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This organization hired asylum seekers to pack Passover goods for Jews in need
(New York Jewish Week) — At a warehouse in Borough Park, thousands of apples were waiting to be taken off two 18-wheelers, as dozens of volunteers were hard at work putting groceries into bags.
The scene was one part of a massive $1.5 million operation undertaken every year by Masbia, an Orthodox organization that helps provide kosher food for low-income people, to distribute food for Passover to 10,000 families.
But this week, the Passover initiative differed from those of previous years. That’s because most of the people in the warehouse were migrants, the majority of whom were bused to New York from Texas during the past year. Because they are undocumented, they lack work permits, and for many of them, working in Masbia’s warehouse is their first job in the city.
Masbia was one of many organizations to welcome migrants who came from Texas when they arrived at the Port Authority last year, providing them with new shoes to replace pairs that may have broken down during long treks through jungles and other dangerous areas. The group’s executive director, Alex Rappaport, sees employing a group of migrants as another way to help them find their footing in the city.
“Sometimes, you need to turn over every stone to find a way to help people,” Rappaport told the New York Jewish Week.
Passover is the busiest time for Masbia, with hundreds of pallets of food coming in daily to the organization’s three warehouses in Brooklyn and Queens. At Masbia’s Borough Park location, boxes of potatoes and onions lined the sidewalk and stretched down the block. Inside the garage were piles of other Passover goods, stacked two stories high. Volunteers were busy picking produce off the shelves and putting it into bags for delivery drivers who were waiting near the entrance. The operation starts in December, and food distribution begins two weeks before Passover, which starts next Wednesday night.
“These people should have been given work permits,” Rappaport said. “They’re here, ready, willing and able to do beautiful work.”
Masbia CEO Alex Rappaport in front of a truck full of apples in Borough Park, Brooklyn on March 29, 2023. (Jacob Henry)
Rappaport combined the work with a touch of advocacy: Some of the volunteers working alongside the migrants were Jewish high school students, and Rappaport overheard one of them say that “illegal immigrants” were working there. He gathered high schoolers together and began to hold court.
“These people who are working are asylum seekers,” Rappaport told the teens. “They are fully designated as an asylum seeker, meaning to say, they are fully legal, because they have a day in court.”
Rappaport went on to discuss how if a person jaywalks, they are technically breaking the law, but are not referred to as “an illegal.”
“There’s never a person that turns into ‘an illegal,’” Rappaport said. “The term is just a very bad term. A person might not have documents, but these are people coming from the border who are looking for a new future. It’s an opportunity. They asked for asylum.”
The opportunity Masbia is providing comes via a partnership with La Colmena, a nonprofit that helps find jobs for day laborers, domestic workers and low-wage immigrant workers in from Staten Island.
Kimberly Vega, the workforce manager of La Colmena, told the New York Jewish Week that the group saw “an influx of asylum seekers” that began in August and is still ongoing. Vega has a list of 190 workers looking for jobs. Masbia provided work for 15.
“We’re facing this crisis at the moment,” Vega said. “We have the amount of workers, but we don’t have the jobs. They face all these challenges because they don’t have a permit or any documentation, so we’re very thankful for this opportunity that came up through Masbia.”
Vega added that many of the workers are staying in homeless shelters provided by the city in Staten Island. Many of the workers drop their kids off at school in the morning, then come to Brooklyn to work throughout the day. “They got shipped on a bus, arrived here and were transported to a shelter,” Vega said.
According to NPR, it’s estimated that up to 50,000 migrants were moved to New York over the past year by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican. New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, called Abbott’s actions “inhumane.”
In a New York Post op-ed published last August, Abbott wrote that Adams was hypocritical for calling New York a sanctuary city, then complained about the new arrivals.
On Twitter, Adams’ press secretary Fabian Levy wrote that the mayor is “welcoming asylum seekers with open arms.”
