Uncategorized
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.
Uncategorized
Proposed U.S. $24.3 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia advances
(JTA) — The State Department has approved a possible $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia — a move that would make the kingdom the second Middle Eastern country after Israel to have the world’s most powerful combat aircraft.
“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a major non-NATO ally,” the department said in a statement.
Israel wants the sale attached to a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t appear to be on the horizon. However, there is a small chance that Congress could keep the sale from happening.
When President Donald Trump first confirmed that he was considering the sale last November, Israeli officials told Axios that while they don’t oppose the sale itself, they wanted it “to be subject to Saudi normalization with Israel.”
Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly brushed off the deal’s significance last fall, a security source at the time warned on CNN that the possibility of Saudi Arabia acquiring “the same capabilities” as Israel was “very concerning.”
The prime minister was more vocal in his opposition to a July announcement from Trump that he was weighing selling the advanced jets to Turkey as well, telling CNN that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is “not exactly a model ally of the United States.”
Israel has already purchased 50 F-35 jets, in two procurement rounds that occurred in 2016 and in 2017, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry. However, local media reports indicate that two of the 50 have yet to arrive, meaning that just 48 are on the ground – the same number of planes that the State Department has approved for Saudi Arabia’s potential purchase.
Israel would have many more F-35s than Saudi Arabia for the time being, because its Defense Ministry announced in 2024 that it would be procuring 25 more of the planes, slated to begin arriving in 2028. Earlier this year, the Defense Ministry revealed that it would be procuring yet another squadron of the jets, although the quantity remained unclear.
Congressional approval is not assured; wariness of the Saudi regime, stemming in part from the state-sanctioned 2018 murder of a U.S.-based journalist in Turkey, crosses party lines.
The U.S. Arms Export Control Act requires the executive branch of the government to notify Congress regarding major defense equipment sales to most countries. Congress can then deem a country ineligible to participate in a sale through a joint resolution. The president can then veto the resolution, which Congress would need a two-thirds supermajority to override.
Additionally, U.S. law requires the president to ensure that Israel maintains “a qualitative military edge over military threats” when considering arms sales to other Middle Eastern countries. Israel, per the law, must be able “to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat” from both other nations and “non-state actors.”
“The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the military balance in the region,” the State Department said on Thursday. It called Saudi Arabia “a force for political stability and economic progress in the Gulf region,” adding that the sale would help “deter current and future threats by strengthening its homeland defense.”
The department maintained that not only would the sale improve Saudi Arabia’s defense capabilities, but it would also boost “interoperability” with both U.S. forces and other players from NATO and the region.
As for the potential deal’s logistics, Saudi Arabia has requested 48 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter Jets, as well as 49 Pratt & Whitney engines, according to the State Department.
The kingdom is also seeking to acquire other non-major defense equipment, such as cryptographic devices, precision navigation, secure communications, simple key loaders and support for electronic warfare databases, maintenance and personnel training.
Producing and delivering these planes can take many years.
Meanwhile, just a day before Trump’s announcement, The New York Times surfaced intelligence concerns that China could acquire F-35 technology by spying on Saudi Arabia or through its partnerships with the kingdom.
U.S. House Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat from Illinois, warned in a statement on X that “Beijing has spent decades stealing American intellectual property” and that this deal could “help them do it.”
“Our own intelligence community is warning that it could put the crown jewels of American military technology within reach of the Chinese Communist Party,” Krishnamoorthi added.
The Biden administration reportedly ended a past F-35 deal with the United Arab Emirates — secured by the first Trump administration — due to similar concerns about the country’s connections to China, as well as to Russia.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Proposed U.S. $24.3 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia advances appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
After outcry, Texas lieutenant governor says schools should teach Holocaust books ‘Night,’ ‘Anne Frank’
(JTA) — The lieutenant governor of Texas says his recent call for the state’s public schools to remove “over 2,000 titles” of “dirty, filthy and vulgar books” was not meant to include books about the Holocaust.
Dan Patrick’s statement, provided exclusively to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday, comes after a month of confusion following a press conference in which he and a conservative Christian activist threatened schools with potential loss of state funding if they did not comply with his directive to purge their libraries.
“I believe Texas students must learn about the Holocaust, and that includes reading books such as ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ and other books about the Holocaust,” Patrick told JTA, singling out two books on the removal list he had promoted – one of which, “Night,” that he previously explicitly called for removal from middle schools.
