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How Yiddish authors made a new world writing for children
An intrepid puppy who marches for labor rights. A 6-year-old girl who sews herself a locomotive to carry her away from her daily chores. A Jewish boy who would be Pope.
These stories, written in Yiddish, are all entertaining and whimsical, and like so much writing for young people, may be seen as less than serious. But they were also composed as part of a larger communal project that was widely regarded as urgent. Beginning in the late 19th century, Jewish thinkers outlined the need for a children’s literature in the vernacular as a way to shape the future.
As Miriam Udel writes in her new book, Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature, these authors sought to “write a better world into being in a distinctively Yiddish key.”
Arriving at a time of competing nationalisms — communism and the socialism of the Jewish Labor Bund on one side, Zionism on the other — Yiddish writing for children began in Eastern Europe. It then spread to New York and, with the migration of Jews, Latin America.
Udel’s book is structured around the evolution of the canon, that, after the Holocaust, reexamined its purpose, pushing for literacy and what she calls the “rhythms of Jewish time.”
The writers responsible for Yiddish literature came from various political stripes. Some were educators and academics and others first made their names with stories for adults. Their work ranged from naturalist accounts of a Bund sanatorium to mythic tales of travelers on the Sabbath. Yet within nearly every story a theme of social justice rings through.
Udel, the compiler and translator of the Yiddish children’s story treasury Honey on the Page and the force behind a hit puppet show based on Chaver Paver’s stories of Labzik the communist puppy, researched nearly 1,000 works for the book.
“The overarching goal is to create literature that is going to make its readers want to joyfully and affirmatively choose Jewish identity,” Udel said of Yiddish children’s literature after the Holocaust. “This is an idea that I see us kind of rediscovering now.”
I spoke with Udel, an associate professor of Yiddish language, literature and culture at Emory University, about how this literature developed and changed to meet the times, and why Sholem Aleichem, for all his talent, had “no game” writing for kids. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I think a lot of people might be surprised that the first Yiddish children’s stories can be dated, and that it’s only really back to 1889. Why did it take so long to develop?
Children’s literature is very much a function of changing ideas about what childhood is and what children need. For a really long time, differences in age were much less important than differences in gender. Instead of boys and girls, we really had proto-men and proto-women. It’s really only when we’re starting to get these modern ideas about childhood as a protracted period, as a time for education and leisure [that this emerges]. We had an ideal of education for Jewish boys since time immemorial, but the idea that both boys and girls would have this time available that could be filled with the activity of reading, that was really new, and that was a product of economic changes, as much as cultural and educational developments,
It was also wrapped up in these nationalist movements that were emerging, the secular nationalist movement for Jews that produced the Yiddish school system. What were the cultural changes there and how did they lead to this literature?
By the turn of the 20th century, we have a pretty well-fleshed-out modern idea of what childhood is and what children are. Their job is to become educated, and there is a delay before we expect them to take up the burdens of adulthood, and at the same time, there are a lot of different nation-building projects underway. We can look to Mandatory Palestine as it prepares itself to become the State of Israel, and the way that Hebrew children’s literature is created out of whole cloth for helping to define who would be the citizens of this new Jewish state. We can also look to the Soviet Union. The revolution is going to remake humanity, and so it’s an efficient shortcut to start with the very young who could be imagined as a blank slate onto which you can write the story of your new state and your new citizenry. In the case of Yiddish, there are some of those cultural nationalist impulses, but it’s complicated because it bumps up against the reality that Yiddish really never comes close to being the language of a conventional nation state. And so instead of Yiddish being recruited into a conventional nation-building or state-building project, Yiddish gets recruited into what I call “worldmaking,” which is a project of creating symbolic polities and structures that children are going to be able to inhabit in, and through, their encounter with Yiddish.
The bulk of this genre is coming from mostly secular writers, but you note a lot of the stories seem to involve Shabbat and stories of the cheder. Why did these secular Jewish writers gravitate towards content that was in some way religious?
