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Commemorating Philip Roth means confronting his limitations head on
(JTA) — Next Sunday marks the 90th anniversary of Philip Roth’s birth. In celebration of the famed novelist’s work, a scholarly conference titled “Roth@90,” sponsored by the Philip Roth Society, will be held starting Wednesday at the Newark Public Library. That will be followed by a weekend of high-profile events — staged readings, panel discussions, a bus tour of Roth’s old Newark neighborhood — co-presented by the library and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
Exactly 10 years ago, we commemorated his 80th birthday in a similar fashion. Dozens of Roth scholars made learned presentations about his work, of which Roth attended exactly zero. Later that week, the author read aloud from his novel “Sabbath’s Theater” in front of hundreds of fans, friends and well wishers. The proceedings were televised on C-Span.
Roth was being acclaimed for having just wound down an exemplary career. With the exception of the Nobel Prize, what garland evaded him? Was there a high-culture literary platform where his name wasn’t a virtual watermark? Could he publish any novel without hundreds of reviews being written in newspapers across the world? Was there a serious fiction writer out there with greater renown?
So much has changed in the decade between the two conferences. To begin with, Roth died in 2018. In that same span, the country witnessed the election of Donald Trump and the fissure it exposed in society in general and the Jewish community in particular. America endured one convulsive racial reckoning after another. Finally, in October of 2017, the #MeToo movement gained massive public salience.
All of those events, along with digital media’s indomitable ascent, have combined to affect and reshape Roth’s literary legacy. That legacy is far less assured than all the (justified) praise and lionizing that will occur this week might suggest.
Let’s start with Jews. The Trump era yielded two seemingly irreconcilable data points. On the one hand, Jewish-Americans endured the Charlottesville riot, the Tree of Life synagogue attack and a stunning rise in antisemitic incidents. On the other, there was staunch support for Trump among Orthodox Jews and supporters of Israel’s right wing.
Leaving that conundrum for others to parse, I simply note that Orthodox Jews and right-wing Zionists are almost completely absent in Roth’s fiction. A young Roth wrote a sensitive portrait of Holocaust survivors who want to start a suburban yeshiva in “Eli the Fanatic.” He also sketched a militant religious-nationalist Zionist in “The Counterlife,” Mordecai Lippman, who, according to Roth biographer Blake Bailey (about whom more below), was based on Elyakim Haetzni, one of the so-called founding fathers of the settlement movement. In the same novel, a version of the narrator’s brother falls under the settlement leader’s sway.
And that’s it, across a half century of writing. For traditionalist Jewish readers, whose political and social influence in the United States and Israel is substantial and growing, Roth’s fiction is not a mirror, nor a signpost, nor a scroll upon which is inscribed some essential truth.
The Jews who populated his stories, the Jews he best understood, were of Ashkenazi descent, white, liberal, assimilated and secular. His courage was to valorize them over and against other Jews who viewed them as defective, lost or even as apostates. Thus Anne Frank in “The Ghost Writer” was portrayed as a patron saint of secular Judaism. Elsewhere, his stories abound in proud, professionally accomplished diaspora Jews. They rarely think about God. Synagogue attendance is reserved strictly for lifecycle events and High Holy Days, if that.
A novelist, of course, is not a political clairvoyant. However, the immediate future of Judaism is being greatly shaped by Jews whose population and influence are growing and whom Roth rarely portrayed. In this manner, another stellar writer like Cynthia Ozick — herself Orthodox and quite attuned to the mindset of her co-religionists — might fare better commercially and emerge as more relevant than her friend in the coming decades.
Roth didn’t just write about Jews. In my book “The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race and Autobiography,” I pointed out that depicting non-Jewish Black people was an unrecognized “obsessional theme” across his 28 novels and 25 short stories. Much to my dismay, I found Roth’s multi-decade treatment of his African and African-American characters often to be crude, thoughtless and sometimes racist.
Familiarize yourself with the degrading portraiture we receive of Black people in “The Great American Novel” (1973), or a short story like “On the Air” (1970), and you might reconsider what Roth was after in “The Human Stain,” in which an academic who is accused of racism turns out to be an African American who had been “passing” as white and Jewish. The book, the 2001 Pen/Faulkner Award winner, is often seen as a sensitive treatment of racial issues in America, and perhaps as the author’s attempt to extend the hand of friendship to another oppressed minority.
