Uncategorized
Pro-Palestinian activists are banned from Buchenwald, where survivors vowed to fight for peace
(JTA) — As pro-Palestinian activists were shut out of the former Buchenwald concentration camp this weekend, a timeworn fight about the site’s history resurfaced.
That dispute, which dates back to the camp’s liberation in 1945, centers on how the victims of Buchenwald wanted to be remembered. The activists, a group called Kufiyas in Buchenwald, said their fight for Palestinians upheld a pledge made by thousands of Buchenwald survivors days after they were freed.
The inmates swore to punish the guilty, destroy Nazism and create a new world of peace. That promise, known as the “Oath of Buchenwald,” has been invoked by varying regimes and political movements ever since it was uttered.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald was blocked from holding a pro-Palestinian vigil at the Buchenwald memorial on Sunday after a court in the nearby city of Weimar upheld a police ban. The planned event would have marked the 81st anniversary of Buchenwald’s liberation by U.S. troops — and the day before the Jewish world observes Yom HaShoah, Holocaust memorial day.
Judges decided that the rally would likely “violate the dignity of victims” of the Nazis. The activists were offered the alternative of protesting in downtown Weimar, which they refused.
Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps on German soil, holding Jews along with political prisoners, Roma, gay people and prisoners of war. Roughly 56,000 people were killed there, among them some 11,000 Jews.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald argued that their protest would honor the memory of Buchenwald’s victims together with all “victims of genocide and fascism.” The campaign was formed after a German court ruled that Buchenwald could refuse entry to visitors who wear a Palestinian keffiyeh, which has been adopted by left-wing anti-Israel protesters. The memorial foundation argued that in some contexts, the symbol could be disruptive and undercut the memorial’s purpose. Its critics said the foundation was suppressing speech that criticized Israel — and fell in line with the mission of Holocaust remembrance.
By not addressing “the genocide in Gaza,” Kufiyehs in Buchenwald said the memorial became “a place of historical revisionism and genocide denial.”
The memorial site said that Kufiyas in Buchenwald were the ones abusing history.
“This is a completely inappropriate instrumentalization of the memory of the victims of National Socialism for one’s own political, misanthropic agenda,” Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau, a spokesperson for the memorial foundation, told the German broadcaster Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk. The planned rally was also excoriated by the European Jewish Congress, the Conference of European Rabbis and other groups.
Current-day atrocities have been invoked at Buchenwald before, according to William Niven, an emeritus professor of Nottingham Trent University who teaches German history.
In 1993, about 3,000 people demonstrated on the site against the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during the Holocaust, said in a speech, “Europe has learnt nothing since the Holocaust. Nothing was done to stop the murdering. What happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina is a posthumous victory for Hitler.”
But Niven said he viewed the planned pro-Palestinian rally as problematic because it would have interrupted the anniversary of the camp’s liberation, a program that annually draws descendants of Buchenwald victims and a dwindling number of survivors. That risked both upsetting the visitors and hijacking their mourning, he said.
“If you’ve got a group of people standing there with political placards or making political statements, then they are transforming that commemorative event into a political act,” Niven said. “They are using it because they’ll get media attention.”
Tair Borchardt, an organizer for the campaign who is Jewish, countered that the activists include a substantial proportion of Jews, among them children and grandchildren of Nazi victims. She said that drawing a direct line between Buchenwald inmates and the Palestinians was their form of commemoration.
“I think that honoring the victims of Nazi fascism also really should be principled in making sure that it doesn’t happen again,” said Borchardt. “And this is what’s happening right now. So drawing these connections, I don’t think it’s a contradiction in honoring the victims at all.”
Kufiyas in Buchenwald is a leftist alliance that includes activists from communist, anti-fascist and Jewish anti-Zionist organizations. The group collaborated in its campaign with the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the German group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East.
Rachel Shapiro, an organizer with the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, said in a statement that the memorial foundation’s “insistence on the singularity and exceptionalism of the Nazi genocide of European Jews” served to “actively provide cover for Germany’s participation in and funding of the mass murder of Palestinians.”
Shapiro argued that state-funded institutions like the Buchenwald memorial should not singularly decide how Nazi victims are remembered, saying that anti-fascist Jews “wholeheartedly reject the German state dictating conditions around commemoration.”
That is exactly what states do, according to James E. Young, a Holocaust scholar and professor emeritus of Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
“The irony is that by definition, in all national memorial sites everywhere, including Buchenwald, the state always dictates ‘the conditions of commemoration.’ That’s the point,” Young said in an interview.
