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During divided times, this Israeli university promotes inclusion and diversity with an unusual approach
Tal Levine is the first person in her family to go to college. Her mother, a child of illiterate Moroccan immigrants to Israel who spoke only Arabic, left school after eighth grade to help her parents on their Israeli farm. Her father dropped out of high school after his own father died, and he worked his entire career in the Israeli post office.
Levine herself did odd jobs from a young age, scraping together whatever money she could.
“I’ve been working since I was 13 years old, from dog walking to waitressing to whatever I could find,” said Levine, now 28. “My parents could not help me.”
Despite her hardships, Levine found her way into dentistry thanks to a special Hebrew University diversity program that seeks out students from challenging backgrounds. Not only was Levine accepted as a student into the Hebrew University-Hadassah Faculty of Dental Medicine, but she also received a life-changing scholarship that enabled her to pursue her dream.
“I wanted to do something to help people, and not just sit in front of a screen,” Levine said of her career ambitions.
Levine’s story is not unusual: Each year, students from diverse backgrounds are actively recruited to the university, where they are eligible for financial, cultural, academic and mental health support.
It’s part of Hebrew University’s vision for the school as an oasis of diversity, coexistence and inclusion at a time when Israel is facing headwinds of division, discrimination and discord.
The university is a unique and special place in Jerusalem — and in Israel generally — where students from a wide range of socioeconomic, ethnic and religious backgrounds come together. The student body includes Orthodox haredim, Palestinian Arabs, Mizrahim, Ethiopians, people with disabilities and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
“We are working hard to bring together people from different backgrounds, where they practice listening to each other and learning about cultural diversity,” said Professor Mona Khoury, vice president for strategy and diversity and former dean of Hebrew University’s School of Social Work. Khoury made history as the first Arab woman to be appointed as a dean at the university.
“Just as an example, I recently had lunch with Arab and Jewish students from East Jerusalem and Beersheva,” she said. “Right now, it’s hard because the situation in Israel isn’t good. But even though they were very different politically, they were able to talk and had a very real and genuine conversation. This may have been the first time they had this kind of exchange. And it’s because Hebrew University purposefully enables this to happen — encourages it.”
The university seeks to promote inclusion and diversity in a variety of ways. All the signage at the university is in Hebrew, Arabic and English to make it easier for students of all backgrounds to navigate the campus. The Rothberg International School has gender-neutral bathrooms to ensure students of all gender identifications feel comfortable. Extra help with Hebrew is available to new immigrants and Arab students. Students with disabilities receive special assistance. The School of Social Work offers counseling courses in Arabic, sends out emails in three languages, and celebrates Jewish, Muslim and Christian holidays.
Each minority group in Israel faces its own challenges: Economically disadvantaged students may not have enough money even to apply to the university; haredim and ex-haredi students lack basic educational foundations, and Arab students face linguistic,
cultural and social challenges.
Tala Atieh, a 22-year-old student in education and anthropology from Kfar Aqab in Arab-populated eastern Jerusalem, has benefited directly from the university’s efforts. Although she graduated at the top of her class in high school, she did not know any Hebrew. So she enrolled in a yearlong academic preparation course that the university offers students in her situation. Within a year, Atieh’s Hebrew was fluent and she was able to get into a degree program.
Atieh and Levine are both members of Hebrew University’s Ambassadors for Diversity program: 24 students from varied communities who receive scholarships, engage in multicultural activities and commit to working 100 hours in return for their benefits. As part of the program, Atieh shares her experiences with Arab young people and talks to them about how Hebrew University can help them thrive.
“I have met people from all over the country with many different backgrounds and perspectives,” Atieh said. “For example, I learned a lot about the Jewish holidays that I did not know before. And I share my own holidays as well. These exchanges bring
greater understanding between our different peoples.”
Promoting tolerance is among the university’s core values. The Center for the Study of Multiculturalism and Diversity (CSMD) promotes the development of multicultural sensitivity and tolerance, helping students develop critical perspectives on power
relations within their society and offering courses, clinics and events that explore multiculturalism and enable students to interact with those from different backgrounds. The center is the first academic body in Israel to harness behavioral science to focus on multiculturalism, and researchers at the CSMD are developing innovative policies to foster more social integration and cohesion.
