Seymour Weiner, a Jewish World War II veteran, lifelong Brooklynite and a beloved New York Mets superfan, died Tuesday at 98 years old.

Weiner had been one of the earliest main characters to emerge during the Mets’ storybook 2024 season, which saw the team overcome a slow start to rocket into the MLB playoffs with the help of good-will ambassadors like Weiner, McDonalds mascot Grimace and shortstop-turned-rapper Jose Iglesias.

Of course, Weiner was already a hero: He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1945 “because he was a Jewish 18-year-old and wanted to fight Hitler,” his daughter Beth Weiner told NBC News.

Weiner’s service was delayed by high blood pressure, and by the time he was admitted, the war had ended. He “served in the army of occupation in Italy doing work on communications equipment,” according to NBC, and was honorably discharged in 1947.

“Had they not dropped the atomic bomb, he was actually going to be going to the Far East, but instead they sent him to Italy,” his daughter said. She called him a “lifelong social activist.”

On Opening Day last season, Weiner also became a Mets folk hero, when he was honored as the team’s “veteran of the game.”

We are saddened to learn of the passing of Seymour Weiner. pic.twitter.com/DMeraSZI18

— New York Mets (@Mets) April 29, 2025

 

Mets Fans were enamored by Weiner — and, yes, by his name, which is pronounced “weener.” The jokes and memes poured in. And Weiner saw them all.

“I couldn’t be more excited,” Weiner told The Athletic last year about his sudden fame. “I really can’t believe it’s happening. It’s probably one of the highlights of my life.”

As for the jokes? He had heard them for nearly a century, and he didn’t mind.

“To me, it’s been so enjoyable,” Weiner said. “In no way does it annoy me. Just look at all the notoriety I got out of it!”

As Weiner became a celebrity in Mets world, his daughter, a psychologist and professor who graduated from Yeshiva University, contacted the team to thank them for honoring her father. She also referenced the “weiner” jokes.

“And he has become a meme! Don’t worry. We’ve heard every joke you can imagine,” she told the Mets, according to The Athletic. “If you’d ever want to use us in any ad campaign, we’d love it.”

The Mets didn’t need to be told twice. On April 30, 2024, the Mets held a $1 hot dog night, using an image of Weiner holding a hot dog to promote it, accompanied by the message, “Everyone loves a weiner.”

Seymour Weiner wants YOU to come to Dollar Dog Night 💵🌭

🎟️👉 https://t.co/jqCDgZM4UI pic.twitter.com/cAU0itvBul

— New York Mets (@Mets) April 24, 2024

 

“We had this idea of Dollar Dog Night,” Mets chief marketing officer Andy Goldberg told The Athletic. “And we were, like, well, what would be better than Seymour Weiner?”

Weiner, who lived in Canarsie, Brooklyn, was a lifelong baseball fan. When he was 12, he was in attendance at the Brooklyn Dodgers game when Jackie Robinson’s first MLB hit happened on April 17, 1947, shortly after his army service ended.

“Only 12,000 people were at that game in Ebbets Field,” Weiner said last year, “so I may be the only person who was there and saw it and who is still alive.”

He said the Mets treated him “like royalty” during his visit last season. Mets legends Mookie Wilson and John Franco escorted Weiner onto the field, and they autographed a gift for him, too.

After news spread of his death this week, tributes poured in from Mets fans — many of whom lauded him as a “hero” and a “legend,” and urged the team to win in his honor.

“He gave us what we needed when we need it. This season for you Seymour,” one Reddit user wrote on a thread about Weiner’s passing.

“None of last years meme magic happened without him,” another wrote.

“Our family’s text group is ‘The Seymour Weiner Fan Club,’” one fan said. “He was an amazing way to kick off a magical season.”

Beth Weiner said her dad had a “lifelong connection” with the Mets.

“He was watching games while he was really in the last days of his life, he was listening on his phone,” she told NBC.

“The day before he passed, was the day that they scored 19 to 1 runs and I said, ‘They’re doing it for my dad,’” she said.

The Argentine government announced the release of nearly 1,850 classified documents that show how Nazi fugitives escaped to the country after World War II.

The trove of documents were declassified and made available to the public Monday at the urging of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish advocacy group named for the famed late Nazi hunter. The group praised the decision on Tuesday.

The collection will shed light on the financing of escape routes for Nazis, thousands of whom escaped to South America via so-called “rat lines” after the war.

Last month, Argentine President Javier Milei ordered the declassification of the documents after a meeting with leaders from the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, also requested the records in a letter delivered by representatives of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Argentina’s Chief of the Cabinet of Ministers Guillermo Francos said Milei gave the order “because there is no reason to continue withholding that information,” according to Argentinian outlet Perfil.

The documents are now publicly available through Argentina’s National Archive, the Argentinian government announced in a post on X.  The released documents include banking and financial transactions that show how Nazis were able to resettle in Argentina as well as records held by Argentina’s Defense Ministry, according to The Times of Israel. 

Notorious officials mentioned in Argentina’s extensive documentation include Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust who was captured by the Mossad in 1960 and later tried and executed in Israel, and Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor dubbed the “angel of death.”

The public received a glimpse of Argentina’s collection of tens of thousands of documents relating to its support for Nazis fleeing prosecution in a documentary in 2018. The government’s collection had been fully concealed until 1992, when Argentina’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declassified 139,544 documents. The collection could only be seen in person prior to its online publication by AGN.

The wildfires that erupted outside Jerusalem, burning vast swaths of forest and blighting Israel’s Independence Day, have been brought under control.

