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| INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT. SINCE 1897. Give a tax-deductible donation Welcome to our new morning newsletter, where each weekday I walk you through what you need to know – showcasing the best of Forward journalism and Jewish headlines from around the web. In today’s briefing: Jared Kushner's Bible photo-op, Israel's first deaf lawmaker, TikTok’s Jewish problem and much more…
ONE BIG STORY 🥇 Equestrian events are the only Olympic sport where both men and women compete together. "And they don’t discriminate against the horse’s sex either," said equestrienne Danielle Goldstein Waldman. Photo courtesy of Eric Sultan On your marks: The Summer Olympics are 10 days away Cue Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" and let the countdown begin! While this year’s Games in Tokyo will certainly be a lot different – officials are allowing very few, if any, spectators due to COVID-19 – that hasn’t watered down our enthusiasm for the more than 100 Jewish athletes competing.
Our eyes are particularly peeled on Israel’s baseball team. It beat out dozens of other nations to qualify for the Olympics. And only six teams compete in the sport – which means Team Israel has a 50% chance of medaling.
“Some people don’t believe that chemistry matters in baseball,” Frankie Sachs, who works in the team’s front office, told our reporter, Louis Keene. “But there really is a spirit with these guys that you don’t see with every team. I do believe that makes them better.” Our Molly Boigon, got a sneak peek of the team’s prowess when it beat the New York Fire Department squad 12-3 in an exhibition game in Brooklyn’s Coney Island on Sunday.
Rebecca Salzhauer, one of our summer interns, reports that many of the athletes representing Israel are American Jews with dual citizenship. “It had a cultural significance for me to do it, rather than just representing a place where I was born,” said the equestrienne Danielle Goldstein Waldman. “It was like ‘Alright. If I’m going to do this for sport, I’m going to do it for Israel.’”
Train for the big event > Check out our complete Olympics coverage, including profiles of Jewish athletes like Andi Murez, a swimmer (and medical student) and Jordan Mann, a hurdler from Rhode Island. Plus, read about the Jewish history of Japan and meet the members of the tribe who now call Tokyo home.
YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST 🚨 Jared Kushner may have been the one to advise President Trump to hold a Bible outside a D.C. church for a controversial photo-op, a new book claims. Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images Jacob Kornbluh, our senior political reporter, just handed me some fresh news to share this morning after getting his hands on a highly-anticipated new book coming out today.
Jared and Ivanka Trump advised Trump to hold up a Bible in a photo op outside a church that was damaged by a fire during the nationwide racial justice protests last year, against the advice of his close aides and allies. That's according to "Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost," by Michael Bender, a Wall Street Journal reporter. “Holding the Bible in the air like a trophy was politicizing the holy book and would be received like a slap in the face to many mainstream evangelicals," Bender writes. "Jared and Ivanka were practicing Jews from New York who kept kosher and observed the Sabbath. They weren’t immersed in evangelical culture."
Kushner also boasted about his relationship with U.S. evangelicals by praising a controversial pastor who is considered a heretic by some Christian leaders, Bender's book claims. “A Jew growing up in Manhattan, I never thought I would meet and be such great friends with so many evangelicals,” Kushner once told White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Kushner mentioned Paula White, a Florida televangelist who was brought into the Trump administration to help shore support among evangelicals, calling her “incredible.”
“Whoa,” Meadows reportedly responded. “Never tell any mainstream evangelical that Paula White is your golden standard.”
Bender's book made headlines last week when an excerpt was leaked that contained a quote of Trump reportedly saying that, “Hitler did a lot of good things.”