In fact, my best guess is that, as with many Jewish writers post-1967, Roth was shaken by the deterioration of the Black-Jewish alliance. His frustrations were reflected in prose that often referenced Black communities in his hometown of Newark but showed little curiosity about their lives or sympathy for their plight.
Obviously, this type of literary rendering of African Americans — or any minority group — is disturbing and dated. Insensitive racial representation inspires calls for publishers to drop authors. They disappear from high-school or college syllabi. This bodes ominously for the afterlives of the titans of post-World War II American fiction, including John Updike, Saul Bellow Bellow and Norman Mailer, all three of whom have been accused of being racially insensitive and worse.
Roth’s marketability also seems to be sailing into a squall regarding gender. As women began demanding an accounting of sexual abuse and misogyny within the media, entertainment and other industries, numerous think-pieces wondered how the author of “Portnoy’s Complaint” — whose libidinous narrator identifies most of the women in his life by debasing nicknames — would fare in such an environment. Would he — should he — be “canceled”?
The question is more complex than his admirers and detractors make it out to be. No doubt, many of Roth’s male characters mistreated women. Accusations of Roth himself doing the same exist, but they are fairly rare, unsubstantiated and contested. The dilemma for researchers is that Roth was a deeply auto-fictional writer. You sense his presence in his stories — especially when protagonists share much of his biography, including Nathan Zuckerman and Peter Tarnopol, and when characters are named “Philip Roth.”
It’s hard not to speculate about the relation between the author and the many misogynistic fellows who cut an erotic swath through his pages. There will, of course, be readers who give him the benefit of the doubt. They might observe that Roth’s toxic males provide evidence of women’s experiences that needs to be explored, not censored.
Not helping him cleanse his reputation were the numerous allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against his hand-picked biographer, Blake Bailey. The ructions engulfing Bailey came to dominate the discourse about Roth, leading to a peculiar cancellation by proxy.
The episode also revealed that Roth had instructed his estate to eventually destroy a massive trove of personal papers he entrusted to Bailey. This led Aimee Pozorski (co-editor of Philip Roth Studies), myself and 20 other Roth scholars to issue a statement reminding his executors that “scholarship can only be advanced when qualified researchers engage freely with essential sources.”
As if all these concerns weren’t enough, his grim prophecies about the demise of an audience for serious literature seem to be coming true. “The book,” Roth worried, “can’t compete with the screen.” Meanwhile, the English major is in a very bad way, and the institution of tenure is under siege. Professors (insufferable as we might be) teach the next generation who to read and how to read. Writers might not like them, but they need them.
Roth is also getting the scrutiny that he was at pains to avoid in his lifetime. His disregard for scholars who might be critical of him always struck me, one such scholar, as misguided. Instead, he surrounded himself with friends — friends who had preternatural access to major media platforms. These friends built upon his own interpretations of his own work. It doesn’t mean they lacked wisdom. It just means that when they talked about Roth, they talked about what Roth wanted them to talk about. To wit: Jewish Newark, his sundry interpretations of his life, his pesky ex-wives and lovers, the close-mindedness of his critics, and so forth.
I think, in this cultural moment, it’s prudent to confront Roth’s limitations head on and chart one’s own path through his fiction. I pitch him to my students as a writer with some racial, religious and sexual hang-ups — who among us is innocent of those charges? I also present him as a bearer of unique and meaningful insights. Let scholars (while they still exist) parade those insights into sunlight.
I’ve tried to illuminate that his fiction was preoccupied, for 50 years, by how individual and collective bodies (like the Jews) change. Transformation, metamorphosis, metempsychosis — his obsession with those themes, I’ve noticed in my classrooms, is shared by Gen Z. If the span between Roth@80 and Roth@90 has taught us anything, it is that Roth was right: Life is about radical, unpredictable flux. Now his own legacy is in flux. I wonder who will read Roth@100.
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Possible Platner replacements and their divergent stands on Israel
(JTA) — Following the implosion of Graham Platner — a harsh critic of Israel who lobbed a parting shot about “genocide” in Gaza in his video Wednesday quitting the Maine Senate race — a number of possible replacements have emerged. And as their names have surfaced, interest and questions about their positions on issues of concern to the Jewish community also have arisen.
There is a significant range of views among the possible candidates on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee pro-Israel lobby, arms sales to Israel and whether there was a genocide in Gaza, based on their past and recent comments.
In statements to JTA, pro-Israel groups Democratic Majority for Israel and the Jewish Democratic Council of America both urged the party to nominate a candidate aligned with their values; Platner had drawn concern from a number of Jewish groups because of his covered-up Nazi tattoo and stance on Israel.