Vega said the migrants working at the Masbia warehouse were being paid based on a law that has been used to help undocumented workers earn income. According to the State Department of Labor, nonprofits may give volunteers stipends or reimbursements. Therefore, Vega said, even though a migrant worker is only a volunteer, they can still be paid by a nonprofit organization. Masbia and La Colmena would not disclose how much the workers were being paid.
Asylum seekers working at a Masbia warehouse in Brooklyn on March 29, 2023. (Jacob Henry)
Gledys, 30, a migrant working at the warehouse, told the New York Jewish Week that she came to New York from Venezuela after being bussed here from Texas last October.
Gledys, who did not give her full name for fear of her family being harmed, said through a translator that when she was living in Venezuela, “There’s a certain political view that everyone has to have.”
“If you even think differently, you can’t even speak amongst your community, because then they will turn on you,” Gledys said. “My husband was a police officer there, and because of that reason, we had to leave.”
When she arrived in New York, Gledys said she was “hit with the reality that it’s hard to find a job because you need certain permits.”
“I’m working really hard [at Masbia] and hoping this will open my doors,” Gledys said. “They’ll be able to see that I’m a hard worker and [I will] gain experience for more opportunities to open up.”
She added that she was thankful that her children were able to begin attending public school only a few days after she arrived. The city also helped provide daycare for her.
“No other country has done that,” Gledys said. “It’s more than enough. I’m not suffering, and I’m grateful. I’m definitely very hopeful because now I can see a different future for my children, a different future for myself.”
Another worker named Moises, 39, who likewise did not provide his full name due to fear for his family’s safety, said he came to New York from Venezuela via Texas in January after entering immigration custody.
“During those days, we were still cuffed and I was separated from my family,” Moises said. His wife and children eventually made it to New York, and they were reunited.
He said that in Venezuela, inflation was so rampant that he was only making $7 to $10 a week.
“People are really struggling,” Moises said. “There are also a lot of political issues as well. If the community tries to step up and do a protest, you have the military stepping in and shooting directly at civilians. We’re really running away, because we were so scared.”
He said he was worried about how he was going to feed his family, but was also thankful for the help they received when they first arrived, including finding a place to stay in a shelter, and now the job at Masbia.
“I want to feel independent,” Moises said. “With a job like this, I can be more independent. I understand it’s a temporary job, but hopefully in the next couple of months, I can find something that is no longer temporary.”
Rappaport feels that there’s a connection between the migrants’ stories and the holiday they’re helping prepare for because the Jewish people were also strangers in Egypt. “The Bible says, ‘You should love the stranger, the newcomer,’” Rappaport said. “There is that idea of people making a long journey to a promised land. These people went through the jungle.”
He added, “It’s beautiful to connect the Jewish story of Exodus to this story of the challenge of the asylum seekers.
“People take their whole family and go for thousands of miles through very dangerous terrain,” Rapport said. “They must be running from something. It’s not utopia yet, but we’re celebrating some freedom. And they’re still in the middle of their story.”
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The post This organization hired asylum seekers to pack Passover goods for Jews in need appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Artists are boycotting a show about Israel. The run’s already sold out
In the third act of Jonathan Spector’s Birthright, the character Izzy delivers the closest thing the play has to a thesis.
“I can go up on the bimah at my parents’ shul and I can say I am married to a woman, I can say I don’t keep kosher, I can say I don’t believe in God,” the character, a former J Street employee played by Molly Bernard, says. “The one thing that would get me kicked off the bimah, kicked out of the shul, kicked out of my family is if I say I am an anti-Zionist.”
There is an unspoken flipside to this equation: Just as Jewish communal life has instituted litmus tests, the pro-Palestine movement also has its dogma.
Jewish organizations once accepted all comers — gay, bacon-eating, atheist — Spector told me in an interview the day the show, tracking six members of a Birthright group over 18 years, opened at MCC Theatre. Recently, though, when it comes to the Jewish state, “there’s been a similar kind of shift away from tolerance from people on both sides of that divide.”
