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Jewish caricature in Ukrainian Christmas tradition resurfaces at New Jersey church, drawing criticism
(JTA) — It had all the trappings of a conventional Christmas pageant: the three wise men, Christmas carols, and children dressed as angels.
But there was a twist: This pageant, performed on Sunday in New Jersey, also included a Hasidic Jewish caricature, carrying a sack of coins and dancing with the devil.
Earlocks swaying, the character called Moshko entered the room to the tune of “Hava Nagila,” offered a greeting in mock Yiddish, and announced that he was selling liquor, in a brazen effort to distract the Christians from reverence about the birth of Jesus.
The pageant that took place at St. Mary Protectress Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Clifton, New Jersey, is known as a vertep — a form of theater prominent in Slavic Christmas celebrations. Caricatures of Jewish figures that promote stereotypes about Jews and greed are a longstanding and frequent feature.
Especially as Ukraine has sought to shed any association with antisemitism amid its ongoing conflict with Russia, calls to remove the vertep’s antisemitic components have gained traction. In recent years, some have replaced Jews with Russians as the villainous characters.
But some communities have continued to embrace the Jewish caricature — leading Lev Golinkin, a Jewish author born in Ukraine who has written about antisemitism there, recently to call out the importation of antisemitic stereotypes from the old country to Ukrainian diaspora communities, usually under the auspices of the Catholic church.
Golinkin said in an interview that seeing the Clifton pageant on Facebook, where the church posted a video, was a “jarring” reminder of antisemitism he experienced as a child.
“It feels like a betrayal,” Golinkin said. “America should be where things are left behind and there are new starts — and there you have this show, this pageant that it seems like it’s a new generation of mockery, teaching kids to mock.”
The Anti-Defamation League condemned the pageant’s contents after learning about it from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“There is no place for antisemitic stereotypes in any religious celebration,” Scott Richman, the regional director of ADL New York and New Jersey, said in a statement. “At a time when antisemitism is surging to alarming levels, continuing harmful stereotypes — even in the context of traditional religious customs — undermines the efforts built to understand and maintain safety for Jewish communities.”
Richman said his office was reaching out to “local leaders to discuss the harm these portrayals cause” but said he had not yet been in touch with St. Mary Protectress, a small church in a suburb with a growing Orthodox Jewish population.
“We hope future celebrations will focus on the joy of the holiday season and the shared values that bring us together, rather than reviving centuries-old stereotypes that have no place in today’s society,” Richman said.
St. Mary Protectress, which had invited members to the pageant by saying on Facebook that it would “take us back to our childhood Christmas,” did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did two organizations serving Ukrainians in the United States, the Ukrainian Institute of America and the Ukrainian American Cultural Center of New Jersey.
Ukrainians have addressed the vertep’s portrayal of Jews in the past. In a 2017 interview with Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, a nonprofit aiming to build bridges between Ukrainians and Jews, the writer and art critic Diana Klochko explained that antisemitism was long baked into Ukrainian society.
“There was also a lot of it in everyday Ukrainian life, and this was fed by unacceptability, negligence, or threat,” Klochko said. “There were very many situations that constantly spilled over into what is, one way or another, a very strong antisemitic motif in Christianity itself. And it exists in the vertep, too.”
But she added, “You have to understand that this is history, and it is not mandatory to drag this from tradition, from history, into the contemporary world.”
The St. Mary Protectress pageant conformed to the patterns that make up the traditional vertep: a retelling of the Christmas story (sans a Jesus character) blended with a satirical take on Ukrainian issues of the day. After discovering that his prospective customers prefer Jesus to alcohol, the Jewish character reports to King Herod, the Roman Jewish king overseeing Jerusalem, about the threat to his power. Herod dispatches soldiers to kill Jesus.
The arc amounts to a romp through antisemitic tropes, from the charge that Jews killed Jesus to the theories that Jews are greedy, use Christian blood in their rituals and exercise inordinate power. The tropes have been used to justify centuries of violent antisemitism, including but not only by the church.
Evolved from puppet theater, the vertep includes a cast of Ukrainian folkloric characters such as the Cossack, the Pole, the Muscovite, the Lithuanian, the Roma and the Jew — referred to in the story as Moshko the “zhyd,” a derogatory term for “Jew.”
In the St. Mary vertep, Moshko introduces himself as a “zhyd,” and Sarah introduces herself as a “zhydivka.”
