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This Jewish farmer is harvesting corn — and planting a synagogue — in the Illinois prairie
STERLING, ILLINOIS — Nik Jakobs crouched down and scooped a handful of dirt. A third-generation cattle farmer and grandson of Holocaust survivors, he rubbed the soil between his fingers, testing its weight the way his father and grandfather once did.
But this time, he wasn’t thinking about crops. He was thinking about a synagogue.
Jakobs, 40, plans to build one right here: a 3,000-square-foot sanctuary and museum near land his family has worked for decades. It will house an ark, a bimah, a Torah, and twelve stained glass windows — all rescued by Nik from a shuttered Pennsylvania synagogue, fragments of light and lineage hauled halfway across the country.
The heirlooms sit in storage for now — not as relics, but as seeds waiting to be planted. Come spring, the Jakobs family plans to break ground.
Across the American heartland, sanctuaries that once anchored small-town Jewish life are closing faster than they can be saved. Some have become yoga studios or condos or Airbnbs; others have simply fallen silent. But in Sterling, Illinois, a family of farmers is trying something radical in its simplicity: to plant one again.
For Nik, that act is as familiar as it is audacious. The question isn’t just whether these sacred objects will find a home, but whether a tradition built on movement and memory can keep reinventing itself. Even among family and friends, there are doubts — about the cost, the scale, the odds of filling pews again. But Nik shrugs them off the way he does bad weather: “You plant anyway.”
It’s a lesson passed down from his grandfather, who started the farm after the war and taught his children that survival was only the first step. You work the soil, you care for it, you hand it off. That’s how things last — not through miracles, but through maintenance.
In the meantime, this fall, as crops ripened and combines roared to life, the family pitched a tent for Rosh Hashanah services. Nearly 50 people came to pray. An offering not of corn or soy, but of continuity, sown for the generations that might come after.
In Sterling, the Jakobses braid family, farm, and faith together.
Of corn and continuity
Jakobs Bros. Farms began with a refugee and a field.
After surviving the Holocaust, Norbert Jakobs arrived in Illinois in 1949, bought some land, and began again: raising cattle, planting corn and soybeans, and teaching his sons that survival was a kind of gratitude. Over the decades, the family grew the operation, a testament to their roots in this soil.
Dave Jakobs — Norbert’s son, Nik’s father, and the keeper of those fields — sat high in the cab of his combine, slicing through a sea of corn his father originally planted. He wore a cap adorned with the farm’s logo and a blue short-sleeve shirt that matched the afternoon sky. Outside, the air shimmered with dust; inside, the cab vibrated with the engine’s low thunder.
“I pitch, he catches,” Dave said, nodding to the tractor hauling a grain cart beside us. “Teamwork. That’s how the harvest gets done.”
For two hours, as he cut through the fields, Dave’s AirPods stayed in and his mounted iPhone on the dash blinked while he fielded calls from family and farmhands. Markets, moisture, machinery. The unseen math of keeping a farm alive. But before long, the talk turned to the synagogue.
“You don’t build the baseball diamond for them to come,” he said. “You build it because you love baseball.”
The line sounded like something out of Field of Dreams, and in a way, the Jakobs’ vision isn’t so different: faith built in the middle of a cornfield, for whoever still believes enough to show up.
He knows Sterling may never attract new Jewish families. The Jakobs family isn’t naïve about that. But the project was never only for them. The building will include a museum to tell the story of Jewish life in the region — and of families like theirs who rebuilt after the Holocaust. It’s a place for their children, yes, but also for their neighbors: a living record of what endurance looks like in the Midwest.
“Being a farmer, we’re at the mercy of God,” Dave said. “You take care of the land, and it takes care of you.”
If the harvest of corn measured what they could reap, this other harvest — the synagogue they were planting now — would measure what they could hand down.
A feast and a future
Back at the house, the roar of the combine gave way to a gentler rhythm — knives scraping, oven doors clicking, the percussive sounds of another kind of harvest.
Margo Jakobs, Nik’s mom, called out from the kitchen, her voice rising above the clatter of pots and the hum of an old house. She stood barefoot on the wood floor, auburn hair brushing her shoulders, a heather-gray T-shirt with “Peaches” across the front. On the counter sat a sous-vide cooler holding the evening’s main course: prime rib for Rosh Hashanah.
She moved with the calm and choreography of someone who had done this many times before, stirring and chopping, calling out to her husband and sisters-in-law as they passed through. Every motion felt purposeful, like another line in a prayer.
