story about saving books feels really resonant.”
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The Psychology Behind the Rise in Right-Wing Antisemitism
Tucker Carlson speaks on July 18, 2024, during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo: Jasper Colt-USA TODAY via Reuters Connect
Over the past year or so, there has been a strange and unsettling shift on parts of the political and cultural right. Figures who built their influence by pushing back against progressive excess, moral confusion, intellectual laziness, and the erosion of democratic values have begun drifting into territory that should have been left behind long ago — antisemitic tropes, conspiratorial thinking, and flirtations with ideas they themselves once would have dismissed as corrosive and dangerous.
It has been very upsetting to watch, not least because many of these voices rose to prominence by presenting themselves as more serious, more grounded, and more responsible than the alternatives they criticized.
Some have pointed to foreign money and malign external influences – with Qatar chief among them as a reliable patron of some of the most destructive forces in the modern world – as an explanation. It would be naïve to deny that such actors play a role. But that explanation, on its own, is not enough to explain this phenomenon.
Even if Qatari money helps shape narratives at the top of the pyramid – and their possible involvement absolutely deserves scrutiny – it does not explain the sheer number of willing followers who nod along to contentious statements and ridiculous conspiracies without being paid a cent by anyone.
Elite influencers may be driven by incentives tied to financial or political power, but the grassroots level is clearly motivated by something else. Money may help light the match, but it does not explain why so many people are eager to watch the fire burn – and then cheer it on.
The instinctive response is to frame all of this as ideological betrayal – and then to draw battle lines, or to declare that the political culture of Western democracies is fundamentally broken. But that reaction is the wrong approach. It shuts down thought precisely when careful thinking is needed most. Because at its core, something more human – and far more familiar – seems to be going on.
What makes this moment so counterintuitive is that this regression on the right has not emerged from defeat or marginalization. It has emerged from success.
The stunning political victory by the Republicans in November 2024 should, in theory, have been followed by a period of consolidation – a sharpening of ideas and a renewed sense of responsibility. Instead, we are witnessing a growing rift between principled conservatism and a darker, more reckless version of right-wing beliefs. That paradox suggests we are dealing less with ideology than with a psychological response to the sudden expansion of freedom and power.
We tend to assume that success produces stability and confidence. History suggests otherwise. When people or movements feel genuinely embattled, they often develop discipline, clarity, and a strong sense of shared purpose – an understanding of what matters and what must be set aside for the greater good.
But when the wind is at their backs, and a threat – real or imagined – appears on the horizon, the result is often anxiety: “We might lose what we have!” And anxiety is dangerous. It clouds judgment and tempts people to reach for ideas they already know are corrosive, simply because they feel familiar.
History offers some sobering examples. After years of devastating war under Napoleon, France in 1814 finally rid itself of him and he was exiled to Elba. The country had a rare opportunity to step back, recover, and build something more stable and restrained. But when Napoleon escaped from Elba a year later and returned to France, large parts of the country welcomed him back.
Soldiers sent to arrest him joined him instead. Within weeks, France had re-embraced the very man who had brought it to ruin, and 100 days later, they paid for it at Waterloo. The regression was not imposed from above. It was embraced from below – and it was an utter disaster.
Ancient Rome offers a similar lesson. The Roman Republic was built on restraint, combined with a sophisticated system of checks and balances and a healthy suspicion of the concentration of power into the hands of one man. And yet Julius Caesar’s rise was welcomed by many as a solution to a period of dysfunction.
He was appointed dictator, and what followed was not renewal but the oppressive age of emperors. Rome gained order but lost its liberty. Once again, faced with uncertainty, a civilization chose a familiar system that was bad over the harder work of repair and healing — and they called it progress.
The Torah identifies this same flaw in human nature at the very beginning of Jewish history, in Parshat Beshalach. Just days after experiencing one of the most dramatic liberations ever achieved by a slave nation – the Exodus from Egypt – the newly freed Jewish people find themselves trapped between the sea and Pharaoh’s approaching army.
Despite everything they know – that God has redeemed them, that awesome miracles have carried them this far – panic sets in. They turn on Moses and cry out: “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you took us out to die in the wilderness?”
And then comes a line so jarring that it almost feels like parody (Ex. 14:12): טוֹב לָנוּ עֲבֹד אֶת־מִצְרַיִם מִמֻּתֵנוּ בַּמִּדְבָּר – “It would have been better for us to serve Egypt than to die in the wilderness.”
