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
With the last hostage released, is American Jewish unity over?
When the remains of the last Israeli hostage in Gaza returned to Israel this week, Scott Spindel, a lawyer in Encino, Calif., finally took off the thick steel dog tag he had put on after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
His friend Lauren Krieger, an orthopedic surgeon, did the same. And he pulled down the last of the names of the hostages remaining in Gaza that his wife, Jenn Roth Krieger, had placed in the window of their Santa Monica home.
During the nearly 28 months that Israeli hostages remained in captivity in Gaza, Krieger, 61, and Spindel, 55, consistently argued over Israel’s war in the strip.
“Lauren would say that we probably were a little too extreme,” Spindel, whose daughter serves in the IDF, told me in a telephone interview. “I don’t think we blew up enough buildings.”
But those differences paled beside their mutual concern over the fate of the hostages.
“Unfortunately,” said Spindel, “it took tragedy to pull us together.”
So it was across the American Jewish landscape. Then, the body of Staff Sergeant Ran Gvili, the 24-year-old Israeli police officer killed on Oct. 7 and taken by Hamas terrorists back into the enclave, was returned to Israel — the last of the hostages to come home.
Jews from across the political spectrum unpinned yellow ribbon buttons from their lapels, removed the hostage posters from their synagogues, and folded up and put away the blue-and-white flags displayed as a symbol of the missing Israelis.
The marches and vigils American Jews held on behalf of the hostages — small but meaningful echoes of the mass rallies that roiled Israel — came to a quiet halt.
Jewish unity is forged in adversity. Without it, we are apt to find enemies among ourselves. And as painful as the hostage saga was, it unified an otherwise fractious American Jewish community in a time of crisis.
Without that common concern, are even deeper rifts our future?
“As committed and connected as we were,” said Spindel, “it doesn’t change the fact that we also were still divided about solutions.”
A family in distress
Across the United States, synagogues of all religious and political bents regularly joined in the same Acheinu prayer for the release and return of the hostages.
“Our family, the whole house of Israel, who are in distress,” the prayer begins — a wholly accurate summation of the totality of Jewish concern.
Surveys showed that the hostages unified American Jews even when Israel’s Gaza campaign divided them. An October 2025 Washington Post poll found that a plurality of American Jews disapproved of Israel’s military actions in Gaza — but a whopping 79% said they were “very concerned” about the hostages.
There have been other moments in recent Jewish history when calamity created unity. The 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, for instance, brought together the vast majority of American Jews in mourning, even those who opposed his policies.
And, of course the brutal Oct. 7 attack, which claimed almost 1,200 lives, created a near-universal sense of shock and sorrow.
But the hostage crisis may have had an even deeper emotional — and perhaps political — impact.
“Even for people who were not affiliated Jewishly, those hostages struck a deep, deep chord,” Krieger told me. “It felt personal. I don’t think we’ve had that level of collective trauma in our lifetimes in that same way.”
And a family divided
The hostage crisis bonded American Jews to one another, and to their Israeli counterparts, at a time when enormous political rifts were opening within their communities.
In the U.S., as in Israel, there were sharp disagreements over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war and whether he was even prioritizing the hostages’ safety.
And the encampments and protests against the war at college campuses — in which many Jewish students participated, and to which many others objected — created even deeper divisions over support for the Jewish state.
But if the hostage issue didn’t erase such differences, it muted them. Krieger and Spindel could frustrate each other in conversations about the conduct of the war, or American support for it. But in the end, they were both in that 79% that the Washington Post poll identified.
What will hold them — and the rest of us — together, now?
The hostage crisis provided something history unfortunately bestows upon Jews with regularity: an external enemy that transcended ideological differences. With it gone, American Jews return to what they’ve always been — a community bound by tradition, and riven by politics.
Krieger and Spindel have already resumed their arguments. But even though the dog tags are gone, they’re both still wearing Jewish stars on silver chains around their necks. When someone admires Krieger’s, he takes it off and gives it to them. He buys his metal stars in bulk on Amazon, and has given away dozens since Oct. 7.