Everybody, no matter how secular they felt, had to deal with a question of, “What is the significance of the Jewish past?” “What is the significance of the language that has been handed down to us as a mother tongue?” And “How can this shared, collective past in some way shape the future?” Some of them don’t deal with the past — everything is very forward-looking, and that’s where we actually tend to see a lot of girl protagonists. The future is female for Yiddish children’s literature. Whereas we see our cheder stories, our school tales with boy protagonists that orient themselves toward the past, and sometimes we see authors digging into a very deep, rich kind of Jewish past in order to pull up something that they think will be of use now and tomorrow.
That’s what happens with a subgenre that I write about the Sabbatarian tale, that describes somebody observing a very traditional, even Halachically-informed Sabbath under vulnerable circumstances, where maybe it wouldn’t even make sense for them to choose the immobility and all of the ways that the Sabbath grounds you in a negative sense, they are nevertheless choosing to uphold the Sabbath and finding that it grounds them in a positive sense. There’s a convergence point between the very traditional idea of a regular cessation of labor every seven days and the most cutting-edge socialist thinking about the worker being able to reclaim time from the boss and say, “1/7 of my time doesn’t belong to you.”
There are some sort of bold-faced names showing up and trying their hand at this literature. We have Sholem Aleichem trying his best. What do you make of the writers that are maybe more familiar to us and their efforts, and who are some writers that we might not know about who stand out?
Across Jewish literatures, several decades into the 20th century, there’s a sense of almost civic duty to try your hand at writing something for children, and some of them are terrible. One of my favorite Yiddish authors for adults, Yisroel Rabon, writes this super weird novella that I wrote about at length in my first book, Never Better! It’s violent and disturbing and terrible, and I would never put it before children in my life. And then we get someone like Sholem Aleichem, who wrote so brilliantly about childhood and child characters from the perspective of adulthood, but really had no game when it came to addressing living, breathing children. And he was such a bold name that they tried to retrofit his stories to appeal to children. It became canonical because he’s Sholem Aleichem. And then you get someone like Isaac Basevis Singer, who’s really already made quite a name for himself as a novelist and a writer for adults. And [Elizabeth Shub], the daughter of a legendary children’s editor of the Kinder-zhurnal, who becomes an English language children’s book editor as her career, goes and recruits Isaac Bashevis Singer to write for children.
And he didn’t know how to do it. He had to really kind of stumble his way into some kind of address to children. So he started out trying to write rhyming poetry, because he thought that’s how you talk to children, literarily, and it was stilted and it was terrible. And she told him, “Itsik, go back to the drawing board.” He kind of cracked the code and figured out his formula, and he started producing these really heartwarming tales of the old country, and he was able to pour a sense of hopefulness and decency that he only half believed in for adults into these children’s stories.
Then as this enterprise of writing for children in Yiddish and publishing arms gets going, it becomes professionalized, and it becomes the province of both professional educators and also people whose whole career is write for children, or who wrote somewhat for adults, but also somewhat for children. And then we start to get figures like Zina Rabinowitz, who’s one of my favorites. Last year I did this project, 5785 where I published a new Yiddish children’s holiday tale before each one of the holidays that ran in the Forward. And one of my go-to authors was Zina Rabinowitz. She’s writing in the 1950s, but she really understood how to address kids, and it was a very smooth process to translate her, and her psychological intuitions about children and childhood were very much in keeping with our own.
A large part of it for the Americas was how to communicate about the Holocaust. Part of the approach was stories of resistance or metaphors — the life of a tear shed by a boy who was deported. Can you talk about how they tackled that?
One of the really important figures in thinking about this and kind of theorizing what to do was Yudel Mark. He’s publishing articles in 1941 and 1943 and 1947 reflecting on what they did and how they did. And he says “We may have sinned against child psychology.” So there’s an awareness that there is a field devoted to children’s wellbeing, and that field has made everyone aware of children’s vulnerability, and that it was worth overriding that concern in order to let Yiddish-speaking Jewish children know what was happening to their cousins and how to go on and live their own Jewish lives in light and in spite of what had happened to European Jewish children.
