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As Israel turns 75, we should celebrate by fighting for it to live up to its ideals
(JTA) — I spent July 4, 2017, at Trump Tower protesting the ban on travel from Muslim countries, enacted earlier that year. For me, standing side by side with Muslim, Christian and other faith leaders to fight discrimination was the best possible way to celebrate America’s independence.
This month, Israel marks the monumental occasion of its 75th anniversary. There is much to celebrate: The establishment of the State of Israel is, without doubt, one of the greatest accomplishments of the Jewish people in the last century. The country has provided safety for millions of Jews fleeing oppression, helped revive Hebrew language and culture, and allowed Jews access to our most sacred historical sites.
And there is much to mourn and protest, beginning with the 56-year-old occupation that violates the human rights of Palestinians every single day; the ongoing discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel, Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews, asylum seekers and foreign workers; and, this year, the all-out attack on democracy perpetuated by the current government.
For the last four months, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been in the street every week protesting the efforts by the current government to eliminate the power of the High Court to serve as a check on legislation that violates Israel’s Basic Laws, the closest thing the country has to a constitution. And yet the response by too much of the American Jewish community has been more or less business as usual. While many legacy organizations have issued tepid statements criticizing attempts to destroy the judiciary, these groups have not rallied American Jews to actively oppose this coup or taken actions that would put direct pressure on the Israeli government.
Following President Donald Trump’s inauguration, millions of Americans took to the street — many for the first time — to protest his administration’s attacks on democratic institutions and on immigrants and minorities. We did so not out of hatred for the United States, but rather out of love, and out of a commitment to build a multiracial, multifaith, multiethnic democracy for the future.
Those of us who care about the future of Israel, and who dream of a state rooted in democracy and human rights, must mark this 75th anniversary by fighting for that vision.
This anniversary comes at an inflection point for the country’s democracy. What happens this year will determine whether Israel has a chance at living up to the values enshrined in its declaration of independence, or whether it becomes a fascist theocracy that codifies discrimination against women, LGBTQ people, Palestinian citizens and other minorities and that permanently occupies another people.
On Sunday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Knesset Member Simcha Rothman, the architect of the judiciary coup, will address the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly meeting in Israel – despite calls from Israeli Jews for JFNA to cancel their appearance. Many Jewish communities have announced Yom Haatzmaut plans that pretend that nothing is amiss — falafel, Israeli music and dancing, and celebratory visits to Israel. And in June, the Celebrate Israel parade — which bans any political signs — will proceed down New York City’s Fifth Avenue as though nothing is amiss.
I also love a good falafel, but this moment calls for much more.
Since the new Israeli government took power, I have stood on the street in New York and Washington, D.C., with hundreds of Israeli Americans and American Jews who came out to protest Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich speaking at an Israel Bonds dinner, the (temporary, as it turns out) firing of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and the ongoing attacks on the High Court. As someone who has been working for human rights in Israel for decades, I am thrilled to see more and more American and Israeli Jews join these protests.
But we have not yet seen a call to the streets from most of our legacy organizations or synagogues. Nor has JFNA altered its regular General Assembly programming to instead take 3,000 American Jews into the streets of Tel Aviv — or even host protest organizers or civil society leaders, rather than the leaders of the coup.
Why are American Jews so terrified to protest Israeli actions, even when the country is being taken over by people whose values are anathema to most of ours?
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an influential and prophetic 20th-century Jewish thinker, warned of the danger that the nascent state of Israel would become an object of worship. “The state fulfills an essential need of the individual and the national community,” he wrote, “but it does not thereby acquire intrinsic value — except for a fascist who regards sovereignty, governmental authority, and power as supreme values.” In a 1991 lecture, he went so far as to call any religious Jews who supported occupation and settlement “descendants of the worshippers of the Golden Calf, who proclaimed ‘this is your God, Israel.’ A calf doesn’t necessarily need to be golden; it can also be a people, a land, or a state.”
In Israel, the religious settler movement that Leibowitz disparaged three decades ago now runs the state, and — as he warned — its agenda puts the occupation of land first, and the treatment of people second.
Many Jews in the United States find it hard to see that reality because the State of Israel has become an object of worship, rather than a real country where real people live, and where fascist-leaning politicians are working to fundamentally change its government and culture into something unrecognizable and dangerous. American Jewish conversations about Israel too often become conversations about Jewish identity, a slippery slope that makes it easy for criticisms of the State of Israel — a political entity subject to international human rights standards — to be misinterpreted as attacks on Jews more generally. It is easier to celebrate a fantasy with no hard edges than deal with the reality of a beloved, but flawed state.
