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WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION

Today: The unconventional candidates vying to be Trump’s antisemitism envoy • Columbia professor out after discriminating against Israeli students • Ben Stiller on rising antisemitism • and how NYC congestion pricing is impacting car pools at Jewish school.

CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES

The Pasadena home of Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater burned, but one book survived. (Courtesy)

Our hearts and thoughts are with those in Los Angeles, where the two largest fires are not yet contained and forecasters expect another round of strong winds today.

A rabbi’s book survived the Holocaust — and an LA fire

Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater’s home was reduced to ash, swallowed by the relentless wildfire that tore through Pasadena. As he stepped through the rubble, searching for anything, he spotted a book sitting atop a pile of ash. The title caught his breath: Sacred Fire. “It was in perfect condition,” he told me.

• The book is a collection of essays by Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, who was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, where he ran a secret synagogue and delivered these weekly sermons. The one for this Shabbat’s Torah portion offered a lesson in accepting the limits of human understanding.

  
  

• Only one other item survived the house fire: a framed copy of the Obama “Hope” poster. Together, they seemed to whisper a lesson that only a rabbi could articulate. “There’s fire and fury and destruction and fear,” Levine Grater said. “And then you have this reminder: Nothing can extinguish hope.”

Related: Because it’s tied to the weekly Torah portion, a bar mitzvah can’t easily be postponed. So two boys displaced by the fires had theirs on Saturday — in synagogues they’d never stepped foot in before. My colleague Louis Keene reports from Los Angeles on how their makeshift celebrations came together.

Plus: The wildfires destroyed at least a dozen houses of worship. (Religion News Service)

Congregants sift through the remains of Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, which served the city for over 100 years and was destroyed in a wildfire. (Getty)

Houseless, but not homeless

Opinion | How can evacuees replace irreplaceable Judaica? “Whether passed-down heirlooms or recently acquired, the presence of these Jewish objects have long represented the portable home of a people on the move,” writes Rachel Steinhardt of Santa Monica. “When we unpack them and put them on display, we have consecrated and transformed a space into a Jewish home.” Read her essay ►

Related: “As Jews, we’re people who have so often lost our home, navigating one exile to the next. And yet, we honor the home,” Rabbi Sharon Brous told her Los Angeles congregation.

Home, again

Meg Adler, a Jewish artist in the Bay Area, has spent years drawing buildings like Temple Sinai in Oakland, where she went to Hebrew school and became bat mitzvah. And for the past few years, she has drawn more than 70 homes lost to wildfires, illustrating based on photos before they were destroyed, in an effort to provide comfort in a time of despair. Read our 2021 profile of Adler ►

For our California readers: Adler has offered to draw illustrations for 10 people who’ve lost their homes in the current wildfires. Send us a photo of your home before and after the fire, along with a story of what happened and how the loss is connected to your Jewish life, and we’ll work with her to provide the free drawings.

POLITICS

At left, New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind with Mike Huckabee, Trump’s pick for U.S. Ambassador to Israel; and at right, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. (Getty)

Job opening

Who will President-elect Donald Trump choose to replace Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt as antisemitism envoy? Two unconventional contenders are among those vying for the gig: Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a spotlight-seeking rabbi perhaps best known for having been Michael Jackson’s spiritual adviser; and Democratic Assemblyman Dov Hikind, an Orthodox New York politician who caused an uproar by wearing blackface for Purim in 2013. Our senior political reporter, Jacob Kornbluh, spoke with both men. Read the story ►

Plus: HIAS laid off 22 workers last week, in a sign the Jewish refugee advocacy agency is still reeling from major budgeting errors discovered last year even as it gears up to fight mass deportations and other anti-immigrant policies expected with Trump’s return to power. Our Arno Rosenfeld has the details. Read the story ►

ISRAEL AT WAR

Gali Maayan wears a military beret as family members and friends mourn during the funeral Sunday for her son Sergeant Yahav Maayan, who was killed in a battle in Gaza. (Getty)

Israel and Hamas had a “breakthrough” in negotiating a ceasefire-for-hostage deal, according to an official briefed on the matter. Mediators gave negotiators a final draft of the agreement this morning. (Reuters)

• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with President Joe Biden Sunday about the efforts. The next few days are believed to be critical. (AP, Axios, CNN, Times of Israel)

  
  

• Vice President-elect JD Vance said on Fox News Sunday that he’s “hopeful there’s going to be a deal that’s struck towards the very end of Biden’s administration, maybe the last day or two.” (Jewish Insider)

Plus….

• Republican officials invited leaders from Israeli settlements to attend the Trump inauguration. (Bloomberg)

  
  

• Israeli commanders failed to address the mental health concerns of their soldiers, according to an investigation published in the Hebrew press. (Haaretz, Times of Israel)

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

(iStock)

🏫  A Columbia University law professor retired after a school investigation found she discriminated against Israeli students by alleging that they were harassing Palestinian students on campus. (Times of Israel)

🎒 In anticipation of stricter enforcement under the incoming Trump administration, several universities are rushing to settle antisemitism complaints with the Department of Education. (Jewish Insider)

🇦🇺 🇮🇹  Two synagogues in Sydney were defaced with swastikas and antisemitic phrases, prompting police investigations amid a rise in antisemitic incidents in Australia. Across the ocean, “Free Gaza” was sprayed on a synagogue in Italy. (JTA, Haaretz)

🎞️  Nearly 1,000 pro-Palestinian activists signed a petition asking a Brooklyn movie theater to stop showing September 5, a movie about the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, calling it “Zionist propaganda.” (X, Google)

🚗  The Abraham Joshua Heschel School on Manhattan's Upper West Side is situated just outside New York City's new Congestion Pricing Zone, leading families and staff to rethink their commuting routes to avoid the additional tolls. (NY Jewish Week)

Quotable ► “To see the rise in antisemitic violence, is something that I never thought I’d experience in my lifetime. The reality of it is frightening.” — Ben Stiller in an interview with The New York Times.

Shiva calls ► Robert Levine, a longtime leader of the Jewish National Fund who traveled to Israel more than 90 times, died at 94 … Richard Cohen, who lived with multiple sclerosis during a long career as a news producer and was married to Meredith Vieira, died at 76.

In case you missed it ► Sally Friedman, a New Jersey columnist who chronicled life’s magic moments in thousands of essays, died at 86. In a remembrance, our editor-in-chief, Jodi Rudoren, recalls some of Friedman’s poignant pearls of wisdom.

VIDEO OF THE DAY

From Ground Zero, executive produced by Michael Moore and shortlisted for Best International Feature at the Oscars, is a compilation of 22 shorts, each made by a different Palestinian filmmaker in Gaza. It’s “a collection of art from a place from which it’s hard to imagine creativity flourishing,” writes our culture reporter Mira Fox in a review. Watch the trailer above.

Thanks to Louis Keene for contributing to today’s newsletter, and to Julie Moos for editing it. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com.

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