But as the fires were contained, discourse in Israel focused on who or what was responsible for them. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, publicly suggested that they may have been an act of arson, but the country’s police and fire department pushed back on those claims. Israel’s president highlighted the role of climate change in the fires.

While dozens were reported injured, and thousands of residents of the towns in the hilly area around Jerusalem were evacuated from their homes, no one has been reported killed from the fires, which burned some 5,000 acres, most of them forest. Residents have been given the all-clear to return home.

The fires, estimated to be the worst in Israel’s history, began Wednesday, marring Israel’s Memorial Day, a solemn occasion, as well as Independence Day, which began Wednesday night. Israelis on social media questioned whether the flames, coming amid war on a national holiday, were a criminal or terrorist act. Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s son, suggested without evidence on social media that his father’s left-wing critics could be responsible.

On Wednesday night, the elder Netanyahu shared footage of a meeting in which he attributed the fires to “a combination of very strong winds, dryness, and open areas that have forests, which create a lethal combination,” as well as a “a possibility of arson.”

By Thursday, Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir were amplifying the arson claims. Speaking at a teen Bible trivia contest held annually on Independence Day, Netanyahu claimed that 18 people had been arrested who were “suspected of arson, including one caught in the act.” He then hinted that Palestinians were literally and figuratively fanning the flames.

“Our neighbors, who claim to love this land, are prepared, in their propaganda, in their incitement, on the Palestinian networks — they talk about burning the land,” he said. “We are the ones who love the land. We protect the land.”

And Ben-Gvir announced on Thursday that he had established a “counter-incitement” task force to stop arson as well as incitement to arson on social media. “These are terrorists for all intents and purposes,” he tweeted. (Ben-Gvir is lobbying for Israel to introduce the death penalty for terrorists.)

But by Thursday night in Israel, police and fire services were telling a different story. After Netanyahu’s speech, police clarified to Israeli media that three people had been arrested, not 18. And in the evening, Israeli Channel 13 reported that according to the fire department’s assessment, the main burns were due to negligence, not arson — though the report added that arson could have played a role in subsequent fires that erupted.

Around the same time, Netanyahu posted footage of his Bible contest speech from earlier in the day — with the erroneous arrest numbers edited out.

Ayman Odeh, an Arab member of Knesset, Israel’s parliament, accused Netanyahu and his allies of manufacturing allegations of terrorism to distract from criticism of his leadership.

“There is no one like the Jews, who know well how dangerous false accusations are, from the Black Death, through blood libels to economic crises,” Odeh tweeted. “But this government learns nothing from history: neither about the dangers of incitement, nor about responsibility. Netanyahu was and remains the national instigator.”

Other Israelis pointed to the cause Netanyahu had spotlighted on Wednesday night — climate conditions. Dov Khenin, a former left-wing lawmaker, posted a fire-tracking map from NASA that showed fires breaking out across the eastern Mediterranean region. “For all those spreading conspiracy theories, NASA’s fire map shows: when there is a situation of extreme dryness accompanied by winds, large fires occur,” he tweeted. “This is what the climate crisis looks like.”

Avner Gross, a climate scientist at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva, tweeted Wednesday that he was at a climate conference in Vienna when an acquaintance called him and told him his town was on fire, though residents had evacuated safely. “Thank you to the fire department, perhaps the only force that is taking climate change seriously,” he tweeted.

“This fire is part of the climate crisis, which must not be ignored,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said at an Independence Day event. “It requires us to prepare for serious and significant challenges and to make decisions – including appropriate legislation.”

Israel just completed its driest winter on record, according to its Water Authority.

Irrespective of the cause, several prominent Israeli civic rituals on Independence Day involve fire — and were canceled or tamped down because of the wildfires. The national torch-lighting ceremony, due to honor public figures including conservative American pundit Ben Shapiro — was called off, with a dress rehearsal airing on TV instead. Fireworks and an airshow were nixed. And authorities banned one of the core festivities of the day — barbecues in the park.

But as the flames burned, some voices still projected hope on what is usually a celebratory day.

“Every burnt tree hurts,” the Jewish National Fund, which owns many of the destroyed areas, posted on Facebook Thursday. “Every damaged acre is a reason to keep fighting — and to know that we will yet again grow the greenery.”

The body governing the World Zionist Congress election in the United States took the unusual step this week of barring an individual from running, citing his behavior during the campaign period.

Ronn Torossian, a combative Jewish public-relations executive and founder of the upstart militant Zionist group Betar USA, can no longer run as a delegate on the ZOA Coalition slate, the body ruled earlier this week. The ruling, which has not yet been made public, was shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Torossian violated rules that bar delegates from speaking negatively about other delegates, the chairs of the Area Election Committee, Abraham Gafni and David J. Butler, wrote in their decision. 

“With respect to Mr. Torossian, we are offended by the aggressive, hateful tone and vulgarity in many of his attacks,” they wrote.

The ban offers yet another sign of how heated this year’s election has become. Advocacy groups, religious leaders and rank-and-file voters have flocked to the election — in which Jews worldwide vote for delegates to a global Zionist legislative body — seeing it as a battle for Israel’s future and seeking to control a $5 billion pot of Israeli government funds allocated by the congress.

It has also, the decision against Torossian shows, become another front in a personal showdown between two fierce opponents of anti-Zionism.

In the same ruling, Gafni and Butler ordered Shai Davidai, the Columbia University professor and activist, to cease campaigning for a different party, Kol Israel. Kol Israel and ZOA Coalition had filed the respective complaints that resulted in the rulings against Torossian and Davidai.

