Uncategorized
In Indiana, a vaunted Jewish studies program is upended by red-state politics over Israel and speech
A sudden change in leadership at Indiana University’s Jewish studies program has erupted into a bitter internal feud, pitting a new interim director against faculty and students who say he is undermining academic freedom and reshaping the program’s direction amid national tensions over Israel and campus speech.
The turmoil began with the abrupt replacement of the department’s longtime director, continued with a clash between the new director and an ardently pro-Palestinian graduate student, and culminated last week with a statement of support for the new director from the college’s dean.
The conflict, first reported by the student newspaper, began in August, when the longtime director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program, Mark Roseman, unexpectedly stepped down a year before his term ended. Roseman said he was told, without explanation, that IU’s newly installed chancellor, David Reingold, sought to replace him.
Günther Jikeli, a scholar of antisemitism and associate director of IU’s Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, stepped into the role.
Soon after taking over, Jikeli clashed with graduate student Sabina Ali, who identifies as Jewish and supports the Palestinian cause. He expelled her from a Zoom seminar for displaying a “Free Palestine” image and later denied her travel funding to present a paper critical of “Jewish indigeneity” claims related to Israel. Jikeli said her work was “political activism, not scholarship.”
Many of the Borns Jewish Studies faculty and graduate students have publicly sided against Jikeli, fearing that his actions will threaten academic freedom and damage the reputation of one of the oldest and most storied Jewish studies programs in the country.
“We used to have a Jewish studies program where we knew we had political differences, but we had really great academic working relationships,” said Sarah Imhoff, a tenured professor who has been at IU for 16 years. “And that has significantly deteriorated.”
At the same time, dozens of faculty at universities around the world, most of them in Jewish studies, have signed a letter to the dean supporting Jikeli. They wrote that he was “facing an entirely unwarranted political assault on his professional integrity and judgment.”
“What Professor Jikeli is trying to do is restore rigor and objectivity in the department,” Allon Friedman, a medical school professor on IU’s Indianapolis campus and leader of multiple pro-Israel advocacy groups in the state, told JTA.
Friedman continued, “We’ve seen over the last few decades a real deterioration — not only the quality of scholarship in Jewish Studies in particular, but also an injection of politics that is oftentimes anti-Israel, if not overtly antisemitic. That’s what we’re seeing here.”
Mark Roseman, former director of Indiana University’s Jewish Studies program, in a promotional video for the program, Oct. 28, 2015. (Screenshot via YouTube)
Jikeli, who is not Jewish, declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency for this story. Representatives for IU and the dean’s office did not return repeated requests for comment.
Jikeli’s appointment in August came as a surprise to Roseman, who directed Jewish Studies at IU from 2013 to 2020 before reassuming the position last year. Roseman, who unlike Jikeli is Jewish, told JTA he stepped down after Jikeli told him that Reingold, who was named chancellor in June, had privately offered the director role to him.
This was considered a highly unusual arrangement for an academic program, where directors are not typically forced out before the end of their term and any replacements would typically be vetted by committee.
“I was surprised by it, obviously. It didn’t make sense to me to continue not having the confidence of the campus leadership,” Roseman said. He added that, in his eyes, “the program operated very harmoniously.” He remains affiliated with the program as a tenured faculty.
Jikeli told the Indiana Daily Student that he, too, was given no reason for the leadership change. Seemingly no one in the program was. At a meeting with Rick Van Kooten, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Jewish studies faculty asked why their director was being replaced now.
“I can’t tell you that,” the dean responded, according to multiple accounts of the meeting.
This scene was part of a broader cultural shift at IU, where around 12% of the student body is Jewish — and where new personnel and new oversight have been installed at various levels in a broader effort to comply with the nationwide campus crackdown led by President Donald Trump.
Indiana’s Republican state legislature, following Trump’s model, has wrested control of public university governance and pressured IU to curb the power of faculty decision-making, leading to a broader revolt over free speech on campus. During last year’s pro-Palestinian encampments, state police dispatched snipers to campus rooftops as a peacekeeping measure in a much-criticized move.
After the encampments, IU, like other schools, convened an antisemitism advisory board. Roseman and Jikeli served on it together, along with Dean Van Kooten and others including an Indianapolis congregational rabbi. (Unlike similar antisemitism task forces at other schools, IU’s has not produced a formal report.)
