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Acknowledging ‘reputational risk,’ ADL chief defends partnership with undemocratic United Arab Emirates

(JTA) — The announcement was akin to several that Jewish groups have made in recent years: a new partnership with an Arab nation would advance coexistence in the Middle East.

Except that the group announcing the new alliance last week was the Anti-Defamation League, which devotes itself to fighting for human and civil rights. And the country it’s partnering with is the United Arab Emirates, an autocracy that, say the U.S. government and civil rights advocates alike, is guilty of a wide range of such abuses.

The new Manara Regional Center For Coexistence, based in Abu Dhabi, will “engage young leaders across the Middle East and North Africa, empowering them to build ties with peers and foster a shared commitment to coexistence,” according to a tweet by ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who traveled to the UAE for the center’s launch.

The ADL partners with a wide array of organizations in the United States and beyond to achieve its mission. But Greenblatt told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he recognized that working with the UAE could be complicated.

“There’s always execution risk,” Greenblatt said. “There can be, if things go south, a kind of reputational risk. You know, there are specific internal issues of UAE that we can’t control for.”

Those issues, according to the State Department, include placing “serious restrictions on free expression and media” and engaging in “substantial” repression of human rights groups, LGBTQ residents and international critics. Its latest human rights review includes “credible reports” of arbitrary arrest and detention, the jailing of political prisoners and a lengthy listing of other reported restrictions and abuses in the country.

Human rights advocates say the UAE prohibits free speech, banishes political parties, does not have a free media and tolerates slavery-like conditions for some of the large immigrant workforce it houses, which comprises the vast majority of its residents. 

And Freedom House, a democracy watchdog, scores the UAE 18 out of 100 on its freedom metric (“not free”) – including ratings of 5 out of 40 for political rights and 13 out of 60 for civil liberties. It has called a UAE press law “one of the most restrictive press laws in the Arab world [which] regulates all aspects of the media and prohibits criticism of the government.”

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, right, confers with Ali Al Naumi, the chairman of the Manara Regional Center For Coexistence, in Abu Dhabi, March 14, 2023. (UAE Embassy to Washington Twitter feed)


Rabbi Jill Jacobs, who heads T’ruah, a liberal rabbinic human rights group
that has collaborated with the ADL in the past, said she was “flabbergasted” by the partnership and that she did not understand how the ADL could advance its mission in an autocracy.

“I just don’t really see how any civil rights organization or any organization that claims to be a civil rights organization can justify partnering with a government that is completely autocratic,” she said.

An official at Human Rights Watch, which has criticized the UAE for an “alarming campaign of repression and censorship against dissidents,” among other abuses, also said the ADL’s mission seemed inconsistent with the values of a repressive regime. (The ADL and Human Rights Watch disagree over Israel, an issue that has caused the ADL to clash with human rights or civil rights groups. Human Rights Watch has said Israeli authorities are guilty of the crime of apartheid, an accusation the ADL has called inaccurate and offensive.) 

“The UAE’s rights record should be especially concerning for organizations who profess to ‘protect democracy and ensure a just and inclusive society for all,’” said Michael Page, the deputy director of the group’s Middle East and North Africa division, quoting the ADL’s mission statement. “This UAE record includes detaining scores of activists, academics, and lawyers serving lengthy sentences, severely restricting independent civil society, and maintaining a restrictive labor governance system that leaves millions of migrant workers vulnerable to abuse.”

The UAE has also drawn criticism from labor rights groups, which accuse it of turning a blind eye to abuses of its migrant laborers, who comprise as much as 90% of the workforce. The International Trade Union Confederation accuses the country of allowing “modern day slavery.” Reported conditions include letting employers confiscate passports; having laborers work off prohibitive fees that allowed them into the country; and making the laborers live and work in squalor.

An ADL spokesperson said that the group is “unaware of any issues related to the building” housing the Manara Center and referred questions on the issue to the UAE Embassy in Washington, D.C., which did not respond to a request for comment. 

Greenblatt said the ADL was bringing its decades of experience in promoting civil rights and democracy to the region.

“The UAE, again, let’s just say the country has a different tradition than the United States in terms of its governance, in terms of its law, in terms of its practices,” he said. “The ADL, which is a part of that civic fabric of America, is going to have the opportunity to initiate work here in the Emirates and in the Gulf more broadly.”

He said such a prospect “is incredibly exciting, if we can bring to bear some of what we’ve learned the hard way over 110 years.”

