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Israelis Celebrate Ceasefire to End Gaza War as Cabinet Convenes to Approve Hostage Deal

Einav Zangauker, the mother of hostage Matan Zangauker, reacts holding an Israeli flag with photos of hostages, after US President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Hamas agreed on the first phase of a Gaza ceasefire, at the “Hostages square,” in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 9, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

US President Donald Trump declared on Thursday that he had succeeded in ending the war in Gaza, as Israel’s cabinet convened to ratify a ceasefire deal and crowds gathered in celebration across the Jewish state.

“Last night, we reached a momentous breakthrough in the Middle East,” he said at the start of a cabinet meeting in Washington. “We ended the war in Gaza, and on a much bigger basis, created peace, hopefully an everlasting peace in the Middle East.”

Trump said he planned to leave for the region on Sunday and hoped to be in Israel when the hostages are released early next week. “The hostages will be coming back Monday or Tuesday,” he said. “I’ll probably be there. I hope to be there.”

Amir Ohana, speaker of Israel’s parliament, known as the Knesset, on Thursday officially invited Trump to speak at the legislative body ahead of his slated trip to the Jewish state.

Former Israeli Ambassador to Washington Michael Oren said the ceasefire outcome reflected the Trump administration’s strategic leverage in the Middle East.

“The Trump deal proves, once again, that peace is only possible through strength,” he told The Algemeiner. “The president’s willingness to project military power first against the Houthis and then against Iran, together with his steadfast support of Israel’s operations in Gaza, impressed Middle East leaders and earned him great leverage in negotiations.”

Oren added that Trump’s team — including special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, as well as the president’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner — had used that leverage effectively. “Combined with Witkoff’s negotiating skills and Kushner’s regional relations, Trump’s prestige proved decisive,” he said. “History will also give [Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and his negotiating team high marks for forging a courageous agreement.”

Both Witkoff and Kushner attended the Israeli cabinet meeting on Thursday night.

While Trump spoke of peace from the White House earlier in the day, Israeli landmarks were illuminated in the colors of both nations. The walls of Jerusalem’s Old City were projected with Israeli and American flags, and Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, was lit in red, white, and blue.

In Tel Aviv, Hostages Square — the central gathering point for families of captives and their supporters — filled with people, many of whom carrying either American or Israeli flags. The square, usually subdued and heavy with grief, took on a rare mood of release. A band that included Gil Dickmann, cousin of slain hostage Carmel Gat, took to the stage as revelers danced. 

One well-wisher commented that by next week, the square would lose its name, “or else become known as Returnee Square.”

Gil Yosef Yisraeli, who lives nearby, said he had never seen it so animated. “We waited two years to see the square like this,” he said. “Seeing people dancing, singing — an atmosphere of pure joy for the first time is just amazing.”

Avihoo Halevy traveled from the northern Israeli city of Yokne’am Illit to join the crowd. “I’m very happy that they’re coming home,” he said. “I’m very, very emotional. But I’m also praying that an attack like Oct. 7 won’t happen again, and that Hamas should be eliminated.”

Shira, who declined to give her last name, described herself as “delirious with joy,” but said the feeling was shadowed by thoughts of families whose loved ones would not be coming home alive, and pointed to Ruby Chen, an American-Israeli whose soldier son was killed on Oct. 7, 2023, and whose body was taken to Gaza.

According to Israeli officials, 75 of the 251 people abducted that day were killed during the attacks or while in captivity. Of the 48 still held in Gaza, roughly 20 are believed to be alive. They are expected to be released in exchange for 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and another 1,700 Gazans held since the Hamas-led assault of Oct. 7.

Across Israel, many people credited Trump for the breakthrough. His image appeared on homemade posters in the square, and his role was widely discussed on television talk shows and social media feeds.

Asked earlier in Washington about his chances of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize — which will be announced on Friday — Trump cited what he called “eight agreements” he had brokered since returning to office, saying the Gaza ceasefire was “the biggest.”

Israel’s cabinet met to vote on the terms of the deal around 10 pm local time, several hours after it was slated to begin. According to officials, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s demand to veto the release of certain Palestinian prisoners, including convicted terrorists, prompted the delay.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced earlier on Thursday that he would vote against the agreement. Ben Gvir did not state his position publicly but threatened “bring down the government” if Hamas “continues to exist” after the hostages are freed.

