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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.
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Some named names, some didn’t, but it’s not just a story of good guys and bad guys
It was written in 1972 and takes place between 1947 and 1959. It consists of testimony given before the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities, which damaged or destroyed the lives of many people in the entertainment world during the Communist scare and the blacklisting of the 1940s and 50s. But for its Tony-winning director, Anna D. Shapiro, Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been, a docudrama that is being revived at New York City Center, is relevant today — in more ways than one.
“I think that everybody will enter this play from a different perspective, because it’s in conversation with things that we’re dealing with as a country right now,” Shapiro told me over the phone. “For instance, my producer, Jeffrey Richards, who is of a certain generation, for him, it’s just deeply about freedom of expression. He has spent his whole life making art, championing artists, and the idea that he feels like we’re moving towards, which we clearly are, is a more fascist behavior around freedom of expression. He wants to remind people how dangerous some of these moves from the current administration are.”
“But I’m just a little bit younger than Jeffrey,” Shapiro, 60, continued. “I did the play when I was in college. So I was probably 22, 23, actually, just finishing college. And it was very clear then, right? It was about good guys and bad guys, and it was very easy to demonize the people who named names and champion the people who were brave enough not to name names. And now, as I’m older, I realize there’s a lot more complexity when the entire system is coming after you in a way that makes you feel like your entire livelihood is threatened. So on one level, it’s one thing for Arthur Miller not to name names. It was Arthur Miller. They weren’t going to be able to destroy Arthur Miller. But it’s another thing for an actor whose career is fading and who doesn’t have any control over his destiny to be kind of pushed into naming names. And I think that that’s what interests me, which is how difficult it becomes to be good in America, how difficult that is becoming, how terrifying and terrorizing the current administration is.”
The play, by Eric Bentley, highlights testimony by some of those — Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan, Larry Parks, Abe Burrows — who named names of Communist Party associates and some of those who didn’t, such as Arthur Miller, Paul Robeson, Lillian Hellman, Lionel Stander. It features a rotating cast that includes Steven Pasquale, Molly Ringwald, Santino Fontana and Bob Odenkirk.
Bentley, who died in 2020 at age 103, taught dramatic literature at Columbia University during the 1950’s and 60s. He was a champion and translator of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Shapiro won her Tony for Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County and is a former artistic director of the famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. Most recently on Broadway she directed the Tony-winning revival of Eureka Day.
‘Of course they were antisemitic’
Six of the Hollywood Ten screenwriters and directors who were blacklisted and sent to prison for their refusals to testify were Jews. In the Bentley play, Miller, Robbins, Hellman, Stander and Burrows are Jewish.
As the play records, one key committee member, John E. Rankin of Mississippi, a known racist who was called out for his antisemitism, insisted on reading out the birth names of actors who he presumed to be Jewish, such as June Havoc (June Hovick), Danny Kaye (David Daniel Kaminsky), Eddie Cantor (Edward Iskowitz), Edward G. Robinson (Emanuel Goldenberg) and Melvyn Douglas (Melvyn Hesselberg).
“Of course they were antisemitic,” Shapiro said. “One of the things that they went out of their way to point out was how many of the actors and directors in Hollywood had changed their names and that their original names were so clearly Jewish. For them, this exposed a kind of nefariousness. They assumed a nefarious intent, as opposed to being what it really was, which was a way for Jews to defend themselves and keep themselves safe from antisemitism by changing their names, to be able to be in the public eye in a way that was less dangerous for them.”
The committee, she said, “twisted that and said, see, all these people, all of these people in Hollywood, are pretending not to be Jews, but they are, and they’re the problem.”
Actually, though, she said, “when you really look at what being a quote-unquote Communist was in this time, for the most part, these were essentially Democratic socialists. They were people who had gotten a little lucky, were making a little money. Many of them for the first time in their families. And they wanted to help the underdog. They wanted to look at what was corrupt in the system and make things better for people. They weren’t ‘burn the system down.’ They weren’t those people.”
Many Jews were victims of blacklisting, but many top executives in Hollywood who perpetrated or supported blacklisting were themselves Jewish. One reason, of course, was fear of the committee and other anti-Communist zealots like Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. But there was another.
“I think that’s our complex history, isn’t it?” Shapiro said. “And we’re in a complex moment as Jewish people. We have been in such a conversation with our existential threats. And what we think of as the solution to that very, very real historic and current threat. And what I appreciate about you bringing that up is that Jews are not a monolith. Right now, that’s happening again, right? I disagree actively with my older brother, right? Now, what we don’t disagree with each other about is that we’re Jews.”