Something that comes up as a theme — there’s tzedekah for a poor person on Purim, even in the first story — is building empathy for readers.
The single most frequently occurring theme across all the varieties of Yiddish children’s literature, is the persistence of wealth inequality and the need to redress it in some way. The prescriptions for what to do or what to focus on in redressing wealth inequality really vary, particularly by political stripe. This is where we can sort of dig down and see where an author situated themselves on the ideological spectrum. And so we have Kadia Molodosky writing a beautiful story “The Beggar and the Baker,” about the traditional value of giving tzedakah, of charitable giving as a matter of justice and as a matter of pre-paying a debt that you don’t even know exists yet, because that’s what the baker does. He gives challah every week to all the beggars, including one with radiant eyes. And when the bakery burns down and the baker is left destitute, along comes the beggar of all of those years whose fortune has changed, and he’s come precisely to pay back and discharge the debt.
And we have other stories that speak in the language of tzedakah. We have a story of a little boy’s political awakening, realizing that as a kind of well-off, middle-class kid with everything that he needs, there’s a whole economy and political order that’s been created to make sure that he has down feathers in his pillow and wool to be sewn into the suit that he wears, and leather for the shoes that he wears, and that other creatures have suffered and died, and that other human beings are working at hard jobs, like the washer woman, so that he can have nice things. So there’s his coming into political awareness.
And then, going further out on the left, we get a story about the birds of the forest who organized politically to liberate the urban birds who are dwelling in cages. And the story really walks its child reader through the mechanics of labor organization and collective action. And so everyone wants to fix wealth inequality, but people have really different ideas about how to do it and what to emphasize.
The state of this literature now is mainly from the Hasidic world. Do they read any of these, these old secular writers and their Shabbat stories? I know the orthography is different.
It’s not like there’s a kosher version of Kadia Molodowsky or Isaac Bashevis Singer. There is, instead, just alternate content that originates in that community. There might be Yiddish children’s versions of midrashic stories, stories from rabbinic literature, that got an update in the 1910s or the 1920s and those same stories have formed the basis of materials for contemporary Hasidic children. But that would be sort of incidental. One thing that I did see, and actually my favorite of the contemporary Hasidic children’s books that I own, is a graphic novelization of a Rebbe Nakhman story about a wise man and a fool, and the production values are really high. The illustrations are great, and who doesn’t love a graphic novel?
What does the future of the genre look like for non-Hasidic Yiddish readers, a growing cohort having kids now.
One of the ways that I got into this research area is that I was looking for children’s materials that originated in Yiddish, not necessarily something that’s been translated into Yiddish or translated for pedagogical purposes, that would be simple enough that my students could productively read it in the second semester. And I thought, “Is there any children’s literature?” And so now I get emails all the time from people who are using Honey on the Page to locate children’s literature, which they are then using to further their Yiddish education. I think that some of these stories really want to exist in new forms, and as picture books and as graphic novels. I actually just got the go ahead from the peer reviewer on my translation of Labzik, which SUNY is going to publish in August. All 12 Labzik stories. And I think Labzik is desperately eager to become a graphic novel. And I think Labzik wants to be animated. The puppet film was so successful. I think there’s a lot more where that came from.
I do think that it’s a time of renaissance, and that children’s literature is such an exciting frontier, because it’s a way to build interest from and grant access from a very young age. It’s something that multiple generations can share with each other with great pleasure and profit. And then, for the people who do make the leap into studying Yiddish, whether it’s through Duolingo or a class, it gives them a way to progress with their language study, so it can do all of these different things for us that feel like they have a lot of currency right now.
The post How Yiddish authors made a new world writing for children appeared first on The Forward.
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Is this Vermont farm the American kibbutz? I camped out there during Sukkot — and got a taste of Judaism’s ancient agrarian roots
Sukkot, the Jewish harvest festival, can feel a little abstract for Jews like me who live in big cities, far removed from the agricultural cycle that gave rise to the holiday. Typically, the extent of my fall harvest consists of buying a pumpkin from Trader Joe’s.
