Legendary Jewish sportscaster Marv Albert will retire after the NBA playoffs this summer, he announced Monday.
Born Marvin Aufrichtig to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, he became one of basketball’s most prominent broadcasters. But he was also a national voice for the NFL and NHL, calling Super Bowls and Stanley Cup Finals in addition to NBA Finals over a career that saw him broadcast in seven different decades.
Albert, who turns 80 next month, will continue to call basketball games on TNT up until the NBA finals, before he hangs up the microphone for good.
As the story goes, a 21-year-old Albert got his big break when another Jewish Syracuse grad, the fabled Marty Glickman — also Albert’s mentor — had a conflict and couldn’t broadcast a Knicks game on New York’s WCBS-AM radio in 1963. It was off to the races after that, as Albert began a play by play career that had him call Knicks, Nets, Rangers and Giants games on TV and radio in New York.
Albert’s legacy includes calling the Olympic gold medal game for the original Dream Team in 1992, NCAA tournament games, boxing and tennis. He was the sports anchor on WNBC-TV in New York from 1975-1987, which led to his more than 50 appearances with David Letterman, first on NBC (“Late Night with David Letterman”) and then on CBS (“The Late Show”), showing highlights and lowlights in sports.
He was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1993.
In 1997, his longtime employer NBC fired him in the wake of sexual assault charges by multiple women. The network brought him back two years later, after he was given a 12-month suspended prison sentence.
Firefighters attempt to extinguish a fire at a warehouse which was hit during an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, on May 18, 2021. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90 via JTA.org)
By Cnaan Liphshiz
Gaza militants continued to fire rockets into Israel, which continued to respond with airstrikes on the coastal strip, as efforts toward a ceasefire progressed on the 10th day of the current round of fighting.
Twelve people in Israel have been killed in the fighting, including two children. In Gaza, the death toll is 219, including 63 children, according to Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza. Israel maintains that many of Hamas’ rockets have fallen within Gaza, killing Palestinians there. Israeli forces have also killed 20 Palestinians in fighting in the West Bank.
The United States and other countries have been pushing for a ceasefire, and anonymous officials suggested on Tuesday that a truce could be reached in a matter of days. But on Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a press briefing that Israel is “not standing with a stopwatch. We are taking care of the operation’s objectives.”
The United States and the European Union have continued to signal their desire for an end of hostilities, but both have reiterated their belief that Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas, which both have condemned for targeting civilians.
Hamas and other militants were able to continue firing rockets at Israel on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, albeit at a diminished rate of about 50 rockets last night compared to hundreds each night last week. More than 3,000 rockets have been fired at Israel since May 9.
The Israel Defense Forces has been targeting Hamas commanders and its missile launch units, particularly launchers with multiple barrels that have the capacity of overwhelming Israel’s Iron Dome rocket interception system. It has intercepted most of the rockets fired on populated areas, IDF sources told Army Radio.
On Tuesday, many Israeli Arabs as well as Palestinians in the West Bank went on strike. In Israel, the strike shut down the Arabic-language school system and municipal services in Arab-majority cities, to protest what they called “attacks” on their community and the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
Here’s the rest of the latest on Tuesday and Wednesday:
— Israel says that it has killed dozens of fighters for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other factions in the fighting, including Bassam Ayisa, one of Hamas’ top five generals in Gaza. Islamic Jihad senior commanders have also been killed in the fighting, according to the Israeli publication Globes. In recent days, IDF strikes have focused on tunnels that Hamas uses to shuttle men and equipment along the border with Israel, destroying long stretches of that network, an IDF spokesperson told Israeli media.
— A 56-year-old Jewish Israeli man died in hospital as a result of injuries he sustained in an assault by Arabs protesters in Lod last week. Yigal Yehoshua was hit in the face with a brick by men who pulled him out of his car in the city’s center.
At least 10 synagogues and 112 homes owned by Jews have been torched partially or thoroughly in the unrest. Hundreds of cars owned by Jews have been set on fire. There have been a series of cases of vandalism and assaults against Arabs by Jews, as well.
