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WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION

Next season of Fauda to tackle Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, Canada adds new regulations for kosher butchers, Saudi officials ask rabbi to remove kippah, and century-old lost Jewish mural discovered in Boston attic.

WAR IN ISRAEL

The latest: The IDF announced today that Itay Chen, a 19-year old American-Israeli hostage, was killed on Oct. 7 and his body is in Gaza … Israeli fighter jets and some 70 rockets struck overnight deep inside Lebanon at sites belonging to Hezbollah … The first cargo ship carrying humanitarian aid for Gaza set sail from Cyprus Tuesday morning.

Before many of them fled in October, Thai workers made up about 85% of Israel’s agricultural workforce. Almost all are men, earning eight to 10 times the wages they could in Thailand. (Susan Greene)

A forgotten front in the war: Israel’s farms at risk of failing for lack of low-wage labor

For weeks after Oct. 7, busloads of 50 to 100 Israelis pulled up each morning to Adi Dafna’s vegetable farm to help harvest his tomatoes and cucumbers and plant new ones for winter.

In a grieving and divided nation, the outpouring reflected Israelis’ willingness to roll up their sleeves and come together in crisis, with volunteer pickers pitching in to replace Palestinian laborers barred from entering the country and foreign workers who fled because of the Hamas terror attack.

But after five months of war, as winter turns to spring, the buses have stopped coming, low-wage farm labor is still scarce, and Dafna has lost more than half his produce and nearly all his profits. He is worried that he may not be able to stay solvent long enough to pass down to his teenage sons the 99 acres about a half-hour’s drive from the Gaza border that his grandfather, an immigrant from Yemen, homesteaded in 1953.

Our Susan Greene reports from Israel.

Ron Hassner, chair of the Israel studies program at the University of California, Berkeley, is holding a one-man sit-in in his office. (Courtesy)

On campus…

Jewish Berkeley students are confronting pro-Palestinian protesters. Their professor is staging a sit-in instead: The chair of Israel studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said he will not leave his office until the school does what he believes it should do to keep students safe amid intense protests over the Israel-Hamas war. He’s sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and people are stopping by to drop off food and words of encouragement. Read the story ➤

Related…

• Some 250 UC Berkeley students and faculty marched in silence on Monday to demand safety for Jews on campus.

  
  

• The president of Columbia University and the co-chairs of its Board of Trustees agreed to testify before Congress next month at a hearing on campus antisemitism.

Opinion | A ceasefire is needed in Gaza. My college shouldn’t call for one: “Such statements might be appropriate for nonprofits dedicated to addressing global conflicts or organizations focused on civil rights. They might be fine for religious groups,” writes Sascha Freudenheim, an alumnus of Hampshire College. “But educational institutions play a different role in a civil society. They serve to educate and train the people who go on to lead and serve such organizations — and those people benefit from receiving an education based on open inquiry rather than indoctrination.” Read his essay ➤

Activists protest outside AIPAC headquarters last month in New York City. (Courtesy)

Plus…

• Georgia, Mississippi and Washington have primary elections today. It’s Biden’s first test at the polls after calling for an “immediate” ceasefire in Gaza.

  
  

• AIPAC is holding its annual conference in D.C. this week. A coalition of left-leaning groups launched “Reject AIPAC” Monday to counter AIPAC’s influence in Congress and its spending against critics of Israel in Democratic primaries.

  
  

• The town of Jericho in the occupied West Bank named a street after Aaron Bushnell, the U.S. Air Force soldier who set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington to protest the war in Gaza.

  
  

• A new survey found that 70% of Israeli Jews want to end the longstanding blanket exemptions from military service for Haredim. The issue has split Israeli society and threatens to topple the most right-wing government in the nation’s history.

Idan Amedi, an actor on Netflix's Fauda and an IDF reservist, was wounded in Gaza in January. (Getty)

• The next season of Fauda, the hit Netflix series about an elite team of IDF soldiers, will tackle the events of Oct. 7, the show’s creators said on Monday.

  
  

• Shaun King, a controversial Christian pastor, converted to Islam with his wife over the weekend citing, among other things, his solidarity with Palestinians suffering in Gaza.

  
  

• The grandmother of two Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza says she evaded capture herself on Oct. 7 by bonding with a Hamas terrorist over the Argentine soccer star Lionel Messi — and now wants the athlete to help secure her grandsons’ freedom.

  
  

• Freed Israeli hostage Mia Schem attended Elton John’s Oscar party Sunday night to raise awareness for those hostages still trapped in Gaza.

Wednesday at 7 p.m. ET: Our editor-in-chief, Jodi Rudoren, and our enterprise reporter, Arno Rosenfeld, will be at Adas Israel Synagogue in Washington, D.C., to discuss the rise of antisemitism on college campuses and beyond since the war — and how American Jews and Jewish organizations are responding. You can join in-person or virtually. Register here ➤

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ALSO IN THE FORWARD

Artist aleXsandro Palombo painted images of characters from The Simpsons on the outside of Milan’s Holocaust memorial. (Courtesy)

A mural of the Simpsons as Holocaust victims should be offensive. It’s actually a stroke of genius: “They are immune from trauma because they are only cartoon characters,” writes Fredric Brandfon. “Recontextualizing the Simpson family at Auschwitz in a landscape of suffering imbues the characters with vulnerability shocking to viewers who know them as ageless beings impervious to harms,” adding that “it is a profound artistic choice.”

A comedy about a vanishing Jewish community doesn’t seem so funny right now:The French film The Last of the Jews tracks a Chaplinesque nebbish, Ruben, living in a once-Jewish enclave in Paris. While Ruben blunders his way through life, he convinces his apartment-bound mother that antisemitism and population change haven’t altered their old neighborhood. Our critic Robert Zaretsky, who notes the film’s echoes of other French Jewish works, believes that the comedy captures “a painful and perhaps pivotal moment in the history of French Jewry — a moment that is no laughing matter.”

Plus: Three major Canadian Jewish groups say new rules have made kosher meat production in the country “nearly impossible” to sustain in the long term.

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

Former President Donald Trump at an October rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (Getty)

📖  Former President Donald Trump allegedly expressed praise for Hitler, according to retired Gen. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff. Kelly’s accusation appears in a new book out today. Trump denied similar allegations in 2021. (CNN)

🇸🇦  A U.S. government delegation tasked with monitoring religious freedom around the world cut short a visit to Saudi Arabia after Saudi officials demanded that a prominent rabbi on the trip remove his kippah. (JTA)

🚃  A Dutch tram company that carried Anne Frank to her doom sought compensation for their trouble, new research shows. The company still provides public transport in Amsterdam today. (JTA)

🖼️  A Jewish mural lost for more than a century was found in the attic of a Boston apartment. The building used to be a synagogue. (CBS News)

Shiva calls ➤  Eric Carmen, the Raspberries frontman who went on to have his own successful solo career, died at 74.

What else we’re reading ➤  Animal chaplains offer spiritual care for every species … The long history of cholent … Meet the Jewish family that operates Manhattan’s oldest and only typewriter repair shop.

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Alex Edelman’s hilarious and heartwarming one-man show about going to a white supremacist meeting made it to Broadway last year. Now the show will air on Max beginning in April. Watch the trailer above.

Thanks to PJ Grisar, Jacob Kornbluh and Lauren Markoe 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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