WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION

Israel and Hamas reach a deal to deliver medicine to hostages, the Jewish story lines at tonight’s Iowa caucuses, and meet the funeral cats of Sacramento.

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ISRAEL AT WAR

Jacob Wheeler outside of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where dozens of Israelis were killed by Hamas. (Courtesy)

A student journalist covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on campus. Then the protesters turned on him: Jacob Wheeler, who is Christian and joined a University of Southern California Hillel trip to Israel in March, was accused of pro-Israel bias in his reporting shortly after the war began. Tensions grew when a group of pro-Palestinian activists stopped in front of the journalism school and called him out by name. “I was looking over my shoulder the next few days,” said Wheeler, who has since taken a step back from reporting for the school TV station. Read the story ➤

Opinion | Could Israel cease to exist? In a letter to readers on his 67th birthday, our editor-at-large, Robin Washington, reminds us that history offers no guarantees. “For me,” he writes, “that thought of Israel’s newness on the world stage has long preceded the current disaster of the war with Hamas. I’m reminded of it when perusing dusty prayer books on synagogue bookshelves. It’s disconcerting to find those with copyrights from the 1930s, on the eve of the Holocaust and before Israel became a state; all artifacts oblivious of both the inhumanity of the Shoah and improbability of a Jewish nation to come.” Read his essay ➤

Ido Felus stands outside the wreckage of his home at Kibbutz Kfar Aza. (Deborah Danan)

Israel’s ravaged kibbutzes have become museums of the macabre. Their former residents want to go home: For months, celebrities on guided tours and Jewish groups on solidarity missions trekked through burned-down and destroyed homes on Israel’s southern border. But 100 days on, the residents of the area are hoping to return to some sense of normalcy. “If we don’t come back,” said Ido Felus, a 24-year-old kibbutznik, “the terrorists will have won.” Read the story ➤

Plus…

• Sunday marked 100 days of the Israel-Hamas war. Here are 10 numbers that explain what’s happened since Oct. 7.

  
  

• Israel and Hamas reached an agreement to deliver medicine to the hostages in Gaza, the first time since the war began.

  
  

• An Israeli who plays professional soccer in Turkey showed solidarity with the hostages while celebrating a goal Sunday. Turkey is now deporting him.

  
  

• An Israeli man and his elderly mother were killed on Sunday when a missile fired by Hezbollah struck their home, as tensions on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon continue to rise.

  
  

• Several new polls indicate that U.S. politicians’ responses to the war in Gaza could influence voters in the 2024 elections.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY

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The civil rights hero was born 95 years ago today, and his birthday was made a federal holiday in 1983.

• Rabbi Shuly Rubin Schwartz, the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, relates in a new essay what Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught her dad, a rabbi who took part in the March on Washington.

  
  

• Harvey Burg was a 22-year-old interning in Washington in 1963 when he saw a call for volunteers to help keep the peace at the march. “Coming out of that World War II experience as a kid, seeing people mourning with Kaddish because their relatives had been lost, all of that made an impact,” he recalled. “It was quite natural to be involved with the march.”

  
  

• Rabbi Israel S. Dresner, a civil rights activist who marched with King, died at 92, just days before MLK Day in 2022. Our editor-in-chief, Jodi Rudoren, recounts a visit with him two weeks before. “We joked about him pushing through to the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the friend and mentor he often said he ‘followed around like a puppy dog,’” she wrote in a tribute. “They were partners in struggle until King’s assassination, bonded by their respective ancestors’ enslavement and parallel faiths.”

  
  

• We invited three Black Jews whose families had different experiences in the Civil Rights Movement to write about one of their forebears. Here are their essays.

Plus: Here’s how the Forward covered the 1963 March on Washington

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ALSO IN THE FORWARD

Emma Stone as Whitney and Elliot Berlin as Moses in Showtime’s The Curse. (Paramount)

Meet the actor playing Moses on last night’s finale of Showtime’s The Curse: The baffling conclusion of Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s horror comedy features an Orthodox Jewish doula named Moses. In real life, he’s Elliot Berlin, an Orthodox prenatal chiropractor. So the role wasn’t much of a stretch. But the bizarre episode took some imagination — and stunt work. “I think you have the wrong person,” Berlin recalled telling the stunt coordinator. “I’m a fat guy from Los Angeles. Like, if I just skipped the last step on the way down, that’s my biggest stunt.”

Details emerge about rabbinical students arrested in tunnel fracas at Chabad world headquarters: We spoke with the attorney representing five young men charged in connection with the tunnel incident last week. “They’re like students in colleges all over the country: a little enthusiastic, a little naive,” he told our Beth Harpaz. “They have beautiful ideas of the world and it doesn’t exactly comport with reality.”

Dangerous rhetoric: House Republicans began impeachment hearings against Alejandro Mayorkas. Our senior opinion columnist, Rob Eshman, writes that the attempt to get rid of the homeland security secretary is part of an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

In case you missed it: Our editor-in-chief, Jodi Rudoren, was in Boston last week helping her mom pack up to move into a senior living facility. Going through decades of papers, Jodi stumbled across her great-grandfather’s last will and testament. She writes in her latest column that the “humble, poetic, faded words” offer many life lessons for today.

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

(Getty/Design by Mollie Suss)

🇺🇸  The Iowa caucuses are tonight, which means the 2024 presidential primary season is officially underway. Israel’s war with Hamas and an uptick in antisemitism have featured heavily. Here’s your guide to each candidate’s Jewish bona fides. (JTA)

🤝  The White House recently met with officials from eight states to learn about their progress in implementing the Biden administration’s national strategy to combat antisemitism — including strengthening education on Jewish history and the Holocaust. (Haaretz)

😲  Surveillance video recorded a vandal defacing a Holocaust memorial in Philadelphia with a swastika early Sunday morning. Police are looking for the suspect. (NBC Philadelphia)

🏨  A Florida Marriott hotel canceled a Muslim group’s conference at the last minute after a protest claimed the group was promoting Hamas, terrorism and antisemitism. The state also recently barred Students for Justice in Palestine from public university campuses. (AP)

📺  The Emmy Awards are tonight with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Fleishman Is in Trouble and Natasha Lyonne among the Jewish nominees. (JTA)

Shiva call ➤  Irving M. Levine, a noted expert on ethnic studies and public policy, died at 94.

What else we’re reading ➤  This Orthodox scholar is a professor of torts at Brooklyn Law School. His father was the chief rabbi of Milwaukee … In Iowa and beyond, evangelical Christian voters follow their party more than their faith … Meet the Jewish funeral cats of Sacramento.

VIDEO OF THE DAY

HBO released the trailer for the 12th and final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David’s very Jewish comedy series. It premieres on Feb. 4.

Over the years, David’s character — a cantankerous fictionalized version of himself — has incited localized holy wars, disrupted a bat mitzvah and an afikomen search, and spilled coffee on a klansman’s robe. In an essay about what Curb taught him about being Jewish, our culture reporter PJ Grisar writes that he, “like so many American Jews, saw an extension of Borscht Belt subversiveness and the ongoing Talmudic debate over how to live according to a code.”

Thanks to PJ Grisar and Talya Zax 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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