(JTA) — When Rabbi Mike Moskowitz got the Pride email from Kasbah BBQ & Deli, a kosher restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he immediately went to Facebook to offer his feedback.

“Very impressed!” wrote Moskowitz, a longtime advocate for LGBTQ inclusion in Orthodox communities. He tagged the restaurant and shared the rainbow-colored image that touted “diversity in all many flavors,” along with a 10% discount code.

Moskowitz’s reaction stemmed from the fact that Kasbah Deli caters to Orthodox Jews. While acceptance of LGBTQ Jews has grown within some Modern Orthodox communities in recent years, it’s far from the norm in most Orthodox communities, which largely view the biblical prohibition on same-sex relations as binding. Pride Month, celebrated annually in June, is not widely acknowledged in most Orthodox spaces.

The email was news to Kasbah Deli, too.

“This is our old logo, something here is wrong and we are looking into it,” Kasbah commented.

It wasn’t the only New York City kosher restaurant to be surprised by its own Pride email. Mendy’s, a kosher deli in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, sent a formal retraction and apology to customers just hours after its email went out, blaming the incident on a marketing company.

“Mendy’s would like to apologize for an email that went out this morning that you may have found offensive,” its retraction email said. “We work with a non-Jewish company on marketing and promotions and, as the result of a miscommunication, the wrong campaign was launched on our behalf. We are now working with them in order to educate them so that they can better-serve the needs of our community going forward.”

Both Mendy’s and Deli Kasbah send promotions through a service offered by 9Fold, a company that operates digital services for restaurants.

Reached by phone, a Mendy’s employee said the discount code (15% off with code TOGETHER) had been sent out “without talking to the owner.” The employee declined to give his name or comment further.

Deli Kasbah’s email offered a 10% discount code. A representative of the restaurant said the manager was out of town and could not comment about the email.

But the restaurant’s Facebook account responded quickly to the post from Moskowitz, who is currently a scholar in residence at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, an LGBTQ synagogue in Manhattan.

“We don’t know where was this sent from we are looking in to it our self’s as well,” it wrote.

“Thank you and to be clear, we are very supportive of it and hope that you do not apologize for celebrating people,” Moskowitz answered. “If I can be supportive in any way, please PM me.”

(JTA) — To everything there is a season. June is Pride season, one where LGBTQ people proudly refuse to choose between our identities and our demand for the freedom to live equally and without fear. 

A Wider Bridge, which builds meaningful relationships between LGBTQ people in North America and Israel, has always stood for our ability to celebrate all our identities without being forced into boxes. This year is no exception. And this year it’s especially personal to me.

Just last week I was saddened to see vile antisemitic hate against Manny’s, a cherished establishment in San Francisco, when it was vandalized with “Zionist Pigz” to intimidate the owner and like-minded Jews for their Zionism. We stand with Manny, a Wider Bridge trip alum, as he refuses to choose between his LGBTQ identity and his Zionism.

Another friend of mine and A Wider Bridge recently saw her synagogue vandalized with swastikas. A non-Jewish member of our Wider Bridge family has been verbally attacked just for saying that he likes traveling to Israel.

On campus, Jewish students including LGBTQ activists are being bullied and feel forced to take a side in a conflict taking place on the other side of the world.

In Israel, we’ve seen bigots run for — and win — seats in the Knesset on anti-LGBTQ platforms, calling themselves “proud homophobes.”

On social media, at conferences and rallies, friends of Israel are routinely attacked with slurs about “pinkwashing.”  

With all the progress made by the LGBTQ community over the past few decades, it is easy to forget that most of Pride’s history has been a season of protest. It began in 1969 with the Stonewall riots, where brave individuals – including trans, Black and brown heroes — stood up to police brutality. It continued with our communities demanding an end to discrimination in the workplace and in housing, and forcing our leaders to face the AIDS crisis head-on.

That spirit of protest and courage must stay alive today. We must refuse to choose one identity over another, stay in solidarity with those who feel forced to choose between their LGBTQ identity and their Zionism, and refuse to live in fear. Nobody should have to choose between their activism and their safety.

We are proud to support Israel not in spite of, but because of our progressive values.

This month, together with our allies, we will experience pride both virtually and in the streets with joyful scenes celebrating our identity, our lives, our successes and the long road we have traveled in just a few decades. We will pay tribute to those brave people who fought for the right to choose marriage and raise our families, and to those still fighting against discrimination, bullying and even the ability to choose our own pronouns.

Politicians, who once ran on platforms to take away rights and marginalize the LGBTQ community for electoral gain, will court us as a critical interest group whose support is essential to their political futures. America’s largest corporations, which once fired their employees just for being who they are, will sponsor pride events and run commercials and sell products expressing their solidarity. Baseball teams will host Pride Nights at their stadiums. 

