(JTA) — A children’s museum housed on a U.S. military base cancelled a planned storytime reading celebrating the life of a pioneering 19th-century female Jewish cyclist earlier this year, after the book was flagged under a military-wide ban on “DEI” content.

The stated reason was because the book was about a woman, its author, Mary Boone, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

“If they had actually read the book and found out it was about a Latvian Jewish immigrant, it would have been a double whammy,” Boone said.

The recently revealed reason for the cancellation is the latest example of how a broad crackdown on diversity initiatives throughout the U.S. military, under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, has pushed out Jewish representation as well.

Earlier this year the U.S. Naval Academy removed a display honoring Jewish female graduates ahead of a planned Hegseth visit. The academy also removed several books about Judaism and the Holocaust from its campus library, while leaving others including “Mein Kampf” intact. The Pentagon additionally removed content about Holocaust remembrance from its websites this spring, prompting a response from Jewish War Veterans of the USA.

The incidents all occurred this spring, immediately following Hegseth’s anti-DEI order. That was also when a military base near Tacoma, Washington, cancelled a planned reading of the children’s book “Pedal Pusher: How One Woman’s Bicycle Adventure Helped Change The World.” The picture book is a biography of Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, who in 1895 became the first woman to cycle around the world.

The talk featuring the book’s author was scheduled to be held this past March, during Women’s History Month, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, home to around 110,000 people including service members and their families. Boone, a Tacoma resident, revealed the reasons behind the cancellation in a Seattle Times op-ed on Oct. 11, in recognition of Banned Books Week.

“Four days before the event, I was told it violated the administration’s executive order restricting so-called ‘radical’ Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs across federal institutions,” she wrote. “Someone complained when they saw my story time being promoted. Museum higher-ups appealed to military attorneys, who ruled that the program about a pioneering cyclist was out of bounds.

“Let that sink in: the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military had effectively declared a woman on a bike too threatening for children.”

A representative for Joint Base Lewis-McChord declined to comment, citing reduced office functions owing to the ongoing government shutdown.

Boone, who is not Jewish but is married to a Jew, told JTA that she was led to believe someone on the base had complained after seeing a poster advertising the reading. She doubts that those objecting to the book had actually read it, but rather had reacted because “it was a book about a woman.”

A section of the book briefly mentions Kopchovsky’s Jewish and immigrant identity as one reason why her journey, as a mother of three circumnavigating the globe by bike in 1895, was so improbable.

“Annie was a Latvian Jewish immigrant, and this was a time when prejudice toward Jewish people was widespread,” the book reads.

Initially, Boone said, she had not planned to include the section in the book, which only runs to 700 words. “My editor called and said, ‘This is a huge part of her story you left out,’” the author recalled. She said she responded, “I’m not a Jewish writer. Can I tell this? She was like, ‘Yes, you can tell this.’” The passage made the book.

Greentrike, a nonprofit that operates the base’s museum as well as a different children’s museum in Tacoma, declined to comment. Another March event featuring Boone at the Children’s Museum of Tacoma, off base, went forward as scheduled.

The Seattle Times obtained an email from Greentrike outlining the military’s reasons for the book’s cancellation as part of the op-ed’s fact checking process.

In March, the museum had initially announced the events “in celebration of Women’s History Month,” saying the readings would be paired with children’s activities including bike safety lessons. A brief update announcing the military base event’s cancellation only stated that storytime “will not be taking place at this time and has been removed from the event calendar.”

Back in 1895, Kopchovsky set off on her bicycle journey from Boston as part of a wager between two men who had placed bets on whether it was possible for a woman to cycle around the world. Initially pedaling west, she reached Chicago and almost gave up before ditching her heavy women’s bicycle for a lighter and more practical men’s model, then set off back east — eventually sailing on to bike in Europe and Asia before heading back to Chicago.

During her travels, Kopchovsky went by “Annie Londonderry” — not to disguise her Jewish identity, but because she had struck a sponsorship deal with the mineral-water company Londonderry Lithia. She earned $10,000 for her ride and wrote often about it after her return, frequently embellishing her tales of derring-do.

Children on the base have still received multiple opportunities to hear about Kopchovsky. When the storytime cancellation was initially announced, Boone said, she was contacted by representatives from two public schools also housed on base. She wound up speaking at both of them, without incident.

Months later, after she went public with the initial cancellation, she was swarmed with speaking invitations and sales of her book picked up. Among the new connections she made were to distant relatives of Kopchovsky.

“It’s given me the opportunity to talk about her to a lot more people who are outraged that this book about a woman would be cancelled,” she said.

The post A US military base canceled a children’s event celebrating a pioneering Jewish woman cyclist, citing DEI ban appeared first on The Forward.