Since the day Buchenwald was liberated, meanings of the place — and interpretations of what happened there — have shifted under changing regimes.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald said its demands from the memorial site were faithful to the Oath of Buchenwald, a pledge made by 21,000 survivors of the camp on April 19, 1945. That day, the freed inmates marched onto the roll call square and surrounded Buchenwald’s first memorial monument, a wooden obelisk made in the camp’s wood shop. They read a memorial address in Russian, Polish, German, French, Czech and English, ending with the jointly spoken oath.
“We will only give up the fight when the last guilty has been judged by the tribunal of all nations,” they said. “The absolute destruction of Nazism is our motto. The building of a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal.”
Just a few days later, the oath was revised. A new version swore to pursue the destruction of Nazism “down to its roots.” That addition had a clear meaning for communist survivors, a meaning solidified when Buchenwald came under Soviet-occupied East Germany: The “roots” of fascism were understood as capitalism and the West.
In 1958, the German Democratic Republic unveiled Buchenwald’s first state memorial, a path linking mass graves to a bell tower where the oath was inscribed.
“It was politicized during the GDR as an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-West message. Pretty much up to 1990, that’s how it was framed,” said Niven.
Buchenwald became a monument to the communist-led struggle and ultimate victory over fascism, a site symbolizing solidarity across national boundaries. For decades, wide gaps remained in this history, such as the Hitler-Stalin pact and the fate of Jewish inmates.
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, Buchenwald was reconceptualized. In 1991, an independent historical commission recommended an array of changes, including emphasizing the concentration camp and installing memorials for groups that had not yet been commemorated.
A memorial was also installed for the “special camp” that the Soviets set up from 1945 to 1950. The regime used this camp to intern Nazis, along with numerous perceived enemies who were not Nazis. An estimated 7,000 people who died there were buried in a forest near the camp, their graves kept a state secret. Now, Nazis are remembered among the victims in mass graves.
In the 1990s and 2000s, a new doctrine shaped Germany’s memory of the past: its special responsibility to Israel. During the process of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” or reckoning with the Nazi era, the robustness of the State of Israel became key to Germany’s rehabilitation.
“Just as the Holocaust did justify the birth of the State of Israel, in Germany’s eyes, part of the reason for the memorial is to commemorate the reason that Jews must never be attacked again — or, there must never be another genocide of Jews, in particular,” said Young.
Still, the Oath of Buchenwald has been invoked throughout the 2000s with a globalized urgency. During the 70th anniversary of liberation in 2015, survivor Bertrand Herz pleaded with young people around the world to defend human rights and fight racism. As long as repression persisted in the world, he said, the oath would not be fulfilled.
That commemoration came in the midst of terrorist attacks on Jews in Europe and a Syrian refugee crisis that changed the makeup of Germany. Beside Herz, the politician Martin Schulz said Buchenwald’s victims left behind a moral compass to navigate these challenges. Their memory obligated Europe to “fight the return of demons that we thought were overcome but which still show their ugly face — racism, anti-Semitism, ultra-nationalism and intolerance,” said Schulz.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald is not the only group to object to the Buchenwald memorial in recent years. Thuringia, the state housing the memorial, is a stronghold for the far-right Alternative for Germany party. The party received 38.6% of the vote there in last year’s federal elections, more than in any other German state.
The leader of the AfD in Thuringia, Bjoern Hoecke, has urged Germany to break with its culture of repentance for Nazism. He has called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame.” In 2021, AfD election posters in the Buchenwald parking lot advertised “courage to speak the truth.” The site has seen attacks from graffiti of swastikas to people cutting down trees planted in memory of survivors.
The AfD’s takeover of Thuringia in 2024 prompted an outcry from the International Committee Buchenwald-Dora and Kommados, founded in 1952 to preserve the memory of Buchenwald’s resistance.
“The ICBD thanks all the people in politics and civil society who fought fiercely in Thuringia and Saxony to defend our values — the values of the Buchenwald Oath,” the group said.
The AfD, predicted to surge in the region in September’s election, has presented an agenda to overhaul German life toward social conservatism and drive out immigrants and refugees.
Borchardt, the Kufiyas in Buchenwald organizer, said the memorial recently published a handout that placed images of a keffiyeh, a watermelon (a symbol of Palestinian solidarity) and the words “ceasefire now” next to swastikas, all shown as examples of antisemitism. She repudiated that comparison.
