Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar (left) and Bolivian Foreign Minister Fernando Armayo (right) sign a Joint Communiqué in Washington, DC on Dec. 9, 2025, formally restoring diplomatic relations between the two countries. Photo: Screenshot

Israel is further expanding its diplomatic and economic presence in Latin America, formally restoring relations with Bolivia and signing a free trade agreement with Costa Rica as the Isaac Accords begin to take shape.

On Tuesday, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar and Bolivian Foreign Minister Fernando Armayo signed a Joint Communiqué in Washington, DC, formally restoring diplomatic relations between their countries after two years of severed relations amid the war in Gaza.

“Today, we are ending the long, unnecessary chapter of separation between our two nations,” the top Israeli diplomat said during a speech at the signing ceremony. 

“Following the election of [Bolivian] President Rodrigo Paz, I am pleased to announce that Israel and Bolivia are renewing diplomatic relations,” he continued. 

Israel and Bolivia: We renewed our diplomatic relations!
We’re continuing to work. pic.twitter.com/oUtcXyyaHa

— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) December 10, 2025

During their meeting, both leaders committed to fully restoring diplomatic relations, appointing ambassadors, and fostering collaboration between government and private-sector representatives. 

They also pledged ongoing dialogue and broader cooperation in areas including agriculture, security, health, innovation, and their shared fight against organized crime and narco-terrorism.

“Bolivia, the Jewish people, and the State of Israel share a long history of true friendship,” Saar said during his speech. “Bolivia opened its doors to Jewish refugees during the Second World War when much of the world closed its gates.”

“Bolivia supported the establishment of the State of Israel in the historic 1947 UN vote,” he continued. “For many decades, our two nations enjoyed warm diplomatic relations. The renewal of our ties is an important and welcome step.”

Bolivia has also announced it will lift visa requirements for Israelis entering the country, a move the top Israeli diplomat praised as helping to “strengthen the human bridge between our peoples.”

With the official launch of the Isaac Accords by Argentina’s President Javier Milei last week, Israel has been working to expand its diplomatic and security ties across Latin America, with the new effort designed to promote government cooperation and fight antisemitism and terrorism.

Modeled after the Abraham Accords — a series of historic US-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries, this initiative aims to strengthen political, economic, and cultural cooperation between the Jewish state and Latin American governments. 

The first phase of the Isaac Accords will focus on Uruguay, Panama, and Costa Rica, where potential projects in technology, security, and economic development are already taking shape as the framework seeks to deepen cooperation in innovation, commerce, and cultural exchange.

On Monday, Israel and Costa Rica signed a free trade agreement covering goods, services, and investments, advancing their bilateral relations during Costa Rican Minister of Foreign Trade Manuel Tovar Rivera’s visit to Jerusalem.

Rivera also announced that Costa Rica will open an office for trade and investment innovation in Jerusalem next year.

The newly signed agreement will eliminate over 90 percent of tariffs, providing broad access for Israeli industrial and agricultural products to the Costa Rican market, while also reducing import costs on a wide range of goods, from food and medical equipment to industrial tools.

“This agreement opens significant new avenues for both Costa Rica and Israel,” Rivera said during a speech at the signing ceremony.

“It enhances access to high-quality Costa Rican goods and services while creating a mutually beneficial platform for collaboration in high-technology industries, premium agribusiness and specialized services,” he continued. 

Building on the renewed momentum in diplomatic engagement across Latin America, Israel is expanding and strengthening its bilateral relations with several countries in the region. 

Argentina announced plans to relocate its embassy to Jerusalem next spring, fulfilling a promise made last year as the two countries continue to deepen their ties.

Last week, Ecuador opened an additional diplomatic mission in Jerusalem, a move that Saar hailed as a “milestone” in strengthening their bilateral relations.

Paraguay, Guatemala, and Honduras, all of which have previously relocated their embassies to Jerusalem, have reaffirmed their support for Israel and signaled intentions to deepen future cooperation.

When her mother Clara dies suddenly of a stroke, Emily is left with her ashes and a note to scatter them on Sylvia’s farm in Chandler, Oklahoma. There’s a problem: Emily has no idea who Sylvia is and has never been to Oklahoma before in her life — and as far as she knows, neither had her mom.

Oklahoma Samovar, a new play opening at La MaMa’s Downstairs Theater, starts at the end of Emily’s trip to find Sylvia, who turns out to be an old woman with a bit of a memory issue and the sister of Emily’s grandmother Rose. When Emily asks why her mother would want her ashes left on the farm, Sylvia launches into their family history. She goes all the way back to 1887, when Emily’s great-grandparents Jake and Hattie fled persecution in Latvia with nothing but a feather bed and a samovar, and unfolds the stories of each generation over the play’s acts.

