June 24, 2021

Shay Charka is one of Israel’s most talented comic book artists and political cartoonists. Dara Horn, writing in TabletMagazine, called “From Foe to Friend,” Charka’s pictorial versions of stories by the Nobel prizewinning author S. Y. Agnon, “miraculous” and “so breathtaking that I almost thought I dreamed it.” Born in 1967, Charka has published twenty graphic novels and cartoon collections, his work drawing playfully and profoundly on Jewish sources such as the Bible and Talmud. His “Jewdyssey,” a graphic-novel retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey” as a Holocaust story, has recently been prepared in English translation. He is the political cartoonist for the Israeli paper Makor Rishon, where his deft and brilliant visual commentary on current events is relished by thousands.

In these three recent “shorts,” Charka meditates on Europe—the “old world.” The first, “Berlin,” captures the haunting experience of the Jewish visitor to that city, figured as the boy from the Warsaw Ghetto photograph. The second, “Nehemia,” mischievously retells the Hasidic tale of the Baal Shem Tov and the boy who played flute on Yom Kippur, making a place for the cartoonist in a story Agnon included in his “Days of Awe.” The third story is an acerbic, affecting reflection on family memories and the impulse to look for our “Roots” in the landscape of post-Holocaust Europe.

Michael Weingrad is a professor of Jewish Studies and lives in Oregon. 

We are living today in a world of division.

Politics is angrily polarized, foreign relations are increasingly confrontational, gun violence is frighteningly endemic, and ethnic animus is surging, including violence against Asian Americans, new and awful antisemitism, and our country’s unresolved history of racial oppression.

We need people who can teach us how not to hate.

The good news is that we have some 400,000 of them: the Holocaust survivors who are still with us.

Today is the first-ever Holocaust Survivors Day. It is a day of celebration, first proposed several months ago by Michael Berenbaum, a professor of Jewish studies at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, and Jonathan Ornstein, founding executive director of JCC Krakow. “Holocaust survivors deserve a day of joy; a day of celebration,” they wrote. “Not a day to share with condemnation of the Nazis, but a day to celebrate their lives they built in response to the Holocaust. Survivors represent the best in all of us, the best of the human spirit.” More than 60 organizations worldwide are joining in these festivities.

I see today as an opportunity not only to honor survivors, but to thank them. For more than 75 years, they have been doing the hard work of bearing witness, sharing wisdom, and teaching us how to transcend hatred and display the power of love.

For more than 75 years, they have been doing the hard work of bearing witness, sharing wisdom, and teaching us how to transcend hatred and display the power of love.

They are the ones who teach us how not to hate.

These men and women experienced the worst evils of the 20th century. And yet in my 25 years as a scholar of genocide, in thousands of conversations with survivors, I can’t recall a single one using the memory of their experience to hate. Instead, they live their lives with dignity and respect. They’ve turned the horrors they experienced into a profound commitment to share their stories and build understanding among the younger generations.

We celebrate them not for surviving; we celebrate them for their humility, their resilience, and their generosity.

When I ran the United Kingdom’s National Holocaust Museum and Center many years ago, we hosted an event on how to confront antisemitism. “We need an army of volunteers,” someone said. “We need to go into schools, talk to children, change their minds.” I knew we already had that army: Holocaust survivors. And as a group, they met the challenge, going and speaking with thousands of children daily. They have made a difference to an entire generation.

Just a few days ago, I met a survivor in San Diego named Dr. Edith Eva Eger. She is 93 years old, and a practicing psychologist and prolific author. When I went to visit her, she couldn’t meet until noon—she had patients in the morning. She made us lunch, breaded chicken and salad, followed by chocolate ice cream for dessert. (She was most excited about the ice cream.) And we talked.

Born in Hungary, she survived Gunskirchen, a subcamp of Mauthausen in Austria. When the U.S. Army liberated the camp, she was left alive on a pile of corpses. An American G.I. walking by saw her finger move and picked her up. He was the first Black man she’d ever seen.

Today, she gives back—in her work, and in her life. While we ate lunch, a neighbor with cancer, a Hungarian woman significantly younger than her, stopped by. Edie, at 93, is a friend when in need. She reminds me, “Love is not what you feel, it is what you do.”

Holocaust survivors are ordinary people, but they are living extraordinary lives. Only the last generation of survivors is still with us, but they are vibrant, they are engaged, and they still have much to teach us.

On this Holocaust Survivors Day, let’s not treat these remarkable people as artifacts of the past, or as superheroes who did the impossible. Let us instead invite them into our homes, invite them into our communities, give them the support they need when they need it. Let us also heed their guidance, and let us follow their example to help us surmount our polarized times and renewed scourge of antisemitism.

Let us celebrate Holocaust survivors today, let us thank them, and let us walk in their footsteps. They have taught us how to live our best lives, in spite of everything.

Stephen D. Smith is Finci-Viterbi executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation. The first episode of “The Memory Generation” was released on April 15, 2021, and can be found here: https://www.memorygenerationpodcast.com/episodes

One of my favorite Hebrew expressions is “al ta’am v’reiach ein l’hitvakeach”—“there is no point arguing about taste and smell.” If I like brussels sprouts and you don’t, what’s the use of arguing? It’s a matter of taste.

Well here’s something worth arguing about. Last week in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, an Israeli food truck was disinvited from the “Eat Up the Borders” food festival. The Moshava Israeli Inspired Cuisine food truck, which was initially included in the event, was asked to bow out because of concerns that it would lead to protests from those who felt it inappropriate to feature Israeli cuisine—at a festival that celebrates food from around the world.