But last weekend, sleeping in a tent at Living Tree Alliance, a Jewish farm and co-housing community in rural Vermont, I found myself much closer to Sukkot’s agrarian roots. Rows of colorful produce stretched across the 93-acre property, much of it destined for the “stone soup” that would become our dinner the following night. Plants grown on the farm formed the sukkah’s schach, or roof covering.
“I forgot scissors,” Melanie Grubman, one of Living Tree’s founding members, told me as she cut yellow flowers off their stems with her teeth for material to decorate the sukkah.
About 16 people, including a few families with children, live on this bucolic property year-round, in what may be the closest American equivalent to an Israeli kibbutz. Residents are expected to volunteer between 8 and 16 hours per month, doing farm chores, serving on committees, managing the on-site AirBnB and keeping common spaces clean. All disagreements are resolved through a system of “sociocracy,” a governance model based on consent; decisions are made only when no one objects. On Shabbat, that work ceases, and chickens raised by residents are butchered kosher-style for dinner.
By living closer to the land, their food supply, and each other, residents say they feel closer to Judaism, too.
“It’s hard for me to pray not in the garden,” Grubman said. “I have no desire to sit inside when holiness is blowing on me.”
The Founders
Sephirah Oshkello, 54, barefoot and wearing a long purple tie-dye dress, swayed back and forth with the rhythm of prayers. As we went around the circle naming those in need before reciting the Mi Shebeirach, the prayer for healing, she offered, “Mama Earth.”
Oshkello, a Hebrew priestess, or kohenet, also works as a holistic nutritionist when she isn’t gardening or leading prayers.
This free-spirited lifestyle is a far cry from the environment in which she grew up. Oshkello was raised in Great Neck, New York, where she attended Temple Israel, a Conservative synagogue.
But after college at University of Maryland, she joined a community service program in Tzfat, Israel, where she got a taste of Jewish communal living, studied Jewish tradition, and spent her days hiking. From there, she spent a year living on an Israeli kibbutz.
“From then on, I felt like, I want to create something like this in the States,” Oshkello said. “Because when I went to Israel, my mom said, ‘OK, go, but you better come back.”
She returned to Great Neck and attended an Orthodox synagogue, but quickly realized it wasn’t the right fit.
“Judaism is connected to the land, and when the Jews got kicked out of their land, it became a culture of the book,” Oshkello said. “I do love to study words, but it only serves one part of our being, right? In Kabbalah, we talk about body, mind, spirit.”
The idea for Living Tree took shape on Oshkello’s second date with her now-husband, Craig, at a vegetarian restaurant in Seattle in 1997, when she told him about her dream to create an intentional Jewish community. The couple moved to secular co-housing in New Hampshire, where they began scouting property in Vermont and making plans for their own Jewish community.
In 2015, she and Craig bought the 93-acre Living Tree property in Moretown, Vt., then just a field with trees and a sugar shack, and moved there about a year later.
Grubman, a 47-year-old Waldorf teacher and owner of an all-women stonemasonry business in Vermont, was among the first residents. Like Oshkello, Grubman grew up in a suburban Jewish community — in her case, a “ritzy” Conservative synagogue outside Philadelphia. But she never connected with the idea of praying while sitting still inside.
“I was one of these angsty teenagers who was like, ‘Nature is busting through the concrete!’” Grubman said. “‘My heart is crying!’”
At Wesleyan University, Grubman became president of the environmental club and wrote her own eco-Haggadah for Passover. She later helped jumpstart Wilderness Torah, a program reconnecting Jews with the agricultural context of the Hebrew calendar, in Berkeley and Oakland, California.
Along the way, she encountered spiritual leaders who helped her understand that Jewish practice could look different from the Judaism of her childhood.
She remembered one rabbi who arrived for Yom Kippur “in white pajamas, covered in dirt.”
“And we were like, ‘Oh, what’s he doing?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, I was davening in the woods,’” Grubman said. “That’s the opposite of suburban Philadelphia Yom Kippur — when you show up in some fancy dress [that] you went to the mall to buy and gossip.”