Around 6:15 a.m. on a recent Thursday, Rabbi Moshe Tauber parked his van in the merge lane of the Henry Hudson Parkway at 72nd Street. He turned on his hazard lights and ran out of the vehicle with a flashlight. His wife, Chaya, sitting in the passenger seat, watched anxiously.

Tauber, 51, turned his head upward, shined his flashlight on the nylon fishing wire strung up 30 feet from the ground between two poles, and ran back to the car. All clear — the boundary was unbroken.

For the past 25 years, this process has been the rabbi’s routine on both Thursday and Friday mornings: leaving his home in Monsey, an Orthodox enclave in Rockland County, hours before sunrise in order to circumnavigate the entire island of Manhattan. His mission: to check every part of the borough’s eruv — the symbolic boundary, marked by strings and other man-made and natural elements, inside of which observant Jews may carry objects like food, keys and even babies on Shabbat and certain holidays.

Maintaining the eruv, which must be unbroken to be considered kosher, has been Tauber’s job since 1999. Tauber says it doesn’t make sense for someone else to sub in for him, simply because he knows the eruv so well and can do it so efficiently, after having inspected it for so many years. With Chaya’s approval, he even missed the early-morning birth of his 13th and youngest child, now 7, to check the eruv on a Friday morning. He immediately went to the hospital to visit mother and baby after his inspection was done.

“I don’t know if I can explain what I like in this job,” Tauber said. “I like it.”

Now, for the first time, the eruv inspector is getting some high-tech assistance. 

Installed in August, a new sensor system created by technology entrepreneur Jerry Kestenbaum — also the creator of the residential building software company BuildingLink — magnetically snaps onto multiple locations of the eruv. The 142 sensors detect changes in the angle of the wire and send a signal to a receiver held by Spectrum on Broadway, the lighting and electrical company responsible for maintaining the line per Tauber’s instructions. The sensors themselves are battery-operated and meant to last for six to 10 years, sealed in a waterproof case.

“It gives me more comfortability,” Tauber said. But he’s not planning on ceding oversight entirely to the machines, saying, “I know I need to check because the sensors are not 100%.”

The sensors mark the first major innovation to Manhattan’s biggest eruv, installed in 1999 after Adam Mintz, then the rabbi of Lincoln Square Synagogue, requested its installation to surround his Upper West Side neighborhood. (Prior to the borough-wide eruv, different parts of the city each had their own, but travel between them while carrying anything was prohibited on Shabbat.) 

According to Jewish law related to Shabbat, no items can be carried outside the home on what is supposed to be a day of rest and prayer. Recognizing this as a potential burden, rabbis in the Talmudic era devised a workaround: The boundary defined by the eruv would extend the “private” zone where carrying is permitted. Despite some community objections — sometimes from Jews and non-Jews who worry that the eruv will change the “character” of their neighborhoods, or civil libertarians who worry about the blurring of church and state — nearly every observant community, from big cities to small towns, is surrounded by an eruv.

The Lincoln Square eruv has expanded multiple times since 1999, now encompassing most of Manhattan, from 145th Street between Riverside Drive and Malcolm X Boulevard at its northernmost point, roughly down FDR Drive all the way to the bottom of Manhattan at the South Street Ferry, and back up the Henry Hudson Parkway. 

In the years since he became its inspector, Tauber’s dedication to the eruv has been unflagging. He made sure it was unbroken after 9/11 (it didn’t extend all the way downtown at the time), after the 2003 citywide blackout, after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In Tauber’s 25 years of inspections, the eruv has only been down once over a Shabbat, during a snowstorm in 2010. 

In addition to checking the eruv twice a week, Tauber helps his wife run a daycare, and he teaches boys at a yeshiva. He hasn’t taken a vacation longer than a few days for a quarter century. 

Chaya Tauber said she has a theory about why he likes the eruv job so much. “[It’s] many hours of a busy week — he has more jobs, it’s not the only job — that he can be by himself,” she said.” Quiet time. I think he likes the traveling, also.”

Just two weeks ago, he helped establish an eruv around Columbia University Medical Center in Washington Heights and the surrounding apartments. Eventually, the plan is to connect it to the main Manhattan eruv — and potentially to other smaller eruvs in Upper Manhattan. There, smaller eruvs serve portions of Washington Heights with many observant Jews, including one  that is home to the Orthodox flagship Yeshiva University.

Kestenbaum, whose new business, Aware Buildings, provides sensors for home security, said the idea for the electronic eruv technology came about during a conversation with Mintz, now the rabbinic leader of Kehilat Rayim Ahuvim (The Shtiebel) on the Upper West Side at the Marlene Meyerson JCC.