Davidai is not actually a candidate with the slate, which also includes advocacy group StandWithUs and the Zionist youth group Young Judaea. But he had planned to be before officially stepping aside in February amid complaints from the Zionist Organization of America, the conservative pro-Israel group that backs the eponymous slate, about his own negative comments about Torossian. Davidai continued to advocate for Kol Israel in social media posts since.

While both men have gained prominence calling for more forceful responses to antisemitism and anti-Israel advocacy in the United States, their differences are longstanding and deep. Torossian has said his “first real job” was “working for the Likud Party in Israel,” which is headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while Davidai prior to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel had been a critic of Netanyahu. In an essay Davidai co-wrote with his wife last year in Tablet, they said they “remain staunchly opposed to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank [and] refrain from buying products manufactured beyond the 1967 armistice line.”

Davidai and Torossian promote different visions about the war in Gaza: Betar USA has called for “more blood in Gaza,” while Davidai has expressed concern for Palestinian civilians there.

The men have been feuding since at least February, when Betar USA activists joined in a demonstration Davidai organized at Columbia, and Davidai said he did not want their participation. Since then, Torossian has publicly accused Davidai of backing Israel boycotts, owing to the line in the Tablet essay, while Davidai has called Torossian an “unhinged extremist” and Betar USA “a group of violence-loving thugs” (the group insists it is operating in the spirit of early Revisionist Zionist thinker Ze’ev Jabotinsky).  

The WZC ruling found that both men had engaged in “derogatory, demeaning and filthy language” and that neither of their respective parties “should have tolerated, approved or promoted any part of the hateful exchanges between Torosian [sic] and Davidai.” The American Zionist Movement, which manages the U.S. election for the WZC, and its executive director, Herbert Block, did not return requests for comment about whether individual candidates had been barred from previous elections.

Torossian, whose Betar USA social media account publicized the ruling against him late Wednesday, told JTA that he planned to appeal. On X, Betar called the ruling “a terrible decision for the fate of American Jews” and continued to go after Davidai, at one point calling him a “cuckold.”

Reached for comment, Davidai said he stepped down as a delegate voluntarily, “triggered by Ronn’s behavior.” He also said he hadn’t heard that the WZC had leveled a disciplinary ruling against him. 

The head of Kol Israel, which had been trying for months to expel Betar USA from the congress, said the episode was “a sad day for the Zionist movement.”

“The last thing that the Jewish people need is more infighting,” said David Yaari, chair of Kol Israel. 

Yaari said he didn’t want to have to go public with his group’s complaint against Torossian. But as Betar and its leader targeted Kol Israel leaders and allies, both in public and private, for their associations with Davidai, he saw no other way. 

“People should know the kind of person that he is and what he’s done to these organizations,” he said.

Kol Israel’s secretary general Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, who is the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem and ran for Israel’s parliament with the Likud Party, filed the complaint against Torossian that the AEC acted upon.

The complaint accused Torossian of “blackmail, intimidation, incessant harassment, direct personal attacks, inflammatory rhetoric, and aggressive behavior (including, but not limited to, threats of physical violence, defamatory statements, calculated and malicious misrepresentation, and continuous bombardment and badgering of various members of the Kol Israel slate) that are entirely personal in nature and undermine the integrity of the World Zionist Congress elections,” according to a copy of it posted on X by Betar USA. Many of these attacks, Hassan-Nahoum wrote, were directed at Davidai and his family. 

Mort Klein, longtime head of the Zionist Organization of America, told JTA he knew nothing about the banning of his coalition partner from the election. He also called Hassan-Nahoum “a liar and a disgrace” for refusing to debate him about Davidai at a recent event, and for saying Klein had “abused” her. Hassan-Nahoum did not return a request for comment.

Torossian said that in addition to appealing the ruling, he also planned to seek redress against Davidai in a Jewish legal court, known as a beit din. But whatever happens, he added, he plans to attend the World Zionist Congress regardless. 

If he does, he would be taking a page from the late extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, whose ideology he has embraced. Kahane, the leader of the Jewish Defense League, flew to Israel from New York for the 1972 World Zionist Congress despite not being a delegate and demanded to address the convention. He left without doing so, but not before his supporters briefly halted proceedings with their protests.

Torossian said he would not fear repercussions from coming to the conference, set for October in Jerusalem.

“I’m going to be there every single day,” he said. “The security guards for the convention are Betaris…. We are the government.”

Rabbi Deborah Waxman, who leads the seminary and congregational union of Judaism’s Reconstructionist movement, said this week that she will retire in the summer of 2026, opening the top job at a movement that has been rocked by tension over a growing strain of anti-Zionism among its recent rabbinical school students and graduates.

Since taking over as CEO of Reconstructing Judaism in 2014, Waxman has steered the main bodies of American Judaism’s smallest denomination to a firm financial footing following the post-2008 financial upheavals, and spearheaded curriculum changes at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College that beefed up field training and pastoral education for its graduates. During her tenure, the seminary also became the first rabbinical school to admit rabbis with non-Jewish partners. 

In 2018, she led the renaming of the organization that combines, since 2012, the seminary and the former Jewish Reconstructionist Communities. She hosts a popular podcast, “Hashivenu: Jewish Teachings on Resilience,” and expanded Ritualwell, an online collection of new rituals and prayers. 

But the movement’s reputation as organized Judaism’s progressive vanguard — pioneering the inclusion of women, LGBT people and Jews of color and embracing rituals later adopted by other liberal denominations — has been overshadowed in recent years by internal discord over Israel. Reconstructionist rabbis have taken leading roles in anti-Zionist activism, leading to public complaints by students and alumni and to the formation of Beit Kaplan, a new group of rabbis asserting their support for Israel. 

