Day: July 9, 2024

(JTA) — WASHINGTON — The committee drafting the Democratic platform heard clashing visions of what the party’s Israel policy should be, with two witnesses urging continued military aid and one urging cuts.

Tuesday’s online meeting, convened by a subcommittee of the Democratic platform committee, underscored a dilemma the party faces as it heads into their August convention.

Any change to the robustly pro-Israel language in the Democrats’ 2020 platform could alienate Jewish voters and donors who are already rattled by months of protests against Israel’s war in Gaza and increasing criticism of Israel’s actions among Democratic lawmakers.

The Biden campaign, on the other hand, is seeking to stem discontent on the party’s left with the president’s support for Israel. That backlash has been especially pronounced in swing states such as Michigan where there is a substantial Arab American population. Fights also erupted over the Democratic platform’s Israel policy section in 2012 and 2016.

The Democratic platform meeting, one of several that will take place before the convention in Chicago, also came a day after the Republican Party published its platform, which includes unmitigated support for Israel as well as anti-immigrant language and pledges to erode the separation of church and state, both of which have long unsettled Jewish Americans.

Speaking in favor of continued assistance to Israel were Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, and Dana Stroul, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank highly regarded by Israel’s defense establishment.

Stroul said President Joe Biden had reversed much of the damage that former President Donald Trump’s isolationist bent caused to U.S. deterrence in the Middle East. She cast U.S. support for Israel as part of the fabric of a robust defense policy. And she stressed that Biden coupled his support for Israel with plans to bring relief to the millions of Palestinians displaced by the war.

“The focus on human security and rights is why the Biden-Harris administration is pushing Israel to formulate a credible plan for Gaza’s recovery and stabilization,” she said. “Palestinian civilians deserve a future without the stranglehold of Hamas governance, as well as a viable political horizon for a state of their own alongside the Jewish democratic state of Israel.”

Soifer spoke of how closely Israel is held in American Jewish hearts. Her remarks signaled that changing the platform could cause damage for the Democrats among one of their most loyal constituencies.

“Eighty-two percent of Jewish voters identify as pro-Israel and have an emotional attachment to Israel, and 74% approve of President Biden’s handling of the war with Hamas, according to a November poll,” Soifer said, adding that the polling by the Jewish Electorate Institute and others also showed broad American support for the U.S.-Israel relationship. “The Democratic Party platform language on Israel should not be diluted from the strong starting point of four years ago.”

Elianne Farhat, who is of Lebanese and indigenous American descent, is the executive director of TakeAction Minnesota, a grassroots activist group. She described the U.S. Navy evacuating her from Lebanon in 2006, when she was visiting family during the Israel-Hezbollah war of that summer.

“I know what it is like when our country uses our immense power to promote good as well as when it misuses that power to spread pain, suffering and genocide,” she said. “I know what it’s like to have bombs paid for with my tax dollars falling on my head.”

Farhat, who is also a leader in the “Uncommitted” movement, which urged Democratic primary voters to vote “uncommitted” to protest Biden’s Israel policies, cited polling whose source she did not identify to back her claim that cutting assistance to Israel would be popular and reach disaffected voters.

“I’d ask you to consider the overwhelming sentiment among our constituents: 80% of Democrats support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, 52% of Americans and 62% of Biden voters advocate for halting arm sales to Israel,” she said. “These numbers are reinforced by tens of thousands rallied nationwide.”

She urged the United States to advocate an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and an embargo on arms sales to Israel.

The structure of the hearing, which lasted several hours, saw each presentation followed with friendly questions from members of the drafting committee who are sympathetic to the witness’s point of view. Jeremy Bash, a former top defense official in Democratic administrations who is now a consultant, spoke to Stroul and Soifer. Keith Ellison, the Minnesota attorney general who was a prominent critic of Israel when he was in Congress, spoke to Farhat.

The platform must be complete by the beginning of the convention, when it will be formally approved on the floor. The convention starts on Aug. 19.

The post Democrats clash over aid to Israel at meeting of party platform committee appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — BERLIN — Germany’s president helped inaugurate a new, multi-denominational synagogue center in the city of Potsdam last week.

With a formal blessing delivered by Rabbi Avichai Apel, chair of Germany’s Orthodox Rabbinical Conference, the inauguration means that every state capital in Germany now has its own freestanding synagogue. Potsdam, just west of Berlin, is the capital of the state of Brandenburg.

