“When I do feel that I’m right, I’m not much bothered by criticism,” she added. “Who has ever stood up against injustice without being criticized? If that’s all I have to endure, then it’s very little.”
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Jewish community groups host Afghan, Ukrainian evacuees for Thanksgiving meals
(JTA) — Four and a half feet of snow had just fallen on East Aurora, New York, but Kim Kaiser and her fellow volunteers through Jewish Family Services of Western New York weren’t willing to compromise on their Thanksgiving plans.
Those plans involved joining a community Thanksgiving feast on Tuesday night, two days before the holiday, at the Ukrainian American Civic Center in nearby Buffalo, along with the Ukrainian family of six that the volunteers had been supporting since their arrival to the United States at the end of the summer.
The event, which was sponsored by the Buffalo branch of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, was open to all new Ukrainian arrivals, their sponsors and their supporters. A buffet of traditional Thanksgiving foods was on offer, along with musical accompaniment by a Ukrainian singer and pianist.
For Kaiser, the evening was a can’t-miss milestone in her journey supporting recent immigrants who have come to the United States under duress. Last year, she began volunteering through Jewish Family Services to set up housing for Afghan, Congolese and Burmese refugees new to Buffalo, which has a very large refugee population.
“And then I heard of a family in our town that was going to be sponsoring a family from Ukraine,” Kaiser told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “My husband and I knew that we needed, that we wanted to do this.”
In joining the efforts to support refugees, Kaiser participated in an age-old Jewish tradition. The importance of welcoming strangers is so deeply rooted in Jewish tradition and experience that immigration issues have long enjoyed a bipartisan consensus in American Jewish communities even amid deep polarization on other topics. Many cities have social services agencies that began to support Jewish immigrants and now work with new arrivals of all backgrounds, often conscripting Jewish volunteers as the backbone of their work.
Over the last year, those networks have kicked into high gear as not just one but two significant waves of people unable to remain safely in their homes made their way to American shores: first Afghans last year after the U.S. military withdrawal from their country and then Ukrainians this year amid the war instigated by Russia there.
Now, as millions of Americans prepare for their Thanksgiving meals, Jewish volunteers are introducing Ukrainian and Afghan evacuees to Thanksgiving for the first time. Some are even setting aside their own reservations about the holiday to do so. (Thanksgiving’s cheery origin myth is seen by many as whitewashing the genocide of Native Americans that followed the arrival of Europeans in North America.)
In California, Gail Dratch and her husband Elliot have been volunteering through the Orange County Jewish Coalition for Refugees. They will celebrate the holiday on Thursday by inviting a family from Afghanistan into their home, where they’ll serve a halal turkey — in keeping with their Muslim guests’ religious requirements.
“For us, Thanksgiving has become just such a part of what we do,” Dratch told JTA. “And I know my family at least, we don’t think about the beginnings of Thanksgiving, which are really troubling. My daughters especially are very troubled by the original story. But clearly, this family is so thankful for having this opportunity to be in the United States.”
Both Kaiser and Dratch got support for their volunteer circles from their local Jewish federations, in Buffalo and Orange County. They were two of 15 local federations to get support from Jewish Federations of North America, an umbrella group, to resettle nearly 2,000 Afghans through refugee welcome circles, according to Darcy Hirch, a spokesperson.
Gail and Elliot Dratch stand with their partners from the volunteer circle and their evacuee family from Afghanistan, whose faces have been blurred for their safety. (Courtesy of Jewish Federations of North America.)
The Dratches have done far more than cook a special dinner. The Afghan family they are working with arrived on a Special Immigrant Visa, so the father was able to obtain a driver’s license quickly and found work almost immediately. But the mother had to learn to drive from scratch.
“She cried the first time I took her to a big parking lot just to drive around Angel Stadium,” Dratch said, referring to the stadium in Anaheim where the Los Angeles Angels play. “And when she got behind the wheel, she cried because she said it’s been a dream of hers to drive but she never thought she’d be able to, living in Afghanistan.”
The couple’s son, who is in preschool, is learning English very quickly, Dratch said.
“They’re just charming, lovely people,” she said. “It was their dream to come to the United States and raise their son here because they knew he would have far more opportunities here than in Afghanistan. And so we are thankful that this family has come into our lives because they’ve been such a gift to us.”
Dratch’s experience working with displaced people began in 2016 when she went to Greece to work with Syrian refugees.
