Uncategorized
‘Jewish life goes on’: Djerba Jews and their supporters show resilience after deadly attack
(JTA) — The day after a gunman killed four people outside an ancient place of Jewish worship on the Tunisian island of Djerba, men gathered in the same synagogue not to mourn, but to celebrate.
They were there to witness the blessing of a new life: a brit milah, or ritual circumcision. Not long after, a recording of the ceremony, complete with the men chanting in Hebrew as they surrounded the eight-day-old baby, made its way to the phone of Isaac Choua, a Sephardic rabbi living in New York.
For Choua, watching the ceremony was a relief from the horrors that had emerged the day before, when a rogue security official at the Tunisian synagogue killed two Jewish cousins, Aviel Haddad, 30, and Benjamin Haddad, 43, as well as two security guards before being gunned down.
“Something beautiful happened,” said Choua, the Middle East and North Africa communities liaison for the World Jewish Congress, in an interview. “They had a brit milah in Djerba, even with all the chaos. Jewish life goes on.”
Tuesday’s deadly shooting came during the Hiloula, an annual pilgrimage and celebration of Jewish sages held on or around Lag b’Omer, which takes place a little more than a month after the beginning of Passover. The annual festivity attracts thousands of Jews from around the world, many of Tunisian descent. It is held at the El Ghriba synagogue — a 19th-century building constructed on a site believed to have been a Jewish house of worship for as long as 2,500 years.
The pilgrimage has grown substantially in recent years, after trepidation following an attack on the synagogue by Al-Qaeda in 2002 that killed 20 people, and a suspension of the pilgrimage in 2011 amid security concerns in the wake of the Arab Spring, which began in Tunisia.
The Tunisian government has invested in the pilgrimage, billing it as a symbol of the country’s tolerance, and has provided intense security. Last year, Tunisia was one of six African countries that signed the “Call of Rabat,” an initiative of the American Sephardi Federation that sought a commitment to preserving Jewish heritage on the continent.
Jason Guberman, the executive director of the American Sephardi Federation, said the numbers that the Hiloula attracts today have not yet reached the 10,000 or so who attended before the 2002 attack. The Arab Spring and COVID-19 pandemic, he said, “have also deterred pilgrims in the past decade.” He estimated that fewer than 5,000 people attend annually now.
Additionally, Tunisia’s authoritarian president Kais Saied remains unfriendly to Israel and has rebuffed efforts by successive American administrations to join the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries.
Djerba, nonetheless, remains an oasis of coexistence, said Yaniv Salama, the CEO of the Salamanca Foundation, which seeks to reinvigorate Jewish communities in Muslim lands.
”You have to understand something about Djerba,” Salama said. “The community there has very, very deep ties with the local municipalities. Everything is done in conjunction — there are joint [security] watches” between the Jewish and larger communities, “and joint communication between the Jewish community leaders and the local police.”
Jason Isaacson, the American Jewish Committee’s chief policy and political affairs officer, who has frequently visited Djerba, said it was significant that two Tunisian security officials died protecting the Jewish community.
“It’s obviously now going to be a source of shame for the country that this happened, within its own military forces, but this happens within military forces” everywhere, he said. “The fact that the country deploys a huge protective cordon around the synagogue and around the festivities and around the worshipers who come, to assure that it all goes off smoothly and proper in a celebratory spirit, is significant.”
Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank whose expertise is Islamist extremism in Tunisia, said the attack appeared to be an outlier, unlike the carefully planned 2002 attack.
“It wasn’t really a sophisticated attack,” Zelin said. “So it’s plausible it could have just been one person that just decided to do something on their own accord, and there wasn’t some broader plot or planning in the same way.”
Choua said the Tunisian Jewish Diaspora would not be deterred. “Jewish Tunisians are still going to either visit family [or] visit this pilgrimage site,” he said. “Jews are resilient.”
Djerba has the attention of the world, at least for the moment. The day before the attack Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. envoy monitoring antisemitism, alongside U.S. ambassador to Tunisia Joey Hood, joined Tunisian officials in a ceremony launching the Hiloula.
