(JTA) — TEL AVIV — As missiles flew toward Israel on Sunday night, beleaguered Israelis once again took to Facebook from their safe rooms.

“Whoever is in charge of naming wars over here, please do not give it a fierce animal name this time,” one Israeli wrote in an English-language group. “The last military operation was called ‘Roaring Lion,’ and the Twelve Day War in June 2025, ‘Rising Lion.’”

Another replied with a suggestion: “I hope it’s something like ‘The One Day War.’”

The idea may not have been far off. U.S. President Donald Trump said early Monday that he hoped both Iran and Israel would halt their fire. By mid-morning, Iran’s military announced the strikes were on pause, saying it had sufficiently retaliated for the Israeli strikes in Beirut, a tit-for-tat exchange. By Monday evening Israel time, Netanyahu, too, said the fighting was halted, but warned that Israel would respond “with force” to any future attacks.

Despite the tenuous pause — not quite a ceasefire — Home Front Command restrictions remained in place by Monday evening, touching every layer of daily life in Israel. Schools were closed through at least Wednesday. Or Erez, head spokesperson for Clalit, Israel’s largest health care network, told JTA, “We will continue to remain operating in shelters until the Home Front Command restrictions change.”

By 10 p.m. Sunday, NICU infants and those in critical care were already being moved to bunkers beneath Beilinson hospital, home to the largest emergency room in the Middle East.

“This is the third time within a year that we have carried out such a transition,” said Dr. Erez Barenboim, director of Beilinson and Hasharon Hospitals.

Hospital staff were visibly fatigued but resilient. Soroka University Medical Center was struck by an Iranian ballistic missile during the June 2025 conflict, and as is standard during attacks, health care staff canceled non-essential visits and moved operations to shelters.

Alexi Wirpel, a student at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, was on a Birthright trip in the Galilee when the first sirens rang out. “We could hear the dome working, so we knew we were going to be relatively okay,” she said.

It was not Wirpel’s first trip to Israel, but it was her first time hearing sirens signaling incoming missiles. Others on the Birthright trip were more anxious and had to be consoled by staff, she said.

When word came of a tenuous pause, Wirpel said, she and others didn’t believe it would last long.

“All day today we’ve all kind of been just waiting for something to go off again,” she said. “It’s become a very real reality that this is something that my family has to go through instead of just hearing about it.”

Caroline Flannery manages an after-school program at a Tel Aviv middle school and has watched the cumulative toll of two and a half years of conflict reshape an entire generation of Israeli children. Added to the time lost during the pandemic, students in those grades have missed the equivalent of a year of school.

“We have kids in fifth and sixth grade that still don’t know the alphabet,” Flannery said.

Israel’s education system has been among the hardest hit since Oct. 7. Leaked results of a government aptitude test found that only 3% of Israeli ninth graders met the national benchmark for science, and just 22% met the benchmark for English, figures that prompted opposition leaders to call for a declaration of a “national educational emergency.”

The disruption extends to staff, who are just as rattled as students when a siren sounds and a week of lesson plans is suddenly worthless.

Flannery moved to Israel in 2019 and hadn’t planned to stay, but the impact she could make on Israeli children convinced her to commit to another year, and then another, until she was running the after-school program herself.

The conclusion she has come to in the wake of Oct. 7 is that many of her students, faced with constant disruption, will never fully catch up.

“It’s not just that they miss school, so now they have to work extra hard and catch up,” she said. “Their whole routine was disrupted and they come back. They’re not ready, not used to, not prepared to sit, to come into class, to sit in their seats, to learn. Their minds aren’t there.”

With Trump pressing Israel and Iran to return to the negotiating table, Flannery discussed contingency plans already on the table — such as Zoom classes, home visits — should the war return to its March tempo.

“This,” she said, “is sort of their normal.”

The post ‘This is sort of their normal’: Israelis confront yet another wartime flare after Iranian fire appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Dave Matthews, the frontman of the American rock band Dave Matthews Band, pushed back on allegations Friday that his vocal criticism of Israel in recent years had crossed into antisemitism.

Reading his remarks from a sheet of paper on stage at the Coastal Credit Union Music Park in Raleigh, North Carolina, Matthews, whose criticism of Israel has drawn backlash from some Jewish and pro-Israel voices, pushed back on accusations of antisemitism.

“It’s no secret, at least I don’t try to make it a secret, that I disagree with the policies of Israel and the United States, and their treatment of the civilian population in Gaza and the West Bank,” Matthews said. “But that should by no means be twisted into anybody thinking that I am bigoted or antisemitic in any way at all.”

Matthews continued: “On the contrary, I have a deep respect and love for all of my life that I can remember, and an admiration for the culture and history of the Jewish people.”

The frontman of the band continued to list a host of prominent Jewish figures he admired, including Albert Einstein, George Gershwin, Hannah Arendt and Anne Frank, and described being at a friend’s son’s bar mitzvah on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel.

“I hold the Jewish people in the highest regard, and it breaks my heart that my opinions born out of deep commitment to nonviolent resolution and resistance can be twisted to serve any hateful or racist or bigoted ideas,” Matthews said.

Matthews’ remarks come after years of outspoken criticism of Israel, including in 2024 when he joined a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Washington, D.C., against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress.

“I’m ashamed that my tax dollars are going to the brutalizing of an entire people,” Matthews told Al Jazeera at the time. “It’s shameful. And I’m ashamed that our government is welcoming him here.”

At a New Jersey concert last year, Matthews also donned a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headscarf, and held up signs reading “Stop The Genocide” and “Stop Killing Children.”

