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South African Jewish journalist Jeremy Gordin murdered in home burglary at 70
(JTA) — Jeremy Gordin, one of South Africa’s most prominent journalists, wrote repeatedly in recent months about burglaries at his family’s Johannesburg home.
In a weekly column, he expressed dismay at the rampant levels of crime, growing urban decay and regular power outages endured by South Africans as a result of mismanagement and corruption. In one — titled “It is getting dark, too dark to see” after the Bob Dylan lyric — he addressed his two children, both in their twenties.
“I’m not suggesting that you’re going to find yourselves in desperate flight across your own border, that your graveyard may be ploughed up and strewn with garbage. But there comes a time when things are clearly falling apart,” he concluded.
He added, with the allusion to his Jewish identity clear to anyone familiar with Jewish history, “And you, who have your whole lives before you (as they say), need to consider seriously going to live elsewhere. We’ve been doing it for centuries, after all.”
On March 31, Gordin’s worst fears came to pass: He was murdered during a night robbery at his home. He was 70.
South African police described the incident as “a robbery gone wrong” but did not describe the exact cause of death. Seven people were arrested in Johannesburg two weeks later; one was driving a car that had been stolen from Gordin’s residence.
It was a tragic end for Gordin’s 70-year South African story, which, as with so many of his country’s Jews, intersected sharply with both the story of Israel and with the struggle of Black South Africans. As a lifelong journalist, he had at times headed both South Africa’s version of Playboy and its storied working-class Black tabloid, and also ran an initiative that used reporting to prove the innocence of people who were wrongfully imprisoned. He won the country’s annual top journalism prize multiple times.
Gordin was also a friend to many, frequently opening his home in Johannesburg’s Parkview neighborhood to guests. (This reporter was one of them during a stint in Johannesburg for Efe, the Spanish newspaper.)
Gordin was born in Pretoria in 1952, in a Jewish family with Lithuanian and Latvian origins. After a spell in South Vietnam, where his pharmacist father worked for the United States, the family returned to South Africa. Gordin went to high school in Brakpan, a town in the industrial east of the Great Johannesburg emblematic of the country’s white Afrikaner working class to which he often referred in his articles.
Gordin obtained a scholarship to study in Israel and completed a bachelor’s degree while playing rugby at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Back in his country, he did his military service volunteering for the South African Defence Force’s elite 1 Parachute Battalion, then started a prolific career in journalism.
In a breakout moment, he published a book in 1998 based on his conversations with the apartheid government’s death squad leader Eugen de Kock. Then incarcerated, de Kock candidly told Gordin about his deeds, but most importantly about those who had ordered his crimes, for which they were hardly questioned and never tried.
Gordin authored another canonical book of recent South Africa history, his biography of South Africa’s former president Jacob Zuma. Published in 2010, a year after Zuma took power, Gordin’s went beyond the usual assumptions about the Zulu former freedom fighter who learned how to read and write as an adult and was often underestimated by South Africa’s intellectual class.
Zuma left office in 2018 after a tenure marked by charges of corruption, cronyism and incompetence. Gordin’s biography has been criticized for being excessively indulgent with its subject, but it remains essential for understanding Zuma’s psychology and the motivations behind his actions.
In the early 1990s, after a period living in San Francisco, Gordin became the launch editor of Playboy South Africa. (He posed nude, with only a magazine as cover, to promote Playboy’s South Africa launch.) In a recent essay, Gordin recounted trying to land a then-unknown Charlize Theron for the magazine’s first cover. Invoking Yiddish terms, Gordin recalled journalists who had passed away, described the actress’s unembarrassed audition, and also managed to explore changing race and class dynamics in South Africa.
(Around this time, his friend Roy Isacowitz wrote in a remembrance published shortly after his death, the pair had successfully gotten a media executive censured for calling them “pushy little Jewboys” — though he said they accepted the description.)