Though the word was once an acceptable word for “Jew” in Ukrainian, it is widely considered a slur today. Still, it remains contested in Ukraine: In 2012, a member of an antisemitic political party in the Ukrainian government referred to Ukrainian-American actress Mila Kunis as a “zhydovka” on a Facebook post, causing immediate backlash from the Jewish community. The country’s justice ministry ruled that the use of the word was acceptable because it appears in the official Ukrainian dictionary.
Hearing the slur being used in his own state felt especially distressing to Golinkin.
“‘Zhyd out’ was ‘kike out’ — just a slogan in my childhood. I saw it written in alleyways, and in bathroom stalls, and it was a call to cleanse Ukraine. When things go bad and things fall apart, the solution is ‘Jew out,’” Golinkin said, adding, “We left everything in Ukraine to have a life in which you don’t hear ‘Jew, out.’”
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Golinkin wrote about how his sense of identity as a Ukrainian was deepening. The pageant in Clifton, he said, would not erase all that is positive about Ukrainian culture.
“Choosing this filth is just a shameful thing to do,” Golinkin said. “It doesn’t do justice to Ukraine which has so much more than this.”
The post Jewish caricature in Ukrainian Christmas tradition resurfaces at New Jersey church, drawing criticism appeared first on The Forward.
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Congressional Hopeful Michael Blake Seeks to Erase AIPAC Support, Misleads on Past Trips to Israel
Former New York State Assemblyman Michael Blake is running for US Congress in the Democratic primary in New York’s 15th Congressional District. Photo: Screenshot
Michael Blake, a progressive Democrat running for US Congress in New York City, appeared to have recently made misleading statements about the nature of his previous trips to Israel and relationship with AIPAC, the country’s foremost pro-Israel lobbying group.
In Instagram comments, Blake characterized one of his visits to Israel as being done in his capacity as a reverend. Blake visited Israel in 2014 with the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and in 2017 with the AIPAC-affiliated American Israel Education Foundation.
“I attended a trip and spoke at previous events about my faith as an ordained reverend and about the Black & Jewish relationship but haven’t been involved in years,” he posted when asked to clarify his ties to AIPAC, which seeks to foster bipartisan support for the US-Israel alliance.
Blake, a former New York state assemblyman, is running an insurgent left-wing campaign to unseat incumbent US Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres, a staunch supporter of Israel, in the state’s 15th congressional district.
Regarding previous support from AIPAC, Blake said, “Donations would have been minimal in the past.”
Social media screenshot
However, Blake’s social media comments contradict previous documentation about the nature of his trip to Israel and relationship with AIPAC. Although Blake asserted that he visited Israel with an AIPAC-linked group as a reverend, reports indicate that he attended AIPAC events through 2019 and only became ordained as a reverend following his 2020 Democratic primary defeat to Torres.
“The Bronx Democrat then gave up his Assembly seat to fall to Ritchie Torres in a 2020 congressional race. Since then, he’s run his public affairs firm, backed Maya Wiley’s 2021 run for mayor, and got ordained as a reverend,” Politico reported in 2024 in an article on Blake considering a bid at the time for New York City mayor.
Contrary to Blake’s assertions that he only participated with AIPAC as a reverend, the politician participated in multiple AIPAC events, including its annual policy conference in 2017 while serving as vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Skeptics have suggested that Blake invoked religion to minimize progressive blowback over his connections to AIPAC.
Last year, the New York Post first reported that Blake deleted several past social media posts touting his attendance at AIPAC events.
Since announcing his campaign to unseat Torres, Blake has lurched farther left on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an apparent attempt to court progressive voters. Blake has issued blistering statements condemning Israel of committing a so-called “genocide” in Gaza and vowed to vote against any military aid to the Jewish state.
“I am ready to fight for you and lower your cost of living while Ritchie fights for a Genocide. I will focus on Affordable Housing and Books as Ritchie will only focus on AIPAC and Bibi,” Blake posted on X in a statement last year announcing his candidacy, referencing Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In May 2025, however, during his failed campaign for mayor, Blake walked back his accusations of “genocide” against Israel, claiming that he regretted using the term to characterize the war in Gaza.
“It was wrong language to use,” Blake said, referencing his October 2023 post which accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. He apparently again reversed his stance when launching his congressional bid in New York’s 15th district.
Despite his efforts, Blake’s previous trips to Israel and history of praising the Jewish state have elicited skepticism among left-wing voters in New York City. Progressive critics have pointed to his 2017 speech at the annual AIPAC conference in which he lavished praise on Israel. In 2020, while speaking with Jewish Insider, he compared his experience as an African American to the struggles of Jewish people in Israel.