For her, there is no confusion in the Oath of Buchenwald, which she said “stands for itself.”
“It’s not very hard to understand that the current genocide happening in Palestine, the imprisonment of political prisoners — who are imprisoned, lots of them, without any court hearing or right to defend themselves — that this was probably meant by the Oath of Buchenwald, too,” said Borchardt.
The post Pro-Palestinian activists are banned from Buchenwald, where survivors vowed to fight for peace appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
On Columbus Day, remember Abraham Zacuto, the Jewish astronomer history forgot
(JTA) — Every October, Christopher Columbus returns not only as history but as controversy. The voyages associated with his name transformed the world, but their legacy is inseparable from conquest, coercion and the destruction that followed European expansion.
Yet the same Iberian age also produced a quieter and far less controversial revolution: advances in astronomy, mathematics, cartography, instruments and practical navigation that made sustained oceanic voyaging possible. Its protagonists included scholars, translators, mapmakers, instrument makers and pilots whose names are far less familiar than those of the captains who commanded the ships.
Among them, one figure deserves particular remembrance on Columbus Day: Abraham Zacuto, a Jewish astronomer born in Salamanca around 1452. Zacuto belonged to the same Iberian world as Columbus, but experienced its monarchies very differently. In 1492, Columbus sailed west under the patronage of Ferdinand and Isabella. That same year, the Catholic monarchs ordered the Jews of their realms to convert or leave. Zacuto left Castile and continued his work in Portugal. The celebrated maritime discoveries and the expulsion of Iberian Jewry were therefore not distinct historical worlds; they unfolded under the same rulers, at the same moment, within the same culture of ambition, knowledge and power.
Zacuto stands out within that larger scientific story. He was a rabbi, astronomer, mathematician and historian whose astronomical work helped give oceanic navigation a new degree of precision and practicality. His contribution belongs not at the margins of the Age of Exploration but within the scientific infrastructure that made long-distance navigation increasingly systematic.
Around 1478, Zacuto completed his great Hebrew astronomical work, “Ha-Hibbur ha-Gadol,” the “Great Composition.” Working within a long scientific conversation that included Greek, Islamic, Jewish and Christian astronomy, he refined and organized astronomical calculations in forms of exceptional practical value.
After the expulsion from Spain, Zacuto entered Portugal at precisely the moment when the kingdom was pushing maritime exploration farther into the Atlantic and down the African coast. Zacuto’s pupil, José Vizinho, a Jewish adviser to Portuguese King John II, was associated with the practical Latin and Castilian presentation of Zacuto’s astronomical material. In 1496, Zacuto’s Almanach Perpetuum was printed at Leiria in four known issues – three with Latin preliminary matter and one with Castilian.
The importance of those tables was intensely practical. They supplied precise, ready-to-use values for the changing position of the sun through the year. For a pilot on the high seas in daylight, far from recognizable coastlines, this meant that a noon observation of the sun could be combined with solar-declination data to determine latitude — the ship’s north-south position. The difficult astronomical calculations had already been embodied in the tables. What remained aboard ship was an operational procedure: Observe the sun, consult the appropriate value and calculate latitude. That combination of precision and usability greatly facilitated daytime position-finding at sea. Solar tables derived from Zacuto’s work entered early Portuguese navigational manuals and became part of the practical scientific culture of oceanic travel.
The clearest measure of Zacuto’s importance may be what happened next. The Almanach did not remain a local Portuguese publication. Its tables were reprinted repeatedly in Venice in 1498, 1502, 1525 and 1528. A work first printed in Leiria moved into one of Europe’s great publishing centers and continued to circulate for decades. That publishing history alone tells us something about the standing Zacuto’s astronomy acquired.
Its reach extended farther still. Zacuto’s astronomical material was translated and adapted into Arabic. One Arabic version was produced, likely in Istanbul, in 1505-06; another, associated with Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari in Morocco around 1624, survives in several manuscripts. The work of a Jewish astronomer writing in Hebrew in 15th-century Salamanca had crossed into Latin, Castilian and Arabic scientific cultures.