One Jewish professor who had played a leading role in the encampments was disciplined over the summer after being found in violation of an “intellectual diversity” law recently passed by the state senate. That professor, Benjamin Robinson, has since been sanctioned by the school. The complaint said that by sharing his views on Israel and Gaza in one of his Germanic studies classes, he violated a state law that forbids faculty from discussing their views in the classroom if they are unrelated to the professor’s expertise.
Many saw the recent shutdown of the student newspaper as a further attempt to quash dissent. (IU walked back its decision last week, but not before having fired the student media director.)
At the same time, not all speech has been silenced on campus. Recently Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, spoke to 3,000 IU students as part of the Turning Point USA tour days before releasing a chummy interview with avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes.
Roseman alluded to such pressures in the Jewish studies program’s most recent alumni newsletter, dated fall 2025. In a “director’s report” written before he stepped down, he warns of recent actions from the state legislature forcing public universities to close programs that enroll under a certain threshold of majors. Such actions, he told alums, could jeopardize the program’s future.
The same newsletter included an “editor’s note” stating that Roseman would no longer be serving as director — and a welcome note from Jikeli. His primary concerns were different.
Günther Jikeli, a professor of antisemitism, addresses an audience in Cleveland, Ohio, Dec. 7, 2018. In 2025 Jikeli was installed as interim director of Indiana University’s Jewish Studies program over the wishes of some of his colleagues. (Screenshot via YouTube)
“Rising antisemitism is a challenge on campuses across the country,” Jikeli wrote. “While IU is not immune, we are fortunate to have strong partnerships and resources to address these concerns, and we will continue to work together to ensure that Jewish Studies remains a place of learning, resilience, and community.”
Roseman, a renowned British scholar of the Holocaust who most recently edited a comprehensive four-volume Cambridge history of the Shoah, had tried to keep a low profile on campus in the two years since the Hamas attacks and outbreak of war in Gaza. Even as IU, like many other schools, contended with encampments and accusations that Israel was committing genocide, the resident genocide scholar sought to keep his own views out of the spotlight, colleagues said.
That has not been the case with Jikeli, whose research specialties include monitoring antisemitism among pro-Palestinian supporters on Instagram and in European Muslim communities, including Syrian refugees. Last year he helped to organize a “Rally Against Hamas Propaganda” on campus, alongside the leaders of IU’s Hillel and Chabad centers and the president of Hoosiers for Israel. At the time, Jikeli told the Indiana Daily Student that the rally was not intended as a direct counter to the encampments.
Speaking to the Combat Antisemitism Movement, an activist group, over the summer prior to his appointment as director, Jikeli warned that tensions on campuses like his own were “entering a more dangerous phase.” He painted anti-Zionist activists in stark terms.
“We’re not just dealing with protests,” he said then. “We’re facing a hardened core of ideologically driven actors, empowered by digital amplification and real-world networks, who are reshaping campus discourse — and possibly campus safety — in deeply troubling ways.”
In the two months since Jikeli took over the Jewish studies director post, he has taken a harder line against a strain of pro-Palestinian activism that had been running through some aspects of the program. In his view, expressed in emails viewed by JTA, he is protecting the program from influence or activism that could harm its mission.
Indiana University graduate student Sabina Ali holds a sign with her name on it as members of the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition and its supporters picket while striking for union recognition in Bloomington, Indiana, April 25, 2022. (Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
His efforts soon focused on a chief adversary: Sabina Ali, a sixth-year doctoral student pursuing a Ph.D. in religious studies with a minor in Jewish studies and a former managing editor of the American Religion Journal, a scholarly publication based at IU.
Over email, Ali told JTA she identifies as “post-Soviet Jewish,” with a mixed family including Muslims. “My Jewish identity is inseparable from the struggle against all forms of oppression, including Israel’s ongoing occupation, apartheid, and genocide against Palestinians,” she wrote.
Last year Ali was one of dozens to sign an open letter from “Jewish Faculty, Staff, Students, and Alumni” protesting the university’s breaking up of a student encampment — a letter not signed by Roseman, Imhoff or any other current Jewish studies faculty save one. (An emeritus professor who is on the Jewish studies faculty advisory board also signed.) She supports a movement pressuring IU to divest from Israel, and her Zoom profile picture, visible when her camera is off, is a drawing of a woman wearing a keffiyeh accompanied by a Palestinian flag and the words “Free Palestine.”
