Connect with us

Uncategorized

Italy is having a Yiddish moment. An unprecedented I.J. Singer translation is part of the boom.

(JTA) — In September 1932, Israel Joshua Singer boarded a ship bound for New York, where he had been invited to report on the United States for Yiddish-speaking Jews like himself.

“Americans are a difficult people to understand,” the famed novelist wrote in one of his first articles from the U.S. “They have tried at all costs to be, in every aspect, the opposite of Europeans.”

In a series of articles commissioned by Abraham Cahan, the famed editor of the Yiddish Forverts, Singer sought to help his readers understand this mirror world. On the eve of the Nazis’ rise in Europe, he marveled at the landscapes, the Jewish strivers and dreamers and the Christians who lent a sympathetic ear to the challenges facing Jews back home.

Nearly a century later, Singer’s astonished first encounters with America have appeared together in translation for the first time — not in English, but in Italian. “Viaggi in America” (Travels in America), published by the historic Italian Jewish publishing house Giuntina and translated from Yiddish by Enrico Benella, brings together I.J. Singer’s witty American dispatches for the Forverts.

The articles follow Singer from New York’s Jewish heart on the Lower East Side to Coney Island, the Catskill Mountains, the Warner Bros. studios in Hollywood and a General Motors factory in Michigan, among many other stops. Singer returned to Poland after his visit and moved permanently to the United States with his family in 1934, but he continued to observe the country with the distance of a European Jewish outsider. Most of the pieces in the new volume have never been translated, including into English.

The collection arrives amid an Italian revival of Singer and Yiddish literature in general, enabled by newly accessible digital archives, a new generation of translators and readers increasingly interested in Yiddish culture.

“Yiddish is alive and well — even in Italy,” said Shulim Vogelmann, the book’s publisher.

“I think the reason books like ‘The Family Carnovsky’ succeed [in Italy] is that they are books written in blood,” said Anna Linda Callow, who translated that Singer novel into Italian. Yiddish literature, she explained, emerged from a society being “violently confronted with modernity, the collapse of empires, and profound historical questions.”

Born in Poland in 1893, I.J. Singer was the elder brother of the future Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. (Their sister Ester Kreytman also became a novelist and short story writer.) Within the Yiddish-speaking literary world, I.J. was once the better-known of the Singer brothers, but his work has long been eclipsed by Isaac Bashevis’.

When the Italian publisher Adelphi published the first Italian edition of his masterpiece “The Family Carnovsky” in 2013, the book became a major success, selling more than 120,000 copies. That was a watershed moment for Yiddish literature — and for I.J. Singer’s popularity — in Italy.

Before “Carnovsky,” Italian publishers had brought out a handful of Yiddish literary works, many of which were translated through English rather than directly from Yiddish (a practice that continues today). Since the success of “Carnovsky,” over 50 new editions of Yiddish books have appeared in Italy, from authors including Kreytman, Sholem Aleichem and Chaim Grade.

Interest in Yiddish culture has not been limited to books — and it does not appear to be closely entwined with surging anti-Israel sentiment in Italy, even as some Yiddishists report renewed interest from those who are embracing diasporic Jewish traditions.

Yiddish began reaching Italian audiences in the late 1980s, when director Mara Cantoni and performer Moni Ovadia staged a Yiddish-themed production at one of Milan’s most established theaters. Their work helped popularize Yiddish culture in the years that followed. (Ovadia later became one of Italy’s most prominent Jewish anti-Zionist public figures.)

But Miriam Camerini, an Italian artist and theater director who specializes in Yiddish culture, said presenting Yiddish material live has become more difficult during the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Speaking to JTA from Yiddish Summer Weimar, a festival in Germany that draws Yiddishists from around the world, she said theaters and cultural institutions increasingly told her it was “not the right time” for Jewish programming — even though her work focuses on diasporic and non-Zionist traditions.

“The fact that my work dealt with the history of the Bund,” Camerini said, referring to the Jewish socialist movement founded in the Russian Empire at the end of the 19th century, “did not lead people to say, ‘How interesting — let’s listen to Jews with different, non-Zionist ideas.’ No: anything Jewish was to be excluded.”