“I am sickened and heartbroken by the lethal, antisemitic attack targeting the Ghriba synagogue in Djerba during the Lag B’Omer celebrations, with thousands of Jewish pilgrims in attendance,” Lipstadt said on Twitter.
That may be the silver lining, the World Jewish Congress’s Choua said: The predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish Diaspora tends to forget the communities that persist outside the Western world.
“The Jewish world is noticing that there’s still Jews in the Middle East and North Africa,” he said. “This might even spark more tourism in the country itself.”
Salama said he did not expect the community of about 1,400 people, which includes a number of institutes of religious learning, to be broken following the attack.
“They’re all they’ll do their grieving and they’ll continue, they’ll push forward,” he said. “They really have got a stiff upper lip.”
Robert Ejnes, the executive director of CRIF, the umbrella body for French Jewry, said the French Jewish community is close to the Tunisian Jewish community because France colonized the country beginning in the 1800s, and because the community speaks French. He said that the Hiloula attracts French Jews of all ethnic origins.
“It’s really affecting the whole of the community of France because on the Hiloula, there are a lot of people going [from] the French Jewish community of all origins,” he said.
Ejnes found it notable that even after the attack, French Jews who attended the Hiloula posted photos of the festivities on social media. He said he expected the same number of people to attend next year’s Hiloula.
“People will be resilient,” he said. “They posted pictures of them[selves] at the Ghriba, saying, ‘We’ll be back.’”
—
The post ‘Jewish life goes on’: Djerba Jews and their supporters show resilience after deadly attack appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Defining the Goals of the Iran War
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth holds a briefing with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, amid the US-Israeli war on Iran, at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, US, March 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Evan Vucci
Going after the unacceptable threat Iran posed to American, Israeli, Gulf Arab States, European, and Asian military and political interests — and understanding the destructive hand of China behind the mullahs — was not a mistake. It was recognition of the stakes for the civilized world.
But the US and Israel, indispensable allies at many levels, have to take account of their differences in threat level and capabilities, and forge a political as well as military path together.
Two points to make in wartime:
First — achievable goals are essential to ending a war. Corollary 1: It is easier to start a war than end one Corollary 2: Every war must end
Second — there are things you don’t know and won’t know (although in some cases, people knew, but people weren’t listening.
President Donald Trump said in his State of the Union address: “They [the Iranians] have already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.”
He was right, but dismissed with a collective snicker.
My husband, security analyst Dr. Stephen Bryen, ran the statement through Google Gemini and found disparaging references to the President in The Washington Post, The Guardian, American Progress, PBS NewsHour, PolitiFact, The New York Times and CNN, among others.
He found “experts” who told us that the range of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal was about 2,000 km, which made Israel and the Gulf States potential targets, but allowed the Europeans to claim immunity. In 2025, a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment posited that Iran was “years away” from possessing a viable ICBM.
They were wrong.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told NBC News in February, “We are not developing long-range missiles … we have limited the range below 2,000 kilometers.”
He lied.
Trump was right. The range is closer to 4,000 km, technically putting Paris in range (about 4,200 km from Tehran).
[Aside: Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) said in a TV interview that Iran had enough uranium to make nuclear bombs, but there was no reason to do anything about it because Iran’s missiles couldn’t yet reach the US. Is he still sure?]
The unwillingness to see and understand threats is, in some ways, an admirable attempt to avoid war. War is terrible. No one wants war. War may kill the enemy, and surely it will also kill innocents. But the decades-old idea that one could negotiate with terrorists is a huge failing in the Western world.
The Oslo Accords were not peace. Temporary deals with Lebanon are not peace. Multiple Gaza ceasefires were not peace. Operations Rising Lion and Midnight Hammer were not peace. The return of the Israeli hostages was not peace.
Israel collected intelligence and built an extraordinary military force in cooperation with the United States, while the US built Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPS). But it also assumed that giving the people of Gaza a decent life, including work permits in Israel, would keep things calm.
It worked at some level until October 7, 2023.