— The EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, issued an informal call to end the violence after Hungary, a close ally and supporter of Israel, thwarted the passing of a similar text as an official EU foreign policy document agreed upon by all member states. The text spoke of a “high number of civilian casualties” and a “high number of children and women” killed. “We condemn the rocket attacks by Hamas and other terrorist groups on the Israeli territory, and we fully support Israel’s right to defense,” Borrell also said.
— Many thousands of Arab workers across Israel, as well as Palestinians, heeded a call for a general strike issued by several Arab-Israeli organizations and leaders, who cited “attacks on our communities by extremists and settlers” and “the attack on Sheikh Jarrah and the al Aqsa mosque.”
The current conflagration began amid tensions over the eviction of Palestinians from homes in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Cellcom, a major cellphone and communications provider, saw tens of thousands of subscribers leave after they declared a one-hour “protest strike” on Tuesday to “promote coexistence” and to “not let extremists win.” A company spokesperson later said the move’s timing had been “wrong” and that the firm did not mean to associate itself with the strike in the Arab sector.
— Clashes in the West Bank escalated. Three Palestinians were killed there Tuesday during rioting against Israeli troops, according to the Ma’an Palestinian news agency. Two soldiers were lightly wounded, Ynet reported.
— The escalation in Israel is triggering an increase in antisemitic incidents in Europe and especially in the United Kingdom. On Tuesday, Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary of the UK government, said that an assault Sunday on a rabbi near London was among the incidents. The rabbi, Rafi Goodwin, sustained moderate injuries in a beating outside his synagogue on May 16. That day, multiple cars displaying Palestinian flags drove through Golders Green, a heavily Jewish part of London. A participant in the convoy shouted through a loudspeaker: “F–- the Jews, rape their daughters” among other chants.
New Yorker Sophie Vershbow had an epiphany about religious Judaism just before her bat mitzvah. (Peter Cunningham via JTA.org)
By Gabe Friedman
Jesse Wilks had a bar mitzvah — just not a religious one.
His parents raised him in a secular home in New York City but still instilled him with a strong sense of Jewish identity. His mother — who worked for the Workers Circle and is now on the editorial board of the left-wing Jewish Currents magazine — hosted holiday dinners, minus the religious prayers. Instead of attending Hebrew school at a synagogue, Wilks grew up going to a “shule,” or non-religious school that taught him Yiddish.
The pattern continued with his coming-of-age ceremony, which gathered family and friends at a synagogue he never attended.
“It did not involve a Torah reading but instead involved picking any topic related to Judaism that interested me, and then working with a tutor … doing research and basically reading the equivalent of a 13-year-old’s paper” during the ceremony, he said. He chose to explore social justice in Judaism and Jewish history, with a focus on labor movements.
Now a 34-year-old architect living in Philadelphia, Wilks does not believe in god and defines himself explicitly as atheist — but also Jewish. That makes him squarely a “Jew of no religion” according to the survey of U.S. Jews released last week by the Pew Research Center.
As it did in 2013, Pew researchers broke American Jews into two broad categories: “Jews of religion” and “Jews of no religion.” People in the second group, the researchers wrote, “describe themselves (religiously) as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular, but who have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish, and who still consider themselves Jewish in any way (such as ethnically, culturally or because of their family background).”
Out of the survey’s 3,836 total respondents, 882 identified as Jews of no religion, suggesting that nearly a quarter of American Jews — 1.5 million people — fall into the category.
Becka Alper, a 2021 study co-author, said the term captures a large and diverse part of the Jewish community that can’t be summarized by other terms such as “cultural Jews” or “ethnic Jews.”
“It really wouldn’t be sufficient to simply ask people about their religion and categorize [only] those who said Jewish as Jews,” she said. “We’d be missing a really big and important part of the Jewish community, those who are Jewish but not namely or at all as a matter of religion.”
This chart from the study shows the researchers’ thought process behind the categories and questions. (Pew Research Center via JTA.org)
Critics of the term say it draws a distinction where there should be none. “The fact that 24% of ‘Jews of no religion’ own a Hebrew-language prayer book should give us pause,” Rachel B. Gross, a professor of Jewish studies at San Francisco State University, wrote in an essay for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after the study was released.