Some of Platner’s former volunteers have said they want his replacement to fit his mold as a progressive and Israel critic who is taking on establishment politics in the effort to unseat GOP Sen. Susan Collins. After Platner dropped out, the Maine Democratic Party announced on Wednesday that to fill the candidate vacancy it will hold a nominating convention made up of about 600 people selected by county-level Democratic committees. The timing of the convention is not yet clear; the deadline for naming a replacement is July 27.
“There is an unprecedented amount of energy and enthusiasm among Maine Democrats, driven in part by many of the dedicated volunteers and supporters who were inspired by Graham Platner’s campaign,” the party said in a statement. “We look forward to coming together and harnessing that energy around our new nominee as we work to defeat Susan Collins in November.”
Here are some of the replacements being mentioned and what they’ve said about Jewish-related issues, Israel and AIPAC. None of the possible nominees responded to JTA’s requests for comment.
Nirav Shah, epidemiologist and healthcare executive
Nirav Shah, who ran for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in June, finishing second in ranked-choice voting, told reporter David Weigel on Tuesday that he supports an arms embargo on Israel, and he accuses the country of having committing genocide. Shah also said that in keeping with his policy he would not accept funds or an endorsement from AIPAC.
Shah has touted himself as a political outsider like Platner and said Tuesday that he had “no establishment support, and no major political endorsements” when he was running for governor. He has called on possible Platner replacement to participate in a televised debate and “multiple” town halls across the state to make the nomination process transparent.
Troy Jackson, logger and union leader
Troy Jackson, who has backing from the left, had a close political alliance with Platner until calling for him to step aside on Monday and officially launching his campaign for the nomination on Wednesday.
A number of Platner’s supporters have called for the party to nominate Jackson, who finished third behind Shah in the gubernatorial primary. He’s said little publicly related to Israel, but in his run for governor, Jackson had the backing of a number of left-wing, strongly pro-Palestinian politicians, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Rep. Ro Khanna, as well as Maine’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter.
Sanders’ group Our Revolution and left-wing streamer Hasan Piker — a staunch Israel critic who’s drawn accusations of antisemitism — are both backing Jackson to be the new Senate nominee.
In 2024, at the Maine State Democratic Convention, Jackson, who served as convention chairman, reportedly attempted to quiet down a small group of protesters who called for a ceasefire in Gaza and called Maine Rep. Jared Golden a “war criminal” during a video celebrating the Jewish congressman.
“I believe in the ability of people to demonstrate and protest,” Jackson said amid the outburst. “There is a time for that.”
Shenna Bellows, Maine secretary of state
Before assuming her current role, a position that is filled by state lawmakers every two years, Shenna Bellows served as the executive director of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine.
In May, Bellows spoke at the Jewish-Asian Friendship Dinner, hosted by the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine. Bellows said she began working with the JCA during her time leading the Holocaust museum, and said she’d attended numerous events that discussed “many stories of Holocaust survivors and of genocide around the world, and how important it is that we stand up for all of each other, and for unity, and the love that we have for all of each other.”
Bellows also commended the JCA for its response to the surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence over the winter, which included mutual aid to support people who felt unsafe leaving their homes.
Bellows does not appear to have commented extensively on Israel, although she signed Maine Gov. Janet Mills’ 2023 proclamation recognizing the 75th anniversary of the founding of modern Israel that wished the country “a peaceful and prosperous future.”
Jordan Wood, ex-congressional staffer
A former staffer for former California Rep. Katie Porter, Jordan Wood spoke extensively about his views on Israel and AIPAC in an interview as a Senate candidate in Maine last fall. He was the first Democrat to enter the race for Collins’ Senate seat before being overshadowed by Platner and later suspending his campaign to run for the House.
Wood told Democratic commentator Kaivan Shroff that he would support Sanders’ resolution to restrict offensive weapons sales to Israel but backs the continuation of aid to the Jewish state with conditions.
Wood said he believes Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, but stopped short of accusing the country of genocide, pointing to a connection between that accusation and a rise in antisemitism.
“I’ve hesitated on it because I’m also seeing a real rise in antisemitism in the United States,” Wood said. “My husband is Jewish, and the acts of violence toward Jewish Americans is very much connected to the language that we use.”
Wood added that it would be “a huge deal for the United States Congress to designate what’s going on in Gaza as a genocide officially.”