However, a majority of the cabinet is expected to support the ceasefire and hostage-release deal.

Galit Kalfon, whose son, Segev, was snatched by Hamas terrorists at the Nova music festival, said she had spent the morning responding to messages from around the world after hearing the news that her son would soon return. She felt she had to answer each one, she said, to thank people for the support and endless prayers they had offered over the past two years.

“So many psalms were said for him,” she told Israel’s Channel 12. “I felt I had to answer every message.”

Kalfon added that for the first time since her son’ abduction, she allowed herself to listen to music. But she added that she was still full of anxiety. “When he’s finally here I’ll let it all out.”

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Pro-Palestinian LA Times Heiress Seizes Left-Wing Outlet to Push Agenda

May 1, 2024; Los Angeles, California, USA; A flag is waved during a sit-in outside of a pro-Palestinian encampment at the campus of UCLA. Violence broke out early in the morning at the encampment, hours after the university declared that the camp “is unlawful and violates university policy.” Photo: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect.

The pro-Palestinian daughter of the Los Angeles Times owner has recently been appointed publisher of the left-leaning outlet Drop Site News— a new platform for her to espouse her hateful views about Israel.

Nika Soon-Shiong, 32, daughter of billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, is no stranger to newsrooms. She has allegedly interfered behind the scenes at her father’s newspaper to influence coverage, meddling with headlines and clashing with editors who didn’t align with her activist agenda.

Soon-Shiong’s own public statements reveal a consistent hostility toward Israel and Zionism. On social media, she has displayed a Palestinian flag in her biodismissed the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, described Israel as an “apartheid state” that is engaged in “genocide” — and even alleged that the Los Angeles City Council was funding a “Zionist militia.”

Despite this pattern of rhetoric aligning with fringe, hardline narratives rather than journalistic neutrality, Soon-Shiong has, since 2021, sat on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) — an organization that redefines international law to designate terrorists as journalists.

How much influence has Soon-Shiong exerted on the CPJ? Even before the October 7 massacre and the resulting war, the CPJ published a report accusing the Israeli military of acting with “impunity” and severely undermining freedom of the press. This, even while according to the organization’s own data, Israel did not even feature in its so-called “Global Impunity Index,” which charts the countries in which press freedom is curtailed and where there is a lack of accountability when journalists are killed.

The double standards were glaring.

The CPJ has also been at the forefront of eulogizing so-called “journalists” who were killed in Gaza while working for outlets like Al-Aqsa TV and Quds News Network, which are affiliated with Hamas.

As we will see below, Soon-Shiong isn’t overly concerned when it comes to distinguishing between journalists and terrorists. One can only assume that this has played an active role in the CPJ’s willful blindness on this issue.

A New Platform for Anti-Israel Hate

So what happens if someone who brings both money and an extreme pro-Palestinian agenda is given her own media outlet?

We’re about to find out. Soon-Shiong has been appointed publisher of Drop Site News, a proudly left-wing outlet positioning itself as a corrective to what it calls mainstream media’s failure to cover “genocide” and “apartheid.”

It’s a media outlet devoted to delegitimizing Israel and promoting terrorist agendas. Alarmingly, its audience keeps growing.

The move provides Soon-Shiong’s ideological agenda a direct platform with more than 400,000 followers, which is most likely now set to receive a significant injection of cash.

Funding Gaza Journalists or Terrorists?

For starters, just before Soon-Shiong’s new role was announcedshe launched a fund to support an undisclosed list of Gaza “journalists” whose vetting process raises questions about possible terror ties.

The fundraising initiative is run in partnership with Unmute Humanity, which describes itself as “a grassroots collective to disrupt media complicity and call for accurate reporting of the U.S.-funded genocide by Israel against Palestinians.”

The so-called “Gaza Journalist Fund” has already raised more than $200,000, but no list of beneficiaries has been published. Instead, the group says it supports “journalists who have appeared on Unmute Humanity’s Voices of Palestine webcast or weekly TikTok Lives, or individuals with whom Unmute Humanity maintains ongoing direct communication.”