This has been amazing progress, so we really do have much to celebrate.

But there is much unfinished business. The problem facing LGBTQ Jews is not just a collection of anecdotes. It’s a systemic issue that our community feels on all sides.

In the organized Jewish community, many feel forced to check part of their identity when they seek to get involved. While there has been progress in LGBTQ representation in politics and on corporate boards, leadership is sadly lacking in American Jewish life. As aspiring LGBTQ leaders work to explore and celebrate their Jewish faith, some feel forced to hide in the closet — and to check their LGBTQ identity when they walk through the door.

This Pride, we are standing up to celebrate all our identities. The late trailblazer Harvey Milk once said: “Once you have dialogue starting, you know you can break down prejudice.” We will force that dialogue this Pride Month — no matter how uncomfortable it may be for some.

We will let people know how we feel when we’re told that Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, should not even exist. And we will prove that we can stand up for racial justice and equality and support Israel at the same time.

When we go to synagogue, we will do so proudly. We will educate, we will be leaders and we will break down barriers.

We will be our full selves everywhere: on the streets, on campus, at work and in our synagogues. Because we refuse to choose.

For most New Yorkers, the early days of COVID-19 were synonymous with eerily empty streets, the constant wails of sirens, and the clapping and cheering for health-care workers.  But what was it really like for the doctors and other health-care professionals who found themselves on the front lines of a city that was an epicenter for the global pandemic?

More than most city residents, Emma Goldberg, a young journalist building her career at The New York Times, saw what was happening to the people in those hospital wards — especially the young physicians who graduated a few months early from medical school in order to support the massive influx of coronavirus patients at New York’s Bellevue and Montefiore Medical Center.

Her book, “Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic” (Harper), offers an in-depth look at how six newly minted young doctors — Sam, Gabriela, Iris, Elana, Jay, and Ben — began their medical careers in the very heart of a global, and frighteningly local, pandemic.

“I had never lived through a moment that hit New York that hard, where it felt like we were really living almost in a crisis zone of sorts, and it was really eerie, just seeing the streets completely empty out,” Goldberg, 27, told The Jewish Week. “And so for me there was a real glimmer of hope in getting to talk with people who were around my own age, in their mid to late 20s, who were doing something incredibly constructive, incredibly valuable, in stepping up to the front lines to be of service to the city in this moment of need.”

Goldberg, an editorial assistant at The Times with responsibilities that include research and fact-checking, was already reporting about issues of gender and health and the many inequities in medical education. In Nov. 2019, “I reported a story about all of the invisible costs of medical education, and, beyond the cost of tuition, all of the other sort of stumbling blocks for lower-income people who want to enter medicine.”

Those include the cost of flying to interviews for medical schools, exam fees and expensive study guides.

And then, on March 1, 2020,  Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the state’s first confirmed COVID-19 case — a healthcare worker believed to have contracted the infection while traveling in Iran.

By March 26, the state recorded 8,500 cases, 4,600 hospitalizations and 49 deaths. Goldberg reported a story that day about medical schools around the country that decided to graduate their fourth-year students early and send them, if they chose, to support the overwhelmed doctors treating coronavirus patients. 

“It was this moment of so much paralysis and anxiety, I think particularly for journalists, because we’re so used to being out there in the thick of the action, and instead we were all trapped in our apartments, just looking at headlines at how New York was a sort of war zone,” she said. “So I found it an incredibly inspiring story and I knew it was one that I wanted to continue following.”

Goldberg worked with the medical schools to identify young doctors who were willing to share their experiences. “They made the time because they were incredibly generous. They were working 10 hours a day in the hospital, and then they would call me…it was often late at night,” she recalled. Other times, they “would call me from the grocery store, or on their way home, and sometimes they would speak going on their lunch breaks and call me.”

A book contract followed, and she reported “Life on the Line” mostly from April to Dec. 2020. In it she describes brand-new doctors who “couldn’t spend any more time with their patients than was clinically necessary,” and who “spent much of their time helping their patients determine how they wanted to die.”

“And the grief felt all the sharper for those in the newest cohort of doctors who didn’t look like their predecessors — working-class people and people of color who’d gone into medicine only to see Covid-19 ravaging the very communities they’d set out to serve,” she writes in an essay adapted from the book.

Goldberg, who grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, has had no personal shortage of role models encouraging her journalistic pursuits, including her father, J.J. Goldberg, editor emeritus of The Forward. Her mother, Shifra Bronznick, served as founding president of Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community, which is helping women break the glass ceiling in Jewish leadership roles.