“There could be consequences to that of US citizens that have served in the IDF,” he said. “Do they get prosecuted?”
Wood also said he would not take money from AIPAC, and added that there is a “huge amount of distrust” of the lobbying organization among Democratic voters.
“I believe the only way to truly prove to a voter that you are voting and prioritizing policies in their best interest, and for our country’s best interest, is to remove any perception of corruption or misdealing,” Wood said.
Dan Kleban, brewery owner
Dan Kleban, who announced on Wednesday that he is back in the race for Senate after having suspended his campaign in October and endorsing Gov. Janet Mills, who dropped out before the primary after trailing in the polls, has a very different approach from Platner to the U.S.-Israel relationship.
In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Kleban refrained from accusing Israel of committing genocide, instead calling the military campaign in Gaza an “absolute tragedy.” Kleban said he would condition arms sales to Israel.
When Kleban — a political novice and co-founder and co-owner of the Maine Beer Company — first launched his Senate campaign last fall, he told Politico that he did not support the recent resolution from Sanders to block certain arms sales to Israel.
“I believe Israel has a right to defend itself,” he said. “I don’t think that we solve the horrific humanitarian crisis in Gaza by disarming Israel and exposing them to harm.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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For generations of Jews, this cookbook defined the journey from immigration to assimilation
Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of the Settlement Cook Book
By Nora L. Rubel
Columbia University Press, 232 pages, $28
It was an inspiration for bestselling cookbook writer Mark Bittman, a trusted reference for James Beard, the first recipe book owned by New York Times food critic Mimi Sheraton, and the source of the recipes that famed Jewish cookbook writer Joan Nathan grew up with: The Settlement Cook Book, across 40 editions, sold over 2 million copies and defined Jewish American food.
In her book Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of the Settlement Cook Book, Nora L. Rubel traces the book from its birth as a 1901 fundraising pamphlet by Elizabeth “Lizzie” Black Kander, a kosher cooking-class instructor for Milwaukee immigrants, to its life as a hardcover distributed globally by Simon & Schuster into the 1990s.
For many Jewish Americans, the cookbook brings back memories of seder meals and their mother’s brisket. I didn’t grow up with a dog-eared copy of my grandma’s, but that didn’t mean I found the book any less interesting. Rubel, a University of Rochester professor of religion, discovered The Settlement Cook Book in graduate school. In it, she found not just a snapshot of the Jewish American kitchen throughout the 20th century, but also a continuous debate over what counts as American, conducted in the language of potato soup and noodle kugel.
Rubel credits Kander with pioneering “culinary pluralism” at a time when social reformers pushed immigrants to rid themselves of their garlicky and spiced ethnic cuisine in favor of a blander New England “diet of cornmeal mush and pea soup.“ Kander, a Reform Jew, aimed to help recently arrived Eastern European Jews integrate into American society. Unlike Christian reformers, Kander, an ethnic minority herself, envisioned an America where immigrant groups belonged.
The first edition contained kosher recipes for traditional Ashkenazi fare, but the Russian Jewish immigrant women in Kander’s class were also being prepared for domestic work in the Milwaukee homes of wealthier German Jews like Kander who did not keep kosher and had a taste for ethnic cuisine. Thus, the matzo ball recipe appears on the same page as the mulligatawny soup, and filled fish (gefilte fish) sits alongside scalloped oysters.
Rubel argues that, by not placing Jewish or other ethnic dishes in a separate section, the Settlement Cook Book is the among the first to define modern American cuisine through its immigrants. “Kander’s vision of American diversity,” she writes, “suggests that ethnic recipes are on equal footing with each other and traditional ‘American’ recipes, thus framing the United States as a multiethnic society.”
The ethnic mix and straightforward, simple recipes made Kander’s book the most successful of the era’s many charitable cookbooks. It funded the Abraham Lincoln House, which offered programming for impoverished Jews, as well as the Milwaukee Jewish Center, and helped establish Milwaukee’s first nursery school. By mid-century it had expanded from helping Jewish immigrants to funding programs for the broader public.
Kander was blunt that her philanthropy was rooted in what she called a “selfish motive.” The affluent German-Jewish community in Milwaukee feared the newly arrived Orthodox, unassimilated Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews might spark American antisemitism, which would threaten their own status. “To protect ourselves, our own reputation in the community,” Rubel quotes Kander, “we must work with tact, with heart and soul to better the home conditions of our people . . . and teach them habits of industry and cleanliness.”
