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Why Israel’s new right-wing leaders immediately made plastic plates inexpensive again
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Devora Zien’s tiny apartment in Bnei Brak runs like a factory, but, she admits, not a very smooth one. With 12 mouths to feed three times a day, single-use plasticware is a basic necessity, she says. So when Israel’s then-Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman increased taxes on disposables in 2021, Zien said she was “in total shock.”
“For me, it’s more important than bread and milk,” she said. “It’s about survival. I can’t stand in front of the kitchen sink all day washing dishes — and where would I put a dishwasher even if I could afford one?”
Liberman’s tax on disposable dinnerware, as well as another set of taxes he imposed as finance minister on sugar-filled soft drinks, were viewed by many ultra-Orthodox Israelis as unfairly targeting their lifestyle and cynically using health and environmental considerations to single out their community.
This week, after Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was sworn in, Liberman’s successor, Bezalel Smotrich, in his first move as finance minister, signed orders repealing the tax hikes on disposables and sugary drinks.
Ultra-Orthodox lawmakers hailed the move, as did many in the broader haredi population. Images made the rounds on social media of haredi men celebrating the decision by drinking Cristal Mint, a low-in-price, high-in-sugar soda, from disposable plastic cups. Beyond the relief felt by members of the community, there was also a sense that the balance in Israel’s cultural war is once again tipping in their favor.
MK Uri Maklev of the haredi United Torah Judaism party, said the tax reversal underscored the new government’s policy of “working for the citizens and not against them.”
Israel is either the world’s top or second-biggest consumer of disposable tableware per capita, depending on the analysis, making the goods a natural target for environmental activists. And the taxes were projected to bring in $350 million annually to the country’s treasury, no small amount. That’s nearly twice, for example, what the city of Jerusalem spends each year on sanitation.
But the disposables were Liberman’s only target for environmental taxes, which came as he sought to address Israel’s high cost of living by cutting taxes on other goods. And no environmental activist himself, Liberman is well known for his fierce criticism of Israel’s haredi sector, which he says contributes too little to the country through work and army service.
Avigdor Liberman, center, holds a news conference following the dissolving of the Israeli parliament, in Tel Aviv, May 30, 2019. (Flash90)
“The only thing that matters to him is sticking his finger in our eye,” said Devora’s sister-in-law Yael Zien, a media personality who advocates on behalf of Israel’s haredi population. She went on to cite Liberman’s widely condemned statement that he would send haredi Jews on “wheelbarrows straight to the dumpster.”
“You can’t compare your average, secular, two-car family that orders takeaway, with the haredis. We also host far more family functions than any other sector,” Zien said. “Why not raise taxes on a second car? Or flights overseas?”
“Haredim are actually more green than anyone else. We buy less clothes, we don’t fly abroad, and our communities rely heavily on gmachim and passing things on,” she said, referring to the free-loan establishments that provide anything from baby bottles to evening gowns.
Though the taxation touched on a sensitive nerve and was viewed by both sides as another round in the cultural war between secular and Orthodox Israelis, when the dust settled, it turned out that both sides may actually agree on some important issues.
Despite saying she reacted with “ecstasy” to Smotrich’s moves, Zien is not entirely opposed to reinstating the taxes, but this time with cooperation from the affected parties and a multi-pronged approach. Addressing the sugary drinks, Zien believes that the government should have taken steps in parallel to raise awareness in haredi society about the danger of diabetes and not just enforce acts that could be interpreted as punitive.
Yael Zien, a haredi Orthodox personality and mother, said she opposed the tax on disposables — as it was enacted, not on principle. (Courtesy of Yael Zien)
Meanwhile, environmental activists, who had marveled at the taxation on plastic dishes, are willing to admit that Liberman might have paid too little attention to the needs of haredi communities.
Yael Gini, community director at Sustainable Development Goals Israel, noted that tax hikes are just one way to combat waste, and not necessarily the most optimal. Targeting businesses or public places with a blanket ban on disposables, as France enacted this week in what activists are calling a watershed moment, might have been a more prudent first step, she said.
“It’s a shame it came to this. This isn’t sectorial but it feels like it is. [Politicians] turned it into something political and the haredim are right about that,” said Gini, formerly a program director at Greenpeace.