Her grandfather was taken to Dachau on Kristallnacht, lined up before a Nazi guard who pointed a gun and pulled the trigger on an empty chamber. He was able to escape with a few other men, thanks to a commandant he served under in World War I. The family fled on one of the last ships from Rotterdam. “The ship before theirs was bombed,” Margo said.
They rebuilt their lives in Wisconsin: her grandparents in a paper factory and department store; her parents later opening a bakery. Now, in rural Illinois, Margo keeps those stories alive — kneading resilience into every meal she prepares.
By the time she married Dave Jakobs in 1983 and moved to Sterling, two hours west of Chicago, the town’s Jewish community was already shrinking. Temple Sholom had once thrived, its sanctuary filled by families drawn to the promise of a postwar Midwest. But when the Northwestern Steel and Wire plant closed, so did the shops and synagogue it sustained.
“It made Sterling so vibrant in the 1940s and ’50s,” Margo said. “But as the mill closed, people moved away. It’s just sad.”
When she joined the congregation, she and Dave were among the few young Jewish couples left. “We had picnics and potlucks,” she said, smiling.
Earlier this year, Temple Sholom sold its building to a church. Members packed away the Torahs and yahrzeit plaques and began meeting in a tent on the Jakobs’ farm. When word spread that they planned to build again, on a two-and-a-half-acre cornfield in the middle of town, something unexpected happened: other synagogues that were closing began sending their remnants. Prayer books and pews, windows and wine goblets, all to be replanted here.
“We’re humbled,” Margo said. “People are entrusting us with what’s precious, with their stories.”
She wanted to be clear, though, that the project isn’t just about her family. It’s about Temple Sholom and all the congregants who have kept it going. “It takes a village,” she said, wiping her hands on a towel.
In that village is Scott Selmon, the congregation’s treasurer, who has quietly kept Temple Sholom alive for decades — paying the bills, leading services when no rabbi could make it, and making sure the lights stayed on long enough for the Jakobs’ dream to take hold.
He doesn’t see it as their project alone. “It’s all of ours,” he told me. “We just happen to have good people willing to lead the way.”
Selmon spoke of Nik’s grandfather, who became a pillar of the Jewish community in Sterling. “Norbert taught us what it meant to belong somewhere,” Scott said. “To show up for each other, to make this town home.”
People carried in casseroles for Rosh Hashanah and a neighbor dropped off a basket of apples from her orchard. Selmon watched quietly. “That’s what this is,” he said. “Community. You tend it, you keep it alive.”
Standing next to Selmon was Bill Sotelo, 79, who spent three decades as a machinist at the mill. He grew up in Mexico, was raised Roman Catholic, but had always felt a pull toward Judaism. In the 1980s, he started attending Temple Sholom and volunteered whenever something needed fixing. “I helped run the water line to the bathrooms and the kitchen,” he recalled.
Sotelo and his wife, Teresa, eventually converted. Bill celebrated his bar mitzvah at the shul when he was 68. “I did a DNA test recently,” he told me with a grin, “and it turns out I’m 8% East European Jew.”
Once, this village had been vast. Downtown Sterling bustled — clothing shops, newsstands, scrap yards, law offices — many owned by Jewish families who helped build the town’s economy. The steel mill by the river powered the synagogues and storefronts across the Sauk Valley — in Sterling, Rock Falls, Dixon, Morrison, even tiny Mount Carroll and Milledgeville.
Now the mill sits quiet, but Sterling is trying to grow again: a redevelopment project, a new hotel, a sports park, green trails along the river. “Sterling’s been reinventing itself ever since the mill closed,” former Mayor Skip Lee told me. “What the Jakobs are doing — taking something old and giving it new life — fits right into that story.”
The Jews scattered across the Sauk Valley are rooting for Sterling — for this family, this field, this synagogue — to succeed.
Margo opened the oven to check dessert: a peach crisp warming beside an apple-bourbon cake. The smell of cinnamon and butter filled the kitchen, a small sweetness before the holiday began.
A tent that became a temple
The September light was fading, the fields turning the color of old straw. Out on the lawn beside the house, Nik and his brothers, Alex and Ricky, worked in rhythm, raising a canvas tent where the Rosh Hashanah service would be held. Metal poles lay scattered in the grass like the ribs of something waiting to take shape.
“It’d be easier if we had a temple,” someone joked.
