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DC’s new Jewish museum highlights Jews who shaped the nation’s capital, from a Confederate spy to RBG
WASHINGTON (JTA) – Washington, D.C.’s new Jewish museum features at least two notorious women from history.
One is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first Jewish woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice, who was dubbed “Notorious RBG” late in her life by a cluster of fans. When the Capital Jewish Museum opens next week, it will launch with Ginsburg at its center when a traveling exhibit on her life has its final stop here.
The other is the 19th-century figure Eugenia Levy Phillips, whom the museum characterizes as “notorious” without irony.
“One of DC’s most notorious Confederate sympathizers, Eugenia Levy Phillips (1891-1902) came to town in 1853 with her congressman husband, Philip Phillips (1807-1884) of Alabama,” one of the exhibits says. “Eugenia, a spy, delivered Union military plans and maps to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.”
Another description of Levy Phillips in the museum is more straightforward: “SPIED for the CONFEDERACY,” it says below her photo.
An exhibit on Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the new Capital Jewish Museum in Washington D.C.;, June 1, 2023. (Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Photos)
The late justice and spy are two of an assemblage of notable Jews throughout history who grace the Capital Museum, which opens next Friday in northwest Washington’s Judiciary Square neighborhood, which was a local center of Jewish life more than a century ago. Showcasing the warts-and-all history of Jews in and around the nation’s capital — both prominent officials and ordinary denizens of the city — is the point of the museum, its directors say.
“Jews are a Talmudic people, we like to argue, we like to look at different sides of a story,” Ivy Barsky, the museum’s interim executive director, said Thursday at a tour for members of the media. Sarah Leavitt, the museum curator, involved the Jewish idea of “makhloket l’shem shamayim,” Hebrew for “an argument for the sake of heaven” — in other words, for sacred purposes.
“We’re telling the story in this museum in a Jewish way,” Leavitt said. “So that it’s not just that we might not agree, but actually the disagreement is important and preserving those disagreements is important.”
Barsky, who was previously the CEO of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, said that in relating the local history of Washington’s Jews, the new museum fills a gap. Unlike many of the country’s other longstanding Jewish communities, Washington attracted Jews not because it was a port but because it was the center of government. Like the district’s broader community, Jews in the area have been prone to transitioning in and out of the city.
“Lots of our stories start in other places, with folks who end up in D.C.,” Barsky said. “This is a unique community, especially because the local business is the federal government.”
An exhibit at the new Capital Jewish Museum asks visitors, “Who are you? and features a diverse array of Jews , in Washington D.C., June 1, 2023. (Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Photos)
Jews have been in Washington since it was established in 1790, and the area now includes some 300,000 Jews, according to a 2017 study. The museum chronicles that community’s expansion from the capital to the Maryland and the Virginia suburbs, driven at times by Jews joining “white flight” — when white residents left newly integrated neighborhoods — and other times by restrictions that barred Jews from certain areas.
Larger historical events have also at times played a role: The Jewish population in the city grew in the 1930s and 1940s because of the expansion of government during President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and World War II.
An exhibition asks visitors “Who are you?” and features a diverse range of Washington Jews, past and present, as well as others with quirky biographies, including Tom King, a CIA spy who became a comic book writer.
The changing fortunes of American Jewry are embedded in the date the museum opens, June 9: On that date in 1876, Ulysses Grant was the first president to attend synagogue services, when he helped dedicate the new building of the Adas Israel congregation. Fourteen years earlier, as a Union general, he infamously expelled the Jews of Paducah, Kentucky, accusing them of being war speculators. President Abraham Lincoln rescinded the order, which has been described as “the most sweeping anti-Jewish regulation in all of American history,”
Esther Safran Foer, the museum’s president and the former executive director of the city’s historic Sixth & I synagogue, said Grant’s presence in 1876 in the Adas Israel building was emblematic of the upward trajectory of American Jewry. “He sat here for more than three hours in the heat, no air conditioning, and he even made a generous personal contribution,” she said.
The museum’s core is the 1876 building that Grant helped dedicate. It has since been physically moved in its entirety three times in order to preserve it, most recently in 2019 as part of the initiative to build the museum, which began in 2017. The museum’s upper floor reproduces the sanctuary, with the original pews. Its walls, however, are renovated: they display an audiovisual chronicle of the area’s Jews.
The museum’s permanent exhibition aims to traverse that history in other engaging ways as well. The same section that highlights Levy Phillips’ adventures (including her diary’s account of her arrest — “I am not in the least surprised Sir” she told the agent who had come to take her away) also mentions Rabbi Jacob Frankel, who was commissioned by Lincoln during the Civil War as the first Jewish military chaplain.
A photo of Jews and Blacks joined in a bid to desegregate a local amusement park in the early 1960s gets equal billing with one of Sam Eig, a Jewish developer who in 1942 advertised the new Maryland suburb he built as “ideally located and sensibly restricted,” a euphemism for not allowing Black people to buy property.