Internationally, the city is perhaps best known for the Sanssouci Palace and the Babelsberg film studios. It is also home to the Glienicke Bridge, sometimes known as the “Bridge of Spies,” which was the site of prisoner exchanges during the Cold War. It is where Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky walked to his freedom in 1986.

More recently, Potsdam has become home to Germany’s Reform and Conservative rabbinical schools and School of Jewish Theology at the University of Potsdam, which inaugurated an egalitarian synagogue on its premises in 2021.

Now, in a move that is rare in Germany, this four-story, beige-brick building with arched windows will house a handful of congregations representing different shades of traditional Judaism. It will also be a center for social and cultural events that will be open to the public.

Also unusual is that Brandenburg is partnering in this project with Germany’s Jewish social welfare organization, the Central Welfare Council of Jews in Germany (ZWST), rather than with the Central Council, the umbrella organization that administers most Jewish communal institutions.

The model means four congregations will no longer have to meet in scattered, improvised quarters — at least not every Shabbat. According to Ud Joffe, president of one of the congregations, the Synagogue Community of Potsdam, they will take turns using the new sanctuary. Joffe — conductor and artistic director of the New Chamber Orchestra in Potsdam — said in a telephone interview with JTA that so far, there are no claims on the space from more liberal Jewish groups, as there aren’t that many Reform or egalitarian Jews in Potsdam.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was among the featured guests at the July 4 unveiling of the new building on Schlossstrasse, a quick trip by commuter train from Berlin, and just down the street from the home of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

“It is a gift to us all,” Steinmeier said in his remarks at the dedication, which was attended by several other dignitaries.

But first of all, it is a gift for the 600 or so Jews of Potsdam, said Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. In all, Brandenburg has about 2,000 Jewish residents.

Many migrated to Germany from elsewhere, he said. “They are members of a founding generation of Jewish life. The construction of this synagogue is for them,” he said.

The process of building the new center, from idea to realization, has taken more than 20 years and was fraught with misunderstandings and conflict that has not yet been resolved: Joffe told JTA he is suing Berlin architect Jost Haberlan over the latter’s claim to have designed the synagogue.  “He actually tried to say that I had no part in the whole process,” said Joffe.

There are also critics of the project. In a press release, a group called “Torah True Jews,” founded in 1999 in Brandenburg, called the center a “fake, state-owned, unity synagogue” promoting a “German ersatz Judaism.”

Over the years, some community members found fault with the post-war Jewish communal structure here. It is primarily shored up by state funds, in a form of reparations after the Holocaust. In one example, the Central Council of Jews in Germany receives about $24 million per year in federal funds to help support congregations, schools, youth programs and integration of new immigrants or refugees. There are currently about 90,000 registered members overall of Jewish communities in Germany, and perhaps the same number who are unaffiliated.

Critics have said that financial dependency results in a kind of  infantilization.

On the other hand, the model of congregations sharing premises — especially where real-estate is hard to come by — has succeeded elsewhere. Overall, the infusion of federal and state funds has helped boost the variety and number of Jewish offerings across Germany.

The Potsdam building is a case study of that model. The cost of construction, about $19 million, was borne by the state of Brandenburg, which owns the building. The ZWST, meanwhile, serves as landlord for the congregations: The Jewish Community of Potsdam, the Synagogue Community of Potsdam, and two more recently founded groups — Congregation Adass Israel and Congregation Kehilat Israel. The state will provide annual funding to the tune of about $704,000 to the ZWST to run the center and its programs.

The synagogue is centrally located near the state parliament building. Potsdam’s original “Alte Synagoge” was desecrated in the Nazis’ Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, and finally destroyed in Allied bombing raids towards the end of World War II. An apartment building was built on that site.

Jewish life in Germany exists in the shadow of the Holocaust, and to some observers, it is by definition “ersatz.” But participants in last week’s ceremony expressed feelings of hope, despite an increase in antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.

Speaking at the ceremony, ZWST President Abraham Lehrer said it was “up to all of us to ensure that this center can be open both within and to the outside world, as a beacon of hope for a better future, even if it must continue to be protected.”

The post 4 congregations will share a new synagogue in the heart of Potsdam, Germany appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — On Shabbat, Shlomo Tannor often encounters a problem common to regular synagogue-goers: He’ll hear a tune that sounds familiar but he can’t place it. When Shabbat is over, he’ll have no way to look it up.