The quote is a reminder that despite the framing of Kander as a multiculturalist, at its heart, The Settlement Cook Book was an assimilationist project. As Rubel notes in her introduction, “liking foodways does not automatically translate into welcoming the people who make it.” A century ago, Americans ate chow mein while backing the Chinese Exclusion Act; many today happily order tacos and arepas, while supporting ICE raids targeting Mexican and Venezuelan immigrants. Still, the book captures a real push-and-pull into what counts as American– with the immigrants being Americanized, inevitably changing what it means to be American. .
Unsurprisingly, many Jewish immigrants didn’t appreciate Kander’s “selfish motive.” While young Jewish women were enthusiastic about the classes, their parents resented the patronizing German-Jewish teachers. Kander’s plan to train domestic workers backfired, the immigrant girls rejected being “neat little housekeepers,” preferring clerical and garment work. Rubel notes that the Jewish women avoided work at the time associated with African Americans. “In a country with a distinct color line,” she wrote, “Jews found their whiteness still in question, tenuous at best.”
In response, Kander pitched the cooking classes as preparation for marriage, as captured in the book’s original title: The Way to a Man’s Heart: The Settlement Cook Book. For decades, the book was a quintessential bridal gift, yet its crowdsourced nature allowed it to evolve with the times.
Wartime editions included canning instructions; the book went dry during Prohibition; and new gadgets and processed foods were introduced to keep up with the post-war kitchen. By the 1970s, however, the nonprofit organization that held the rights to The Settlement Cook Book resisted change, and became a guardian of tradition. The book stubbornly kept old fashioned housekeeping tips like how to remove stains with cod-liver oil and a section entitled “When There Is No Maid.” Only in the last edition, published in 1991, did an editor prevail to have pad Thai, curried lentil and refried beans appear alongside kugel and kreplach, altering the book’s content, but returning to Kander’s multicultural instincts.
Most keenly, Rubel examines the paradox of what makes The Settlement Cook Book so profoundly Jewish, given its massive popularity among gentiles and while it had many Jewish recipes, one would never know from its cover. Simon & Schuster, which took over the book in 1954, further chipped away at any hint of Jewishness in favor of mass appeal.
But as was the case with mid-century Jews assimilating into middle-class America, the cookbook’s Jewishness was not erased; it was merely coded, obvious to anyone looking for it. It’s precisely the cosmopolitan blending of recipes that makes The Settlement Cook Book a truer representation of how Jewish Americans actually ate than a Haddasah cookbook or the popular 1958 Jennie Grossinger’s The Art of Jewish Cooking. “Unlike kosher cookbooks that eschew treyf,” writes Rubel, “it is what this cookbook includes, rather than what it omits, that codes the text as Jewish.”
Ultimately, this coded nature led to the book’s greatest irony. As mid-century Jewish Americans moved to the suburbs, they yearned for the food and customs of the old neighborhood, if not the old country. Once a tool to Americanize Jews, The Settlement Cook Book became the definitive guide for American Jews who wanted to remember how to make matzo brei and gefilte fish. Rubel argues that the book itself became a marker of a Jewish home without explicitly announcing religion or ethnicity.
Though nostalgia kept The Settlement Cook Book alive in its final decades, and has kept it in the Jewish American consciousness, I have no memory of my family ever using it and have zero nostalgia for it. The recipes Rubel reproduces in her book might be of historical interest, but a 1910 chop suey recipe with canned mushrooms and chicken gizzards is decidedly dated today. And yet, reading this book, I felt incredibly seen.
That is because, as early as 1901, Lizzie Black Kander defined part of being Jewish in America as a cosmopolitan embrace of the world. The 1921 edition, for instance, includes a “Chinese Supper” menu as well as a list of Passover Seder recipes, “allowing Jews,” as Rubel puts it, “to have their gefilte fish and eat chop suey too.”
Yet 125 years since Lizzie Kander wrote her recipe pamphlet, it’s clear that, when it comes to building a truly multicultural and tolerant society, enjoying both gefilte fish and chop suey is the easy part.
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Israelis are experiencing a new kind of international boycott
Israelis are not facing formal sanctions from Western corporations. No international business coalition has announced a boycott. No major bank or airline has openly declared that Israeli customers are unwelcome.
Yet many Israelis are increasingly encountering something quieter and more difficult to define: a new norm of friction and the sense that when systems fail for Israelis, nobody feels much urgency to fix them.