Ali was drawn to Jewish studies, she said, “because my research engages core questions within the field while also expanding the field’s boundaries through critical approaches.” She also admired the work of the faculty, particularly Imhoff. “It matters deeply to me to be part of Jewish Studies because it is a field where I feel I can make meaningful contributions and connect it to broader interdisciplinary conversations,” she said.
When on campus she routinely wore a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headscarf that has been adopted by protesters on the left, to Jewish studies events — something she said she did without incident before Jikeli’s appointment.
“I am fully aware that not everyone in the program shares my political views or my fundamental moral conviction that occupation, apartheid, and genocide are unacceptable,” Ali told JTA. “Academic freedom does not require that everyone is comfortable.”
Before the leadership change, Ali’s politics encountered little pushback within Jewish studies — although some faculty and students had expressed discomfort behind closed doors. But under Jikeli, it quickly became an issue.
Her Zoom picture became a sticking point in September when it was visible during a program event, as Imhoff prepared to present her own latest research to colleagues. According to those in attendance at the Zoom lecture, Jikeli ordered Ali to remove the pro-Palestinian image or he’d kick her off the call. When she refused, he booted her — prompting a mass exodus from nearly all of her colleagues, who reconvened in a separate Zoom meeting, sans Jikeli, to discuss the research.
The incident infuriated many on campus who viewed Jikeli’s actions as a violation of academic freedom, with one professor calling his behavior “autocratic.”
In an email obtained by JTA, Ali wrote, “The irony is not lost on me that I — a Jewish student — was excluded from a Jewish Studies event for expressing solidarity with Palestinians, while you, a ‘scholar’ of antisemitism, used your authority to decide what kinds of Jewish expression are acceptable.”
Some, however, supported Jikeli.
“I do not think it was wrong of Dr. Jikeli to ask, or to insist, that a Zoom profile with said imagery and said language be removed, given the program that we’re in, given the times that we’re in,” Joanna Martin, a second-year doctoral student with a Jewish studies minor, told JTA.
Things shortly escalated when Jikeli vetoed Ali’s request for funding to present her research paper, “Weaponizing Indigeneity,” at a conference on religious studies. According to the paper’s abstract, “claims about ‘Jewish indigeneity’ to Palestine…are appropriated to justify the existence and actions of the settler-colonial nation-state of Israel and deployed to legitimize the possession of Palestine.”
The funding request, typically pro forma, had already been approved by the faculty committee overseeing graduate studies. The program director’s decision to unilaterally override the committee was, observers said, unprecedented.
No one before Jikeli had raised a flag about her research proposal. “In fact,” Ali said, “my advisors and committee members have told me that my research is innovative for Jewish studies.”
Jikeli defended his decision to faculty in a September email, obtained by JTA, saying Ali’s research was too politicized. He suggested that the Department of Religious Studies, Ali’s primary doctoral home, could fund her travel instead.
Jikeli explained in a follow-up email that he had to act “in the best interest of Jewish Studies as a program,” and believed that funding Ali “could have harmed Jewish Studies.” He added, “I understand that reasonable people may disagree on where exactly to draw such lines.”
Many in the program weren’t persuaded.
“Many of us feel like this current arrangement is not one we would want to continue,” Imhoff said. “I would like to find a way forward where we can support all graduate students and faculty who are doing serious research, regardless of their politics.”
“She’s a graduate student. We’re all graduate students. Part of our job here is to learn how to fit within this discipline, fit within the field, and push boundaries of what that’s supposed to look like,” Daniel Reischler, a third-year doctoral student, told JTA.
Ali’s activism, long tolerated in the program, was now a flashpoint. “My sense is this is just what he was hired to do, to deny Sabina funding,” one member of the Jewish Studies faculty said of Jikeli. Some have argued it is, in fact, Jikeli who is imposing personal politics on Ali’s research.
“People are paranoid,” Claire Richters, a sixth-year Ph.D. student, told JTA. She was one of three members of the Jewish Studies graduate student executive committee, including Reischler, who signed an open letter to Jikeli protesting his decision to withhold funding to Ali. “There’s just a worry that this will start extending to any issue that the director has a political disagreement with.”