Interactive exhibits include a Seder table that encourages guests to debate immigration, Israel and civil rights. Parts of the museum’s exhibition recount Jewish debates over pivotal issues such as those and others, including abortion.
Ginsburg will be the museum’s first main attraction, and it makes clear she was a role model. The special exhibition on her life and career includes a glamorous photo of the two Jewish women who coined the “Notorious RBG” nickname, Shana Knizhnik and Irin Carmon. Visitors can go into a closet and don duplicates of Ginsburg’s judicial robes.
One of the first events is on July 12, when museum goers will join in fashioning the special “I Dissent” collars that Ginsburg would famously wear over her robes when she was ready to dissent from the bench.
Jonathan Edelman, the museum’s collections curator, described one prized collection — items he persuaded disability rights advocate Judy Heumann to donate before she died in March.
“Judy’s is a Washington story,” he said. “She came to this city first as an outsider as a protester protesting for disability rights. And then she came back to the city as an insider working within the government to make change both in D.C. government and in the federal government.”
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The post DC’s new Jewish museum highlights Jews who shaped the nation’s capital, from a Confederate spy to RBG appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Grok said Hebrew translation was disabled on X — but it’s not
Despite what you may have heard, Hebrew translation still works on X. But allegations that the platform had disabled translation for Hebrew went viral after Grok, the AI chatbot built into the platform, said Hebrew was disabled because posts in the language were likely to encourage violence. As it turns out, the AI was hallucinating — the real question is why.
The rumor seems to have started because a Hebrew post advertising a pop group’s new single, “I, Butterfly,” was not working with the translation tools on the site. An account with the name “Red Pill Media” — though the bio for the account only says “America First,” and does not link to any media site — took a screenshot of an error message pop-up saying that Hebrew was not supported “for this translation.” They then shared the photo with a caption alleging that Hebrew translation was gone because “Jews were calling for genocide on this app without getting suspended.”
In the comments of this post, someone tagged Grok to ask why Hebrew wasn’t available. “Translation from Hebrew was disabled because it often amplified inflammatory or policy-violating content, like calls for violence, to a global audience via inaccurate or literal renditions,” the bot replied. “It’s about platform integrity amid documented spikes in Hebrew hate speech.”
Many people took this as an official confirmation from X that Hebrew translation had been turned off.
But while engineers, and the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, often tinker with the AI’s responses — for example, Musk made Grok more right-wing, and programmed it to flatter him — it largely consumes responses on X itself as its training material, which means that it is easy to mislead it. This is particularly the case on new, viral topics that its programmers have not had time to put up safeguards around.
In the comments on the original post, users speculated as to why the translation wasn’t working, quickly coming up with nefarious explanations. One user posited, or joked, that there was a Mein Kampf excerpt in the caption. Others guessed that it was an effort to “protect hate speech” in Hebrew so that English speakers can’t condemn it or use it to criticize Israel.
The original post that Grok could not translate contained no hate speech at all. It simply lists the song’s composers and the members of the band. (The translation issue may have stemmed from the fact that the song’s title was in English, and mixing characters from different alphabets confused the translation software.) But that didn’t stop false ideas about what it said from circulating. This is likely how Grok came to its conclusion — by consuming and regurgitating the conspiracy theories that users had themselves generated.
Chatbots and AIs are prone to hallucinations like this because of the way that they are trained; they tend to use human-generated input as their main source of information, which means that they are easily influenced by people’s own thoughts, incorrect beliefs and conspiracy theories. (This is also why they are prone to spouting neo-Nazi talking points without safeguards; there’s a lot of those floating around on the internet that the programs learned from.)
In fact, the error message in the screenshot saying that Hebrew was not available for that translation was not actually part of X; it was a pop-up from Apple Translation, the iPhone’s built-in translation tool, which was probably also confused by the mixed alphabets. And Grok has elsewhere confirmed that Hebrew can be translated on X, and that mixed alphabets cause a glitch. Still, theories continue to swirl that Grok may be refusing to translate Hebrew posts that include hate speech as part of an effort to reduce outcry against Israel.
But whether or not it’s good for the Jews, it’s still perfectly possible to translate plenty of racist statements in Hebrew, and any other language.
The post Grok said Hebrew translation was disabled on X — but it’s not appeared first on The Forward.
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French Court Cuts Sentence for Teen in Antisemitic Gang Rape of 12-Year-Old Jewish Girl
France, Paris, 20/06/2024. Gathering at place de la Bastille after the anti Semitic rape of a 12 year old girl in Courbevoie. Photography by Myriam Tirler / Hans Lucas.
More than a year after the brutal gang rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl, a French court has dramatically reduced the sentence of one of the two teenagers convicted in the attack, citing his “need to prepare for future reintegration.”
On Tuesday, the Versailles Court of Appeal retried one of the convicted boys — the only one to challenge his sentence — behind closed doors, ultimately reducing his term from nine to seven years and imposing an educational measure, the French news outlet Le Parisien reported.
“The court took into account the entire case as provided for by law: the facts, their seriousness, but also the personality of the minor and the need to prepare for future reintegration,” the boy’s lawyer Melody Blanc said in a statement.