After that, Israel’s determination to defend its citizens forced a reckoning. It would no longer ignore Iran. President Trump agreed. Last summer’s attack on Iranian assets was a masterpiece of coordination and cooperation.
But it wasn’t enough.
The attacks launched this year were designed not only to eliminate Iran’s weapons and weapons-producing capability, but to put in place a new strategic pattern for behavior.
Much of the Arab world has come to his thinking. UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and even Qatar, seeing that they are targets for Iran, not allies, have stepped up. Azerbaijan, too. Syria is silent and Lebanon is trying to figure out how to get rid of Hezbollah. In Europe, the Czech Republic and Estonia defied the EU resolution on the war.
In the past few days, Japan and several European countries appear to have awakened to the fact that their future, their security, and their people are on the firing line.
The late Fred Iklé, a defense strategist and official in the Reagan administration, wrote a book entitled Every War Must End. He was writing primarily, but not only, about American wars. For Iklé, who passed away in 2011, the essential lesson was that it is much easier to start a war than to successfully conclude one. Having achievable aims — both military and political — and stopping when they have been met — is the key to success.
The alternative is to slog along with grinding casualties until the conflict peters out ignominiously when public opinion no longer supports the effort. The French, he pointed out, were the military victors in Algeria — as were the Americans in Vietnam — but in both cases, the Western power withdrew without a political victory, and public disillusionment hampered the government at home and abroad for years after.
The Russians left Afghanistan when it produced unacceptable grumbling at home. More recently, the US left Afghanistan and northern Syria.
In none of those cases was the war over; in each case, people continued to die on the ground when we went home.
But Israel is home. Israel needs victory to ensure peace — how you define that between allies is precisely the point. And America and Israel must find a definition of victory that works for each.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly magazine.
Uncategorized
When a Jewish Landmark Disappears, So Does Jewish Presence
The Contemporary Jewish Museum. Photo: screenshot.
Another major Jewish institution has collapsed – and the implications reach far beyond San Francisco.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) has closed and is selling its building. What was once a bold, architecturally striking institution in the heart of downtown will soon be something else entirely. Another civic space repurposed. Another cultural anchor lost.
I loved seeing that building. Designed by Daniel Libeskind, it was bold, unmistakable, and confident – right off Yerba Buena Gardens in the heart of the city. It stood prominently, not tucked away or obscured, but fully visible. It sent a simple but powerful message: Jewish life belongs in the civic fabric. For me, it was a symbol of pride.
And now it is gone.
The explanations offered are familiar. Attendance declined by roughly 50 percent from 2019 to 2023–2024. Revenue fell. In the fiscal year ending June 2024, expenses outpaced revenue by more than $5.9 million. Leadership acknowledged that the building itself had become “beyond our capacity” to maintain.
All of that may be true. But it is not sufficient.
Institutions do not simply collapse because conditions change. They collapse because they fail to respond to changing conditions with clarity, discipline, and purpose. And when a flagship Jewish cultural institution disappears in one of the wealthiest and most philanthropic regions in the country, it is worth asking not only what happened, but what it says about us.
At one level, this is a story of institutional failure. The museum expanded into a large and expensive footprint – a 63,000-square-foot facility completed in 2008 at a cost of $47 million in a city already becoming more difficult to sustain. It relied on a fragile mix of philanthropy and foot traffic in a downtown that was hollowing out even before COVID accelerated the trend. The museum was still carrying roughly $27 million in outstanding construction debt. When those pressures intensified, there appears to have been no clear plan to right-size the institution, refocus its mission, or rethink its role in a changing cultural landscape.
Instead, the result was a slow drift toward insolvency – followed by closure.
But the deeper problem is not simply managerial. It is cultural. And it was visible in the year before the closure, when the museum found itself caught in an episode that illustrated just how far it had drifted from its core identity.