As the relationship between the Democratic Party and Israel continues to deteriorate following the breakout of the Israel-Hamas war, liberal politicians have continued to recalibrate their approach to Middle Eastern geopolitics. Many ambitious Democratic candidates have staked out positions on Israel more aligned with the far-left, progressive flank of the party, accusing the Jewish state of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” while vowing to oppose any arms sales to Jerusalem.
Despite his aggressive overtures to progressives, Blake’s campaign to unseat Torres still remains a longshot. The 15th district encompasses Riverdale, a heavily Jewish and affluent community and hub of pro-Israel activism. Polling suggests that Torres maintains heavy levels of support in his district, placing him among the most popular politicians in the state of New York.
Blake’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
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National support group for interfaith Jewish families guts staff amid funding crisis
(JTA) — A national nonprofit that supports interfaith Jewish families has slashed its workforce after facing an unanticipated budget shortfall.
18Doors announced on March 31 that it had “significantly” reduced its staff due to budget constraints. In fact, about two-thirds of the staff were laid off the week before the announcement, board member Laurie Beijen told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The nonprofit had 15 staff members last August, according to an archived version of its website. This week, it lists four employees, nearly all in the C-suite.
CEO Mike Wise has stepped down, and 18Doors is now being led by Ellen Frank, the chief operating officer, and Adam Pollack, the chief program officer, the organization said.
Among those no longer at 18Doors are employees responsible for fundraising, creating digital content about interfaith inclusion and running a referral service to connect interfaith families and clergy. That service, which the organization says reached 2,000 families a year, remains operational, Beijen said, but “to a lesser degree.”
She said the budget crunch was complex and had come as a surprise. She cited in particular the squeeze felt by nonprofits like 18Doors in recent years as foundations and donors shifted their giving priorities toward Israel and fighting antisemitism.
“We were kind of caught off guard by the severity of our funding issues,” Beijen said. “It’s a myriad of causes that are sort of short, medium and long term, and we ended up just getting caught in this storm.”
Jodi Bromberg stepped down as CEO in 2024 after helming the organization for a decade, including during its 2020 rebrand from InterfaithFamily. The organization hired a search firm to find her replacement and a consulting firm to help draw up a strategic plan, which Beijen said it had been “on the cusp” of announcing before instead sharply contracting.
A delayed annual gift also scrambled budget planning, Beijen said, with a gap of just a few months sending the organization into a financial crisis. 18Doors declined to identify the donor or the size of the gift.
The nonprofit has raised $2 to 3 million a year in recent years and spent all of that or more, according to its filings with the IRS. Its significant donors have included the Marcus Foundation and Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Jewish federation in Boston, where 18Doors is based. The Marcus Foundation and CJP did not respond to requests for comment.
In a statement emailed to the 18Doors community and posted on social media last week, the nonprofit wrote, “The Board has since secured necessary funding to stabilize the organization in the short term.”
Jewish philanthropic giving has changed since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, with many donors choosing to focus on pro-Israel giving and causes that address antisemitism.
In December, the Shabbat dinner nonprofit OneTable laid off a quarter of its staff, citing donors’ funding priorities. The group is adapting its programming to include more Israel content.
At the recent Jewish Funders Network international conference, speakers, funders and philanthropy executives put a heavy emphasis on giving toward Israel and antisemitism-related issues, according to video and recaps of the conference.
Activists and educators in other areas say that while Israel and antisemitism are important issues, other causes are being left behind.
Founded in 2001, 18Doors says its mission is to encourage mixed-heritage families to engage in Jewish life, while encouraging Jewish communities and clergy to become more welcoming and inclusive.
18Doors’ vision of inclusion for interfaith families has grown closer to reality in the decades since its launch. In 2001, a Pew survey found that half of Jews who married in the previous 10 years had married non-Jews. Two decades later, in 2021, it found that the rate for marriages in the last decade had risen to 61%. Most children of the couples were being raised Jewish, the survey found, with participation in synagogue life and Jewish institutions common.
Two major seminaries recently began admitting students who are in relationships with people who are not Jewish, saying that they wanted to ordain rabbis who match the communities they serve. And in December, while continuing to prohibit intermarriages performed by its rabbis, leaders of the Conservative Movement formally apologized for decades of discouraging intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews and vowed to create new opportunities for inclusion in Conservative synagogues.
But advocates for interfaith families say much more needs to be done.
“The idea that being warm and welcoming is sufficient is false. There’s much more to learn and to do,” said Keren McGinity, an interfaith educator and scholar. “18Doors is important because they are part of the work that gets done, including training clergy.”