Those concerns aren’t shared by everyone. “There’s a lot of, like, ‘Will my research be denied?’ And it’s like, you’re doing Holocaust studies. I doubt it,” Martin said. Declining to share her thoughts on Ali’s research and its appropriateness for Jewish Studies, she added, “The majority don’t have reason to be worried.”
The letter from outside faculty supporting Jikeli also defends the actions he took against Ali.
“First, there was good reason, we believe, to turn down a request for travel support to deliver a programmatic indictment of Israel as a colonialist power. Nothing in the abstract demonstrates any original arguments,” the letter states. “Second, the decision to disallow a student in an online seminar to replace her face with a political slogan and an anonymized portrait in a keffiyeh was responsible and appropriate.”
Among the letter’s signatories: Alvin Rosenfeld, who founded Jewish studies at IU.
A police officer with a gun stands on a Palestinian flag during the arrest of an activist on the third day of a pro-Palestinian protest camp at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, April 27, 2024. (Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Dean Van Kooten weighed in on the disputes with Ali in an internal email on Oct. 29.
He tried to walk a fine line. “I concur with the director’s decision to not use Borns Jewish Studies Program funding, particularly an IU foundation account[,] to fund the travel of the graduate student,” Van Kooten wrote in an email viewed by JTA. However, he added, Ali’s travel to the conference would still be funded, just from a different IU piggy bank. This would be done, he wrote, in the name of “respecting academic freedom.”
When it came to Zoomgate, Van Kooten was more circumspect. “Regarding the governance of the use of Zoom in department/program seminars, colloquia, etc., the college does not have a policy on this, and we don’t recommend one,” he wrote. Any Zoom policy going forward, he added, “should be voted on by the entire core faculty, and in consultation with Indiana University’s general counsel.”
The dean added that, in absence of any clear policy, “the convenor of an event must exercise sound judgment in balancing the importance of freedom of speech and expression [following university policies] with the obligation to maintain an inclusive learning environment, and limit disruptions when they occur.”
One graduate student told JTA the email felt like a “stalemate.” The work of the program goes on: This week its contemporary antisemitism center hosted a symposium on campus antisemitism, with many of its featured speakers having also signed the letter supporting Jikeli.
Unusually, the conference was supported with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Under Trump the NEH has defunded virtually every other Jewish humanities program, with the exception of the conservative Tikvah Fund. The current acting chair of the NEH was expected to attend IU’s conference.
For some broader observers of the Jewish studies space, who’d long seen Indiana as a beacon for the field, the situation is deeply troubling.
“Indiana is more than a red state. It has an incredible history of white supremacy,” said Riv-Ellen Prell, an emeritus professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the history of Jews on campus. “And here is IU, in the middle of this world, as this incredible magnet for Jewish students — because the Jewish studies program was so great, because they had a big Hillel.”
But with the forced changes, Prell said, the forces that shape higher education were sending a message: “‘We like these kinds of Jewish studies people. We don’t like those kinds of Jewish studies people.’”
Prell said that concerns about the appropriateness of Ali’s graduate studies were missing the point: that there were other ways the program’s director could have addressed them.
“This is where she is housed as a student, admitted as a student, and there is academic freedom, and there are faculty who wish to supervise and work with her,” Prell said. “If we are to begin saying, ‘Well, the faculty who work with these students aren’t allowed to teach or supervise people with this kind of work,’ then that is the death of academic freedom.”
Friedman sees things differently.
“It’s insane that we would even consider to pay for something like this,” he said, of Ali’s research. “What’s the point of a Jewish studies department if the students in the department are demonstrating that, not only do they know nothing about the history of the Jewish people, but they’re actively trying to undermine it? No one else would tolerate this.”
Jewish studies has increasingly been a growing lightning rod for Jewish campus politics, even before Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack and Israel’s assault in Gaza; the spike in campus antisemitism, and Trump’s college crackdown.
At other schools, donors have pulled funding for Jewish and Israel studies programs over political disagreements with faculty on Israel. Some Jewish studies faculty have been targeted or muscled out of campus antisemitism task forces because of their perceived views on Israel, while others have led protests against their own task forces. At Columbia, which reached a settlement with the Trump administration to protect its funding after becoming the epicenter of student protests, some angry Jewish donors have opted to support Jewish Studies, but not the rest of the university.
