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The synagogue means something special to Southern Jews — which makes the Mississippi arson that much darker
The arsonist who confessed to burning a synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi, told police he targeted the building because of its “Jewish ties.”
What an odd phrase, I thought. As if there was nothing more than a flimsy connection between the building he aimed to destroy and the living tradition contained within it.
For those of us raised in one of the small Jewish communities scattered across the South, nothing could be further from reality. I grew up in Louisiana, attending a Reform temple that was very similar to the one the arsonist called a “synagogue of Satan.” Baton Rouge, like Jackson, isn’t a small town, but both cities’ Jewish communities aren’t big enough for a day school or a kosher butcher. There’s no mikveh, and no chevra kadisha. Like so many other tiny communities scattered throughout the region, we did not have a Jewish Community Center, a Jewish bookstore or a Jewish museum.
And so our synagogues had to be everything to everyone, all at once.
We listened to the blast of the shofar in the same auditorium where we giggled late into the night at youth group lock-ins. We learned our first Hebrew words in the same classroom where we organized against KKK Grand Wizard David Duke’s political campaigns. We played fierce basketball games against each other in the same space where we came together to mourn the murder of Yitzhak Rabin.
The synagogue gave us our only access to kosher corned beef sandwiches and parent-approved teenage crushes; our only chance to sit in a sukkah or watch our fingernails glow in the flames of a Havdalah candle; our only opportunity to hear firsthand testimony from Holocaust survivors.
As Jewish minorities in the Bible Belt, some of us encountered open antisemitism; others simply learned what it meant to feel subtly, but perpetually, like an outsider. We were navigating a world where “Merry Christmas” was the default greeting and our sports teams recited the Lord’s Prayer before every game. Where we had to explain, again, why we missed school for Yom Kippur. The synagogue was where we went to feel completely at ease in our Jewish skin.
This is another part of what makes Southern Judaism so unique: just like their members, the synagogues themselves form an incredibly tight-knit network, so we have all spent time in one another’s sanctuaries and social halls. Reading coverage of the fire, I was bemused but not surprised to learn that the temple president is an old camp friend.
Decades ago, I celebrated friends’ bar and bat mitzvahs at Beth Israel and spent weekends there for North American Federation of Temple Youth conclaves. Now, my daughter is invited to those friends’ children’s rites of passage, sitting in the same pews where we once whispered loudly to each other behind tattered prayerbooks. For so many of us, Sunday’s fire was not just another horrific act of antisemitism. It was an attack on our very identity, an attempt to destroy the place where it has been formed, practiced and passed down for generations.
But Southern synagogues have survived violence and trauma before. And in the wake of this outrage, I take comfort in the fact that so often, when tragedy has stricken, we have been comforted and cared for not only by fellow Jews across the region but also by allies of other faiths.
When a hurricane rendered my childhood synagogue unusable, the Baptist church next door offered us their space for High Holiday services. Without being asked, they draped large cloths over the crosses in the sanctuary so that we would feel more comfortable. After the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, the imam of the local mosque reached out to our rabbi to invite the congregation to an interfaith service of prayer and peace.
And so it has been in the aftermath of the Jackson fire. Within hours, faith leaders from across the city had reached out, offering the dislocated Jewish community their spaces for services. Outside the charred entrance, bouquets of flowers lay on the ground. Someone left a simple note: “I’m so very sorry.”
The arsonist may have aimed to sever the “Jewish ties” Jackson Jews have to their community’s physical home, to the holy books and sacred artifacts kept inside it. But he grossly underestimated so much: our long legacy of resilience; the unbreakable commitment we have to our faith and our values; and most importantly, the Jewish — and Southern — tradition of caring for one’s neighbor, of standing arm in arm to overcome injustice and hatred.
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Vanderbilt launches inquiry into instructor after math question about Israeli occupation draws criticism
(JTA) — Vanderbilt University has launched an inquiry into a mathematics lecturer whose classroom exercise about Palestinian territory drew criticism from the activist group StopAntisemitism.
Tekin Karadağ, a senior lecturer at the university’s department of mathematics, drew the ire of the antisemitism watchdog after it obtained a slide from one of his lectures that used a pro-Palestinian protest slogan and suggested that Israel was shrinking the Palestinian territory.
“Assume Palestine as a state with a rectangular land shape. There is the Mediterranean Sea on the west and the Jordan River on the east,” read the slide. “From the river to the sea, Palestine (…) was approximately 100 km. in 1946. The land decreases by 250 sq. km per year, due to the occupation by Israel. How fast is the width of the land decreasing now?”
Karadǎg, a Turkish national who received his PhD from Texas A&M University in 2021, included the question under “examples related to the popular issues” in a survey of calculus class, according to StopAntisemitism, which wrote in a post on X that Karadǎg was “bringing his anti-Israel, antisemitic bias into his classroom.”
In a statement shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Vanderbilt said that the content had been removed and that an inquiry had been launched into Karadağ.
“The university has received reports alleging a member of the faculty engaged in unprofessional conduct related to content shared during course instruction,” the school said. “The content in question has been removed, and a formal inquiry has been initiated consistent with relevant university policy.”
In recent years, rhetoric about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on college campuses has grown increasingly fraught, with professors’ commentary on the region sparking heavy scrutiny and, at times, disciplinary measures when their universities have determined that they exceeded the bounds of academic freedom. A recent report by Columbia University’s antisemitism task force found that students frequently experienced pro-Palestinian advocacy in classes entirely unrelated to the Middle East — such as dance or math classes.
The inquiry was not the first time that Vanderbilt took swift action against the expression of pro-Palestinian sentiments on its campus.
In March 2024, the university, which has roughly 1,100 Jewish undergraduate students, was among the first universities to expel students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. This year, the school’s antisemitism “grade” from the Anti-Defamation League was bumped up from a “C” to an “A.”