According to the Torah, Abraham was 75 when he left his parents’ house and set out on his own. At 75, Israel is a strong, modern country, more than able to stand on its own on the international stage and healthy enough for vibrant debate about its future. Real celebration of Israel demands fighting for it to live up to the highest ideals of democracy, dignity and human rights for all.
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She claims she saw Hitler’s ashes and danced with Goering. But is any of it true?
Hitler and My Mother-in-Law
By Terese Svoboda
O/R Books, 416 pages, $23.00
Patricia Hartwell had many stories from her time as a correspondent for the US Office of War Information. Once, she said, she took a picture with Adolf Hitler’s ashes so American citizens would see that the war was over. It’s a thrilling tale, but nobody knows if it’s true.
The mystery surrounding this photo — where it is, if the ashes were actually Hitler’s, whether there even was a picture — takes center stage in Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, a lengthy memoir by author Terese Svoboda.
As a correspondent for the US Office of War Information during World War II, Hartwell was the first female reporter to arrive at Dachau and Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. She also pocketed several of Hermann Goering’s medals. Well-researched, engaging, and occasionally cringe-inducing in its depiction of awkward interactions between Svoboda and Hartwell, the book paints Hartwell as a woman who was both morally dubious and undeniably impressive.
Svoboda, author of the novels Cannibal and Dog on Fire, has plenty of reasons not to believe her mother-in-law, who died in 1998 at age 82. She lied in an oral history of Hawaii’s State Foundation on Culture and the Arts about being accepted into Harvard Law School in 1936, even though women weren’t admitted there until 1950. She claimed several times to have been close friends with Eleanor Roosevelt and that she was invited to stay in the White House on occasion. No records of such a relationship with the former-First Lady exist.
While Svoboda doesn’t hold back her criticisms of her mother-in-law — and she has plenty — the memoir does not demonize her. Instead, Svoboda attempts to understand her mother-in-law’s penchant for embellishment in the context of the patriarchal society in which she lived, one that forced impressive women to be quiet about their achievements. Maybe struggling so long for recognition led Hartwell to feel the need to exaggerate her life story.
The book does not just explore the lies Hartwell told others but also the ones she told herself, such as refusing to believe that her second husband, Dickson Hartwell, a World War II veteran and fellow journalist, beat her children.
And yet among all the falsehoods, there are known facts about Hartwell’s life that seem stranger than the ones she invented. During the Allied occupation of Germany, Hartwell served briefly as the mayor of Berchtesgaden, a resort town where Hitler and other Nazi leaders vacationed. She got to see a collection of looted art recovered from Goering — and picked out a painting to take home. Apparently it wasn’t unusual for members of the American press and military to take souvenirs, no matter how heinous their origin story.
The piece, one of Lucas Cranach’s many versions of “Cupid Complaining to Venus,” was one of Hitler’s favorites. Nearly two decades after Hartwell brought it back to New York, Dickson sold the painting, apparently without her permission, to E. A. Silberman Galleries in order to purchase a small newspaper in Arizona. The Jewish-owned art firm then sold the painting to the National Gallery of London for over a hundred times more than what they bought it for.
Hartwell also claimed to have danced with Goering at a party that the American soldiers held the night of his arrest. According to some reports, rather than punishing Goering, the military fraternized with him. Based on her own archival research, Svoboda determines this claim to be plausible.
Why, Svoboda wonders, would Hartwell “want to boast of not only meeting the second most evil Nazi, but dancing with him?” If it’s a lie, it’s one that seems to work against its teller. If it’s the truth, it’s one most people would probably like to keep hidden. To some, whether it’s fiction or not may not be important. But Svoboda contends that to those who want to understand the type of person Hartwell was, the truth behind this story is crucial.
Although Svoboda remembers seeing the photo of Hartwell with Hitler’s ashes, it never resurfaced after the woman’s death. According to Svoboda’s husband, Hartwell’s oldest son, the ashes were not Hitler’s, just a random pile picked for a posed photo to mark the end of the war. No matter who — or what — the ashes belonged to, it’s the power behind the story, one of a fallen dictatorship, that mattered. And Hartwell clearly understood the power of stories.
The post She claims she saw Hitler’s ashes and danced with Goering. But is any of it true? appeared first on The Forward.
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How ‘Spiritually Israeli’ became a slur that isn’t really about Israel
Once upon a time — which is to say, not recently — Israel had a reputation in the West as an underdog. This, combined with its gold-star management of its international image, a practice known as hasbara, led to a perception of the Jewish nation as a scrappy fighter that triumphed over its bullies, the Arab nations that flank each of its borders. Later, Israeli PR successfully marketed Tel Aviv as a gay mecca to prove its character as a progressive leader, and its success in technology to paint the country as the “Start-up Nation.”