The original sentences, handed down in June, gave the two boys — who were 13 years old at the time of the incident — seven and nine years in prison, respectively, after they were convicted on charges of group rape, physical violence, and death threats aggravated by antisemitic hatred.
The third boy involved in the attack, the girl’s ex-boyfriend, was accused of threatening her and orchestrating the attack, also motivated by racist prejudice.
Because the girl’s ex-boyfriend was under 13 at the time of the attack, he did not face prison and was instead sentenced to five years in an educational facility.
The lawyers of the victim, Muriel Ouaknine-Melki and Oudy Bloch, praised “the courage of [their] client” for confronting her attackers and ensuring that two of them were imprisoned.
According to police reports from the time, the two French boys cornered the girl on June 15, 2024, inside an empty building in Courbevoie, a northwestern suburb of Paris, questioned her about her Jewish identity, and then physically assaulted and raped her.
The assailants who were Muslim also allegedly called the victim a “dirty Jew” and uttered other antisemitic remarks during the brutal gang-rape.
Under threat of death, she was forced to perform penetrative and oral sex on two of the boys, while her ex-boyfriend threatened to burn her cheek with a lighter and attempted to make her sit on her handbag, which he had set ablaze.
Local reports indicate that part of the assault was recorded, and at least one assailant allegedly demanded 200 euros from the girl to withhold the footage, which was eventually circulated.
The ex-boyfriend sent footage of the assault to a boy the girl had gone out with that afternoon, with the message “Look at your chick,” according to law enforcement. After receiving such a message, the boy informed the girl’s family, who found her an hour after the attack.
“Before letting her leave, they made her swear on Allah not to say anything and that she should not tell anyone, neither her parents nor the police,” the girl’s mother told Le Parisien at the time.
The three-day trial, held behind closed doors, took place in a regional juvenile court in Nanterre, a suburb west of Paris.
During the proceedings, the judge explained that the severity of the sentence came “in view of their concerning personality traits and the immense social disturbance.”
“There is no doubt that [the victim] would not have been assaulted or raped if she had not been Jewish,” the judge said at the time.
The brutal crime sparked outrage throughout France and among the Jewish community, unfolding against the backdrop of a disturbing surge in antisemitism that has gripped the country since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
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Miami Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa says he wants to play an NFL game in Jerusalem
(JTA) — The phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” is customarily spoken at the end of the Passover seder. But this past weekend its sentiment was conveyed at the end of a different kind of gathering: a low-scoring NFL game between the Miami Dolphins and Washington Commanders.
“Shoot, it’d be pretty cool to go play in Jerusalem,” Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa said postgame.
The game — which the Dolphins won 16-13 in overtime — was the NFL’s first in Spain, as part of a growing international series that’s seen contests played in England, Germany, Brazil, Ireland and Mexico.
Tagovailoa, a Christian, was asked where else he’d like to play after experiencing Madrid and previously Frankfurt, Germany. And his answer caught the eye of a high-ranking diplomat: Mike Huckabee, the United States Ambassador to Israel.
“Tua is right,” Huckabee wrote on X. “Bringing an NFL game to Israel is a great idea. Next year in Jerusalem…I like the sound of that.”
The suggestion comes amid an increasingly contested role for Israel as a host in global sporting events. EuroLeague basketball is supposed to return next month, and officials from the league are in Israel now to assess conditions before finalizing the plan.
Soccer, too, has been a fraught space for Israeli participation. The Union of European Football Associations had been set to vote on suspending Israel but paused the process after the ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza that began last month. Some want the organization to return to the deliberations, with Ireland’s soccer federation submitting a motion earlier this month to ban Israel from all UEFA competition for “organising clubs in occupied Palestinian territories without the consent of the Palestinian FA” and “the alleged failure of the IFA [Israel Football Association] to enforce an effective anti-racism policy.”
Tagovailoa’s comments on playing in Israel did not mark the first time speaking about the country during a postgame media availability. Following a home game on Oct. 15, 2023, Tagovailoa paused the press conference to talk about Hamas’ attack on Israel, which had taken place just over a week earlier.
“I didn’t really realize how bad things were in Israel,” Tagovailoa said. “And just wanted to bring to the attention for those who don’t necessarily understand things that are going on, that it really is bad.”
He added, “I don’t know what we’ve come to, but just my thoughts, my prayers are out with those people in Israel,” continuing on to note that there is “also the Ukraine and Russia war still going on as well.”
There has been no indication from the NFL about a potential game in Israel, though Robert Kraft — the American billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, who is Jewish and founded the Blue Square Alliance against Hate, formerly called the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism — sponsored the construction of the Kraft Family Sports Campus in Jerusalem, which includes an American football field. The adjacent park, Gan Sacher, is routinely home to informal football and flag football games.
Meanwhile, the capacity of Jerusalem’s largest stadium, Teddy Stadium, is just 31,000. Attendance at the NFL’s international games have ranged from upwards of 86,000 to, at their lowest, 47,000.
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