That vague “vetting process” has already spotlighted troubling figures. One is Bisan Owda, an Al Jazeera reporter exposed as a longtime member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) — a terror group responsible for suicide bombings, shootings, rocket fire, and the 2014 massacre of five Jewish worshipers in a Jerusalem synagogue. Unmute Humanity repeatedly promoted Owda across its platforms throughout 2024.

Another example is Anas al-Sharif, a Hamas operative who masqueraded as an Al Jazeera journalist until being killed by the IDF. Unmute Humanity openly eulogized him in posts and collaborations with other pro-Palestinian groups. Had he survived, it appears he would have been eligible for Soon-Shiong’s Gaza Journalist Fund.

Another “journalist” whose material was promoted is Mohammed Salama, a Hamas terrorist who posed as an Al Jazeera journalist and was targeted by the IDF together with al-Sharif.

If these examples are the norm rather than the exception, Soon-Shiong may effectively be financing terrorists under the guise of supporting Gaza reporting, through partnerships with groups that present them as journalists.

And she does not even try to hide her agenda.

Soon-Shiong also proudly announced her plans to turn her new media toy into an instrument of propaganda, for the sake of “the verdict of history”:

And Drop Site News’ Middle East editor recently explained — in an agenda-driven panel with CPJ’s CEO and former head of Human Rights Watch — that journalists should join the Gaza-bound flotilla (and thus take part in a blatant breach of international maritime law) because avoiding it is a “political” decision.

Many questions arise: How much cash is Soon-Shiong funnelling into Drop Site News? Is she planning to tighten her grip on her father’s newsroom, too? And who are the so-called “journalists” in Gaza now poised to receive US dollars?

The American public is owed absolute transparency — because when media power and US money are funneled into agendas that imperil Jewish lives — silence is complicity.

HonestReporting is a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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Satire on ‘Saturday Night Live’ used to be a deadly weapon; is it still enough in the Trump era?

A funny thing happened when I went to Austin last week. My youngest child, Basil, a junior at the University of Texas, and I paid a visit to the university’s Harry Ransom Center.The crown jewel of UT, the Center is named after its founder, Harry Huntt Ransom, who began as a professor of English at the university and ultimately became its visionary president. In a speech he gave to the Philosophical Society of Texas in 1956, he declared “that there be established somewhere in Texas — let’s say in the capital city — a center of cultural compass, a research center to be the Bibliothèque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation.”

Jane Curtin, Dan Aykroyd and Laraine Newman as The Coneheads on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Photo by Getty Images

Nearly 75 years later, the massive stone and glass building in the heart of the campus stands as the realization of Ransom’s dream. The Center’s holdings include nearly one million books along with some 42 million manuscripts, five million photographs, and 100,000 works of art; the manuscripts of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Doris Lessing, Jack Kerouac and Ezra Pound are here; so are the papers of Albert Einstein and Robert de Niro; even original works by Frida Kahlo and Pablo Picasso.

Three of those last four iconic figures also appear in the Ransom Center’s most recent acquisition: the papers of Lorne Michaels.

Born Lorne Lipowitz in Toronto in 1944 — and not, as some folks still believe, on a kibbutz in Israel — Michaels is, of course, the creator of Saturday Night Live, the weekly NBC television comedy show that has been running, and often stumbling, since 1975. (Now 80 and with no plans to retire, Michaels has said he would like “Uneven” inscribed on his tombstone.)

The collection begins with Michaels’ years in theater productions at the University of Toronto and his early work in television — including his stints with The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show in 1968 and, that same year, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In — before moving on to the half-century of SNL as well as the dozens of films on which Michaels served as producer.

As my Longhorn and I visited the just-opened and eye-popping SNL exhibit, I noticed, with a surge of verklempt, the index cards that Michaels tacks to a bulletin board every Friday, outlining the segments of the following night’s show. The show, after all, has to go on — a huge weight for a handful of cards to carry. According to his recent biographer Susan Morrison, Michaels often shakes his head slowly as he gazes at the index cards, concluding “We have nothing.”

