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At the Venice Biennale, protests, self-mutilation and rage against Israel and Russia. Is anyone left to talk about the art?
Belu-Simion Fainaru wanted very badly to talk about the water.
The Romanian-born Israeli artist had come to Venice with “Rose of Nothingness,” a quiet, ritualistic installation in Israel’s temporary pavilion at the Arsenale: water dripping into a rectangular black pool in a silent corner of the city’s former armory and shipyard, disturbing the stillness of the reflective surface, inviting visitors to focus on the movement from absence to presence — and back again to nothing.
There’s an explicit link to Paul Celan, above all to “black milk,” the central image of the German-speaking Romanian-Jewish poet’s “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), one of his best-known works. The pool, with its dozens of circular ripples, evokes collective memory, ink and writing in the city where the Talmud was first printed.
Yet by the time I reached Fainaru during the professional preview of the 61st Venice Biennale, he had been forced to defend his art’s right to exist. The Israeli Pavilion had become one of the pressure points of an exhibition that seemed to be losing faith in the structure that had sustained it for more than a century: the national pavilion, that quaintly anachronistic yet oddly durable relic of late 19th century world’s-fair patriotism. Fainaru had been asked, he told me, about Benjamin Netanyahu, The Hague, Vladimir Putin and Gaza, but rarely about the work he had come to Venice to present.
“You are a cultural reporter; I am an artist,” he said. He had not come here as a politician, but this year’s Biennale had treated him as one.
“What I see now,” the 66-year-old artist said, “is total politicization of art.” If this continued, he warned, art would become “very limited, very narrow,” and eventually “a very violent arena.”
The phrase stayed with me throughout the preview. This year, the Biennale has indeed become a violent, chaotic and scandal-ridden arena. There were barricades, strikes, legal warnings, shuttered pavilions, the resignation of the Golden Lion jury, and art performances and actions meant to disquiet and to shock.
L’Esposizione internazionale d’arte di Venezia was founded in 1895. It is now the most prestigious international contemporary art exhibition in the world, although it still bears traces from the era in which it was born, an age of imperial prestige and competitive cultural display. The Giardini, with its permanent national houses (owned by the countries they represent), is not merely a garden. It is a geopolitical map of cultural power and prestige.
This year, it often looked like that map was being torn up before the spectators’ eyes.
The Biennale’s 2026 exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” opened to the public on May 9 and runs through Nov. 22. It was conceived by the late Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh and completed after her death, with 110 invited participants in the central exhibition representing 100 countries. But when I attended, the curatorial project masterminded by Kouoh and implemented by her assistants was eclipsed by a series of interlocking controversies: the participation of Israel and Russia; a €50 million gift to secure Qatar’s arrival in the Giardini with a temporary structure built on the site of a future permanent pavilion; Iran’s last-minute withdrawal; and the anger and bewilderment directed at the American pavilion due to the global havoc the Trump administration is only too happy to unleash.
The Israeli Pavilion was not in its permanent building in the Giardini this year. That structure, built in 1952 by Zeev Rechter, remained closed, officially for renovation. (The pavilion also remained shut during the previous Biennale, in 2024; Ruth Patir, the artist representing Israel that year, installed her work but refused to open the pavilion until a ceasefire and hostage-release agreement was reached).
I had been told about sizable protests outside the temporary Israeli pavilion at the Arsenale, but by the time I arrived, all was calm. Two young carabinieri stood outside looking bored. Inside, I thought I spotted a plainclothes Israeli security guard, though the curators later denied that any such person was present. During my interview with Fainaru and his curators, Rabbi Ramy Banin of Chabad of Venice stopped by; he had supplied the klafim, the handwritten parchment scrolls, for the oversized black mezuzot, engraved with a stylized שַׁדַּי, that Fainaru had designed for the installation.
Fainaru was plainly relieved to be asked about the work. His installation is built around an Israeli irrigation system — technology devised to deliver water in places where it is scarce. In agriculture, he told me, such systems are used “to bring life in places that are not life.” In Venice, he had transformed that apparatus into “food for a spiritual dimension.”
The title, “Rose of Nothingness,” points to Celan’s evocative neologism Die Niemandsrose (“The No-One’s Rose”), the title of a 1963 volume that he dedicated to Osip Mandelstam as well as to the Kabbalistic understanding of nothingness not as nihilism but as a generative source.