Yet Jikeli’s fear that the IU controversy “could harm Jewish Studies” seems to some a self-fulfilling prophecy. On social media, current and former IU Jewish Studies faculty were bemoaning the spiritual end of the program. And citing the interim director’s actions, some prospective graduate students have told faculty they are no longer interested in enrolling.
—
The post In Indiana, a vaunted Jewish studies program is upended by red-state politics over Israel and speech appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Mamdani joins Theo Von’s podcast. They find common ground in criticizing Netanyahu.
(JTA) — New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani appeared for an interview with “manosphere” podcaster Theo Von, during which he called for the United States to join the International Criminal Court and enforce its arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“If I had my say, the U.S. government would have joined the ICC, honored every single warrant that they issued,” Mamdani said near the end of the 75-minute interview that was posted on Thursday.
“F–k yeah,” Von replied.
The interview came one week after Netanyahu visited the United Nations and delivered a speech during which he called Mamdani an “antisemite” and a supporter of Hamas. (Mamdani has condemned Hamas as a terrorist organization.)
Von, meanwhile, is part of a growing ecosystem of everyman “manosphere” podcasters who host sprawling conversations with a wide array of famous guests — he has hosted Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, JD Vance and Mark Zuckerberg — and increasingly are seen as representing a crucial sector of the electorate. He drew an invite to Trump’s inauguration in 2025 after hosting him on the campaign trail the year before.
Since then, Von has become increasingly critical of Israel and pressed the case in his Vance interview that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The International Court of Justice, which is separate from the ICC, is adjudicating charges Israel committed genocide — which the country rejects — but has not issued a ruling. Von has also hosted guests who have spread conspiracy theories about Israel and Jews.
At the end of his interview with Mamdani, Von thanked the New York mayor for “talking a little bit about the genocide” during their podcast, noting that “a lot of people are afraid to speak about it in politics.”
“One thing I would just say is, your curiosity is a beautiful thing,” Mamdani told Von.
The chummy conversation was notable, arising as it did out of a meeting between an icon of the libertarian-leaning “manosphere” and a self-declared socialist.
Mamdani decried Israel’s campaign in Gaza during their conversation.
“People talk about a ceasefire — just last week, the Israeli military killed an 11-year-old boy, Palestinian boy in Gaza, in a section that’s considered to be a safe zone,” he said. “This is continuing.”
He also recalled hosting Palestinian families at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, where they told him about “the ways that their lives have been shattered.”
Von asked Mamdani how he keeps people “from misdirecting energy that’s against Israel towards their Jewish friends,” especially as the mayor of the country’s most Jewish city.
Part of that, Mamdani said, is being clear that “no Jewish person in New York City is responsible for the actions of the State of Israel. And if you want to hold anybody accountable, it’s the people who are making those decisions — the prime minister, the State of Israel, also our complicity as American taxpayers knowing how many billions of dollars we have sent in bombs and continue to send.”
Mamdani also pointed to his administration’s official strategy to combat antisemitism, which it released earlier this week, as an effort to both condemn and prevent antisemitism. Some groups said the strategy “failed to address” anti-Israel rhetoric and links between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, while applauding aspects like security funding boosts and Holocaust education expansion.
Finally, he added, it takes “being very clear that critique of the State of Israel, the policy actions, the genocide — that in and of itself is not being antisemitic.”
“Yeah, I agree, speak up about it,” Von said.
Von, who has nearly 700 podcast episodes and more than 4.7 million YouTube subscribers, has interviewed or spoken positively about multiple controversial figures who have spread conspiracy theories about Israel and Jews, including former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, streamer and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and commentator Candace Owens.
During an episode from this past January with comedian Dave Smith, Von called Fuentes “fascinating” and said, “He’s f–ing brave, dude.”
Von hosted Carlson on his show in December 2025. The two men spoke at length about Israel and Von criticized what he said was a lack of transparency in the control that Israel and corporate interests have over American politics.