“But [the haredim] need to understand, it’s not an us-versus-them situation,” she said, adding that the environmental impact of Israel’s use of disposables is “a disaster for everyone.”
Despite the political uproar created by the decision to tax single use dinnerware, anecdotal evidence shows it might have been effective, especially for haredi Orthodox families living on a tight budget. Data published in April 2022 by the Ministry of Environment indicated that purchase of single-use plastics in supermarkets had dropped nearly 50% since the taxes were imposed six months earlier. Critics of this survey noted, however, that it did not take into consideration the haredi community’s tendency to shop at convenience stores and to make large purchases before Jewish holidays.
A man shops for disposable plastic tableware in the Osher Ad Supermarket branch in Givat Shaul, Jerusalem, Oct. 27, 2021. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
For Leah, a Hasidic Orthodox mother of seven living in the cloistered Bukharian neighborhood of Jerusalem, Liberman’s policy worked.
“We finally got around to toivelling a dinner set that we had been gifted years before,” she said, referencing the Jewish practice of immersing dishes and utensils in a ritual pool to ensure that they can be used with kosher food.
She also went to IKEA to buy other multi-use items like casserole dishes and admits that she would not have made the trip had plasticware remained affordable. “Life is fast-paced and that was one less thing to worry about,” she said.
The adjustment took time and there were bumps in the road. “Many plates got broken, the children argued all the time over cups, but we got through it. I bought each child their own set and encouraged them to wash it.” Leah, who asked that her last name not be printed, has very little exposure to current affairs and was not aware of Smotrich’s rollback. While the move means she would probably allow herself to be less frugal about buying plastics in the future, she was unlikely to go back entirely to the way things were before, she said.
“It’s nice to eat Shabbat meals on real plates,” Leah said. “It feels more special.”
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A radical idea to bridge Chicago’s Black and Jewish communities
I have strong Southern roots. Both sets of my grandparents, with the exception of my Philadelphia-born maternal grandmother, were descendants of enslaved people who later became sharecroppers. I visited the South often as a child, and being different in a place like that could be difficult. There was no Black Jewish community there at the time. I was usually its sole representative.
Or so I thought.
I was a teenager when I first learned about Julius Rosenwald‘s philanthropic efforts that helped build thousands of schools for Black children throughout the rural South, including many of the places I grew up visiting. After that, I began looking for Rosenwald schools whenever I traveled. I was always happy to find them. They were old and mostly dilapidated, but somehow still seemed to quietly defy time and the elements.
This was the first time I remember understanding how Black people and Jews could do meaningful work together. Those faded clapboard buildings, once whitewashed and full of possibility, had housed the education system that helped generations of Black children and laid part of the groundwork for the civil rights movement that would follow.
I was born in the late 1970s. I have no memory of the storied alliance between Blacks and Jews during the civil rights era. By the time I came along, much of that coalition had faded, and people were already asking how those bridges might be rebuilt.
I never experienced the Black-Jewish relationship that the teachers and staff at my Jewish day school recalled so fondly. But whenever I traveled through the South, I saw those schools. They stood as proof that the two communities I come from had once worked together to accomplish something extraordinary. They filled me with hope and pride, and with the certainty that if it happened once, it could happen again.
That is why, at a time when antisemitism and racism are once again on the rise, I find myself returning to the example set by earlier generations of Jewish philanthropists and community leaders. They understood that investing in Black communities was not simply an act of charity. It was an act of solidarity. They recognized that prejudice thrives when people remain strangers to one another, and that real change requires shared investment in a common future.
Today, we find ourselves confronting many of the same challenges. Distrust is growing. Division is growing. Fear is growing.
Which is why I want to build a Jewish Community Center on the south side of Chicago.
Not in a neighborhood where many Jews already live, but in a neighborhood where they can come to build new relationships, and new solidarity. A neighborhood where children from the two communities I hold in my heart can grow up seeing one another as neighbors instead of strangers.
The groundwork for this kind of bold community building is already in place. More than a decade ago, I started Mothers and Men Against Senseless Killing on the south side, as a response to violence, hopelessness and despair. From the beginning, that work was shaped by Jewish values, and Jews from across the Chicagoland area have stood alongside me in that work.
What began as an effort to keep children safe, based on the corner of 75th Street and Stewart Avenue, has evolved into an open air community center where children receive hot meals after school, where they can play safely throughout the summer, and where parents can find diapers, formula and other necessities for their families.