“The origin comes from nothingness,” Fainaru told me. Presence emerges from absence; the visible world returns to abstraction.
This isn’t Fainaru’s first Biennale. In 2019, he represented Romania, a country he left in 1973. He won the Israel Prize in 2025 and is a professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Haifa. He is a founder of the Mediterranean Biennale, which showcases works by artists from Europe, the Middle East and Northern Africa; its most recent edition was held in Sakhnin, an Arab city in Israel, where he also helped create the Arab Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s impossible to read Fainaru’s résumé and conclude that he’s a lackey of the Netanyahu government.
Avital Bar-Shay, one of the two curators of the Israeli Pavilion, took me aside and told me many Jewish visitors had come inside and said “Kol hakavod,” telling the team they were proud that Israel was exhibiting. Some spoke of antisemitism in London and other cities that have seen an uptick in violence against Jews since the start of the Israel-Gaza war. “They said, ‘You are giving us courage,’” she recalled. For those visitors, the pavilion was not an assertion of Israeli power, hard or soft. Rather, it was a modest sign that Israeli and Jewish cultural presence had not been expelled from the international stage.
The evening I arrived in Venice, I met a Turkish curator who told me he had spearheaded a “massive demonstration” in front of the Israeli Pavilion earlier that day. Fainaru disputed the scale of the protest. “There were perhaps 30 or 40 people shouting loudly” and shaming those who entered the pavilion. “The majority wants to see art,” he asserted, adding that he found attempts to cancel progressive Israeli artists, like the filmmaker Amos Gitai (whom he called a friend) and him not only wrong but counterproductive.
“We totally are against boycotts, not just against Israel, but against any other countries,” he said. “Artist or scientist or academics. And I think we should strive to live in a better world, not a world of dispersion, of hate and exclusion. I mean, there’s enough violence in our world. We have to keep art as an open space for dialogue.”
Though I didn’t doubt Fainaru’s sincerity, I wondered what led him to accept the unenviable job of being Israel’s art ambassador at this point in time. Was it naiveté? Defiance? Although I am staunchly opposed to banning, cancelling and boycotting artists on the basis of nationality, it also strikes me as disingenuous to claim that the Israeli Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale is just another gallery space.
Fainaru’s display is the official Israeli representation during a war whose devastation in Gaza has become, for many in the world — and especially in the art world — the defining moral scandal of our time. Whether one calls Israel’s conduct genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes or massacre, no honest account can defend the scale of destruction.
When I asked Fainaru whether he would also defend the participation of artists from Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia or Qatar, he said yes. Artists from authoritarian or repressive countries, he argued, belong here. “The artists have the right to expose and to try to keep a dialogue with other cultures,” he said. “That’s the meaning of Venice Biennale.”
Clearly, many saw the situation differently.
On Friday, May 8, the final day of the professional preview, a strike for Palestine and workers’ rights brought much of the Biennale to a grinding halt. Roughly a third of the national pavilions were partially or fully shut and some works in the central exhibition were removed from display or covered. Beginning at 4:30 p.m., hundreds — possibly thousands — marched along Via Garibaldi toward the Arsenale with Palestinian flags and banners that read “No artwashing. No genocide pavilion.”
Watching the parade wind its way down the Fondamenta Arsenale, hearing their slogans and reading their signs hammered home the extent to which Gaza has become a devastating emblem of the failure of the liberal postwar order, where international law is invoked yet ignored and American power underwrites destruction, while other nations, especially in Europe, oscillate between guilt and paralysis.
Even before it opened, this year’s Biennale was overshadowed by politics. On April 23, the five-member Golden Lion jury announced that it would not consider pavilions and artists representing countries whose leaders were charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, a position that effectively rendered Russia and Israel ineligible. In response, Fainaru issued legal warnings to the Biennale, the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Italian prime minister’s office alleging antisemitism and nationality-based discrimination after the jury’s initial decision. According to the online art magazine Hyperallergic, the Biennale’s legal department warned jurors they could be personally liable for damages to Fainaru in the event of a dispute.