“If they would just say, ‘Hey, America is a country that’s owned by Israel,’ or that it’s always been this outpost or this LLC of Israel — or maybe not even of Israel, it could just be of corporate entities, I’m not really sure exactly — but if they would just tell us, you can operate from a place of knowing what’s going on,” Von said.
Pro-Israel lobbies have repeatedly defended their role as no different than any other interest group seeking influence, citing the successes over the years of pro-choice and anti-abortion groups, environmental groups and gun owner groups, among others.
During that interview, Von also played a clip of CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss calling Carlson anti-American and anti-Jewish, which elicited laughter from both Von and Carlson. Von then read out an AI-generated overview that described Weiss as “a vocal supporter of Israel.”
“If her allegiance isn’t to America first, how is she the head of an American network?” Von said.
“Well that’s of course an entirely fair question, that you’re not allowed to ask,” Carlson replied.
Von’s conversation with Mamdani this week covered a number of topics including socialism, the achievability of the American Dream and their preferred fish.
When asked about Netanyahu’s U.N. speech, Mamdani explained that he’d been meeting with the prime minister of the Netherlands about an LGBTQ center and the community’s history in New York.
“Then I get back from that meeting and it’s like, ‘Oh by the way, here’s what he was saying at the U.N.’,” Mamdani said.
“It’s so bizarre. Did it feel personal then?” Von asked.
Mamdani replied that “all of this is an attempt to distract from responsibility, name as many people as possible, try and make it into a back and forth.”
He added, “It’s not about me and him. It’s about the fact that he’s the architect of a genocide.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Mamdani joins Theo Von’s podcast. They find common ground in criticizing Netanyahu. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
A Jewish journalist recorded pro-Palestinian protesters outside services. He was reportedly suspended from his job
(JTA) — TORONTO – A number of Canadian groups are demanding answers in the wake of media reports that the country’s national broadcaster suspended a Jewish reporter after he posted a video of pro-Palestinian protesters outside Yom Kippur services and wrote about his pained reaction.
The reported suspension came after Neil Herland shared footage of protesters gathered outside the Meridian Arts Centre in north Toronto, which on Sept. 20 was hosting Yom Kippur services for The Song Shul.
Herland, who has worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for nearly 30 years, began his post on X, “On Yom Kippur I went to a synagogue service in Toronto and was met by protesters trying to taunt and intimidate me from entering the building.”
A man can be heard yelling “Zionist alert!” through a megaphone, while another masked protester approaches the camera and screams, “You’re going to hell.”
A pro-Palestinian group, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, filed a complaint against Herland with the CBC, saying he had mischaracterized the protest.
“It is clear to CJPME that Mr. Herland was aiding the pro-Israel side of these demonstrations defending Mark Regev’s presence, while smearing these pro-Palestine protesters as antisemitic for their criticisms of Regev’s awful record on Palestinian human rights,” their complaint said, referring to the presence of a former Israeli diplomat at the event.
The Toronto Sun reported the suspension on Sept. 24. CBC declined to confirm the suspension and said reporting had mischaracterized what had happened.
“We don’t comment on internal matters,” a spokesperson said. “That said, we are aware of reporting on this matter which has errors and mischaracterizations but we can’t get into the specifics given the confidentiality of the situation.”
Reached by JTA, Herland declined a request for comment.
A press freedom group decried the reported suspension, however.
“Recording events in a public place and reporting them to the public is not misconduct,” Sheila Gunn Reid, president of the Independent Press Gallery — a non-profit advocating for independent and nongovernmental journalist organizations — said. “It is journalism. It is not the role of a public broadcaster to punish its journalists for doing their jobs to appease activist groups. Its role is to defend their right to report.”
In a thread under his tweet about the protest, Herland noted that “The guest speaker at the Toronto synagogue tonight was an Australian-born university teacher who lives in Israel and once served as Israeli ambassador to the UK. His speech was about making peace in the Middle East. Let’s hope that happens this year.”
He was referring to Regev, formerly the Israeli ambassador to Britain, who gave a talk during Yom Kippur services. Online defenders of the protesters chided Herland for not personally naming the prominent media defender of Israel’s war in Gaza in his post.
Commenters also scored Herland for describing the venue as a synagogue even though the service was held in a public events space.
