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Antisemitic attack against school bus reported in Chicago media didn’t happen, Jewish school says
(JTA) – Chicago Jews were alarmed Thursday as local news outlets reported that a bus full of Jewish schoolchildren had been the victim of antisemitic harassment.
Police were investigating after a group of adults had forced the bus to stop, made their way on board, and then delivered a “Heil Hitler” salute, according to the reports, which appeared in a wide array of Chicago outlets, including the Tribune and Sun-Times newspapers.
The story unnerved parents and triggered outcry among Chicagoans worried about rising crime and antisemitism at an especially tense time for American Jews.
But it wasn’t true, according to the CEO of the school whose students were involved.
“This is the definition of a fake story,” Rabbi Menachem Levine, the head of Joan Dachs Bais Yaakov – Yeshivas Tiferes Tzvi elementary school in West Rogers Park, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Friday. “I literally had a media incident for nothing.”
The saga raises questions about how antisemitism watchdogs call attention to the incidents that American Jews report. The story landed in the papers through the advocacy of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which sent a press release Thursday noting that the incident took place on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom that marked a turning point in the Nazis’ campaign against the Jews of Europe.
The center had been contacted by a Chicago parent whose child reported that a man had made a Nazi salute during a conflict with the children on his bus. The parent also filed a report with the Chicago Police Department.
What actually happened, Levine said, was unnerving but not antisemitic. According to a video of the incident which he said he reviewed, the elementary school-aged kids had been calling out of the school bus at a group of men on the street, saying they looked like they were “mafia guys.” One of the men flagged down the bus, and the bus driver, acting against protocol, opened the door; the man then yelled an expletive at the kids, warning them to “watch what you say.”
While this was happening, Levine said, “the kids are laughing their heads off. They think it’s this hysterical thing.” Levine said he couldn’t share the video with the media because students’ faces are visible, but that he had also spoken to the students involved to confirm their accounts.
Afterward, however, one of the students reported to their parent that they had seen one of the men performing a Nazi salute; none of the other witnesses recalled such an act taking place. The parent, in turn, filed a police report and contacted the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which has played a prominent role in responding to multiple high-profile instances of antisemitism.
The organization reported the parent’s account of the incident to the media while linking it to the high-profile rise in antisemitism reported across the country.
“The Simon Wiesenthal Center is urging anyone with information about the anti-Semitic incident to contact the Chicago PD or the Midwest offices of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,” Alison Pure Slovin, the group’s Midwest director, said in the release.
The release led to a flurry of news reports that quickly circulated among Chicago’s Jewish community, which is centered on the north side of the city, where the incident took place, and in its northern suburbs. It ignited fear among families already on edge because of national incidents and reports about harassment of Orthodox Jews in New York City.
“We plan to send our kids to Jewish schools, and this is the biggest fear — things like this happening,” said Rebecca Finkel, a mother who lives within a 10-minute drive of the reported incident. “I’m the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. And in my mind, it’s not a question of if these things can happen, but which generation is going to be most impacted.”
All that left Levine, whose campus is the largest Jewish elementary school in the Midwest, in the position of trying to play catch up against what he said was a false news story as it spread rapidly through local and national outlets.
In an email to parents, he emphasized that “there was no antisemitic, threatening or racist behavior in the occurrence,” and continued, “We know there has been an increase in antisemitism recently, and we are all concerned about this. However, this occurrence was not one of antisemitism; the spread of misinformation is simply due to irresponsible reporting.”
Reached for contact, Slovin, the midwest director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told JTA that the center had relied on the parent’s report when they made their “statement of concern” to the media. (Most outlets that reported on the incident relied almost entirely on the center’s statement.)
She said she had spoken to two parents who filed police reports and also spoke to multiple police officers who were investigating the allegations. It is typical for officers to investigate reports of violence or harassment that are filed.
Slovin added that the Chicago PD told her organization that the incident was being investigated as a hate crime, but she acknowledged that the school itself “do[es] not believe it was antisemitic in nature.” The center had not retracted its press release on Friday.
While Levine said the center does “good work,” he said their handling of the bus incident was “highly irresponsible” and “a ‘boy who cried wolf’ case.”
The grandson of four Polish Holocaust survivors, Levine said that if there ever were an antisemitic incident at the school that required his attention, “I’ll be the first one to scream it out.” But he said he does worry that the false reports of the bus incident could encourage “one nutcase to read this and say, ‘Oh, I’ll show them real antisemitism’ — that’s all we need.”
Finkel, too, said she was concerned about the ramifications of a false report of antisemitism at a time when multiple indicators suggest that incidents targeting Jews are rising. The reports from her city broke during the “Never Is Now” conference organized by the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights group that last year tallied more incidents of antisemitism in the United States than in any year since it began publishing annual counts in 1979.