On April 30, nine days before the opening of the Biennale, all five members of the jury resigned. The Biennale then replaced its traditional Golden Lion with a “Visitor Lion,” to be voted on by ticket holders and awarded in November, at the end of the event, leaving many to wonder “What Did the Golden Lion Die Of?” to quote the title of a widely-circulated essay. Now perhaps more than ever before in the Biennale’s history, people are reassessing how much freedom art can ever claim when it arrives draped in a national flag.
In 2022, Russia’s curatorial team pulled out of the Biennale following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After skipping the 2024 event, Russia staged a bizarre and largely symbolic comeback this year with a pavilion that was only open during the professional preview and which has led the European Union to freeze a €2 million grant to the Biennale.
On opening day, the scene in the Giardini outside the Russian Pavilion was far more openly confrontational than anything else I witnessed at this year’s Biennale. There were riot police and carabinieri, demonstrators waving signs and trying to block people from entering the pavilion. Pussy Riot and members of the Ukrainian feminist group Femen protested with colored smoke, pink balaclavas and slogans like “Blood is Russia’s art” and “Disobey.” A Brazilian artist milled out outside with a toilet lid over his head that read “NOW, EVERY SHIT IS ART.”
When I squeezed past the protesters and entered the pavilion, I found very little going on: a few elaborately tangled clusters of flowers (“Why do flowers no longer smell?” the wall text queried forlornly), a man standing like a bodyguard and wearing a bunny mask, a DJ spinning records and a couple half-heartedly dancing.
By far the most shocking act of protest I witnessed was on Friday morning, when Danila Tkachenko, a Russian artist who is a political refugee in Italy, entered the Scuola Piccola delle Zattere and used a scalpel to carve the word ART into his upper abdomen.
The 18th century palazzo houses a cultural institute that is funded by the Russian oligarch Leonid Mikhelson and owned by his daughter Victoria. Tkachenko’s grisly performance was intended to call attention to how, in the words of the journalist and curator Konstantin Akinsha, “money stained with Ukrainian blood feeds contemporary art in Venice.”
While Tkachenko stood next to a mechanical flower sculpture by Rachel Youn, blood trickling down to his belly, flummoxed ushers half-heartedly tried to clear the gallery. From a corner, a poker-faced Victoria Mikhelson looked on. She instructed the museum guards to do nothing. She clearly wasn’t going to give Tkachenko the satisfaction of being arrested.
And then there was the United States. In a year when Israel and Russia were treated as agents and emblems of world disorder, America remained oddly peripheral as a target, despite, well, everything. The U.S. Pavilion did not become a magnet for protest, although some artists and curators told me that they refused to enter on principle. For the most part, however, the art world’s revenge on America’s presence at Venice was limited to ridiculing this year’s Trump-approved artist, the sculptor Alma Allen.
Venice has always asked nations to appear through art. This year, they arrived damaged, accused, defensive, wealthy, frightened and enraged. The Biennale’s traditional structures — its garden of nations, its prizes, its diplomatic courtesies — did not collapse entirely. But they trembled.
And in the Israeli Pavilion, beneath the sound of black water falling into a pool, one could hear the tremor.
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Michigan’s Senate race has become a referendum on Israel — and the future of the Democratic Party
Tuesday’s primary contest for an open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan has become a proxy fight over the Gaza war and a referendum on Israel supporters’ influence in Democratic politics. Democratic voters will decide whether to nominate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who is leading in the polls after assailing his opponent as beholden to the campaign fundraising group AIPAC, or Rep. Haley Stevens, a reliable supporter of Israel who has condemned what she called “inflammatory rhetoric” from El-Sayed.
Following a string of primary victories by insurgent Democrats who made condemning Israel central to their campaigns — from New York to New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Colorado — the outcome will become the clearest test yet of whether the vocally anti-Israel progressive movement may come to define the Democratic Party.
Recent polls show El-Sayed with growing momentum, leading Stevens by as much as 16 points.
Michigan, home to one of the country’s largest Arab-American communities, was already a national hot spot for voter pushback on pro-Israel politics as the birthplace of the 2024 “uncommitted” movement that protested President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza by submitting blank ballots in the presidential primary.
It also has an influential Jewish community that has become deeply invested in the race — and with some El-Sayed supporters among them.