“In the Ambassadors program I encounter people I would have never met otherwise,” said Tova Abeve, 34, a master’s degree student in public policy of Ethiopian descent.
Also the first in her family to attend university, Abeve is a social influencer and content creator with podcasts and other media aimed at Jewish women of Ethiopian descent. She uses her influence to tell her followers about the opportunities that Hebrew University offers.
“Most people don’t know that these opportunities exist,” she said. “I’m sharing a vision for what the world could look like.”
Shiran Brosh, a 38-year-old Orthodox student in education, is also in the Ambassadors program. “I have never met such a special group of people with different languages and cultures,” Brosh said. “We all come together. It’s a wonderful experience.”
Abichai Tzur, 24, is a former Orthodox Jew who spent much of his teen years cut off from his family following his decision to leave Orthodoxy. In order to get into the university’s program in international relations and communication, Tzur not only needed help overcoming gaps in his education but also financial support, mental health support and mentorship. Today, in addition to studying, he works at the Ministry of Social Equality in the LGBTQ division as manager of international relations, leads the Model United Nations program at the university, and speaks to other ex-Orthodox Jews about diversity and inclusion.
“The reason I advocate for social equality and share my story is that I know what it feels like to have a disadvantage and to need some help to get on your feet,” Tzur said.
Levine also talks to prospective students about her experience.
“My message to students is simple: You can do it,” Levine said. “Even if you don’t have money, even if you don’t think you are a good student, even if you haven’t studied — you can overcome all those obstacles and succeed.”
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Opinion: Hate crime law a tentative step forward
Canada has taken a long overdue step in strengthening our ability to confront hate. The federal government’s new legislation not only creates a stand-alone hate crime offence, it also does something our courts have wrestled with for decades, it codifies a definition of “hatred” in the Criminal Code. That clarity matters, but let us be clear from the start, not all is perfect in this law.
Until now, judges and Crown Attorneys relied on Supreme Court decisions going back to Keegstra in 1990 and Whatcott in 2013 to determine what “hatred” meant in law. Those cases established that hatred was not about mere insults or offensive speech, but about “detestation” and “vilification,” the kind of speech that isolates a community, marks them as less than fully human, and places them in real danger. The new legislation takes those definitions out of the legal textbooks and places them clearly in the Criminal Code. That matters for police officers deciding whether to lay charges, for Crowns weighing evidence, and for communities who have too often felt that the law was uncertain, inconsistent, or too slow.
For Jewish Canadians, Indigenous peoples, Muslim communities, Black Canadians, LGBTQ+ people, and many others who have borne the brunt of hate crimes, the signal is welcome, Canada is saying hate is not just a social problem, it is a crime against us all.
The bill also removes one of the most frustrating procedural roadblocks, the need to secure the personal consent of the provincial Attorney General before charges could be laid in hate propaganda cases. In practice, this meant that police and Crowns, even when they had strong evidence, could be stalled at the starting line because approval from the Attorney General was rarely granted. By removing this requirement, the new law allows police and Crown attorneys to proceed more swiftly and with more confidence. For communities long told to “just report it,” this change could finally build trust that the justice system is not only listening but ready to act.
Another important element is the protection of spaces where communities gather. The law makes it a crime to intimidate or obstruct people entering synagogues, schools, community centres, or other places primarily used by identifiable groups. That means no more hiding behind masks to frighten congregants on their way to worship or children on their way to school. These protections may seem obvious, but for too long communities at risk have faced such harassment without adequate recourse.
Just as important, the government has committed $12.9 million over six years, with nearly a million annually ongoing, to support new anti-hate projects. This includes funding to improve the collection and availability of hate crime data and to expand services for victims and survivors. These investments will help communities not only seek justice but also begin healing.
So yes, this is progress.
But progress does not equal victory.