“I think in the future people are going to look back and say, ‘Why wasn’t more done?’” she said. “And I don’t want to look back and think, ‘Why didn’t I do something?’”
In Buffalo, Kaiser’s volunteer circle takes turns running errands and sharing the duties of a host family for the parents and with four children with whom they have been working since September. Though the family has only been in the United States for a few months, Kaiser said she has noticed a big difference in the children, who she says were initially downcast and shy but are now “smiles all around.”
At the meal on Tuesday, which was set up for 200 people, Kaiser says she saw evacuees mingling with each other, delighting in speaking Ukrainian without relying on Google translate to communicate with each other, and exchanging addresses and telephone numbers with where they can be reached in the Buffalo area. The kids went back to the buffet table multiple times for dessert.
Said Kaiser, “You can tell that every time you do something for them that they are thankful that there’s somebody there to help them and that they can start feeling, finally, a little bit at ease.”
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The post Jewish community groups host Afghan, Ukrainian evacuees for Thanksgiving meals appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Sally Rooney to Publish Hebrew Translation of Latest Book With Pro-BDS Israeli Publisher
Author Sally Rooney in an interview with “PBS NewsHour.” Photo: Screenshot.
Award-winning Irish author Sally Rooney will publish a Hebrew translation of her latest novel, Intermezzo, through an independent Israeli publishing house that supports the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, it was announced on Tuesday.
According to its website, November Books aims to “promote the full realization of human rights … and in particular for Palestinians living under all forms of Israeli oppression including the military occupation.” The Israeli publishing house said it is also “committed to the idea, in line with Palestinian and democratic voices in Israel, that Israel should not be a Jewish state but rather a state of all its citizens and recognize the right of return as it was accepted by the UN. We strongly oppose any form of inequality and apartheid.”
November Books will publish the Hebrew translation of Intermezzo in collaboration with +972 Magazine and Local Call, two independent Israeli news outlets. Translated by Debbie Eylon and edited by Asaf Schurr, it will be published in June “in a way that honors the principles of the boycott and stands in solidarity with the Palestinian demand for freedom, equality, and justice,” +972 Magazine executive director Haggai Matar wrote on Tuesday in an op-ed announcing the news. The novel, published in 2024, focuses on two brothers following the death of their father, and it explores themes of grief, love, and family.
In 2021, Rooney announced she would only allow her third book, Beautiful World, Where Are You, to be translated to Hebrew through a publishing house that complies with the BDS movement’s “institutional boycott guidelines” against Israel. The 35-year-old author said she does not want to partner with an Israeli company “that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.”
At the time, Rooney had already published Hebrew translations of two of her novels — 2017’s Conversations With Friends and 2018’s Normal People – with the Israeli publishing house Modan, but refused to let them translate Beautiful World, Where Are You.
BDS seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination. Leaders of the movement have repeatedly stated their goal is to destroy the world’s only Jewish state.
Rooney spoke this week to The Guardian and attempted to explain her position.
“For me, the act of translation is in itself a beautiful ideal,” she said. “Though my refusal to work with complicit Israeli publishing houses made the contractual side of things more complex, I was, of course, never boycotting the Hebrew language or any language.”
Last year, Rooney said she would give proceeds from her books and BBC adaptations of them to support Palestine Action, an anti-Israel group designated as a terrorist organization in the United Kingdom.
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For Israel, the Accusation Itself Becomes Proof
People attend the annual al-Quds Day (Jerusalem Day) rally in London, Britain, March 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jaimi Joy
A dangerous shift happens when people stop feeling responsible for verifying what they believe. The accusation itself becomes enough. Once institutions repeat something with enough confidence, many decent people hand over their judgment completely. They assume somebody else has already checked the facts.
That is where real danger begins.
A case is being built against Israel in international courts, and much of the public discussion around it already feels emotionally settled long before most people have examined a single document, testimony, or legal standard for themselves.
The International Court of Justice has no meaningful conflict-of-interest mechanism comparable to what people would expect in many domestic legal systems. UN reports and secondary claims enter public discourse carrying the weight of institutional authority, even when the underlying sources were never cross-examined or independently verified in a courtroom setting.
At a certain point, the accusation itself becomes proof.