How is this even possible? These are people who have just witnessed the collapse of the most powerful empire on earth for their benefit – who are, in that moment, at the very top of their game. And yet, even as they bask in the glow of victory, the instant their freedom begins to feel fragile, their instinct is not to move forward into the rational unknown but to retreat into what they already know is irrational evil.
That is the crucial point. It is not a calculation that makes sense, nor is it a carefully thought-out strategy; it is a psychological reflex, and a dangerous one. Faced with what feels like an existential threat, people often reach for the familiar – even when that is the worst possible thing they could do.
Which is what makes the current flirtation with antisemitism and conspiracy thinking on certain parts of the right so disturbing. These are old instincts, long known to be destructive, that have now resurfaced because they feel familiar, as some on the right feel tinges of anxiety.
But familiarity is not necessarily wisdom; far more often, it is a dangerous trap. A recent study suggests that engagement with antisemitic conspiracy theories on the right has risen dramatically since the November 2024 election. Unless this trend is halted, it won’t end well.
The Torah’s message at the sea is uncompromising. The way forward is not to turn backward. Redemption does not come from retreating into the habits and ideas that once enslaved and degraded us. The sea will open up and offer salvation only when someone is willing to step into it – to take the risk, and to trust that moral clarity and courage still matter.
Regression may feel comforting, but it leads nowhere. The only way forward is through.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Karen Jones and the Institutionalization of Medical Dhimmitude
Illustrative: Health workers move a woman on a stretcher to an ambulance after a deadly terrorist shooting at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, on Dec. 14, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
The reports emerging from Sydney’s Liverpool Hospital are not merely a localized administrative failure; they represent a chilling indicator of a new, institutionalized “dhimmitude” taking root in the heart of Western society.
Rosalia Shikhverg, a survivor of the horrific Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre on Dec. 14, was admitted for treatment of shrapnel and gunshot wounds to the head. While she lay in her hospital bed, terrified and recovering from a terror attack that claimed 15 lives, staff — without her knowledge or consent — snipped her medical wristband and replaced it with a new one. Her name was gone. In its place was the alias “Karen Jones,” with her religious status completely scrubbed from official records.
The hospital’s defense, offered through state health officials, is perhaps more terrifying than the act itself. Officials claimed the name change was a “protective measure” to shield a high-profile victim from media intrusion following the heightened risks in Sydney. But Shikhverg’s own account points to a more sinister and systemic motivation: the hospital administration apparently did not trust its own staff to provide equal, safe care to a patient identified as Jewish. Shikhverg recounted how the switch left her more focused on a fear of her caregivers than her physical injuries, crying incessantly and pleading for an early discharge because she felt profoundly unsafe.
This incident represents the logical culmination of a process by which the values of the Middle East’s most regressive ideologies are imported into Western civil society. When a premier medical institution in a Western democracy feels compelled to erase a Jewish patient’s identity to ensure her safety from the very people hired to heal her, we are no longer talking about a mere “spillover” of the Gaza conflict. We are witnessing the surrender of Western professional ethics to the mob.
This is the rebirth of dhimmitude. In the classical tradition, the dhimmi was a protected non-Muslim subject granted life and property only on the condition of submission and the public erasure of their distinct identity.
In 2026, a modern hospital has effectively recreated this status. By stripping Shikhverg of her name and her religion, the hospital sent a clear message: Jewish identity is a provocation and a “safety risk” that the state can no longer manage. It suggests that the only way to protect a Jew in a modern metropolis is to ensure that they are no longer recognizable as a Jew.
This betrayal is not an isolated event. It follows the recent suspension of nurses at other nearby facilities who were caught on video bragging about their refusal to treat Israelis and expressing a desire to kill Jewish patients. The “Karen Jones” incident shows that instead of purging these radical elements from the health-care system, administrators have chosen a path of appeasement. They have decided that it is easier to erase the patient than to confront the radicalization of the workforce.
The “long march through the institutions” by radical ideologues has finally reached the bedside. We have seen this pattern on campuses, where “Jew-free zones” are established under the guise of “safe spaces,” and in the courts, where legal harassment is used to silence critics of extremism. Now, the hospital ward has become the next frontier of exclusion. If a nurse or a doctor cannot look at a patient with a Jewish name without the administration fearing for the patient’s life, then the social contract of the Western democracy has been fundamentally breached.