The legislation’s definition of hatred, detestation and vilification not mere offence or hurt feelings, is both precise and cautious. It tries to balance freedom of expression with the need to protect communities from real harm. That balance is crucial. Nobody wants to see a law that punishes criticism or satire, even if it makes us uncomfortable. At the same time, communities need protection from the toxic brew of rhetoric that we know can escalate into violence.
And here lies the problem, this law looks only at the traditional sphere of hate crimes and hate propaganda. What it does not yet confront is the digital ecosystem where hatred thrives, multiplies, and metastasizes.
We live in a world where conspiracy theories that once stayed in dimly lit basements now reach millions with a single click. Holocaust denial, racist caricatures, misogynist rants, antisemitic tropes, they all travel faster and hit harder online. A Facebook post, a TikTok video, or a Telegram channel can stoke the same kind of detestation and vilification the Criminal Code now defines, but at a speed and scale our laws are still catching up to.
Without integrating online harms into this new framework, Canada risks winning a legal battle while losing the societal war. A Pyrrhic victory, if you will.
Hate groups adapt quickly. They couch their language in irony or “just joking.” They migrate to platforms beyond the reach of Canadian courts. They recruit vulnerable young people not with burning crosses but with memes and livestreams. If our laws remain focused only on in-person hate crimes or printed pamphlets, we will forever be chasing yesterday’s problem.
The government has promised separate legislation on online harms. Communities targeted by hate cannot afford to wait much longer. Every month of delay is another month when young Canadians are radicalized in their bedrooms, another month when harassment campaigns go unchecked, another month when hatred festers behind a screen only to erupt into real world violence.
This new hate-crime law deserves praise. It is careful, measured, and long needed. But from the very beginning we should be honest, it is not perfect. Unless it is paired with a robust strategy for confronting online hate, one that forces platforms to act responsibly and gives law enforcement real tools to respond, it risks being remembered as a noble but incomplete gesture.
History will not judge us on the elegance of our legal definitions. It will judge us on whether we made our communities safer, whether we stood up for those targeted by hate, and whether we matched words with action.
Canada has given itself sharper legal tools. Now we must decide, will we use them to carve out a safer, more inclusive future, or will we leave them on the shelf while hate keeps spreading in the digital shadows? Because if we settle for half-measures, we may find that what looks like victory today is nothing more than defeat in slow motion.
Bernie M. Farber is the former CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress and founding chair emeritus of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.
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Austria may withdraw from hosting Eurovision 2026 if Israel is excluded

The chancellor of Austria is pressuring its public broadcaster and the city of Vienna not to host next year’s Eurovision Song Contest if Israel is excluded.
The potential withdrawal from hosting the competition comes as several countries, including Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain and Iceland, have announced they will not participate in next year’s competition if Israel is included due to the war in Gaza.
Unlike those countries, Austria has a right-wing government. “It’s unacceptable that we, of all people, should prohibit a Jewish artist from coming to Vienna,” a top representative of the Austrian People’s Party told Austrian news outlet oe24.
The party’s leader, Chancellor Christian Stocker, and State Secretary Alexander Pröll are urging the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation and Vienna to cancel hosting if the boycott goes ahead.
The mayor of Vienna, Michael Ludwig, told oe24 that excluding Israel would be “a serious mistake,” but no formal plans to withdraw from hosting the competition have been announced. If the city does pull out of hosting, ORF would potentially owe the new host country up to 40 million euros, or roughly $46 million.
Members of the European Broadcasting Union are set to vote in November on whether the Israeli public broadcaster, KAN, will be allowed to participate in next year’s competition. They have previously rebuffed entreaties to exclude Israel, but pressure is higher this year.
Talks of Austria canceling its 2026 Eurovision hosting come after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Sunday that Germany would skip the contest if Israel is boycotted.
“I consider it a scandal that this is even being discussed. Israel is part of it,” Merz told German talk show host Caren Miosga, according to German news outlet Der Spiegel. He added that he would “support” Germany voluntarily withdrawing from the competition if the boycott takes effect.