As if one needed more proof of Spector’s assertion, the group Theater Workers for a Ceasefire announced on Tuesday a call to boycott the production for “normalization,” even though the show is, at press time, sold out.
In an open letter, the organization outlines its concerns. “Normalization includes any plays, festivals, and other kinds of cultural activities that are based on the false premise of symmetry between oppressors and oppressed or which assume colonizers and colonized are equally responsible for the ‘Israel/Palestine conflict.’”
Birthright, they argue, meets this definition in its third act, when Izzy and Chaya (Zoë Winters), a former Obama staffer, debate the Gaza War in the aftermath of Oct. 7. “Chaya and Izzy perpetuate the fallacy that genocide has two equally legitimate sides,” the Theater Workers wrote. “The play does not challenge Chaya’s beliefs — it privileges them.”
But does it? We learn Chaya resigns from her job at the domestic nonprofit she founded over a pressure campaign by her staffers, who share an offensive text she sent via Instagram. The text: “Maybe they should spend a week in Gaza, and then come back and tell us if the rapes are real or not.”
In an Instagram carousel, Artists For Ceasefire describes this as “a text accusing Palestinians of being rapists.” This is a distortion, but reveals a familiar taboo in certain pro-Palestinian activism: the acknowledgment that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad committed sexual violence.
“Birthright emphasizes Chaya’s victimhood, whereby her own personal and professional losses in the wake of October 7th are greater than that of any Palestinian,” the letter continues. “Izzy is depicted as immoral for caring more about Palestinian strangers than her friend.”
This smacks of a bad faith reading. Once again we are in the realm of depiction not equalling endorsement. Cherries are being picked. That the play doesn’t “challenge” every argument, or “encourag[es] audiences to empathize with” an Israeli character’s “subjectivity” is seen as morally deleterious, rather than what it is: a play, with characters, not a debate, op-ed or struggle session.
As Spector told me, “plays contain ideas, but plays are about people.”
We needn’t wonder what Theater Workers for a Ceasefire would recommend as counter-programming: on Instagram they argued for an example in Seven Jewish Children by Caryl Churchill, a non-Jewish playwright. That play is more polemic than drama and runs on an engine of Holocaust inversion, which makes sense when you look at their Instagram post.
“Conventional drama demands we present contrasting viewpoints in the name of conflict,” the group concedes, “But how we write the conflict is not an ideological [sic] benign matter.”
The overriding interest is not art, but ideology. Not the mirror up to life, but of the funhouse variety that warps reality to an endless, echo chamber tunnel.
Eli Gelb, an actor in the show, acknowledged the boycott in an Instagram story, wrote “I’ve been outspoken as an antizionist Jew and I remain so. I believe in the show and will be continuing to perform in the production.” Molly Bernard’s Instagram stories Wednesday are of devastation in Gaza.
The letter makes clear “this would not be a boycott of MCC, nor of Jonathan Spector, but of this specific cultural product.” How can you boycott a run that, at press time, has no seats left to buy? Yield your tickets while ye may, someone will gladly snap them up.
In the play, a character, whose identity I won’t reveal due to spoilers, discusses an episode recounted in the Talmud, where a Super Bowl-sized crowd witnesses one priest stab another for the privilege of cleaning up ashes from a ritual sacrifice.
Rabbi Tzadok says all present were responsible for creating the conditions for the attack. But then the father of the stabbed priest retrieves the knife from his son’s back, and tells the crowd that, as he is not yet dead, the knife is still ritually pure. The onlookers cheer.
In the show, the story is cryptic, but speaks to Israel, where the ideal of the state has given way — perhaps irreversibly — to a culture of violence.
“This is how far they had fallen in this period,” the character says, “how far they had strayed, that they valued the laws of ritual purity over human life.” It’s an argument that would seem to align with Artists for Ceasefire, for whom the suffering in Gaza supersedes any gestures at complexity.