Jeremy Gordin, at right, stands in front of covers of the Sun, the South African tabloid he oversaw for many years. (Courtesy Gordin family)
In 2012 he was named caretaker editor of the Daily Sun, a South African tabloid wildly popular among the Black working class. The paper lost much of its appeal after the death of its founder, larger-than-life Afrikaner media executive Deon du Plessis. Gordin brought back the pride, the punch and many of the readers to the paper. Or, as a headline made for him by his colleagues when he retired said, he “brought rock’n roll back to the Sun.”
The tabloid’s news largely relied on cases of violence, gossip and sex often featuring “tokoloshes,” fantastic creatures of popular African mythology whose encounters with the Sun’s readers were reported nationwide in the first person to its many correspondents. The readership and the paper’s foot soldiers were 100% Black. They collected the stories and sent them to the Johannesburg newsroom, where a group of experienced white male journalists including Gordin translated their texts in the characteristic Daily Sun language.
Gordin’s world couldn’t be further away from the one his newspaper reflected. But as his colleague at the paper Vincent Pienaar wrote after his death, “Not only did he understand the ethos of the publication, he embraced it.”
The tabloid took on serious stories, too. During his tenure as the paper’s editor the Daily Sun broke the story of the death at the hands of police officers of Mozambican immigrant taxi driver Mido Macias. A reader had filmed his gratuitously brutal arrest and sent it to the newspaper. Eight police officers involved in the victim’s death in custody were ultimately sentenced to 15 years in prison.
After leaving the Daily Sun, Gordin took on a role coordinating the Wits Justice Project, a journalism program focused on the plight of innocent or unfairly treated prisoners. In 2011 he helped secure the release of Fusi Mofokeng and Tshokolo Joseph Mokoena, who had served 19 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.
Gordin’s many friends say that his sympathy for the underdog was inextricable from the Jewish traditions and attitudes he inherited.
Although not religiously observant, Gordin peppered his articles with Jewish stories and jokes and Yiddish words and expressions. His sense of humor was strongly influenced by his Jewishness, as it was the combination of principle and humorous compassion that defined his personality. He was extremely well-read and voraciously curious, loved to share what he discovered with friends and indulged in sassy but harmless gossip both in private and in his articles.
Sometimes, his Jewish identity and his journalism entwined as when, in 2016, he reported from Johannesburg about the extradition hearing of a Hasidic rabbi, Eliezer Berland, wanted in Israel on rape charges. His final column, published the day before his death, explained, and condemned, the proposed right-wing judicial reforms in Israel.
Rabbi Sa’ar Shaked of the Beit Emanuel Progressive Synagogue in Johannesburg said Gordin as a friend and “wild spirit” who didd’t regularly attend services but was a repeat guest speaker at the synagogue to discuss weekly Torah portions and a variety of aspects of Jewish history and law.
Despite not attending services regularly, Gordin’s role in the community is described as “very active” by Wendy Ovens, a South African health professional in the NGO sector who served with him on the management committee of Beit Emanuel in 2011.
“His knowledge on Judaism and Jewish history was incredible,” Ovens said. She said his Jewish identity fueled his core mission: “He was community-minded and believed in justice and in what was right.”
Gordin is survived by his wife, Deborah Blake, and his children, Jake and Nina.
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WATCH: Yiddish and German — old relatives, new neighbors
במשך פֿון הונדערטער יאָרן איז מיזרח־אייראָפּע געווען דער צענטער פֿון ייִדיש־לעבן. הײַנט, נאָך דעם חורבן, האָט זיך די מאַפּע אַריבערגערוקט: אַחוץ ענגלאַנד, קלינגט ייִדיש הײַנט בעיקר אין מערבֿ־ און מיטל־אייראָפּע, דווקא אין לענדער וווּ דײַטש איז אַן אָפֿיציעלע שפּראַך — אין אַנטווערפּן, בערלין, ווין, ווײַמאַר, ציריך און אַנדערע ערטער.
אין דעם ווידעאָ, געפֿירט אין גאַנצן אויף ייִדיש, רעדט אלי בענעדיקט מיט די ייִדיש־אַקטיוויסטן דזשייק שנײַדער, איידל מלובֿיצקי, מענדי קאַהן, אסתּר סאַנדרוי און אַנדרעאַס שמיטגעס וועגן דעם וויכטיקן פֿענאָמען.
