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The fuzzy, neurotic, unmistakably Jewish legacy of cartoonist Ed Koren
(JTA) — The other day I was in a kosher Chinese restaurant and I noticed an older white guy happily eating alone. He had white shaggy beard and white shaggy hair tucked under a ball cap reading “You had me at coffee.” He looked like a former City College professor who was thoroughly enjoying his retirement.
In other words, he looked like an Ed Koren cartoon.
Koren, who died last Friday at 87, published well over 1,000 cartoons in The New Yorker magazine, starting in 1962. His drawings were instantly recognizable, featuring fuzzy, lumpy, big-nosed people who looked vaguely like gentle animals, and fuzzy, lumpy, big-nosed animals that looked vaguely like amiable people.
His subject matter was also consistent: Middle-class, slightly neurotic characters whose challenges were as minor as they were familiar to the New Yorker’s target readers. In one, set in a restaurant, a well-dressed couple is interrupted at their meal by a waitress who explains, “We think it’s terribly important that you meet the people responsible for the food you are eating tonight.” Behind her is a crowd of farmers, along with a turkey and a cow.
In another, set in a playground, a little girl is eating an enormous ice cream cone. “My parents decriminalized sugar,” she tells her friends.
The New York Times, reviewing an exhibit of his work, once described him as the “poet laureate” of the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The same article also described the neighborhood as “the home of overeducated, comfortable but not super rich liberals and the psychotherapists who treat their garden-variety neuroses.”
I hesitate to lay too much Jewish significance on artists or writers who didn’t make much of their own Jewish identities, but many of Koren’s characters seemed Jewish even if he didn’t say so. And Koren, born to Jewish parents in Manhattan on Dec. 15, 1935, seemed never to have said so. The few references to his Jewish background that I found came via his friends, like Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s, who once told a newspaper, “Like Ed, I’m a Jewish guy from the suburbs of New York City.” (Koren grew up in Mount Vernon, in Westchester County.)
Instead, his characters inhabited a world defined by familiar markers of a white, secular, upper middle class New York: Zabar’s tote bags, fussy restaurants, overstuffed apartments, hovering parents, pampered pets. Not explicitly Jewish, but unmistakably so, like the Upper West Side itself.
Koren attended Horace Mann School in the Bronx, and edited the Jester, the student humor magazine at Columbia College. After graduation he worked odd jobs, then got a Master of Fine Arts degree at Pratt and taught printmaking, drawing and design courses at Brown University for 13 years. When he wasn’t drawing cartoons (“I couldn’t survive as a cartoonist, frankly,” he once explained) he did illustrations for other magazines, books and advertisers, and made prints that were shown in gallery shows.
He became a full-time resident of Vermont in 1982, but even his cartoons set in the countryside often featured city dwellers adjusting — clumsily — to rural life. (A pair of hikers are stuck in a tree as a pair of furry beasts shake the trunk. The man says to the woman, “Tell them how hard we’ve worked to protect their habitat.”)
Despite the city’s changes, Koren cartoons still come alive on Amsterdam Avenue and in Riverside Park. Bearded, older dads pushing toddlers in strollers. Vaguely bohemian women walking dogs who look just like them. Precocious tots already thinking about their college essays.
“I’m a social historian in a funny way, I guess. Or, looking at it another way, an armchair anthropologist,” Koren told an interviewer in 2012. “What I find funny is the formulaic way in which people go about their lives and the absurd, silly things they do — unreflectively, unthinkingly, intensely, humorlessly. All those things intrigue me. It’s an endless well of delight and absurdity.”
All of which is to say that some people contribute to the Jews’ self-understanding without, like Koren, wearing their Jewishness on their sleeves or anywhere else. I recently covered an exhibit of Yiddish holdings from the library at the Jewish Theological Seminary. There are cartoons on display that show Jewish immigrants as they were at the turn of the 20th century – peddlers, rabbis, cobblers, garment workers. Perhaps 100 years from now certain kinds of New York Jews of the late 20th and early 21st century will be represented by an Ed Koren cartoon.
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EU seeks to advance trade ban on Israeli settlements
(JTA) — The European Union could be leaning toward banning trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Foreign ministers debated various tactics to respond to the settlements on Monday at their monthly council meeting in Brussels, against the backdrop of rising violence by settlers and efforts by the Israeli government to expand settlements in Palestinian territories.
In a press conference following the meeting, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said one possibility had stood out.
“The option that got the most support was banning the trade with illegal settlements,” she said. All 27 member states consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank to violate international law.
Kallas added, “We tasked the ambassadors to take this work forward, and probably will also have an extraordinary meeting on this.”
No decisions have yet been made, and the path forward is uncertain. Some EU member nations favor aggressive action against the settlements, while others are unlikely to back any measures that take aim at Israel. A number are in the middle and have not decided whether they support trade bans.
The level of agreement between European governments needed to enact a partial or full trade ban on Israeli settlements remains an open question. Kallas said it was the European Council’s legal opinion that voting on trade issues called for a qualified majority, meaning that 15 out of 27 states would have to vote in favor, representing at least 65% of the EU population.