“I always grew up just kind of revering books, like we had this home that was filled with books, and so it made me kind of from a really young age dream about wanting to write,” Goldberg said. The family was and continues to be involved with Minyan M’at, a lay-led traditional egalitarian minyan at New York’s Ansche Chesed.  

She attended the pluralistic Abraham Joshua Heschel School, where she was involved with its student newspaper, writing about “questions of feminism in the Orthodox minyan and questions of kashrut at the school and meat-packing plants. I was kind of pursuing those Jewish stories and Jewish journalism was what kind of sparked my interest in going into the field.”  

Along the way she received mentoring from Samuel G. Freedman, a journalism professor at Columbia University who volunteered as an adviser for Heschel’s student newspaper, the Helios. In an email to The Jewish Week, he wrote, “Emma has been a tireless reporter, a courageous thinker, a lucid writer, and, considering those talents, a strikingly modest person ever since I began working with her.”

After high school, Goldberg went on to receive her B.A. from Yale University and her MPhil in gender studies at Cambridge University. At an age when other reporters are happy to be collecting bylines, she was named best new journalist by the Newswomen’s Club of New York and received the Sidney Hillman Foundation’s Sidney Award for co-writing a story about the abuse of clients at the city’s Human Resources Agency.

Two of the six subjects in her book are Jewish, and one of her favorite parts about reporting the book was connecting with them, hearing “where questions of faith were particularly challenging for them during the course of the pandemic.” 

One of the interns, Elana, is an Orthodox Jew who struggled with the question of working in the hospital on Shabbat. Another intern, Sam, a member of New York’s Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, “was exploring how Jewish summer camp affected his views on sexuality and sexual health. So I felt like there was just this incredible bond, because I had the language and the kind of shared experiences to connect with them over the ways in which their Jewish identity informs their work.”

I had the language and the kind of shared experiences to connect with them over the ways in which their Jewish identity informs their work.

As a journalist at The Times since May 2019, Goldberg is aware of the outsized role it plays in the minds of the city’s Jews, from those who find it indispensable to others who insist it is biased in its coverage of Israel. “I’ll just say in general that their coverage is incredibly rigorous, balanced, fair, and strong and I’m proud at all times to work for the organization,” she said. 

Goldberg, who lives in Park Slope, is gratified about the city’s gradual return to life since the pandemic’s darkest days; she has even had the delayed opportunity  of having dinner in person with the doctors in the book. 

“I’ve never felt so kind of connected to the city — and I did feel like New York City kind of felt like a character that was springing to life in the book, too.”

Over the last year, no fewer than five young people came out publicly as LGBTQ at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, a pluralistic synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Even Rabbi Lauren Grabelle Herrmann, SAJ’s spiritual leader and an active champion of gay rights dating back to her days as a rabbinic intern at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the world’s largest synagogue for LGBTQ individuals, was surprised at the number.

“That’s a lot in a very small community,” Herrmann said. “And the whole community has been very accepting.”

In the congregation of 270 families, only a handful of adults identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or queer, she said.

“But there are quite a substantial number of tweens and teens, and even younger, who are LGBTQ,” Herrmann said. “These are kids who are out by the fourth grade through high school, from age 8 and up.”

To help figure out how to support them, the synagogue for the past six years has been working with Keshet, the national Jewish organization that works for full equality of LGBTQ individuals in Jewish life.

Among the changes the synagogue has implemented: Instead of using the gendered terms bar or bat mitzvah, the synagogue now uses the gender-neutral term b’mitzvah. Instead of calling a person to the Torah by saying “ya’amod” for a man or “ta’amod” for a woman, everyone is called by “na la’amod” – “please stand.”

This year, as a result of multi-year support from UJA-Federation of New York, SAJ and Keshet have developed a more formal partnership to ensure greater inclusivity and sensitivity.

“A lot of kids now have more openness to express themselves in new ways, and the environment of SAJ makes it a safe place for them,” Herrmann said. “It’s been wonderful.”

It’s a step that a growing number of synagogues and other Jewish institutions are taking amid the skyrocketing number of people coming out as LGBTQ while still in their teens or even younger. The 2020 survey of U.S. Jewry by the Pew Research Center found that about one in 10 Jewish Americans identifies as lesbian, gay or bisexual. But among the respondents, 15% in their 30s and 40s, and 25% younger than 30, identified as something other than straight.

“I would assume if we were looking at under 18, that percentage would increase,” said Idit Klein, president and CEO of Keshet. “These are numbers that we have to pay attention to and that we need to guide us how to make investments in a change that is needed both in Jewish life and in the broader world.”

Klein said the Pew survey missed the number of Jews who are trans or nonbinary.

“It’s a painful erasure,” Klein said. “The No. 1 reason we see that trans and nonbinary Jews leave the Jewish community is because of explicit transphobia or the absence of proactive gestures that tell them this is a community that sees them and wants them.”