Since Oct. 7, this has changed entirely. Now, Israel, not its Arab neighbors, is widely portrayed as the bully. And this association goes so deep that posters online have begun to bring up Israel outside of any context relating to the war, international politics or anything Jewish. In the current parlance, “spiritually Israeli” has taken hold as a catch-all pejorative.
Take, for example, the World Series. The Los Angeles Dodgers — if you’re not a baseball fan, they just won the World Series — are, this year, the spendiest team in the game, known for hoarding wealth and amassing the best players. Other sports impose salary caps to try to keep the playing field relatively equal, and the games more compelling. Not baseball. (It does levy luxury taxes on teams that spend a lot — but, if you’re already paying your star player $700 million, you just pay the tax, too.)
Which means that the Dodgers’ win was not exactly widely celebrated outside of Los Angeles. “Never forget it’s fuck the Dodgers, fuck Israel and fuck ICE forever,” reads one popular tweet on the game. The Dodgers, as several posts put it, are “spiritually Israeli.” Yet another post referred to the team as the “Tel Aviv Dodgers.”
To be clear: The team has no Israelis. The posters don’t mean the team has a partnership with Tel Aviv, or that any of the players are Jewish. They partially mean the team is punching down. And they mostly mean it’s lame to support a team that seemed nearly guaranteed to win.
“Spiritually Israeli” and its ilk are far from the first anti-Israel slang to pop up in the past two years. Various pejoratives like “Isn’treal” and “Israhell” have been common for years, and gained traction after Oct. 7. Long before the “Hot Girls for Cuomo” and “Hot Girls for Zohran” battle arose in the New York City mayoral battle, there were influencers posting thirst traps captioned: “#freepalestine.” In short, Israel is becoming deeply uncool.
This is all, of course, just the internet. Israel still has the support of the vast majority of U.S. political leaders, for example, who probably don’t keep track of which influencer is posting what about Israel, much less what outfit they were wearing when they did so.
On the other hand, the internet is where much of culture is manufactured today. And however intangible they may be, language and slang do matter reveals societal currents.
Meme encyclopedia Know Your Meme says “spiritually Israeli” is used to call things “culturally empty.” It’s possible to see this as a rebrand of “rootless cosmopolitanism,” an antisemitic idea used to condemn Jews as a corrupting influence on European society. And that is part of the term’s meaning. But really, in practice, it’s used to describe things that are extremely corporate, too big to fail.
Israel is no longer seen as the underdog. And support for Israel in mainstream arenas — politics, government, some media — is why it has become increasingly, well, unsexy to support the nation. Are you excited about your bank? Or your local Safeway? Just like it’s lame for Starbucks to be your favorite coffee shop instead of somewhere local, or it’s basic to love Taylor Swift instead of a niche musician, it has become cringe to love Israel.
But only among a certain crowd; the people using “spiritually Israeli” are, generally, cultivating an aesthetic of hipsterdom. In practice, though, most people love corporate things; that’s how they got so big. At least one major TikToker built her entire brand on being excited about drinking her daily Starbucks. And Taylor Swift is, of course, one of the most successful pop singers of our time. Israel doesn’t need to be cool to thrive.
So however “spiritually Israeli” it might be, people will continue to like what they like — even if it’s the L.A. Dodgers.
The post How ‘Spiritually Israeli’ became a slur that isn’t really about Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump takes aim at Jews who vote for Zohran Mamdani, calling them ‘stupid’
As voters took to the polls across New York City on Tuesday, President Donald Trump renewed his attacks on mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani and the Jewish voters backing him.
“Any Jewish person that votes for Zohran Mamdani, a proven and self professed JEW HATER, is a stupid person!!!,” wrote Trump in a post on Truth Social Tuesday morning.
Trump’s critical comments about Jewish voters casting their ballots for Mamdani, who has drawn sharp criticism from Jewish leaders for his rhetoric about Israel, were not his first.
Last month, Trump told reporters at a press conference with Argentinian President Javier Milei that Mamdani was a “communist” who “hates Jewish people and yet he’s got Jewish people supporting him.”
Recent polls have suggested that more Jews in the city are planning to vote for Gov. Andrew Cuomo than Mamdani. But Mamdani has significant support from Jewish voters, too, including some who have campaigned hard for him.
Trump’s comments echo those he made about Jews who were voting against him in last year’s presidential election, when he said any Jew who votes for Democrats “hates their religion.”
Trump also took to Truth Social Monday night to endorse Cuomo and suggest that he would retaliate against a Mamdani-run New York. “If Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the Election for Mayor of New York City, it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required,” he wrote.
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