In the distance, a combine droned through the corn, a harvest of another kind unfolding just beyond the prayer site. Nik carried folding chairs from the basement. Alex unspooled an extension cord from the garage to power the lamps and string lights. When they tamped the final stakes into the soil, the tent stood ready — not planted, exactly, but rooted for a day.
By morning, the field had turned into a sanctuary. Nearly 50 people gathered beneath the sloped roof, the air still and expectant after weeks without rain. Some women wore sundresses and cowboy boots; others went barefoot, their toes brushing the grass. They faced east, toward Jerusalem, toward renewal.
At the front, three Torahs rested on a table covered with a white cloth embroidered decades ago by Nik’s grandmother, Edith, while she hid from the Nazis — her childhood handiwork carried through war, exile, and soil.
Cantor Lori Schwaber, who has helped lead High Holiday services in Sterling for three decades, stood beside Hannah, Nik’s cousin, her prayer shawl pale pink in the morning sun. Their melodies carried across the field.
When it came time for the haftarah, Hannah chanted from the Book of Samuel, the story of another Hannah who prayed for a child and was answered with life. The promise echoed here: Even in barren soil, something new can take root. This was a harvest whose yield measured not in bushels, but in belonging.
Then Taylor, Nik’s eldest, stepped forward to read the same passage in English. It was a rehearsal for the bat mitzvah her family plans to hold in the new synagogue. The rabbi from Pennsylvania, whose congregation donated its stained glass and ark, has already promised to officiate a service that weekend.
As the service ended, Nik’s four daughters called out the shofar blasts: Tekiah. Shevarim. Teruah. Tekiah Gedolah. Each shout met by their father’s ram’s horn, its note low and unbroken, bending through the air until it joined the wind.
The synagogue and the soil
In a storage area tucked away on the farm sit the rescued pieces from Temple B’nai Israel — the century-old synagogue in White Oak, Pennsylvania, whose sacred objects Nik salvaged.
The space was quiet, almost reverent — a warehouse of waiting. Along one wall, stained-glass windows lay boxed and labeled, their blues and ambers dulled by dust, their light waiting to be released. A pair of rabbi’s chairs stood sentinel beside the bimah, their arms worn smooth by generations. At the far end, Nik lifted a heavy blanket to reveal the ark — twin lions perched on top, their wooden paws folded in patience.
“This is what we’re saving,” Nik said softly. For a man who measures life in acres and seasons, this was another kind of harvest.
Around the objects sat more fragments of American Jewry: twelve stone tablets engraved with the tribes of Israel, salvaged from another synagogue — Beth Israel in Washington, Pennsylvania — beside the yahrzeit plaques from Sterling’s own Temple Sholom. Legacy upon legacy, boxed but not buried. A reliquary of Jewish endurance.
He was done storing the past like seed. It was time to see what would grow.
In the center of town, there’s the cornfield where the new synagogue will rise, beside New Life Lutheran Church. A farmer from the congregation had sold them the land: steeple on one side, shul on the other. The name felt like a promise.
On the hood of his truck, Nik spread the blueprints, the paper snapping in the wind. A sanctuary lined with stained glass from White Oak. Beside it, a museum to tell the story of Jewish life in small-town America — and the people who refused to let that story end.
One area will honor the Jewish merchants and families who once filled the Sauk Valley towns. Another will recreate the room where a Christian family hid Nik’s grandmother and her relatives during the Holocaust — her childhood spent in whispers, her prayers muffled beneath a pillow.
He paused, tracing calloused fingers along the edge of the paper. “It won’t be dark,” he said. “People will walk through and understand what it means to come out of hiding.”
Since the Forward first published Nik’s story about the synagogue in a cornfield, envelopes have arrived at the farm, postmarked from towns Nik had never heard of — some with checks for $18, others with offers of sacred objects from shuttered shuls across the country. One rabbi wrote to donate his congregation’s bimah chairs; Nik plans to use them as seating in the museum, each marked with a small plaque naming where it came from.
Margo told me she still dreams of Torah crowns, the silver rimonim that once shimmered atop scrolls in sanctuaries now gone. Each new package feels like a quiet affirmation, a widening circle of faith.
The Jakobs family and the small but mighty Sterling Jewish community are not trying to save Judaism. They’re proving it can still take root here, in open country.
Hope, here, isn’t an idea. It’s a practice, the daily work of planting what you may never see bloom.
Stretching before us, the field was bare, the soil raked smooth and waiting. Nik stood in silence, listening for the faintest stir of something beginning, the sound of a harvest yet to come.