Tuesday’s winner will have to prevail in the November general election, and success is not guaranteed: While Democrats are a majority of registered voters in Michigan, Republican President Donald Trump won the state in 2016 and 2024.
With Democrats counting on winning Michigan as they aim to retake the Senate, the questions looming over Tuesday’s primary aren’t just about the party’s direction on Israel — they’re also about whether running against Israel is a winning message in a swing state.
Democrats are facing a difficult path to winning Senate control even as polls show growing dissatisfaction with the Republican agenda.
A look at three possible scenarios shows the high stakes of the race for the Democratic Party and the place of Israel in U.S. politics:
An El-Sayed victory
An Emerson College survey of 700 voters shows El-Sayed leading Stevens by 16 points, despite more than $60 million of outside spending attacking him. AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, has spent $30.6 million backing Stevens, according to recent FEC filings. AIPAC also raised several million dollars for Stevens by directing its donors to online portals that funnel money directly to the candidate’s campaign. All in all, the Michigan contest is AIPAC’s largest investment this election cycle.
If El-Sayed wins, he would become the first Muslim nominated by a major party for the U.S. Senate and would immediately become one of the most prominent figures on the Democratic left. It would echo the victory of Zohran Mamdani in last year’s mayoral race as the city’s first Muslim mayor and the most prominent democratic socialist in office, with Jews divided between fierce opposition and fiery support.
But the immediate political meaning would be about AIPAC.
The progressive frontrunner has transformed AIPAC’s investment in the race into a centerpiece of his campaign message. Backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, El-Sayed used AIPAC as a political foil and a symbol of everything he says is wrong with Democratic politics: super PAC money, billionaire influence and demands for unconditional support for Israel. A poll of Michigan voters conducted by Data for Progress in April found that 64% of likely Democratic primary voters would be less inclined to support a candidate backed by AIPAC.
At a recent virtual town hall hosted by Progressive Democrats of America, El-Sayed compared his possible victory to David defeating Goliath. “AIPAC, if you’re listening, burn your money, come back and burn it again in the general,” he said. “I’m happy to burn your money for you, and then we can get onto the business of governing and asking whether or not our foreign policy ought to be dictated to us by the interests of a foreign government.”
An El-Sayed win would mark a reversal from AIPAC’s last confrontation with Stevens’ opponents in Michigan. In 2022, Stevens defeated Jewish Rep. Andy Levin by 20 points in a rare incumbent-versus-incumbent House primary after redistricting. Levin argued that the group was trying to punish him for criticizing Israeli policy and supporting Palestinian rights. AIPAC celebrated Levin’s defeat as proof that even a Jewish incumbent could not survive after crossing the organization. (Levin is supporting El-Sayed.)
It would also create immediate questions about how El-Sayed would operate in Washington.
Would he support Sen. Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in American history and one of Stevens’ most powerful allies, as Democratic leader if Democrats win the majority? And would he give Senate progressives new leverage over key votes on Israel?
What if El-Sayed loses the general election?
For Democrats worried about electability, the primary is only the first test.
The winner will face former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, who narrowly lost Michigan’s 2024 Senate election and is now running with a largely unified Republican Party behind him.
Michigan remains one of the country’s key battlegrounds. President Donald Trump carried it in 2016, lost it in 2020 and won it again in 2024. Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a moderate Democrat who was an intelligence analyst in the CIA and served three tours in Iraq, won her race even as Trump carried the state.
Recent polls found Rogers leading El-Sayed by single digits.
Some Michigan Jewish Democrats are already considering whether they could support El-Sayed, vote for the Republican, or leave their ballot blank in November. Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in the state.
Stevens has sharpened those concerns in the final days of the campaign. She accused El-Sayed of blaming “all of your problems on Jewish Americans,” warning that his rhetoric would lead to defeat in the face-off with Rogers. El-Sayed, who has courted Jewish voters without moderating his views on Israel, rejected accusations of antisemitism.
“I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people,” he said.
A November loss would have consequences far beyond Michigan.
Democrats are already facing an uphill battle for Senate control after the collapse of Graham Platner in the competitive Maine Senate race.
Losing the seat being vacated by Sen. Gary Peters would further divide Democrats. Party leaders would almost certainly blame El-Sayed’s ideology, his vocal opposition to Israel and the progressive groups that elevated him for losing a swing state. AIPAC, meanwhile, would claim vindication despite losing the primary.