Waxman addressed those tensions last year in remarks at the seminary’s ordination ceremonies, and last July the movement issued a statement reiterating its support for progressive Zionism, the existence of Israel and the two-state solution.

In an interview Tuesday, Waxman emphasized her own personal commitment to Israel and the movement’s stance that it will not submit current or prospective rabbis to “litmus” tests over Zionism. 

And she said her decision to step down was not related to the tensions over Israel, but rather a personal decision after 13 years to hand leadership over to a new generation. (The movement has not announced a successor.)

“I deeply believe that institutions need to renew themselves, and that a change in leadership helps toward that renewal,” said Waxman, 58. “When my contract concludes in August of 2026 I will have served 13 years, almost a generation, and I really believe in raising up the next generation of leaders, and so [I’m] stepping aside for the vitality of the Reconstructionist movement.”

Talk of generational change came up frequently in a conversation held shortly before the movement was to announce her decision. Ordained as a rabbi by the RRC in 1999, Waxman said she studied in Israel when the potential of the Oslo Accords was “still at hand.” 

“The Reconstructionist movement had long been in support of a two-state solution, and many of our leaders were involved from the time when Jews paid a very high price to advocate for Palestinian national aspirations,” she said.

For younger Jews, such ideals seem like ancient history, especially following the shocks of Oct. 7, 2023 and the war in Gaza that continues to grind on.  

“Thirty years later, the young folks in the Reconstructionist movement have largely come up with the dismantlement of Oslo under Netanyahu’s leadership, with brief interruptions, and with the building of the separation barrier, and with an ever-worsening situation for Palestinians with no political will to really address it,” said Waxman, who holds a Ph.D. in American Jewish history from Temple University. “The realities of Israel and what has gone on in Israel have something to do with the experience of young folks and their differing analyses.”

Rather than shun the Reconstructionist rabbis who have joined anti-Zionist movements such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Waxman said her approach has been to engage them in a process of dialogue and mutual learning she calls “covenantal community.” 

“We’re in the vanguard because of our commitment to complexity and nuance and our willingness to have really hard conversations. How we are navigating all of the complexities of the current moment is yet another way that the Reconstructionist movement is leading, and I would love for people to see that in our efforts to create a covenantal community,” she said. “What we are trying to do is stay together with integrity and with courage.”

Reconstructionist Judaism emerged out of the teachings of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983), a Conservative rabbi who conceived Judaism as an evolving “civilization” rather than just a religion. That framing allowed the movement, which coalesced in the 1950s and opened its own seminary in 1968, to innovate in ways that the Conservative movement considered a breach of halacha, or Jewish law. The college, based in the Philadelphia area, accepted its first woman rabbinical student in its second class, 16 years before the Conservative movement followed suit. Waxman is herself the first woman and the first out LGBTQ person to lead a congregational union or seminary affiliated with one of the Jewish denominations.

Today the movement counts 94 Reconstructionist congregations; this year, RRC will ordain 10 rabbis, of whom a third or so will seek pulpit positions. The others expect to find work on college campuses, as chaplains or as what Waxman calls “entrepreneurial” rabbis. 

Having herself grown up in the Conservative movement — where rabbis were often considerably more observant of Jewish law and custom than most of their congregants — Waxman says that in the spirit of Kaplan, she has led efforts to orient the movement “toward the lived experience of people on the ground,” as opposed to a top-down approach. 

“Reconstructionism has been so deeply informed by an embrace of democracy, which includes a powerful partnership between rabbis and lay people, and the understanding that in communities a rabbi exists as a  leader, a teacher, an interpreter, as an empower, as a facilitator – as the first among equals in all of the different expressions of the Jewish civilization.”

The “lived experience” model led the RRC, in 2015, to accept rabbinical students in interfaith relationships. (Hebrew College, a pluralistic seminary, followed suit in 2023, as did Hebrew Union College, the Reform movement seminary, last year.) Critics said rabbis need to be role models who demonstrate the Jewish norm of in-marriage. Proponents said rabbis could better serve their communities by reflecting the demographic reality of increasing mixed marriages. 

“We heard some anxiety, including from some folks who were partnered with non-Jews, but overwhelmingly, we heard from people who said, ‘Thank you so much for validating my life, and thank you so much for seeing me and for believing that that that I am no less Jewish,’” Waxman said.  

That conception of the rabbi as facilitator has led to criticism that the movement refuses to set firm boundaries of what is and isn’t acceptable Jewish belief and practice — criticism that Waxman accepts with pride. 

“The idea of who sets the boundaries and how they get policed is an unhealthy and unhelpful conversation,” she said. “I’m much more interested in the generative conversation. I’m much more interested in, What are we building? What are we committed to? What are we trying to drive for?”

That approach has extended to Israel. Last December, responding to the previous year’s divides over Israel, the movement hosted a ”convening” of some 600 movement rabbis, professionals and lay people. In careful language, Waxman and many of the speakers sought to avoid a debate over “Zionism” and focus instead on “values” articulated in her opening remarks: “a commitment to worldwide Jewish peoplehood,” “all humans are created b’tzelem elohim, in the image of God,” “the centrality of democracy and justice, the affirmation of self-preservation and the importance of accountability and reconciliation.”

Similarly, during an intensive summer in Israel, rabbinical students are encouraged to engage with Israeli and Palestinian activists and NGOs who are working on the ground on issues that reflect that set of largely liberal values, and not on politics.  

“What we are most interested in at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College wåhen we’re training our rabbis is behavior,” said Waxman. “How do we interact with each other, what is the kind of care we provide and the kind of capacity to see the humanity and the pain and the aspirations of the person in front of us? 