However, Jewish groups who reviewed the video or otherwise tracked the protest said that Regev’s presence did not seem germane to the protesters’ chants, and noted that synagogues often move to event venues for the High Holidays because of the volume of congregants attending.
“The protesters claimed to have been demonstrating against the speaker, but I don’t recall seeing anything that particularly said they were targeting [Regev],” Rochelle Direnfeld, senior criminal counsel for the Alliance of Canadians Combatting Antisemitism, said in an interview. “It seemed to be much more general against Jews and supporters of Israel.”
Criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic, Direnfeld said, but the protesters’ apparent targeting of worshipers was worrying. “It’s not okay to blame Canadian Jews for what’s going on in the Middle East,” Direnfeld said. “Given what [the protesters] were saying to the people trying to enter the building for services, that’s what they were doing.”
Simon Wolle, CEO of B’nai Brith Canada, said the protests on Judaism’s holiest day amounted to intimidation. “It is deplorable that members of the Jewish community are subject to these incessant acts of hatred and intimidation,” he said. “It is especially alarming when these protesters target members of the community as they enter their houses of worship, in this instance on Kol Nidre, the holiest night of the year.”
Wolle said the CBC needed to explain its reported disciplinary measures. “Neil Herland had every right to document his lived experience, and the very idea that he would face disciplinary action for that is deeply concerning,” he said. “As Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC owes the public an explanation for its inexplicable treatment of Mr. Herland.”
Vivian Bercovici, a lawyer as well as former ambassador of Canada to Israel and a CBC board member, said the alleged discipline Herland has faced is cause for concern.
“Herland didn’t say anything derogatory, rude or inappropriate,” said Bercovici. “He told us what was happening in a very clear and factual way, and so I think that the CBC owes us an explanation as to why that post was so egregious.”
Herland’s tweet thread also included a post noting that his late father was an Austrian Jew who survived the Holocaust in Romania, and that he “came to Canada as a refugee. This year I got an Austrian passport, in case Canada becomes unsafe for me as a Jew. I fear that moment is approaching, here in Canada and elsewhere.”
Herland’s expression of his own distress at the alleged harassment is not usual practice for reporters, but it is also not unheard of.
His comments echo those of many Canadian Jews, who increasingly are saying they do not feel safe in the country and even considering taking up potential offers to move to the United States as refugees.
Direnfeld said the incident reflected what is becoming a pervasive complaint among Canadian Jews that the authorities are not doing enough to decrease tensions. The police practice of deescalation was failing, she said.
“De-escalation can quickly turn into capitulation, which only serves to embolden these protesters to continue,” she said. “We’re now seeing the fruits of that capitulation in conduct such as what happened in Belleville,” she continued, referring to a gunman who tried to attack the Sons of Jacob synagogue on Yom Kippur but was killed in a shootout with police.
Bercovici said the protest was no less distressing because the Meridian Arts Centre is an events space.
“A synagogue can be anywhere, and there are a lot of religious groups that rent space over specific holidays because they don’t have their own building,” she said. “That’s just a fatuous, ridiculous argument.”
Herland has posted only once to X since his reported suspension: A photo of Shabbat candles on Friday, Sept. 25.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A Jewish journalist recorded pro-Palestinian protesters outside services. He was reportedly suspended from his job appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
A great Jewish intellectual understood the Kafkaesque horror of Tennessee’s botched execution
Two days ago, the state of Tennessee tried to kill Christa Pike, the Death Row prisoner who, in 1995, was found guilty of the torture and murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer. After spending more than 30 years on death row, Pike was strapped to a prison gurney and, as journalists watched through a window, an execution team cycled through at least a half-dozen syringes before finding a vein suitable for the injection of pentobarbital.
Or so they thought.
After Pike herself tried to help the team find a vein, they injected her with a supposedly lethal dose of the barbiturate. Though it caused an intense burning sensation in Pike’s arm, the dose failed to do its job, leading the executioners to empty a second dose into what they thought was a vein but turned out to be the surrounding tissue. Shortly thereafter, a curtain was drawn across the window and, for an hour, the journalists heard Pike continue to breathe and snore. Pike’s legal team eventually learned that their client, barely but still stubbornly alive, had been rushed to the emergency room of a nearby hospital.