Zacuto’s name also became entwined with the memory of the great navigators. Accounts have long connected his tables with Columbus and Vasco da Gama, including the famous 1504 lunar eclipse in Jamaica. In this episode, Columbus intimidated Indigenous Jamaicans by predicting the disappearance of the moon, relying on Zacuto’s almanac, which he had on board. A manuscript connected with the Almanach also survives in Seville’s Biblioteca Colombina, the library created by Columbus’s son Hernando. Taken together, these associations reveal the stature Zacuto’s work acquired in the historical memory of the Age of Exploration.
Perhaps the most striking part of Zacuto’s story is what happened to the man himself. Portugal valued the kind of expertise he represented. Yet in December 1496, King Manuel I ordered Portugal’s Jews to leave unless they converted, and in 1497 the crown subjected the Jewish population to mass forced conversion. Zacuto left Portugal as well.
Exile did not end either his travels or his scholarship. From Portugal he moved through North Africa, including Tunis, before eventually reaching Jerusalem. There, late in life, he returned once more to the astronomical work that had made his name known across the Mediterranean, recalculating and updating his earlier tables for the Jewish calendar and the meridian of Jerusalem. The strongest recent reconstruction of his life places his death in Jerusalem in Tevet 5274, or late 1513 or very early 1514 — commonly given as 1514.
Zacuto’s story is therefore larger than a footnote to Columbus. It joins two strands of Sephardic history too often told apart: persecution and exile, and the transmission of knowledge, texts and technologies across borders.
Zacuto’s own tables and 15th-century procedures are now obsolete, but their underlying navigational logic endures. Modern celestial navigation still determines position by combining observations of the sun, moon, planets or stars with authoritative astronomical data. The U.S. Naval Academy requires all midshipmen to study navigation, and its current curriculum includes celestial navigation alongside electronic methods. The U.S. Naval Observatory still describes celestial navigation as a critical independent backup to GPS and other electronic systems. And the Nautical Almanac, first published in 1855, remains the standard U.S. Navy resource for marine celestial navigation. The instruments and calculations have changed, but the essential logic remains: Observe the heavens, consult reliable astronomical data and determine position.
Zacuto’s scientific reputation also survives in an unexpected place. In 1935, the International Astronomical Union formally adopted the name Zagut for a lunar crater honoring Abraham ben Shmuel Zacuto. Modern astronomy has, quite literally, written his name onto the Moon.
Columbus remains a household name because voyages leave dramatic images: ships, landfalls, encounters and conquest. The calculations, tables, instruments, translations and printed books that made such voyages possible are easier to forget. Remembering Zacuto widens the story: His tables brought greater precision and practicality to daytime navigation; his work crossed languages and continents; and his life traced the routes of Sephardic exile from Iberia to Jerusalem. The age of maritime discovery was also an age of scientific discovery, and some of the knowledge that carried Iberian ships across oceans was created by scholars whose communities those same monarchies expelled.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
The post On Columbus Day, remember Abraham Zacuto, the Jewish astronomer history forgot appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Recorded anti-Jewish hate crimes rise 10% in England and Wales
(JTA) — Hate crimes targeting Jewish people in England and Wales rose by 10% in the year ended in March, according to the latest data released by the British government.
Police-reported hate crime — including crime influenced by other factors such as race and sexual orientation — overall increased by 7% compared with the previous year, according to the Home Office data released last week.
British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband posted on X on Monday, “Antisemitism has no place in our society. This morning, I hosted a crucial discussion with the J7 Global Task Force to discuss how we can work together across countries to stamp out the scourge of antisemitism.”
Following the meeting, the Board of Deputies of British Jews issued a statement explaining that Miliband and the task force had discussed, among other things, “the sharp rise in global antisemitism” and the “continued demonisation of Israel.” Representatives from the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Argentina and Australia make up the task force.
“In the meeting, the J7 proposed a new international intergovernmental ministerial task force on antisemitism, comprising the countries represented in the J7 and taking on the key themes discussed. We were pleased that the Foreign Secretary agreed to host an inaugural meeting of J7 countries’ ministers to start this process,” the statement sent to JTA said.
The Community Security Trust, a charity that protects the Jewish community and monitors antisemitism, said on X that the new data show “that antisemitic hate crime remains at an unacceptably high level.”
“As seen previously, Jewish people continue to experience by far the highest police-recorded rate per head of religious hate crime of any faith group,” CST said. “This shows the disproportionate scale of anti-Jewish hatred and its impact on Jewish life in Britain.”
Religious hate crime rose by 13% overall in the 12 months to March 2026, the report said. The overall figure rose from 10,067 to 11,419 offenses.