The post This Jewish farmer is harvesting corn — and planting a synagogue — in the Illinois prairie appeared first on The Forward.
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The play is about Birthright, but it’s about a lot more than Israel
Towards the end of Birthright, a new play that just made its New York City debut at the MCC Theatre, two characters are arguing over Israel and Zionism in the wake of Oct. 7. The talking points will be familiar to anyone who’s been ensconced in the discourse of the past few years: Izzy says that Zionism is and has always been a colonialist project, and Chaya blames the conflict on Palestinian leaders who rejected early two-state solutions.
As they argue, each is frantically Googling; their phone screens are projected onto the walls of the set. We can see the chasm between their echo chambers: Izzy goes to the Jewish Voice for Peace website, Chaya to The Jerusalem Post. Each time they focus on their own screen, the sound of the argument becomes muffled and indistinct until they resurface to throw a new piece of evidence into the conversation.
It’s a clever piece of production magic that effectively drives home the schism over Israel in the Jewish world, and our inability to hear each other.
Birthright, commissioned by Miami New Drama from Tony Award-winning playwright Jonathan Spector and here directed by Teddy Bergman, is nominally about the eponymous free trip to Israel. But really it’s about a group of six friends that formed on the trip, and their personal journeys — through Judaism, and through life — as the somewhat motley crew diverges and reconnects over the years.
The show is a long one, three and a half hours once you include its two intermissions. Each act depicts a single night, spaced over the course of nearly two decades — first, right after they’ve returned from their trip to Israel in 2006, then in their early 30s as their careers are taking off in 2016, and finally a year after Oct. 7. While the runtime is admittedly long, it allows for well-developed characters, which are essential to approaching such a touchy topic with any nuance, and the fast-paced dialogue keeps things moving briskly. (A reasonable helping of humor, including a Kanye reference in every act, doesn’t hurt.)
And the show does manage an astonishing amount of subtlety for a topic that has become so factionalized. The characters represent a reasonably diverse range of Jewish thought and experience, though certainly leaves some out. (There are no Jews of color or converts, for example, and no true right-wing hawks.)
There’s Chaya (Zoe Winters, best known as Logan Roy’s secretary and mistress on Succession), who grew up Conservadox, but spent college rushing a sorority and dyeing her hair blonde; she ends up working for the Democratic establishment. Noah (Eli Gelb, Tony-nominated for Stereophonic) is a political wonk with a Facebook-addled dad prone to right-wing conspiracy theories. Izzy (Molly Bernard), a queer Jew who eschewed law school, has worked on the Jewish left long before it became buzzy. Lev (Hale Appleman), a lost soul wanderer with a penchant for Jewish philosophy — he name-drops Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath and Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor — has family who survived the Holocaust. Alona (Molly Ranson), a sociology PhD who fell for an IDF soldier on the trip, eventually marries an Israeli and moves to Tel Aviv. And Emerson (Nate Mann), a musician, is barely aware that he’s Jewish when he lands on their trip half by accident.
This long summary represents only a smidgen of the events in the group’s lives. The play makes sharp use of production gimmicks, opening the second and third acts by projecting a montage of messages, summarizing the events of the group’s intervening years — and also cleverly reminding us of the quirks of bygone eras. Before the second act, we see wedding invitations and job announcements sent out by email, and then newborn photos posted on Facebook. Before the third, there are group chats on iMessage and then Whatsapp, where we see more birth announcements. Later, they exchange articles about the Israel-Hamas war.
This glut of information is how the show achieves its depth. On paper, one could slot some of these characters into obvious archetypes: The Zionist who makes aliyah, the queer anti-Zionist activist who has made politics her whole identity, the centrist liberal who staunchly supports Israel. But every character has real depth and pathos, and none of the action plays out to its stereotypical end.
When someone asks Izzy, the JVP-type activist, why she hates Israel so much, she doesn’t list out its sins; instead, she’s affronted. “I don’t hate Israel. I love it,” she says. “What it could be at its best.” She doesn’t believe she’s fighting against the nation, but for it.
Meanwhile, Alona, who made aliyah, does not launch into a speech about how Hamas has to be eradicated before the war can end; Bibi, the rest of the Israeli government and settlers, she says, are just as much of a “cancer” as any terrorist group.