SAJ is one of six synagogues and two summer camps now receiving yearlong training and consultation under the UJA-Keshet Leadership Project designed to strengthen their work for LGTBQ equality and belonging. Each of the institutions has designated a small team of professionals and/or lay leaders to be a part of this project, which started in March.

The Leadership Project followed one open to all Jewish institutions in the five boroughs of New York City, Long Island and Westchester begun in December 2019 and extended until the end of this month because of COVID restrictions. Some 14 institutions participated, including the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, synagogues and day schools.

Over a three-year period, UJA-Federation of New York has invested more than $350,000 in grants to Keshet.

Dubbs Weinblatt, Keshet’s associate director of education and training for New York, said the growing number of young people identifying publicly as LGBTQ is a reflection of a growing sense of safety people feel to come out and say who they are.

“Communities are making active changes to celebrate and embrace folks. This then creates a sense of belonging for all,” said Weinblatt, whose pronouns are they/them. “Jewish institutions want to work with Keshet to make sure that their programming, policy and cultures celebrate and represent all LGBTQ Jews.”

Weinblatt has been conducting trainings around LGBTQ issues for synagogue clergy, including how to build more inclusive congregations. For day school educators, they said, there have been discussions about how to talk about gender in the classroom.

“LGBTQ Jews are an important part of our Jewish community and we want to ensure that they feel fully included in all of our Jewish institutions,” said Andrea Fleishaker, a planning director in UJA-Federation’s Jewish life department.

The Riverdale YM-YWHA was among the Jewish institutions that did training with Keshet. Initially the senior center staff, family and youth department, a board member and the Y’s chief operating officer participated in a daylong training, and several months later Weinblatt came in to do a training for all staff.

“We are trying to make sure we are doing what is needed so that everyone can feel welcome. That is our goal,” said Matt Abrams Gerber, the COO. “We have plenty to learn and we are trying to be a place in the community where everyone feels completely welcome, including members of the LGBTQ community.”

At B’nai Jeshurun, a Conservative synagogue in Manhattan, executive director Colin Weil, who is gay, was approached by both UJA-Federation and Keshet to participate in the Leadership Project. He realized through the program that being welcoming doesn’t mean not asking people about their gender identity or sexual orientation; there are ways of asking that are affirming.

Today the synagogue’s membership forms ask about gender identity, and in parentheses, cis or trans (cis refers to those whose gender identity aligns with what they were assigned at birth).

“We’re trying to see everybody for who they are and allow them to add to who they are, but we do not want to separate them at the get-go,” Weil said. “We are all born in God’s image and God did not have to identify as a gender.”

“As an out gay leader in a mainstream Jewish community,” he added, “it is affirming that the Jewish community is acknowledging the importance of doing this work.”

UPDATE: This story has been updated to reflect that “Taste of Home” was canceled. 

(JTA) — Organizers of an event celebrating immigrant chefs in Philadelphia removed an Israeli food truck from the lineup, citing “the concerns of community that we love and serve.”

But the bid to calm controversy by Eat Up the Borders, the organizer of the event on Sunday, backfired: After announcing the removal, thousands of people replied, with varying levels of vitriol, questioning why the group associated a chef living in Philadelphia to the policies of a country nearly 6,000 miles away. A congressman representing Philadelphia released a statement saying he was “stunned and saddened” by the Israeli food truck’s removal.

On Sunday, around the time the event was supposed to begin, the host of the event announced that it had been canceled.

That announcement came soon after Eat Up The Borders had taken its Instagram account offline, early Sunday morning, under an onslaught of at least 4,200 critical comments, many from people directed to the page from various accounts devoted to chronicling and responding to antisemitism. At least one prominent account warned the organization to bulk up security at Sunday’s event.

Moshava, the month-old food truck and catering company removed from the roster of “A Taste of Home,” had attempted to defuse the situation, even as it said it believed that Eat Up the Borders had “succumb[ed] to such antisemitic and dividing” rhetoric.

“We didn’t share this with the intention to cancel or boycott anyone,” Moshava wrote late Saturday night. “The way we got canceled was terribly mishandled no doubt, but the point was to bring a positive and constructive dialog [sic] to the table not more hate and violence.”

The incident encapsulates some of the dynamics that have characterized online discussions of Israel and antisemitism in the weeks since the violence in Israel and Gaza turned social media into a battleground of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Allies of the Palestinian cause have found unprecedented allyship online; meanwhile, Jewish social media users have increasingly sought to call out instances where they see criticism of Israel veering into antisemitism.

Neither Eat Up the Borders nor Moshava Philly replied to requests for comment late Saturday. But the saga is spelled out in Instagram posts from the last several days.

