WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION

Good morning. The presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania will testify before Congress today, in the most high-profile examination yet of how the war has affected the lives of Jewish students on campus. In advance of their testimony, we’re sharing three perspectives on how war is changing what it means to be a Jew in the U.S.

OUR LEAD STORY

(iStock by Getty Images)

Is it time for me to conceal my Jewish identity in the United States?“The other day, my non-Jewish roommate told me she was happy we didn’t have a mezuzah on our door because if we did she’d be afraid,” Arielle Kaden, a former Forward intern, writes. It’s a question that recalls the concerns she faced some years ago, living in Germany, when she found herself hiding her Jewishness in public amid concerns of rapidly escalating antisemitism. Back then, she writes, she’d been “confident that things in America could never be so bad for Jews.” Read her essay ➤

Camping, crafts and Zionism: How an Israeli-American scouting program has changed since Oct. 7. A Long Island chapter of Tzofim, an American scouting program in which most participants have at least one Israeli parent, now travels with a security guard on field trips. One 12-year-old member’s father makes him take off his scouting uniform, which features an Israeli flag, before going out to eat after meetings. With 26 chapters in the U.S., the group is meant to be a “safe haven” for Jewish kids:  “We are not going to stop doing what we are doing because it’s scary,” its director said. Read the story ➤

Opinion | Israel’s war is the biggest threat to Jewish peoplehood. “Eventually, the world will get tired of Israel’s war in Gaza — much as it got tired of the United States’ unjust wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — and Jews everywhere will be blamed,” writes Anna Mollow. In the U.S., as around the world, she sees the war changing the way Jews relate to Judaism, and persuading non-Jews to see Jewish tradition as “merciless and mean.” “Lots of people hate Jews,” she writes. “Many would love to see us die. It is essential that we refuse to help them destroy us.” Read her essay ➤

And:

• Special report: What’s it really like to be Jewish on campus right now?

  
  

• Opinion | As university crowds cheer Hamas, the intellectual left has rarely been less moral

A Palestinian child injured during an Israeli airstrike arrived at Gaza’s Nasser Medical Hospital today. (Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

Plus…

• The Israel Defense Forces expanded the ground invasion of Gaza to the strip’s southern reaches, where displaced Palestinians fleeing the north were previously told to evacuate. As tanks entered the city of Khan Younis, a World Health Organization official said “the situation is getting worse by the hour.”

  
  

• Top IDF commanders were aware of details of preparations for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack shortly before it happened, but still relocated troops away from the Gaza border in a dismissal of the threat, Israeli media reported Monday. The report, which follows last week’s reveal that Israel’s government had been warned of a Hamas attack plan nearly identical to what unfolded on Oct. 7 a year in advance, claims that top IDF officials held a consultation after being warned of imminent action hours before the attack began, but decided against an immediate response.

  
  

• Some liberal senators have begun to press President Joe Biden’s administration to condition aid to Israel on reducing civilian casualties in Gaza, with Sen. Bernie Sanders saying “the blank-check approach must end” in a recent speech on the Senate floor.

  
  

• A State Department spokesperson said efforts to lengthen last week’s truce between Israel and Hamas broke down after Hamas refused to release more women and children held hostage, because “they don’t want those women to be able to talk about what happened to them during their time in custody.”

  
  

• Some of the Palestinian prisoners released during the truce as part of the hostage exchange have detailed harsh conditions in Israeli prisons, including minimal food and water and the repeated use of solitary confinement in cramped cells.

  
  

• Israel raised travel warning levels for several European countries, with Israel’s National Security Council warning Israeli tourists to “avoid exhibiting Israeli and Jewish signs and avoid gatherings” while traveling. A European Union official warned that the risk of terror attacks over the holiday season is “huge,” after a weekend attack in Paris in which an assailant who had declared allegiance to the extremist Islamic State group killed one and injured two.

Protesters gathered outside the UN to raise awareness of sexual violence on Oct. 7. (Camillo Barone)

At the UN, a call to recognize Oct. 7 victims of rape. As a Monday special session of the United Nations focused on sexual violence against women during Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, protesters gathered outside to decry UN Women for waiting eight weeks after the attack to denounce it. “You’re not a feminist if you have to be convinced that raping Israeli women is wrong,” Sheila Katz, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, told the crowd. Read the story ➤

Plus:

• Opinion | The women’s movement has a double standard when sexual violence happens to Jews

  
  

• Opinion | Israeli women were raped and widowed by Hamas. Now the world ignores and mocks their suffering

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ALSO FROM THE FORWARD

David Thewlis as Fagin in Hulu’s The Artful Dodger. (John Platt/Hulu)

Does The Artful Dodger finally fix the Fagin problem?A new Hulu series, imagined as a sequel to Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, takes a creative approach to Fagin, the novel’s Jewish villain, who embodies a number of antisemitic tropes. The Fagin onscreen is still a morally complex character, but “the traits that define him can’t be chalked up to an ethnicity,” writes our PJ Grisar — and if “any group has something to be angry about in The Artful Dodger, it’s not the Jews.”

How a lifelong fascination with Jewish culture led this author to become a science fiction pioneer. Joanna Russ, whose works have been honored with a new Library of America series, “saw literature as a quest to rescue her Ashkenazi Jewish mother,” writes critic Benjamin Ivry. But while Russ sometimes romanticized the Jewish past in her works, she was skeptical about much of the Jewish world in which she was raised, noting that “familial oppression of women in Ashkenazi Jewish households meant that men were privileged to associate with ‘poetry, philosophy, science, and fiction, all the things I loved the most’” — a privilege that she, as a woman, did not share.

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WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

Javier Milei, Argentina’s president-elect. (JUAN MABROMATA/AFP via Getty Images)

🇦🇷   Javier Milei, Argentina’s far-right president-elect, appointed a former justice minister who resigned over past participation in a violent antisemitic group to head the country’s top legal office. The appointment includes oversight of legal efforts combating antisemitism. Milei has shared his intention to convert to Judaism; Argentina’s main Jewish organization called the appointment “a direct affront.” (J=TA)

🇮🇹   Italy refused a German request to return a Roman statue once purchased by Hitler. The Discobolus Palombara, a second-century Roman copy of a lost Greek bronze original, was returned to Italy in 1948 as part of the return of works illegally obtained by Nazis; the German State Antiquities Collection in Munich now claims that transfer was illegal. (Associated Press)

🇦🇺   Australian officials condemned neo-Nazi demonstrations after a group marched through the city of Ballarat over the weekend. The march came after the state of Victoria, where Ballarat is located, banned the display of Nazi symbols and gestures in public. (Guardian)

Shiva call ➤ Rabbi Laurie Phillips, 55, founder of the New York-based synagogue Beineinu. And Julia Lieblich, former religion writer for The Associated Press and Chicago Tribune, whose final piece after four decades as a journalist was a wartime essay for the Forward: “A chance encounter with an Arab woman during the war has taught me the power of grieving together.”

What else we’re reading ➤“Columbia suspended pro-Palestine student groups. The faculty revolted” … “The ‘Hanukkah Erotica Book Club’ aims to connect Jews — with romance novels” … “Ukraine planned an ambitious memorial at the site of a Holocaust massacre. Then war came to Kyiv.”

PHOTO OF THE DAY

(OREN ZIV/AFP via Getty Images)

Siblings Maya and Itay Regev, who were held as hostages in Gaza after Oct. 7 and released during the recent truce, returned to their family home in Herzliya Monday wearing shirts calling for the return of Omer Shem-Tov, who remains in captivity.

Thanks to Lauren Markoe for contributing to today’s newsletter, and Beth Harpaz for editing it. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com.

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