Instead, the Yiddish publishing boom can trace its roots in part to a practical matter: The copyrights for Singer’s work expired in Europe in 2015. While Elisabetta Zevi, an executive and Jewish literature editor at Adelphi, insisted on publishing “Carnovsky” just a couple of years before the copyrights expired, the financial barrier has been lifted for new titles.

Adelphi’s status as one of Italy’s most prestigious publishers also gave Singer a visibility in the country that earlier editions lacked and primed the pump for further interest.

“It was a masterful publishing coup,” Callow said, who recently began teaching a Yiddish course at the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in Ferrara.

Another factor in the Yiddish boomlet was the emergence of new translators able to work directly from the language, a tiny but significant trend helped along by technology and the commitment of a passionate few.

“There are no university-level Yiddish courses in Italy, so you either have to go abroad to study or learn on your own,” said Enrico Benella, the translator of the new collection, in an interview. “It is therefore hardly surprising that so many major authors have been left behind.”

Within the remarkably narrow circle of Yiddish translators in Italy, Benella is an outlier — first and foremost, because he is not Jewish and did not start his career as a translator or a scholar of Jewish literature. Born near Padua in 1979, he only began learning Yiddish a few years ago, driven by a desire to read I.J. Singer’s work in the original.

Benella began studying through the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages, which offers free online courses on 18 Jewish vernacular languages, including various Judeo-Arabic dialects, Ladino and Judeo-Italian. Almost immediately, he began reading and practicing translating Singer’s work.

Digital access, also made possible by U.S. donors and research institutions, created another opening. Large collections of Yiddish books, magazines, and daily newspapers are now available online, including almost a century of the Forverts. The Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library at the Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts includes more than 11,000 Yiddish titles. YIVO, the Yiddish research center in New York, is digitizing its prewar library and archival collections.

“Yiddish literature will soon become the first modern literature to be completely digitalized,” Benella said.

Benella was inspired to pursue the translation of Singer’s American dispatches while reading “The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer” by Anita Norich, one of the most prominent living scholars of I.J. Singer’s work. Benella worked through her bibliography of Singer’s Forverts journalism, much of it published under the pseudonym of G. Kuper. That’s where he first encountered the titles that “sounded American.”

He then approached Vogelmann, Giuntina’s publisher, and pitched the idea for the collection. Benella had already translated two other books from Yiddish for Giuntina. (Giuntina has also published a book by the author of this article.)

Anita Norich still remembers the painstaking work behind that bibliography, which she compiled in the 1980s while working on her first book on I.J. Singer.

“There was no index of the Forverts, and there was no search engine you could use,” she recalled. “I went to the YIVO library in New York, and turned the Forverts microfilm page by page, looking for his name.”

The desire to explain America to Yiddish-speaking American readers reflected a central part of the Forverts’ mission, Norich said.

Singer, who arrived speaking very little English, often looked beyond the stories and places familiar to Yiddish readers, and instead reported from Harlem and Chinatown, compared poverty in New York with poverty in Warsaw, and explored American commerce, culture, and religion.

“There is America to be described, there are American Jews, and then there is Singer, who is neither an American Jew nor an American,” Benella said. “Precisely for that reason, he has an additional point of view. His distance gives him a different perspective on an America that American Jews may be seeing from too close up.”

“You could define ‘Travels in America’ as the encounter between the Jews of Eastern Europe and true modernity in the United States.”

Singer encountered that modernity on his initial voyage. He marveled when the ship’s Christian passengers packed into a talk by a rabbi on the just-completed First Preparatory World Jewish Conference in Switzerland, Hitlerism and antisemitism.

“The large hall immediately filled with crowds of Christians,” Singer wrote. “They sat there listening … and applauded the speaker enthusiastically. It came as a surprise to me. Such a thing is completely incomprehensible to a Jew … and with what interest those genuine Americans listened to a Jewish man speak about Jewish problems!”

The dispatches also move from travelogue to comedy to political witness. One of the collection’s most notable pieces recounts a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden — an article that Italian reviewers have highlighted in a country with its own Fascist past and wartime alliance with Nazi Germany.

“Whenever Jews were mentioned, the crowd roared like bloodthirsty beasts,” Singer wrote. “That hall reeked of a medieval hatred and bloodlust directed against everything honorable, just and humane.”