It began late last week when Eat Up The Borders announced the lineup for the third iteration of Taste of Home, billed as “a curated event celebrating diversity through food” and other activities. Along with eight other vendors including a Mexican restaurant and a tea company, Moshava was on the list for the second month in a row of the festival.

Launched last month by a chef named Nir Sheynfeld who came to the U.S. in 2015 to attend culinary school, Moshava serves Israeli street food such as falafel and sabich. Its first public event was at the last Taste of Home on May 16, during the recent conflict in the Middle East.

The post announcing the lineup quickly began attracting comments criticizing the inclusion of an Israeli truck.

“I’m absolutely disgusted by the cultural appropriation of Palestinian food in this event. I will definitely not be attending and telling all my friends the same,” one user, @buzkashi, wrote in response to the announcement.

Initially, Eat Up the Borders indicated that it did not intend to relent to pressure.

“We will not be private on our values, which are uplifting the immigrate [sic] voices,” it said in an Instagram post Friday. “Our concern is not where they have immigrated from but giving a platform to small businesses here in Philadelphia.” Moshava responded with three applause emojis.

But on Saturday morning, the group reversed course.

“In order to provide the best experience to all, we decided to remove one of our food vendors from Sunday’s event,” it wrote on Instagram. “This decision came from listening to the concerns of community that we love and serve. Our intent is never to cause harm. We’re sorry, and we realize being more educated is the first step to preventing that from happening again.”

Eat Up The Borders did not name the food truck it had removed. But Moshava filled in the details in a post on its own account in which it said it was “deeply saddened” not to be attending the event.

“The organizers of the event heard rumors of a protest happening because of us being there and decided to uninvite us from fear that the protesters would get aggressive and threaten their event,” the post said. “We were really hoping that the organizers @eatuptheborders and @sunflowerphilly would step up to the plate and defend local, small and immigrant based businesses, no matter where they are from (as per their so called ‘mission statement’) but by the looks of it fear, violence, and intimidation got the best of them.”

Moshava also said it believed that Eat Up The Borders had given in to antisemitism.

“We really do hope that in the future you don’t succumb to such antisemitic and dividing rethoric[sic] and keep true to your words of a safe environment for all religions and nationalities — not just all of them except Israeli and Jewish ones,” the company’s account posted.

By midday Saturday, the incident had gained attention among Jewish influencers, especially within the contingent of anti-antisemitism crusaders on social media. Some simply decried it, while others explained in comments why Eat Up The Borders’ decision was objectionable. A few likened Moshava’s removal to the Nazi boycott of Jewish-run businesses in 1933, a precursor to the Holocaust.

Blake Flayton, a college student who is among a self-described group of New Zionists fighting antisemitism online, told his Twitter followers that he saw danger in the way Eat Up The Borders explained its decision. “Notice how they word it — it sounds like justice. It sounds like inclusivity and openness. This is how antisemitism becomes mainstream.”

On Instagram, he added another line tagging the event’s organizers. “@eatuptheborders hire security if you want to ensure safety you clowns,” he wrote late Saturday night.

It was as those comments rolled in that Moshava posted again, thanking its supporters but emphasizing that Eat Up The Borders does good work.

“Let’s not dim the light they shine on local, immigrant businesses,” the company wrote, before announcing that it would be selling at a different event Sunday afternoon. On Sunday, it posted that it was meeting with both representatives of Eat Up the Borders and Sunflower Philly, the nonprofit that was hosting the event.

“We do not believe the organizers’ intention came from an antisemitic place but the threats they were receiving to their event were,” Moshava wrote. “Our shared goal for the future is to steer away from violance (sic) and hatred and be able to share a platform with all members of our community and collectively share our cultures.”

In a comment posted Saturday, a representative of Eat Up The Borders told one commenter that the saga had caught the event organizers by surprise.

“We received more hate than I thought was possible for having an Israeli vendor,” the representative wrote. “They themselves never detracted from the event. The amount of uproar we received and legitimate threats forced our hand.”

Several hours later, Eat Up The Borders was no longer active on Instagram. And on Sunday around noon, Sunflower Philly posted on Instagram that the event was canceled.

“Due to the ongoing situation with one of our event partners @eatuptheborders and @moshava_philly we have decided to cancel the ‘Taste of Home’ event today,” the post said. “We will continue to host events with people of all races, nationalities and sexual orientations who are aligned with our mission.”

(JTA) — Standing poolside in Barcelona, Eden Blecher and Shelly Bobritsky beamed with pride and satisfaction as they struggled to catch their breath.

The two athletes from Israel on Sunday had just clinched the fourth slot in the Women Duet category of the Artistic Swimming Qualification Tournament in that city in Spain, assuring their participation in the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo.