That pattern extends far beyond a courtroom. Perception gets taken over before a person realizes his or her thinking has been outsourced. Repetition creates familiarity. Familiarity creates emotional certainty. Eventually people stop asking where the information came from in the first place.
Jewish history carries enough experience with this pattern to recognize it early. A claim repeated often enough starts feeling like an established truth even before evidence exists to support it.
Once institutions absorb the accusation, the public no longer experiences skepticism as responsibility. Skepticism starts feeling like disobedience.
Artificial intelligence is about to accelerate this problem even further. AI systems absorb dominant narratives faster than human beings can examine them critically. Once a version of events becomes widely indexed, cited, repeated, and emotionally reinforced, it enters the system as background truth. The next generation encounters conclusions first and context later.
That matters because most people do not independently investigate history, legal claims, or war. They inherit understanding socially. Search engines shape it. Institutions shape it. Algorithms shape it. Repetition shapes it.
The responsibility for your own safety begins before the threat fully arrives. Physical self-defense taught me that years ago. Cognitive self-defense follows the same principle. A society that loses the ability to question emotionally satisfying accusations becomes vulnerable to manipulation at a scale far larger than any courtroom.
People once understood that serious accusations required serious proof. Today, institutional confidence often replaces evidence in the public mind. That shift should concern anyone who still believes good intentions alone are enough to protect people from participating in injustice.
Tsahi Shemesh is an Israeli-American IDF veteran and the founder of Krav Maga Experts in NYC. A father and educator, he writes about Jewish identity, resilience, moral courage, and the ethics of strength in a time of rising antisemitism.
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Fatah Turned 388 Terrorists Into Its Leaders at Its 8th General Conference
A meeting of the Fatah Revolutionary Council at the Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar in the West Bank, July 12, 2018. Photo: Reuters / Mohamad Torokman.
The Eighth Fatah Conference continued to glorify past Palestinian terrorist murderers while building the next generation of terrorist leadership.
PA and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas decided that all prisoners who were incarcerated for more than 20 years — meaning those who were guilty of murder or attempted murder — automatically would become part of the Palestinian leadership and thus were able to participate and vote at the conference, which took place this past weekend.
The consequence of this is that a total of 388 Palestinians, who as prisoners were presented as role models, just transitioned into becoming PA leaders.
A senior Fatah youth leader described the importance: “We have a great opportunity as Fatah youth … to learn from them.”
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has shown repeatedly exactly how the PA and Fatah, as policy, portray murderers of Jews as role models for all Palestinians, and especially youth:
Official PA TV newsreader: “The prisoners [i.e., terrorists] will also have prominent representation in the [Eighth Fatah] Conference, there will be participation of more than 388 prisoners who have served more than 20 years in the occupation’s [i.e., Israeli] prisons…”
Fatah Shabiba Youth Movement Secretariat member Tasami Ramadan: “The participation of the [released] prisoners this time in this conference… is a very qualitative addition... seeing this qualitative and special addition that our released prisoners will contribute, as they are not just released prisoners and we cannot summarize them only as such.
They are also [figures] of national stature and national pillars who have outlined the characteristics of Fatah’s path, and they are also spiritual and organizational pillars. We have a great opportunity as Fatah youth … to learn from them and to be their partners in building Fatah’s political decision.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV News, May 8, 2026]
A Fatah spokesman further legitimized the participation of released terrorists in Fatah’s leadership conference as they “precede everything” and are held “in highest regard:”
Fatah Spokesman and Eighth Fatah Conference preparatory committee member Iyad Abu Zneit: “The composition of the [Eighth Fatah] Conference is diverse and rich … Of course, the released prisoners [are also represented], as they precede everything.
I will emphasize that the leadership insisted on there being broad representation for the [released] prisoners at this conference… The group of prisoners that these ones represent from among those in the Fatah Movement also constitutes a significant number [of members], a large number, who have their own role, and we hold them in the highest regard. They have the right to be partners in Fatah, in the [Fatah] Revolutionary Council, in the leadership of the [Fatah] Central Committee, and in any place they can reach.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Topic of the Day, May 6, 2026]
PMW exposed last week that among the Fatah members at the Eighth General Conference and those running for Fatah leadership positions are released prisoners responsible for the murder of 75 people while some of the most venerated figures at the conference included arch-terrorist murderers Abu Iyad, who planned the Munich Olympics massacre, and Abu Jihad, who was responsible for the murder of 125 people.
The author is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.