The two groups most affected were Jews and Muslims, the Home Office said. Religiously motivated hate crimes against Muslims increased 15%, the report found, with spikes reported around public protests in September 2025 and the start of the U.S. war with Iran in February.
The number of recorded offenses affecting Jews rose from 2,874 to 3,162 offenses, spiking after the attack on Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester last year on Yom Kippur.
Two men, Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, were killed on Oct. 2, 2025, after Jihad Al-Shamie, who was wearing a fake suicide bomb belt, drove into the gates of Heaton Park synagogue and began attacking congregants with a knife. Cravitz died from stab wounds; Daulby was fatally struck by a police bullet during the response.
A spate of violent antisemitic incidents followed this year, including the torching of four ambulances belonging to Jewish volunteer service Hatzola on March 23 and the stabbing of two Jewish men in separate attacks in Golders Green on April 29.
The Home Office figures, which do not include data from London’s Metropolitan Police Service because of a change in how it records crime, showed the second-highest level of religious hate crime directed at the Jewish community since the Home Office began keeping records in 2018. It was surpassed only by the year ending March 2024.
“In the last year, there were 117 police recorded religious hate crimes targeted at Jewish people per 10,000 population, the highest rate for any religious group. The next highest rate was for religious hate crimes targeted at Muslims, with 13 per 10,000 population,” said the Home Office.
The report was published on Oct. 8, at a time of heightened sensitivity. Eleven people were arrested at pro-Palestinian marches in London a day earlier, despite calls by the Metropolitan Police to avoid demonstrating on the anniversary of Hamas’ deadly 2023 raids inside Israel.
Police reported 20 arrests at Saturday’s pro-Palestinian protest in London, where many demonstrators were wearing kaffiyehs, waving Palestinian flags and brandishing banners.
The level of hate directed at the Jewish community has remained at an “elevated level” since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict, the report stated.
The CST said, “There is an urgent need to reduce the amount of incitement connected to conflict overseas,” adding that “much more needs to be done across society to tackle this problem.”
Over the summer the government announced a major funding boost to support the Jewish community, promising £250 million ($335 million) over the next three years for increased policing and protection of Jewish communities.
More remains to be done, according to community organizations.
A spokesperson for the Board of Deputies of British Jews said the report’s publication “confirms the need for rigorous prosecution to ensure deterrence, and a whole of society approach to tackling hatred and extremism, and to stopping conflict in the Middle East being used to incite hatred against the Jewish community.”
The Campaign Against Antisemitism said the report was evidence that the British justice system was failing the Jewish community.
“Antisemites, emboldened by the Hamas terrorist atrocity three years ago, are not only not letting up in their hatred but are doubling down,” it said in a statement. “That’s because there is no real deterrent. So really these figures are most damning for the criminal justice system, which has utterly failed to defend British Jews.
“Even as conflict in the Middle East is easing off, antisemitism in the U.K. is rising, yet there have been essentially no changes in policing policy over the past three years and nobody has been held to account for this monumental failure,” the campaign said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Recorded anti-Jewish hate crimes rise 10% in England and Wales appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Hasan Piker criticizes ‘opportunists’ who accused Mamdani of genocide
(JTA) — Hasan Piker called the protesters who jeered New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani at an Oct. 7 vigil last week “opportunists,” who “tarnished” the anti-Zionist movement’s message.
Piker, the popular streamer who has campaigned for a number of democratic socialist candidates, made his remarks Sunday at Jewish Currents Live, an all-day event hosted by the left-wing magazine at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Speaking on a panel titled “Can the Left Wield Power?”, he said that the protesters had “valid concerns,” including demands like firing police commissioner Jessica Tisch and disbanding the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, a heavily armed unit that often responds to protests.
But he criticized the Democratic Socialists of America — the left-wing political organization that Mamdani has called his “political home” — for not playing a bigger role in last week’s protest, which started at City Hall and later overran an Israeli peace vigil. DSA did not sponsor the protest, though some campus chapters of its student section, the Young DSA, participated.
“The DSA not being at the forefront of the anti-Zionist mobilization in New York City is what allowed that mobilization to be tarnished by opportunists, sectarians and those who actually were calling him a genocidaire — which I obviously find to be ridiculous,” Piker said, referring to protesters’ chants of “Mayor Mamdani you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”
Piker, who has drawn heat for his anti-Israel views, did not comment on the Hamas iconography displayed by numerous protesters, nor the decision to crash an Oct. 7 vigil that memorialized the 1,200 people killed in the Hamas-led attacks on that date in 2023, and the 74,000 Palestinians who have been killed since then, according to Gaza health ministry figures, which do not distinguish civilians from combatants.
