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Trump's Israel ambassador blasts Jewish congressman, Yad Vashem invites Whoopi Goldberg, Netflix film uncovers Israeli con man, 'Sex and the City' features transgender 'they mitzvah.'
THE WINTER OLYMPICS The Israeli delegation enters the stadium at the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. (Getty) Beijing is 13 hours ahead of Forwarding headquarters, and the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games just got underway. If you’re feeling a sense of déjà vu, you’d be forgiven. The Summer Olympics ended less than six months ago. And although the upstart Israeli bobsled team failed to qualify for these Games by just 0.2 seconds, there’s still plenty of Jewish athletes to watch…
Let’s get started: Louis Keene, our resident sports reporter, has compiled this handy list of all these athletes, and when they will be competing. We’ll keep you informed in this newsletter on how each of them do throughout the Games, but if you’re looking for up-to-the-minute results, follow @thislouis on Twitter.
Ones to watch: Louis interviewed several of the athletes before they boarded their flights to China. He spoke with Barnabás and Noa Szőllős – Hungarian-born siblings who will be competing for Israel in all the ski events; and Alexei Bychenko, the Israeli who skated to Hava Nagila in 2018, and is now taking a Puccini opera to his third Olympics.
While we’re on the topic of skating soundtracks, we profiled Jason Brown, who will be attempting a double-axle to the music from “Schindler’s List.” And our colleagues at JTA chatted with Hailey Kops, a figure skater from a modern Orthodox family in New Jersey, who did a gap year studying in Jerusalem last year and is now headed to her first Olympics.
Fun fact: Thanks to Jason Demers, Josh Ho-Sang and Devon Levi, the men’s hockey team from Canada will be one of the most Jewish teams in Beijing.
Looming in the background of these games is China’s ongoing genocide against Uyghur Muslims. More than 1 million Uyghurs have been tortured, sterilized or sent to internment camps since 2017. Millions more face systematic persecution, surveillance and “reeducation.”
Human rights activists, genocide scholars and Holocaust historians see parallels between the way that Beijing is attempting to use the Games to distract from their crimes against humanity to the way Nazi Germany successfully did so during the 1936 Olympics.
ALSO FROM THE FORWARD 'Old Men Dancing,' a painting by Leo Segedin. At 95, this visionary Jewish artist can’t stop painting — and painting:Leo Segedin gets up every morning at 5, has coffee and a full breakfast and by 6:30 is at his easel. His new exhibit is of self-portraits (“I’m a cheap model,” he joked), but much of his art refers to his years growing up in a Jewish neighborhood on the west side of Chicago. “Childhood is still part of my life,” he said. “It’s not something I outgrew.” One difference now? His studio is on the ground floor, so he doesn’t have to walk up any stairs.Read the story ➤
Sneak peek at new book by Trump’s Israel ambassador: The memoir by David Friedman, the Orthodox, pro-settlement envoy whose tenure included moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and signing the Abraham Accords, is slated for release on Tuesday, but our Jacob Kornbluh got an early copy. Titled “Sledgehammer,” the book finds Friedman quoting himself swearing at pro-Israel Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch over invitation protocols for the embassy opening ceremony. (Deutch said in an interview he recalls only “congenial conversations” with Friedman over the event.) Read the scoop ➤
On the far right, there are no contradictions, only virulent antisemitism: Last summer’s 16-day trial in Charlottesville ended with a whopping $26 million in damages assessed to more than a dozen white supremacists and hate groups for their role in a deadly 2017 rally. Among the courtroom observers was the historian James Loeffler, who directs the Jewish Studies program at the University of Virginia. The Forward’s language columnist, Aviya Kushner, spoke to Loeffler about what he saw and heard — and whether dangerous rhetoric from the past made its way into the courtroom. Read their conversation ➤
WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY 🎙️ Sarah Silverman defended Whoopi Goldberg, who was suspended from ABC’s “The View” for saying the Holocaust was not about race. “She’s not antisemitic,” Silverman said. “It’s semantics.” Earlier in the week, another Jewish celebrity, Mayim Bialik, also sided with Goldberg, saying the Holocaust is “not just about Jews and it’s not about race – it is about the things that humans do to each other.” On Thursday, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, invited Goldberg to visit. (Mediaite, New York Post)
