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JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT. |
| WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION |
|  | | | | | | Today: How Hunter Biden’s Jewish wife helped him overcome addiction • American families sue Iran • Antisemitic incidents rise in Australia • Why Moana was Disney’s first Jewish princess • and a NYC bagel shop is so popular its landlord is taking it to court. |
| | |  | Donald Trump with the family of Edan Alexander, an American-Israeli hostage, and, at right, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro on Oct. 7, 2024. (Getty) |
| Trump, the dealmaker?
The families of American hostages held by Hamas in Gaza are urging President-elect Donald Trump to help secure a deal before his inauguration. Their pleas took on urgency after the IDF said this morning that hostage Omer Neutra, a lone soldier from New York who was believed to still be alive, was actually killed in the Oct. 7 attack and his body is being held in Gaza. The families are hoping Trump could leverage his popularity in Israel and his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A Trump-brokered deal could give Netanyahu the political cover he needs to navigate resistance toward compromise, since Israelis in Netanyahu’s camp see Trump as a friend.
In a video released by Hamas on Saturday, Edan Alexander, a 20-year-old American-Israeli hostage, called on Trump to help secure his release.
The Biden administration is attempting a final push to get a deal done, noting that last week’s truce between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon created an opportunity to reignite stalled negotiations for a similar deal in Gaza.
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| | Related: Sara Netanyahu had dinner with Trump at his golf resort Sunday in Florida where she says she “emphasized the urgency to act to release the hostages and return them quickly.” (Haaretz, Times of Israel) |
|  | Massad Boulos, left, and Charles Kushner, right. (Getty) |
| Meet the parents
Over the weekend, Trump tapped two of his in-laws, one Jewish and one Arab, for diplomatic roles that could shape foreign policy in his second term. Massad Boulos, the Lebanese-American father-in-law of Tiffany Trump, was appointed as senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.
During the election, Boulos met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and helped the Trump campaign court Arab and Muslim voters in the key battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Charles Kushner, the father of Jared Kushner and father-in-law of Ivanka Trump, was nominated as U.S. ambassador to France.
Charles Kushner, a philanthropist to Jewish causes and a convicted felon, was imprisoned after pleading guilty to tax evasion and admitting to hiring a prostitute to entrap his brother-in-law, who was a witness in a federal campaign finance investigation against Kushner. Trump pardoned Kushner in 2020.
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| | | |  | A woman sits with her child in the remains of their home in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, after it was damaged in an Israeli airstrike. (Getty) |
| The latest… Israel reached a ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon last week, but experts believe a similar deal with Hamas in Gaza will be much harder to attain. (JTA)
Moshe Yaalon, a former Israeli defense minister, accused Israel of war crimes and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. (NY Times)
Syrian and Russian forces are fighting back against rebels who overtook Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city. The surge in fighting has raised the prospect of another active war in the Middle East. (BBC)
An Israeli airstrike in Gaza killed several World Central Kitchen workers, according to the humanitarian aid group. The Israeli military said it was targeting one of their employees who joined Hamas in the Oct. 7 attack that started the war. An Israeli airstrike in April killed seven WCK workers. (NY Times)
Dozens of family members of Americans killed or injured by Hamas and Hezbollah are suing Iran for its role in funding the attacks. (Times of Israel)
Opinion | Why do American Jews and Christians lack empathy for Palestinians? “I have long admired Jewish efforts to push for their own equality in the face of oppression,” writes Daoud Kuttab, an American Palestinian journalist. “And I have admired those Jews who have, even more bravely, pushed for the equality of others — even those who hate them.” But, he adds, over the past year of war, “rabbis and Christian Zionist leaders have demonstrated a total lack of empathy towards Palestinians, but shameful support for their total destruction.” Read his essay ► |
| |  | | |  | Hunter Biden was joined by his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, at court this summer in Delaware. (Getty) |
| Of pardons and Polynesians
President Joe Biden on Sunday pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, clearing his convictions on tax and gun charges. He blamed political opponents who had unreasonably attacked his son “who has been five and a half years sober.” The younger Biden credits his Jewish wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, for helping him kick his addiction. Go deeper ►
At the movies ► Moana 2 broke box office records, becoming the highest grossing Thanksgiving weekend film ever. Back in 2016, when the original film was released, we wrote about how Moana could be described as Disney’s first Jewish Polynesian princess. |
| | WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY |
|  | Pro-Palestinian demonstrators march in Sydney, Australia, on Oct 6, 2024. (Getty) |
| 🇦🇺 Antisemitic incidents in Australia quadrupled — from 495 to 2,062 — in the year after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack in Israel, according to an Australian Jewish group. (Haaretz)
😲 Sidi Mohammad Abdallahi, who shot and injured a Jewish man walking to a Chicago synagogue in October, was found dead in his jail cell on Saturday. Officials say it appears to be a suicide. (Chicago Tribune)
💰 With a $300,000 donation to Adamah, a Jewish environmental nonprofit, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, funded by the largesse of the Tulsa-based oil family, has for the first time given a grant to a group addressing the climate crisis. (JTA)
🥯 Can a bagel store be too popular? A Manhattan landlord wants to evict the shop because its long lines are obstructing other shops on the street. The case is now heading to court. (NY Times)
👍👎 Good news and bad news for fans of the hit Israeli series Shtisel, which gained popularity in the U.S. when it re-aired on Netflix. The highly anticipated spinoff show, Kugel, is premiering on Thursday — but, for now, only in Israel. (Instagram)
Shiva calls ► Manfred Ohrenstein, who fled Nazi Germany and became a New York state senator, died at 99 … Marshall Brickman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter on Annie Hall, died at 85 … Rabbi Michael Graetz, an IDF chaplain during the Yom Kippur War who served as a pulpit rabbi in Israel for three decades, died at 84.
What else we’re reading ► The hit movie Wicked originated as a book about fascism and echoed 1930s antisemitism (Aish) … Yiddish was thought to be dying. Instead, it’s thriving (NY Times) … Katz’s Deli gets its first-ever commercial (NY Jewish Week)
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| | |  | (Courtesy Shmulie Grossbaum/Chabad.org) |
| | Thanks to Jacob Kornbluh 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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