Speaking with reporters on Sunday, El-Sayed said he’s confident Democratic voters will rally behind his candidacy as they reckon with what is at stake.
What if Stevens survives?
A Stevens victory would offer a very different lesson.
It would show that experience, establishment support and a strong general-election argument can still overcome anger about AIPAC, even in the state where the uncommitted movement began. Even a narrow victory would preserve AIPAC’s reputation as one of the most effective forces in Democratic primaries.
But it would say more about Stevens and her personality. She first entered Congress in the 2018 Democratic wave, capturing a Republican-held suburban district. She then survived redistricting and defeated Levin in the bruising 2022 primary.
Stevens has the backing of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Schumer and much of Michigan’s Democratic establishment. And she leads Rogers in a November matchup.
By Wednesday morning, Democrats will know who won Michigan. It may take until November or even longer to know whether Tuesday’s vote marked the beginning of a new era in Democratic politics or another chapter in the party’s divide over Israel. Nonetheless, Democratic leaders still have to reunite a coalition fractured over Gaza and manage a growing progressive wing in the House.
The fight extends down the ballot
The Senate contest is not the only Michigan race testing the strength of the progressive left.
In Detroit’s 13th Congressional District, state Rep. Donavan McKinney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is challenging incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar with the support of Justice Democrats. The group, which helped launch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the Squad, made McKinney its first congressional endorsement in four years.
In Michigan’s 7th District, former climate activist William Lawrence is running against two centrist Democrats in the primary, making an end to all U.S. military aid to Israel a key part of his campaign. The seat was previously held by Slotkin.
On a state level, Abbas Alawieh, one of the leaders of the uncommitted movement in Michigan, is running for a seat in the state legislature in a Dearborn-area district with a large Arab and Muslim population. In a sign of his growing profile, Alawieh recently met with former Vice President Kamala Harris.
AIPAC and the debate over Israel is also spilling into a neighboring state Senate race. Pro-Israel donors are spending heavily to back Justin Onwenu against former State Rep. Abraham Aiyash, an outspoken critic of Israel’s war in Gaza.
It has also reached the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents. Michigan Democrats nominated Amir Makled, an attorney who represented pro-Palestinian protesters, after he defeated incumbent Regent Jordan Acker at the party convention. Makled faces scrutiny for past Hezbollah praise and antisemitic posts. Republican regent candidates Lena Epstein and Michael Schostak, both Jewish, have campaigned on antisemitism and campus safety. That race will be decided in November.
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Suspected arson gutted Montreal’s trendiest kosher restaurant. The city’s Jews say they saw it coming
Howard Szalavetz’s phone buzzed around 3:15 a.m. Saturday, startling him awake. It was news no landlord wants: a retail building he owned was on fire. Nöam, the kosher restaurant that anchors it, was burning.
He threw on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and hopped into his daughter’s Ford Bronco. The drive was only five minutes, but each one felt like an eternity. Police and fire crews had cordoned off several blocks around Montreal’s Décarie Boulevard, forcing him to abandon the car and run the rest of the way on foot. Eventually, they let him through.
“It was insane,” he recalled in an interview Sunday. “There were 80 firemen.” The building he’s owned since 1987 — home to a car wash, an auto repair garage, and Nöam — was engulfed. The restaurant’s section, a wood-frame extension, “went up pretty quickly.”
By the time the fire was under control around 8 a.m., the restaurant was gutted top to bottom. The car wash and auto repair suffered less damage and plan to reopen this week.
Video of the fire that burned down Noam, a popular Kosher restaurant in Montreal pic.twitter.com/gVvvTVvcRQ
— Benyamin Cohen (@benyamincohen) August 2, 2026
Szalavetz and police were able to pull footage from a security camera mounted to the exterior of the auto repair shop. In it, a figure appears on the restaurant’s wood deck, bends down and lights a fire with what looks like a can of accelerant. The man’s face wasn’t hidden, but the footage was too poor in quality to make out much more.
When nearby shops that were closed over the weekend reopen Monday, investigators hope to gather additional footage. Szalavetz said a camera damaged in the Nöam fire might also contain more information.
