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‘We will not give up’ on judicial changes, right-wing protesters at Israel’s largest pro-reform rally are told
JERUSALEM (JTA) — The right-wing protest that took some 200,000 people to Jerusalem’s streets on Thursday night to demonstrate in favor of the government’s judicial overhaul felt bizarrely familiar.
In many ways, it mimicked the anti-government protests that it meant to oppose: Like the demonstrations that have filled Tel Aviv’s streets every week this year, this too featured lots of Israeli flags, chants to the tune of “Seven Nation Army” and signs declaring that the rally represents the majority of the country.
And like the protests in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem’s mass gathering felt driven by grievance: a sense that the country the rally-goers had fought for — the country they thought they had — was being taken away from them.
“There are those who have decided that they can make decisions for me, even though they have no right to decide for me,” said Michal Verzberger, who came from the central town of Mazkeret Batya with most of her family to protest in favor of the reforms. Verzberger was echoing a central message of Thursday’s protest: that the right won the recent elections, and therefore had every right to pass its desired judicial overhaul.
“The nation decided it wanted reform, and there are some who are protesting the reform, and they’re deciding in our place that there won’t be a reform,” she said. “The minority is deciding what is good for the majority.”
The idea that a loud minority is unjustly obstructing the will of the electorate inspired Thursday’s protest, which filled an artery of central Jerusalem with a largely Orthodox, religious Zionist crowd. The judicial overhaul would sap the Israeli Supreme Court of much of its power, and since it was proposed at the beginning of the year, hundreds of thousands have filled the streets — in Tel Aviv and elsewhere — weekly to decry the proposal as a danger to democracy.
Right-wing Israelis attend a rally in support of the government’s planned judicial overhaul in Jerusalem, April 27, 2023. (Erik Marmor/Flash90)
Those protests, and associated actions, led Israel’s right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to pause the reforms for a month — a period that ends in several days. The governing coalition and opposition are now negotiating over the legislation, a process that, if successful, will by definition soften the reforms at least a little.
Thursday’s rally was a show of force that aimed to strengthen the position of the government majority, several protesters said. One of the crowd’s chants was “64 seats” — the majority the right-wing holds in Israel’s 120-seat parliament, the Knesset. One homemade sign read, “64 > 56.”
The government ministers who spoke at the rally did not seem interested in half-measures. They promised that despite the delays, the substance of the reform would become law.
“Listen well, because this is my promise: We will not give up,” said Bezalal Smotrich, the far-right finance minister. “We won’t give up on making Israel a better place to live. We won’t give up on the Jewish state. … We’re fixing what needs to be fixed, and promising a better state of Israel for us and for the coming generations. Most of the nation agrees that the judicial reform is the right and necessary thing to do for the state of Israel, and I say again: We will not give up.”
Who is, in fact, in the majority on this issue is a more complicated question than it seems. Israel’s electorate has had a right-wing majority for years, both according to polls and election results. While the ideological bent of coalitions has varied, the past 22 years have seen only several months — last year — with a prime minister who didn’t build his career in conservative politics.
Justice Minister Yariv Levin at a rally in support of the government’s planned judicial overhaul outside the Knesset in Jerusalem, April 27, 2023. (Arie Leib Abrams/Flash90)
But polls also show that a majority of the country opposes the court reform itself, which has been pushed through the Knesset without any support from opposition parties or even engagement with their concerns. The central motivation of the anti-overhaul protests has been the importance of defending democracy and an independent court system.
That idea vexed Thursday’s protesters. “We won’t give up on Israeli democracy, and no one will steal that word from us,” Smotrich said. Yariv Levin, the justice minister and architect of the judicial overhaul, said, “Two million Israelis, half a year a year ago, voted in the true referendum: the elections. They voted for judicial reform.”
Protesters who spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency said they supported the overhaul’s provisions, which include giving the governing coalition a large measure of control over the selection of judges and allowing the Knesset to override most Supreme Court decisions with a bare majority. Observers across the political spectrum and around the globe have cautioned that those changes could damage Israel’s democratic character.
But protesters said that, rather than destroy democracy, the overhaul would restore balance to Israel’s branches of government, curbing an overly activist court.