Norich said Singer’s journalism and fiction cannot be neatly separated. He reported what he saw, but he also turned the people he met into characters.

Benella described Singer’s humor as understated. “It never makes you burst out laughing; it’s closer to a form of analysis, a kind of sly teasing that shows you reality and laughs at it — but not in order to diminish it or belittle it.”

Norich, who has studied and translated Singer for decades, edited a recent three-volume English-language collection of his work for the Israeli publisher Koren. (The collection does not include the American dispatches.)

“I think readers are responding to something that’s going on now in our own world,” Norich said. “Antisemitism and the condition of Jews in Europe are an ongoing theme of his.”

Readers are responding to Singer’s “honest sense of uncertainty,” she said, about “all of these panaceas, all of these cures, all of these convictions that don’t listen to one another.” His work repeatedly returns to “Jewish arguments, political and religious messianism, and the fractiousness of communal life. As Singer put it, ‘I have the diagnosis, but not the cure.’”

Nearly a century after Singer used his European perspective to interpret America for Yiddish-speaking immigrants, the Italian translation adds another layer of distance: American Jewish life returns to contemporary readers through Yiddish and Italian.

“The sign of a great writer is that he’s steeped in his own world but speaks to other worlds and other times,” Norich said.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Italy is having a Yiddish moment. An unprecedented I.J. Singer translation is part of the boom. appeared first on The Forward.

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Uncategorized

Israeli-Arab influencer behind ‘Nas Daily’: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism

(JTA) — DENVER – Israeli-Arab social media entrepreneur Nuseir Yassin, of the viral vlog “Nas Daily,” said he believes “anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism” and stressed his commitment to overturning “misguided hate” against Jews, at a conference devoted to the subject this week.

Yassin, 34, was speaking with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the sidelines of the conference, hosted by the David Merage Foundation for Confronting Antisemitism. A self-described “village boy” from the Lower Galilee town of Arraba in Israel, he achieved massive success through viral short-form videos that attracted viewers from all over the world. Today he boasts more than 68 million followers across numerous social networks.

Yassin is a Muslim of Palestinian origin, although he said he is not religious. Asked why it was important for a non-Jewish person to participate in a conference about combatting antisemitism, Yassin equated this battle to fighting for his family, noting that “the success of Israel and the Jewish people is also my success as an Israeli citizen.”

“I’m not a fan of the Israeli government, and I’m not here to defend it, just like I’m not a fan of many governments,” Yassin noted, but he asserted that the reaction to the government “is absolutely fueled by antisemitism.”

“I do believe anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism,” he added.

He said he views Zionism as “the most vanilla thing in the world – a group of people wanting a place to live,” and has therefore concluded that Israel’s detractors “just really don’t like Jews.”

Yassin, who first broke through in 2016, has become increasingly outspoken in recent years about his combined Israeli and Palestinian identity. During the conference, he recalled that he grew up labeling himself Arab-Israeli. After the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, he started listing Israeli first and Palestinian second.

“I could not relate to the extremism that I saw, and I wanted to distance myself from it without erasing my identity connected to it,” Yassin said. “I’m not just Israeli because I think it removes a little bit of spice, but I’m also not just Palestinian anymore.”

“A lot of Israeli culture is inside me,” he continued. “I never agree with people. I’m always disagreeable. That’s Israeli. I speak up.”

Yassin noted that he was “the first guy to go study in the United States out of my entire lineage,” graduating from Harvard University in 2014 with a degree in economics and a minor in computer science. Despite having grown up in Israel, Yassin said that Harvard was the place where he made his first Jewish friend.

After working as a software developer for Venmo in New York, Yassin left his job in 2016 to travel and document his journeys. Ultimately, he launched a Facebook page called Nas Daily – using the word for “people” in Arabic – where he posted one-minute videos for 1,000 days, telling the stories of communities around the world.

What was once a personal brand has since expanded into the parent Nas Company, which offers platforms for solo entrepreneurs to build and monetize their online businesses.

Yassin earned an honorary degree from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2025 in recognition of his advocacy work for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence. This past August, he also joined the advisory board for the Genesis Prize Foundation, which each year celebrates inspiring Jewish individuals for their achievements.