The partnership reflects the sometimes strange bedfellows created by the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the UAE and three other Arab countries in 2020. Since the deals, a string of initiatives to invigorate business ties and Jewish life in the Arab countries have launched, and Dubai, the UAE’s most populous city, has become a vacation destination for Israelis.

Greenblatt said ADL’s venture would help address a neglected component of the accords: people-to-people encounters.

“It is worth trying to find ways to bring together the people of the region — Muslims and Christians and Jews of different ethnicities and nationalities — in pursuit of the greater good,” he said.

Jacobs, of T’ruah, said that outlook was naive. “It’s not like there’s slight differences” between the United States and the UAE,” she said. 

“They’re not stupid,” she said of the UAE’s rulers. “They know what international law is.”

A number of other Jewish and civil rights groups that have partnered with the ADL, including the American Jewish Committee and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, did not return requests for comment.

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said he welcomes the chance for Jewish organizations to bring their values into unfamiliar territory. He likened criticism of the ADL to the flak he got a few years ago when he met the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who has been accused of intensifying the kingdom’s already dour record of human rights abuses. Bin Salman was subsequently accused of ordering the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. 

“People would say, well, how could we even meet with such a person? The answer is, how can you try to build a more, I would say, pluralistic, and a more respectful community,” he said in an interview. “And we don’t just do that in places that are already very friendly. I think that’s our challenge wherever we are and, you know, Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL have made that a very pervasive mission. It’s an important one.”


The post Acknowledging ‘reputational risk,’ ADL chief defends partnership with undemocratic United Arab Emirates appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Could dementia be the key to saving endangered Jewish languages?

One day, when Sabrina Hakim was out for a walk with her father, he started speaking a language she could not understand.

Sabrina figured he must be speaking Judeo-Kashi, a variety of Judeo-Iranian. Her father spoke this language as a child in the Iranian city of Kashan before he moved to the capital, Tehran. Since Jewish people haven’t lived in Kashan in decades, at least not in large numbers, the language “faces possible extinction,” according to Rutgers University linguist Habib Borjian.

Sabrina felt that in order to best care for her father, she had to learn this language. “I would just ask him questions, like, how do you say ‘Are you hungry?’ How do you say ‘I’m tired?’” she told me. “I was asking questions about words or phrases that we could use in his care.”

A reader consults a Judeo-Kashani glossary. Photo by Lauren Hakimi

As time went by, her interest in Kashi evolved from purely practical to cultural. She started scrawling notes on the backs of receipts, and now, Sabrina says she has some 200 pages of notes from conversations with her dad, and she is helping to create a dictionary of the language.

Sabrina’s father, who died in February, is one example of someone whose dementia helped his descendants work with professional linguists to preserve a rare Jewish language. Since dementia affects shorter-term memory more than longer-term memory, it’s not unusual for multilingual people with dementia to begin speaking the language they learned first. As a 2009 study put it, “the language with the best recovery may be the earliest acquired language, the language of greater use, or the language spoken in the patient’s environment.”

Sarah Bunin Benor, a linguist and the director of the Jewish Language Project, said that, while she has long been aware of this phenomenon, she has noticed it most recently with speakers of Judeo-Iranian languages. Historically speaking, that makes sense: In the mid-20th century, when people who are now elderly were children or young adults, many Jews from small cities all across Iran moved to Tehran, oftentimes to avoid antisemitism or enhance economic opportunities.

In Tehran, these people might have spoken their hometown language with their families, but standard Farsi with pretty much everyone else. They had also studied Torah and knew some Hebrew. But even as their brains held room for three languages — and later, when they fled Iran altogether, for yet a fourth language in the country where they wound up — those hometown languages remained deeply rooted in their minds.

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Ashton, an 18-year-old from Great Neck, New York, had always been close with his grandmother, Mommy Po-Po, who began showing signs of dementia more than a year ago. (Ashton requested to be identified only by his first name so as to keep the details of his grandmother’s condition private)

Mommy Po-Po was born around 1939 in the small Iranian city of Tuyserkan in Hamadan province. Though she later moved to Tehran, she continued speaking Judeo-Tuyserkani, a language Borjian told me is at even greater risk of extinction than Judeo-Kashi.

Ashton’s aunt and Mommy Po-Po’s youngest child, Dina, told me that her mother usually speaks Judeo-Tuyserkani when she’s confused. In the last few months, Dina said, “whenever she talks to me, she feels that we live still in Tuyserkan, and I’m one of her sisters.”