Patrick added that his initiative was “focused on age-inappropriate, sexually explicit books in public school libraries across Texas.” At his earlier press conference, he had directed viewers to an online list compiled by an activist group that features several books about the Holocaust and Jewish identity.
Patrick’s threats have teeth. In Texas, lieutenant governors are more powerful than in many other states, playing central roles in shaping the budget and determining the legislative agenda.
Patrick also appeared to walk back some of the harsher proclamations from his Aug. 19 press conference, at which the Republican had stated, “We’re coming for the books.”
“As the law states, local communities have the right to make their own decisions about their public school libraries,” he told JTA Friday.
The lieutenant governor, who is up for reelection this fall, appeared at the conference with Bonnie Wallace, the head of the activist group Recover America, and told viewers to “go to RecoverAmerica.com.” That group has circulated a list of more than 2,100 “Harmful Books in Libraries.” Its list, which it describes as “books with harmful, sexually explicit, and vulgar content,” includes more than a dozen titles of particular import to Jewish readers.
Recover America’s flagged books include both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a comic-book adaptation of Frank’s diary and Bernard Malamud’s novel of a blood libel “The Fixer” — all books that have been removed from school districts in Texas and other states in the past amid broader conservative-led library culture wars. In some cases those books were restored to the districts following public outcry, but spurred deeper dialogue about the state of Holocaust education and antisemitism awareness in public schools.
Patrick’s latest push would go much further than a handful of districts, affecting the more than 5.5 million students in public schools across the state.
One book of particular contention on Recover America’s list was “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s bestselling memoir of surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, which has been taught in schools for decades. After a Houston Chronicle story noted the book’s inclusion on the Recover America “harmful” list, Patrick initially doubled down on “Night,” saying that it was not appropriate for middle schools owing to its “violence.”
“If ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, were made into a movie, it would likely be rated R,” Patrick wrote on the social network X on Aug. 26. “‘Night,’ which includes depictions of graphic violence and the machine-gunning of babies, should not be available to sixth graders in middle-school libraries. High school is more age-appropriate.”
His tweet appeared to contradict the state’s own K-12 required reading list, passed this summer, which mandates that “Night” be taught in the eighth grade beginning in 2030.
Now, in response to questions from JTA, the lieutenant governor said he would defer to the Texas State Board of Education on the appropriate grade to teach “Night.”
“The State Board of Education decides the appropriate grade level for books and will determine whether ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, is at the appropriate grade level,” Patrick told JTA in his statement.
He continued to insist that books in schools should be held to “FCC standards,” referring to the Federal Communications Commission, an agency that governs broadcasting content and does not regulate publishing.
The head of the Texas Holocaust, Genocide and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, a governor-appointed panel which advised the state on the inclusion of “Night” and other Holocaust texts on its required reading list, did not return a JTA request for comment.
In a statement, the Texas Educational Authority, which drafted the required-reading list, told JTA, “When Texas students learn about the Holocaust, they will be exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust. That is why the SBOE placed the book in 8th Grade to ensure age appropriateness for students.”
At the Emmys this week, when “The Librarians,” a documentary about librarians facing book removal threats, won an award, retired Texas librarian Carolyn Foote joined the producers on the stage and held up a copy of “Night” in protest.
“I felt like it was very symbolic to bring ‘Night,’” Foote, a subject of the film and a co-founder of the librarian activist group FReadom Fighters, told JTA. “Having read it, I just know the importance of not forgetting our past. And that’s part of Elie Wiesel’s whole legacy, is remembrance, and so it just felt very important for me to carry that book, coming from Texas.” Another librarian onstage for the win held up “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation.”
Elisha Wiesel, Elie’s son and chair of the Elie Wiesel Foundation, told JTA that “Texas deserves credit for recognizing that Holocaust education belongs in the eighth-grade curriculum.” Yet, the younger Wiesel suggested, Patrick’s concerns about the book’s violence were misplaced.
“‘Night’ contains violence because the Holocaust was violent; its purpose is not to shock young people, but to help them understand where hatred and indifference can lead,” he wrote in an email. “With context and guidance, students should not be shielded from this history. They should be equipped to confront it.”
