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Israel bars travel to U.S., Trump says Jews and Muslims love Christmas, why a Broadway show hired a rabbinic consultant, and a Catholic priest gets a Jewish burial.
THE WEEK IN POLITICS Jacob Kornbluh, the Forward's senior political reporter, with Tom Suozzi, a gubernatorial candidate. Each Monday, Jacob Kornbluh, our senior political reporter, shares what’s in his notebook about New York, Washington, Jerusalem and beyond.
Pizza time with Tom Suozzi: Suozzi, a Democratic Congressman from Long Island, discussed his bid for governor of New York in an interview Sunday in Brooklyn.
He peppered the hourlong conversation with Yiddish and Hebrew, while eating pizza, and emphasized his pro-Israel record. “My goal is to be known as the most reliable non-Jewish Democrat,” he said. “I’m standing up to the far-left and to the far-right.”
A second chance: Suozzi is one of three announced Democratic primary challengers to Gov. Kathy Hochul, who got the job when Andrew Cuomo resigned in August. It’s his second run for the statehouse, having lost in the 2006 primary to Eliot Spitzer, who resigned after less than two years in office. “I then learned the Yiddish saying, ‘Mensch tracht un Gott lacht’ – ‘Man plans and God laughs,’” Suozzi said about that race. “Whatever is bashert is going to happen anyway, and I feel like this is my time.”
Courting the Orthodox: Taking a page from Eric Adams’ successful mayoral campaign, Suozzi has recently been courting Orthodox leaders. In the interview, he promised a hands-off approach to yeshiva education and said he would take a different approach than Cuomo on COVID in religious communities. Read the full interview here ➤
Challenge cards: AIPAC’s announcement last week that it had launched political action committees to directly finance candidates in the 2022 midterm elections is having ripple effects. J Street, an AIPAC rival, called on all PACs to pledge not to support Republicans who backed Donald Trump’s claim of election fraud. The Jewish Democratic Council of America and Democratic Majority for Israel accepted the challenge – unsurprisingly, since they don’t support Republicans. The Democratic Majority group issued its own call to AIPAC and J Street not to back politicians who voted against the replenishment of the Iron Dome.
In Congress: President Joe Biden is expected to sign the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act into law. It includes $500 million in funding for U.S.-Israel cooperation on missile defense systems, $30 million for joint cybersecurity partnerships, and several amendments to counter Iran’s terror activities in the Middle East.
Before adjourning for the year on Saturday, the Senate confirmed 41 ambassadors, including Rahm Emanuel (Japan), Michael Adler (Belgium) and Marc Stanley (Argentina).
Remembering: Former Sen. Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican who retired in 2019, died on Sunday at the age of 76. Isakson was a sponsor of the 2012 legislation that advanced Israel’s military edge. In a 2016 interview, Isakson said one of his favorite mementos was the letter of thanks he got from then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY Passengers arrive at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel. (Getty Images) ✈️ Israel voted Monday morning to bar travel to 10 countries including the United States, where the Omicron variant has fueled a surge that brought more than 130,000 new cases on Sunday. This marks the first time the U.S. has been placed on Israel’s no-fly list. Israeli citizens who are out of the country must stay at a state-run quarantine hotel when they return home. (Times of Israel)
🇺🇸 In a newly released interview with Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, former President Donald Trump made a series of remarks that invoked antisemitic tropes. He claimed Jewish Americans “either don’t like Israel or don’t care about Israel” and said he believes “evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country.” The ADL condemned the remarks. Separately, Trump raised eyebrows in an interview with former Gov. Mike Huckabee on Newsmax, where he said: “Whether you’re Muslim, whether you’re Christian, whether you’re Jewish, everyone loves Christmas.” (CNN, The Guardian, Daily Beast)
😲 A staff member at a Washington, D.C., elementary school instructed third-graders to reenact scenes from the Holocaust. One student was told to pretend he was on a train to a concentration camp and then to act as if he were dying in a gas chamber. When the class asked why the Germans killed Jews, the staff member said: “Because the Jews ruined Christmas.” (JTA)
🗞 In Greensboro, N.C., an antisemitic flyer was tossed on hundreds of lawns. “Every single aspect of the COVID agenda is Jewish,” it read. (News & Record)
🎄 Meet Si Spiegel: He bombed the Nazis, outwitted the Soviets and modernized Christmas. Spiegel, a Jewish fighter pilot during World War II, invented the artificial Christmas tree, now found in nearly 75% of the American homes that put up trees. Spiegel, 97 and a multimillionaire, does not have one. (New York Times)
🏊 Anastasia Gorbenko, an Israeli swimmer, picked up her second gold medal on Sunday at the World Swimming Championships in Abu Dhabi. She won both the 50-meter breaststroke and the 100-meter individual medley. (Jerusalem Post)
🎬 Is the new film “Licorice Pizza” an updated iteration of “Fiddler on the Roof?” Perhaps not, but one culture critic is praising the casting of Alana Haim in what is an inherently Jewish role – along with Andrew Garfield as the star of “Tick, Tick … Boom!” – as a positive step. “Jews do not need a string of stories about Orthodox Jews leaving the fold,” writes Malina Saval. “Sometimes, it’s almost better if it’s just a story about an Israeli-American Jewish girl running around the Valley, or a New York-based Jewish playwright pining away to produce a play.” (Variety)
FROM OUR CULTURE SECTION A Broadway cast had questions about Jews and money. So they hired a rabbi. The acclaimed play “Lehman Trilogy” tells the story of three Jewish immigrants from Bavaria who built Lehman Brothers into a banking empire. Rabbi Daniel Epstein’s job was to make sure the actors sounded right saying kaddish. But when he arrived on set, they had bigger questions – questions that, in a different context, “might have been borderline antisemitic,” he said in an interview. Find out how he answered, and about the Teutonic accent he helped them master. Read the interview ➤
That time ‘I Love Lucy’ confronted antisemitism in front of millions of Americans: The “Pioneer Women” episode aired in the spring of 1952. In it, Lucy is called a “show person” and turned down for a membership in an exclusive country club. “Lucy Ricardo got up to a lot of mishegas,” writes Victoria Myers. “There was no shortage of things the writers could have had her do that would have made her a Society Matrons’ League reject,” she continued, but they chose the canard that Jews run Hollywood. Read the story ➤
ON THE CALENDAR On this day in history: Uri Geller, the Israeli magician and mind reader, was born on Dec. 20, 1946. Geller’s most famous illusion was spoon bending, a trick he popularized during four decades of television appearances – including on “The Merv Griffin Show” and “The Tonight Show.” In more recent years, Geller’s off-stage life drew attention. Michael Jackson was his best friend (and best man when Geller renewed his wedding vows). In 2017, he bought at auction a 1954 letter written by Albert Einstein in which the physicist called Israel “intellectually active and interesting.”
Also on this day in 1971, Bernard Kouchner, a Jewish physician from France, founded the international aid organization Doctors Without Borders.
PHOTO OF THE DAY A minyan of Jews traveled from Israel to Poland to bury the Rev. Gregor Pawlowski, Jaffa’s Roman Catholic priest. Pawlowski was born Jewish and rescued by a Catholic orphanage during World War II. It was his dying wish to be buried in accordance with Jewish law, adjacent to the mass grave where his mother, sisters and 1,000 other Jewish victims were shot and killed in 1942 during the Holocaust.
––– Thanks to Louis Keene and Jacob Kornbluh for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com.
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