Dina thinks memories of Tuyserkan comfort her mother. “I think she likes to go back there, when everything is OK, when my father was alive, when her father was alive, when she had her mother next to her,” she said. “I think she feels warmer when she thinks about back then.”

Around the same time that his grandmother’s illness was worsening, Ashton got in touch with Borjian, who was studying Judeo-Tuyserkani but didn’t know anyone who actually spoke it. “He gave me a huge list of words, and he said please translate all these” into Tuyserkani, Ashton said. He worked with his great-aunts, who still live in Iran, to get the words translated.

Now, Ashton, like Sabrina, is creating a dictionary. He has also started recording interviews with Mommy Po-Po, which he hopes to use in a documentary. Ashton “speaks better than me in Farsi and Tuyserkani,” Dina said.

Sabrina has also gotten praise from her family about her new language skills.

At first, when she started speaking Kashi with him, he might respond in Farsi, “een chert-o-perta chiye?” What’s all this gibberish? “My accent was so bad,” Sabrina said. But as time went by, her Kashi became more and more comprehensible. “Maybe about a month before he passed, one time I was saying something, and he said, ‘where did you learn to speak Kashi? You’ve never been to Kashan.’”

Of course, he’s the one who taught it to her.

The post Could dementia be the key to saving endangered Jewish languages? appeared first on The Forward.

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I know exactly why leftists aren’t celebrating this ceasefire

“We can’t hear you, Zohran,” read one New York Post headline this week: “Pro-Hamas crowd goes quiet on Trump’s Gaza peace deal.”

“It seems awfully curious that the people who have made Gazans a central political cause do not seem at all relieved that there’s at least a temporary cessation of violence…Why aren’t there widespread celebrations across Western cities and college campuses today?” the article asked.

The Post wasn’t alone in voicing that question. A spokesperson for the Republican Jewish Coalition posted on X that “The silence from the ‘ceasefire now’ crowd is shameful and deafening.” Others went so far as to imply that the protesters had been lying and never actually wanted a ceasefire — because what they really wanted wasn’t freedom and security for Palestinians, but the ability to blame Israel. If pro-Palestinian voices had really wanted a ceasefire, the thinking went, they would be celebrating.

I read these various posts and articles and thought of Rania Abu Anza.

I have thought of her every day since I first read her story in early March 2024. Anza spent a decade trying to have a child through in vitro fertilization. When her twins, a boy and a girl, were five months old, an Israeli strike killed them. It also killed her husband and 11 other members of her family.

A year and a half later, a ceasefire cannot bring her children, her husband, or her 11 family members back. They were killed. They will stay dead. What is there to celebrate?

This does not mean that the ceasefire is not welcome, or that it is not a relief. On the contrary: It is both. Of course it’s a relief that the families of hostages don’t need to live one more day in torment and anguish. Of course it’s a relief that more bombs will not fall on Gaza.

But celebration implies, to me anyway, that this is a positive without caveats. And in this situation, there are so many caveats.

The families of the surviving hostages will still have spent years apart from their loved ones, in no small part because their own government did not treat the hostages’ return as the single highest priority. The families of those hostages who were killed in the war will never again sit down to dinner with their loved ones, who could have been saved. And it is difficult to fathom what’s been taken from the hostages themselves: time spent out exploring the world, or with family and friends, or at home doing nothing much at all but sitting safely in quiet contemplation.

And a ceasefire alone will not heal Israeli society, or return trust to the people in their government. It will not fix some of the deep societal problems this war uncovered. A Chatham House report this August found that, “Israeli television ignores the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, while the rhetoric is often aggressive. Critical voices, from inside Israel or abroad, are attacked or silenced.” If the country is ever going to find its way back from Oct. 7 and this war, a ceasefire is a necessary precondition, but not a route in and of itself.

In Gaza, Palestinian health authorities have said that about 67,000 people — not distinguishing between combatants and civilians — have been killed by Israel’s campaign in response to Oct. 7. A full third of those killed were under the age of 18. The ceasefire cannot bring those children back to life.

It cannot turn back time and make it such that Israel admitted more than minimal aid to the embattled strip. It will not undo the damage that has been done to the people of Gaza who were denied enough to eat and drink and proper medical care. It will not give children back their parents, or parents back their children. It will not heal the disabled, or make it so that they were never wounded.