But the commentator who narrated the tournament for TV3, the state broadcaster of Catalonia, the separatist Spanish region whose capital is Barcelona, didn’t focus on their technique or performance.

“Beyond the technical commentary, I’d like to draw attention to the fact that Israel’s international presence is another strategy for whitewash the genocide and violations of human rights that they’re committing against the Palestinian people,” the commentator, swimmer Clara Basiana, said during the live transmission.

As Blecher and Bobritsky waited for the score, then flashed excited smiles and hugged happily when they saw it, Basiana went on.

TV3 did not immediately reply to a request by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency for comment about Basiana’s commentary. Another commentator, veteran sports reporter Imma Pedemonte, avoided the subject. “Well, they certainly seem happy with the result,” she said.

“We’ve seen it repeatedly in Eurovision, and it’s as though the war crimes of the State of Israel are erased and we’d like to point this out to the viewers so as not to normalize it,” she said.

On social media and in some left-wing publications, Basiana’s commentary was celebrated as a rare case of demanding accountability from Israel. The news site Contrainformacion praised it as “truths that hit like fists.”

ACOM, a pro-Israel organization in Spain, accused TV3 of singling out Israel due to antisemitism. The event’s second-place winners were from Belarus, often referred to as Europe’s last dictatorship and where mass arrests and violence against pro-democracy protesters took place earlier this year.

“It is unsurprising that TV3, a mouthpiece for supremacist and hostile feelings toward Spanish people, again disseminates antisemitic libels,” ACOM wrote on Twitter. It was a reference to the perceived support of TV3 for the Catalonian separatist cause, which in 2017 led to a failed attempt by the government to break away from Spain.

Daniel Sirera, a former politician for the center-right Popular Party and a journalist in Catalonia, tweeted that Basiana had engaged in “unethical behavior by dragging politics into sports.”

And Marc Villanueva, a writer for the El Nacional paper, said that linking the athletes to the politics of their country “is as unfair as linking Basiana, who competed in the Spanish national team, to the taking of political prisoners by Spanish authorities” in Catalonia, he wrote.

(JTA) — “The Shrink Next Door,” a 2019 reported podcast about a Jewish psychiatrist on the Upper West Side of Manhattan who takes control of the life of one of his Jewish patients, is being made into a limited TV series. 

And it’s starring two comedy stars who last collaborated on “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.” 

The 8-episode adaptation will star Paul Rudd as Dr. Isaac “Ike” Herschkopf, the psychiatrist, and Will Ferrell as Marty Markowitz, the patient whose life he takes over. It will stream on Apple+ beginning in November. 

The podcast, reported by Bloomberg columnist Joe Nocera, is dark and tragic. It narrates how, over the course of nearly three decades of therapy, Herschkopf came to dominate Markowitz’s life and finances, commandeer his house, treat him like hired help and cut him off from his family and friends. 

According to the podcast and a subsequent trial at the New York State Department of Health, other patients of Herschkopf also accused him of manipulating them financially and getting them to sever relationships with their families — including a woman who, on Herschkopf’s advice, stopped speaking to her mother and didn’t attend her funeral or shiva. After an investigation of those allegations, the Department of Health ordered Herschkopf to surrender his license in April.

The podcast is chock-full of Jewish references. Markowitz was referred to Herschkopf by Shlomo Riskin, the prominent Modern Orthodox rabbi who, at the time, led Markowitz’s synagogue. Herschkopf hosted parties at what was, in fact, Markowitz’s house and invited an array of prominent Orthodox leaders. Markowitz worked in the famously Jewish garment industry. And Herschkopf also ran a charity created by Markowitz that had a Hebrew name (and to which he instructed Markowitz to leave his millions in wealth). The list goes on.

While Rudd (born Paul Rudnitzky) is Jewish, Ferrell is not. He’s certainly not the first non-Jewish actor to take center stage in a very Jewish show, though there is no shortage of actors (including several of Rudd’s frequent collaborators, like Seth Rogen or Jason Segel) who often mine their Jewish background and culture in their acting.

The trailer for the show, released Thursday, hints at the story’s upsetting turns. Ferrell and Rudd, of course, are not known for their work in psychological drama. They’re best known for starring in blockbuster comedies such as “Anchorman” and “I Love You, Man.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcTTqbLmvI4

But both actors have done dramatic work. In 2018, Paul Rudd starred in “The Catcher was a Spy,” a film about Moe Berg, a Jewish baseball player who becomes (you guessed it) a spy in World War II, based on a true story. And Ferrell has had his share of more serious roles, including in “Stranger than Fiction,” a 2006 dramedy in which he plays an introverted, straitlaced IRS agent. His character in this trailer seems to share similar qualities.