Frequently, those tunes come from one source: Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, perhaps the most prominent composer of Jewish religious music in the postwar era. So to solve the problem, Tannor, an artificial intelligence engineer and amateur musician who lives in Riverdale, New York, created CarleBot — a melody detection software that, like the music-identifying app Shazam, can tell its users the source of Jewish prayer melodies.

More specifically, the app can tell users whether the song was one of Carlebach’s many niggunim, or wordless melodies, along with its name. The bot lets users sing or hum up to 20 seconds of a song into the microphone of a computer before working to identify it.

So far, CarleBot has about 200 songs in its library.

“Sometimes there are just these tunes that circulate around and I’m not really sure where they’re from,” Tannor said. “I just thought it would be an interesting project to just start with a well-defined library of songs, which is Carlebach music, and just try to see if I could get something to work with that.”

The tool, Tannor says, will benefit both fans and critics of “the singing rabbi.” Carlebach’s catchy melodies — inspired by Hasidic music and the 1960s American folk revival, and recorded on 25 albums spanning four decades — have become so ubiquitous across Jewish sanctuaries, schools and summer camps that sometimes, singers don’t even realize they come from one composer.

But in the post-Me Too era, many Jewish spaces have begun to reckon with longstanding sexual assault allegations against Carlebach, which emerged in the years after his death in 1994. Now, a number of prayer leaders strive to avoid his work — which is difficult when much of it has become synonymous with modern Jewish music. (A Facebook group called “Beyond Carlebach: A place to share & discover Jewish liturgical music,” has more than 3,000 members.)

“Some people just love his music, some people try to avoid using the tunes,” Tannor said. “But anyway, he was a major influence of Jewish music and he just composed many, many tunes that are widely used — and many people aren’t aware that they’re Carlebach.”

Ethnomusicologist Jessica Rode said CarleBot was the latest in a series of projects seeking to catalog and preserve traditional Jewish music from across the globe. She pointed to Gharamophone.com, launched in 2017, which aims to collect music of the North African Jewish community, and larger archives like SephardicMusic.org. The National Library of Israel also has a section on piyyutim, or sacred songs, with tunes from different regions around the world.

Such archives can help people understand which songs have been passed down in Jewish communities for generations and which, like Carlebach’s compositions, are relatively recent, said Rode, a professor at Georgetown University and the author of “For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age.”

“There is the idea of something that is preserved,” said Rode. “And then, of course, there’s the work of musicologists to uncover it, to say, ‘No, this is actually not that old a song.’”

There’s also the work of listeners to note when art is created by problematic people.

“This is one of the most controversial figures in the recent development of Jewish music,” Rode said of Carlebach. “So that’s interesting. But on the other hand there’s always the question of the separation between the artist” and the works they create.

The bot, named by Tannor’s wife Dena, was built over the course of 10 hours spread over a few weeks. It is loosely based on a previous bot created by Tannor, called MishnahBot, which summarizes arguments and rulings from the compendium of Jewish oral law. On that site, sample questions include “Is it permitted to build a sukkah on the back of a camel?” (The answer is yes.)

While Shazam identifies recorded songs, Jewish ritual music is often paired with a range of prayers or hummed, rather than played, and can sound different depending on the singer and the tempo. CarleBot is sensitive to the a cappella voice.

To gather the melodies, Tannor downloaded and then converted YouTube videos of the Carlebach songs into files that can easily be transposed onto different musical scales, accounting for a user’s imperfect pitch.

“I’m curious about learning about their history or what was the given tune originally composed to — like, which words was it supposed to go to originally,” Tannor said. “I think that’s something that’s a little bit unique to Hasidic niggunim, that you could just sort of use them on a lot of different words.”

He says niggunim are similar to melodies of nursery rhymes such as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” whose melody is also sung to the alphabet and “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” (That tune is itself an adaptation of an 18th century melody from the French-language song “Ah! vous dirai-je, maman.”)

“It’s very unique in the landscape of music in general, where these melodies are just sort of attached to different words,” Tannor said. “I think there’s something similar to that also in children’s songs.”

For Joey Weisenberg, founder and director of the Rising Song Institute at Hadar, the malleability and improvisational nature of niggunim — and the way they spread by word-of-mouth — is all part of the fun.