דער ווידעאָ ווערט געשטיצט פֿון דער ייִדיש־ליגע.
The post WATCH: Yiddish and German — old relatives, new neighbors appeared first on The Forward.
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Howard Zinn: a radical historian with a Jewish conscience
“I am a sportswriter by trade,” Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation, told me. Zirin has written 11 books, all of them dealing with the knotty and oft-controversial politics of sport, coming at the games he loves — and the machinations behind them — from a progressive position. His previous subjects have included Colin Kaepernick, Barry Bonds and John Carlos.
But Zirin’s latest book, The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, is not that. It’s a biography of the late Boston University professor and self-described “radical historian,” best known for the long-running bestseller, A People’s History of the United States, which was first published in 1980.
“I never would have thought in eight trillion years that I was ever going to write a book about Howard Zinn,” Zirin, 52, told me by phone from Washington, D.C.. “He was a hero of mine, a great influence, and I would have thought it presumptuous to even think about it, not just to mention that I never gave thought to writing a non-sports book.
“But I just had so many people in recent years want to engage me in this discussion of ‘What would Howard say about these incredible demonstrations in 2010 of the Black Lives Matter movement, and, especially, in the age of Trumpism, the rise of neo-fascism, not just in this country, but abroad?’”
If Zirin couldn’t divine an exact answer, he was at least in a position to hazard an educated guess. Turned on to an abbreviated 20th century-focused version of A People’s History as a high school graduation gift by his sister, Zirin became a history major at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. Much later in life, Zirin found himself hosting Q & A sessions with Zinn at venues throughout the country.
Zirin says that the events of the two Trump terms made people wonder: “‘Would that have shaken Howard’s faith in the power of the people to make positive change and the ability for people to bend the arc of history, as they say, toward justice?’ That made me want to write the book.”
When he started work on the biography, Zirin knew the basics of Zinn’s public trajectory: his service in WWII as an Air Force bombardier; his stint teaching at Spelman College and his role in the Civil Rights movement, his protests against the Vietnam War, his ongoing conflict with Boston University president John Silber, his work as a playwright, the Hollywood actors and rock musicians who read his prose and wanted to meet and work with him. The bottom line: Zinn had an unwavering commitment to unions and organization, the power of the people.
“The power of tyranny is overestimated (not in the short run, but in the long run),” Zirin quotes Zinn as saying in his preface, “and can be overcome by the unity, the determination, of apparently powerless people.”
“When we were on stage,” Zirin told me, “he would speak about things he was a central player in, but he would kind of leave himself out of the narrative, partly out of humility but I also think that’s the political training of people who came up in the 1930s during the Depression. They’re always thinking about the movement, not about themselves.
Still, Zirin added, “Howard had so many great stories that he would tell about his life offstage. So, I really wanted to tell his story because I felt truly that it hadn’t been told and I wanted to learn about him. I wanted to invest in it.”
What did Judaism mean to Zinn and, now, to Zirin? “Judaism was expressed through the pursuit of knowledge, of questioning established truths, and always standing with the underdog,” said Zirin. “It is why he felt strongly that Jews of conscience needed to advocate for the Palestinian people. I am inspired by this commitment to tikkun olam and I share his approach to how we need to apply our faith: as voices against apartheid and genocide.”
Zinn’s cultural identification as a Jew often emerged in his sense of humor that Zirin calls his “secret sauce.”
“It’s not like I think Howard Zinn was like Billy Crystal with a history book,” Zirin said. “His ability was to keep an audience listening through humor. [He could] apply history to the present and make people think about it, bring it alive in present terms and then Howard had that third layer, that third gear, where he could be funny and affable and work that twinkle in his eye and that smile and keep an audience focused. I think that allowed him to speak in a lot of diverse circumstances.”