“And sometimes I’m talking about Palestinians, but sometimes I’m talking about the young person sitting opposite me, or someone who holds a different opinion than I do,” she added. “I just think that these are essential skills for us to learn.”

For some in the movement, this kind of openness sanctions behavior that is beyond the pale. Last May, in an oped in the Forward, two rabbinical students said they withdrew from the seminary because they “experienced an increasingly vociferous anti-Zionism among the student body, the steady erosion of civil discourse and the seminary’s inability to transmit the Jewish narrative to those it will ordain as future spiritual leaders of the Jewish people.”

Waxman insists, however, that rather than “retreat into rigid orthodoxies” and expelling students over their beliefs about Israel she prefers an approach of dialogue and acknowledging differences.  

“There’s a huge generational component to what’s going on, and I think that we’re so much better served being in conversation with each other and articulating the things that we are most interested in investing in,” she said. “That is a much richer conversation, full of potential, than talking about who’s out and who’s in.” 

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan raised the concern during a hearing Wednesday that New York state could be forced to fully fund yeshivas that offer little education in basic secular subjects like English or math as a result of a landmark case the court will soon decide.

At issue in the case is whether to allow the Catholic Church in Oklahoma to establish the nation’s first religious public charter school. If the court backs the Catholic school, it could pave the way for publicly funding Jewish schools across the country.

The court has a conservative majority of six to three. From their questioning of lawyers arguing on either side of the case, the majority of justices appeared open to the idea that excluding religious institutions from Oklahoma’s charter school system is discriminatory and unconstitutional. 

Kagan and the other two liberals on the bench, meanwhile, expressed skepticism toward the proposed charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School.

Kagan, the court’s only Jewish justice, brought up Hasidic schools in New York while questioning St. Isidore’s attorney, Michael McGinley, about the implications of his argument. She wanted to know if he thought religious charter schools should be allowed to exempt themselves from curriculum requirements based on their doctrines.

“Let’s say we’re up in New York, and there’s a Hasidic community that has a yeshiva, and it’s a very serious yeshiva, and what that means is that almost all the instruction has to do with studying Talmud and other religious texts,” Kagan said. “Very little of it has to do with secular subjects. Almost none of the instruction is in English. Almost all of it is in Yiddish or in various, like, ancient Hebrew-Aramaic kinds of languages.

“Does New York have to say ‘yes’ even though that curriculum is super different from the curriculum that we provide in our regular public schools?” Kagan asked McGinley.

Kagan’s line of questioning comes as New York recently closed multiple yeshivas that were not abiding by a state law requiring all schools — private and public — to adequately teach basic secular subjects. The state’s crackdown is focused on Hasidic schools that critics describe in much the same terms used by Kagan in her example. 

McGinley responded that Kagan’s scenario should not influence the court’s ruling in the St. Isidore case.

“You can’t take imagined hypothetical downstream questions and let them drive and justify front-end religious discrimination,” McGinley said, citing a series of previous cases concerning the First Amendment’s religion clauses.

Kagan replied that the nature of religion means conflict with secular authorities would become inevitable with the existence of religious charter schools. She also said states created charter schools in order to spur innovation within the typical public school context, and did not intend to begin funding religious education. 

“And now you’re saying to that state, you know, yes, you have to go fund the yeshiva that I described; yes, you have to go fund the madrasa … if you want to have this program at all,” she said, referring to Islamic religious schools as well.

A ruling in the case could affect as many as 47 states that permit charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed. Some states, including New York, have caps that limit new charters as well as other kinds of restrictions.

Most American Jews, as a small religious minority in a majority-Christian country, have traditionally backed the principle of separation of church and state, and mainstream Jewish groups have historically fought to keep religion out of the public sphere.

Organizations representing Orthodox Jews, who almost universally send their children to religious schools, are an exception, and several of them have weighed in to support St. Isidore. Orthodox groups have also lobbied for other measures, such as tuition vouchers, that make religious education more affordable. 

An amendment saying that criticism of the Israeli government is not antisemitic was added to the Antisemitism Awareness Act today in a Senate committee hearing.

The amendment was proposed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Jewish progressive leader, and approved in a 12-11 vote in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

The committee adjourned before voting on the bill itself and another piece of legislation, the Protecting Students on Campus Act, which would require schools to share information about how students can file civil rights complaints through the Department of Education.

A date for the committee vote has not yet been announced. If passed by the HELP committee, the bill will move onto the Senate floor for a final vote.

Sanders’ was one of seven amendments to be added to the bill, which would codify a widely adopted and controversial definition of antisemitism into U.S. law. That definition, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, has been adopted by hundreds of governmental bodies and other entities but drawn criticism from the left because it defines some criticism of Israel as antisemitic.

“One can criticize the government of Israel for their policies without being antisemitic,” said Sanders, the committee’s ranking member, during the hearing. “This amendment makes it clear that it is not antisemitic to oppose the Netanyahu-led war effort that has killed more than 50,000 people and wounded over 116,000, 60% of whom are women, children and the elderly.”

All committee Democrats and Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, voted for Sanders’ amendment. Those opposed said that the amendment and others acted as a poison pill.

“Supporting these amendments is an effort to kill this bill, which protects Jewish students from antisemitic acts,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the committee, during the meeting. “The bill includes protections for free speech, so let’s not be naive as to what’s taking place here.”

In response, Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said, “Antisemitism is wrong. Authoritarianism is not the answer. That’s what we’re debating right now.”