Szalavetz’s father survived three concentration camps and lost much of his family in the Holocaust. He died in 2021. “Thankfully he didn’t see this,” Szalavetz said, “because this is how Europe started.”
The Nöam fire is the latest in a rapid drumbeat of attacks on Jewish targets in Canada. Last week, in Toronto, a gunman fired at the windows of one branch of Kiva’s Bagel Bar, a Jewish-owned bakery chain, about an hour after vandals had shattered the glass front of another location. In June, a man smashed a window at Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, a Reform congregation in Montreal, and tried to start a fire inside.
That same month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney acknowledged that two-thirds of all religion-motivated hate crimes in Canada are directed at Jews. “Canada’s civic compact,” he said, “is failing Jewish Canadians.” B’nai Brith Canada recorded 27 violent antisemitic incidents in the first six months of 2026 — nearly triple the count for all of 2025.
Deborah Lipstadt, the noted Holocaust historian and former U.S. special envoy to combat antisemitism during the Biden administration, said the Nöam fire was “utterly predictable.” Carney, she said, “does not have the chutzpah” to stand up and declare, without qualification, that antisemitism has no place in Canada.
“If this is not a wake-up call, I don’t know,” Lipstadt said. “Do more people have to die for it to be a wake-up call? How much more do you need? Spare me your pious sympathies and sincere regrets.”
A vigil and a crowdfunding campaign
By Saturday, Szalavetz said he’d fielded some 150 calls — more, he said, than he gets on his birthday. Montreal is home to an estimated 90,000 Jews, but Szalavetz said it still has the feel of a “shtetl,” and word traveled fast: a vigil drew a crowd outside the burned restaurant Saturday night, and the community plans on launching an online crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the two owners and roughly 30 employees, since insurance can’t cover the full scope of the loss.
Brothers-in-law Meir Azerad and Ynon Cohen opened Nöam in August 2024, transforming what had been little more than a car wash’s waiting room into a polished, sit-down kosher restaurant. They named it for Cohen’s brother, Noam, who had died years earlier and had dreamed of opening a restaurant of his own.
They turned out wood-fired pizzas at 1,000 degrees, two minutes a pie. Expanding the menu to include Mediterranean and Italian, Nöam grew to a following that surprised even its owners, and had a waitlist most weeknights. The partners had just spent a year renovating a second floor to keep up with demand.
Among the social media posts circulating Saturday morning was one from Francine Goldberg, a lifelong Montrealer, that quickly went viral. The fire broke out on Shabbat — the one day, she wrote, “we are forbidden to kindle a flame. Somebody kindled it for us.”
Politicians were quick to respond. Anthony Housefather, a Jewish member of Parliament who represents the area, demanded the fire be investigated as a hate crime. Police say they have not yet established a motive.
The Mamdani angle
But for many Montreal Jews, official statements have started to feel beside the point. Goldberg calls them “the typical Hallmark pleasantries: ‘Oh, it’s horrible, and it should never happen.’”
Goldberg, who works at a medical clinic in downtown Montreal, said she’s received more hate mail this year than at any point in her life. She doesn’t think Carney is an antisemite — just a politician counting votes. “There are far more of them than there are of us,” she said. Jews make up approximately 1% of the Canadian population.
Jesse Brown, a Canadian Jewish journalist who has tracked the country’s antisemitism surge since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust, sees the same pattern from a different angle.
When Carney announced a new council to combat hate this summer, Brown called it “disingenuous” — the council had already existed for months, under a different name, and included members with histories of anti-Israel advocacy. More pointedly, Brown said, Carney has refused to name the actual cause. “This is happening because of this global movement against Israel,” he said. “Jews in Canada are being targeted in the name of targeting Israel.” Naming antisemitism, he argued, is easy. Naming anti-Zionism as its engine is the part no Canadian politician has been willing to do.
Goldberg sees this dynamic playing out beyond Canada’s borders. In New York, Zohran Mamdani was elected the city’s first Muslim mayor in January and recently to called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide.” His win in the U.S. city with the largest population of Jews has been widely read as evidence that anti-Zionist politics can win elections across the country.
