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Alleging exclusion, Jewish faculty boycott James Madison University’s Holocaust commemoration event
(JTA) — An event that took place at a Virginia university Thursday night to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day was scheduled to feature lectures about the legacies of Auschwitz and the intersection between white supremacy and antisemitism. There was also a planned recitation of a poem and a musical performance.
Not on the docket at James Madison University: support for the event from the school’s Jewish faculty and staff.
Dozens of them announced in an open letter that they would boycott the event, titled “An Evening Conversation on the History and Legacy of the Holocaust,” citing concerns about its appropriateness. Of particular concern, according to multiple people familiar with the situation, was a planned performance by the university’s provost, a pianist, during a segment titled “Music as Refuge in the Holocaust.”
“There was no refuge for those targeted by the ‘Final Solution,’” said the open letter, which was unsigned but said it had the support of “24 of Jewish JMU Faculty, Faculty Emeriti, and Staff.”
The letter, which the school’s student newspaper The Breeze published Thursday morning, said the planning of the Holocaust event had “disrespected and disparaged Jewish individuals, dismissed Jewish participation and failed to reflect the inclusive values that JMU purports to foster.” The letter criticized the university’s decision to invite keynote speakers from other universities and the rabbi of a neighboring community to give a community address, rather than centering James Madison personnel or the local rabbi.
That rabbi, Jeffrey Kurtz-Lendner of Beth El Congregation of Harrisonburg, said the event had been planned with little to no input from Jews, and that three Jews who were added to the planning committee late in the process later resigned en masse.
In an interview, Kurtz-Lendner compared the event to “a Martin Luther King observance planned by an entire committee of white people.” He said he was joining the boycott and not encouraging his congregants, who include James Madison professors, to attend. He said the rabbi listed on the original program, from a Reform synagogue about 30 miles away in Staunton, would not attend, either.
“The program looks wholly insensitive,” he said. “Instead of being a commemoration of the Holocaust, it looks like it’s turning into an opportunity for celebration.”
That idea appeared to be rooted in the inclusion of music during the event. Maura Hametz, the Jewish chair of the university’s history department, said she had successfully argued against including instrumental music during last year’s commemoration, citing prohibitions in Jewish tradition against instrumental music in times of mourning.
“Biblically we don’t use instrumental music, as Jews,” to commemorate the Holocaust, she said. “If you use the instruments, it’s a celebration.” The proposal to include a musical interlude, she said, also had a history in “medieval church music, so that doesn’t track with what is good for us.”
The belief that Holocaust commemorations cannot include music is not universally held; some commemorations have featured music written by Jewish composers as acts of resistance or remembrance. International Holocaust Remembrance Day was created by the United Nations in 2005 as a way to mourn all victims of the Holocaust, distinct from Yom HaShoah, the Jewish holiday that takes place in April and was established by the Israeli government to commemorate specifically Jewish Holocaust victims.
Still, Hametz had made the case against music last year, so when she saw that this year’s event was again scheduled to include musical selections, she said, “It did surprise me.” She ultimately decided to boycott the event and sign the open letter.
The boycott was supported by one of the university centers sponsoring the event, the Mahatma Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence. Its director, Taimi Castle, issued a statement to the student newspaper saying the center would “spend time reflecting on how we can support the Jewish community at JMU in addressing the harm caused by these actions.”
A James Madison University spokesperson said Thursday that the event itself was still scheduled to proceed as intended that evening. The university said it had reached out to “a spokesperson for this group” of critics and planned to hold a meeting “to gain further understanding and collectively work on a path forward.”
The episode comes amid broad questions about the role of Jews in efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in universities and workplaces. Jewish critics of the emerging field of diversity, equity and inclusion have charged that antisemitism is not always treated as similarly offensive to racism or homophobia, despite also being rooted in hatred based on identity. The Jewish open letter signers also cited a recent statewide report on antisemitism in Virginia as reason to take their concerns about Jewish representation at the university seriously.
James Madison’s Holocaust Remembrance Day event was sponsored in part by the university’s equity and inclusion office, and the associate provost for inclusive strategies and equity initiatives was scheduled to deliver opening remarks and also moderate a question-and-answer session at the event’s end.