Consider a recent experience I had with the United Kingdom’s NatWest bank.
When NatWest stopped sending authentication texts to Israeli phone numbers in the spring, I assumed it was just a technical error. Banks malfunction. Security systems fail. But then the bank’s mobile app stopped properly recognizing my Israeli number — despite that number having functioned perfectly well beforehand. Customer service representatives offered contradictory explanations. The fallback solution was supposed to be a physical card reader for secure logins. I requested one repeatedly. Nothing arrived for months. Then, in early May, a representative informed me that NatWest apparently was not mailing card readers to Israel, either.
On a visit to London, I went to a branch, where they offered no explanations; they put me on the phone with customer service, where the agent repeated that they were no longer engaging in contact with Israeli phone numbers or addresses, due to “war tensions.” So I emailed every executive I could find to ask, directly, if the bank was boycotting Israel.
After lengthy exchanges, I was told that Israeli access was removed earlier in the year. The bank insisted the restrictions were not political and not specific to Israel, but rather part of broader fraud prevention measures. So I asked which other countries were affected. This, the bank refused to answer.
On its own, this could still be dismissed as another case of corporate opacity mixed with bureaucratic risk aversion. (Eventually, a physical card reader did make its way to me, still with no clear explanation for the delay.) But it was not the first strange interaction I had experienced.
In early 2024, I ordered a novel from Amazon. The book arrived at my home in Tel Aviv damaged and obviously used, despite being sold as new. Customer service initially handled the issue professionally, immediately agreeing to replace the order. Then I provided my address. There was silence.
“I see this address is not on the map,” the representative finally said. “I only see Palestine.” Then the line disconnected.
An alarming interaction, but the representative was expressing a personal political view, not enforcing corporate policy. What proved more revealing was Amazon’s institutional indifference afterward. Despite repeated inquiries to the company’s press office, I never received a clear decrial of the customer service representative’s actions. The issue simply disappeared into a bureaucratic void.
That sorry episode was felicitous in a way: It inspired my first op-ed for the Forward.
Then came British Airways.
After BA canceled flights between Tel Aviv and London in 2025 following a Houthi missile strike near Ben-Gurion Airport, my wife and I scrambled to reconstruct an itinerary at enormous personal expense. Wars disrupt aviation. That part was understandable.
What followed afterward was not. Months passed in a maze of contradictory responses, partial refunds, bureaucratic evasions and compensation offers so absurd that they bordered on parody. Only after I contacted the airline’s press office identifying myself as a journalist did the company suddenly rediscover the ability to communicate. Even then, the process remained exhausting and opaque. We were compensated perhaps a third the value of the ticket lost, with no apology whatsoever.
None of these incidents independently prove anti-Israel discrimination. Banks mistreat customers. Airlines fail passengers. Customer service departments malfunction. Yet together they illustrate a kind of new atmosphere for Israelis.
The most profound sign of that atmosphere has come in academia. As a new report by the Technion documents, what was once an academic boycott of Israel evolved from highly visible protests toward a more diffuse climate of exclusion.
Jewish students in Sweden reported hiding their identities in academic environments. British surveys found that roughly one in five students said they would not want to live with a Jewish roommate. Canadian campus activism increasingly moved from symbolic rhetoric toward operational demands for universities to sever ties with Israeli institutions and withdraw investments.
My friend Bar Harel experienced this personally at Portugal’s University of Coimbra. After complaining about antisemitic graffiti, pro-Hamas and Hezbollah imagery, and slogans such as “No Jews wanted” around campus, Harel became a target. He was threatened online, publicly vilified, physically assaulted near campus and told his family “should burn in a second Holocaust.”
University authorities largely deflected responsibility. Only after he fled Portugal at the advice of Israeli and American diplomats did the state ombudsman finally issue a report that said the university had adopted a “posture of fundamental passivity” in response to his harassment, failing to investigate despite clear evidence.
In business and academia alike, organizations don’t need to announce formal sanctions to change Israeli experience. They simply begin treating Israel operationally troublesome.
Does all this come from antisemitism — or is it a form of quiet protest against Israel’s brutality during the past years’ wars, or the indefensible situation in the West Bank? Does it relate to the current right-wing government — and if so, is it fixable should the moderate opposition return to power?
I do not have definitive answers, and there’s probably a mix of reasons. But it is clear that Israelis are losing the global narrative with astounding speed, and unless this is countered, more formal boycotts are on the way.
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