Though the political discussions are impressively nuanced, Birthright finds its true success in spending as much time on the rest of the characters’ lives as it does on their political stances. There are the complications of falling for a non-Jewish partner. The ways having children changes life in inalterable ways. Divorces. Substance abuse. The way a dream career can still disappoint. For a topic that is so often turned into a polemic, the play takes a broader view.
In presenting stories of real, believable Jewish lives that are not solely defined by their Judaism, the play demonstrates that Jewishness doesn’t mean just one thing to anyone. Instead, it explores the ways Jewish identity layers on, mingles with and sometimes challenges the rest of one’s choices, values and beliefs.
There are views left out of Birthright, to be sure. No one is right wing (the characters call their group “BirthLeft”), and in the first act they all make fun of their trip as a way to get Jewish kids laid. No one is truly hawkish about the war; in the first act, the characters make fun of George W. Bush and fantasize about working on Democratic campaigns. No one is making an argument, as plenty of people have in the past few years, that Palestinians should be exiled from Gaza or deserve to die.
But the overall point can apply equally: Judaism, and Israel, is not one clear thing. There’s no perfect answer. We aren’t all supposed to agree — but that doesn’t have to tear us apart. It’s a simple message, but one that is hard to believe these days; Birthright makes it feel tangible.
As Lev says when considering their Birthright trip, and his confused feelings about it. “History, Jewish history, it’s never been a straight line, and it’s never meant only one fixed thing. It’s more a thing you interpret, that you find meaning in.”
The new play Birthright is playing at the MCC Theater in Manhattan through Jul 26, 2026.
The post The play is about Birthright, but it’s about a lot more than Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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New York Times hires Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg to cover Jewish American life
(JTA) — The New York Times has hired Atlantic staff writer Yair Rosenberg to launch a national beat covering Jewish American life, bringing a widely known journalist on antisemitism and Jewish affairs to a newspaper whose coverage of Israel and the Jewish community has been under unusually intense scrutiny since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
The appointment, announced Monday by National Editor Nestor Ramos, creates a dedicated beat focused on American Jews at a moment when questions of antisemitism, Israel, religious identity and political polarization have moved to the center of public debate.
It is the first time that the newspaper, published in the city with the world’s largest Jewish population, has a beat dedicated to Jews.
“Over the course of 15 years chronicling Jewish life in America and abroad, Yair has taken on the biggest, thorniest stories on the beat,” Ramos wrote in a memo to staff. “Now, Yair will bring that boundless energy and deep expertise to a new religion beat on National focused on Jewish American life, chronicling a period of extraordinary tension but also possibility and reinvention.”
The move brings Rosenberg to a publication that he has occasionally criticized for its coverage of Jewish affairs, but without echoing some critics’ charges of institutional bias.
For the past five years Rosenberg has written The Atlantic’s “Deep Shtetl” newsletter, blending coverage of antisemitism, American politics and Jewish culture with essays on history, religion and popular culture. Before joining The Atlantic in 2021, he spent nearly a decade at Tablet, a magazine of Jewish affairs.
Over the years, Rosenberg has broken or advanced reporting on online extremism and antisemitism while also becoming known for explaining Jewish issues to a broad audience. His work has ranged from investigations into antisemitic disinformation networks to historical features. He has written about antisemitism on the far left and on the Republican right.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, an Anti-Defamation League study found Rosenberg was among the Jewish journalists most frequently targeted with antisemitic abuse on Twitter. Rosenberg became known for responding publicly to trolls and for developing technological tools — including an “Impostor Buster” bot — designed to expose white supremacists posing online as minorities in order to inflame social tensions. The effort drew widespread attention before Twitter eventually suspended the tool.
He later described those experiences in a New York Times guest essay titled “Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter,” and has remained a frequent public speaker on combating online hate while preserving free expression.
Ramos’s announcement emphasized that Rosenberg’s beat would extend beyond antisemitism.
“Yair knows better than most that these fraught moments are not all that define Jewish life today—not even close,” Ramos wrote, citing stories on Hanukkah traditions, Jewish representation in popular culture and other facets of American Jewish life.
The Times, through a spokesman, declined to comment beyond Monday’s announcement. Rosenberg did not respond to a request for an interview by press time.
The hire comes as The New York Times continues to navigate a complicated relationship with many Jewish readers.
For decades the newspaper has occupied an outsized place in American Jewish public life, employing prominent Jewish reporters and editors while producing influential coverage of religion, Israel and antisemitism. Yet the newspaper has also faced sustained criticism from parts of the Jewish community over its Israel coverage, criticism that intensified after Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza.