“I do not relate to hundreds of men on the street shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’” Yassin told JTA, adding that there needed to be more women and fewer religious fanatics participating in the Israeli-Palestinian conversation.

Yassin argued that he’s “not a weird Arab for saying this” and that “the entire country of the UAE says the same thing,” referring to one of the Gulf countries that signed onto the Abraham Accords normalizing relations with Israel. He also challenged “Free Palestine” activists to envision a concrete future for Palestinians rather than fixating on Israel’s transgressions.

“We should all be ‘Free Palestine’ – but from what?” Yassin asked. “We disagree on the solution, not on the problem. We don’t want suffering. Nobody wants suffering.”

“I’m a free-Palestine-from-Hamas guy,” he continued. “Just free Palestine,” he said, ”is not an answer. I’m free-Palestine-from-extremism.”

Yassin affirmed that there is room for criticism of Israel’s government, noting, for example, that he would like to see an Israeli-Arab presence in the government.

But he marveled at the notion that an alien visiting Earth would likely guess that the most hated country in the United Nations is North Korea, when in fact “It’s not – It’s Israel.”

That struck him as absurd because “the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a big deal when you compare it to everything else that’s happening on planet Earth. The only thing that makes it a big deal is that we, as Palestinians, have the perfect enemy.”

That enemy, he continued, is “the most hated type of enemy, which is the Jews.”

Nuseir Yassin
Social media entrepreneur Nuseir Yassin, left, stands with fellows Raihaana Adira and Grace (right) at a conference hosted by the David Merage Foundation for Confronting Antisemitism, in Denver, Colorado, on Oct. 20, 2026. (Sharon Udasin/JTA).

As part of his appearance at the conference, Yassin presented a recap of a fellowship he launched this past spring in partnership with the David Merage Foundation to help 50 content creators – 25 Jewish and 25 Muslim – produce meaningful material.

Participants received $1,000 and spent a month learning from the Nas Daily team about viral and impactful storytelling during the fellowship, named for Yassin’s first Jewish friend, Zaki Djemal, who recently died of a sudden heart attack.

To Laura Merage, the Iranian-born Jewish co-founder of the foundation, Yassin was a natural partner for this bridge-building effort. Given his social media following and “infectious personality,” Merage said she felt “that’s what we need more of in the world.”

At the conference on Tuesday, Yassin announced two winners of the fellowship’s influencer competition: recent McGill University graduate Raihaana Adira, a Canadian Muslim, and Grace, a Jewish-American digital content creator who preferred to use only her first name for privacy reasons. Grace tells stories about unique public figures, such as the first Arab “Miss Israel.” Adira, meanwhile, began posting about antisemitism and Muslim-Jewish relations after witnessing anti-Zionist protests at McGill.

“When I see a Jewish person being attacked on campus or online, it feels like I’m watching someone from my own community hurt,” Adira told JTA, noting that she started posting because no one believed her when she talked about incidents on campus.

“I wanted the protests and the graffiti on the walls that said ‘Death to the IDF’ to be seen,” she continued. “I am a Canadian, I am a Muslim, and when people at school on the streets say, ‘Death to Canada, We are Hamas, Hamas is heroic’ – that is not me.”

Adira said she received many death threats when she first started posting. While acknowledging how difficult that was, she also emphasized an influx of support that has helped “drown out the hate.”

Yassin offered a similar perspective, noting that at the beginning of his career, he “used to amplify the blowback and talk a lot about it,” referring to the criticisms he’d receive for promoting coexistence and calling out antisemitism. But after realizing that this deterred others from speaking out, he deemed the threats insignificant, calling them “the smallest price to pay for the largest outcome you can possibly imagine.”

During his travels around the world, Yassin said he has witnessed how flawed people’s perceptions of Jews can be and that he feels “a responsibility to set the record straight.” He also noted that he is dating a Jewish woman, author and influencer Aija Mayrock, whom he is marrying next year and with whom he expects to have children.

“They’re going to be Jewish, so that’s my family – literally, my family,” Yassin said.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Israeli-Arab influencer behind ‘Nas Daily’: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.