But she also acknowledged that legal experts disagreed about how much backing was needed for a trade ban. “You can always find different lawyers who come up with different ideas,” she said.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar accused Kallas of an “obsessive campaign against Israel” in a post on X. “There was no consensus. There was no qualified majority. In fact, there was no majority at all,” he wrote, adding, “Tricks like this do nothing to advance our shared interests.”
The EU has hotly debated measures against Israel as settlements in the West Bank have expanded and settler violence has sharply intensified over recent years. The Israeli NGOs Peace Now and Kerem Navot said in a report last week that “the current Israeli government has advanced de facto annexation of the West Bank at an unprecedented pace.”
The ministers considered measures including a stricter export licensing system, higher tariffs and a partial or outright ban on goods produced over the pre-1967 lines. The options were first presented in a paper last week by the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, as pressure mounted from European governments.
Kallas said these potential moves were not “options against Israel,” but “options against the illegal settlements that undermined the two-state solution.” She told reporters before the meeting that member states had been pressing for a trade ban on Israeli settlements, saying, “Everyone agrees that the situation in the West Bank is really intolerable.”
In May, the EU sanctioned Israeli settlers over violence against Palestinians after Hungary’s new government, led by Peter Magyar, gave its approval and allowed the states to reach a consensus.
To protest the Gaza war, the commission last year proposed suspending the EU’s free trade agreement with Israel as set out under the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the cornerstone of economic and political cooperation between Europe and Israel. The proposal was not advanced because it lacked the majority support of 15 member states.
The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, accounting for 33.1% of its imports and 29.4% of its exports in 2025, according to a summary on the European Commission website, which did not provide data on settler goods. The free trade agreement does not apply to goods originating from Israeli businesses located over the pre-1967 lines.
Revoking the association agreement requires unanimous approval from the EU’s 27 member states, while a partial suspension, such as freezing the free trade agreement, calls for a qualified majority. Germany, Italy, Hungary and Czechia have consistently opposed such suspensions.
Israel’s most vocal critics in Europe, including Ireland and Spain, have pushed for suspending the association agreement along with proposing their own import bans at the national level. Ireland now holds the rotating presidency of the European Council, a six-month term that ends in December 2026.
The legal basis of trade restrictions on Israel lies at the heart of debates in the EU. Support from a qualified majority is sufficient to enact a commercial policy, while changes in the common foreign and security policy — such as sanctions — require unanimity.
Some legal scholars have argued that an EU ban on imports from Israeli settlements should be imposed as a trade measure rather than a sanction, making it easier to pass.
A group of 40 scholars said in an open letter last month to Kallas, trade chief Maroš Šefčovič and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen that a blanket ban on settlement imports had a legal basis under the EU’s common commercial policy. Claims that unanimity was needed for the prohibition were “grounded in political rather than legal considerations,” they said.
The scholars also referenced an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice in 2024, which said that Israel’s military control of Palestinian territories in the West Bank constituted an illegal occupation.
“In that regard, it should be noted that the EU Court of Justice has ruled that, in its acts, the EU is ‘bound to observe international law in its entirety,’” they said.
Daniel Mariaschin, Honorary CEO of the pro-Israel Jewish advocacy organization B’nai Brith International, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that reducing trade “would only weaken one of Europe’s most important partnerships in the region.”
“There are those within the EU who are looking for any way to undercut Israel’s international standing, and this is yet another example,” Mariaschin said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post EU seeks to advance trade ban on Israeli settlements appeared first on The Forward.
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PEN America president, defending Israel’s critics, resigns after report warns of threats to Jewish authors
(JTA) — The president of PEN America resigned over the weekend in protest of a report on boycotts targeting Jewish and Israeli authors, part of yet another round of internal division over Israel at the literary free-speech institution.
Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian-American novelist and Bard College professor, told The Atlantic he was stepping down because he believed the PEN report, “A Silent Moratorium,” failed to defend the free-speech rights of participants in the movement to boycott Israel.
“It’s the First Amendment that allows all of us to engage in boycotts, not PEN America,” Mengestu told the publication. “PEN America as a free expression organization is supposed to defend that right.”
The author did not respond to multiple Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment, but in an Instagram post Monday alluded to an interest in creating a new organization to rival the prominent nonprofit, which defends the free expression rights other writers.
In response to an interview request, PEN sent a statement to JTA saying it was “grateful” for Mengestu’s leadership and would “respect” his decision. The statement also alluded to PEN’s own past turmoil: “We tell hard stories, in politically challenging moments, about writers from a range of perspectives, even when it’s uncomfortable for us given our own recent history.”
In its report, published on its blog, PEN described “Jewish and Israeli writers who feel that the mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views.” Interview subjects include several Israel critics, as well as literary agents who assert that they face more difficulties signing Jewish authors after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and amid the subsequent war in Gaza. The report also repeatedly cited a JTA report about a 2024 viral list of “Zionist” authors to boycott.
Among other details, PEN’s report revealed that Israeli novelist Etgar Keret and public radio host Ira Glass had cancelled a planned live event in Australia over fears of threats and protest.