“I want people to feel like I do,” he said, “like we’re a peoplehood worth cherishing.”
Worth cherishing — even though we can’t agree on much else.
The post With the last hostage released, is American Jewish unity over? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Iran President Says Trump, Netanyahu, Europe Stirred Tensions in Protests
Amnesty International Greek activists and Iranians living in Athens hold candles and placards in front of the Greek Parliament to support the people of Iran, in Athens, Greece, January 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Louisa Gouliamaki TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Saturday that US, Israeli and European leaders had exploited Iran’s economic problems, incited unrest and provided people with the means to “tear the nation apart” in recent protests.
The two-week long nationwide protests, which began in late December over an economic crisis marked by soaring inflation and rising living costs, have abated after a bloody crackdown by the clerical authorities that US-based rights group HRANA says has killed at least 6,563, including 6,170 protesters and 214 security forces.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told CNN Turk that 3,100, including 2,000 security forces, had been killed.
The US, Israeli and European leaders tried to “provoke, create division, and supplied resources, drawing some innocent people into this movement,” Pezeshkian said in a live state TV broadcast.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly voiced support for the demonstrators, saying the US was prepared to take action if Iran continued to kill protesters. US officials said on Friday that Trump was reviewing his options but had not decided whether to strike Iran.
Israel’s Ynet news website said on Friday that a US Navy destroyer had docked at the Israeli port of Eilat.
Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Europeans “rode on our problems, provoked, and were seeking — and still seek — to fragment society,” said Pezeshkian.
“They brought them into the streets and wanted, as they said, to tear this country apart, to sow conflict and hatred among the people and create division,” Pezeshkian said.
“Everyone knows that the issue was not just a social protest,” he added.
Regional allies including Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia have been engaging in diplomatic efforts to prevent a military confrontation between Washington and Tehran.
The US is demanding that Iran curb its missile program if the two nations are to instead resume talks, but Iran has rejected that demand.
Foreign Minister Araqchi said in Turkey on Tuesday that missiles would never be the subject of any negotiations.
In response to US threats of military action, Araqchi said Tehran was ready for either negotiations or warfare, and also ready to engage with regional countries to promote stability and peace.
“Regime change is a complete fantasy. Some have fallen for this illusion,” Araqchi told CNN Turk. “Our system is so deeply rooted and so firmly established that the comings and goings of individuals make no difference.”
Uncategorized
CBS News Chief Weiss Touts Commentator Push, Draws Mixed Reaction in Newsroom
FILE PHOTO: Bari Weiss speaks at the 2022 Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., May 3, 2022. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo
Three months into her tenure, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss presented a vision this week to revitalize the nearly century-old broadcaster, in part by applying the same formula that fueled the rise of The Free Press – recruiting commentators who offer observations about news, politics and culture.
From adding 19 new commentators, including some drawn from The Free Press ranks, to introducing new podcasts, newsletters and live events, employees were variously energized or skeptical of the ideas presented by CBS’ new boss. Weiss’ notions about how to thrive in a post-Walter Cronkite era struck some as in conflict with the stated mission of doing great journalism, according to seven current and former CBS News employees and industry insiders.
In her presentation, Weiss also envisioned a galaxy of cross-platform stars, like New York Times columnist and CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin, whom she highlighted with a meme: “Sorkining.” The Dealbook founder is the author of several business books, executive producer of the Showtime series “Billions,” and maestro of the New York Times premiere live event, and a Davos fixture.
“It’s like saying ‘Hey, Hollywood. Why can’t you just be like Leonardo DiCaprio?’ If people knew how to bottle that magic and make someone a star, they would do it,” said a former CBS employee.
An industry veteran said the idea suggested a lack of appreciation for the power of television, which has been making stars for generations: among them “CBS Evening News” anchors Dan Rather, Connie Chung, Walter Cronkite and Katie Couric.
The 41-year-old Weiss, who has no broadcast experience and has been described as a distant leader by six current and former CBS News sources, now has to deliver on her promise of capturing new and younger viewers – including political independents who don’t see themselves reflected in mainstream media. It is a daunting undertaking that has hobbled executives across broadcast and cable, including former CNN chief Chris Licht, ousted in June 2023.