Zinn, of course, attracted negative heat, too. In 2020, President Donald Trump said, “Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.” Zinn caught flak not just from the expected bastions of the far-right but also from other historians. The latter, Zirin says, were critical of Zinn mostly out of jealousy. Zinn was popular and well-read; they were not.
“He was able to break out of the academy and impact the world,” Zirin said, “He saw academic praise meaning very little relative to the world. He took greater joy in writing 800-word columns that spoke to what was happening rather than writing another 800 -page book the likes of which a lot of academics write, these things that no one reads.”
As to the right-wing trolling, Zirin said, “I think he would have just taken that as a badge of honor. I think for Howard that just rolled off his back because of his interests, which was in teaching and seeing how what he was teaching applied to the world — he loved bringing the lessons of the street into the classroom and he loved seeing what was in the classroom applied to the streets. He was blessed to have lived in interesting times and in important places.”
The book explores Zinn’s family life, too. Zirin got co-operation and input from Zinn’s son Jeff, an activist-playwright, and his daughter, Myla, an educator and environmental advocate. Some of those stories involve their upbringing. Howard was on the road frequently, and Zirin writes that his wife Roslyn (Roz) had to play good cop and bad cop, neither role she relished.
Roz Zinn, who died at 85 from ovarian cancer in May 2008, was also an activist and artist, and though the couple remained happily married for 64 years, she lived, to an extent, in his shadow. Her death crushed him.
“Howard stayed extremely active after Roz passed and in many ways that was his therapy,” Zirin said. “He took to email voraciously. He traveled, he spoke, he did events like the ones I did with him where he could sit because, while he was still sharp, he didn’t want to stand that long. The twinkle would go out during those moments when the warmth of a crowd, or a friend, would leave the stage or his presence.”
“At the very end,” Zirin said, “he had these moments of looking very sad. How do you comprehend what it’s like to lose someone you’ve been married to for 64 years? Incomprehensible.”
Zinn died from a heart attack at 87 on Jan. 27, 2009. He’d been in a swimming pool in a Santa Monica, California hotel. He was not, as some said, swimming laps; he didn’t have the strength for that. At the memorial service at the Arlington Street Church in Boston April 23, 2010, Myla said he was standing in the pool. A pool worker pulled him out of the water and asked if Zinn wanted an ambulance. He reportedly said, “No, I’m OK.”
Zinn’s friend Noam Chomsky spoke at the service, as did Matt Damon — whose family grew up next to the Zinns in Newton, Mass. — and poet Martín Espada, who read a tribute poem written for Zinn. Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon — founding member of the SNCC Freedom Singers and Sweet Honey in the Rock, cultural historian and activist — led the crowd in singing “This Little Light of Mine” and “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho.”
Zirin told me that Zinn’s writings and words have made him less pessimistic about the world. “It irrevocably changed me,” he said. “The main effect that Howard had on my own outlook was that there are answers in history. Howard imbued me with this idea that you had to be more than angry. You had to have a sense of the world if you wanted to change it. I also really thought about how we could not just be objects but subjects of history.”
“So many people out there want the world to be a different place and are disgusted by the state of things, of what Naomi Klein describes as ‘end times fascism,’” Zirin said. “You try to imagine a sense that if you can root your ideas and even your anger in history, there’s a path out, there’s a road map out.”
The post Howard Zinn: a radical historian with a Jewish conscience appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel is revoking entry permits for U.S. activists involved in West Bank
Hannah was on her way to class on Jan. 8 when she opened her inbox and found an email from Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority. Due to a change of circumstances, it said, her authorization to enter Israel had been revoked.
“I had to read it a few times, honestly, and then I Googled it and just started crying. I was on my way to class. I was bawling,” Hannah told the Forward. Hannah asked that her last name not be published because she fears that speaking to the media could affect her ability to visit Israel in the future.
Hannah, whose boyfriend lives in Israel and who has family there, has spent almost every summer of her life in the country. She was left dumbfounded by the email. There was no explanation of the reason for the revocation, and nothing about how, or whether, she could appeal.