Separately, Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University pro-Palestinian protest leader who was detained by ICE last year, reportedly criticized those protesters’ “purity politics” during an event in Washington, D.C.
“You don’t have to agree with someone 100 percent — 85 percent is good,” he said, provided that the end goal is “liberating Palestine and ending the unconditional support of the United States.”
Where should Democrats draw the line?
Two Democratic congressional nominees from New York, Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier, appeared on a separate panel focused on Israel and the Democratic Party.
Lander is Jewish and Darializa Avila Chevalier helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian encampment in 2024. Peter Beinart, editor-at-large at Jewish Currents, moderated the panel, which also featured Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman, the first Palestinian American elected to public office in her state.
Their discussion exposed some of the gaps between Lander and Avila Chevalier, both progressives who were endorsed by Mamdani this year and who appeared in a campaign ad together alongside fellow Mamdani endorsee Claire Valdez.
Beinart asked where Democrats should draw the line on what is considered legitimate Palestinian resistance. He pointed to the pro-Palestinian protest held in New York City on Oct. 8, 2023, which Avila Chevalier attended and Lander called “abominable” at the time.
“I think international law has already drawn that line,” Avila Chevalier said, arguing that U.S. protests should target Israel, which receives U.S. support, rather than Hamas.
“We could be the biggest anti-Hamas protesters, but a protest against Hamas in the U.S. isn’t going to do anything,” Avila Chevalier said. “Because we don’t fund it. We don’t have any structural power over it, there is nothing tying us to that institution other than condemning it endlessly.”
After the event, Lander did not confirm to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency whether he had spoken about that Oct. 8 protest with Avila Chevalier.
“We have talked about these issues broadly in private, and I don’t want to characterize those conversations,” Lander told JTA. “And obviously I’ve made my feelings known in public, and I stand by them. I mean, on that day, I was in mourning.”
An attendee named Mark, 29, who declined to share his last name to avoid potential workplace complications, said he felt that Avila Chevalier “didn’t really acknowledge the criticism about perhaps disregarding loss of life; despite the power imbalance, it is lost life.”
For Lander, meanwhile, Mark said it was “politically expedient” for him to not directly address Avila Chevalier’s presence at the 2023 protest. “This is a super lefty crowd that probably would eat him alive if he went against her right now,” he said.
During the panel, Avila Chevalier repeated her call for an arms embargo against Israel while Lander stopped short of doing so, consistent with his statements in the past that Israel should be able to buy defensive ware. Both said Congress must pass the Block the Bombs Act and vote to suspend the sale of offensive U.S. military weapons to Israel. Lander was the only speaker on stage who advocated for a two-state solution in the region.
Beinart asked Romman about Jon Ossoff, the Jewish Democratic senator running for reelection in her state, and how she views his stance on Palestine. She said she was pleased that both Georgia senators have been consistently voting in favor of Bernie Sanders’ resolution to block arms sales to Israel, but added that “in terms of leading, in terms of rhetoric, there’s still a lot of work to be done.”
“We’ll get everyone to where we need them to be eventually,” she said.
‘The bund is back in town’
The Jewish Labor Bund — the early 20th-century socialist movement that fought against Bolshevism, Nazism and Zionism — came up at numerous points on Sunday. One attendee doled out fliers with a website URL and the message, “Tell your bubbe the bund is back in town.” It was also a subject of a conversation that featured Molly Crabapple, whose 2026 book “Here Where We Live is Our Country” focuses on the Bund.
Arlene Geiger, an Upper West Sider and longtime activist, told JTA that she related to those conversations.
“My connection to Judaism is not to Israel, it never has been. It’s more to Eastern Europe and the Bund, so that spoke to me,” Geiger said.
Mark, who is from New Jersey, said he doesn’t come from a “staunchly pro-Zionist” family, but that he has a new interest in leftist Jewish spaces since realizing that he could no longer comfortably distance himself from the issue of Israel, which he believes is committing a genocide.
“It’s just an education for me to be immersed in this kind of space,” he said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Hasan Piker criticizes ‘opportunists’ who accused Mamdani of genocide appeared first on The Forward.
