Uncategorized
Celebrities Help ‘Spotlight’ Holocaust Survivors, Their Testimonies in New NYC Portrait Exhibit
A new portrait series and exhibition that opened in New York City on Tuesday showcases Holocaust survivors paired up with some of the most notable figures in media, fashion, and entertainment, in an effort to preserve survivor testimonies and amplify their stories, as well as to help combat antisemitism.
The portraits in “Borrowed Spotlight,” which is on display at the Detour Gallery, were captured by South African-born, renowned fashion photographer Bryce Thompson. They debuted ahead of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah), which begins on Wednesday night and marks 80 years since the end of World War II. The photographs feature portraits of survivors alongside prominent Jewish and non-Jewish figures such as Cindy Crawford, Jennifer Garner, Billy Porter, Wolf Blitzer, Chelsea Handler, Jenna Dewan, Barbara Corcoran, Nicola Peltz Beckham, Scooter Braun, David Schwimmer, Martha Grant, Ashley Benson, Josh Peck, George Stephanopoulos, Sheryl Sandberg, and Julius Erving.
The recognizable names heard testimonies from the Holocaust survivor they were paired with and then posed for photographs together with the survivor. A total of 18 celebrity and Holocaust survivor-paired portraits are in the series, and they were all taken by Thompson in 2023 and 2024. The exhibit features these large-scale portraits but also additional behind-the-scenes photos and other elements that aim to educate and inspire the public.
One section showcases notes written by some of the Holocaust survivors about life, hope, and reflection. In one such note that was on display, Holocaust survivor Risa Igelfeld, who is 107 years old, wrote: “I am writing this to urge the world to bring only positive thoughts to one another and let love flow.”
“Holocaust survivors are few and far between. Special people with special stories, and I really felt like they need to be told. [And] firsthand was really important to me,” Thompson, who is not Jewish, told the large crowd that attended the exhibit’s opening on Tuesday night. “Hearing a story from someone who has told a story is not the same as sitting in a room with someone who lived through something.”
Thompson told The Algemeiner he was originally hoping to only include non-Jewish celebrities in the portraits because “I wanted non-Jewish people standing up for Jewish people.” But once the project started, Jewish celebrities reached out to him and said they wanted to participate in the portrait series. He also admitted that he had a hard time getting some celebrities on board for the project.
“It wasn’t as easy as I had hoped, but the ones who did say ‘yes’ said [it] willingly and happily, and we were lucky to have them,” he said.
The Holocaust survivors in the series include natives of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Belgium, Romania, and one man who was born in a Budapest ghetto basement during a bombing raid in 1944. The photographs feature survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, and one person who survived 12 concentration camps. After surviving the genocide of World War II, some of these Holocaust survivors went on to have large families, become graduates of MIT, rocket designers, entertainment lawyers, writers, acclaimed sculptors, tailors, members of the Israeli Air Force, doctors of clinical psychology, and Holocaust educators. The photo series also highlights a survivor of the Farhud pogrom that targeted Jews in Baghdad, Iraq.
The goal of the portrait series and exhibit is to take the spotlight off the featured celebrities and instead use it shed some light on the Holocaust survivors, to help magnify their testimonies and help them reach a larger audience, especially the next generation. “In these pairings, recognition is redirected, and the attention so often given to fame is instead used to illuminate history,” read a description of the exhibit that was on display at its entrance. “The result is a series of intimate portraits and conversations where past and present collide, where silence is broken, and where remembrance becomes an act of defiance against forgetting.”
Brazilian model Daniela Braga is featured in the portrait series alongside Czech Holocaust survivor Gabriella Karin, who survived the war as a teenager by hiding in the one-bedroom apartment of a non-Jewish young lawyer who was located directly across the street from the Nazi-Slovak Gestapo. Born and raised Catholic, Braga converted to Judaism and her husband is Jewish. She told The Algemeiner that hearing about Karin’s experience during the Holocaust made her “very emotional because growing up in Brazil, we learned just a little bit about the Holocaust and World War II. But to have the experience to actually talk to someone who lived through it, it’s something so mind-blowing to me.”