McGinity has her own experience with layoffs in the interfaith inclusion space. She was the interfaith specialist at the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism before her position was eliminated last year.
She said she is optimistic that 18Doors’ financial crunch will be temporary — but she said she believed the Jewish philanthropic landscape needs to change nonetheless.
“What concerns me is that there should be more funding channeled towards engaging interfaith couples and families,” McGinity said.
Though no other institution has quite the national reach that 18Doors has, other organizations addressing some aspects of interfaith family life include the children’s Jewish literacy program PJ Library; Embark at Mem Global, a program for interfaith and mixed-heritage couples in their 20s and 30s; and Honeymoon Israel, which provides trips to Israel for “young couples of all backgrounds.”
Beijen said 18Doors is aiming to preserve its flagship 18-month clergy program, the Rukin Rabbinic Fellowship, which provides training for spiritual leaders who work with interfaith families.
Bromberg, the group’s former CEO, says 18Doors serves families like hers: Her wife is Catholic and they have children together. Now a consultant helping other nonprofits, she said the cuts at 18Doors signify both a crushing loss and a pressing question.
“These are long time, long-tenured staff. The Jewish community as a whole will lose the institutional knowledge and the relationships that it’s had through 18Doors, through the laying off of those staff,” she said.
Bromberg added, “The question it leaves in the minds of families like mine is: Whose priority are mixed-heritage and interfaith families in Jewish life?”
The post National support group for interfaith Jewish families guts staff amid funding crisis appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish groups condemn Trump’s threat that a ‘whole civilization will die’ in Iran
(JTA) — Jewish groups were among those criticizing President Donald Trump and accusing him of using genocidal rhetoric on Tuesday after Trump posted online that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” wrote Trump in a post on Truth Social. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?”
The president’s comments came hours before his 8 p.m. deadline for Iran on Tuesday to reach a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and were met by swift condemnation by a group of Senate Democrats, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“We speak today with one voice and one purpose: to condemn President Trump’s threat to extinguish an entire civilization,” Schumer wrote in a joint statement. “This is not strength. Intentionally destroying the power, water or basic infrastructure upon which tens of millions of civilians depend to punish the very civilians who suffer at the hands of the Iranian regime would constitute a war crime, a betrayal of the values this nation was founded on and a moral failure.”
Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, condemned the president’s remarks, saying in a statement that there were “simply no words to describe the danger of a U.S. president openly threatening to erase an entire civilization.” She alluded to Jews’ history of facing genocidal leaders in her comments.
“Make no mistake: the president’s threats are deeply reprehensible to us as Jews and as Americans, and must be condemned by all leaders – regardless of their stance on the war with Iran,” Spitalnick said. “We know what it means when leaders call for communities and populations to be wiped out.”
Spitalnick was not the only Jewish leader to weigh in. Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street, said in a statement that the group was “appalled by President Trump’s heinous remarks.”
“This language – a threat to carry out war crimes – is a searing violation of Jewish and American values, certainly will not lead to the de-escalation we desperately need and is a terrifying example of the senseless violence that has characterized Trump’s leadership,” Ben-Ami said, calling on Congress and the Cabinet to “do everything in their power to restrain and remove him.”
Other progressive Jewish groups and leaders accused Trump of promoting genocide, including Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, which wrote in a post on Instagram, “This is not strength. This is not safety. This is a call for genocide.”
Timothy Snyder, a historian of the Holocaust, also leveled the accusation against the president in a Substack post published on Tuesday titled “The president speaks genocide.”
“To bomb a bridge or a dam or a power plant or a desalinization facility, very likely a war crime in any event, could very well have a different legal significance, a genocidal one, if it takes place after the expression of genocidal intent by the commander and head of state,” Snyder wrote.
For some Jews, the president’s looming deadline for Iran carried added significance as it came during the final days of Passover — and as Iran continued to barrage Israel with missiles.
“Tonight, I pray that the Pharaohs who insist on our demise recognize the harm that they may bring on themselves,” Rabbi Arie Hasit, associate dean of the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary in Israel, wrote on Facebook. “That they recognize that Iran can put aside its insistence that Israel must be destroyed and that they can make the necessary steps to end this war.”
“And I pray that if they are overcome by Pharaoh, that no leader try to play the part of God,” Hasit continued. “That in the name of my future, we do not wipe out any civilization. That we understand that even the worst of enemies does not justify the use of the fiercest of our power.”
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