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Good morning! I'm Talya Zax, the Forward’s innovation editor and Judy Blume superfan. Benyamin Cohen is off this week, so I’m filling in on the Forwarding desk.
Today: Noa Tishby on her new role fighting antisemitism, the debatable Jewishness of Marvel’s newest TV hero, and Holocaust museums condemn Russia.
OUR LEAD STORY Oksana Naumchuk conducts a Polish lesson. (Courtesy of Oksana Naumchuk)
Unlikely shelter: Oksana Naumchuk, 26, who lives in Kyiv and before the war worked for a company that produces strollers, spent a year volunteering at the Auschwitz Jewish Center beginning in 2017. Before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, she had been planning to host friends from that experience in her apartment during their vacation in Ukraine’s capital in May.
Instead, Naumchuk is one of some 2.5 million Ukrainian refugees who have landed in Poland. And those friends who were planning to stay with her arranged for her and her family to live for the past several weeks at the International Youth Meeting Center in Oświęcim, an educational facility dedicated to Holocaust awareness about a mile from Auschwitz.
Paying it forward: After making it to Oświęcim, Naumchuk joined efforts to aid other refugees. She teaches Ukrainians Polish at a small local museum, acts as a translator and helps them with paperwork and public transportation. She jokes that she has become the “manager of the Ukrainians in Oświęcim.”
Historical parallel? Naumchuk, who is not Jewish, is reluctant to compare the atrocities of the Holocaust and those of the current war, which many experts say is also a genocide: “How can I comment on things,” she said, “which I haven’t seen with my eyes?” But her experience in Oświęcim has left her with some hope: After horror, rather than simply move on, the town “is still working as a place where people can come to study.”
ALSO FROM THE FORWARD Noa Tishby, Israel’s new special envoy to combat antisemitism. (Rich Fury/Getty Images) Noa Tishby, new Israeli envoy, says anti-Zionism is antisemitism “100%.”The actor, author and pro-Israel activist spoke to our Jacob Kornbluh on Monday about her appointment to a new role in Israel’s foreign ministry. While she may lack the expertise or credibility of Deborah E. Lipstadt, who was confirmed March 31 as the U.S. ambassador against antisemitism, Tishby says it is “crucial” in today’s climate to have both “the historians of the world and people like me to articulate that message” regarding anti-Zionism and the threats posed by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. “I have been in the trenches with this for over a decade,” Tishby said. “It's not because I'm nice or post cute social media videos.” Read the story ➤
Chicago teacher who assigned Nazi propaganda poster takes ‘indefinite leave of absence’: After the Forward reported last month on a Jewish student’s complaint about the eighth grade social-studies project, the teacher sent a letter of apology. “I am sincerely sorry I upset Gladys,” it said. “I have spent a lot of time reflecting on ways to improve.” Then on Friday, the school announced the teacher would not be returning after this week’s spring break. Gladys, the girl who complained, said she has been isolated by her peers and her mother is considering pulling her out of the school. Read the story ➤
How Jewish is Moon Knight, anyway? The Marvel superhero, now hitting the small screen in a Disney+ series starring Oscar Isaac, is canonically the son of a Chicago rabbi — and his anger at his Holocaust survivor father’s pacifist response to antisemitism starts him on his path to developing superpowers. Before the series’ debut, questions swirled over whether it would engage with its hero’s Jewishness. While the show’s lead writer tweeted in March that “preserving the character’s Jewish faith was important to our entire writing team,” writes Roy Schwartz, who literally wrote the book on Marvel and the Jews, the company has a checkered history when it comes to handling Jewish superheroes thoughtfully on screen. Read the story ➤
WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY Some 19,000 Americans are expected to visit Israel with Birthright this summer. (David Silverman/Getty Images) 🇮🇱 After two years of pandemic lull, Birthright said it plans to host approximately 19,000 Americans on trips to Israel this summer, 14,000 of them current students. As of May 2021, an estimated 30,000 would-be participants’ trips had been postponed or canceled because of COVID-19.