The Antisemitism Awareness Act was passed by the House last year but stalled in the Senate over concerns that it could punish political speech against Israel. Some Republicans, including Paul, have also criticized the IHRA definition because it identifies the belief that Jews killed Jesus as antisemitic.

“This bill would subject to punishment speech claiming that Jews killed Jesus,” Paul said at the hearing.

He called the deicide charge “an absurd and insulting insinuation, if the argument is that all Jews are responsible for killing Jesus,” but added, “and yet, the Gospel of John describes the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. It reports Jews present at the trial, including the high priest and crowd called for his crucifixion.”

He continued, “Nobody thinks that’s all Jews, but you’re no longer allowed to read John 18 and 19. This is sort of insane.”

Paul also said he opposed the bill over a litany of other concerns including fears that it would target comedians. He invoked Jerry Seinfeld as an example.

“Have you guys ever listened to comedy? Do you know why Jerry Seinfeld won’t go to colleges because he can’t make any Jew jokes anymore, or Indian jokes, or whatever jokes. Jokes are about silly categorizations of people,” said Rand.

He entered into the record a list of the names of 400 Jewish American comedians who he said have referred to Jews in stereotypical language, and who he says may be targeted by the bill.

Two other Sanders amendments were also approved by the committee, including one that states the federal government cannot compel schools to violate the First Amendment rights of a student or professor. The measure could impact the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian student activists.

“We have already seen attack after attack on freedom of speech and right to dissent. This amendment defends the Constitution of the United States and our First Amendment,” said Sanders. It passed in a vote of 13-10, with all Democrats as well as Paul and Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, voting in favor.

Another Sanders amendment provided protection to students distributing written materials on campus, carrying out school-sanctioned protests, and engaging in “any speech that does not include true threats or incitement of violence,,” according to Jewish Insider. It was approved by all committee democrats along with Paul and Collins.

A fourth amendment to the bill was proposed by Markey which opposed the Trump administration’s recent student visa revocations, as well as detainments and deportations of students and faculty at universities for activities protected under the First Amendment. It was approved by affirmative votes from all Democrats and Paul.

ZAGREB, Croatia — Among the Jews who gathered in nine cities and towns in this former Yugoslav republic last week to commemorate Yom HaShoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day — was Darko Fischer, one of about 140 remaining survivors of a wartime regime whose fascist leaders were considered even more brutal than the Nazis.

“It was worse than Auschwitz. Here they had crematoria and massive killing, but also physical and psychological torture. It was extremely cruel, especially in Jasenovac,” Fischer, 87, said during a recent interview. “Many Jews, including some of my relatives, finished their lives there. I survived just by chance.”

Fischer survived because his father made arrangements in 1941, when the fascist Ustaše regime began enacting antisemitic laws, for the family to leave Croatia. His father was murdered in 1944 after the Nazis invaded Hungary, but the rest of the family survived and returned to Croatia after the war.

Next month marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II as well as the collapse of the Ustaše regime, the Nazi puppet government formally known as the Independent State of Croatia. Its territory — which encompassed much of today’s Croatia as well as neighboring Bosnia and parts of modern-day Serbia — housed around 30 concentration camps including Jasenovac and two camps specifically for children, Jastrebarsko and Sisak.

During its reign of terror, the Ustaše regime persecuted and murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma, as well as Croatians opposed to their rule. The Catholic Church openly collaborated with the Ustaše, whose support came largely from young men with rural, blue-collar, uneducated backgrounds.

Today, the Balkan nation’s government is an ally to Israel, born in the wake of the Holocaust. But at the same time, nationalist sympathizers of Croatia’s once-feared Ustaše are finding increasing traction for their rhetoric. Those who want to tamp down on  pro-Nazi expressions say they are not finding meaningful support among lawmakers.

“We proposed to have the same law as in Germany about Nazi symbolism, making it a felony punishable by prison, rather than a misdemeanor as it is now, but nothing happened,” said Zoran Ferber, 55, secretary-general of the Jewish Community of Zagreb. “We cannot propose a law if nobody else is supporting us.”

In 2016, Croatia’s then-president posed with a Ustaše flag during a trip to Canada, despite having previously expressed regret about the regime during a state trip to Israel. Today, nationalist sympathizers continue to use the prohibited, yet increasingly tolerated, slogan “Za Dom Spremni” (Defend the Homeland) — the Ustaše equivalent of the Nazi “Sieg Heil.”

In a sign of how widespread Nazi sentiments may be, Marko Perkovic, a Croatian singer who goes by Thompson, known for his Nazi sympathies, has sold more than 500,000 tickets for an outdoor concert in July.

Tena Banjeglav, program coordinator at Documenta: Center for Dealing With the Past, a Zagreb-based nonprofit group, notes that Nazi signs have potent symbolism for some Croatians.

“Normal people who know what these symbols meant in the past think it should be forbidden,” she said. “On the other hand, ethnic Croats usually connect this salute with the 1990s war against Serbia, not with the Ustaše. With this current far-right government, there is no chance it will be banned.”

The current government, like other right-wing governments in Europe and beyond, has proven in recent years to be a staunch supporter of Israel. In 2020, Israel’s then-Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi called Croatia “one of our best friends in Europe” and urged his counterpart, Gordan Grlić Radman, to move the country’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Croatia was one of just four members of the European Union to vote with Israel and the United States against a United Nations resolution calling for a ceasefire on Oct. 27, 2023, three weeks after Hamas attacked Israel and the day that Israeli troops entered Gaza for the first time. (The others were Austria, Czechia and Hungary, and the resolution passed 120-14.)