While most immigration stories usually focus on big cities, Oklahoma Samovar explores the little-known history of Jews in the Midwest in a deeply-human way. It is a tender portrayal of an immigrant family struggling to survive and figuring out their identity over multiple generations. Instead of villanizing or lionizing its characters, Oklahoma Samovar presents people with all their complexities, allowing them moments of moral failing while portraying them with empathy.

A fictional drama based on her own family history, playwright Alice Eve Cohen considers the play her “foundational work.”

“I’ve truly been working on Oklahoma Samovar since the day I met my Aunt Sylvia,” she said. “I met her in 1987. And I was so enthralled and inspired by her stories that I started writing about it probably the next day.”

After putting on a workshop production of the play in 2007, Cohen shelved Oklahoma Samovar to focus on other projects, including authoring two memoirs, writing several other plays, and teaching playwriting and creative writing at The New School. Over a decade later, she returned to working on Oklahoma Samovar and submitted it to the National Jewish Playwriting Contest, where it won in 2021.

“My very first draft of this play was almost verbatim documentation of the stories that Sylvia told me,” Cohen said. “It was very romantic. It was very fanciful. It was almost all positive, and there was no conflict.”

While some elements of the original play remain — such as the use of puppetry, which depicts long boat voyages and dream sequences — the new iteration is not an idealized version of the American Dream. Its characters are complex and flawed to the point that Jake kills someone trying to secure a home for his family during the Oklahoma Land Runs.

“I knew that I had incomplete stories,” Cohen said about the original conversation that inspired the play’s events.

“I’ve done research into the Oklahoma Land Run, which Sylvia described in the most romantic way,” Cohen went on. “In fact, the land run was a violent land grab, it was a theft of land from the Native Americans who had been forced to relocate to what was then called Indian territory.” Cohen explained. “I took this kernel of the story that Sylvia remembered from her childhood, her dad saying, ‘I lost my thumb, but I kept the farm,’ and I realized there was a shootout.”

Although Cohen’s exact version of events is imagined, the harsh depiction of the Land Runs encapsulates the brutality of the immigrant experience and the family’s desperate actions in pursuit of starting their lives in America.

Immigrants also had to choose between assimilating and preserving tradition, a conflict that is exacerbated for Hattie and Jake when they settle in Chandler, an Oklahoma town with virtually no Jewish community. Hattie struggles to connect with her new environment, concerned about the lack of a rabbi and a minyan, but Jake wholeheartedly embraces a new, goyish American cowboy persona. He even adopts a signature catchphrase: “Hot Diggety Damn!”

This struggle with identity follows their oldest daughter Rose into adulthood. Having grown up learning the Bible at Chandler’s Presbyterian Sunday School, Rose is unprepared for the level of Orthodoxy her new mother-in-law expects of her. A Russian immigrant who believes Rose’s lifestyle amounts to heresy, Mrs. Giventer spends her days dismissing Rose as a convert and poor excuse for a wife.

Cohen says these characters serve as a reflection of the diverse experiences in the Jewish diaspora. “They all practice Judaism in different ways. They’ve assimilated in different ways,” Cohen said. “They’ve either held on to their original accents and their original Yiddish language, or they have intentionally spurned them and Americanized as quickly and as completely as they can.”

“When family members from these different traditions and different positions in the spectrum of American Judaism meet, it isn’t always easy,” Cohen said. “There are often huge clashes.”

Even though virtually all the characters of Oklahoma Samovar are Jewish, Cohen does not imagine Jews to be her only audience.

“I think there are universal themes that relate to immigration and assimilation that anybody of any culture can relate to,” Cohen said. “While the play is set in Oklahoma and in New York and in Latvia, I think its stories transcend geographic boundaries.”

And perhaps it will inspire others to find the complicated truths that lie in the sweet family stories they’ve always heard.

Oklahoma Samovar is playing at LaMaMa’s Downstairs Theater through December 21st.

The post What happens when you’re the only Jewish family in Oklahoma? appeared first on The Forward.

Students attend a protest encampment in support of Palestinians at University of California, Berkeley during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Berkeley, US, April 23, 2024. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect

The University of California, Berkeley has agreed to pay a five-figure sum to settle claims that it unlawfully denied a teaching position to a dance instructor because she is Israeli, both the victim’s legal counsel, provided by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, and the school announced on Wednesday.