But as anyone with a good memory or, lacking that, a good pair of walking shoes knows — the exhibit covers figuratively and literally a good deal of ground — there is much ado, and much to do, with that nothing. It is impossible to exaggerate the show’s impact on American culture and politics. There are, of course, the gag lines that have bled into everyday usage where the user usually has no idea of the line’s origin, such as Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella, who ends every misunderstanding with “Nevermind” and Stuart Smalley aka Al Franken’s mantra: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.” And, of course, the motivational blast of Matt Foley, played by Chris Farley, “I live in a van down by the river” as well as, yes, Mike Myers’ Linda Richman, who punctuates her monologues with “I’m getting a little verklempt.”

Yet, while this sort of humor zeroes in on cultural fads and ethnic tics, SNL has also specialized in satire with political bite, such as Will Ferrell’s coinage “stratergery” in his brilliant impersonation of George W. Bush — which, hilariously, Dubya proudly assumed he had himself coined — or the 2016 debates between Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump and Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton. In a small theater at the exhibit, this very sketch was repeatedly replayed. As I watched and listened — not for one, but two replays — I noticed that the knots of visitors, while mesmerized, did not often laugh. The silence was especially loud when Baldwin, playing Trump, suddenly given two more minutes to talk, lurches into this hallucinatory riff:

“The thing about the Blacks is that they’re killing each other. All the Blacks live on one street in Chicago, all on one street. I just read that this morning. It’s called ‘Hell Street’. And they run Hell Street and they’re all just killing each other. Just like I am killing this debate.”

In 2016, silence from the audience in Studio 8H would have been unimaginable; a decade later, laughter seems equally unimaginable. With the events now unfolding in Chicago and other “Democrat” cities under Trump 2.0, Baldwin’s rant is more a matter for laments than laughs. Perhaps some of the visitors wondered, as I did, what the Republican state leaders, housed just a short walk away in the capitol, would have thought of their state’s premier university showcasing this sketch. (One need not wonder very long,though, given that Jay Hartzell, the university’s former president, decided to resign rather than resist pressures from crusading Republicans to enforce the state’s ban on the use of DEI.)

Gilda Radner, late 1970s. Photo by Getty Images

Perhaps more important, the sketch raises a question worthy of “Coffee Talk” as well as for our collective and growing vibe of verklempt: Is comedy, even the middle of the road satiric fare at which SNL excels, the proper response to the tragic situation our country now faces? The answers to this question, long debated by political thinkers and actors, generally fall into two camps. In the first camp are those who believe that laughter is subversive, a weapon of the weak that reveals, through mockery and, as Dubya might say, snarkery, the incoherence of their justifications for taking power and the corruption that inevitably follows.

In short, comics show us an emperor with no clothes. This is a notion that Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park, unlike Michael’s middle-of-the-road SNL, have taken quite literally this year.

But as those in the other camp point out, even the sight of a butt-naked Donald Trump in bed with Satan has hardly dented the standing of a man who would be emperor. This camp’s slogan, to paraphrase W.H. Auden’s famous line about poetry, is that comedy makes nothing happen. Or, even more discouraging, it makes matters even worse. Comedy distracts us from grave matters at hand and, by diluting every event through entertainment, deadens our sense of outrage at the sheer cruelty and stupidity of this administration. Amusement, the sociologist Neil Postman observed 40 years ago, is “the supra-ideology of all discourse on television.”

Even, it seems, when the entertainment might qualify as Jewish humor. The efforts that have been made to explain Michaels’ humor, and that of SNL, through the prism of Michaels’ Judaism have mostly fallen flat for a simple reason: When Lorne Lipowitz opted to become Lorne Michaels, the biographer Morrison suggests, he also opted out of his Jewish upbringing. Morrison quotes one colleague who said that Michaels’ “yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah” verbal tic “is the one bit of Jewishness still left in him.” And yet, a way of being and seeing is not so easily uprooted. In Morrison’s book, Conan O’Brien marvels at his old boss’s achievement: “A Jewish kid who started out with a furrier for a father, and he somehow makes it to this place? Our insecurities, our defense mechanisms, are what we use to survive, and they build up, like plaque.”