It will not change that all of this happened with the backing of the United States government. (This is to say nothing of the West Bank, which has seen a dramatic expansion of Israeli settlements and escalation of settler violence over the course of the war). And as American Jewish groups put out statements cheering the ceasefire, we should also remember that it does not reverse the reality that too many American Jews were cheerleaders for all this death.

Protesters calling for a ceasefire have regularly been denounced as hateful toward Jews or callous toward the plight of Israelis; American Jews who called for one were called somehow un-Jewish. (Yes, some pro-Palestinian protesters also shared hate toward Jews; the much greater majority did not.) The charge of antisemitism — toward those calling for a ceasefire, those calling for a free Palestine, and those who called attention to Israel’s abuses during this war — was used to silence criticism of Israel and of U.S. foreign policy. Some American Jews went so far as to call for the deportation of students protesting the war.

A ceasefire doesn’t change any of that. It can’t.

I have hopes for this ceasefire. At best, it will allow people — Israelis and Palestinians and, yes, diaspora Jews — to chart a new, better course going forward. But it almost certainly will not do that if we delude ourselves into thinking of this as a victory or a kind of tabula rasa, as though the lives lost and hate spewed are all behind us, forgotten, atoned for. The last two years will never not have happened. What happens next depends on all of us fully appreciating that.

The post I know exactly why leftists aren’t celebrating this ceasefire appeared first on The Forward.

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University of Sydney Suspends Staff Member After Viral Video Shows Verbal Assault on Jewish Students During Sukkot

University of Sydney staff member verbally assaulting Jewish students during a Sukkot celebration on campus. Photo: Screenshot

The University of Sydney has suspended a staff member after a viral video showed her verbally assaulting Jewish students and teachers during an on-campus holiday celebration, sparking public outrage over one of Australia’s latest antisemitic incidents.

In a video widely circulated on social media, a university staff member — reportedly of Palestinian Arab background — is seen approaching a group of Jewish students and teachers during a campus holiday celebration, shouting antisemitic insults at them.

The incident has sparked public condemnation and renewed calls for stronger action against rising antisemitism on college campuses, as the local Jewish community faces an increasingly hostile climate and a surge in targeted attacks across the country.

During a Sukkot celebration organized by the Australian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) on campus, attendees — including students, teachers, and the university’s rabbi — were approached by a woman who asked them, “Are you Zionists?” while they gathered to participate in the annual Jewish festival.

“A Zionist is the lowest form of rubbish. Zionists are the most disgusting thing that has ever walked this earth,” the university staff member can be heard saying.

She then identifies as an “Indigenous Palestinian” and continues hurling antisemitic insults at the group, calling them “child killers.”

“You are a filthy Zionist,” she said. “You colonized us.”

University security personnel tried to intervene as the incident escalated, but the staff member refused to leave and continued filming the group.

The woman is then seen in the video pointing at the group and shouting to a security officer: “Look at this rubbish, look at these parasites.”

University of Sydney Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott announced that the staff member had been suspended pending further investigation and offered a personal apology to the affected Jewish students and staff.

“We’re disturbed and appalled by the vision that depicts verbal abuse and harassment on campus,” Scott said in a statement. “Such conduct is utterly unacceptable, and we are taking immediate action under our codes of conduct, including suspending a staff member involved pending further assessment.”

“Hate speech, antisemitism, and verbal harassment have no place on campus, online, or in our wider community,” he continued. “We deeply apologize to any staff, students, or visitors who are distressed or impacted by this incident in any way.”

University officials referred the incident to New South Wales Police, who have opened an investigation into the matter.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) strongly condemned the incident, calling for swift action and prompt intervention by the authorities.

“This is the real face of antisemitism in Australia today. It hides behind an anti-Zionist mask,” the statement read. “This woman aimed to intimidate, threaten, offend, and humiliate a group of Jewish students just because they were Jewish.”

Antisemitism spiked to record levels in Australia — especially in Sydney and Melbourne, which are home to some 85 percent of the country’s Jewish population — following the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

According to a report from ECAJ, the country’s Jewish community experienced over 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024, a significant increase from 495 in the prior 12 months.

The number of antisemitic physical assaults in Australia rose from 11 in 2023 to 65 in 2024. The level of antisemitism for the past year was six times the average of the preceding 10 years.

Since the Oct. 7 atrocities, the local Jewish community has faced a wave of targeted attacks, with several Jewish sites across Australia subjected to vandalism and even arson amid an increasingly hostile climate.

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