Living Tree, Grubman said, offered a way to make Judaism a part of daily life beyond prayer and study.
“I felt like Judaism and like the world in general can be very intellectual. And I am a very intellectual person,” Grubman said. “But the more I link it to what I’m doing with my body and my hands, it just feels like it makes more sense to me.”
‘Shtetl Vibes’
There’s a long history of Jews who have sought to build communal, self-sufficient communities. But turning that ideal into a sustainable way of life has always been complicated.
The first kibbutz was established in Ottoman Palestine in 1910; the movement expanded after Israel’s founding in 1948. But the kibbutz system largely collapsed during the country’s financial crisis in the 1980s, when the utopian socialist model slowly gave way to a privatized version. Kibbutzim retained many of their collectivist values, but residents no longer pooled their incomes, raised their children together, or lived completely off the land.
American Jews experimented with communal living, too. During the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and ’70s, tens of thousands of young, college-educated city dwellers moved to rural Vermont as part of a countercultural movement. While few communes were explicitly Jewish, residents included many Jewish hippies. (Sen. Bernie Sanders, who briefly lived on an Israeli kibbutz in his twenties, was kicked off a Vermont commune for allegedly loafing around and talking about politics rather than working the land.)
But few of those experiments lasted as fully communal settlements.
Today, efforts to revive Jewish communal living are taking new forms. Young Jews live together through organizations like Moishe House, where residents get subsidized rent in exchange for planning Jewish community events. In Berkeley, an urban Jewish cohousing community called Berkeley Moshav is under construction; residents will own condos and make collective decisions about shared spaces.
Living Tree Alliance, which operates as both a nonprofit and a homeowners association, has seemed to stand the test of time — it has been hosting residents for over a decade. But like the modern kibbutzim, it’s not a full escape from the trappings of capitalism: Residents, most of whom have day jobs outside their farming responsibilities, don’t share income, and they own their own homes while co-owning the surrounding land.
Grubman, who works three jobs, cringed when I asked if Living Tree sometimes felt like utopia.
“It actually is a lot of work. It’s really really challenging,” Grubman said. “But what else are you going to do? Look at your screen?”
Many of the residents I spoke to were attracted to Living Tree as an escape from modern malaise.
Gil Ben Moshe and Ella Sutherland moved to Living Tree a few months ago with their three children, ages 2, 5 and 14. The couple met at an anarchist community in northern California and co-founded an intentional community in Virginia. After deciding they wanted a Jewish co-housing community instead, they found Living Tree online and moved.
Ben Moshe, wearing a kippah over his long hair, a plaid flannel, and no shoes or socks, has fond memories of living on an Israeli kibbutz until he was 4, when his family moved to the city of Eilat. The transition to urban life was jarring, he said, and he vowed to eventually return to the pastoral life of his early childhood.
“I’ve been so shocked at the discrepancy between people really believing that community is the right way to live, but not actually meaning it when they say it,” Ben Moshe said. “People’s relationship with spirituality is one that resembles more of their shelf with porcelain knickknacks … it’s not their daily bread.”
Arielle Sabot, a 28-year-old who uses they/them pronouns, worked as an apprentice at Living Tree for a year beginning in 2023. They now live in the Boston area, where they attend a traditional egalitarian synagogue and work as an outdoor Jewish educator.
While at Living Tree, they lived in a tiny cabin that lacked running water. During the winter, they chopped their own wood to heat the cabin with a wood-burning stove.
The arrangement wasn’t always idyllic. There were no flush toilets. Dishes, which Sabot had to boil water to wash, could pile up. And living alongside neighbors who were also co-workers could get tense sometimes.
But that proximity, Sabot said, also made some aspects of Jewish life feel more manageable.
“I think it’s easier when your community is right outside your door,” Sabot said. “You don’t have to go somewhere. It was shtetl vibes.”
Getting Outside
Since Living Tree was founded more than a decade ago, organizations explicitly linking Jewish spirituality and the natural world have been “growing exponentially,” Oshkello said.