Media watchdog organizations, some Jewish communal leaders and a number of current and former journalists have accused the Times of factual errors, headline framing and insufficient skepticism toward claims made by Hamas officials in some early coverage of the conflict.
A May 2026 column by Nicholas Kristof, alleging systemic sexual violence by Israeli authorities against Palestinian detainees, was widely criticized for amplifying unverified claims and platforming biased sources. The Times stood by Kristof’s column in an editorial note.
Defenders of the Times argue that accusations of institutional anti-Israel bias often conflate disagreement over editorial judgments with evidence of systemic prejudice.
At Tablet and The Atlantic, Rosenberg occasionally criticized aspects of the Times’ reporting on both Israel and antisemitism. In a 2018 Tablet article he criticized The New York Times Book Review for offering a platform for the novelist Alice Walker to recommend a book by the English author David Icke that was heavily saturated in antisemitic conspiracy theories.
The next year he called out the Times for a profile of former CIA officer and would-be congressional candidate Valerie Plame that failed to mention her history of tweets sharing antisemitic theories. He has also regretted that the Times in 1937 dropped its subscription to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency syndication service because of the perception at the time that JTA’s coverage of Nazi Europe was alarmist.
Unlike some Jewish media watchdog groups, however, Rosenberg has not argued that the Times is institutionally or inherently biased against Israel or Jews. Against that backdrop, Rosenberg’s hiring is likely to be watched closely by Jewish readers across the political spectrum.
According to Ramos, Rosenberg will begin work July 20 and will be based in New York while traveling nationally for the beat.
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Canadian Museum for Human Rights opens ‘Nakba’ exhibit amid pushback from Jewish leaders
(JTA) — After weeks of backlash from Jewish groups and leaders, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights this weekend opened its exhibit on the Nakba, the narrative of Palestinian defeat and displacement upon Israel’s founding.
The Winnipeg, Manitoba, exhibit is called “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present” and features photography, poetry and everyday objects that document the experience of Palestinian-Canadians impacted by the Nakba. Palestinians use the term, meaning “catastrophe,” to describe their mass displacement upon Israel’s establishment.
The exhibit has drawn fierce condemnation from some Jewish groups, including the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.
“Materials that are one-sided and driven by a political agenda can contribute to discrimination, bullying and even assault targeting Jewish students,” the group wrote in a post on X last week. “The federal government must hold the CMHR’s leadership accountable for this egregious mishandling.”
The museum’s only Jewish board member, Mark Berlin, was upset enough by the exhibit to resign.
“Because the museum chooses to proceed with this exhibit in its present form despite repeated concerns raised by myself and members of the mainstream Jewish community and others seeking a more balanced and historically complete presentation, I can no longer, in good conscience continue to serve as a Trustee,” Berlin wrote in a resignation letter dated June 22.
In the letter, Berlin argues that the exhibit omits the context that “hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands” were also displaced during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
“A story detached from the surrounding factual details is not the truth, it is just a story,” Berlin continued. “The museum has a statutory and moral obligation to tell the full truth, not to sacrifice it at the altar of politics.”
The museum has vigorously defended the exhibit. In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Isha Khan, the CEO of the museum, said that “focusing in this one exhibit on the human violations faced by of Palestinian Canadians does not negate the human rights violations faced by Jewish people.”
“Sharing the stories of one community in no way minimizes the experiences of another,” Khan continued.
Khan added that the exhibit had drawn “both criticism and support from Jewish Canadians.”
Several progressive Jewish groups in Canada, including Independent Jewish Voices, the Jewish Faculty Network, and United Jewish Peoples’ Order, defended the exhibit in a joint statement Thursday, writing that it was the “result of dedication, persistence, care and advocacy, especially from the Palestinian Canadian community.”
“We are proud to celebrate a Canadian institution that has remained steadfast in the face of unfounded criticism and pressure and chose to move forward with integrity,” the statement continued. “We hope this historic opening, and the ongoing inclusion of the exhibition in the Museum, encourages learning, reflection and action.”
The dispute over the exhibit comes as Jews in Canada have faced a spate of antisemitic attacks in recent months, including in March, when shots were fired at three Toronto-area synagogues. In 2025, there were 6,800 antisemitic incidents in Canada, marking a 9% rise from 2024, according to B’nai Brith’s annual audit of antisemitic incidents.
The post Canadian Museum for Human Rights opens ‘Nakba’ exhibit amid pushback from Jewish leaders appeared first on The Forward.