“All of us who do this kind of thing, one of the joys of not knowing a niggun, which happens all the time, is then asking friends if they know it,” Weisenberg told JTA. “And sometimes it’s very obvious to somebody else where this came from, and most of the time it isn’t.”

And while Weisenberg said “it’d be great to have a tool like this,” he added that for those in the know, “If it’s a Carlebach melody, many times there’s somebody who’s going to know the answer to that pretty quickly.”

The post A new Shazam-style bot will detect Shlomo Carlebach’s melodies appeared first on The Forward.

The suspect in a Manhattan woman’s death was taken into custody Monday after NYPD officers pulled him from a crowd of angry neighbors.

Yazmeen Williams’ body was found wrapped inside a sleeping bag amid garbage about a block away from the Straus Houses on East 27th Street in Kips Bay Friday night, according to authorities. The 31-year-old woman was shot to death, per police.

Ukrainians responded calmly to news of the Labour Party’s landslide victory in the UK’s July 4 general election, reflecting widespread confidence that British support for Ukraine will continue despite the change in government in Westminster. At a time when the rise of the far right in France and the prospect of a second Trump presidency are fueling concerns in Kyiv over the future of international backing for the Ukrainian war effort, Britain is widely viewed as one of the country’s most dependable partners.

“Ukraine and the United Kingdom have been and will continue to be reliable allies through thick and thin,” commented Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a post congratulating Labour Party leader Keir Starmer on his historic win. “We will continue to defend and advance our common values of life, freedom, and a rules-based international order.”

Zelenskyy was one of the first international leaders to speak to Starmer during the new British Prime Minister’s first day in office, underlining what Starmer referred to as the incoming Labour government’s “unwavering commitment” to maintaining the UK’s strong support for Ukraine. The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine was also reportedly high on the agenda during Starmer’s discussions with other world leaders including US President Joe Biden.

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

Starmer has long been an outspoken advocate of British backing for Ukraine. As the country prepared to mark the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion in February 2023, he visited Kyiv to offer assurances that the UK would remain a steadfast partner under his leadership. “I’ve said throughout this conflict there will be no difference between the political parties on this,” he commented while in the Ukrainian capital.

The Labour Party has vowed to continue providing Ukraine with current levels of military, financial, and diplomatic support, while also pushing to hold Russia accountable for the invasion, including support for efforts to establish an international tribunal for the crime of aggression. The Labour Party is also committed to helping provide Ukraine with a clear path toward future NATO membership.

Starmer’s stance is a continuation of the leading role played by the British government in support of Ukraine since the eve of Russia’s full-scale invasion. With the Russian military concentrated on the Ukrainian border in January 2022 and posed to invade, Britain was among the first countries to provide Ukraine with anti-tank weapons. This set the tone for British military aid to Ukraine, with the UK repeatedly setting the standard for other partners to follow by delivering new categories of weapons such as modern tanks and cruise missiles.

Britain has also provided Ukraine with vocal diplomatic backing in the international arena. During his tenure as Prime Minister, Boris Johnson was a particularly prominent supporter of the country, visiting Kyiv on numerous occasions and speaking powerfully of the threat to international security posed by Russian aggression. This advocacy helped earn Johnson something approaching cult status in Ukraine, with streets named and a pastry dish created in his honor.

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The firm stance adopted by successive UK governments reflects British public opinion, which strongly favors continued support for Ukraine. This is very much in line with British tradition. Indeed, for many Brits, Ukraine’s current struggle against Russia’s invasion echoes their own fight against Nazi Germany almost a century earlier.

Starmer will have an opportunity to emphasize his commitment to Ukraine at the 2024 NATO Summit, which takes place this week in Washington. While there is no realistic prospect of any breakthrough toward Ukrainian membership of the alliance, this high-profile event will allow the new British leader to lay out his vision for continued international support for the Ukrainian war effort.

The bipartisan consistency of British support for Ukraine comes as a welcome relief to Ukrainians. The Ukrainian military is heavily dependent on continued international deliveries of weapons and equipment, but this aid has proven vulnerable to disruption due to political shifts in various Western capitals. Amid uncertainly over the implications of elections in key partners including France and the United States, Britain’s clear position gives Ukrainians much-needed confidence as they continue to fight for national survival.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

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