In a press release, the Croatian government said it “could not support a draft that does not mention or name Hamas, which perpetrated a massacre of civilians that is considered the deadliest day for Jews since the Second World War.”

During World War II, some 80% of Croatian Jews were killed, one of the highest percentages of any country in Europe; 13,000 Jews were beaten or bludgeoned to death at Jasenovac alone, which was so horrific that even senior Nazi officers warned camp commanders to use more humane methods of execution.

Before 1941, some 39,000 Jews lived in territory controlled by the Independent State of Croatia. Croatia is today home to 1,300 Jews, including Holocaust survivors ranging in age from 80 to 102. About 1,000 Jews live in Zagreb, with smaller numbers in Osijek, Split, Dubrovnik and five other cities, according to Saša Cvetković, vice president of the Jewish Community of Zagreb.

“We are the leftovers of the Jewish community,” said Cvetković, 50, estimating that 60% of Croatia’s Jews are elderly, and that 20 to 40 members die each year. “So imagine in a few years, if we don’t get newcomers, our kids will be the last generation. For me it’s very sad.”

Banjeglav, a non-Jew who helps document war crimes as part of an ongoing project, frequently gives visitors tours of Jewish Zagreb. Key attractions include the hilltop Mirogoj cemetery complex — which houses at least 1,500 Jewish tombstones — as well as Zagreb’s Ban Jelačić Square, a once heavily Jewish shopping district, and a parking lot on Praška Street where the city’s original Ashkenazi synagogue, built in 1867, was destroyed by the Ustaše regime in 1942.

Around that time, she noted, Ustaše commanders converted the Adriatic island of Pag into a concentration camp, “but now the locals don’t want to admit it was there. An Israeli film crew went there in 2015 to make a documentary and was physically attacked.”

(Residents of Pag reportedly called police after spotting a group that included Israeli filmmakers and an American Jew whose mother was imprisoned on Pag. Police officers briefly confiscated the visitors’ passports, then escorted them off the island, according to contemporaneous news reports.)

What the tours do not include are any Holocaust memorials devoted just to Jews murdered by the Croatian fascists.

“We as a Jewish community don’t have one single memorial only for Jews who were brutally murdered by the Ustaše, because after the communists came to power in 1945, they made memorials for the victims of fascism and Nazi terror,” Cvetković said. “But who killed the majority of Jews here? Let’s be honest. It wasn’t the Nazis.”

Banjeglav said that even high-ranking government officials are guilty of Holocaust denial.

“They don’t want to accept responsibility,” she said, noting that in 2023, Croatia had the rotating presidency of the Berlin-based International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. “The main theme was combating Holocaust denial and distortion, but everything they did was literally denial and distortion. All the events were in English and nothing was translated, so the Croatian public didn’t even know we had the presidency.”

At Zagreb’s main railway station, a bronze sculpture 12 meters, or nearly 40 feet, high, dedicated three years ago, depicts a wall of suitcases stacked in a huge pile, along with a locomotive and a plaque inscribed in English, Hebrew and Croatian commemorating victims of the Holocaust. Yet local Jewish groups objected to it, arguing that the memorial neglects the Ustaše’s role in killing Jews and instead puts the blame on Nazi Germany.

“I will never go there,” said Cvetković. “For me, this is not a memorial. It was built without the blessing of the Jewish community.”

The contemporary Jewish community is small, scattered across several cities, with Zagreb as the largest hub. For the past 20 years, Pinchas and Raizel Zaklos have been the Israeli-born Chabad emissaries there, operating a synagogue on Rokova Street, in a neighborhood that was heavily Jewish before World War II. It’s about a 10-minute walk from the Zagreb Funicular, one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions.

The four-story building boasts Croatia’s first new mikvah since the war, and a small shop that sells kosher meat from Poland, for the 30 or so Jews who keep kosher. There’s also an Israeli-style café and space for Jewish students who otherwise have nowhere just for them to work or socialize.

Between 50 and 60 people show up for Friday night services, and twice a month, Bet Chabad offers activities for Jewish teens. On Hanukkah, it sponsors a public menorah-lighting on Britanski trg, one of Zagreb’s main plazas. All its activities are funded by donations from abroad.

Despite their efforts, said Raziel Zaklos, “there’s a huge lack of understanding. The community here sees Judaism through the lens of the Holocaust. And among the younger generation, nobody wants to identify with those memories. They want to look to the future.”

In September, Croatia’s government announced that 52 abandoned Jewish cemeteries around the country would be protected as “memorial heritage” to preserve the memory of Jews who were persecuted during World War II. Another 15 are already protected as independent cultural sites.

Acts of vandalism have spiked since the beginning of the war in Gaza. For example, graffiti recently appeared on the streets of Zagreb saying “Zidove na vrbe” — “Hang the Jews.” And last October, the Jewish community broke all ties with the Anti-Fascist League — which had co-sponsored Holocaust commemorations in the past — after that group came out with a statement condemning Israel’s war in Gaza as a genocide.

Banjeglav sees this as one more challenge in forcing her fellow Croatians to come to terms with their wartime past.

“For me, nothing is too controversial,” she said of the work she and her colleagues at Documenta do to fight Holocaust revisionism and glorification of war criminals. “If we continue denying and sweeping these issues under the carpet, we won’t get anywhere. That’s why some people really don’t like us — but it’s part of our job.”

David Horowitz, a former ‘60s radical turned right-wing firebrand who decried what he called the “the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values,” died Tuesday after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 86.

His death was announced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the think tank he founded with Peter Collier in 1988.