We’ll see in November whether Ferrell and Rudd can capture the feel of the twisted story — and its Jewishness. 

WASHINGTON (JTA) — A key Supreme Court decision on religious freedoms earned praise from Orthodox Jewish groups, and has more liberal groups breathing a sigh of relief that its scope was narrow.

On Thursday, the court issued a unanimous decision overturning Philadelphia’s policy of refusing to work with a Catholic agency that will not place foster children with same-sex parents. Jewish groups had filed friend-of-the-court briefs on both sides of the case, known as Fulton v. City of Philadelphia.

Orthodox groups, driven by concerns about religious liberty, sided with Catholic Social Services. Many cheered the ruling.

“Today’s historic ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court is of critical importance to the American Orthodox Jewish community,” Nathan Diament, the Orthodox Union’s Washington director, said in a statement. “As a minority faith community in the United States, the robust legal protection for religious practice is an existential issue for us.” The Orthodox Union had joined a slate of Christian groups defending the agency.

Liberal and civil rights Jewish groups, meanwhile, expressed disappointment — but also relief that the court’s decision was narrow and unlikely to impinge on other church-state separations.

“This Supreme Court decision is a devastating loss for Philadelphia children in foster care, who are harmed when the religious beliefs of government-funded agencies override the best interests of the children,” said a statement from the National Council of Jewish Women, one of several groups to file a joint brief on behalf of Philadelphia.

The case had been viewed as a potential watershed moment in which the court’s expanded right-wing majority could deliver a sweeping win for the religious right by overturning a 1990 decision that allows the government to restrict certain religious practices as long as the government’s intent is not discriminatory.

Instead, the decision in Fulton took care not to overturn decades of precedent, potentially allowing the three liberal justices to sign on; meanwhile, the court’s three most conservative judges criticized the decision for its timidity in a concurring opinion. The majority opinion was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, who has endeavored recently to preserve the court’s reputation as above politics in a polarized society in which Democrats, in particular, are seething at Republican maneuvers to entrench the court’s conservative majority.

Roberts wrote that because screening criteria vary among Philadelphia’s fostering agencies and the city allowed exemptions to its policies, singling out the Catholic agency for its specific criteria was discriminatory.

“So long as the government can achieve its interests in a manner that does not burden religion, it must do so,” Roberts wrote.

That conclusion heartened Orthodox groups that, like Catholic Social Services, may see requirements to serve LGBTQ families as infringing on their religious beliefs.

“Philadelphia’s policy locked religious agencies out of the foster care system unless they were willing to openly violate their religious beliefs, and children who needed caring families paid the price,” the Coalition for Jewish Values said in a statement.

Agudath Israel of America, which led a grouping of Orthodox groups in a friend-of-the-court brief, gave the decision qualified praise, noting that its narrow scope stopped well short of delivering the changes that conservative and religious organizations had hoped would happen.

“We are gratified that the Court has ruled that the City of Philadelphia violated CSS’s Free Exercise rights,” said Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, the group’s executive vice president. “But we are disappointed that the court did not use this opportunity to overturn Employment Division v. Smith. We can only hope that soon the court will revisit Smith, which has had a detrimental impact on religious freedom in America.”

The 1990 Smith decision, upholding Oregon’s right to deny unemployment benefits to Native Americans who had been fired for ingesting peyote as part of a religious ritual, held that a government may apply laws that effectively discriminate against a religious practice as long as the laws do not specifically target religious practice. Two conservative justices on the court, in the concurrence with Roberts’ ruling, said that it should have gone farther and overturned Smith.

The O.U’s Diament said in an interview that he too had hoped for Smith to be overturned, but that a unanimous decision encompassing the court’s three liberal justices was no small thing.

“A 9-0 First Amendment ruling very emphatically that religious liberty is of the highest constitutional value, we consider a pretty clear victory,” he said.

Jewish groups that backed Philadelphia expressed disappointment but also noted with relief that Roberts ruled narrowly and did not touch Smith.

The Anti-Defamation League, which led an amicus brief that included Bend the Arc, Jewish Women International, Keshet, the National Council of Jewish Women and T’ruah, said the ruling underscored the urgency of passing bills under consideration that would ban discrimination against LGBTQ individuals seeking to adopt or foster children. “Although this is a very narrow ruling, we must not lose sight of the fact that discrimination pervades the child welfare system throughout the country,” the ADL said in a statement.

In 2018, the ADL took up the cause of a Jewish family in South Carolina barred by a state-sanctioned agency from fostering because of their faith.

The Reform movement, separately, said that it too was disappointed in the ruling but emphasized that it did not grant agencies a broad right to discriminate.