Despite having directed viewers to Recover America’s book list during his press conference, Patrick’s new statement to JTA said, “I do not have a book list.” He pointed instead to a law passed in the state legislature in 2025 regulating school books that he said districts were required to follow.
Yet some districts in the state have removed every book on Recover America’s list from their own libraries out of fear of losing funding, Foote told JTA. While the list nominally contains a ratings system, many of the books do not have a rating.
Besides “Night,” “Maus,” “Anne Frank’s Diary” and “The Fixer,” other books about Judaism and the Holocaust on Recover America’s list of “Harmful Books” include:
- “Annexed,” a young-adult novel about Peter van Pels, who hid in the Amsterdam annex with Anne Frank
- “The Berlin Boxing Club,” a young-adult historical novel based on German boxer Max Schmeling, who helped young Jews during Hitler’s rise to power
- “Black, White and Jewish,” a memoir by Rebecca Walker, the mixed-race Jewish daughter of author Alice Walker
- “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents,” a nonfiction book analyzing the “caste systems” of Nazi Germany. “Caste” had been included on an earlier, Wallace-spearheaded list of books for removal from a Texas public library in a case that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear in 2025, allowing the removals to proceed.
- “Kasher in the Rye,” a memoir by Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher
- “Pride: the story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag,” a children’s picture-book biography of the pioneering Jewish LGBTQ legislator
- “Sophie’s Choice,” the bestselling Holocaust novel for adults
- “The Violin Maker’s Daughter,” a historical novel about a Jewish family of musicians during the Holocaust
- “White Bird,” a young-reader graphic novel about a Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied France
In response to JTA sharing a list of the above books, Patrick’s statement mentioned only “Night” and Anne Frank by name. The Recover America list is largely made up of romance and fantasy novels, many with an LGBTQ element, while also including classics such as “The Glass Menagerie” and “Cat’s Cradle” and some picture books for children.
Recover America did not immediately return a JTA request for comment Friday on Patrick’s new statement. Wallace, the group’s leader who has also appeared on Patrick’s podcast, previously told the Houston Chronicle that she had “thought long and hard” about including “Night” on her list.
She ultimately did so, she said, because “an eighth-grade student is 13 years old. Do they need to read about soldiers massacring, throwing up babies, and killing them with machine guns?”
She added, “It’s not to say this doesn’t happen in life. And the Holocaust was maybe the worst tragedy in the history of the world.”
For Cameron Samuels, a Jewish alum of Texas public schools and founder of the activist group Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, such efforts do not help Jewish students.
“Non-Jewish people are deciding for us what’s best, and making this public policy,” Samuels said. “We can’t readily access these books and stories. And that makes students feel alone. It also means that our classroom peers are not learning authentic Jewish narratives.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post After outcry, Texas lieutenant governor says schools should teach Holocaust books ‘Night,’ ‘Anne Frank’ appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘Checkout’ and ‘Fauda’ test the appetite for Israeli spy stories after Oct. 7
(JTA) — Is there still an appetite for Israeli spy stories?
That is one question being tested by two different productions arriving in the United States this month: “Checkout,” a dark Israeli comedy about an aging Mossad operative, and the fifth season of “Fauda,” the Israeli action thriller about undercover counterterrorism agents.
One is an indie film that spent years getting to the screen; the other is a global Netflix hit whose new season plunges directly into the trauma of Oct. 7.
The two projects are seeking audiences in a challenging climate. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in March found that 60% of Americans had an unfavorable view of Israel, compared with 37% who viewed the country favorably. And Israeli cultural exports have faced increasing scrutiny abroad over the country’s conduct since Oct. 7.
Yet “Fauda” has returned to Netflix with considerable international attention, while “Checkout” opened in Manhattan to a sold-out audience.
“It’s hard for Israeli movies right now to find an audience because everything translates to, you know, the ‘P’ [Palestinian] problem,” Jonathan Dekel, the writer, director and executive producer of “Checkout,” said in an interview. “It’s problematic.”
“Checkout” opened Sept. 17 to a sold-out audience at the Quad Cinema in Greenwich Village, which Dekel described as a “stalwart of indie cinema.”
Dekel has said the film’s six-year production was almost as difficult as the journey of its protagonist. They shot in Ukraine in November 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and barely escaped with the film’s hard drive after the set was bombed when Russia invaded. They had just finished editing when Oct. 7, 2023, arrived, and Dekel was called up for military service.