Making an impact
Although Shapiro says her family were not practicing Jews, she said she is very conscious of her Jewish heritage. “My mother didn’t practice primarily because she was a Marxist and she didn’t believe in God. And also, quite frankly, she was raised in a very conservative Jewish household. And the sexism of her day, of when they were in shul, the women were upstairs. Every Friday night, her grandmother would cook everything and eat in the kitchen. So she saw a lot of the sexism. And that really made her walk away from her Judaism. But with both of my parents, whenever Judaism was being attacked or somebody wanted to take it away from them, they would fight for it.”
“What I’ve realized, Shapiro went on to say, “is how without practicing, without going to shul, without even celebrating Passover, my Judaism is in my body, and it informs decisions I make. I think it’s the reason that I’ve done so much work around equity and systemic racism and systemic sexism. I think I essentially understand that part of my task is to seek justice, and to make an impact in the world.”
So what impact would she like the play to make on audiences?
“I always say that I direct plays really for one reason, and that is to make the audience’s world bigger. And that really only happens two ways, right? You go into a theater and you either see something familiar and you go, wow, there’s other people like me, or you go into the theater and you see something so different from your own experience and you think, my God, the world is so much bigger than I know. In this play, based on the way that you calibrate the performances, you can either make a very black and white statement, or you can make more nuanced and ambiguous statements.”
She agrees with the philosophy, she said, that every society’s survival is based on its ability to embrace ambiguity.
“And where we are right now — and I’m not even talking about on the right, because I don’t have anything to say about the right. They’re very confusing to me. So I can only speak to the people with whom I share essential beliefs. I think that we are not talking to one another well. I think we are looking at black and white and good and evil, and it’s way more complex than that. So I hope people come away going, wow, I really thought it was just going to be like the good guys who didn’t name names and the bad guys who named names.”
‘Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been’ runs through Sept. 11 at City Center in New York.
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Israel dominates debate as Rep. Dan Goldman defends seat in referendum on Zionism
American support for Israel and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict emerged as a central point of contention during the first televised Democratic primary debate between Rep. Dan Goldman and former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander on Tuesday night.
Lander, who identifies as a liberal Zionist, is challenging Goldman with the support of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in a campaign that has gone after Goldman as allegedly out of step with Democratic voters who seek change in Israel.
Recent events in and near the 10th Congressional District, in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, provided plenty of fodder. The Celebrate Israel parade, the vote by members of the Park Slope Food Coop to boycott Israeli products, military assistance for Israel and investments in Israel bonds made up the first 15 minutes of the one-hour debate, hosted by Spectrum News NY1.
The exchange highlighted growing divisions within the Democratic Party over Israel and the war in Gaza.
“With all due respect, we’re now 10 minutes into this, and we’ve only spoken about Israel,” Goldman, a two-term incumbent, complained. “Israel is not the most important issue in this district.” The district voted heavily for Mamdani, an outspoken critic of Israel. Jewish voters make up an estimated 20% of the electorate.
“This is one of the significant moral and humanity challenges of our time, and our representative failed,” Lander pushed back, citing Goldman’s support for U.S. aid to Israel and refusal to call the war in Gaza a genocide. In his opening remarks, Lander criticized Goldman for accepting donations from AIPAC, the U.S. campaign fundraising group allied with the Israeli government.
The Goldman-Lander contest is expected to serve as an early test of Mamdani’s political influence following his upset victory in the mayoral race. Mamdani and Lander cross-endorsed each other in the mayoral race, and Mamdani made his endorsement of Lander for Congress along with democratic socialists in two other congressional primaries. Recent polling has shown Goldman trailing Lander.
Both candidates, who describe themselves as liberal Zionists, drew sharp contrasts over their approach to the conflict in the Middle East and the movement to boycott Israel.
Lander defended his decision not to march this year the annual Israel parade by pointing to the participation of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition who has made past controversial statements, including advocating for the displacement of Palestinians. “We shouldn’t be marching with war criminals,” Lander said.
However, Lander announced he would not attend the parade before it was publicly known that Smotrich would participate in the event, and shortly after Mamdani announced that he too would skip. Smotrich’s appearance drew little attention during the march itself. The Israeli minister joined the march at East 63rd Street along the route and walked primarily with a delegation of Knesset members. His participation sparked backlash afterward, with prominent Democrats condemning his appearance and critics of Israel excoriating Democratic elected officials who marched along the same route.
In an interview on Monday, Mamdani said he’s “offended” by the participation of Smotrich, saying he represents “a vision of annihilation, a complicity in genocide, and frankly a belief that does not have much value for even the sanctity of children in Gaza.”