“This event is to create an opportunity for people to learn about the lived experiences of others and honor the Holocaust Remembrance Day through educational and solemn means,” Malika Carter-Hoyt, the school’s vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion, said in a statement provided to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The statement did not mention Jews or antisemitism.
Carter-Hoyt said she hadn’t received “any notice about these concerns” prior to the letter.
“I acknowledge the letter and express compassion toward the concerns outlined by faculty,” Carter-Hoyt said. But she also defended the planning and suggested that having Jews on the planning committee had not been a specific university priority.
“Committee members were selected based on substantive expertise and commitment to the creation of an event that properly marks the occasion,” she wrote. “No one was included or excluded explicitly based on a particular protected characteristic.”
James Madison University, located in Harrisonburg, is a public college with about 21,000 students. About 1,200 of them are Jewish, according to Hillel International, which offers some services on campus but does not have a building or rabbi there. Efforts to reach anyone affiliated with JMU Hillel were unsuccessful. The chapter’s vice president was listed as a participant on the evening’s program, scheduled to read a poem by Primo Levi, an Italian Holocaust survivor.
The school also does not have a Jewish studies department, despite what Hametz said had been extensive lobbying by faculty members to establish one. Alan Berger, who launched Jewish studies departments at Syracuse and Florida Atlantic universities, was billed as a keynote speaker at the event Thursday.
James Madison’s provost Heather Coltman, who was scheduled to play piano at the Holocaust memorial event and also previously worked at Florida Atlantic University, has an uneasy relationship with the school’s faculty. This week the faculty senate sought to condemn her for reportedly retaliating against the authors of a report on transparency at the school.
While there are courses taught on Jewish topics, the lack of a separate department means that Jewish representation on campus is limited, Hametz said.
“There is no spokesperson here for the Jewish community,” she said. “There’s no central voice to say, ‘Hey, why is this happening? How is it possible that you go ahead with a Holocaust event with no Jewish people on the committee?’”
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The post Alleging exclusion, Jewish faculty boycott James Madison University’s Holocaust commemoration event appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Interviews with Holocaust survivors reveal the richness of Yiddish
Many people today prize the Yiddish of native speakers who grew up in Eastern Europe before World War II, viewing it as a mark of linguistic authenticity.
As a language of daily life that millions of Jews spoke in a range of regional dialects, Yiddish had, over the centuries, become enriched with many words and idioms that were unique to a specific location.
More than 80 years after the end of the Holocaust, very few of those speakers are still around. As a result, the Yiddish they spoke is deemed precious. Thanks to a new online resource, in which dozens of Holocaust survivors talk about their lives before, during and after the war, anyone can now hear the language of that bygone era.
There are already a number of resources that document the Yiddish of these native speakers. Among the earliest examples are 28 audio recordings made by David Boder, a psychologist who traveled from the United States to Europe in 1946 to interview Holocaust survivors. He asked them about their wartime experiences in nine different languages, including Yiddish.
Another valuable source for hearing native Yiddish speakers is the Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ). In the late 1950s, linguist Uriel Weinreich launched this project, based at Columbia University, to study Yiddish dialects and folklore. Weinreich and his colleagues taped responses from over 600 European-born Yiddish speakers to a detailed survey of their language, with over 3,000 individual questions, as in, for example: “What games did you play as a child?”
One of the largest number of recordings of these Yiddish speakers can be found in the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA), launched in 1994. Based at the University of Southern California, the VHA holds almost 50,000 video interviews with Holocaust survivors. Among these recordings, which were conducted in 32 different languages, are more than 600 entirely or partially in Yiddish. Until recently, only people who had access to the VHA, mostly through university libraries, were able to listen to this trove of Yiddish speakers as they relate their life histories. Thanks to a new online resource, known as the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), anyone can now hear these interviews.
The CSYE is the brainchild of Yiddish sociolinguist Isaac Bleaman who first worked with the VHA’s Yiddish interviews for his doctoral dissertation, where he compared the Yiddish spoken in the 2010s by Hasidim and Yiddishists. Through these recordings, Bleaman was able to explore how these two contemporary forms of Yiddish developed.