Dekel knew that the movie would debut in a world transformed by the war and its aftermath.
“Trying to find a good time to put out a movie, a satire — a dark comedy about the Israeli special forces — was very, very touch and go until we finally decided to go for it,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“Checkout” is not a conventional spy thriller. Its protagonist, Dov, is an American-born New Yorker who moved to Israel and is now about to retire from the Mossad.
“The day he checks out of his hotel to retire, someone else checks in and it turns out it’s Mossad’s number one target — an arch terrorist [code-]named Gilgamesh,” Dekel said. “The entire movie is this weird weekend in a hotel where these two middle-aged men, spy-versus-spy, try to figure out who they are. They’re trying to find out about each other, but they find themselves.”
Josh Pais, who plays Dov, said his character is a man searching for meaning in his life — and comes to believe he can find it by tracking down and stopping a terrorist.
“He is possibly stepping into delusion,” said Pais. “What was appealing to me was that this is a story of what really happens to spies. So many movies tap into, you know, the James Bond of being a spy. Those movies are awesome, but this movie is about what it’s really like to be sent to a distant land, to be on location and to pretend that you’re someone else. Over a certain amount of time these guys start to lose touch with reality because, in truth, the vast majority of time as a spy nothing happens.”
Shai Satran, the movie’s co-writer, said he believes this is the “perfect moment for a movie about the Israeli intelligence community and an operation gone bad.”
“His driving force is not really to catch that guy — he doesn’t care about that guy. The driving force is to be accepted by his peers, the people who sent him — that’s at the core,” said Satran. “I don’t want to be crude about this, but there was something pre-Oct. 7 about the Israeli security forces, maybe the special forces: There’s a certain arrogance in being only worried about your peers and not being aware of” the wider mission. In the lead-up to the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, “Israel, in a sense, thought that they were more in control of the situation than they were,” he said
That idea — of intelligence work as something more complicated than heroic missions and exotic adventures — also runs through “Fauda,” though in a much more conventional action-thriller format.
The Israeli series has been an international success since its Netflix debut in 2016, and its fifth season, which arrived on Netflix Sept. 8, is now testing whether audiences will follow its characters into a story shaped directly by and set two years after Oct. 7.
Lior Raz, the show’s creator, co-writer and star, said last month at a fundraiser in Lenox, Massachusetts for Israel’s Magen David Adom emergency service that he was genuinely surprised by the show’s reception in unlikely places: Previous seasons of the show hit No. 1 in popularity in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates and it was No. 2 in Qatar.
Season four ran in 2022 in Israel and early the next year on Netflix. The show’s creators had originally begun writing a different fifth season. But after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, Raz said, those scripts were discarded. The new season deals directly with the aftermath of the attack and what Raz described as the nature of revenge. One reviewer called it “gripping, emotionally exhausting and often deeply difficult to watch,” particularly because of its depiction, in flashbacks, of Oct. 7.
Raz, in his MDA talk, said the backlash against Israel was a campaign orchestrated by radical activists and Israel’s enemies. The latest season of “Fauda” is in part an attempt to depict the Israeli perspective for those open to nuance. “I want them to look in my character’s eyes, and to see what we felt on those days,” he told the New York Times. “If it would happen in their countries, they would feel exactly like we felt and how we feel about the world. So I hope it would open people’s eyes to see what happened on Oct. 7.”
Although its reception abroad is hard to gauge, the latest season was a hit in Israel: The Times reported that it had already been the most-watched season of any show in the history of Israel’s Yes network.
Lacking the backing of a streaming giant, Checkout will have to work harder to find an audience. The Sundance Screenwriters Lab supported the “Checkout” script, Dekel said, but that was before Oct. 7. Since then, “finding a distributor, finding a Netflix, Amazon or Hulu was pretty much crickets [silence] all over. It might be our movie, but looking around [at] movies from my colleagues — Israelis — I think it’s pretty much a broad phenomenon.”
Asked if he believed the difficulty he faced was because it is an Israeli movie or because it involved Jews, Dekel replied, “Is there a difference?”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post ‘Checkout’ and ‘Fauda’ test the appetite for Israeli spy stories after Oct. 7 appeared first on The Forward.