Those insecurities and defense mechanisms, so fundamental to Jewish humor, are no longer unique to Jews in the Age of Trump. When we left the Ransom Center, Basil and I chatted about this subject. They thought there was something Jewish, or at least Jewishy, about the show. When I asked what made for Jewish humor, they paused before replying that it was self-deprecating yet also irreverent. This observation struck me as right, but also worrying. When the target of our humor is a president whose utter lack of reverence for our nation’s laws and norms endangers us all, irreverence makes for a dubious weapon, even for the weak.

 

The post Satire on ‘Saturday Night Live’ used to be a deadly weapon; is it still enough in the Trump era? appeared first on The Forward.

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The Spanish and Portuguese Sukkah

15-year-old Adin Stanleigh cleans palm branches used to cover a sukkah, or ritual booth, used during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, in Jerusalem, Israel, Oct. 11, 2019. Photo: Reuters / Ronen Zvulun.

I live on the 30th floor with no balcony or courtyard below. The possibility of building a Sukkah of my own is zero. For the festival of Sukkot, I do the rounds of the various synagogues and places nearby that have Sukkot, and there are plenty of them.

My favorite is the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, Shearith Israel — the Remnant of Israel. A very appropriate name for a community that was originally established by refugees from the expulsion from Spain in 1490. It is a few blocks away from me on Central Park West, in its present location in an imposing, majestic 19th century building.

I doubt it has any members today who are descendants of Jews from Iberia, but the community adheres strictly in style, music, and rituals to these unique traditions and pronunciations, which are distinct from both mainstream Ashkenazi and Sephardi rituals.

My first experience of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in New York was over 30 years ago, when I was invited to give the sermon at the bar mitzvah of the stepson of a very close friend of mine and somebody who I miss to this very day, Howard Ronson. Before I was allowed to speak, there were two conditions. One was that I had to wear canonicals. I had never previously or since worn canonicals, which are somber clerical clothes borrowed from the non-Jewish clergy and particularly favored by 19th century rabbis. The second was that I had to walk behind a member of the board who led me in a dignified walk up towards the ark, where other members of the board were sitting, and I had to bow towards them first and only then could I proceed with my sermon.

When I moved to New York many years later, I went to visit the synagogue. I found the services sparsely attended and drawn out, and not the sort of religious experience that I relished — except on a Friday night, which was a very short service, no sermon, and an excellent male voice choir hidden out of sight above the ark, singing a selection of tunes of a very specific Hispanic style.

I admired the long-serving rabbi, Mark Angel. Descended from Jews of Rhodes, born and brought up in the American Orthodox world, speaking Ladino, and with a strong Spanish and Portuguese tolerant religious tradition, he was open minded and tolerant, having the fortitude to stand by his values no matter what was going on around him in the Orthodox world.  He was followed briefly by his talented academic son, and today the pulpit is occupied by a brilliant, unusual minister, Rabbi Soloveitchik, a descendant of a unique rabbinic dynasty, who has a photographic memory and whose interests range from Talmud to sports, art, literature, and history.

And this was where I went to enjoy a delightful Sukkah with highly congenial company. The Sukkah is inside the synagogue building in a room which has a roof that pulls back, and the Schach is placed over the gap and decorated intricately by the ladies of the community.

This festival is rounding off a month of intense restorative spirituality. Over Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I joined the Koznitz Chasidim on the Upper West Side, where the services were sung with gusto, passion, and spirituality, non-stop, from beginning to end. After another year of suffering, sadness, and uncertainty about the future, it was so therapeutic. I came out walking on air.

Then I was brought down to earth, and my ecstasy was diminished by the attack on the Jews of Manchester, the city of my birth. But then I got ready for Sukkot, the festival of joy — bouncing back as we always do. And what could add more to my joy and delight than to hear the news that at long last it seems the war in Gaza is over, the hostages will soon be returned, and I could ignore and laugh at the pathetic waves of Jew hatred sweeping and swirling around the world. I know they will never subside and frankly I will not let it get me down.

We have the beauty and spirituality of our tradition and the many impressive talents our community encompasses to inspire and delight us, and to know that all this is worth fighting for. And we will dance again on Simchat Torah.

The author is a writer and rabbi, currently based in New York.

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