🕍 The new mayor of Pittsburgh says he is going to make safety for Jews a top priority – especially in the aftermath of the hostage-taking at a synagogue in Texas. “I don’t have an answer to why people hate people because of their religion or the color of their skin. I don’t have that answer,” said Mayor Ed Gainey, whose mother was one of the medical examiners who worked on the victims of the Tree of Life massacre. “What I do know is that we have to fight.” (Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle)
💰 Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan has received a $5.5 million donation from Mark and Robyn Tsesarsky. “These last two years have been a struggle for many of the things we hold dear,” said Rabbi Shaul Robinson of Lincoln Square. “All religious institutions have faced considerable challenges in remaining open and vibrant.” (Facebook)
📖 When Australia banned Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” in 1970, a collective secretly printed hundreds of copies that were passed hand-to-hand while the novel’s future was decided in court. But the bootleg book was only recently brought into public view. “We’re not talking printers and binders, we’re literally talking about people secretly working to print hundreds of copies of a banned book, which would have been completely illegal,” said librarian Des Cowley. (The Guardian)
🎉 The season finale of the “Sex and the City” reboot featured parents planning a “they mitzvah” for their transgender child. But not all traditions were modified. When a friend suggests serving “hipster” sourdough challah to a senior relative, the family balks. “We’re already pushing the envelope with this ‘they mitzvah.’ Can we please give the old Jew something they’ll recognize?” (JTA)
What we’re watching this weekend ➤ A new Netflix documentary, “The Tinder Swindler,” unveils the multimillion dollar fraud scheme of an Israeli who posed as a billionaire diamond dealer to woo victims via dating apps. The women manage to flip the script, which our PJ Grisar describes as “heroism in the face of bad dating-app actors.” Read the review ➤
Shiva call ➤ Mel Mermelstein, an Auschwitz survivor who filed multiple lawsuits against Holocaust deniers, died at 95. Leonard Nimoy played Mermelstein in a TV movie. “Many people thought it was a foolhardy thing to do, but he went ahead and did it anyway, and he won,” said Deborah E. Lipstadt, adding that she was inspired by Mermelstein to pursue her own subsequent legal battle against a British Holocaust denier. Read an appreciation and see the iconic photo of Mermelstein and Elie Wiesel ➤
YOUR WEEKEND READS We’ve collected some favorite articles from the week into an easy-to-read, printable format. This edition features: my interview with a quixotic Congressional candidate from West Virginia, a followup on how Jewish groups reacted to an Amnesty International report accusing Israel of apartheid, a poem by the father of Daniel Pearl on the 20th anniversary of his son’s death, and an essay by a Black Jewish mom about race, religion and Whoopi Goldberg. Get your copy ➤ ON THE CALENDAR On this day in history: Betty Friedan, the feminist author and activist, was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein on Feb. 4, 1921. She rose to prominence in the 1960s when she published “The Feminine Mystique” and became the first president of the National Organization for Women. She died on her 85th birthday in 2006. In an editorial looking back at her life, the Forward wrote: “Like few other figures in recent history, she introduced a transformative concept that changed the way we looked at ourselves and each other, and then she watched and participated as society reshaped itself around her ideas.”
Last year on this day, we reported on the death of Flory Jagoda, a matriarch of Ladino music.
In honor of National Homemade Soup Day, check out this go-to matzah ball soup recipe courtesy of Rob Eshman, our food editor, or read Jodi Rudoren’s recent column about bringing soup to friends with COVID.
VIDEO OF THE DAY Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg and other female religious leaders appeared on “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” Thursday night to talk about the Supreme Court and abortion rights. “Religion has been used to justify atrocity and to maintain power for centuries,” Ruttenberg said. “Now it is being used to hold and maintain and entrench existing power structures.” Watch the video ➤
––– Thanks to Laura E. Adkins, PJ Grisar, Louis Keene and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com.
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