“I could hear the pain in her voice,” Braga added. “It made me happy in the end that she’s alive and is able to tell her story to all of us, to share with other people. When we say, ‘Never Again,’ it really has to be never again.”
Braga also told The Algemeiner she met a Jewish people for the first time ever when she moved to New York 15 years ago.
“I’ve been immersed in this [Jewish] culture for 15 years. The Jewish culture is something very close to my heart. Anything that I can do to help the Jewish community, I will do it,” she said while explaining why she wanted to participate in Thompson’s portrait series.
Jewish actress Kat Graham is photographed in the portrait series with Holocaust survivor Yetta Kana. Graham spoke at the exhibit opening and said Thompson’s portraits capture “truth, resilience, and humanity.” The “Vampire Diaries” actress – whose maternal grandmother fled Europe during the Holocaust – additionally said the photographs “build a bridge between generations; a conversation between memory and legacy.”
“This project is about remembrance but it’s also about responsibility,” she told the crowd. “We are the torchbearers now. It is up to us to keep these stories alive and to ensure that history is never forgotten. That the voices of survivors, like Yetta, are not only heard, but felt. I invite you to see, to feel, and to carry these faces with you, long after you leave … Let’s never forget.”
The opening of “Borrowed Spotlight” on Tuesday night was attended by other well-known figures including Gregg Sulkin, Remi Bader, Moti Ankari, and “Real Housewives of New Jersey” stars Margaret Josephs, Melissa Gorga, and Lexi Barbuto. Sulkin, who is Jewish, told The Algemeiner he wanted to be in the portrait series but ultimately was unable to participate in Thompson’s project because of scheduling conflicts.
The photographs in the exhibit, as well as additional ones not on display, were compiled into a coffee table book available for purchase that features a foreword by Crawford. Proceeds from the book sales will support efforts to educate younger generations about the Holocaust. Proceeds from a private auction on Monday night of select prints in the series will benefit Selfhelp, which provides services and assistance to living Holocaust survivors in New York, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
There are more than 200,000 Holocaust survivors worldwide. Nearly 50 percent of all Holocaust survivors will die within the next six years, while 70 percent will no longer be alive within 10 years, according to a new report released this week by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference). There are estimated to be more than 1,400 alive today around the world who are over 100 years old.
“Borrowed Spotlight” will be open at the Detour Gallery through Sunday.
The post Celebrities Help ‘Spotlight’ Holocaust Survivors, Their Testimonies in New NYC Portrait Exhibit first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
Uncategorized
Meet the TikToker trying to revive Judeo-Arabic, the nearly extinct language Jews once spoke across the Arab world
In TikTok videos viewed tens of thousands of times, 31-year-old Dan Sheena dons a blond wig and acts out skits of a bickering Iraqi couple in a language that is nearly extinct: Judeo-Arabic.
Sheena began posting videos on TikTok in 2023, speaking the endangered language, which today is rarely spoken by anyone under the age of 60, following the mass exodus of Jews from Arab countries due to discrimination and religious persecution.
Raised by two parents from Baghdad, Sheena grew up in Israel and spoke the language at home. That’s a rarity among second- and third-generation Iraqi Jews, whose families often stopped passing it down in an effort to assimilate.
From a young age, Sheena, who still lives in Israel, knew he wanted to become an Arabic teacher. After years of teaching conversational Arabic in the public school system, he became determined to preserve the dialect he grew up with.
When Sheena told his family that he wanted to teach Judeo-Arabic, they urged him to focus on a more practical dialect. “They told me, ‘Oh, you are stupid. Why do you want to do that? No one wants to learn it. It’s going to die.’”
Despite their concerns, the initial response to his account and the Judeo-Arabic Zoom lessons he offered was overwhelming. “Many people registered. They told me, ‘Dan, this is my dream. I heard my parents speaking in Judeo Arabic, and I really want to learn it. And I finally have the opportunity.’”
He said that, for him, social media has been essential to his efforts to preserve the language. “Many people forward my videos between themselves” and “ask their parents about certain words,” he said. “This is the way to talk about Judeo-Arabic, to keep it alive. Social media lets me do that, not in the classic way of writing a book and trying to spread it and share it. This is the old way of keeping a language alive.”