After joining the faculty at Berkeley, Bleaman sought a way to make the VHA’s Yiddish interviews more accessible to both linguists and students learning the language. Eventually, he received permission from the Shoah Foundation to use some 200 of its Yiddish videos for this purpose, and in 2022 he was awarded a multiyear grant from the National Science Foundation to establish the CSYE.
Creating this online resource entails manually transcribing the interviews, which are rendered both in transliteration and in the Yiddish alphabet. This is a painstaking process that relies on skilled speakers of Yiddish as well as other languages that the survivors may have included in the interviews. The transcripts, when synced with the videos, enable users of the CSYE to search the interviews for specific terms and topics.
A database on the CSYE lists each survivor’s name, city of birth, gender, age and dialect of Yiddish (Central, Northeastern, or Southeastern). The website also features an interactive map, showing the location of each survivor’s hometown, grouped by dialect. A different map shows where the VHA interviews were recorded in the 1990s. Ranging across Europe, the Americas, Australia and Israel, they reflect the scope of the postwar Yiddish-speaking diaspora.
In this Yiddish interview, for example, Holocaust survivor Lazar Milamed talks about his childhood in a Ukrainian village, his experiences under the Nazis and his post-war life in Brooklyn.
The CSYE also offers an interactive page that enables users to generate their own word maps to explore the geographic range of words or patterns of speech.
To demonstrate how the CSYE can be used for linguistic research and for language learning, the website provides instruction on pronunciation, as well as examples of the East European Yiddish dialects (for example, which of the interviewees said nit for the word “not” vs. those who said nisht). To date, 171 interviews, totaling more than 300 hours, have been transcribed. When this process is completed, the CSYE explains on its website, it will provide public access to “the most extensive source of conversational Yiddish ever compiled,” which will “bring the voices and narratives of native Yiddish speakers into the classroom.”
For the Yiddish student, teacher and researcher, or anyone else who loves the language, the CSYE is an extraordinary resource. Listening to survivors recount their life histories is compelling, both for the experiences they recall and for the cherished language in which they speak.
The post Interviews with Holocaust survivors reveal the richness of Yiddish appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump Says US May Strike Iran Again but That Tehran Wants Deal
People walk past a mural depicting the late leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the late Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran, Iran. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the United States may need to strike Iran again and that he had been an hour away from ordering an attack before postponing it.
Trump made the comments a day after saying he had paused a planned resumption of hostilities following a new proposal by Tehran to end the US-Israeli war.
“I was an hour away from making the decision to go today,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday.
Iran‘s leaders are begging for a deal, he said, adding that a new US attack would happen in coming days if no agreement was reached.
The United States has been struggling to end the war it began with Israel nearly three months ago. Trump has previously said that a deal with Tehran was close, and similarly threatened heavy strikes on Iran if it did not reach an accord.
The US president is under intense political pressure at home to reach an accord that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz – a key route for global supplies of oil and other commodities. Gas prices remain high and Trump‘s approval rating has plummeted as congressional elections loom in November.
Oil prices settled lower on Tuesday after Vice President JD Vance said Washington and Tehran had made a lot of progress in talks and neither side wanted to see a resumption of the military campaign. “We’re in a pretty good spot here,” he said.
Speaking to reporters at a White House briefing, Vance acknowledged difficulties in negotiating with a fractured Iranian leadership. “It’s not sometimes totally clear what the negotiating position of the team is,” he said, so the US is trying to make its own red lines clear.
He also said one objective of Trump‘s policy is to prevent a nuclear arms race from spreading in the region.
IRAN PROMISES RESPONSE TO ANY NEW ATTACK
In Tehran, Ebrahim Azizi, head of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee, said on X that pausing an attack was due to Trump‘s realization that any move against Iran would mean “facing a decisive military response.”
Iranian state media said Tehran‘s latest peace proposal involves ending hostilities on all fronts including Lebanon, the exit of US forces from areas close to Iran, and reparations for destruction caused by the US-Israeli attacks.