If the West is to survive this ideological assault, the response must be uncompromising. There must be a full, independent audit of radicalization within the public health systems of major Western cities. The administrators who authorized the erasure of Rosalia Shikhverg’s identity must be held legally and professionally accountable for civil rights violations. Furthermore, governments must recognize that non-violent subversion of Western values is just as dangerous as the violent jihad that targeted Boni Beach on Hanukkah.
Rosalia Shikhverg survived the bullets of a terrorist only to be erased by the bureaucracy of a hospital. We must ensure that “Karen Jones” is the last alias a Jew is forced to wear in a Western democracy. Peace and security cannot be built on a foundation of coerced invisibility. The survival of pluralistic society depends on the ability of every citizen to exist openly, without fear that their identity will become a death warrant in the hands of those sworn to protect them.
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Palestinian Terrorists Admit Their Own Rockets Kill Gazans, and the Media Look the Other Way
People inspect the area of Al-Ahli hospital where Palestinians were killed in a blast from an errant Islamic Palestinian Jihad rocket meant for Israel, in Gaza City, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ahmed Zakot
A document seized in Gaza and reported by Israel’s Kan public broadcaster exposes a reality that sharply contradicts much of the global coverage of the Israel-Hamas war: Palestinian civilians have long been killed by Palestinian rockets and terrorist leaders knew it, discussed it, and accepted it.
The document records a meeting between Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials held before Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and the war that followed. In it, Hamas representatives confront Islamic Jihad leaders over a deadly and recurring problem: rockets misfiring and landing inside Gaza, killing civilians.
“Your rockets are falling on people’s homes, and this is a recurring issue,” a Hamas official is quoted as saying.
The response from Islamic Jihad is even more damning. “We are at war,” a senior representative of the terrorist group replies. “Even if a thousand people are killed by friendly fire, that is the price of war.”
This is not a battlefield mishap acknowledged after the fact. It is an explicit, pre-war admission that Palestinian terrorist groups were aware their weapons routinely killed civilians and that they viewed those deaths as acceptable.
The document also records Islamic Jihad officials admitting that they knew their rockets were defective. According to the report, the weapons were manufactured using blueprints supplied by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In other words, unreliable rockets were knowingly produced, launched from densely populated areas, and expected to fall short.
Image of the seized document, as presented by Kan Public Broadcaster
This matters because it directly undermines a central assumption that has dominated coverage of Gaza for years and intensified after Oct. 7: that civilian casualties are almost entirely the result of Israeli fire.
Kan’s report does not quantify how many Gazans have been killed by Palestinian rockets. But it does establish something journalists have consistently avoided confronting: terrorist groups themselves acknowledge that their own fire kills civilians and that this has been happening for years.
That reality burst briefly into view 10 days after the war began, when a PIJ rocket exploded in the courtyard of a Gaza hospital, killing hundreds of Palestinians. Israel was immediately blamed across much of the international media. Only later did evidence emerge that the blast was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket.
This newly revealed document shows that the incident was not an anomaly. It was a known risk discussed internally long before Oct. 7.
So, why has this revelation barely registered outside Israel?
Journalists often justify their reliance on casualty figures and on the fog of war. But here, there is no ambiguity. This is a primary source document describing internal discussions between terrorist groups, criticizing each other for weapons failures and explicitly accepting civilian deaths as collateral.
If such a document emerged showing Israeli officials dismissing civilian deaths as “the price of war,” it would dominate headlines worldwide. When terrorist groups say it among themselves, it is met with silence.
This selective attention has consequences. Media outlets routinely report Gaza casualties without asking how many were caused by Palestinian fire. They rarely revisit earlier claims when new evidence emerges. And they almost never scrutinize the conduct of terrorist groups with the same intensity they apply to Israel.
The Kan report exposes not just the recklessness of Palestinian terrorist organizations but the media’s unwillingness to reckon with it. By ignoring evidence that complicates a simplified narrative, journalists deprive audiences of essential context and accountability.
This document does not absolve Israel of scrutiny. But it does demand that journalists stop treating Palestinian armed groups as passive actors whose actions are irrelevant to civilian harm.
Terrorists killing their own civilians is not a footnote. It is a central fact of this conflict. The question is no longer whether the evidence exists.
It is why so many in the media choose not to report it.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.