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Hugh Laurie rejects ‘Zionist’ label after his tribute to Israeli ‘Tehran’ producer sparks social media firestorm
(JTA) — British actor Hugh Laurie pushed back against being labeled as a “Zionist” after facing a wave of online criticism for posting a tribute to the Israeli producer of the hit television show “Tehran.”
“Dana Eden, who co-created and produced ‘Tehran’, died on Sunday, seemingly by her own hand,” Laurie, who played a nuclear inspector in the show’s third season, tweeted last week. “It’s a terrible thing. She was brilliant, and funny, and an exceptional leader. Love and condolences to all who knew her.”
The seemingly innocuous post eulogizing Eden, 52, who was found dead while filming the latest season of the hit Apple TV+ series in Athens last week, quickly drew a volley of backlash on social media.
“She was part of the occupation force’s propaganda arm,” wrote one user in response to Laurie’s post. “What a shame, didn’t expect you to be a closet Zionist.” Another wrote that Eden “creates propaganda for Israel so that they can kill kids more effectively. People should have no sympathy for her.”
The award-winning series, which follows a young Israeli Mossad agent in Iran, was produced by the Israeli public broadcaster Kan and purchased by Apple TV+ in 2020 for roughly $20 million. Eden’s death, for which no cause has been announced, occurred during production of the show’s fourth season, which had already stalled following Oct. 7.
Laurie is not the first actor to spurn the “Zionist” label, as entertainers in recent years have increasingly faced pressure to declare their views on Israel. In December, Jewish actress Odessa A’zion pushed back on claims she was a Zionist after an image of her wearing an IDF shirt as a teenager circulated online.
On Friday, Laurie, who previously starred in the Emmy Award-winning medical drama “House,” shot back at the criticism.
“Nothing I have ever said or done could lead a sane person to believe that I am a Zionist,” wrote Laurie in a post on X. “However. If someone exults in the death of a friend of mine, yes I will block them. If you wouldn’t do the same in my position, you can f—ck off too.”
Laurie’s subsequent post also drew outcry, but this time from pro-Israel influencers who lamented the actor’s disavowal of the Zionist label, calling him “weak” and a “pathetic weasel” in the replies.
Freelance journalist Angela Epstein replied to Laurie’s post, writing, “Not Hugh Laurie as well. I thought he was one of the decent ones….”
“God almighty, why does no one understand English any more?” wrote Laurie in response to Epstein’s critique. “I have not spoken or written a word that would indicate pro or anti Zionism. That’s what those words mean. Blimey.”
The post Hugh Laurie rejects ‘Zionist’ label after his tribute to Israeli ‘Tehran’ producer sparks social media firestorm appeared first on The Forward.
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German anti-Zionist group’s plan to protest at Buchenwald memorial over kaffiyeh ban sparks outrage
(JTA) — An anti-Zionist group in Germany has drawn condemnation after it announced plans for a protest against the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial in response to a ban on pro-Palestinian symbols at the site.
The group Kufiyas in Buchenwald claims that the memorial has become a place of “historical revisionism and genocide denial.” It announced a demonstration for April 11, the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp.
“Instead of honoring the persecuted and resolutely opposing every genocide, the memorial spreads Israeli propaganda and provides the ideological ammunition for the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” the group says on its website.
Buchenwald, one of the first concentration camps built by the Nazis and one of the largest in the country, was the site of the murder of roughly 56,000 male prisoners, including 11,000 Jews, from 1937 to 1945.
Last year, a German court ruled that the concentration camp had a right to refuse entry to visitors who wear a keffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian headscarf that has been adopted by pro-Palestinian protesters. The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit by a woman who attempted to wear the scarf to an event commemorating the concentration camp’s liberation.
The woman, who was only identified by her first name, Anna, posted a testimony about her actions on the Kufiyas in Buchenwald Instagram page in which she said she was inspired by the resistance of Buchenwald prisoners.
“Our fundamental principle is this: criticism of the Israeli government’s policies, settlement policy, or actions in the Gaza Strip is legitimate,” said the Buchenwald Foundation’s director Jens-Christian Wagner in a statement outlining the memorial’s protocols. “However, it becomes antisemitic when used to relativize the Holocaust and discredit its victims as perpetrators. We will not tolerate this at the Buchenwald Memorial.”
The campaign against the memorial has been signed onto by a host of pro-Palestinian groups, including the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the German group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, which has defended the protest on X as evidence of what “commemorating past German crimes has to do with rejecting current ones.”
In a post on Instagram announcing the protest earlier this month, the Kufiyas in Buchenwald group wrote that it would hold a “public protest” in Weimar, the German city located nearby the concentration camp. The group also said it planned to host lectures and a “tour that vividly illustrates the events in the former concentration camp.”
It was unclear whether the protest is intended to take place outside the memorial itself. Kufiyas in Buchenwald did not immediately respond to an inquiry from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the location of the protest.
The protest quickly drew condemnation from German leaders, including the country’s antisemitism czar Felix Klein, who told the Swiss outlet Neue Zürcher Zeitung that the protest marked a “new low point in the unfortunately all-too-common reversal of perpetrator and victim roles.”
Michael Panse, the commissioner for combatting antisemitism for the German state Thuringia, where Weimar is located, told the outlet that the protest was “tasteless and historically ignorant.”
The protests also drew condemnation from the European Jewish Congress, which wrote in a post on X that the demonstration represents a “deeply troubling instrumentalization of Holocaust remembrance.”
“Holocaust memorial sites are places of solemn reflection and respect for the victims of National Socialism,” the post continued. “They must never be exploited to promote agendas that deny Israel’s legitimacy or glorify those who perpetrate violence against Jews.”
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