In videos, he uses classic Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic phrases, including in equal measure cheeky insults like Wakka mazzalem (“may their luck run out”), and compliments like Asht eedak (“may your hands be blessed”), a phrase used to compliment someone’s cooking or hosting abilities.
Sheena has since built a TikTok following of more than 100,000 and teaches dozens of students around the world, who find him through social media, through Zoom-based courses each year.
A disappearing language
In the 1940s, nearly 1 million Jews lived across the Arab world. Today, an estimated 4,000 remain. In Iraq, where there was once a thriving Jewish community of around 120,000, just three Jews are believed to still live in the country.
Judeo-Arabic, a variety of different dialects of Arabic that were spoken by Jews in the Arab world, endured in active use for roughly 1,250 years. Since the mid-20th century, when Jews were forced to flee the region en masse, the language has been in rapid decline.
According to Assaf Bar Moshe, one of the world’s few Judeo-Arabic experts, Jews in the Middle East were usually bilingual. “They spoke one dialect with their community and families, and another dialect the moment they stepped out of their house,” to be able to communicate with their non-Jewish neighbors. A key feature of the language is words borrowed from Hebrew and Aramaic, especially for religious objects or distinctly Jewish words.
Bar Moshe said today, there are around 6,000 native speakers of the Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic dialect worldwide. That dialect, he said, offers a glimpse into what the Arab world sounded like centuries ago. “Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic is actually the original dialect of Baghdad from the Middle Ages. The Jewish community preserved it, while the Muslim dialect came later with migrations in the 17th century. That’s why they are so different.”
Over the centuries, Jews in each country developed their own dialect, often with additional regional variation. While the spoken language is extremely varied depending on where it was developed, the written language became much more standardized, with Arabic transliterated into Hebrew script, similar to Yiddish or Ladino.
When Jews left the Arab world, most fleeing to Israel, the U.S., the U.K. and Canada, they commonly abandoned the language as they tried to integrate into new societies. In Israel, Bar Moshe said, “Arabic was seen as the language of the enemy, so children were embarrassed to speak it.”
There was a similar pressure to assimilate for Jews who fled to other countries. “We wanted to be British,” said Vicky Sweiry Tsur, a Bahraini Jew who grew up in the U.K. and now lives in California. “I used to feel very embarrassed when my friends heard my parents speak Arabic. And you know, slowly, slowly, if you don’t use it, you lose it.”
According to Sheena, many students come to him with a sense of regret for turning away from the language when they were younger.
“If we just listened to my mom way back then, you know, I wouldn’t be chasing after every word and phrase that I can possibly remember now,” said Sweiry Tsur. “What I wouldn’t give to go back.”
‘You learn it from your heart’
Sheena admits his parents had reason to protest his decision to delve into Judeo-Arabic. Students come to him all the time debating whether they should learn conversational Arabic or Judeo-Arabic, which, by most measures, cannot be revived and has no practical use outside of the shrinking circle of elderly individuals who still speak it. “I always answer, to learn the spoken Arabic, you do it from your brain because you want to use it daily. But the Judeo-Arabic, you don’t learn from your brain. You learn it from your heart.”
Sheena’s student Jason Mashal, 36, whose parents were born in Iraq, said he is learning the language out of a desire to preserve it. “I don’t even want to learn Modern Standard Arabic,” he said. “My motivation has always been that this is a dying language, and I guess I’m probably going to fail to save it, but I’m still going to try, you know, to be as functional as I can.”
Inspired by his progress, Mashal later traveled to Iraq, visiting the school his parents attended (where current students had no idea it used to be a school for Jews), the only synagogue left in Baghdad, and even a nightclub his father used to frequent. “It was a very magical and electric feeling to walk through those halls in the precise place where I know both my parents went to school many years ago. Speaking Jewish Arabic in Iraq was just as electric.”
For many of Sheena’s students, the language offers a way to reconnect with memories they can no longer access. “People say to me, ‘Dan, I want to smell again my grandmother. I can’t sit with her and listen to her stories again, but I can hear her by these words by this language.’”