In their demands for a purity test, they may have missed it.
The post Artists are boycotting a show about Israel. The run’s already sold out appeared first on The Forward.
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Haley Stevens takes aim at Netanyahu in Michigan Senate debate, as opponent Abdul El-Sayed calls Israel a ‘rogue state’
(JTA) — Viewers of Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary debate on Tuesday night could be forgiven for at times forgetting that one candidate comes with the heavy backing of pro-Israel donors.
“The prime minister of Israel has failed,” Rep. Haley Stevens said when asked about Iran, saying that both Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump had failed to achieve “long-term peace.”
Later, Stevens added that she supported “aid into Gaza” and reiterated that she believed Netanyahu has been bad for American Jews.
“It is very clear that Mr. Netanyahu has not made us safer, has not brought us closer to peace, and he is a danger to Jews in America and around the world,” she said.
The lines represented sharp criticism of Israel’s leadership for a candidate who, according to federal campaign records, has received more than $10 million in support from donors affiliated with AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby that her progressive opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, has excoriated on the campaign trail and during Tuesday’s debate. Regarded as one of Congress’ more reliable pro-Israel Democrats, Stevens made the comments as Democratic voters have largely shed their sympathies for Israel.
El-Sayed, meanwhile, said during the debate that the United States’ foreign policy “has been handed to us” by Israel and AIPAC and called Israel a “rogue state.”
The former Wayne County health director, whose grassroots campaign has gained momentum as it has increasingly centered anti-Israel rhetoric, did not hold back in his criticism.
Citing “the impact of AIPAC in our politics” as the reason for the joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, El-Sayed asserted that the lobbyist’s goals were “to annex Lebanon or to do genocide in Gaza.” He added that Israel was committing “human rights abuses, genocide and apartheid” and called for the United States to “stop funding the Israeli military unilateral blank checks.”
He also tied voters’ economic woes to Israel. “Ask yourself why it is that we are paying $5 gas, why it is that we can’t get out of this quagmire,” he said. “It’s because for too long, our foreign policy has been handed to us by the likes of the state of Israel and AIPAC, who has made sure that both Democrats and Republicans are doing their bidding.”
He further claimed there was no difference between his Democratic opponent and the presumptive Republican nominee, former congressman Mike Rogers, on Israel.
“If Congresswoman Stevens makes it, or if Mike Rogers wins, either way, Israel will win,” El-Sayed said. “AIPAC is perfectly fine with either of my two opponents because they know they will have a comfortable, reliable vote in the U.S. Senate.”
Stevens, who noted that she supports a two-state solution, rejected the line of attack. “No one owns my vote and no one owns my policies,” she said. “Anyone who’s contributing to my Senate campaign is doing so because of my proven record of fighting for Michigan.”
El-Sayed also suggested that Stevens’ sparring with Netanyahu, who is deeply unpopular with American voters, was ingenuine. Earlier in the day, Netanyahu told CNN that he believed Stevens’ previous comments accusing him of making American Jews less safe represented her “probably trying to excuse antisemitism.”
Sayed said he wasn’t convinced the remark was authentic. “I don’t think Benjamin Netanyahu is attacking her to actually attack her,” he said at the debate. “I think he’s attacking her to try and steer away the stink of how staunchly she stands for their policy.”
El-Sayed also attacked Stevens over a June 2025 vote she made in the House to “thank” Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers. The appreciation was embedded in a resolution condemning the firebombing of a peaceful march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado. Stevens accused Republicans of having “put in a cynical point” about thanking ICE and El-Sayed of falling into a trap laid by the GOP.
Israel has grown increasingly central ahead of the Michigan primary, set for Aug. 4, in a crucial battleground state with large populations of both Jewish and Arab/Muslim voters. A third candidate who sought to tread a middle ground between Stevens and El-Sayed suspended her campaign earlier this week, ratcheting up anxiety among American Jews around the race.