In spring 2024, the museum mounted its first major open-call exhibition of California Jewish artists. Seven of the accepted artists withdrew their work in a coordinated protest, demanding that the museum commit to BDS – the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel – and divest from all funding associated with the Jewish state. The museum rejected those demands. But rather than confidently reaffirming its identity as a Jewish cultural institution, it hesitated publicly, left blank spaces on its walls where the withdrawn works would have hung, and framed the episode as a “complicated moment.” It was a moment that revealed an institution uncertain of what it stood for.
Too many institutions in recent years have confused relevance with purpose. In an effort to remain current, they have chased trends, embraced fashionable programming, and diluted the very identity that made them distinctive. In doing so, they have weakened the case for their own existence – both to the public and to their donors.
Jewish institutions are not immune to this drift. When they lose clarity about who they are and what they are meant to do, they risk becoming interchangeable with any number of other cultural organizations. And interchangeable institutions are far easier to abandon.
The museum’s collapse also raises uncomfortable questions about the direction of Jewish giving. The Jewish Federation Bay Area manages more than $2 billion in assets and provided millions in grants in fiscal year 2023 alone. The Bay Area is home to some of the most generous Jewish philanthropists in America. If a flagship institution like this cannot be sustained in that environment, the problem is not a lack of resources. It is a question of priorities.
Much contemporary giving is directed toward causes, programs, and initiatives – often important ones. But less attention is paid to sustaining the shared institutions that give Jewish life visibility, continuity, and public meaning. Museums, cultural centers, and communal spaces do not always produce immediate or measurable outcomes. But they create something more enduring: a sense of presence.
The board chair told reporters that the building “does not define the museum.” And perhaps he is right, technically. The executive director expressed optimism about a smaller, reimagined future. That deserves acknowledgment. But what has been lost in the interim – the physical presence, the civic statement, the visibility – cannot simply be reimagined back into existence. Presence is not just programmatic. It is architectural. It is spatial. It is the fact of a building that stands in the middle of a great city and says: we are here.
Places like the Contemporary Jewish Museum did something rare. They connected past and present, insiders and outsiders, tradition and creativity. They offered a space where Jewish life could be explored without precondition – neither purely religious nor purely academic, but deeply cultural and civic at once. They were not simply museums. They were part of the infrastructure of Jewish public life.
The disappearance of such institutions is especially troubling given what is happening in the broader culture. The ADL recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, the highest level since tracking began in 1979 – a staggering 893 percent increase over the past decade. The FBI simultaneously recorded the highest number of anti-Jewish hate crimes since it began reporting data in 1991. A majority of American Jewish college students report feeling uncomfortable or unsafe on campus because they are Jewish.
At a moment like this, the disappearance of visible Jewish institutions sends precisely the wrong signal. It suggests contraction when presence is needed. It risks normalizing a quieter, less visible Jewish public life.
It is also worth noting that the CJM’s collapse is part of a wider pattern in San Francisco’s struggling cultural sector – the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, California College of the Arts, and the nearby Mexican Museum have all faced severe financial distress in recent years. This context matters. The CJM did not fail in a vacuum. But it is not exculpatory, either. What distinguishes the institutions that endure is usually not better luck. It is clearer purpose and stronger accountability.
When an institution like this collapses in a wealthy and engaged community, it is rarely because no one cared. It is because no one felt ultimately responsible for ensuring that it endured. Not the board. Not the donors. Not the broader community.
Everyone assumes someone else will step in. And no one does.
That is the accountability failure. And it is correctable – if the community chooses to correct it.
The sale of the Contemporary Jewish Museum should not be treated as a local story or an isolated failure. It is a signal, one that should prompt concrete action.
Jewish philanthropists and federations should dedicate a meaningful portion of their giving specifically to sustaining cultural institutions – not just causes and programs, but the physical and civic infrastructure of Jewish life. Boards of Jewish institutions should be held to explicit accountability for institutional survival, not just programmatic innovation. And Jewish communities in every major city should ask, right now, whether their flagship cultural institutions are financially sound – and what they would do if they were not.
If the CJM survives in some smaller, reimagined form, that would be welcome. But the larger lesson stands regardless: Jewish presence in American public life is not self-sustaining. It requires deliberate investment, disciplined governance, and a community willing to prioritize endurance over the fashions of the moment.