“He comes out with a word or a phrase that literally I can say I have not heard for like, 40 or 50 years,” said Sweiry Tsur. “There’s no way I would have been able to bring it out from the depths of my brain, but then you hear it, and you know exactly what it means, and exactly in what context you would use it — and all the emotions that are tied to it, you know, Friday night dinners with all of the family.”
The post Meet the TikToker trying to revive Judeo-Arabic, the nearly extinct language Jews once spoke across the Arab world appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Iran’s President Says Immediate Cessation of US-Israeli Aggression Needed to End War
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian attends the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit 2025, in Tianjin, China, September 1, 2025. Iran’s Presidential website/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Saturday that there needs to be an “immediate cessation” of what he described as US-Israeli aggression to end the war and wider regional conflict, Iran’s embassy in India said in an X post on Saturday.
Pezeshkian spoke with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi by phone earlier in the day.
Pezeshkian told Modi that there should be guarantees to prevent a recurrence of such “aggression” in the future. He also called on the BRICS bloc of major emerging economies to play an independent role in halting aggression against Iran.
The Iranian president proposed a regional security framework comprising West Asian countries to ensure peace without foreign interference, according to the country’s embassy in India.
In a separate post on X earlier on Saturday, Modi said he condemned attacks on critical infrastructure in the Middle East in the discussion with Pezeshkian.
The Indian Prime Minister further reiterated the importance of safeguarding freedom of navigation and ensuring shipping lanes remain open and secure.
Uncategorized
Trump’s Peace Board Hands Hamas Disarmament Proposal, Sources Say
US President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff attend the inaugural Board of Peace meeting at the US Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Donald Trump’s Board of Peace has presented Hamas with a written proposal on how it could lay down its weapons, two sources said, a step the Palestinian terrorists have thus far refused to take as the US president pushes on with his plan for Gaza’s future.
The proposal, first reported by NPR, was submitted to Hamas during meetings in Cairo over the past week, one of the sources said. The talks were attended by Nickolay Mladenov and Aryeh Lightstone, the two sources familiar with the matter said.
Mladenov is the Trump-appointed Board of Peace envoy to Gaza. Lightstone is a US aide to Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff.
Trump’s Gaza plan, to which Israel and Hamas agreed in October, sees Israeli troops withdrawing from Gaza and reconstruction starting as Hamas lays down its weapons.
Mladenov on Thursday said that serious efforts were underway to bring relief to war-torn Gaza, with a framework agreed by the mediators that could advance reconstruction in the enclave, much of which lies in ruins.
“It is now on the table. It requires one clear choice: full decommissioning by Hamas and every armed group, with no exceptions and no carve-outs. In this season of hope, may those responsible make the right choice for the Palestinian people,” Mladenov said on X in a post for the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr.
Representatives of Hamas were not immediately available for comment on Saturday, the second day of the holiday. Talks on disarmament had been placed on hold at the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran which began on February 28.
AMNESTY OFFER MAY BE ON THE TABLE
US officials have said that Iran-backed Hamas could be offered amnesty in any deal under which they agree to lay down any heavy weaponry and light arms including rifles.
Sources close to Hamas say the group would likely refuse to give up their rifles for fear of attacks by rival militias in Gaza, some of which have backing from Israel. Hamas and its rivals have staged deadly attacks on one another since the October ceasefire.
One of the sources said much would depend on what is acceptable to Israel, which demands the group’s complete disarmament.
Some of Hamas’ prominent officials have outright rejected any disarmament over the past few months.
Israel has shown no sign of withdrawing its troops who are in control of around half of Gaza’s territory, with Hamas keeping a firm grip on the other half of the enclave and its two million population, most of which has been rendered homeless by two years of devastating war.
The source said that amnesty and targeted investments in Gaza were being offered as incentives for Hamas, but said that it was unclear whether the Board of Peace would have funds to pay for it.
Trump garnered some $7 billion in pledges in February from countries, including some in the Gulf, before those same countries came under attack by Iran in a widening Middle East war.
The source said that only a small amount of those pledged funds had actually been provided, without specifying sums.