Stevens’ bid for the Senate comes four years after she ousted Andy Levin, a Jewish progressive congressman who expressed criticism of Israel, in a race that drew more than $4 million in AIPAC-affiliated spending. In the years since, she has remained in a dwindling minority of House Democrats who have voted against all measures that would block or condition military aid to Israel.
El-Sayed’s bid comes as other anti-Israel progressives have prevailed in congressional primaries, shifting campaign discourse about Israel to the left. In an interview with CNN also published Tuesday, El-Sayed took aim at the very idea of a Jewish state.
“Every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one,” he told CNN. Asked if support for Israel could ever be about more than money, he responded, “Not if you’re a Democrat and you believe in human rights.”
Other Michigan races are also turning into referendums on the Democratic stance on Israel. El-Sayed has cross-endorsed two left-wing congressional candidates, state Rep. Donavan McKinney and activist William Lawrence, who have both said Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Stevens, meanwhile, has endorsed pro-Israel Jewish state Sen. Jeremy Moss for her House seat.
Further down the ballot in Michigan, Democratic activist Abbas Alawieh, a key architect of the 2024 “Uncommitted” movement designed to pressure national Democrats on Gaza, on Tuesday picked up the endorsement of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in his bid for a state senate seat on the party ticket. Alawieh has also met with former Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost Michigan to Donald Trump in the general election after the state’s large Arab and Muslim population expressed strong dissatisfaction with her stance on Israel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Haley Stevens takes aim at Netanyahu in Michigan Senate debate, as opponent Abdul El-Sayed calls Israel a ‘rogue state’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump says Iran ceasefire ‘over’ as Hegseth cancels Israel visit amid rising tensions
(JTA) — President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the ceasefire with Iran was “over” after the U.S. military pounded sites in Iran and the Islamic regime struck dozens of American military facilities in the region.
“I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore,” Trump told reporters in Ankara, Turkey, where he is attending the NATO summit. “They’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re vicious, violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.”
At the same time, the president did not appear to rule out further negotiations with Iran, adding, “I’ll speak to our negotiators. They want to negotiate.”
Trump’s comments came hours after the military’s U.S. Central Command announced Tuesday evening that it had launched a “series of powerful strikes against Iran” in retaliation for Iran hitting commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.
Following the U.S. strikes, Iran targeted dozens of U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait, according to the Iranian Fars news outlet.
“In the initial response to the US aggression, the naval and aerospace forces of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, in a joint missile and drone operation, struck 85 locations of important US military facilities,” the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps said in a statement Wednesday.
The exchange of fire further imperiled the shaky ceasefire between the United States and Iran, as well as negotiations with Iran that were supposed to resume after the dayslong funeral for Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ended Thursday.
Following Trump’s announcement, the price of oil jumped to its highest level in weeks.
Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cancelled a planned visit to Israel Wednesday to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to media reports.
The U.S. and Iran signed a Memorandum of Understanding last month to provide a 60-day framework for the sides to reach a deal on Iran’s nuclear program and other sticking points.
Following Tuesday’s U.S. strikes, Iran’s parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf accused the United States of violating the Memorandum of Understanding, including “Continued Zionist aggression on [Lebanon]” in a post on X.
“The era of bullying and extortion is over. It leads nowhere. We don’t fold,” Ghalibaf wrote.
During Trump’s meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Tuesday, the president also signalled that he would likely restore the country’s ability to purchase F-35 fighter jets, a move that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has staunchly opposed.
“Turkey has been in many ways much more loyal than other countries that we think would be loyal,” Trump said when asked if he is going to sell the jets to Turkey, according to Axios. “So it is something we definitely would consider.”
Hegseth’s scrapped meeting with Netanyahu was widely expected to touch upon the idea of U.S. selling the advanced stealth plane to Turkey.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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