When I first read about the incident, I thought it might have been an article from The Onion, but, sadly, this actually happened in our country this week. (And make no mistake, incidents like these are daily occurrences in the form of statements or resolutions from the UTLA, the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board, or any number of student organizations at universities across our nation.)

I’ve written and spoken about antisemitism that comes from the political right: white nationalist, Neo-Nazis waving confederate flags, holding tiki torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

But antisemitism also comes from the political left, where falafel balls and shakshuka on an Israeli food truck are depicted as symbols of occupation and injustice, and where Israeli cuisine is a form of cultural appropriation while Jews are falsely accused of not being indigenous to the Land of Israel. This is the antisemitism that defines Zionism as racism and colonialism and Israel as an apartheid state.

We need to label all such rhetoric for what it is: antisemitism, pure and simple. Food trucks from places like China, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Syria are welcome at such festivals without concerns that their presence will lead to protests notwithstanding the horrendous human rights abuses perpetrated regularly by the governments of each of these countries.

With all we have to worry about in the world today, concerns for the exquisite sensitivity of those who might be triggered by Israeli food is beyond ridiculous.

With all we have to worry about in the world today, concerns for the exquisite sensitivity of those who might be triggered by Israeli food is beyond ridiculous.

As a result of this controversy, the festival was canceled. This is sad, and it’s also a loss for all those who wanted to enjoy their favorite foods at this moment when our cities are finally reopening after 15 months of the pandemic.

But this incident points to something that is a much bigger deal than the cancellation of a local food festival. It demonstrates the insidious nature of bigotry generally and antisemitism particularly. Events like these have become normalized. The exclusion of Jews and Israelis at gay pride events has been happening for years now. Israeli-owned and themed businesses and restaurants are regularly targeted by those who use their concerns about Israeli governmental policies to justify behavior that is simply hateful and xenophobic.

Imagine the outcry if our community banded together to organize a boycott of a local Thai restaurant, for example, because of our opposition to corruption and human rights abuses on the part of the Thai government?

Unlike disagreements over food, the core values at the root of this episode are worth fighting for. When it comes to bigotry, prejudice and antisemitism—yesh l’hitvakeach—we must speak out with all of our might.

Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback is the Senior Rabbi of Stephen Wise Temple in Los Angeles, California.

(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — The two of us have spent most of our lives working for two causes: Israel and the Democratic Party. For a long time we experienced very little dissonance or disagreement. If you were pro-Israel, you were most likely a Democrat. If you were a Democrat, you were most likely pro-Israel.

While the Democratic Party’s 2020 platform is unambiguously pro-Israel, as it has been in years past, there are Democrats who are critical of Israel and want the U.S. government to influence Israel to change its policies. Some of that criticism, such as recent comments by Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and other members of “the Squad,” has created challenges for the Democratic leadership, who are tasked with keeping the party unified.

There are plenty of reasons for these changing attitudes among Democrats, but there is no doubt about the Democrats’ fundamental position on Israel. As Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the dean of Jewish congressional Democrats, wrote recently, “On Israel, there exists a broad, mainstream consensus around a number of core principles.”

Republicans see an opportunity to capitalize on controversies about Israel among Democrats. If they can delegitimize criticism of Israel, their thinking goes, they can skew political giving their way, damage intraparty relationships among Democrats and undermine the broad-based multiracial coalition needed to achieve Democrats’ goals – like fighting climate change, addressing income inequality, healing social and racial divides, and restoring America’s integrity internationally.

In pursuit of their objectives, some Republicans employ accusations of antisemitism as a political weapon. They paint all Democrats with the same broad brush – from progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to moderates like Elaine Luria. All the while, they continue to enable true antisemites like those who assaulted Congress waving QAnon flags and wearing sweatshirts glorifying the Holocaust.

The favorite tactic of these Republicans is to manipulate anti-Israel sentiment and conflate criticism of Israeli policies with antisemitism. The challenge for Democrats is to deconflate them and disentangle issues related to Israel from issues related to antisemitism.

To meet this challenge, we must learn to avoid labels. The “pro-Israel” community extends from the left to the right. Harsh criticism of Israel may be difficult to hear; we may not like some of the language used to describe Israeli policies. But that doesn’t automatically make it antisemitic. Yitzhak Rabin once said: “I don’t think it’s possible to contain over the long term — if we don’t want to get to apartheid — a million and a half [more] Arabs inside a Jewish state.” Would we have called him an antisemite?

We must also learn not to automatically label anti-Zionists as antisemites. Anti-Zionism is not necessarily antisemitic any more than opposition to a Palestinian state necessarily derives from hatred of Palestinians. We are Zionists, and we believe in the Jewish people’s right to a homeland. At the same time, there are those who oppose Zionism because they hold it writ large responsible for the occupation of and systemic discrimination against Palestinians.

While anti-Zionist views are not prima facie antisemitic, they do cross the line if they rely on antisemitic tropes or deny the right to self-determination for Jews alone. And when they cross the line, we must call them out.

We have no patience with antisemitism on the left any more than we do with antisemitism on the right.

We also insist on consistency from both the left and the right. In progressive policy circles, there is a growing focus on equality and human rights in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. This is a good thing, so long as the principle of equality is applied on all levels – from personal rights to national rights. Just as Israelis and Palestinians must have equal human rights, civil rights, and civil liberties, so, too, must both Israelis and Palestinians have the right to self-determination.

The two of us continue to devote ourselves to Israel and to the Democratic Party. We do not see the differing and even conflicting views on Israel as liabilities. Indeed, we see them as assets. They afford us opportunities to build relationships across the Democratic political spectrum. And this enhances our ability to help Israel and combat antisemitism.