The closest thing to an incident she can point to came the previous July, when she joined her rabbi and a group of volunteers accompanying a Palestinian farmer during the grape harvest — a practice known as protective presence, in which foreign witnesses aim to deter settlers and soldiers from interfering. Israeli soldiers stopped the group and held them for hours. “They asked to see my passport and said they were looking to see if there was any reason to deport me,” she said. They found none, and told her she was free to go.
Hannah came up through the institutions Israel counts on to keep American Jews attached to it. In high school, Hannah was involved with hasbara fellowships, and her mother is active in her local Jewish federation. “It’s so odd that almost the more I become familiar with the place in ways that I wasn’t as a kid, and maybe less naive about it, now I don’t have the ability to be there,” she said. “I’m not welcome there anymore.”
Hannah is one of seven American Jews who told the Forward that Israel had revoked their electronic travel authorization, or ETA-IL, after they participated in protective presence activities in the West Bank.
A loose network of Jewish organizations recruits diaspora Jews for the work and frames it as an expression of Jewish values. Programs range from 10-day delegations to seasonal olive-harvest cohorts to Hineinu, Hebrew for “here we are,” a three-month placement in Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta that the Center for Jewish Nonviolence launched in 2021.
According to figures from the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, dozens of participants in its Hineinu program and other protective presence initiatives have had their authorizations revoked since the system took effect.
Israel launched ETA-IL as a pilot in June 2024 and made it mandatory for travelers from visa-exempt countries, including the United States, on Jan. 1, 2025. The application is a brief online form, usually approved automatically within minutes, that allows visa-free entry for tourism or business. It functions as Israel’s counterpart to the U.S. ESTA system, and followed Israel’s admission to the American Visa Waiver Program in 2023.
A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on individual cases or on the department’s discussions with Israeli officials, but said the Department of Homeland Security, in consultation with State, regularly reviews whether Visa Waiver Program participants meet program requirements.
Israel was admitted to the program in 2023 only after signing a memorandum of understanding committing it to treat all American citizens equally at its borders, a longstanding program requirement that had kept Israel out for years over its treatment of Palestinian American travelers.
None of those who spoke to the Forward had been arrested or charged with a crime. Some received no notice at all, which Daniel Roth, executive director of the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, said has become increasingly common. Those who did get revocation emails received identical notices citing a change of circumstances, with no explanation of the duration of the ban.
By the letter of the law, all of those whose authorizations were revoked remain eligible to make aliyah — immigrate to Israel — unless they are deemed a security threat under a provision of the Law of Return. Neither of two immigration attorneys who spoke with the Forward could recall any applicant being blocked as a security threat.
The visitors could open a file with the group Nefesh B’Nefesh and, in theory, be Israeli citizens within months. For now, they are barred from entering.
The Forward asked the Population and Immigration Authority how many ETA-IL authorizations have been revoked and on what legal basis, and the Israel Police asking whether it recommends revocations. Neither responded.
The Jewish Agency, which facilitates immigration by Jews to Israel under the Law of Return, said in a statement: “There is no connection between the ETA process and the Aliyah process. Regardless, we cannot comment on ETA refusal because we do not handle any part of that process. The criteria for eligibility for Aliyah remain unchanged.”
Change of circumstances
That Israel’s government sees protective presence workers as an adversary and target for law enforcement is no secret.
In April 2024, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ordered the creation of a police task force to handle foreign and Israeli left-wing activists in the West Bank, which he described as a team for dealing with “anarchists.”
The unit sits under the West Bank district police and works in coordination with the Population and Immigration Authority. Ben-Gvir publicly credited the immigration authority for its role in deporting 32 foreign activists in October 2025 following an olive harvest action in the northern West Bank.
Of the Jews the Forward interviewed, one described himself as an anti-Zionist. The others were liberal Zionists who said they are concerned about the rise of settler violence in the West Bank and the preservation of Israel as a liberal democratic state. They were day school and summer camp alumni. Most have family in Israel and visit regularly.
Sam Sherman, an actor and writer who lives in New York City, was in Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the southern West Bank, when he opened an email telling him that his ETA-IL had been revoked due to a change of circumstances.