Continue Reading

Uncategorized

Four Seats or No Seats? Why Israel’s Final Polls Disagree Over Amcha Yisrael

Ofer Winter

Conflicting projections for Ofer Winter’s party illustrate the uncertainty of measuring public support near an electoral threshold.

A Channel 12 poll gives Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael four parliamentary seats.

An i24NEWS survey reaches the same seat total.

Other final polls find that the party does not qualify for representation.

How can surveys conducted close to the same election produce such different results?

The answer lies partly in the difference between measuring a vote share and converting it into parliamentary seats.

A Statistical Boundary

Israel’s electoral threshold is 3.25 percent.

For a party receiving substantially more than that percentage, modest sampling fluctuations may change its expected number of seats without calling its parliamentary presence into question.

For a party whose support lies near 3.25 percent, the same type of fluctuation may change its projected representation from several seats to zero.

This does not necessarily mean the polls are measuring completely different political realities.

They may be producing estimates close to the same threshold but on opposite sides of it.

Sample Size Is Only One Factor

The i24NEWS survey conducted on October 22 included 5,124 adult respondents and reported a sampling error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.

That is a substantial sample by conventional political polling standards.

But a larger sample does not eliminate every source of uncertainty.

Different pollsters may employ different recruitment methods, weighting systems and procedures for estimating turnout.

They may also differ in how they handle respondents who are undecided or reluctant to state their preferences.

These choices can matter particularly for smaller parties.

The Problem of Turnout

Opinion polls generally estimate voting preferences before actual voting takes place.

Election results reflect the ballots cast by people who participate.

Differences between intended and actual turnout can affect parties in different ways.

Analysts must therefore consider not only how many respondents express support for a party, but also whether the poll’s turnout model accurately reflects the eventual electorate.

Without transparent, comparable information about the methods used by each polling organization, it is difficult to identify which methodological difference is responsible for a particular disagreement.

Reading the Final Surveys

The appropriate interpretation of Amcha Yisrael’s polling is neither that its parliamentary representation is guaranteed nor that exclusion is certain.

The available surveys demonstrate uncertainty around a legally decisive boundary.

The four-seat projections reported by Channel 12 and i24NEWS are meaningful observations.

So are the below-threshold findings published by Channel 13, Maariv and Zman Yisrael.

Each survey is a measurement of electoral intentions under a particular methodology, not a count of actual votes.

For readers following Israel’s election, this makes Amcha Yisrael an instructive case study in how polling uncertainty interacts with electoral law.

The final result will provide the definitive seat allocation. The polls explain why the outcome was difficult to measure in advance.

Continue Reading

Uncategorized

As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich

In Munich on Sept. 30, 1938, the leaders of Britain and France signed an agreement with Adolf Hitler that caved to the Nazi leader’s demand that Germany be given a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Five months later, Hitler ordered the German military to forcibly take the remainder of the neighboring country.

On Oct. 9, 2026, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin struck a deal allowing Russia to sell diesel fuel to global markets, most importantly to the US. Then Trump waived a package of sanctions on Russia that had been passed by Congress. By replenishing Russia’s war coffers, it is likely more Ukrainians will die because of these twin gifts from America’s president to the warmongering Russian autocrat.

Why is Trump doing this? He seems to be hoping the diesel deal will help him avert disaster in the upcoming midterms. Or maybe there’s more to it than that. Perhaps Trump seriously thinks that this will get him the Nobel Peace Prize by ending the war in Ukraine through helping Putin win it. Perhaps it’s one more scheme to further enrich himself and his family. Or maybe Putin really does have something on Trump.

In any event, it feels like Munich all over again.

There are some remarkable parallels between Czechoslovakia’s predicament in 1938 and Ukraine’s nine decades later: separatists in two vulnerable Central European democracies were encouraged and supported by a neighboring authoritarian regime that sought to seize adjacent territory under the pretext of protecting a minority from oppression.

And at the center of both narratives is betrayal: of Czechoslovakia by Britain and France, and Ukraine by Trump.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, 1939. Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In the spring and summer of 1938, Konrad Henlein, leader of the Nazi-allied Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia, held secret meetings with Hitler and other Nazi officials. They concocted a plan: Cause so much disorder in the Sudetenland that the Czech government would declare martial law, thus creating an excuse for German troops to march in to protect the ethnic German minority.