Our corner has also become a place where we can have open and sometimes difficult conversations about race, and life in America. Those conversations are often also about Judaism. We host Yom Kippur services, Passover seders, and an annual Christmahanukkwanzukah toy giveaway.
This corner has become an oasis that welcomes both Black people and Jews, and of course Black Jews, and invites them to spend time together.
I grew up watching my friends go to the JCC, even though my family could never afford it. It was important to me that my own children had that experience. At a JCC far from the neighborhood where we live, they deepened their Jewish identities, learned to get along with people different from themselves, got exercise, and made lifelong friends.
It’s time to bring that opportunity to the area where we live, and where MASK has already begun to serve some of the purposes that JCCs often fill — primarily that of giving children a safe place to learn and play.
It’s time to take things to the next level. We need a place where Black and Jewish families can gather with intention to build more communal services that help us all. Yes, we need bridges between our communities.But those bridges also need to lead somewhere. And I cannot think of a better destination than a place where Black and Jewish children can learn, grow, and build a future together.
The post A radical idea to bridge Chicago’s Black and Jewish communities appeared first on The Forward.
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Fight wildfires and other climate crises with this spiritual guide to catastrophe
As smoke from Canadian wildfires blankets much of the Northeast and Midwest in a hazy fog, some Jews are observing this Tisha B’av by mourning a different kind of destruction: that of a planet in crisis.
Tisha B’av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples, deals with themes of grief and resilience relevant to today’s climate crisis, said Rabbi Laura Bellows, director of spiritual activism and education at Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action.
In advance of Tisha Ba’av, Dayenu this week released a spiritual guide for the aftermath of extreme weather — including floods, storms, heatwaves and fires. It was a grim coincidence, Bellows said, that the guide’s publication coincided with a time when those prayers would be of particular use.
“The grief is real,” Bellows said. “Jewish tradition is really good at encouraging us not to ignore it, but actually to make space and time to be with that grief.”
The guide includes an adapted version of Mi Shebeirach, the prayer for healing, written by Rabbi Daniel Scher at Kehillat Israel in the Palisades. Scher wrote the prayer for his congregation after wildfires caused significant smoke damage to the synagogue’s building, leading it to close for several months. Roughly 250 synagogue members — and all three clergy — lost their homes.
“The fire has seared through our homes and hopes, yet we stand together in our pain, trusting that new life can blossom in our midst,” the prayer reads.
Other texts in the guidebook offer hope for rebuilding. Rabbi Zoe Klein of Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles adapted the daily prayer, “May it be your will that the Temple be speedily rebuilt in our own time,” into a plea for wildfire survivors: “May it be Thy will that homes be rebuilt in our own time.”
Another ritual offers a hand-washing ceremony for survivors of water-related natural disasters. Participants wash their hands and recite the Birkat HaGomel, a prayer traditionally said after surviving a life-threatening event.
It’s not the first year rabbis have linked the climate crisis to Tisha Ba’av. More than a decade ago, Rabbi Tamara Cohen, chief of program and strategy at the Jewish youth group Moving Traditions, co-wrote “Eikha for the Earth,” which adapts the Book of Lamentations traditionally read on Tisha Ba’av as a “lament for the Earth.”
“Checkerspot butterflies flee their homes; polar bears can find no rest. Because our greed has heated Earth,” the text reads.
The adapted text aims to “welcome in Jews who are not so connected to the idea of mourning for the ancient temple, which doesn’t necessarily move lots of people today,” Cohen told the Forward.
But the timing of this year’s Tisha B’av makes the text feel eerily relevant, she said, pointing to the line “forest fires reach down and spread like fury.”
Jakir Manela, CEO of the nonprofit Adamah, which leads immersive Jewish experiences grounded in nature, said he’s also feeling particular grief for the earth this Tisha B’av. Manela lives in Baltimore, where he and his kids have been unable to go outside due to the unhealthy air.
“This is destruction in front of our very eyes, and affecting the largest population centers on the planet,” Manela said. “If folks have trouble connecting with Tisha B’av and the grief and mourning that it calls us to do, maybe this year is the time when it will hit home.”
The post Fight wildfires and other climate crises with this spiritual guide to catastrophe appeared first on The Forward.