“We continue to hold that social service providers should not be allowed to choose whom to serve when receiving government funding, as allowing discrimination to supersede provision of social services will endanger lives and harm the most vulnerable,” it said in a statement.

This article originally appeared on Kveller.

This Saturday, June 19, marks the first time that Juneteenth will be observed as a federal holiday. The date — a portmanteau of the words “June” and “nineteenth” — marks the day in 1865 in which enslaved people in Texas were informed of the Emancipation Proclamation, and thus their freedom from slavery. 

While the Emancipation Proclamation, an official decree by President Lincoln to end slavery, was put into place in 1863, the majority of enslaved people either remained unaware, uninformed by their enslavers, or still living in the Confederacy at the time. This meant that millions of people who were now supposedly free under the law remained enslaved for weeks, months and even years. The news of emancipation was especially long awaited for those in Galveston, Texas, where the holiday originated in 1866. It has since been celebrated by Texans and African Americans all over the country. 

If you’d like to commemorate this holiday through a Jewish lens, here are seven events that you and your family can attend or stream online.

Juneteenth Through the Eyes of Jews of Color: Sharing Stories and Perspectives

The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism is presenting “Juneteenth Through the Eyes of Jews of Color: Sharing Stories and Perspectives,” an event in which four Jewish guest speakers of color will share their thoughts on the holiday and what it means to both them and the Jewish community.

This event is Thursday, June 17, at 8 p.m. ET and will be online. You can register for the Zoom here and find more information on their website. 

Juneteenth Kabbalat Shabbat

Join the organization Be’chol Lashon for a Juneteenth Kabbalat Shabbat, in which a variety of hosts — including Rabbi Sandra Lawson, Rabbi Isaiah J. Rothstein, Robin Washington, and many others — will lead services and present a celebration of Juneteenth. Listen to music, join in prayer and learn the history of Juneteenth all while attending Shabbat services!

The event is online and registration is free. It will be held on Friday, June 18, at 5 p.m. ET. For more information, go to this link.

Juneteenth Havdalah with Maya Wiley

This year, Juneteenth falls on a Saturday, and you can partake in a Juneteenth havdalah service led by Jews for Racial & Economic Justice and their The Jewish Vote initiative. The event will be attended by Maya Wiley, a candidate for New York City mayor endorsed by The Jewish Vote.

This in-person event is on Saturday, June 19, at Grand Army Plaza on Flatbush Ave in Brooklyn, New York, between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. ET. You can RSVP here.

Kol Or Jews of Color Caucus Juneteenth Havdalah

Not in New York City, or just prefer something virtual? There’s also this virtual Juneteenth havdalah sponsored by the Chicago-based Kol Or Jews of Color Caucus of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs. This annual event “connects the Jewish struggle for freedom with the Juneteenth holiday that commemorates the abolition of slavery in the United States,” according to the JCUA.

The event takes place on Saturday, June 19, and will start at 8 p.m. ET. Registration can be found at this link.

Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue Juneteenth Havdalah

Another virtual Juneteenth havdalah option is being hosted by the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue based in Detroit and the non-profit volunteer organization Repair the World. There will be a discussion on both the importance and history of Juneteenth.

The event will begin on Saturday, June 19, at 8 p.m. ET and you can register for it here.

Juneteenth Tikkun

The Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation is hosting a Juneteenth Tikkun, in which Torah study is done continuously throughout the night until morning services. It’s a larger part of the anti-racist work the congregation has been doing since the murder of George Floyd, and the event aims to address “the complexity and urgency of this moment.”

This event starts Friday, June 18, at 8:30 p.m. ET and concludes at 6:30 a.m. ET Saturday morning. While registration for the in-person event is closed, you can stream the entire Tikkun on their Youtube channel. 

Shabbat Service Honoring Juneteenth featuring special guest Jerald Walker

Temple Emanu-El in New York City is hosting Shabbat services on Friday with special guest Jerald Walker, an award-winning author and creative writing professor at Emerson College. Attend services and learn more about what it means to honor Juneteenth.

This event is held on Friday, June 18, at 6 p.m. ET, and will be held both in person and online. You must register online to attend in person services with this link. You can livestream the event directly from their website. 

Looking for additional resources?

For more resources about Juneteenth — including ways to discuss the holiday with your family — be sure to check out visit this page on the Anti-Defamation League’s web site. 

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

There is plenty of blame to go around for these changing Democratic attitudes, but there is no doubt about Democrats’ fundamental position on Israel. As New York Rep. Jerry Nadler, the dean of Jewish Congressional Democrats, recently wrote, “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 intra-party 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. And 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 de-conflate them and to 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?

Harsh criticism of Israel may be difficult to hear, but that doesn’t make it antisemitic.

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 and systemic discrimination of 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 to combat antisemitism.