“This silencing and exclusion of writers is a threat to what PEN America is fundamentally committed to defending: a culture of free expression for all,” according to the report.
In addition to the report, PEN also altered its institutional policy toward cultural boycotts, which the organization has long opposed. Although its report on Jewish authors asserted that boycotts “threaten the free expression rights” of their targets, the revised guidelines say that the group will also defend the right of writers to participate in boycotts.
Mengestu’s resignation comes at a perilous moment for Jews facing cultural boycotts, both within the standard-bearers of PEN and elsewhere. PEN’s Jewish former longtime CEO stepped down in 2024 following months of blowback from rank-and-file authors who felt the organization was insufficiently critical of Israel and caused PEN to cancel a festival for global authors.
Since the leadership change, PEN leadership has published and retracted a condemnation of a boycott effort trained at an Israeli comedian and also published a report cataloguing Israel’s “cultural destruction in Gaza.”
Mengestu had assumed the role of board president in 2025. But PEN’s report about Jewish and Israeli writers on Thursday, he wrote, “makes clear that [change] will not happen.”
The Anti-Defamation League said it was “deeply troubled” by Mengestu’s resignation Monday. “Freedom of expression means opposing efforts to boycott, silence, or exclude writers because of their identity or nationality,” the organization tweeted, saying that the author’s decision to leave PEN over his objections to the report on Jewish authors “sends a chilling message.” Jewish authors also objected.
“Imagine running a free expression org and resigning because it refuses to blacklist authors based on their nationality,” the author David Zweig wrote on X, musing whether Mengestu would object to boycotting authors from his birth country: “Ethiopia doesn’t exactly have a good human rights record.”
In response to The Atlantic’s story that quoted sources from inside PEN who were critical of his resignation, Mengestu wrote a lengthy Instagram post Monday in which he stated, “This piece is about trying to suppress constitutionally protected speech,” criticized past PEN reports critical of the BDS movement, and added, “What PEN America fails to understand is that boycott is a form of dialogue.”
He announced his intention to “help make something better,” receiving affirmative comments from notable authors including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Angela Flournoy, Jewish pro-Palestinian novelist Jess Row and Pulitzer Prize-winner Benjamin Moser, author of a forthcoming history of Jewish anti-Zionism.
Other Jewish authors on the left were among those defending Mengestu’s decision to step down.
“Dinaw is one hundred percent correct that this kind of fake victim propaganda can be used to support anti-Boycott legislation which violates the First Amendment and is everywhere as popular support for Palestinians grows,” author Sarah Schulman wrote on Facebook. Calling PEN’s blog about Jews “one of those fake anti-semitism pieces,” Schulman added, “If PEN wants to survive, they have to get out of the Israel/Zionism business.”
The post PEN America president, defending Israel’s critics, resigns after report warns of threats to Jewish authors appeared first on The Forward.
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Church of England backs study of Palestinian Christian document accusing Israel of genocide
(JTA) — The Church of England’s legislative body voted Monday to encourage churches across England to engage with a document produced by Palestinian Christians that accuses Israel of genocide despite requests from Jewish organizations and Britain’s chief rabbi to reject it.
The document is titled “Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide” and is also known as Kairos II, after the Palestinian Christian movement Kairos Palestine that produced it. It describes Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide, states that Israel is a “colonial enterprise built on racism,” and says decades of “occupation,” “apartheid” and “settler colonialism” are at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The vote on Monday does not adopt the accusations as church doctrine but says the church should hear the documents as “heartfelt expressions of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians,” and to engage with them in order to better understand the conflict.
Ahead of the debate in York, several Jewish organizations expressed concerns, and Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis asked Synod members to reject the amendment. Mirvis called Kairos II “deeply concerning” and that it “risks undermining decades of careful relationship-building” between Christians and Jews.
“It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood,” he said.
Afterwards, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Phil Rosenberg, issued a statement calling the passage of the motion “highly problematic.”
“Kairos Palestine may come from a place of genuine pain, but the falsehoods and distortions of Kairos II, including its erasure of Jewish identity and experience, is a prescription for more division and not the answer to conflict in the Middle East,” he said.
“This document reflects the pain and trauma of the Palestinian people. As a pastor, I hear the cry of our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers — a cry that rises from the ruins of Gaza, and from the violence and oppression of the West Bank,” she said.
She added, ”I also hear the concerns of the chief rabbi, the co-leads of the Movement for Progressive Judaism, and the Board of Deputies, and I thank them for their honesty.” She said the church remained opposed to antisemitism and committed to safety for Israelis as well as Palestinians.
The Synod debate followed Mullally’s visit to the West Bank in June, where she met Palestinian Christian communities in Birzeit. During the visit she said, “I will use my role as Archbishop to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve.”
The debate marks the ascendance of Israel-related issues in another major church, after the Catholic Church’s Pope Leo XIV angered Jewish groups soon after being elected last year by endorsing an investigation into whether Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
The post Church of England backs study of Palestinian Christian document accusing Israel of genocide appeared first on The Forward.