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László Krasznahorkai, whose family hid Jewish roots during Holocaust, wins literature Nobel
For decades, Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has written sentences that seem to stretch to the end of time — long, feverish, unpunctuated meditations on chaos, faith, and collapse. Now, the writer once dubbed “the contemporary master of apocalypse” has received the world’s highest literary honor. On Thursday, the Swedish Academy awarded Krasznahorkai, 71, the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born in 1954 in the small Hungarian town of Gyula to a Jewish family that survived the Holocaust and concealed its identity, Krasznahorkai has spent decades chronicling moral disintegration and spiritual endurance.
If you don’t read Hungarian, you might know Krasznahorkai through film: his longtime collaborator Béla Tarr turned several of his novels into movies — Sátántangó (a seven-hour black-and-white epic), Werckmeister Harmonies, and The Turin Horse — all staples of international art-house cinema.
Who is László Krasznahorkai?
A cult figure in world literature, Krasznahorkai is known for sprawling, hypnotic prose and bleak humor. He first drew attention in 1985 with Sátántangó, a novel about life in a decaying Hungarian village.
He has since written a series of darkly comic epics, including The Melancholy of Resistance and Seiobo There Below — each circling questions of despair and transcendence.
Some of his later novels, including Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming and Herscht 07769, feature neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists. The latter contains only a single period in 400 pages. The rest is one relentless cascade of clauses — a symbol of his determination to hold chaos together by grammar alone.
He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015.
How does his Jewish background fit into his work?
Krasznahorkai rarely writes explicitly about Judaism, but the sense of exile, concealment, and moral reckoning runs through his fiction. As antisemitism intensified in the 1930s, his grandfather changed the family name to the more Hungarian-sounding Krasznahorkai. “Our original name was Korin, a Jewish name. With this name, he would never have survived,” the writer told an interviewer in 2018. “My grandfather was very wise.”
Decades later, Krasznahorkai gave the name Korin to the doomed archivist who narrates his 1999 novel War and War — turning family history into fiction. Krasznahorkai didn’t learn about his Jewish ancestry until he was 11, when his father finally told him. “In the socialist era, it was forbidden to mention it,” he recalled.
That buried history gives his novels their haunted tone. In a way, his work continues a Jewish literary tradition: bearing witness in extremity, searching for meaning in ruin.
In that 2018 interview, Krasznahorkai described himself as “half Jewish,” then added darkly: “If things carry on in Hungary as they seem likely to do, I’ll soon be entirely Jewish.”
Do Jews disproportionally win Nobels?
Jews make up about 0.2 percent of the world’s population but have received roughly 20 percent of Nobel Prizes across all categories — a record that spans science, peace, and the arts. That lineage stretches from Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Richard Feynman in physics to Rita Levi-Montalcini and Gertrude Elion in medicine, Milton Friedman and Daniel Kahneman in economics, and Henry Kissinger and Elie Wiesel in peace.
Krasznahorkai now joins that global pantheon — one that also includes Isaac Bashevis Singer, a longtime Forward staff writer, whose Yiddish storytelling won him the 1978 Nobel in Literature.
Who are some other Jewish Nobel laureates in literature?
Louise Glück (2020): The American poet mined family grief and faith, blending autobiography and myth to confront the quiet devastations of ordinary life.
Bob Dylan (2016): The folk legend was honored “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” His Jewish heritage and biblical imagery made his win both celebrated and debated.
Imre Kertész (2002): A Holocaust survivor who was honored in 2002 for Fatelessness, a semi-autobiographical work about a boy in Nazi concentration camps.
Elias Canetti (1981): Born to a Sephardic family in Bulgaria and raised in Vienna, he spent much of his life in exile from fascism. His noted work of nonfiction, Crowds and Power, dissects how mobs become monsters — and how leaders learn to feed them.
Saul Bellow (1976): The Canadian-born American novelist who captured the restless intellect and moral hunger of postwar Jewish life. His novels, including Herzog and The Adventures of Augie March, turned immigrant striving and urban alienation into high art.
JTA contributed to this report.
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