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Curating your news this morning from a friend’s kitchen in Atlanta, where the coffee is strong and the Krispy Kreme donuts are kosher. ☕🍩

Israeli airstrike kills dozens in Gaza, high school yearbook replaces photo of Jewish club with Muslim students, the Holocaust-adjacent confusion over Dallas Mavericks jerseys, the Hitler-adjacent reason why the LAPD declined to accept two police dogs, and honoring the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

 ISRAEL AT WAR

The Rana Choir’s 17 singers — a mix of Jewish, Muslim and Christian women in Israel — practice a song about coexistence. (Rina Castelnuovo-Hollander)

Israel’s only Arab-Jewish women’s choir nearly folded after October. Here’s how they’ve stayed together through the war

The choir’s 17 members have been torn up by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s war in Gaza. But the group has managed to agree on two things: that it would not perform publicly until the singers could work through their grief, and that staying together mattered more than whether anybody heard them.

“Harmony, they have learned, is not something that can be forced,” writes our Susan Greene, who spent time with the group at their rehearsal space in Jaffa.

Members of the choir stretch before a rehearsal Tuesday evening in Jaffa. (Rina Castelnuovo-Hollandert)

The choir did not meet for a month after the massacre. And once they did, some of the Israelis felt betrayed, while some of the Palestinians denied the atrocities of Oct. 7. “It was the first time I ever thought we wouldn’t survive a crisis,” said the choir’s co-founder and director, Mika Danny, who eventually brought in mediators to help.

The group didn’t sing at all for a few months, instead practicing movement and breathing together each week. They took long breaks for home-baked baklava, rugelach and lots of chocolate. Some apologized for things they had said weeks earlier. And, eventually, the music returned.

They plan to sing in Jaffa’s old city on June 15 — at their first concert since the war began.

Could a politician further to the right than Netanyahu be a better peace partner for Biden? (Getty)

Analysis | It’s not working with Netanyahu. Can Biden find a better Israeli partner for peace? Despite the president’s warmer tone with the prime minister in recent days, experts say Biden could well prefer a reset, a reliable new partner who aligns with his plan for a negotiated ceasefire that includes the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza alongside Israel. Our senior political reporter, Jacob Kornbluh, explains why a potential successor to Netanyahu on the right, like Avigdor Lieberman, may actually be a more pragmatic partner for Biden. Read the story ➤

The latest…

• Israel launched an airstrike overnight targeting 20-30 Hamas terrorists who were using a school run by UNRWA in Gaza as a compound. Gazan health officials said dozens of displaced civilians, who were sheltering at the school, were also killed in the attack.

  
  

• The World Central Kitchen said it is now getting aid trucks into Gaza “at a fairly good clip.” The humanitarian group had temporarily paused deliveries after seven of its employees were killed in an IDF airstrike in April.

  
  

• Spain is seeking permission to join South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide.

  
  

• A Jewish U.S. Army Major resigned from his post to protest U.S. support of Israel’s war in Gaza. “As the descendant of European Jews,” he wrote in a letter, “I was raised in a particularly unforgiving moral environment when it came to the topic of bearing responsibility for ethnic cleansing,” adding that his opposition to the war was inspired in part by his experience visiting Yad Vashem.

  
  

• Police arrested 13 pro-Palestinian demonstrators who had barricaded themselves Wednesday in the office of the president at Stanford University.

  
  

• European students have been far more successful than students here in getting their colleges to agree to divest from Israel-linked companies.

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ALSO IN THE FORWARD

Does Luka Doncic play for the Dallas Mavericks (Mavs) or the Dallas Maus? Also, is he wearing No. 77 or 11? (Getty)

Dallas ‘Maus’? Or are the NBA Finals making you see things? People are starting to notice that the jerseys of the Dallas Mavericks, who are in the NBA Finals which begin today, seem to say not “Mavs,” rendered in all caps, but Maus, which is the title of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust. “That’s funny,” Spiegelman told our Louis Keene. “I haven’t seen it, but I have no thoughts about sports at all. I couldn’t recite back to you what sports you were talking about. It’s anathema to me.” He added, “Is there another team with cats playing?”

Furiosa is an action movie about cars. Why is there so much biblical symbolism?The newest installment in the Mad Max franchise opens with a biblical scene: the heroine, reaching up to grasp a forbidden fruit. As soon as she picks it, her idyllic life comes to an end; she’s kidnapped from a lush sanctuary and thrust into an apocalyptic desert world. But that’s about where the edenic references end; the rest of the movie, like any Mad Max installment, is about battle scenes between cars outfitted with bulldozers. Our culture critic Mira Fox wonders whether the Genesis scene is “a lazy attempt to add the illusion of depth without actually having to add any substance,” or whether there’s something more going on.

Plus: Samuel Woodward is accused of killing a former high school classmate who was Jewish and gay. Woodward’s mother recently took the stand and painted a complex portrait of her son.

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

Donald Trump departs the courtroom after being found guilty on 34 counts in his hush money trial. (Getty)

📈  In a survey of religious groups taken after former President Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts involving hush money and a porn star, Jewish Americans were more likely to say Trump’s actions were immoral (73%), than any of the other religious groups polled. (Religion News Service)

🎒 A photo of a Jewish club in a New Jersey high school yearbook was erased and replaced with Muslim students. The superintendent is investigating. (NBC New York)

🎭  At first, the new Academy Museum in Los Angeles failed to highlight the roles Jews played in the history of Hollywood. Then this spring, hoping to rectify that criticism, it opened an exhibit about Hollywood’s Jewish founders. Now come complaints that the exhibit includes unflattering and antisemitic tropes. (The Wrap)

🇩🇪  Germany allocated $1.5 billion in Holocaust reparations this year, a slight uptick from the $1.4 billion from last year. This is the highest it’s ever been, but that growth is expected to plummet as the number of living survivors declines. (JTA)

👮  A New Jersey cop with a neck tattoo of a Hitler Youth slogan as well as other white supremacist tattoos was fired because his visible ink went against department policy for “espousing racist ideology.” (NY Post)

🐶  The Los Angeles City Council refused a donation of two police dogs after it was discovered that the dogs were trained by a company called Adlerhorst International, which shares “the name of the Nazi bunker used by Adolf Hitler during World War II.’’ (LA Times)

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Today is the 80th anniversary of D-Day, so we’re sharing an essay by Beth Harpaz (the editor of this newsletter!) about her father’s experience at Normandy. “It might sound strange to modern parents who fret about exposing their kids to stories about war and other terrible things, but I loved hearing my father’s battle tales,” she writes. “I was in his thrall every night as I pushed my green peas into my mashed potatoes while hearing him describe taking out a nest of German machine guns or hunting down Nazis in the dark.” Read her essay ➤

You can also click on the video above to watch an interview her dad did with the local news on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.

Related: Eighty years ago, an attorney’s French Jewish grandparents were on the run and on the verge of deportation when the Allied forces liberated Paris.

Thanks to Mira Fox, Louis Keene and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter, and to Beth Harpaz for editing it. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com.

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Reporting from the ground in Israel and campuses takes resources. Support the news that matters to you with a monthly donation.