Some institutions are easy to replace. Others are not.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum was more than a museum. It was a statement.
And its disappearance should force us to ask whether we are still willing to make such statements – or whether, slowly and quietly, we are allowing them to disappear.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Uncategorized
Palestinian Authority: Mossad Behind Iranian Attacks on Gulf States
Smoke rises after reported Iranian missile attacks, following United States and Israel strikes on Iran, as seen from Doha, Qatar, March 1, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Salem
No matter how clear it is who is to blame for a problem, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is always ready to blame Israel for any disaster, death, or disagreement.
As a Palestinian Authority (PA) TV preacher once taught: “If a fish in the sea fights with another fish, I am sure the Jews are behind it.”
When Iranian missiles hit Gulf states or fall on Turkey, Oman, and Kuwait, the situation is no different.
Obviously, Israel must be guilty, and an Israeli Arab journalist found the perfect frame for the blame: Those missiles were “coordinated” by the Mossad and the US:
Israeli Arab journalist Suheil Diab:“So far, in at least three proven cases, it has become clear that several [Iranian] missile attacks on Turkey and Oman, as well as some of the missiles that were launched towards Kuwait, were coordinated with the Israeli Mossad with the knowledge of the US to create tension and conflict between the Iranians and the Gulf states.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, March 16, 2026]
Similarly, a regular columnist writing for the official PA daily claimed Iran and Israel have “overlapping goals” to “weaken the Arab states.”:
… the overlapping goals that Israel and Iran seek to achieve through this war will not materialize. Both are interested in weakening the Arab states, casting doubt on their ability to maintain their sovereignty, and harming the strategic Arab depth components of the Palestinian people and of the central cause of the Arab nation: the cause of Palestine. [emphasis added]
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, March 15, 2026]
In the beginning of the current war, Palestinian Media Watch reported on the PA’s sole concern for the “Palestinian cause.”
The PA daily columnist accused Netanyahu of seeking to unify and make alliances with the very Arab states he is supposedly seeking to weaken.
Netanyahu was said to need them in his war against Iran, and by mobilizing them he would be able to erase the “pan-Arab national struggle” against “the international Zionist colonialist project,” and expand into “Greater Israel… between the Nile River and the Euphrates River”:
At the same time, he [Netanyahu] will exploit the hostility and desire for revenge … to achieve his goal: to make the Arab states that are in [Iran’s] sights (the Arab Gulf states) [parentheses in source] be in one united front with Israel against Iran, meaning to erase the truth and trends in the Arab-Zionist conflict, as a Palestinian and pan-Arab national struggle against an existential threat, which is embodied by the international Zionist colonialist project.
[This threat] unabashedly expresses the policy of the state of occupation and settlement colonialism (Israel) [parentheses in source], which still believes that the borders of Greater Israel are between the Nile River and the Euphrates River.
The columnist conveniently tied his imagined alliance between Israel and Iran to another libel that is part of the PA’s regular arsenal of libels and has been exposed by Palestinian Media Watch, and has also been repeated heavily by the PA during the current war. According to the libel, Israel is using the war to realize its “plot” to conquer the surrounding Arab states — Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia — and create “Greater Israel.”
A PLO official likewise lashed out and accused the US of wanting to “subjugate Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Turkey,” while using Israel as the region’s “bad cop”:
Palestinian National Council Committee for Foreign and Parliamentary Affairs member Fawzi Al-Samhouri: “The second goal of the American plan after taking control of Iran’s oil resources is to continue afterwards to Pakistan …
They also want to subjugate the region by integrating Israel into the heart of the Arab homeland to impose it as the bad cop in the region. At the same time, the US is now subjugating this region – the region of the Arab homeland and the large Islamic states surrounding it such as Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Turkey. Turkey, despite it being a NATO member, is also part of the American plan.
The US wants first to weaken Hezbollah and then also to fully control Turkey due to its geographical location.” [emphasis added]
[Fatah-run Awdah TV, Facebook page, March 16, 2026]
The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this story first appeared.