“Antisemitism is so real and so dangerous and so pervasive,” Finkel said. “We don’t need to fabricate anything — we can rely on the truth to ask for allyship and to fight it in our own community. The truth is scary enough.”
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The post Antisemitic attack against school bus reported in Chicago media didn’t happen, Jewish school says appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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After drawing BDS backlash, progressive Jewish writer Peter Beinart apologizes for speaking at Tel Aviv U
(JTA) — Peter Beinart began his first social media post after his latest speaking engagement with an apology.
“By speaking earlier this week at Tel Aviv University, I made a serious mistake,” the progressive Jewish writer posted on X, a day after a scheduled appearance at the Israeli school.
The morning before, he had defended his plans, saying he saw “value in speaking to Israelis about Israel’s crimes.” Now, he said, “I let my desire for that conversation override my solidarity with Palestinians, who in the face of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide have asked the world boycott Israeli institutions that are complicit in their oppression.”
Beinart’s apology came in the face of steep criticism from some on the anti-Israel left, where Beinart has long been one of the most prominent Jewish voices. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, a founding member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, publicly and privately called on Beinart to cancel his talk, and he endured a bruising volley of castigation online.
Emphasizing that he had not been paid for his speech, Beinart said he had been motivated by wanting to influence Israeli Jews as he said he had with American Jews “with whom I strongly disagree, both to listen and in hopes of changing their minds.” But he said he had come to understand that he could have done that without speaking at an Israeli university, and that he had erred by not consulting Palestinians when making his plans.
“It’s embarrassing to admit such a serious mistake,” Beinart wrote. “I dearly wish I had not made this one, which has caused particular harm because international pressure is crucial to ensuring Palestinian freedom. This was a failure of judgment. I am sorry.”
PACBI did not publicly respond to Beinart’s apology. But the mea culpa ignited a wave of criticism of its own from Jewish and pro-Israel voices who said it typified an absolutist ethos in the progressive pro-Palestinian movement that they have long denounced.
“The dynamics of the radical left, especially the American one (which draws on puritanical patterns) demonstrated here include social pressure, incessant border-drawing, threats of boycotts, repeated demands to confess sins, and the perception of confession as a submission that redeems the guilty from the fate of traitors to the revolution,” tweeted the Israeli scholar Tomer Persico, who is currently on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. “This is a political-social space that is purist to the point of self-destruction.”
An Israeli trauma psychologist said Beinart’s apology reflected a stance she had seen before from abused women or people trapped in cults. “They start treating ordinary acts of agency — talking to someone outside the circle or forming a judgment on their own — as betrayals that must be confessed,” wrote Orli Peter in a widely viewed post. “This isn’t moral clarity; it’s fear wearing the mask of conscience.”
Some said Beinart’s apology landed in a historical pattern in which Jews who have sought to ally themselves with antisemitic movements are cast out themselves, sometimes with mortal consequences.
“No Jew is ever good enough for the Jew-hater,” tweeted the Scottish Jewish pundit Ben Freeman. “The goal posts are always moved. The Jew is always left begging for acceptance. They are the ultimate parvenu. Always seeking approval, never gaining it. A Jewish tragedy if ever there was one.”
Some moderate pro-Palestinian voices also weighed in critically. “This is truly embarrassing and deeply self-deprecatory behavior,” tweeted Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Gazan emigre who is critical of much of contemporary pro-Palestinian activism and who himself spoke to an Israeli news organization this week.
“Asking for forgiveness because you spoke to Israeli students who belong to your tribe, are your people, and part of your community is not going to make you more liked, accepted, or embraced by the rabid elements of the ‘pro-Palestine’ movement and the BDS cultists who have long stopped viewing their efforts as a tactic and devolved into demonizing Jews, Israelis, and Zionists as the actual end goal,” Alkhatib added.
Before his apology, Beinart had spoken to a number of Tel Aviv students, including some who attended because they disagree with his views on Israel. Gabi Schiller, a social media activist who has worked at the pro-Israel advocacy group StandWithUs, wrote that some of her Tel Aviv University classmates had spoken with Beinart after his talk to challenge him on his ideas, including his promotion of a one-state solution.
“Putting aside the content of what they discussed, what took place in that moment was inherently valuable, despite how much I oppose Beinart’s stances: the exchange of opinion and ideas in an academic space in a respectful way,” Schiller wrote on Instagram, where she posts under the account name Yehudim Omrim. The experience, she said, was “increasingly impossible on North American campuses around domestic politics and certainly around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where anti-normalization has become the new litmus test to be permitted into social spaces.”
The post After drawing BDS backlash, progressive Jewish writer Peter Beinart apologizes for speaking at Tel Aviv U appeared first on The Forward.