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Why am I the only one troubled by an Anne Frank House shot glass?
Readers, how many of you have ever looked at the Anne Frank House and thought: “Wow, I wish I had a miniature version I could drink alcohol from” ?
Probably very few of you. And yet a ceramic replica of the historic house filled with approximately 1.7ozs of Bols Dutch gin is available from KLM Dutch Airways as part of a gift series for business class passengers on international flights.
The airline first launched the Delft Blue miniature house line in 1952 as gifts for business class passengers on intercontinental flights. I first discovered them last month, when I was flying with my dad to Maputo, Mozambique, to cover the centenary celebration of a local synagogue. My dad and I initially thought these would make good Christmas gifts for my cousin’s kids until we heard the liquid sloshing inside. We ended up keeping these recreations — which included the house of aviator Anthony Fokker and one of the last wooden houses left in Amsterdam — for ourselves.
While researching these unique souvenirs, I quickly discovered that one of the historic recreations is the Anne Frank House, aka “KLM miniature number 47,” which the Dutch airline added to the collection in 1975. My initial reaction was shock: How could the airline take a place that represents such a tremendous tragedy and turn it into a shot glass?
I reached out to KLM and asked if they had ever received a complaint about the item. A representative wrote back to say that, from what he knew, there had only ever been one critical Instagram comment: that KLM tried to make money off of everything. Collectors shared the souvenir online, but nobody I could find on the internet expressed the surprise and revulsion I felt.
My request to chat on the phone for further comments on why KLM included the Anne Frank House in their collection didn’t garner the response I expected. The representative responded via email that the house is historic and if I wanted to know more about it, I could just Google it. The subtext of my question — that it feels like a strange and possibly inappropriate choice to turn a solemn landmark into a cutesy flask — didn’t seem obvious to him.
So why did it feel so obvious to me?
For so many, Anne Frank is the symbol of how horrendous the Holocaust was. The fact that she is an innocent child exposes the depraved nature of the Nazis. Most Americans are first introduced to the Holocaust through the story of her confinement in that house in Amsterdam.
Even though it is not where Frank died (that was Bergen-Belsen, at the age of 16), it feels like the place where her fate was sealed. It is not just a landmark included in a famous book; it was her prison and the last stop on the way to her death. Although some may associate it with Frank’s enduring spirit of hope, filling it with alcohol still feels obscene.
Frank’s image has been co-opted over and over again. Two years ago, a Norwegian artist used an image of Frank in a keffiyeh to bring attention to children being killed in Gaza. More recently, Frank has become a symbol for anti-ICE protesters of the dangers of letting law enforcement target people based on their ethnic background. Then there’s the viral satirical comedy musical Slam Frank, which reimagines Anne Frank as a queer Latinx girl with a Black mom and gay, neurodivergent dad in order to poke fun at woke culture.The KLM house feels like a less charged appropriation of Anne Frank’s legacy; it’s not pushing any sort of political agenda.
The ceramic house is also part of a larger kitsch culture that blurs the fine line between commemoration and trivialization. So many tragedies have been commodified in this way that there’s a term for it: “dark tourism.” There are plenty of 9/11 related objects out there — a Twin Towers Christmas tree ornament, stuffed search and rescue dogs — that feel like they border on exploitation.
But what makes the KLM Anne Frank house stand out is its contents. To use a house of such suffering as the container for gin feels minimizing. (It is worth mentioning that a New York winery did at one point produce a 9/11 commemorative wine, although some of the proceeds were donated to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.) Once the Anne Frank flask is emptied of its contents, it will just be a ceramic trinket that could help keep the memory of the landmark alive. Does the fact that it was originally made to carry alcohol negate that power?
I asked a similar question nearly one year ago in my very first Looking Forward column when I wrote about a recording of Nazi marching songs and speeches made by a Jewish producer. Since that piece was published, I haven’t found a satisfying answer to when memorialization becomes inappropriate, but I have become more comfortable acknowledging how complex this issue is.
This will be my last Looking Forward, as my last day as an employee of the Forward (at least for now, as I embark on a new pursuit) will be July 31. It feels fitting that my time with this newsletter will end similarly to the way in which it started: scratching my head about Holocaust kitsch. But having to grapple with such a topic in my writing is just another day at the Forward.
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