A 2014 national study helped document the growth of what it dubbed Jewish Outdoor, Food and Environmental Education, or JOFEE, and found more than 2,400 people had participated in immersive Jewish outdoors programs the previous year. In 2025, Adamah, one of the movement’s largest organizations, reported more than 45,000 participants in its programs, including almost 10,000 Jewish teens and college students.
Vermont is especially fertile ground for this kind of experiential Judaism. On Shavuot, Living Tree and the Jewish Community of Greater Stowe hike Mount Mansfield, the state’s tallest peak, carrying a Torah for a small taste of what Moses may have felt ascending Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. On Tu B’Shvat, Jewish Vermonters snowshoe beneath the full moon, stopping at different trees for reflection, poetry and song. And then there’s “Ski Ride Purim,” when skiers and snowboarders hit the slopes in costume, eating hamantaschen along the way.
“Vermonters are going to be outside as much as we can,” said Beth Liberman, executive director of Jewish Communities of Vermont, the state’s Jewish umbrella organization. “We’re bringing Judaism where it connects for so many people.”
There may be an even larger Jewish constituency to capture: In a 2020 Pew Research Center survey, 51% of American Jews said they derived a great deal of meaning and fulfillment from being outdoors — more than twice the share who said the same about their religious faith.
The Jewish connection with the outdoors was a major draw for Talia Wilk, a 20-year-old spending two weeks at Living Tree through a fellowship program. Wilk said she grew up going to Jewish summer camp, where Judaism felt intertwined with being in nature. Now living in Toronto, she works as a Hebrew school teacher and an educator at an outdoors school. When she heard about the Living Tree fellowship, she jumped at the chance.
“I’ve always had that kind of longing for a space where Jewish holidays and rituals are really connected to the seasons and to the land,” Wilk said.
For Sabot, residing at Living Tree changed their relationship to the Jewish lunar calendar. In Vermont, where the seasonal changes are particularly dramatic — lush greenery in summer, brilliant foliage in fall, mud in spring, and snow in winter — Jewish holidays timed around an agrarian cycle feel more tangible, Sabot said.
Younger Jews in particular, Oshkello said, connect with the idea of getting outside over sitting in pews.
“This next generation, they don’t want to be bored and sit and listen to other people preach,” Oshkello said.
At Living Tree, I began to understand what that connection could feel like. I awoke in my tent around 6 a.m. to the sunrise and roosters cock-a-doodle-dooing as my alarm. Meditating in the sukkah, we took deep breaths and placed our hands on the earth. Eating potluck dinner, we were invited to reflect on the journey of our food, from seed to mouth. On my last day, we learned how to press apples to make hot cider and pickle cabbage.
After three days immersing myself in nature, I headed back toward New York City, eager to take a hot shower and sleep in my own bed.
But the next morning, I found myself missing the fresh air and the feeling of being outside. All weekend, residents had talked about getting Judaism out of their heads and into their bodies. Crammed into the subway on my morning commute, I understood what they meant.
The post Is this Vermont farm the American kibbutz? I camped out there during Sukkot — and got a taste of Judaism’s ancient agrarian roots appeared first on The Forward.
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In its first detailed response to ‘NAZA’ documentary, IDF claims ‘fundamental errors’
(JTA) — The IDF on Thursday issued its first detailed response to “NAZA” after viewing the full documentary alleging Israeli forces knowingly killed large numbers of civilians in the Gaza war, accusing the filmmakers of making fundamental errors about how civilian-casualty estimates, strike approvals and intelligence tools were used.
“The film’s narrative is based on substantial factual errors stemming from a misrepresented and manipulative depiction of reality,” the IDF said in a statement accompanying its findings. The film “presents a distorted, misleading and disingenuous picture of the IDF’s target planning and striking process,” the military said, arguing that it conflates preliminary intelligence work with the later operational and legal process used to decide whether and how a target can be struck.
The filmmakers, who are Israeli, have previously defended the film’s reporting, saying the identities of its anonymous sources and the cases they described were verified and that editors at the Guardian, which produced the film, had access to the underlying material.
