This article is part of our morning briefing. Click here to get it delivered to your inbox each weekday. We begin the third week of the war with Israel preparing for a ground invasion into the Gaza Strip. We have stories from our reporters and opinion essays from a wide range of viewpoints this morning, but first, the latest on the war…
- There are 222 hostages in Gaza, according to new numbers from the Israeli army.
- Thousands of Haredi men in Israel, who generally avoid military service, have signed up to serve in the army.
- Around 20,000 people joined a rally in support of Israel and against antisemitism on Sunday at Berlin’s famed Brandenburg Gate.
- Omer Balva, a 22-year-old dual U.S.-Israeli citizen and IDF reservist called back to serve, died on Friday in an attack on the Lebanon border. His final weekend in Maryland, where he grew up, included shopping and enjoying a home-cooked meal with his girlfriend.
- Multiple Spanish synagogues were hit with anti-Israel graffiti, and a Spanish politician demanded that Spain “urgently suspend diplomatic relations with the state of Israel.”
- The New York Times said it regrets its initial online coverage of Tuesday’s explosion at a hospital in Gaza, saying that it “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified.” The newspaper said in an editor’s note published at 6 a.m. Monday that it is determining “additional safeguards” to put in place for future coverage.
- Ten U.S. senators — five Democrats and five Republicans — were in Israel on Sunday and met with families of hostages.
- French President Emmanuel Macron is scheduled to visit Israel on Tuesday.
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President Joe Biden sat in on a war cabinet meeting during his trip to Israel last week. (Getty)
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‘The feeling is, Wow’ | Orthodox attitude towards Biden shifts amid show of support for Israel: Orthodox Jews have long been a political photo negative of the three-quarters of American Jews who reliably vote for Democrats, but Biden has been winning over critics since the war began. “He really just knocked it out of the park,” said one Orthodox politician. Nevertheless, they said they would still pick former President Trump over Biden in 2024. Read the story ➤ Meet the upbeat Yiddish-chatting Israeli soldier: In accepting his Nobel Prize in 1978, the novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer described Yiddish as “a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises or war tactics.” Israeli commander Yonatan Alman apparently never got the memo. His videos — where he explains in Yiddish how to load ammunition, or hides in a foxhole while telling a Yiddish joke — have gone viral. Read the story ➤ Going deeper… - For many Jews, statements about the war from universities and corporations reflect a wider debate over whether elite American institutions apply a double standard when Jews are the victims of violence and invective.
- “This war has forced many back into their corners of fear, of hatred of the other and of antipathy,” said Meirav Solomon, a student at Tufts University. Here’s how she and other American college students say the Israel-Gaza war is affecting life on campus.
- Two Israeli siblings launched a website to collect survivor testimonies. “It is our duty to ensure that the world bears witness to these atrocities,” they said.
- “Usually when there is a terrorist attack, you tend the wounded,” Israeli author Etgar Keret told our Jodi Rudoren. “But here it seems everybody is wounded.”
By the numbers: A flash survey by the Israel Democracy Institute showed that 65% of Israeli Jews are confident about the country’s future, despite the war, up from 52% in June. But only 20% have confidence in the government, a 20-year low. |
People gathered Saturday night in Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv to remember the victims. (Getty) |
Samantha Woll (inset) was the president of the historic Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue in Detroit. (Getty) |
Her ‘Amen’ to my kaddish was full of empathy. Now we’ll be saying it for her: Samantha Woll, the 40-year-old president of a Detroit synagogue, was stabbed to death over the weekend. She had a “heart that was welcoming and kind,” writes Rabbi David-Seth Kirshner of New Jersey, who had a chance encounter with Woll earlier this year. “It stuck with me.” Read his essay ➤ Related: Samantha’s funeral took place on Sunday. Watch it here. Her family escaped from pogroms to South Dakota — did they become complicit in the decimation of Native Americans? In The Cost of Free Land, Jewish author Rebecca Clarren shares how her family ended up in 1895 as homesteaders in South Dakota, with an allotment of free land to farm. The new book “serves as a vehicle for intertwining two distinct, occasionally intersecting, tales: of Jewish settlement in the West, and this country’s recurrent crimes against the Lakota,” writes Julia Klein in a review. Read the story ➤
Related: In the new PBS series Little Bird, a Jewish woman uncovers her traumatic Indigenous past. |
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WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY |
The rivalry game on Saturday between the University of Michigan and Michigan State Universty did not go as planned for the latter. (Getty) |
? Michigan State University on Saturday apologized for displaying an image of Hitler on its scoreboard during a pregame quiz. It was not the best day for the school, which lost the game 49-0. (NBC News, Politico) ? Antisemitic graffiti — including a Nazi slogan and swastikas — were discovered at a student dorm at American University in Washington, D.C. And at the University of Pennsylvania, a vacant property next to a Jewish fraternity was covered in antisemitic graffiti Friday night. (WTOP, Daily Pennsylvanian) ? Antisemitic graffiti was also found at the offices of The Free Press, a news site run by Bari Weiss, a Jewish journalist who wrote a book about antisemitism in the U.S. (Algemeiner) ? Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general sued to stop a state board from establishing the nation’s first religious public charter school, warning that it would violate both the state and U.S. constitutions. (AP) ✝️ In what’s being touted as a first for a Jewish organization, the World Jewish Congress opened an office in Vatican City to liaise with Catholic leaders. (JTA)
What else we’re reading ➤ Actress Beanie Feldstein recalls the first time she experienced antisemitism … Church parking near stadiums scores big in a win-win for faith congregations and sports fans … Kermit the Frog singing Fiddler on the Roof will be your new favorite thing. |
“I’m happy to be alive”: Natalie Sanandaji, a Jewish woman from Long Island, escaped the deadly Hamas massacre at an Israeli music festival on October 7. Now safely back in the U.S., she was making the rounds on television this weekend to share her story. — Thanks to Jacob Kornbluh, Jodi Rudoren and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter, and to Beth Harpaz for editing it. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com. |
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