WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION

Lyft lets go of driver who punched Chabad rabbi, Congress to hear testimony in UN agency’s alleged involvement in Hamas attack, TikTok’s lobbyist in Israel resigns amid app’s deluge of antisemitic and pro-Palestinian content, and what’s behind the “#MakeJewishBabies” trend.

ISRAEL AT WAR

Pro-Palestinian activists in October at the University of California, Los Angeles. (Getty)

Colleges rewrite free speech policies and limit protests as spring semester unfolds:The new rules come in response to conflicts and allegations of bias that rocked campus life last fall in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. The fresh guidelines are designed to “counter antisemitism and promote civil discourse,” but there is also pushback by pro-Palestinian students calling them “drastic measures limiting the rights of students for political expression.” Read the story ➤

Opinion | We must continue to support Israel’s war — and honestly grapple with tough questions from critics: “I cannot say personally whether the Palestinian death toll demands an end to this war,” writes Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, who argues both for ethics and a better strategy. “I feel that I can only pray for there to be fewer deaths going forward, and to rely cautiously on the knowledge that international law does not evaluate the morality of a war on the number of casualties, but rather on the justification of the war, its intent, and the way that it is prosecuted.” Read his essay ➤

Families of Israeli hostages gather with supporters to demand an immediate deal as they block off a road in Tel Aviv on Monday night. (Getty)

The latest…

➤  Federal authorities arrested a man who allegedly threatened a Massachusetts synagogue, telling the congregation in a voicemail, “If you can kill the Palestinians, we can kill you.”

➤  Israeli special forces went undercover as hospital staff — the men in fake beards and the women dressed in Muslim garb — to enter a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin Tuesday morning. They killed three men suspected of planning a terror attack against Israel. On social media, some are saying that the video from the spycraft-filled incident reminded them of the popular Netflix series Fauda.

➤  Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, threatened to dismantle the government if a “reckless” deal is reached with Hamas.

A man walks near a facility of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) on Tuesday in the city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank. (Getty)

➤  A congressional committee will meet this afternoon to discuss reports that some staffers at a U.N. agency helped Hamas during the Oct. 7 attack. The head of the agency in question, UNRWA, will not be in D.C. to testify; he’s in Israel today.

➤  Amid growing evidence that TikTok is promoting antisemitic and pro-Palestinian content, the company’s lobbyist in Israel has resigned. “We live in a time when our very existence as Jews and Israelis is under attack and in danger,” he posted to social media. “In such an unstable era, people’s priorities are sharpened.”

➤  The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a national Muslim advocacy group, reported a nearly 200% increase in complaints of bias, discrimination and hate crimes following the Hamas attack.

➤  One of Italy’s best-known Holocaust survivors is wondering if her decades of work teaching people about the dangers of antisemitism was in vain.

ALSO IN THE FORWARD

Painted banners at Adrienne Ottenberg’s new solo show at the Museum at Eldridge Street. (Courtesy)

An artist gives the women of the old Lower East Side new life:Portraits of 29 women, printed on large vertical banners made of cotton and silk, now float in the sanctuary, stairwells and balconies of the Eldridge Street Synagogue as part of a new exhibit. “They’re designed so that as you walk past them, they move,” said Nancy Johnson, curator at the museum. “It creates kind of an ethereal presence.”

Opinion | A beloved rabbi committed sexual misconduct. Here’s why the reckoning needs to be public: “Privacy about such matters is what every powerful person caught in such a situation wants, of course,” writes our opinion editor, Laura E. Adkins. “But privacy provides no deterrence from them acting in such a way in the future, and no incentive to change. A society in which the conditions are such that leaders can commit sexual misconduct and feel no great remorse is not a society that is healthy for any of us.”

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

(iStock)

👩‍❤️‍👨  The Conservative movement will continue to ban its rabbis from performing interfaith weddings, according to a report released Monday, but made several recommendations to make interfaith families feel more welcome. (JTA)

🚗  Lyft has let go of a driver who allegedly punched and verbally assaulted a Chabad rabbi in Washington, D.C. The police are investigating the incident, but have not categorized it as a hate crime. (JTA)

🔪  A Jewish teen in a U.K. kosher supermarket fended off a knife-wielding assailant using Krav Maga he learned in school. Police arrested the attacker, who demanded to know the store’s staff stance on “Israel and Palestine.” (Jewish Chronicle)

👪  A Polish orphan of the Holocaust, who didn’t know his birth name, was reunited with his family after the 83-year-old gave his DNA to a genealogy website. (Daily Mail)

👶  Irina Barskaya, a 33-year-old woman in Brooklyn, felt a pull to have children with another Jew after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. She’s part of the “#MakeJewishBabies” trend. (New York Times)

🇧🇦  Survivors of the Holocaust and of the 1995 massacre that killed some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims joined together to launch a new initiative to advocate for peace and prevent future genocides. (JTA)

🎭  The Los Angeles Opera had plans to adapt Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a story about Jewish immigrants changing American culture. But it’s been scrapped due to finances, and will now open with a student cast at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. (AP)

Shiva calls ➤  Lawrence Langer, a scholar of Holocaust literature who influenced generations of educators, died at 94 … Vera Klement, a Holocaust survivor and artist whose paintings drew attention from around the world, died at 93.

What else we’re reading ➤  He survived the Holocaust. Then he married a Nazi’s daughter … Retired diplomat’s passion project yields searchable database of Jewish last names from the Arab world … Tovah Feldshuh, Debra Messing and more Jewish stars perform at first-ever “Shabbat on Broadway” show.

VIDEO OF THE DAY

A new documentary tracks the story of a 21-year-old street dancer in Mumbai who found an unlikely mentor in a 70-year-old Israeli ballet master. Read our review and watch the trailer above.

Thanks to Lauren Markoe and Jodi Rudoren 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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