The 10-page response came after an IDF representative attended a screening of “NAZA,” directed by filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, in Bologna, Italy, allowing the military to assess the full film for the first time. The army had previously rejected the documentary’s allegations based on excerpts and publicly available material, saying at the time that the filmmakers had not provided it with a copy despite a request to do so.
The film is based on interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers, most of them intelligence personnel, who describe their roles in surveillance, target selection and strikes in Gaza. NAZA is the Hebrew acronym for collateral damage. The film, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival last month, argues that the military accepted high civilian casualty estimates, relied heavily on AI tools to generate targets and weakened safeguards governing strikes.
The IDF in its response Thursday rejected one of the documentary’s most prominent claims, that a strike had been approved despite an estimated civilian death toll of about 500. The military said it had “never planned, approved or carried out” a strike in which 500 civilians, or “anything close to that number,” were expected to be killed.
The IDF also rejected the film’s claim that junior Hamas operatives could be approved for targeting with up to 20 expected civilian casualties, and that senior commanders could be targered with as many as 200. It said the film had confused thresholds requiring approval from more senior commanders, who could then reject the operation, with permission to kill a fixed number of civilians. The military said that no 200-casualty approval threshold had ever existed and that actual thresholds were “much lower,” without specifying what the thresholds were.
The IDF did acknowledge that several incidents involving civilian deaths near humanitarian aid distribution sites prompted operational reviews, changes to instructions and other measures in those areas. However, it disputed testimony that soldiers fired indiscriminately at civilians near the sites and said troops were permitted to fire only at militants or people posing an immediate threat.
Abraham has accused Israeli media of failing to seriously investigate civilian casualties and rules of engagement in Gaza during the war.
The IDF also rejected the film’s suggestion that civilians who remained in evacuation zones could then be treated as legitimate targets. It said evacuation orders did not change a civilian’s status and that every strike still required identification of a military target and a separate proportionality assessment.
When it came to the film’s portrayal of “Lavender” as an AI-powered list of targets approved for attack, the military said the production had misunderstood what the program was: a database used to cross-reference intelligence on members of militant groups which did not make someone in the database a target.
“Artificial intelligence does not determine whether an object or a person is designated as a target, nor whether a target is struck,” the IDF said, adding that those decisions are made by human analysts and commanders.
The IDF also argued that many of the anonymous soldiers featured in “NAZA” were describing only “limited, initial stages” of the targeting process. “Such testimonies therefore cannot be treated as a complete account of the policies at hand, the decisions made and what ultimately happened,” the military said.
A Guardian News & Media spokesperson, in a statement sent to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said the Guardian “stands fully behind the film,” which it said was based on three years of reporting by the outlet and its partners and interviews with more than 100 sources familiar with IDF systems used in Gaza, including senior commanders involved in authorizing strikes.
The Guardian also rejected what it described as the IDF’s attempt to portray the film’s interviewees as “junior-ranking officers involved only in the early stages of the targeting process.”
“They include officers and soldiers who were involved in multiple stages of the targeting process in Gaza, including intelligence, operations and the final authorization process,” the statement said.
The military did not describe all 24 participants as junior personnel and said only that the testimony of the soldiers interviewed in the film “generally” focused on “limited, initial stages” of the targeting process.
The Guardian said the “process of assessing the credibility of the testimonies was rigorous” and included “leaked classified documents, detailed verification of specific strikes and corroboration via a wider pool of confidential journalistic sources who did not appear on camera in the film.”
The Guardian also said the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press had “confirmed the IDF’s use of AI-driven systems in the Gaza offensive and the loosening of safeguards to protect civilians.”
The IDF disputed the film’s suggestion that it did not examine civilian casualties after attacks. Several units tracked strike outcomes and civilian-casualty reports and hundreds of incidents had been reviewed during the war, the military said, arguing that intelligence personnel interviewed in “NAZA” do not appear to belong to those units and “are not positioned to testify on this matter.”
The IDF rejected the film’s criticism that its collateral-damage estimates did not distinguish between adults and children. It said international law treats all civilians as protected regardless of age, adding that when commanders knew children were present, that information “led commanders to cancel, postpone or replan strikes.”