A self-described agnostic Jew who wrote in 2016 that he had never been to Israel, he nonetheless became one of the fiercest critics of Democrats he claimed “empowered” Israel’s enemies, including Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, ISIS and Hamas.

In recent years he was a fierce defender of some of the first Trump administration’s most contentious stances, including its travel ban on a group of mostly Muslim countries, and its policy of separating undocumented immigrant children from their parents at the border. Stephen Miller, the Jewish senior Trump adviser thought to be an architect of those policies, considers himself one of Horowitz’s proteges.

In 2017, in a harbinger of current Trump administration policies, Horowitz’s Freedom Center launched a campaign against “sanctuary campuses” for failing to report undocumented immigrants to authorities.

Horowitz honed his take-no-prisoners approach to activism as a leader of the New Left, a fiery political movement that emerged in the 1960s with the University of California, Berkeley as its epicenter.

Horowitz earned his master’s in English from Berkeley in 1961 and returned to the campus in 1968. He served as co-editor of the radical magazine Ramparts, which preached revolution “by any means necessary” in its opposition to the Vietnam War and support for far-left regimes.

Horowitz was also a supporter and associate of the Black Panthers, a radical Black Power group. By his own account, Horowitz’s political conversion was sparked by the disappearance and murder in 1974 of Betty Van Patter, a friend who he recommended for a job with the Panthers. Horowitz suspected the Panthers in the murder, which remains unsolved.

“My life as a leftist began with a May Day Parade in 1948, when I was nine years old, and lasted for more than twenty-five years until December 1974, when a murder committed by my political comrades brought my radical career to an end,” he wrote in 1986.

By the end of the 1970s, Horowitz began to further question his Marxist views, and like a number of Jewish “red diaper” babies raised in leftist homes (he was born in Queens to parents who were Communist Party members) he became disillusioned with a movement that he felt ignored the violent excesses of the far left.

In 1984, he voted for Ronald Reagan and co-authored a Washington Post op-ed attacking his old comrades for supporting Cuban dictator Fidel Castro as well as the Sandinistas, a revolutionary leftist movement in Nicaragua.

In 1988, he and Collier founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which became the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Its activities include a database of alleged left-wing activists, the Jihad Watch blog and a magazine dedicated to exposing the excesses of “political correctness” on college campuses.

After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the foundation increasingly focused on Islamist terrorism. Its targets included Students for Justice in Palestine and pro-Palestinian Berkeley professors it accused of fomenting antisemitism. In 2016, the Freedom Center launched a poster campaign targeting pro-Palestinian student activists as “Jew haters” and terrorists’ allies. As the posters drew criticism, a pro-Israel campus group funded by the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson was compelled to issue a statement saying that while they had made a “modest” grant to the center, they had not funded the campaign.

Horowitz, deeply critical of Palestinians, claimed that their goal is to erase Jews from the Middle East. “No people have shown themselves as so morally sick as the Palestinians,” he said at Brooklyn College in 2011.

Horowitz was a polarizing figure, earning praise from those who said his views were prescient, and derision from others who described him as a hate-monger.

“David was an incredible resource to me and many other Jewish students facing terror sympathizers and haters on hostile college campuses, before it became national news,” Hannah Grossman, a reporter at the right-wing Manhattan Institute think tank, wrote on X.

The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the Freedom Center as a hate group, saying its projects “give anti-Muslim voices and radical ideologies a platform to project hate and misinformation.”

He was the author or co-author of dozens of books, whose titles reflect his political compulsions, including “The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party” (2017); “BLITZ: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win” (2020), and “Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America” (2018).

Horowitz was married four times. His survivors include three children by his first marriage; in 2008 a daughter, Sarah, died of heart complications at age 44. He wrote about her in his 2009 book, “A Cracking of the Heart.”

Mohsen Mahdawi, a pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia, was released from federal custody Wednesday after a federal judge ruled it was unlawful to keep him detained with no formal charges.

“The two weeks of detention so far demonstrate great harm to a person who has been charged with no crime,” said U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford at the hearing on Wednesday. In his decision, he wrote that Mahdawi’s “continued detention would likely have a chilling effect on protected speech.”

The decision marks the first release of a pro-Palestinian student protester arrested amid a crackdown that the Trump administration says is meant to rein in antisemitism on colege campuses. The government’s effort to deport Mahdawi case will continue but he will be free while it proceeds, under the judge’s ruling.

“I am saying it clear and loud, to President Trump and his cabinet: I am not afraid of you,” Mahdawi said in public comments following his release in Vermont, where he lives and was detained. Wearing a keffiyeh as he emerged from the courthouse, he also said, “To my people in Palestine: I feel your pain, I see your suffering, and I see freedom and it is very very soon.”

Mahdawi’s release came a day after Vermont’s congressional delegation — including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Becca Balint, who are Jewish — rallied on his behalf outside the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C.

Mahdawi was detained by ICE agents earlier this month during an appointment that he had been told was part of the process to become a U.S. citizen. Mahdawi is a permanent resident with a visa who was born in a refugee camp in the West Bank and has been in the United States since 2014.

He was the co-president of Columbia’s Palestinian Students Union and was targeted by the far-right pro-Israel group Betar prior to his detainment. His supporters have argued that he fostered relationships with both Palestinian and Israeli students at Columbia and noted that he receded from prominence in the Columbia protests over time.

Despite no formal charges being made against him, Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified Mahdawi’s detainment in a memo, writing that Mahdawi had undercut efforts to end the war in Gaza. He also accused Mahdawi of “threatening rhetoric and intimidation of pro-Israeli bystanders,” but did not provide evidence, including in a new filing made ahead of Wednesday’s court appearance.