“I want a real democracy in the state of Israel,” said Chanan Fine, a resident of the central city of Modiin. “In a democracy there are three branches that have balance between them, and what happened is that the judicial branch has taken for itself the powers of the legislative branch and the executive branch.”
He added, “The government needs to have the ability to determine policy and to pass laws, and if there’s a policy that contradicts the laws of the state then the Supreme Court needs to get involved,” but less often than it does now, he explained.
Under the proposed legislation, the governing coalition would not have to respect the determination of the Supreme Court.
The message of the protests wasn’t the only thing that separated it from the Tel Aviv demonstrations, which largely draw secular Israelis. While few haredi Israelis attended the event — a leading haredi newspaper instructed its readers not to go, even as it expressed support for the cause — religious ritual pervaded the demonstration. Men gathered in prayer quorums before sunset on the way to the protest, and rallygoers recited the Shema and traditional prayers for salvation en masse. Most of the men wore kippahs, and most of the women wore long skirts.
Some signs at the Tel Aviv rallies, in addition to opposing the overhaul, advocate for LGBTQ rights or Israeli-Palestinian peace. Signs and shirts at the Jerusalem rally instead trumpeted settlements in the West Bank and the belief that the late rabbi of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement is the messiah.
One thing that the two rallies had in common: a preponderance of Israeli flags, something that has been particularly noted at the anti-overhaul demonstrations.
“It’s a desecration of our symbol,” Chen Avital, a protester from the West Bank settlement of Shilo, said about the anti-government protesters’ adoption of the flag. “They took it for a certain side that isn’t supported by the whole country, and they changed it to their side over the past few months. … It’s a flag that represents all of us, and they took it for their own side.”
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The post ‘We will not give up’ on judicial changes, right-wing protesters at Israel’s largest pro-reform rally are told appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Tidbits: This Jewish couple gives homeless dogs a free makeover
Tidbits is a Forverts feature of easy news briefs in Yiddish that you can listen to or read, or both! If you read the article and don’t know a word, just click on it and the translation appears. Listen to the report here:
אַ גרויסער בלאָער משׂא־פֿור האָט זיך אָפּגעשטעלט אויף אַ גאַס אין סקיד־ראָו, אַ באַקאַנטער אָרעמער געגנט אין לאָס־אַנדזשעלעס, פֿאַר אַ היימלאָזן מענטש מיט אַ הינטל.
„אײַער הינטל וויל אפֿשר מע זאָל אים צופּוצן אַ ביסל?“ האָט דער מאַן אינעם אויטאָ געפֿרעגט. לכתּחילה האָט דער היימלאָזער אויסגעזען צעטומלט. דערנאָך האָט ער געגעבן אַ קוק אויף זײַן הינטל, וואָס ער האָט שוין ווער ווייסט ווי לאַנג נישט געבאָדן אָדער אָפּגעשוירן, און צוגעשאָקלט מיטן קאָפּ.
מיט אַ שעה שפּעטער איז דאָס הינטל אַרויס פֿונעם משׂא־פֿור, אויסזעענדיק ווי אַ גאָר אַנדער הינטל. זײַן פֿעל, וואָס איז פֿריִער געווען שמוציק און פֿאַרפּלאָנטערט, האָט מען אויסגעוואַשן, צוגעשוירן און געבערשט ביז ער איז געוואָרן ווייך און גלאַנציק. איידער ער איז אַרויס פֿון אויטאָ האָט מען אים געגעבן אַ נאַש, וואָס ער האָט פֿריילעך אײַנגעשלונגען.
די אָרגאַניזאַציע וואָס האָט אויסגעבאָדן דאָס הינטל, „האָליוווּד מאָביל גרומינג“, באַלאַנגט צו טשאָק און יעל רובין. במשך פֿון די פֿאַרגאַנגענע 11 יאָר, האָבן זיי און זייערע מיטאַרבעטער גערייניקט בערך 5,000 הינט פֿרײַ פֿון אָפּצאָל.