It also pushed back on an interviewee’s claim that the IDF believed there were “no uninvolved civilians in Gaza,” saying that may have reflected the soldier’s personal views but did not represent military policy or orders. It also rejected the film’s genocide allegations, saying the interviewees were not in positions to establish genocidal intent by senior commanders or political leaders.
The IDF also criticized the filmmakers’ reporting methods, saying they provided no dates, locations or other identifying details for alleged strikes and did not put their specific allegations to the military before the film’s release. “The filmmakers could have identified and avoided the substantial errors apparent in the film had they conducted adequate verification and corroboration in good faith. The end result shows they did not,” the military said.
The Guardian statement did not say whether the filmmakers solicited detailed responses from the IDF, and why if they did not..
The military said “NAZA” also gave insufficient weight to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, the group’s use of civilian areas for military activity and measures Israel says it took to reduce civilian casualties, including warnings, changes to strike plans and the cancellation of attacks.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In its first detailed response to ‘NAZA’ documentary, IDF claims ‘fundamental errors’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Zara removes Halloween costume likened to concentration camp uniform
(JTA) — Spanish fashion retailer Zara removed a children’s Halloween costume from its website on Wednesday after social media users noted that the gray-and-blue striped outfit resembled prison garb worn by inmates in Nazi concentration camps.
Zara described the ensemble as “Kids costume featuring vertical stripes with decorative topstitching, a lapel flower and a distressed effect. Includes a cardigan and shorts. Gray / Blue.”
The post was visible via a Google search that continued to display an indexed version of the Zara product page after the listing itself had been removed.
The costume resembles the suit worn by Michael Keaton’s title character in the 1988 horror-comedy “Beetlejuice” and its 2024 sequel, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” Even so, social media users said the vertical stripes and shiny crisscrosses, which some media outlets described as “fake stitched scars,” resembled concentration camp uniforms and the barbed wire visible in many World War II photos.
Priced at $59.90 in the U.S., according to another indexed version of the listing, the costume drew criticism online in Europe on Tuesday. It gained wider attention Wednesday after Israeli journalist Dov Gil-Har, activist Hen Mazzig and others shared images of it on X.
The listing was no longer accessible by Wednesday afternoon. It was unclear exactly when Zara removed it. No reason was given for its removal, and Zara has not made any public statements regarding the controversy, nor has it responded to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s request for comment.
One Instagram commenter wrote “@zara how many levels of approval did this go though (sic)? Who is working for you?” A Facebook user said “It’s supposed to be a groom costume. It does somewhat resemble a (sic) Auschwitz uniform. With all the anti-semitism on the rise I am not surprised.” Another Instagram user asked, “What were they claiming it was meant to be?”
Zara has in the past faced similar controversies over clothing that evoked Nazi or Holocaust imagery. In 2007, it withdrew a handbag from its stores after a customer discovered a swastika embroidered on it; Inditex, Zara’s parent company, said the symbol had not appeared on the design Zara had approved.
In 2014 Zara apologized for selling a blue-and-white-striped shirt with six-pointed yellow-star badges on the chest. The Zara Israel website identified it as a “striped sheriff t-shirt” and the word sheriff was cut out in small letters on the star. The likeness to concentration camp uniforms and the yellow Star of David badges Jews were forced to wear under Nazi rule led Zara to stop selling the shirts and destroy the remaining inventory.
When reached for comment, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which represents Holocaust survivors in compensation negotiations, said the repeated incidents underscore the need for Holocaust education.
“This is not the first time this has happened and it once again makes abundantly clear: The glaring absence of Holocaust knowledge is pervasive,” Gideon Taylor, Claims Conference president, wrote in an email to JTA. “It shouldn’t take the risk of a Shoah survivor opening their door and seeing children that look like they are in concentration camp uniforms for us to see where we have to do better. This should serve as a message to us all of why Holocaust education is so important.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Zara removes Halloween costume likened to concentration camp uniform appeared first on The Forward.
