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JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.

WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION

Good morning. Today: Weekend arrests of student protesters; World Central Kitchen to resume Gaza operations; and an imprisoned Palestinian writer wins a major book prize.

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CAMPUS PROTESTS

“We’re hearing chants about burning Tel Aviv to the ground,” said Yana Naftalieva, president of the World Union of Jewish Students. (Susan Greene)

Israelis see antisemitism — and foreign interests — as fueling campus protests. “If protesters on American campuses are trying to make Israelis reconsider their country’s policies toward Palestinians, that message isn’t getting across,” writes Susan Greene, our Israel correspondent. Instead, within the Jewish state, the sense that the protests are driven by animus toward Jews dominates: “All of the 21 Israeli Jews I spoke with perceive protesters’ rally cries as attacks on Jews writ large.” Read the story ➤

This Passover, college campuses like mine are caught in a very narrow place. “Campuses are boiling with unrest because many students feel that their institutions are participating in patterns of murderous oppression,” writes Michael S. Roth, the Jewish president of Wesleyan University. “They see the people of Gaza as the ones in ‘the narrow place’” — the literal translation of Mitzrayim, the Hebrew word for Egypt — “and are demanding we cut all ties with Israel.” But Roth sees the aims of the protests as unlikely to address the real problems of the war: “Modifying endowment policies at U.S. universities so that they don’t invest in Israeli companies or those that manufacture weapons would do nothing to help the plight of Gazans.” Read his essay ➤

Plus:

• This rabbi is ‘horrified’ at how a song he wrote is being used at campus pro-Palestinian protests

  
  

• Israeli American professor to be honored at Columbia commencement amid campus protests

  
  

• After USC cancels graduation amid Israel protests, some Jewish students question their place on campus

Protesters at George Washington University on Sunday night. (Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

Latest on campus…

• Student protesters were arrested at at least four campuses over the weekend, including Northeastern University in Boston and Washington University in St. Louis. The White House, on Sunday, reaffirmed its insistence that the protests must not edge into bigotry, with National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby telling ABC “we absolutely condemn the antisemitic language that we’ve heard of late.”

  
  

• Some Northeastern students suggested the call “Kill all Jews,” which the university’s president cited in a Saturday statement explaining her decision to clear the protesters’ encampment, was in fact uttered by a pro-Israel counterprotester on Friday evening; video appeared to show the phrase being spoken by a man holding an Israeli flag.

  
  

• Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, accused Rep. Ilhan Omar of invoking the blood libel after she appeared to describe some Jewish students as “pro-genocide” during a visit with student protesters at Columbia University.

  
  

• Students and children in a Gaza refugee camp staged a solidarity rally with the American student protest movement on Sunday morning.

ISRAEL AT WAR

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

‘God wants us to do the right thing’: How Schumer persuaded House Speaker Johnson to pass foreign aid bill. In an exclusive interview, Sen. Chuck Schumer raised the curtain on the complicated legislative bargaining that led to the passage of a long-stalled act providing military aid to Ukraine and Israel. “I told him, you’re a person of faith, as am I. God wants us to do the right thing,'” Schumer said of one conversation he had about the bill with the Republican, Christian speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, with whom he formed an unlikely allyship to push the bill through. Read the story ➤

Plus:

• Israeli opposition leader fears Israel will be blamed if Biden loses reelection

Israeli police dispersed anti-government demonstrators in Tel Aviv on Saturday. (Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)

Latest from the war…

• Israeli officials believe the International Criminal Court may be on the verge of issuing arrest warrants for top Israeli and Hamas officials, potentially including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

  
  

• Hamas released video footage claiming to be proof of life for two hostages, Omri Miran and Keith Siegel, after issuing a similar video last week featuring Hersh Goldberg-Polin. The latest video spurred thousands of Israelis to rally for a hostage release deal Saturday night. Speaking to protesters, Miran’s father begged Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar to “show some humanity,” saying Israel’s “cabinet will reciprocate, I am sure of it.”

  
  

• World Central Kitchen, the humanitarian group founded by José Andrés, will resume aid distribution efforts in Gaza after seven of its workers were killed there in an Israeli airstrike on April 1.

  
  

• Israel’s Sephardi chief rabbi, Yitzhak Yosef, met backlash after releasing a video in which he claimed Israel’s successful defense against missile attacks since Oct. 7 was “thanks to the Torah students and yeshiva students, who sit and study the Torah.” Yosef previously sparked controversy by saying Haredi Jews would leave Israel before enlisting in the Israel Defense Forces.

  
  

• Five Israeli settlers in the West Bank were arrested on suspicion of participating in violent retaliation against Palestinians after the murder of an Israeli 14-year-old last week.

  
  

• Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the head of the Anglican Church, criticized Israel over the detention of a Palestinian Christian woman whose family says Israeli forces have not shared any information about their daughter’s whereabouts or well-being since her arrest in early April.

ALSO IN THE FORWARD

Eddie Redmayne plays the Emcee in Cabaret. (Marc Brenner)

‘Cabaret’ will wine, dine and destroy you. The new Broadway revival of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s portrait of the dying Weimar Republic, imported after a much-decorated debut in London, immerses audiences in a nightclub atmosphere, complete with complimentary schnapps. Its great innovation, writes our critic PJ Grisar, is “how it anticipates its audience, teasing them with frothy liberation before making them gasp at Nazi armbands and shattered windows.”

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WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

Pro-Palestinian protesters rallied in London on Saturday. (Guy Smallman/Getty Images)

🇬🇧  A British Jewish advocacy group canceled a planned march Saturday over security concerns; the march was expected to coincide with a pro-Palestinian rally, at which two people were arrested, including a man holding a sign emblazoned with a swastika. (Sky News, The Standard)

😨  A white supremacist group marched through downtown Charleston, West Virginia, on Saturday, while holding a banner reading “America is not for sale.” The group, Patriot Front, grew out of the antisemitic neo-Nazi group Vanguard America in 2017, and has engaged in antisemitic propaganda. (WV Public Broadcasting, ADL)

📖  A Palestinian writer who has been imprisoned in Israel for 20 years won a major Arabic book prize. Basim Khandaqji’s novel A Mask, the Color of the Sky won the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction; Khandaqji was jailed in 2004 on charges connected to a fatal Tel Aviv bombing. (Times of Israel)

📷  A former employee of the University of Minnesota is suing to have her job reinstated. The university fired her over a photo she shared on social media in which she posed with an Israeli flag with swastikas painted on it. (Star Tribune)

🖼️  The Art Institute of Chicago is arguing a painting by Egon Schiele was never looted by Nazis. The Manhattan district attorney’s office demanded the museum turn over the painting earlier this year; in a legal filing, the museum claimed the heirs of the collector who originally bought the painting legally sold it after World War II. (ABC 7 Chicago)

What else we’re reading ➤  “We’re Jewish students at Columbia arrested for protesting Israel’s war” … “France's last 'hidden Jewish children' share memories of surviving Holocaust” … Is this Sonic the Hedgehog spinoff featuring Idris Elba and a Shabbat episode “the show Jews need right now”?

PHOTO OF THE DAY

(Evelyn Hockstein/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken landed in Saudi Arabia Monday morning, kicking off a tour of the Middle East on which he hopes to advance the prospects of a ceasefire deal. Speaking in Riyadh, he said the United States has recently seen “measurable progress” in humanitarian conditions in Gaza.

Thanks to Benyamin Cohen 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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Large-format wine bottles are named after kings from the Bible. (iStock)