He was about seven weeks into his stint with a Hineinu group, and he was not the only one. “It happened to me and a few others in my cohort … within the same hour,” Sherman said. “A few of us got the same email within minutes of each other.”
Sherman was never arrested. He describes one incident that he believes amounts to a detention in place, and otherwise a pattern of identification, soldiers, police and armed settlers photographing his passport during confrontations he says were initiated by settlers.
“We were just there hanging out with people, essentially,” he said. “But we were treated as if it was almost criminal for us to be there.”
His first reaction was confusion. “I was like, what does this mean?” he said. More experienced activists told him what it meant: once he left Israel, he would be unable to return unless he chose to make aliyah. “If I’m the wrong kind of Jew for Israel,” he said, “sure. Great.”
Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the CEO of T’ruah, a rabbinic human rights organization that has been sending American clergy to the West Bank for years. She said the revocations cut against Israel’s founding promise.
“The promise of Israel is that it’s going to be a refuge and a home for Jews everywhere in the world, not just for Jews with certain political opinions,” said Jacobs. “Israel should be the place in the world that is safest for Jews, no matter what your religious practices are, what country you’re coming from and what your political views are.”
Another participant in Hineinu said she never received an email at all.
Nina, who asked to be identified by her first name only, had a valid authorization when she left the country for a weekend in Cyprus to reset her tourist visa. When she tried to re-enter Israel, she said, she was held at the border and denied entry.
“I never got an email that my ETA had been revoked,” she recounted. “I never got any correspondence at all, and I never got anything written, that said that ETA had been canceled or revoked or anything.” Hours later she resubmitted the application from her phone and got an automatic rejection.
‘Nothing’s out of the question’
Critics of the volunteers say it is simply a law enforcement matter.
Naomi Kahn, director of the international division at Regavim, a right-wing Israeli legal advocacy group that campaigns against unauthorized Palestinian construction in the West Bank and lobbies for demolitions, said some of the accompaniment activity takes place in closed military zones and active IDF firing zones.
“It should not be considered unusual when a sovereign state chooses to deny entry to people whose declared intention is to break the law,” Kahn said. “It should come as no surprise when tourists are disinvited when they break the law. I don’t think this raises eyebrows anywhere else in the world.”
Closed military zones have become a point of contention between activists and the Israeli military. In late October 2025, two American Jewish women, Rachel Beth Flamholz and Leila Stillman-Utterback, were deported and banned from Israel for 10 years after entering a closed military zone imposed on the Palestinian village of Burin the same day they had arranged to pick olives there.
“In my experience, closed military zones are used as a tool to clear Palestinians and those supporting Palestinians, including us, from an area,” Roth said, “and by and large, to leave space for Israeli settlers to do whatever it is they want.”
Jacobs draws a distinction between conduct and status. A tourist who commits a crime in Israel is subject to Israeli law, she said, as a tourist would be subject to the law of any place they were visiting. That, she argues, is not what is happening here. None of the volunteers were charged with anything.
“These are the best of the best,” Jacobs said. “These are people who are devoting, in some cases, months or more of their lives, that they could be spending doing anything, to trying to make Israel a more just place for both Jews and Palestinians. And that’s exactly who Israel should want to be standing by and supporting.”
This fall, some will head to the West Bank as part of Protect the Harvest, an initiative run by an international coalition of Palestinian, American, Israeli and Jewish organizations responding to an invitation from Palestinian farmers. The campaign runs in week-long cohorts from mid-October through mid-November.
T’ruah is bringing a clergy delegation from Oct. 18 to 23, ending four days before Israel’s national elections. Jacobs expects many American rabbis on the ground, some bringing their own congregants.
“I don’t know what the Israeli government is going to do,” she said. “But I think if they decide they’re going to start deporting American rabbis, that would basically be picking a very big public fight with the American Jewish community.” Even people who haven’t been paying attention, she said, will be furious.
Asked whether she thought it was actually possible that an American rabbi could be deported during the harvest, she did not rule it out. “Nothing’s out of the question,” she said.
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