This article is part of our morning briefing. Click here to get it delivered to your inbox each weekday. In New York, migrants crowd into hotels seeking shelter — just like Jewish refugees did after WWII
More than 90,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City since April 2022. Strained to keep up with the influx, Mayor Eric Adams has placed migrants in city shelters, tents, a Brooklyn cruise terminal, office buildings, and over 100 hotels. Many of them are staying within blocks of the hotels where Jewish refugees first rested their heads after years in ghettos, concentration camps and DP camps. Andrew Silverstein, who gives walking tours of historic spots in New York City when he’s not writing for the Forward, spoke with refugees from the past and present to weave a story, as our executive editor Adam Langer described it, “of two eras, two sets of hotels, two generations of refugees, and a common theme of desperation, xenophobia and hope.” |
Recently arrived migrants to New York City camp outside the Roosevelt Hotel. (Getty) |
Promised land: From 1946 to 1953, the United States accepted 144,000 Holocaust refugees. On Purim Day 1950, 5-year-old Joseph Berger arrived with his family at the Capitol Hall hotel on West 87th Street. They stayed about two months. “My mother fell in love with Manhattan,” said Berger, a retired New York Times journalist and author of the memoir Displaced Persons. “New York became our home.”
Stark contrast: Holocaust survivors in the U.S., on average, reached higher incomes than their American Jewish counterparts. Today, the labor outlook for migrants is bleaker. By one estimate, only 3% of migrants in New York have working papers. “Unfortunately, in El Paso, Texas,” said Milton Castiblanco, 52, from Colombia, “ICE took away all of my documents.” |
Kosher certified pork-flavored potato chips to be discontinued: When the Orthodox Union approved the chips earlier this summer, complete with a cartoon pig on the packaging, some consumers complained. “It’s not coming into my shul,” said Rabbi Howard Buechler. The blowback caused the OU to reconsider its decision, a rare step to remove its certification from a kosher product. In the end, the potato chip company stopped selling the product on Tuesday, saying it was always intended to be a limited-run snack. Read the story ➤
At remote spot where Netanyahus are vacationing, dozens of Israelis showed up to make themselves heard: While Tel Aviv’s protests have attracted the most international attention, they are hardly the only ones. Across the country, far from the public eye, residents from small villages meet with their flags and signs seen only by whoever happens to be driving the curving road through the mountains. Our Mira Fox traveled to the Golan Heights in northern Israel this week to watch the latest. Read the story ➤ |
Elon Musk attends the official opening of a Tesla manufacturing plant in Germany. (Getty) |
WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY |
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the 2019 AIPAC event in Washington, D.C. Inset: Bernie Marcus. (Getty) |
? Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot and GOP megadonor, donated $1 million to AIPAC. During the 2022 election cycle, AIPAC spent more than $10 million on ads attacking Democratic candidates. None of the ads mentioned Israel. (Haaretz) ⚖️ Bond has been set at $750,000 for Joel Bowman, who is accused of firing a gun outside a Memphis Jewish school last week. Bowman, an alumnus of the school, who was shot by police, is recovering at a local hospital. (Action News 5) ? A jury convicted a man this week for threatening to blow up a San Francisco synagogue in April 2022. Sentencing is set for Aug. 28; he faces up to six years in state prison. (CBS News) ? A worker at a conservative think tank in Israel used fake accounts on Wikipedia to skew debates and articles about the country’s judicial overhaul and other contentious issues. (JTA) ?? In what is perhaps a sign of growing tensions between two Jewish factions in Israel, a Haredi family was caught on tape shouting at a group of female soldiers on a train. “We will die and not be drafted,” members of the family said in Hebrew. “To prison and not to the army.” (Times of Israel) ⛺ A Ukrainian Jewish summer camp celebrated its 30th anniversary last year in exile, having relocated to Romania. This year, the camp returned home, a move that was both pragmatic and symbolic. (JTA) ? Bela Englman was killed at Auschwitz, and his family was left with no record or photograph to even prove his existence. Until two months ago, when a Book of Exodus that belonged to Bela suddenly surfaced. (Washington Post) Mazel tov ➤ To Brad Mahlof, whose dishes highlighted his family’s Libyan Jewish background, for winning The Great American Recipe, a PBS cooking competition show. What else we’re reading ➤ In antisemitism discourse around Jamie Foxx’s Jesus post, evidence of a culture clash … After recess, Israel’s branches of government to face off in three key cases in September … The journey Coca-Cola took to become kosher. |
A Betty Boop balloon flies past Macy’s during the 1995 Thanksgiving parade. (Getty) |
On this day in history (1930): Betty Boop debuted in Jewish cartoonist Max Fleischer’s animated short Dizzy Dishes. The character’s initial curly hair and Yiddishisms, both early fixtures of Fleischer’s cartoons, were tamed in 1934 with the enforcement of Hollywood’s Hays Code, which was designed to uphold Christian-inflected moral standards. In a 2022 essay for the Forward, pop-culture historian Roy Schwartz looked into Betty Boop’s religious heritage, finding that she “heavily reflected the Jewish background of her creators.”
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The credit sequence of Heart of Stone, the Netflix action movie starring Gal Gadot which debuts Friday, features a new song from Noga Erez, an Israeli pop artist. — Thanks to Laura E. Adkins, Jacob Kornbluh, Adam Langer, Rebecca Salzhauer and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com. |
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