דאָס פּאָרפֿאָלק, וואָס האָט אימיגרירט פֿון ישׂראל, האָט אין 2001 לאַנצירט אַ געשעפֿט וואָס ברענגט אַ לוקסוס־ספּאַ צו פֿאַרמעגלעכע אייגנטימער פֿון הינט. אָבער דערנאָך האָבן זיי באַשלאָסן אַז זיי ווילן אויך העלפֿן די מענטשן מיט הינט, וואָס קענען נישט באַצאָלן דערפֿאַר: סײַ הינט וואָס געפֿינען זיך אין אַ מיקלט פֿאַר חיות, סײַ הינט וואָס וווינען מיט זייערע אייגנטימער אויף דער גאַס.
„אַ מאָל האָבן די אייגנטימער מורא אונדז איבערצוגעבן די הינט, אַפֿילו אויב זיי קענען וואַרטן אין דרויסן,“ האָט יעל געזאָגט. „מיר לאָזן זיי אַרײַנקומען און זען וואָס מיר טוען. די הינט פֿילן זיך אויך בעסער. מע קען זען וויפֿל זיי האָבן הנאה פֿון דער באַהאַנדלונג און ווי עס שפּאַנט זיי אויס. דו ווײַזט זיי ליבע, גיסט זיי אַ נאַש, וואַסער צו טרינקען, און זיי באַצאָלן דיר מיט זייערע קושן.“
אויף דער פֿראַגע, צי זיי זאָרגן זיך נישט, וואָס וועט זײַן ווען די הינט גייען צוריק צו די האַרבע באַדינגונגען פֿון דער גאַס, האָט טשאָק באַטאָנט עטלעכע זאַכן: „זייערע אייגנטימער זענען תּמיד מיט זיי און פּאַסן אויף אויף זיי וויפֿל זיי קענען נאָר. די הינטלעך זענען זייערע ׳קינדער׳. עס זענען אויך דאָ אַ סך אָרגאַניזאַציעס וואָס באַזאָרגן זיי מיט עסן אומזיסט און אַנדערע זאַכן. זיי פֿאַרמאָגן ווייניק, אָבער זיי טוען דאָס בעסטע אויפֿצופּאַסן אויף זייערע הינט.“
צו לייענען וועגן דעם אויף ענגליש גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
To read about this in English click here.
The post Tidbits: This Jewish couple gives homeless dogs a free makeover appeared first on The Forward.
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The tech worker campaigning for ‘Antisemite of the Week’ doesn’t want to talk about antisemitism
After accusations of discrimination led his San Francisco Tech Week event to be pulled from the schedule, a tech worker has decided to embrace his newfound notoriety.
Mostapha Benhenda cited security reasons last week when he denied an Israeli programmer admission to his AI hackathon event, explaining that he didn’t want the Israeli army to make participants’ electronics “explode in their faces and injure them.”
The Israeli tech worker — a former Israeli soldier named Adam Levi — posted the message online, leading sponsors to pull funding for the event. In the days since, Benhenda has begun openly campaigning for an “Antisemite of the Week” award from pro-Israel watchdog group StopAntisemitism.
“I am a competitor, I play to win, this prize will be my Ballon d’Or,” Benhenda said in a message to the Forward, referring to the annual prize for the world’s best soccer player.
Running this week through Sunday, San Francisco Tech Week draws tens of thousands of tech industry workers to hundreds of panels, competitions and parties across the Bay Area.
The saga began Sept. 29 when Levi posted a screenshot of Benhenda’s messages rejecting his RSVP to the event, called “Build Your Agentic Investment Bank Hackathon.” A page for the hackathon on the digital invitation platform Partiful claimed it had been co-sponsored by Tech Week and the convention’s founder, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Levi’s post was reshared on X more than 1,000 times, leading to the event’s de-listing by Tech Week organizers, who said on X that the event had violated the program’s terms of service.
Levi told The Algemeiner that Andreessen Horowitz told him the company had removed its sponsorship.
Benhenda, whose LinkedIn says he attended college in France, declined to participate in phone interviews. But in messages to the Forward, his response to accusations of antisemitism appeared to shift over a manner of days from defensiveness to bemusement.
When first reached for comment, Benhenda denied that his rejection of Levi was antisemitic at all. He said he banned Levi because his LinkedIn indicated service in the Israeli military’s secretive Unit 8200 during September 2024, when the intelligence unit was linked to the simultaneous detonation of thousands of pagers owned by Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon. (Levi declined to be interviewed, but said on X that “building explosive pagers was never my thing.”)
