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Jews dress as Muslims to pray at Temple Mount, Whoopi Goldberg returns to 'The View,' and we went to the theater to see how many people showed up to watch the new Woody Allen film.
FROM THE FORWARD Opinion | Why we’re bringing Black plays to Jewish schools:Students at 10 Jewish schools are watching performances of shows like “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and then interviewing the cast and director afterwards. It’s part of a program called Exploring Black Narratives, which was co-founded by two Jews, one white, one Black. “When we vicariously live through a character’s journeys and conflicts, whether set against World War II, Jim Crow America or contemporary society,” they write, “we shift from our increasingly siloed personal convictions to a form of witnessing and close reading that is grounded in compassion and understanding.” Read the essay ➤
She died of cystic fibrosis. A new film tells her story – in her own words: Mallory Smith kept a diary for more than a decade, including detailed instructions to her mother of what to publish after her death. The book, “Salt in My Soul,” has now been turned into a documentary. The film is at once an intimate family story and a powerful piece of patient testimony. The director, Will Battersby, and Smith’s mother, Diane Shader Smith, also view it as an opportunity to start a discussion about phage therapy, an emerging treatment that may be the magic bullet to combat antibiotic-resistant infection. Read the story ➤
How forgetting the Holocaust helped Germany thrive after the war: How did a democratic West Germany rise so quickly from the ashes of a genocidal fascist state? That’s the central question of “Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich,” a new book by Harald Jähner. “While memory usually bathes the past in a softer light with the passing years,” he writes, “the reverse is true for the post-war period in Germany. In hindsight it became increasingly dark.” Read our review ➤
Woody Allen’s latest is playing in a New York theater – but is anybody going to see it? Anybody?Our PJ Grisar went to see “Rifkin’s Festival” at a Manhattan movie theater last week. So did three other people. (One was a peyos-twirling Hasidic man.) While rewatching the romantic comedy, a critical and box office flop, Grisar immediately began second-guessing his initial “diplomatic” appraisal. And he wasn’t the only one who left the theater unimpressed. It was “like a college skit,” said a full quarter of the audience. Read the story ➤
FROM OUR FRIENDS AT HAARETZ Israeli security forces close-off a street in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah on Sunday. (Getty) The East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah has again become the site of violent clashes: The situation is looking eerily similar to the escalation before last year’s war between Israel and Gaza. What is the story behind the headlines and what happened this week? Here’s your complete explainer about the root of the friction, the latest developments and how the area became a Palestinian national symbol. Read the story ➤
Ukrainian Jews prepare for worst, pray for best and vow to stay: Russia is amassing troops on the border. The last time this happened, 30,000 Ukrainian Jews fled the country and moved to Israel. This time around, the locals are taking a different tack. “We’re looking at our central mission as one of strengthening Jews, giving them faith and certainly not hysteria and panic,” said Rabbi Pinchas Vishedski, who runs a community of refugees in Kyiv and believes the community is in less danger this time. Read the story ➤
WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY 🔫 A gunman fired shots Monday at Craig Greenberg, a candidate for mayor of Louisville, Kentucky. Greenberg, an entrepreneur who runs a professional wrestling business, was unharmed, though a bullet penetrated his clothing. The police arrested Quintez Brown, 21, a civil rights activist who recently announced his own campaign for city council, and charged him with attempted murder and wanton endangerment. “Mr. Greenberg is Jewish, so there’s that,” said the local police chief. “We don’t know if it’s tied to the candidate, is political, or are we dealing with someone who has mental issues, is venomous.” (JTA, Louisville Courier Journal)
📺 Whoopi Goldberg returned to “The View” on Monday after her two-week suspension for saying that the Holocaust was not about race. Goldberg, who had already apologized, said that during the show’s short segments, the hosts have conversations and sometimes “don’t do it as elegantly as we should.” She added: “We’re going to keep having tough conversations because, in part, that’s what we’ve been hired to do.” (JTA)
📈 Extremists killed 29 people in the U.S. in 2021, according to a new report released by the Anti-Defamation League today, and more than 90% of those murders were committed by right-wing extremists. The report details each incident, including the June shooting deaths in the Boston suburb of Winthrop of Ramona Cooper, a Black military veteran, and David Green, a Black state trooper (and veteran) who tried to help her. The police killed the suspect, Nathan Allen, a 28-year-old white supremacist who kept a diary in which he denigrated Blacks and Jews, and claimed racism was good. (ADL)
👶 After World War II, when Jews were often prohibited from adopting children born to non-Jewish parents, an underground baby-selling market sprung up in Canada. Decades later, a group of siblings separated through that market has found each other through genealogy services like 23andMe. “It didn’t really hurt me by meeting them,” one said. “If anything, it enhanced me.” (Washington Post)
🙏 A fringe group of Jews has been dressing as Muslims and speaking Arabic to gain entry and pray at the Temple Mount – also called Al Aqsa Mosque plaza. Non-Muslims can visit the site, which Muslims revere, but are not allowed to pray there, according to a longstanding agreement between Israel and Jordan. “The mission is to reconquer the Temple Mount,” said one of the undercover activists. (BBC)
🎬 Jesse Eisenberg portrayed Mark Zuckerberg in a 2010 movie about the creation of Facebook. Now there’s a film being made about how Facebook has stumbled in recent years, including its role in spreading misinformation during the 2016 election and the pandemic. Claire Foy, the actress who embodied Queen Elizabeth in Netflix’s “The Crown,” will play Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s COO and a Jewish philanthropist. (The Wrap)
ON THE CALENDAR On this day in history: Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman, was born on Feb. 15, 1948 – although you may know him by his other name: Art. The cartoonist, who lost dozens of relatives during World War II, gained international acclaim for “Maus,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir about the Holocaust. A Tennessee school board recently decided to ban the book, a decision Spiegelman called “Orwellian.” It sparked a national debate about Holocaust education that managed to include both Anne Frank and Whoopi Goldberg.
Last year on this day, we reported on Rod Ponton, a small-town attorney from Texas who went viral by showing up to a virtual courtroom looking like a fluffy white cat, thanks to a Zoom filter he couldn’t figure out how to disable. Turns out, Ponton once drew national attention for something else – his prosecution of a Jewish smoke shop owner, who was released from jail only after promising not to say she was being persecuted because she was Jewish.Read about the strange case here ➤
On the Hebrew calendar, it’s the 14th of Adar, a week after Moses’ birth – which means today is the anniversary of his bris.
PHOTO OF THE DAY It’s National Jell-O Week! American Jews were initially reluctant to embrace the product because it contains gelatin, which sometimes derives from pork. But the company worked to allay those concerns with a 1924 Yiddish-language Jell-O cookbook. A copy is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.
––– Thanks to Nora Berman, PJ Grisar, Lauren Markoe and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com.
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