As previously reported by The Algemeiner,  Dr. Yael Nativ, who taught in UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies as a visiting professor in 2022, was denied another appointment in the department because a hiring official allegedly believed that her employment would be unpalatable to students and faculty in the aftermath of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing Gaza war.

“My dept [sic] cannot host you for a class next fall,” the official allegedly told Nativ in a WhatsApp message. “Things are very hot here right now and many of our grad students are angry. I would be putting the dept and you in a terrible position if you taught here.”

Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD) later initiated an investigation into Nativ’s denial after the professor wrote an opinion essay which publicly accused the school of cowardice and violations of her civil rights. OPHD determined that a “preponderance of evidence” proved Nativ’s claim, but school officials went on to ignore the professor’s requests for an apology and other remedial measures, including sending her a renewed invitation to teach dance.

After nearly two years, the situation had remained unresolved, prompting Nativ to file suit and seek damages as well as the apology UC Berkeley refused to pronounce at the time. Now, just under four months after the filing of Nativ’s complaint, the two parties have reached an amiable settlement and disclosed its terms in a joint statement.

“As part of the settlement, UC Berkeley has agreed to continue to strictly enforce the University of California’s Anti-Discrimination Policy and ‘respond promptly and equitably to reports’ of prohibited conduct as defined in that policy,” the statement said. “Dr. Nativ will receive a personal apology from UC Berkeley’s Chancellor Rich Lyons and monetary damages in the amount of $60,000, a portion of which she has decided to donate to a charitable organization.”

The statement added that Nativ will be invited to teach the course she was denied, a major victory for the professor and a positive, if unusual, act of reconciliation between an employer and employee who were only recently contesting claims of discrimination in civil court.

“The excellence of Dr. Nativ’s teaching was never in question, and UC Berkeley appreciates Dr. Nativ’s willingness to teach the course despite the discrimination that OPHD found to have occurred,” the statement added.

In her own statement, Nativ said, “Incidents of discrimination of any kind must have no place within environments dedicated to learning and the free exchange of ideas. It is my hope that this outcome contributes to strengthening these commitments for all scholars and students.”

UC Berkeley was the site of one the most shocking antisemitic incidents in recent memory in the months which followed the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.

In February 2024, a mob of hundreds of pro-Palestinian students and non-students shut down an event at UC Berkeley featuring an Israeli soldier, forcing Jewish students to flee to a secret safe room as the protesters overwhelmed campus police.

Footage of the incident showed a frenzied mass of anti-Zionist agitators banging on the doors of Zellerbach Hall while an event featuring Israeli reservist Ran Bar-Yoshafat — who visited the university to discuss his military service during Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion — took place inside. The mob then stormed the building — breaking glass windows in the process, according to reports in the Daily Wire — and precipitated school officials’ decision to evacuate the area.

During the infiltration of Zellerbach, one of the mob — which was recruited by Bears for Palestine, which had earlier proclaimed its intention to cancel the event — spit on a Jewish student and called him a “Jew,” pejoratively.

“You know what I was screamed at? ‘Jew, you Jew, you Jew,’ literally right to my face,” the student who was attacked said to a friend. “Some woman — then she spit at me.”

Shaya Keyvanfar, a student, told The Algemeiner that her sister was spit on and that the incident was unlike any she had ever witnessed.

“Once the doors were closed, the protesters somehow found a side door and pushed it open, and a few of them managed to get in, and once they did, they tried to open the door for the rest of them,” Keyvanfar said. “It was really scary. They were pounding on the windows outside — they broke one — they spit at my sister and others. They called someone a dirty Jew. It was eerie.”

In July, the chancellor of UC Berkeley described a professor who cheered Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities as a “fine scholar” during a congressional hearing held at Capitol Hill.

Richard K. Lyons, who assumed the chancellorship in July 2024, issued the unmitigated praise while being questioned by members of the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which summoned him and the chief administrators of two other major universities to interrogate their handling of the campus antisemitism crisis.

Lyons stumbled into the statement while being questioned by Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI), who asked the chancellor to describe the extent of his relationship and correspondence with Professor Ussama Makdisi, who tweeted in February 2024 that he “could have been one of those who broke through the siege on Oct. 7.”

“What do you think the professor meant,” McClain asked Lyons, to which the chancellor responded, “I believe it was a celebration of the terrorist attack on Oct. 7.” McClain proceeded to ask if Lyons discussed the tweet with Makdisi or personally reprimanded him, prompting an exchange of remarks which concluded with Lyons saying, “He is a fine scholar.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.