7 OTHER THINGS AMERICAN JEWS ARE TALKING ABOUT 📱 Photo by Lam Yik/Bloomberg via Getty Images 1. A new study reveals a 912% increase in antisemitic content on TikTok. “It may be easy to dismiss the platform as an innocuous forum for children who want to be creative,” said the University of Haifa’s Dr. Gabriel Weimann, who led the research. “However, TikTok’s catering to young, impressionable and naive audiences, combined with bad-faith actors who are posting hateful content online, is something that should be taken very seriously.” 2. Eight in 10 American Jews approve of President Joe Biden's performance, according to a new poll released this morning. Most of the 800 registered Jewish voters polled also support his management of the recent conflagration between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip and the broader Mideast conflict, and 65% trust Biden to do a better job handling the Iranian threat than President Trump.
3. A popular fashion podcaster wanted to call out white privilege. Now she's being accused of antisemitism. Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, a former staffer here at the Forward, said that on a recent episode of the podcast, "The Cutting Room Floor," the host, designer Recho Omondi, "shamelessly equates Jewishness with wealth, power and privilege” and her comments were replete with "antisemitic dog whistles."
4. Shirly Pinto, the first deaf lawmaker in the history of the Israeli Knesset, gave her speech in sign language on Monday evening. "Alongside me stand 1.8 million men, women, and children with physical, mental, emotional, and intellectual disabilities," she said. After, the crowd stood up and waved their hands in the air, a universal sign of applause in deaf culture.
5. A pop-up kitchen in Surfside, Fla. that has been providing thousands of kosher meals each day to families and first responders has been asked to close down due to safety concerns. “It became a safety issue,” Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said. “They scaled up so much and so fast that they had propane tanks, electrical cords, fumes from generators.” (Click here for all the Forward's coverage of the Surfside tragedy.)
6. A new book tells the complicated history of the Satmar Hasidic Jewish community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Nathaniel Deutsch, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, joined NPR to discuss the book, “A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg.”
7. Jon Stewart is returning to TV with a new current affairs program to air on Apple TV+. The former host of "The Daily Show" will be filming the first episodes of the show this week in front a live, fully-vaccinated studio audience.
FROM OUR OPINION DESK 👩🍼 Illustration by Tatyana Antusenok/iStock Carly Pildis, who usually writes about making Shabbat dinner delicious without making it stressful, offered up something much more personal in a moving new essay about her recent miscarriage. “I was taught not to talk about miscarriages – to shush them away, fold them up with the laundry and close the drawer, a secret sadness not to be discussed or shared,” she writes. “When someone in our community has a miscarriage, there are no instructions, no recipes, no halachic obligations. No one quite knows what to do or how to talk about it.” Read her latest column to find out how Carly hopes to turn this loss into an experience that can help others.
ON THE CALENDAR 🗓 📺 The Primetime Emmy Award nominations will be announced today. Watch at 11:30 AM ET on YouTube. Which of your favorite Jewish stars will get the nod?
📚 On this day in history: Rashi, the 11th century French Torah sage, passed away on July 13, 1105. His insights on the Bible and Talmud became so popular that there are now hundreds of commentaries on his commentary.
🐮 It's Cow Appreciation Day. From our archives: Meet the shtetl cow named Vashti. Also, sending my appreciation to my neighbor Marie and the dozens of cows she takes care of at the dairy farm!
🇮🇱 Wednesday @ 11:30 a.m. ET: Join Jodi Rudoren; editor-in-chief of the Forward, Libby Lenkinski of the New Israel Fund, Mishy Harman of "Israel Story" and Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie of Lab Shul for a series called "Israel Therapy" to talk through individual dilemmas about how to square Israel's policies towards Palestinians with Jewish values of social justice. Register here.
PICTURE OF THE DAY 📸 Photo by Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images In Israel on Monday, hospitals like the Sheba Medical Center pictured here began administering a third dose of the Pfizer vaccine as a booster shot against COVID-19, making it the first country in the world to do so. As the Washington Post reports, "Pfizer views Israel — with its small size, heterogenous population and meticulously digitized national health-care system, which serves as the basis for a data-sharing agreement signed by the Israeli government and the pharmaceutical giant — as a test case for vaccine rollouts in the rest of the world."
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