Tensions that had long existed along the Czech frontier erupted into gunfire and death in the Sudeten town of Habersbirk on the morning of Sept. 13, 1938. A mob of German separatists hung a swastika banner from a church tower, stormed the police station, kidnapped the wife of a cop, and engaged in gunfights with police officers that lasted hours. Four Czech police officers and four insurgents died. Outbreaks of violence, terror and torture raged along the border for days, backed by Freikorps paramilitary troops who crossed from Germany and by SA and SS men who took part in cross-border sabotage and armed attacks.

The uprising had the desired impact. Just 17 days later — on Sept. 30, 1938 — Britain, France, Italy and Nazi Germany signed the Munich Agreement, yielding to Hitler’s demand that the Sudetenland be ceded to him. After landing at an airport outside London, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved a document in his hand and jubilantly proclaimed:

“The settlement of the Czechoslovak problem which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace.”

“I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain said later that day.

But it didn’t take long for Hitler to show he could not be trusted. Hitler’s army marched into Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. Germany’s invasion of Poland followed less than six months later, and by 1942 German forces controlled territory spanning from the Atlantic Ocean to deep inside the Soviet Union.

Ethnic Germans’ uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1938 found an echo nine decades later in Ukraine’s Donbas region, where unrest that began with pro-Russia protests in 2014 evolved into the war Russia has been waging on its neighbor for nearly five years.

In the spring of 2014, paramilitary units led by Russian intelligence officers stormed government office buildings in several towns and cities in Donbas, seizing weapons and clashing with police. In a scene reminiscent of the Habersbirk siege of 1938, on April 14, 2014, pro-Russian militants seized the police station in Horlivka, beat up the police chief, and murdered a member of the city council, whose body was found in a river. Similar clashes occurred throughout Donbas.

Two Kremlin-backed pseudo-states soon emerged: the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Russia funneled tanks, artillery, air defense systems and fighters into Donbas, fueling a war between separatists and Ukrainian forces that dragged on for years.

Like Hitler in the Sudetenland, Russia’s de facto occupation of Donbas was not enough for Vladimir Putin. His eyes were on all of Ukraine, and he spent years manufacturing pretexts for the full-scale invasion that began on Feb. 24, 2022.

Trump has been buttering up Putin for more than a decade, starting with his 2015 campaign for president, when he effusively praised the ruthless Russian autocrat’s leadership style. Putin is a “strong leader,” is “far more respected than our president,” meaning the immensely popular Barack Obama, and was someone he “would get along with very well,” Trump said back then.

Trump’s admiration for Putin took on ominous tones after becoming president. During a press conference after the two leaders’ 2018 Helsinki summit, Trump questioned intelligence findings on Russian election interference and said he believed Putin’s denial. “I don’t see any reason it would be  Russia,” Trump told reporters, with the Russian strongman standing at his side.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, during Biden’s presidency, Trump called it “a pretty smart move,” praised Putin as a “genius,” and also said it wouldn’t have happened if Trump was still president, remarks that were amplified by Russian state media.

During Trump’s second term, his buddy-buddy relationship with Putin has turned into a virtual strategic alliance, as the American president repeatedly makes moves and statements that seem designed to please the Russian autocrat. There are Trump’s threats to abandon NATO, his humiliation of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky during a February 2025 meeting inside the Oval Office, and most recently Trump’s demand that Ukraine cease its drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, his call for Zelensky’s ouster, and envoy Steve Witkoff thanking Putin for being a “humanitarian.”

Putin has proposed a summit between himself, Trump, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. It’s notable that Ukraine has not been invited. This is also what happened in Munich nine decades ago, when Czech delegates were excluded from the room, and others decided Czechoslovakia’s fate.

Last October, aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters the Donbas region should be “cut up,” leaving most of it in Russian hands.

“Let it be cut the way it is,” he said. “They can negotiate something later on down the line.”

It seems the fate Trump envisions for Ukraine is similar to the one Hitler envisioned for Czechoslovakia. It would be naïve to think that Putin’s expansionist ambitions would stop there.

The post As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich appeared first on The Forward.

Continue Reading

Copyright © 2017 - 2023 Jewish Post & News