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The gift Tom Stoppard gave to me — and to all who adore him
In 2022, during a reporting trip to London, I had tea with a source who confessed to me that her mother’s central interest was the work of Tom Stoppard. It was more than an interest, really: “He was the main thing in her life,” she said.
There are artists you admire, and then there are artists you flat-out adore. Particularly cerebral types, like Stoppard, risk falling into the first category: They may generate great thoughts, but those great thoughts have a great chance of leaving you cold. That wasn’t the case for Stoppard, who died Saturday at 88, and was a thinker worth adoring. His best work achieved a rare balance: Audiences left his most affecting plays with both a fresh perspective on the world, and a feeling of great warmth toward it.
I felt that myself, after seeing a much-heralded revival of Stoppard’s Travesties on Broadway in 2018. It’s quite a highbrow play, about the brief intersection, in Switzerland during World War I, of the lives and work of James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Tristan Tzara, founder of Dadaism. It made me laugh until I cried. And the gloss Stoppard bestowed on this obscure episode of history followed me out of the theater, giving a brief sheen to everything and everyone I saw. I felt as though I floated back to Brooklyn, and as if the Q train might be full of personalities I’d never guess were important until years afterward.
Much of Stoppard’s work revolved around the question of what it really means to live an important life — one that is not just full, but has some kind of identifiable impact on others. The main character of Travesties isn’t Joyce, Lenin or Tzara; he’s an endearingly self-satisfied British diplomat, Henry Carr, who briefly found himself in the same circles as those luminaries. As the play opens, decades later, he’s trying to conjure up a memoir about his time in the presence of the greats, with the implication that he deserves to be considered among their ranks.
In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the play that made Stoppard into a star at age 29, the two title characters grapple with their inability to in any way change the course of a narrative — that of Hamlet — that they know will lead to their deaths. In Shakespeare in Love, the film that won Stoppard an Oscar in 1998, he and his coauthor Marc Norman imagined the king of English playwrights as a young man full of talent but still struggling toward greatness, in need of an overwhelming emotional shock to propel him into complete ownership of his gifts.
There are the 19th-century Russian revolutionaries of the ambitious trilogy The Coast of Utopia; the intellectuals seeking to redefine the world and its history in Arcadia; the striving academics of The Hard Problem; the newly emancipated Viennese Jews of Leopoldstadt, the play Stoppard wrote that most profoundly invoked his heritage. Over and over, variations of the same question emerge. What does it mean to live completely and well, as an individual and a member of society?
“If there is any meaning in any of it” — “it” being the brutal course of history, its neverending cycles of destruction — “it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities,” Joyce declares in Travesties. Later, Carr echoes him — a surprise, as the two hold very little respect for one another. When told that the only relevant function of art is “social criticism,” he protests.
“A great deal of what we call art,” he says, “has no such function, and yet in some way it gratifies a hunger that is common to princes and peasants.”
Not everyone wants to be an artist, and, as Carr reflects at the end of Travesties, it’s a sure thing that not everyone can be. But in the wake of Stoppard’s death, I’ve found myself thinking about the mother of my one-time source, so enraptured by what Stoppard created that her own child saw his work as the most profound passion of her life.
It’s easy to say that kind of effect made Stoppard’s life important. But the quieter story, I think, is that it made that devoted fan’s life important, too. Because she loved Stoppard, she saw herself as more firmly secured in her own existence; she saw herself as having a purpose and place.
To help someone experience their own significance — to gratify the common hunger that afflicts us all — is a great gift. And Stoppard gave it to many, including to me.
The post The gift Tom Stoppard gave to me — and to all who adore him appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran to Boycott World Cup Draw Over Visa Restrictions
Soccer Football – World Cup Playoff Tournament and European Playoff draws – FIFA Headquarters, Zurich, Switzerland- November 20, 2025 The original FIFA World Cup trophy is kept on display during the draws. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
Iran intends to boycott next week’s World Cup draw due to the limited number of visas allocated to the country’s football federation.
According to the Tehran Times, the United States issued visas to only four members of Iran‘s delegation, with requests for three additional visas denied, including one for Iranian Football Federation (FFIRI) President Mehdi Taj.
“We have informed FIFA that the decisions taken are unrelated to sport and that the members of the Iranian delegation will not participate in the World Cup draw,” FFIRI spokesman Mehdi Alavi said on Friday, per the report.
Alavi said the federation has been in contact with FIFA in an effort to resolve the situation.
The World Cup draw will take place on Dec. 5 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
The expanded 48-team World Cup is being hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico from June 11 to July 19, 2026. Matches will be played at 16 venues, including three in Mexico and two in Canada.
The draw will sort the teams into 12 groups of four. The top two teams from each group and the eight best third-place teams will advance to the knockout stage.
Iran has secured a spot in its fourth consecutive World Cup and seventh appearance overall.