Goldman defended his march. “I was unaware” of Smotrich joining the parade, he said. “And I am incredibly disappointed that that occurred.”
Israel appeared again in the cross-examination period, with Goldman asking Lander to explain why he left the Democratic Socialists of America after Oct. 7, 2023 — with Lander citing a “heinous” rally DSA promoted on Oct. 8 cheering on the attacks.
In the debate Lander emphasized his support for Israel as a Jewish state that is also one where Palestinian rights thrive.
In remarks on Sunday, ahead of the parade, Goldman spoke about the stakes of the race in an appeal to Jewish voters. “It’s a difficult time for many of us, but what we need is more than anything is moral clarity,” Goldman said at the Met Council annual legislative breakfast. “We need to stand for what we believe in, and I will do that right through the tape with the support of many of you.”
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Canada ‘is failing Jewish Canadians,’ prime minister says as he unveils effort to address antisemitism
(JTA) — Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney announced on Monday a new government body to combat racism, saying its first priority would be tackling antisemitism.
Carney addressed Canada’s surge in antisemitic hate crimes during a speech at Holy Blossom Synagogue, Toronto’s oldest Jewish congregation. He said the government had to “start with clearly admitting that Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians.”
Carney referenced the wave of attacks on Canadian Jews since Oct. 7, 2023, including bullets fired at synagogues and Jewish schools and attacks on Jewish businesses, community centers and Holocaust memorials.
Over two-thirds of the country’s religion-motivated hate crimes last year were directed at Jewish Canadians, who make up only 1% of the population, he said.
Carney said the government was responding by launching the Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion, with the mission of advising Canada’s government on combating all forms of hate.
“I am directing that the first responsibility of that council is to address antisemitism,” he said.
The council will be chaired by the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, Marc Miller. Carney also announced that Marc Gold, a lawyer and Jewish community leader who retired last year from the Senate of Canada, will join the council.
Carney said the council will be tasked with reassessing the nature, scale and drivers of antisemitism, developing a whole-of-government approach to align federal policies and public safety programs, improving the collection of data on hate incidents, and measuring the impact of government efforts.
Several Jewish organizations are likely to be disappointed that Carney’s announcement did not include more sweeping enforcement measures against antisemitism.
Rich Robertson, the director of research and advocacy at B’nai Brith Canada, said the speech was a “missed opportunity.” The organization was advocating for a task force that could respond immediately to antisemitic incidents and a commission of inquiry to identify their root causes, he said.
“We were hoping for true tactical changes that could positively be actioned to change the lived experience of Jewish Canadians, and unfortunately, that is not what we received today,” Robertson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Pressures on Carney were mounting ahead of the speech. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, an advocacy arm of the Jewish Federations of Canada, pushed for him to strengthen law enforcement.
“Government and law enforcement must address the drivers of this crisis, including radicalization, promotion of terrorism, and terrorist entities operating here in Canada,” CIJA said in a statement shortly before Carney’s address.
The group added, “The Prime Minister has an opportunity to set the tone from the highest office to make clear that nothing can justify the hatred, intimidation, and violence Jewish Canadians are experiencing and that every tool at the government’s disposal will be used to confront it.”
Carney’s messages about Israel, Gaza and antisemitism have divided Jewish voters. In September, he led Canada to officially recognizing a Palestinian state. He said in October that he would fulfill the commitment of his predecessor, Justin Trudeau, to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited Canada. (The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Netanyahu for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza in 2024.) Last week, he spoke with Israeli President Isaac Herzog about the experiences of Canadians detained after trying to sail to bring aid to Gaza.
But Carney, the leader of Israel’s Liberal Party, has also introduced public safety legislation supported by national Jewish organizations, including CIJA and B’nai Brith Canada. Most significant among them is Bill C-9, which would strengthen Canada’s criminal code by creating new offenses for intimidation and obstruction at houses of worship, schools and community centers used by religious groups.
That bill has also faced backlash from free speech advocates, including both Jewish conservatives and progressives. Pro-Palestinian Jewish groups say that it would wrongly criminalize protesting against events like real estate sales for Israeli settlements in the West Bank if they take place in synagogues.
Carney appeared to acknowledge those criticisms in his announcement of the new ministerial council.
“I want to be clear about what these measures are and what they are not,” he said. “They are not curtailments of freedom of expression. They are not constraints on legitimate criticism of any government on any subject anywhere. But they are the basic standards we owe one another in our shared public institutions.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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