While Pike’s physical prognosis is uncertain, there is nothing uncertain about the ethical diagnosis of this event. At least this would be the case for two earlier journalists who wrote at length on the death penalty: Arthur Koestler and Albert Camus. Long after they both became celebrated novelists and intellectuals, the two men each wrote essays on state-sanctioned killing, which were combined and published in France with the title Réflexions sur la peine capitale, or Reflections on the Death Penalty.
These reflections are as relevant in our own age of drug-induced executions as in Koestler and Camus’ era of where the delivery system of death was a noose or the guillotine.
Born into a secular Jewish family in Budapest, Koestler was, as the phrase goes, a child of his century, one convulsed by catastrophic wars, murderous ideologies, and multiple genocides. Described by his friend George Orwell as an “outstanding figure” of his time, Koestler, like Orwell, fought in and reported on the Spanish Civil War. As a member of the Spanish republican forces, he was captured by Franco’s intelligence service and sentenced to death — a fate Koestler escaped when, after several months of imprisonment, he was released in a prisoner exchange.
Yet this experience deeply marked him. In the mid-1950s, he rallied to the campaign to end capital punishment in Great Britain, penning the essay “Reflections on Hanging.” Serialized in two newspapers, the essay galvanized public opinion and played a pivotal role in the parliamentary vote that, while not entirely abolishing the death penalty, severely limited it. Given the clarity and ferocity of Koestler’s writing — which, Rebecca West observed, was as historically misleading as it was rhetorically moving — this sea change in the public’s attitude and parliament’s position is not surprising.
One passage seems especially relevant for the recent events in Tennessee. “There is indeed a Kafkaesque horror attached to an execution,” Koestler writes, “which goes beyond the mere fear of death or pain or indignity. It is connected not with the brutality but with the macabre, cold-blooded politeness of the ceremony, in which the person whose neck is going to be broken is supposed to collaborate in a nice, sensible manner, as if it were a matter of a minor surgical operation…it is present in the delinquent’s knowledge that in the embarrassed stares of the officials he is already mirrored as a dead man with a blue face and ruptured vertebrae; and that what for him is the final, violent termination of life is for them merely an unpleasant duty, followed by a sigh of relief and a plate of bacon and eggs.”
Did the unnamed doctor, I wonder, stare with embarrassment as he repeatedly tried but failed at killing the — perhaps this is not the best word — patient? How, I also wonder, should readers respond to the description of Pike’s attempted execution? (With embarrassment, I admit while I was revulsed, I also continued sipping from a mug of coffee as I read the New York Times’ account.)
We can guess how Lucien Camus might have responded. His son, Albert Camus, told and retold the story in his writings of his father who, having witnessed a public execution by guillotine, returned to the house, vomited in the sink, and never spoke about the experience. In the essay “Reflections on the Guillotine,” which accompanied Koestler’s, Camus suggested that rather than telling the condemned man or woman that they will pay the ultimate price or their debt to society for their crime, they instead be told the truth. “If you kill you will be imprisoned for months and years, torn between impossible death and constantly renewed terror, we shall slip into your cell…tie your hands behind your back [and] bind your arms with a strap to that you are forced to stoop [and] then carry you through the corridors [and] seize you by the seat of your pants and throw you on a board [then] let fall from a height of seven feet a 120 pound blade that will slice off your head like a razor.”
What, then, did the judge overseeing the 1995 trial tell Christa Pike when the sentence was rendered? The delivery system for death then was the electric chair and, to the judge’s credit, she did inform Pike that she would be subjected to a degree of electroshock sufficient to kill her. I do not know when the agent of death shifted from electroshock to pentobarbital nor do I know if a judge explained to Pike how the drug would act on her brain and organs to bring about her death. But I am pretty certain that none of the judges informed Pike of one legal scholar’s assessment of this form of death: “It is not the most humane, it is the most humane-looking.” I am even more certain they did not inform her, in case she survived another botched execution by the state of Tennessee, which boasts a history of such botches, that her brain would be irreversibly damaged.
Finally, I am most certain that, whether strangled by a tightened noose, decapitated by a sharpened blade, or injected by what was possibly an expired dose of pentobarbital, the sheer barbarism exercised by officials wearing white coats remains constant.
The post A great Jewish intellectual understood the Kafkaesque horror of Tennessee’s botched execution appeared first on The Forward.