“I understand Adam’s disappointment, and his resulting emotional accusation of antisemitism, but he perfectly knows it’s unfounded,” Benhenda wrote Sept. 29, adding, “I hope that over the next weeks he will get more clarity about this.”
However, after StopAntisemitism posted about Benhenda on X, he seemed to lose interest in contesting the claim — and began leaning into it instead.
On Saturday, Benhenda shared StopAntisemitism’s post about him with a request.
“I am competing for the ‘Antisemite of the Week’ award at the San Francisco Tech Week,” he wrote. “Can you show your support/hate with a retweet?”
Founded in 2018 by a social media influencer who goes by Liora Rez, StopAntisemitism.org frequently bestows its “Antisemite of the Week” awards to public figures — a mix of elected officials, civic leaders and celebrities — who antagonize Israel.
Recent recipients of the award — which is not actually awarded weekly — have included actor Javier Bardem and Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Last month, StopAntisemitism sponsored an event where a speaker was later criticized for Islamophobic rhetoric. (Rez did not respond to a request for comment on that story, or for this one.)
Benhenda said in messages to the Forward on Monday afternoon that he did not know very much about the organization, but that he was pining for its distinction, given the group’s 350,000 followers on X.
“What matters isn’t the label, but who puts it,” he added. “Go big or go home, that’s the game in the Silicon Valley.”
Later, though, Benhenda insisted that he still did not understand the accusations of antisemitism against him. His refusal of Levi, he said, had been solely due to Levi’s involvement in the Israeli military.
Meanwhile, he is forging ahead with the hackathon, hosting it Tuesday on the streaming platform Discord for nearly 200 registered participants.
Benhenda blamed the “tremendous lobbying from the Zionist lobby” for the change. But the venue where he had initially planned to host the event indicated there was no change. The supposed host, a coworking space called Frontier Tower, said in an email it had never booked Benhenda’s event to begin with.
The post The tech worker campaigning for ‘Antisemite of the Week’ doesn’t want to talk about antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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Chef Alon Shaya shares the stories, resilience and recipes of World War II survivors
(JTA) — In 2015, while visiting Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, James Beard Award-winning chef Alon Shaya came face-to-face with a World War II artifact that moved him deeply.
It was a red cloth triangle — cut from a Nazi flag — embroidered with the names of a few dozen female prisoners at the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
In a place where they were starving to death, he learned these women had formed a clandestine “food” club. Together, they talked about recipes, their Friday night Shabbat candlesticks and cherished memories of home.
That red cloth was “100% the catalyst,” Shaya said, for his deep interest in food as “an agent of survival, defiance and bringing people together.”
Now, 11 years after that defining moment in Jerusalem, Shaya’s second book, “Memories of a Good Meal: Recipes of Resilience Inspired by Stories of World War II Survival,” is being published on Oct. 6. Co-authored with food historian June Hersh, the book gathers accounts from survivors and heroes of World War II, illustrating the outsized role that food — and the memory of it — played in human survival. While featuring 80 recipes, it functions as much as a history book as a cookbook.
“The recipes are there to support the stories,” Shaya said. “It’s not the other way around.”
Shaya and Hersh tell the stories of 10 distinct groups impacted by the war, including Jewish partisans, hidden children, Navajo code talkers, persecuted homosexuals, Japanese Americans, and Austrian and German Jews who built new lives in the Dominican Republic.
Alongside these narratives, the authors included family recipes preserved across generations. Where none survived or existed, Shaya crafted recipes using ingredients available to the book’s subjects during the war.
The opening chapter highlights a story particularly close to Shaya’s heart. In 2019, during a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Shaya was shown a tattered, 100-year-old, handwritten recipe collection from the Fenves family of Yugoslavia. Saved during the war by the family’s cook, Maris, the Hungarian-language notebook was eventually donated to the museum by survivor Steven Fenves.
Determined to bring those dishes back to life, Shaya worked with Fenves to translate the recipes, filling in missing elements like precise steps, exact measurements and oven temperatures.