Tehran also sought the lifting of sanctions, release of frozen funds, and an end to the US marine blockade, according to Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi as cited by IRNA news agency.
The terms as described in the Iranian reports appeared little changed from Iran‘s previous offer, which Trump rejected last week as “garbage.”
BOTH SIDES ‘CHANGING GOALPOSTS,’ SAYS PAKISTANI SOURCE
Reuters could not determine whether military preparations had been made for strikes that would mark a renewal of the war Trump started in late February.
Trump said on Monday that Washington would be satisfied if it could reach an agreement that prevented Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
A Pakistani source confirmed that Islamabad, which has conveyed messages between the sides since hosting the only round of peace talks last month, had shared the Iranian proposal with Washington.
The sides “keep changing their goalposts,” the Pakistani source said, adding, “We don’t have much time.”
CEASEFIRE MOSTLY HOLDING
The US-Israeli bombing killed thousands of people in Iran before it was suspended in a ceasefire in early April. Israel has killed thousands more and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes in Lebanon, which it invaded in pursuit of the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist group.
Iranian strikes on Israel and neighboring Gulf states have killed dozens of people.
The Iran ceasefire has mostly held, although drones have lately been launched from Iraq towards Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, apparently by Iran and its allies.
The US seized an Iran-linked oil tanker in the Indian Ocean overnight, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing three US officials. The tanker, known as the Skywave, was sanctioned by the US in March for its role in transporting Iranian oil, the report said.
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said they launched the war to curb Iran‘s support for regional militias, dismantle its nuclear program, destroy its missile capabilities, and create conditions for Iranians to topple their rulers.
But the war has yet to deprive Iran of its stockpile of near-weapons-grade enriched uranium or its ability to threaten neighbors with missiles, drones, and proxy militias.
The Islamic Republic’s clerical leadership, which had faced a mass uprising at the start of the year, withstood the superpower onslaught with no sign of organized opposition.
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Somaliland Says It Will Open an Embassy in Jerusalem, Israel to Reciprocate
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar meets with Somaliland President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi on Jan. 6, 2026. Photo: Screenshot
Somaliland, a self-declared republic in East Africa, will set up an embassy in Jerusalem soon, its ambassador said on Tuesday, after Israel became the first country to formally recognize it as an independent and sovereign state.
In turn, Israel is expected to set up an embassy in Somaliland‘s capital Hargeisa, Ambassador Mohamed Hagi said in a post on X.
Somaliland, which has claimed independence for decades but remains largely unrecognized, is situated on the southern coast of the Gulf of Aden and bordered by Djibouti to the northwest, Ethiopia to the south and west, and Somalia to the south and east. It has sought to break off from Somalia since 1991 and utilized its own passports, currency, military, and law enforcement.
Unlike most states in its region, Somaliland has relative security, regular elections, and a degree of political stability.
Last month, Israel appointed Michael Lotem as its first ambassador to Somaliland, after the two governments formally established full diplomatic relations.
Lotem, who was serving as a non-resident economic ambassador to Africa at the time of his appointment, will now shift to work as a non-resident ambassador to Somaliland. He previously served as Israel’s ambassador to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, and Seychelles, a position he concluded in August.
Israel recognized Somaliland as an independent and sovereign state in December, a move Somalia rejected and termed a “deliberate attack” on its sovereignty.
Over the years, Somalia has rallied international actors against any country recognizing Somaliland.
The former British protectorate hopes that recognition by Israel will encourage other nations to follow suit, increasing its diplomatic heft and access to international markets.
Israel‘s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on Tuesday that the opening of the embassy in Jerusalem would be another significant step in strengthening relations with Somaliland. Once opened, the Somaliland embassy would be the eighth embassy in Jerusalem, he said.
Most countries maintain their embassies in Israel in Tel Aviv, although the United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem during President Donald Trump’s first administration. Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and a small number of other countries have also established embassies there.
Israel considers all of Jerusalem to be its capital. However, Palestinians seek East Jerusalem, where the holiest sites in Judaism are located, as the capital of a future state.