“I was saying to him that the sensors can be applied to many, many things that we’re used to doing manually,” said Kestenbaum, whose wife converted to Judaism under Mintz’s supervision.

“It’s a complicated eruv where the deployed environment changes,” Kestenbaum explained. “It’s not [like] in the suburbs, where the outline of the eruvs remains constant. Things go wrong. You’ve got scaffolding that gets put up. You’ve got other things that happen. The weekly eruv job is not just fixing, sometimes it’s rerouting.”

The complications are what gets Tauber out the door around 3:30 a.m. on inspection days. Not only does he beat rush hour, but once the sun begins to come up, it’s far more difficult to see the wire.

Now, the sensors can help him locate the wires more easily — and safely. “I used to walk [out of the car] because I couldn’t see it without the sensors,” Tauber said, pointing to a section near the Manhattan Bridge. “See the sensors? You don’t have to see the actual line.”

Tauber has been surprised by the willingness of various city agencies and construction crews to accommodate him in his unusual line of work.

“Even though we are Jewish, and we know we are not the most liked people here, but I never, ever had a problem with any organization or department officials, or even a construction company — they always come across,” he said. “They always look like they admire something which is religious.”

For Chaya Tauber, the early mornings and constrained vacations are worth it because of the way her husband’s work allows Manhattan Jews to observe one major law of Shabbat with ease.

“There is so much less desecration of Shabbos,” Chaya Tauber said, adding that when the eruv is up, “at least they’re not transgressing on this particular halacha. That makes this job such a responsibility.”

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The post On Friday, the rabbi circles Manhattan — now with tech support to protect an essential Shabbat tool appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Another nominee set to be promoted in President Donald Trump’s administration is facing scrutiny after past remarks expressing admiration for Nazis surfaced ahead of his confirmation hearing.

Several top Republican senators have already pledged to block the nomination of Paul Ingrassia to lead the Office of Special Counsel, following revelations of racist and antisemitic comments he made over text message. The office enforces the Hatch Act, which bans federal employees from taking part in certain political activities and protects government whistleblowers.

Ingrassia already holds a position in the administration, serving as a White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.

According to a Politico report, Ingrassia wrote in May 2024 that he has “a Nazi streak from time to time” in a chat of six GOP operatives and influencers. The comment came after another chat participant joked that Ingrassia “belongs in the Hitler Youth with Obergruppenführer Steve Bannon” — portraying the Republican strategist instrumental in Trump’s 2016 victory, who remains influential within the MAGA movement, as having a senior Nazi paramilitary rank.

Another participant also suggested that Ingrassia do a joint show with Nick Fuentes, an avowed white nationalist and Holocaust denier, on Rumble, a video platform that has amplified far-right antisemitism and Holocaust denial. Fuentes maintains an active Rumble page featuring his live shows, which are filled with antisemitic and anti-Israel content.

“Lmao,” Ingrassia replied.

In April 2023, Ingrassia published a blog post titled “Free Nick Fuentes,” urging Elon Musk to reinstate Fuentes’ X account after he was banned in 2021 for repeated violations of the platform’s content rules. Ingrassia was also reportedly in attendance at a 2024 rally at which Fuentes declared, “Down with Israel.”

Ingrassia, who also faces allegations of sexual harassment, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Thursday as part of his confirmation process. Last month, a group of 13 Jewish organizations sent a letter to the committee urging members to scrutinize Ingrassia’s “support for extremist views and individuals” and expressing doubt about his qualifications.

“He’s not going to pass,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters on Monday.

Ingrassia’s attorney, Edward Andrew Paltzik, initially dismissed the texts as satire meant to mock liberals who call Trump supporters Nazis. “In reality, Mr. Ingrassia has incredible support from the Jewish community,” he told Politico, “because Jews know that Mr. Ingrassia is the furthest thing from a Nazi.”

Paltzik later suggested, without evidence, that the messages might have been AI-generated or doctored to damage Ingrassia’s reputation.

Ingrassia is the latest in a line of Trump administration appointees who have been scrutinized for remarks offensive to Jews and other minorities. Trump withdrew the nominations of some of his candidates amid outrage.

It also follows recent incidents of high-profile right-wing antisemitism, including the discovery of a Republican staffer displaying a swastika at his desk on Capitol Hill and the leak of a Telegram chat involving Young Republican activists trading antisemitic rhetoric, including informal references to Hitler and the Holocaust.

Rep. Jerry Nadler, a Democrat from New York and co-chair of the Congressional Jewish Caucus, called on the White House to pull Ingrassia’s nomination. “As I’ve said many times: if President Trump were truly serious about combating antisemitism, he would start with his own administration,” Nadler wrote on X.

The post A Trump-nominee said he has a ‘Nazi streak.’ Will he still get a key administration role? appeared first on The Forward.