In the months since his election, antisemitic hate crimes in New York have climbed sharply: NYPD data show Jews, roughly 10% of the city’s population, were targets in 55% of all confirmed hate crimes in the first half of 2026, with anti-Jewish incidents up 182% year-over-year in January alone.
Goldberg sees that rhetoric traveling regardless of the border. “That has a trickle-down effect on Montrealers,” she said. She’s watched a segment of the city’s progressive activists argue that Montreal’s own mayor should “follow Mamdani” and formally declare that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Her worry isn’t that Israeli policy is off-limits for criticism — she says she criticizes the Netanyahu government herself — but that mainstreaming anti-Zionism as just another respectable political position is what’s fueling the rise in antisemitism she’s living through.
Goldberg said that people keep telling her to consider moving to Israel. She isn’t interested. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “It’s exactly what they would want, so I’m not going to clarify their mission.” That doesn’t mean the fear isn’t real, she added: “It’s very, very dark. It’s dark times for us.”
‘A lot of gaslighting’
Brown pointed to a pattern that predates the fire at Nöam. Last August, an Orthodox man was beaten in a Montreal park in front of his three children; his attacker tore the kippah from his head and threw it to the ground. Quebec prosecutors ultimately determined it wasn’t a hate crime — the attacker was found not criminally responsible due to mental illness.
When pro-Palestinian protesters marched down Toronto’s “hospital row” in February 2024 and mobbed Mount Sinai Hospital, organizers said the hospital hadn’t been targeted; it just happened to be along the route. Brown calls this a recurring dynamic. “There’s a lot of gaslighting that occurs,” he said.
He expects something similar will happen with the Nöam investigation: police have video of the fire being set, but Canadian hate-crime charges require proof of motive that’s notoriously hard to establish. More likely, he said, if the suspect is charged with arson alone “then people who want to deny what is happening will say, well, ‘We have no proof that was antisemitism.’”
There’s already a template for how that skepticism plays out. In December 2024, a man threw a Molotov cocktail into Montreal’s Beth Tikvah synagogue; windows were smashed the same night at a nearby Jewish federation office. The man who pleaded guilty to three of six arson-related charges, Mohamed Ilyes Akodad, testified this summer that he’d been paid $15,000 through an anonymous contact on Signal to firebomb two buildings and torch a car, and that he didn’t know one of them was a synagogue. Prosecutors are seeking a two-year sentence; his lawyer is asking for a suspended sentence and home confinement. A judge is expected to rule Sept. 10.
Rabbi Lisa Grushcow of Montreal’s Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, which experienced its own firebomb attack this June, has seen the pattern up close. “At this point, none of it feels surprising,” she said, “and that in itself is quite sobering.” Protective coatings on the synagogue’s windows kept the firebomb from getting through, and police apprehended the suspect that night. It could have been far worse, she said, “but we can’t just say ‘This is not who we are,’ because clearly this is who our society is right now.”
Still, she pointed to what happened the day after her synagogue was attacked: so many families showed up for a scheduled service that the congregation had to run two instead of one. She saw the same instinct play out in Toronto, where customers lined up outside Kiva’s Bagel the morning after the shootings there. “It shouldn’t take resilience to live as a Jew,” she said. But if the choice is between resilience and retreat, her community has made its decision: “We’re not going to give up or move away.”
Lipstadt’s message to Jews was also one of resilience, not despair. Asked whether Canadian Jews should consider leaving the country, she declined to answer directly. “That’s not my place,” she said. But she was unequivocal that Jews would endure. “We have survived worse,” she said. What worries her isn’t whether Jews will survive — it’s whether the societies around them will. “Will democratic society, writ very large, be okay?” she said. “I’m not so sure.”
Nöam’s owners Azerad and Cohen have said little publicly since the fire. Szalavetz described them as “very camera shy,” agreeing only reluctantly to a brief interview with a local reporter after Szalavetz pushed them to speak. “The world needs to know,” he told them. For now, what’s certain is the plan: rebuild in the same spot and reopen “bigger, better, newer” than before, said Szalavetz. He estimates that could take six months to a year. In the meantime, he said, he’s working on finding them a temporary home so the restaurant can remain open.
“Coming back is the goal,” Szalavetz said. “It’s my goal as a proud Jew. You’re not going to take us down.”
The post Suspected arson gutted Montreal’s trendiest kosher restaurant. The city’s Jews say they saw it coming appeared first on The Forward.