A representative for Matthews did not immediately respond to a request for clarification of what prompted his remarks Friday.

Matthews is among a growing number of prominent artists who have become outspoken critics of Israel in recent years, including Macklemore, the Irish rap group Kneecap and the British punk band Bob Vylan.

Matthews’ statement Friday was not the first time the artist has defended his rhetoric. In a December 2023 letter to his Jewish fans obtained by JNS, he also assured fans that he “strongly and unequivocally condemn the horrific events of Oct. 7.”

“I will never stop calling for an end to the violence in Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon, and for that matter, the Congo and Sudan and Ukraine, or the violence, or the horrific violence against immigrants and their neighbors in our country,” Matthews concluded during his remarks Friday.

The post Dave Matthews pushes back on claims his criticism of Israel is antisemitic appeared first on The Forward.

Anyone living in the five boroughs has likely seen the Chabad stickers on street corners proclaiming, alongside a photo of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, that the “Messiah Is Here!”

But this week, a different kind of redemption feels imminent in New York — and there’s a new face on the “Messiah” posters.

With the hometown Knicks two wins away from their first NBA championship in 53 years, fans mocked up a t-shirt featuring an image of star point guard Jalen Brunson superimposed on the Chabad sign, black hat, beard and all. (Including Brunson’s signature cornrows.)

The Brunson memes are just one Jewish piece of an unexpected Finals run uniting the five boroughs — and perhaps, even more astonishingly, its Jewish community. There’s been a giant dreidel spinning outside Madison Square Garden, Talmud-lined shelves displayed on sports broadcasts, and a Jewish-inclusive chant going viral. The team on the court has a Jewish aspect, too: Brunson is married to a Jewish woman — and apparently signed a ketubah at his wedding.

Home to an estimated 1 million Jews (a number that nearly doubles when including the full metro area), New York probably couldn’t have had a Finals run without Jewish undertones. After all, their last title-winning team was helmed by a Jewish head coach, Hall-of-Famer Red Holzman. The team’s Jewish history goes well beyond that.

But the Jewish presence has been unmissable — and in these times, unmissably welcomed — in the city’s sports hysteria.

“I seen Hasidic Jews break-dancing with Black kids,” the rapper Fat Joe told reporters Sunday. “This is the greatest unification of the city since 9/11.”

‘People in yarmulkes, people in turbans’

Though the first two games of the NBA Finals were played in Texas, the home of the Western Conference champion San Antonio Spurs, the center of the action for Knicks fans remained Madison Square Garden — the arena known as the basketball Mecca. (OK, that part’s not so Jewish.) The Knicks faithful assemble there after each game, Midtown descending (ascending?) into full-scale revelry.

That’s where a yarmulke-wearing teenager wearing a Brunson jersey was caught breaking it down like a 1970s b-boy, other fans encircling him and cheering him on. About as miraculously as a Brunson high-arcing fadeaway plunging through the net, the kippah stayed on.

Meanwhile, a fan’s improvised rallying cry was becoming an instant hit: “My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish, my Christian Dior, Knicks in four!” (My colleague Mira Fox has written eloquently on the chant.)

Outside MSG — and at the Knicks watch party at Bryant Park — is also where Rami Even-Esh, the Jewish rapper known as Kosha Dillz, plans to bring his human-sized dreidel Monday night, when the Knicks take on the Spurs in Game 3 (8:30 p.m. ET on ABC.) He did a “Knicks Shabbat” outside the Garden during Friday night’s Game 2, serving challah to passersby, and recorded a Knicks music video that featured people of Jewish and non-Jewish backgrounds.

“There’s people in yarmulkes, people in turbans — there’s no ‘anti’ stuff, so that makes it very Jewish for me, and it feels very authentic,” Even-Esh said in an interview.

And let’s not forget that the arena — with President Donald Trump expected in attendance — now has the security infrastructure of an American mega-shul.

‘Torah-cyclopedias’

This Finals’ Jewish imprint also extends to the court. The architect of this team, Knicks team president Leon Rose, was born to a Jewish family in South New Jersey. He later became an NBA super-agent whose clients included Allen Iverson and LeBron James, before taking on the challenge of restoring the ill-fated Knicks to their former glory.

The franchise had long been a vehicle for Jewish hoopers to make their imprint on the game. The first basket in NBA history was scored by a Jew, Ossie Schectman; the late 1970s and early 1980s Knicks featured Ernie Grunfeld, the son of Holocaust survivors.

But the team became a punchline under Knicks owner James Dolan, whose verbal sparring with an elderly Jewish fan once made national headlines. Only after Rose executed a series of transactions both shrewd (like inking Brunson, then seen as a mere second-fiddle, in free agency) and bold (like big trades for Karl-Anthony Towns and Mikal Bridges), the Knicks turned the ship around.

One of their latter-day stars, meanwhile, is Amar’e Stoudemire, who converted to Judaism after playing for the Knicks in the 2010s. Stoudemire is often seen wearing a black hat and a remote hit on a Barstool Sports talk show allowed basketball fans to see bookshelves behind him lined with seforim.

The background prompted a question from the program’s hosts: Are those encyclopedias? Stoudemire explained: “Those are my Torah-cyclopedias,” adding that the one book missing from the shelf was the one he is currently working through.

The Knicks’ success has presented a challenge for Jews like Stoudemire who observe Shabbat, as Game 2 of the Finals fell on Friday night.

It’s a common occurrence for Orthodox fans of teams like the Yankees and Dodgers — and one Knicks fans hope to get used to.

The post Memes, mashiach and ‘Torah-cyclopedias’ put a Jewish twist on the Knicks’ title hunt appeared first on The Forward.