✡️ A group of 17 Holocaust museums condemned Russia for committing war crimes in Ukraine. “We are angered by today’s stories of children with their hands zip-tied and buried in shallow graves,” said a statement from the group, which includes museums in the U.S., U.K., Canada and South Africa. “We are angered by the horrific reports of rape and wanton destruction of lives by the Russian army. These are war crimes, and if we, as the bearers of history, do not speak out, then we have failed in our mission.”
🕵️ No, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and George Soros are not cousins. An online rumor is circling claiming that a Pentagon official said they were, just the latest instance of misinformation suggesting that Jewish people in the public eye are relatives of Soros, the billionaire underwriter of liberal causes who is a major boogeyman for white supremacists and the far right. (Snopes)
🍖 What will the shank bone of the future be made of? Amid mounting environmental concerns surrounding meat and rising prices, many Jews have opted for a brisket-free Passover. Could cell-based meat, which is expected to hit the market this year, be the next holiday trend? “It’s potentially a game changer if it can be scaled up,” said one committed vegan rabbi. (Religious News Service)
💸 Why did the Saudi crown prince invest $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s private equity firm? Mohammed bin Salman, one of Kushner’s partners in brokering the Abraham Accords, faced objections from a panel that screens investments from the main Saudi wealth fund, but bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, overruled them. Kushner had been one of the prince’s prime defenders after U.S. agencies concluded he had greenlit the brutal 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khasshogi. (New York Times)
🗣️ A Long Island woman went on an eight-minute rant about the dangers of Jews moving to her town at a public meeting. New York’s governor and other politicians have denounced her comments. The woman had called for a change to zoning laws in the town, Rockville Centre, so “a synagogue cannot be on every residential street like they are in the Five Towns,” a heavily Orthodox area. The mayor responded: “The board will be very concerned.” (New York Jewish Week)
💐 Survivors of Germany’s largest concentration camp, Buchenwald, gathered there Monday to commemorate its liberation exactly 77 years ago by Allied forces. There are only 16 remaining survivors of the camp, and some of them laid wreaths in a ceremony overshadowed by the war in Ukraine. “What people are capable of, we see today not far from us,” said Josef Schuster, head of Germany's Central Council of Jews. (Deutsche Welle)
🎻 What do you do with a problem like Richard Wagner? So asks a new exhibit at Germany’s national history museum that examines the legacy of the renowned composer, including his vehement antisemitism. “If Wagner had only written his 3,000 pages of prose,” said one of the show’s curators, “he would be remembered as a kook, a second-rate maniacal thinker.” (New York Times)
Shiva call ➤ Andor Stern, the sole Brazilian-born survivor of the Shoah, died at age 94. (JTA)
ON THE CALENDAR On this day in history: A litter of baby Syrian hamsters was discovered underground on April 12, 1930, by Israel Aharoni, a Jewish zoologist in Aleppo. The hamsters, whose evolutionary instincts forced them deep underground, were taken to the lab of Aharoni’s colleague, Saul Adler, who believed they might be genetically similar enough to humans to be used in medical research. But some escaped from their cages and some ate each other. Three hamsters remained, and two mated, produced a miraculous 150 offspring that experts say are the progenitors of most hamsters found in today’s pet stores. Learn more about them in our secret Jewish history of the pet hamster ➤
On the Hebrew calendar, it’s the 11th of Nisan, the birthday of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who was born in 1902 in what is now Ukraine.
Today at 6 p.m. ET: How do you choose the best wines for Passover? Join a special Instagram Live with our Rob Eshman and Laura E. Adkins. They’ll talk about their favorite — inexpensive — wines for the Seder table and take your questions. Watch it here ➤ VIDEO OF THE DAY What is it that makes Passover food so evocative? For the renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman, it’s the memories of home. Speaking to the Forward in 2016, he recalled the potato pancakes his Polish-born mother made for the holiday. She used boiled mashed potatoes rather than grated raw ones, he said, and cooked them with schmaltz. Our Yiddish editor, Rukhl Schaechter, tried making them — watch here for the result. ––– Play today’s Vertl puzzle (aka the Yiddish Wordle)
Thanks to Kayla Cohen and Jacob Kornbluh for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com.
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