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Heeding a Saudi plea, Trump says he canceled a joint U.S.-Israel assault on Iran
(JTA) — President Donald Trump said he canceled at the last minute a planned joint assault with Israel on Iran’s energy infrastructure at the behest of Saudi Arabia, which feared the war blowing up into a wider conflict.
The U.S. alerts over the weekend warning citizens to evacuate the Middle East and then Trump’s announcement late Saturday that he was canceling the planned strike appeared to catch Israel off guard. It undercut Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim last week that he and Trump were in lockstep on Iran.
“The U.S.A. is locked and loaded and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran, at levels of Military Terror, Strength, and Power not seen since World War II,” Trump said on Truth Social, the social media platform he owns.
“Despite this, we have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to,” he said. “This would include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran’s nuclear threat.”
Saudi Arabia’’s official news agency confirmed that Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince who has close business and personal ties with Trump and his family, appealed to the U.S. president to stand down.
“The Crown Prince stressed the need to prioritize dialogue to reduce escalation and the importance of making every possible effort to achieve calm that paves the way for diplomatic solutions, preserves the region’s security and stability, and prevents a wider conflict whose repercussions would affect regional and international security and stability,” the Saudi Press Agency said.
Iran disputed Trump’s claim, instead saying that it was ready to respond to any attack on the country.
“The Iranian Foreign Ministry vowed that Tehran will use all means at its disposal to exercise its inherent right of self-defense in the face of the United States’ ongoing violations against the Islamic Republic,” the Fars News Agency said.
Fars, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps – the principal power in Iran since the war began – denied any stand-down on Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz.
“Iran’s Armed Forces have staged uncompromising retaliation in the face of each instance of violation, including those taking place in support of illegal vessel movement in the waterway,” the agency said.
The waterway is critical to the passage of a fifth of the world’s petroleum. Iran has asserted control of the waterway in the wake of the war the United States and Israel launched in February.
Trump’s statement came after CBS News reported on Saturday that the United States and Israel were set to attack Iran’s energy infrastructure, which would substantially escalate the war. The State Department put out a security alert advising Americans in the region to leave if they could, and to cancel plans to enter it.
Regional media reported that Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, conveyed warnings through Turkey and Pakistan to regional U.S. allies that it would hit back hard if the U.S.-Israel attack went through.
Israel appeared to be caught off guard both by the planned escalation and by Trump’s stand-down. “Israel is unaware of a decision to restart full military operations, nor has been requested of Israel to join any military actions against Iran,” CBS News quoted an Israeli official as saying – even as it quoted U.S. officials as saying that Israel was coordinating with the United States.
Israel’s government had no comment on Trump’s reported plan to attack the infrastructure, or his stand-down. Flights in and out of Ben Gurion Airport were unaffected. In his Truth Social statement, Trump said, “The Country of Israel joins me in this commitment.”
Trump has multiple times since the war’s launch threatened to escalate the war only to retreat at the last minute, something the Fars news agency noted in a sardonic tone.
“This narrative seems familiar and repetitive,” it said in a separate report on bin Salman’s appeal. “Every time Trump has made serious threats against Iranian infrastructure in the past, after Tehran has not backed down, he has claimed that friendly countries have asked him not to do anything.”
Trump escalated his rhetoric last week as Iran continued to attack ships attempting to transit Hormuz. “We’re going to beat the f***ing s**t out of them,” he told Fox News.
Trump has since the tentative signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran in mid-June asked Israel to stay out of the conflict – including in the wake of the resumption of fighting on July 13.
Netanyahu, facing a tough reelection in October, has in recent weeks sought to allay any perceptions in Israel that he had been sidelined by Trump. He met with the president last week.
“I just finished an excellent meeting with President Trump,” he told Israeli reporters after the meeting. “And when I say excellent, it’s not lip service – a conversation with full cooperation, with mutual support, with the understanding of the joint goal to ensure that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon, and other goals.”
The roller-coaster ride appeared to unsettle Netanyahu’s colleagues in his Likud Party. “You can say ‘no’ to Trump,” Knesset member Amit Halevi told Kan Reshet Bet, the government-run radio station. “Our commitment is to the security of the state.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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