“I really became a part of their family,” said Shaya, whose collaboration on what became known as the Rescued Recipes project has raised nearly $1 million for the Holocaust Museum to digitize historical documents and artifacts. “The family wouldn’t be here if Steven and his sister didn’t survive Auschwitz,” said Shaya.
Featured recipes from this chapter reflect the Hungarian culinary traditions of Fenves’s hometown of Subotica, including körözött (a spiced cheese spread) and authentic Hungarian goulash.
Other chapters explore how people sustained themselves despite meager resources. In the profile of Polish Jewish partisan Shalom Yoran — who subsisted largely on potatoes while hiding in the woods — Shaya developed recipes centered on the staple tuber, including Polish herring and potato salad, potato dinner rolls and potato, and pine nut doughnuts with blackberry caramel.
“Shalom’s wife, Varda, shared his story with us,” Shaya explained. “The partisans lived in a hole in the ground in the Polish forest through winters that reached minus-20 degrees, and they did that for four years. Potatoes were a huge part of their survival.”
For Sarah Pelz, executive editor at Harvest, the book’s publisher and the granddaughter of a partisan, the concept of the book resonated deeply, especially in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks inside Israel. “The throughline here is the power of food and memory — the power of food to bring us together at a table, and to remind us who we are and where we come from,” she said in an interview.
“Alon’s message is powerful and necessary right now,” she continued. “He hopes that people will read this book, will cook from it, and that it will bring people together at the table, people of diverse backgrounds, people of diverse perspectives, that it will not just help to enlighten readers, to history and to what happened, but also help bring people together.”
In gathering these accounts across the globe, Shaya and Hersh faced a race against time, as most interviewees were well into their 90s or older. John Kinsel, one of the last living Navajo code talkers, was 107 years old when the authors visited him on the Navajo Nation reservation. His chapter details the vital role Native American Marines played by using their complex language to transmit secret Allied messages in the Pacific theater. The book features recipes inspired by Navajo traditions, including blue corn mush and stuffed pumpkin with stewed lamb.
Throughout the project, Shaya couldn’t help but draw parallels between past atrocities and modern struggles.
“One of the lessons that struck home the most for me is that people will persecute you for what you believe in and gather together and create laws to persecute you,” he said. “We saw it in what happened with immigration in the 1940s, and we see it with what’s happening in America today.”
He was also struck by the role of propaganda, promulgated then by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, and today by bad actors on social media, in spreading hate and disinformation.
Some of the stories, like the meal prepared by nuns in a convent for a group of persecuted homosexual prisoners, seem almost cinematic in nature.
“I have definitely thought about turning these stories into a miniseries or a movie,” said Shaya. “Nobody has shown interest in it yet, but it is something that I think the more ways these stories can be shared, the better.”
Born in Israel and raised in Philadelphia, Shaya has become one of the country’s leading interpreters of Israeli and Middle Eastern cooking, with a distinctly Southern sensibility. His 2018 cookbook, “Shaya: An Odyssey of Food, My Journey Back to Israel,” blends memoir with recipes.
Shaya was committed to the latest book despite huge demands on his time. The chef and his wife, Emily, have two children, aged five and two. His Pomegranate Hospitality operates three restaurants, Saba and Safta’s Table in New Orleans, where he lives, and Safta in Denver. (Saba means grandfather and Safta means grandmother in Hebrew.) He is also involved in a variety of philanthropic work.
“The work I put into this book fills my heart and makes me feel good, like I’m doing something that builds me up and can have an impact,” said Shaya.
Shaya views the book as an educational tool.
“This book might engage a 13-year-old who really loves the chocolate cake recipe,” Shaya reflected. “If he or she hears the history behind that chocolate cake and delves into the history behind it, they learn that Austrian and German Jews took refuge in the Dominican Republic and wanted to keep their culinary traditions alive and need to use the local resources. That’s how a traditional Sacher torte-inspired tres leches cake came to be. Or a plantain latke, or matzo ball soup with avocado, lime and yucca.
“If those stories can come together and have that kind of impact on one 13-year-old in the world,” he added, “I will feel complete.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Chef Alon Shaya shares the stories, resilience and recipes of World War II survivors appeared first on The Forward.
