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‘The Sims’ video game adds Jewish foods, a longtime request of Jewish players
(JTA) — Players of the video game “The Sims” can now bake a challah or dish up a bowl of matzo ball soup, after updates made by the game’s creator that are designed to increase Jewish representation.
The new updates add traditional Jewish foods to the expansive menu available to users of “The Sims,” a best-selling life simulation game in which players customize characters and build homes and communities. The game’s developers periodically release expansion packs offering additional items for use in the role-playing.
On Tuesday, the developers released an update focused on one family of characters, the Calientes. But it also added Jewish foods that some users had mounted an extended campaign to secure.
“Get ready to dig in because today’s Sims Delivery Express adds matzah ball soup & challah bread to The Sims 4 recipe book for the whole family to enjoy,” the game announced on Twitter. An accompanying GIF showed a table with four loaves of challah, two covered by a tree-motif cover. The table is surrounded by diners scooping soup and speaking with their hands.
The announcement elicited gratitude from the community of players, known as Simmers, who had been pushing for Jewish additions to the game.
“The Sims team HAVE LISTENED and have finally brought Jewish food to The Sims 4!” tweeted a user who goes by HufflePom on social media. “Thank you to everyone who has liked, retweeted, commented and supported my posts over the last 462 days. We did it!”
Later, HufflePom tweeted a picture of a multicolored challah and thanked a programmer who had been working on the addition “for doing such a beautiful, thoughtful and respectful job.”
After 462 days tweeting for rep for #SimJews. Yesterday we got it! Thank you for your support it means so much to me. A massive thank you to @SimGuruBat & the rest of @TheSims team for doing such a beautiful, thoughtful, & respectful job. I share this Challah with all of you. pic.twitter.com/d9JSsM8Udf
— HufflePom (@HufflePom) May 17, 2023
HufflePom was the leader of a movement to press “The Sims” and its parent company, Electronic Arts, to add more Jewish options to the game.
“Sims” players have long come up with creative workarounds to permit Jewish practice in the game, such as letting their Sims keep kosher by changing their characters’ traits to “vegetarian.” Some players let their Sims celebrate Shabbat by baking bread and setting it on a table and lighting decorative candles. Players who use “custom content” modifications not created or endorsed by the game developers have also long created Jewish content for The Sims, such as kippahs, other versions of menorahs, chuppahs, Torahs, shofars, mezuzahs and dreidels. Some have Sims performing Jewish rituals, such as stomping on a glass at a wedding.
But other than a menorah that permitted players to light individual candles for each night of Hanukkah, there was no Jewish content provided by the game’s creator. HufflePom and others had noted gaps in other additions over time: An expansion set aimed at providing culturally diverse wedding options, for example, did not include a chuppah, or Jewish wedding canopy.
Neither HufflePom nor the programmer responded to requests for comment on Wednesday.
An online petition launched last year by another Sims user noted HufflePom’s advocacy. “For over a year, Simmer HufflePom has been asking for Jewish representation in The Sims 4 by adding Jewish head coverings and food like challa, babka, hamantashen and brisket,” said the petition, which drew nearly 800 signatures. “This has been done for other cultures like Muslims and it’s important for all cultures to feel represented in their beloved life simulation game.”
Some people who signed the petition said they were Jewish and wanted to have more true-to-life options when they played the game.
“I am Jewish and am tired of not being able to have Jewish Sims,” wrote a signer named Michelle Jackson. “Stuck eating just turkey or fish during grand meals.”
But others said their support for the Jewish expansion was less about their own identity than about an abiding belief that their favorite game should offer flexibility for users of all backgrounds.
“Everyone deserves representation. We need more cultural items and gameplay so people from anywhere can play their own lives because that has always been what the Sims is about,” a signer named Madison Graham wrote in November. “We did it with skin tones and pronouns, we can do it for Jewish rep too. No rep is too much or needless.”
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The post UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
The post Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’ appeared first on The Forward.