One supporter sees the charismatic Weiss as a modern-day Katharine Graham, the legendary publisher of the Washington Post, who was undermined by underlings when she took over in 1963. Graham transformed the paper and led it through its Watergate-era heyday, and generally left editorial decisions to Executive Editor Ben Bradlee.
A current staffer, speaking on background, said, “People are saying, ‘Let’s give her a chance’ … I want to see her succeed. If she succeeds, we all succeed.”
CBS News and Weiss did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
PRIORITIES FOR CBS NEWS
Weiss, a former opinion journalist and media entrepreneur, joined CBS after parent Paramount owner David Ellison bought her five-year-old media company, The Free Press, for $150 million in October.
Some see Weiss’ playbook of expanding CBS’s journalism ranks with commentators as conflicting with other initiatives including breaking news and landing deep investigative stories, according to three current and former CBS News staffers and an industry veteran.
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” said the former employee. “But is that what a news division is or are they craving something completely different? That’s fine but don’t pretend it’s a news division.”
Another current CBS News staffer talked about past failures to capitalize on new ways of reaching the audience, such as leveraging the power of the Paramount+ streaming service to promote news shows, observing, “We have done a wretched job of being on the internet.”
Weiss is also attempting to change the news network’s political orientation, appealing to a wider cross-section of Americans, according to her remarks Tuesday. Weiss said she wants CBS News to reflect the friction animating the national conversation.
In broadening its perspective to include more diverse viewpoints, CBS News could ultimately lay claim to the uncharted ground for a center-right broadcaster, said Integrated Media Chief Executive Jonathan Miller, a veteran media executive who has held senior positions at News Corp and AOL.
“We need to commission and greenlight stories that will surprise and provoke – including inside our own newsroom,” Weiss said in her address to employees. “We also have to widen the aperture of the stories we tell.”
On that front, CBS has had mixed results so far. Earlier this month, “CBS Evening News” broadcast a widely panned segment featuring U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in various meme-like situations, saluting him as “the ultimate Florida man.”
EARLY SUCCESSES
It has also seen successes, including Lesley Stahl’s interview with Trump son-in-law and Middle East advisor Jared Kushner and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, within a week of brokering a peace deal between Israel and Hamas, and Norah O’Donnell’s “60 Minutes” interview with Trump. Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over its editing of an interview with his White House rival, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
It landed journalistic scoops, including interviewing the man who charged one of two gunmen who attacked a Jewish community gathering in Sydney, and exclusive video of Alex Pretti, the man killed by Border Patrol in Minneapolis, reading a tribute to a veteran who died in 2024.
Weiss announced that the network would bring in contributors with expertise in politics, health, happiness, food and culture, whom she encouraged staffers to use on-air. The roster includes Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson of the conservative Hoover Institution, as well as Casey Lewis, a former Teen Vogue and MTV editor who writes about youth culture.
“It’s great to have younger people, a diverse demographic and diverse ideology represented,” said Kathy Kiely, the chair in Free-Press Studies at the Missouri School of Journalism. “Newsrooms can’t do a good job unless we have that diversity in our ranks. What worries me is the emphasis on opinion over primary-sourced, reported facts.”
Weiss emphasized making content available online before it airs on TV to reach more viewers. CBS has long been in third place behind rivals ABC and NBC and, like most mainstream media, is struggling with audience declines as consumers migrate to social platforms.
Pew Research estimates about one-third of all adults get at least some news from podcasts. CBS News does not appear among Spotify’s or Apple’s rankings of the top 50 news podcasts.
One former employee expects the digital-first goal to be complicated because CBS hasn’t devoted sufficient resources to helping correspondents or anchors curate their social media presence or re-edit television interviews for YouTube or streaming.
Weiss encouraged staffers to think of the news organization as the best-capitalized media startup in the world.
“We are in a position, with the support of all of the leadership of this company, to really make the change we need.”