Gross argues that the study’s categories reflected a division that makes sense to Christians, but not in Judaism, where practice has always shifted over time.
“American Jews continue to find meaning in emotional connections to their families, communities, and histories, though the ways they do so continue to change,” she writes. “Expanding our definition of ‘religion’ can help us better recognize the ways in which they are doing so.”
That argument resonated with three “Jews of no religion” who told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about their Jewish identities. Here’s what they had to say.
“I feel Jewish every day”
Certain things trigger Wilks’ sense of Jewishness — for instance, watching the Netflix show “Unorthodox,” about a woman leaving her Hasidic community in Brooklyn. While most days Wilks’ knowledge of Jewish customs, rituals and history stays in the “background” of his mind, “Unorthodox” brought it to the “foreground.”
And when he traveled to Berlin during college, he felt his Jewishness turn to visceral vulnerability, in an uncomfortable way.
“I couldn’t walk around and get out of my head that, you know, if I had been there 70 years before, I would have been murdered. And that colored my entire visit there,” he said. “And that was surprising to me that, you know, that my Jewish identity rose and bubbled up there.”
That experience mapped to one finding in the Pew study: 75% of American Jews overall said that “remembering the Holocaust” was important to their Jewish identity, including two thirds of Jews of no religion.
On the other hand, Pew found that while 60% of American Jews say they are strongly or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel, only a third of Jews of no religion described such an attachment. Wilks said he never thinks about the country, where he is entitled to citizenship because of his Jewish lineage.
“I feel zero connection to Israel. To me, it’s the same [as] any country that I haven’t visited,” he said.
Right now, he is still figuring out what kind of Jewish identity he wants in his life as an adult. Growing up, his mother projected a strong sense of non-religious Jewish identity built on her family history, as a descendant of secular Jewish socialist activists from Eastern Europe.
“[I]t’s hard for me to articulate what role [Jewishness] plays in my life,” says Jesse Wilks. (Via JTA.org)
But now living apart from her, and being married to a non-Jewish woman, Wilks feels more disconnected from Jewish culture. (Jews who are married to people who are not Jewish identify three times as often as Jews of no religion, according to Pew.)
Wilks admitted he would be forced to deal with the issue more head on if he had kids, but he and his wife aren’t planning on having any.
“There’s no question I feel Jewish every day and would always identify myself as that. But I don’t know, it’s hard for me to articulate what role that plays in my life,” he said.
Mandy Patinkin, bagels and a preteen existential crisis
In contrast, Sophie Vershbow knows exactly who she is: an atheist cultural Jew.
The 31-year-old social media manager who works for one of the “big five” publishing houses in New York has a deep connection to Jewish culture. She pointed to two things off the top of her head she feels a particular affinity for: actor Mandy Patinkin, and bagels.
Patinkin is an Emmy and Tony winner who became a minor icon this year for weaving Jewish and social justice themes together on social media. People like him in pop culture create a sense of community for other Jews, Vershbow said, and help familiarize non-Jews with Jewish culture.
That’s something the born-and-bred New Yorker said she realized was needed after she left the city for Hamilton College in upstate New York. Jews make up close to 15% of the population of New York City, where she grew up in the Chelsea neighborhood. While Hamilton’s student body was still far more Jewish than the general U.S. population, both the college and the surrounding area felt decidedly non-Jewish to her.
“I called my mom and I was like, ‘What just happened?’ And she goes ‘Sophie, what percent of the country do you think is Jewish?’” Vershbow said. “I studied the Holocaust in college, and learning about our history and how much we’ve been persecuted certainly makes me feel more connected to [my Jewish side]. And makes me feel like it’s important to carry these things on.”
But when it comes to religion, she describes participating in holidays — she still does some of the big ones with her parents, such as Passover and Hanukkah — as “going through the motions,” because she doesn’t believe in god. She grew up attending a Reform synagogue but had an early existential crisis of sorts, just before her bat mitzvah — “a pre-teenage change of heart,” in her words.
“I realized that I didn’t believe in God, and was like, I’m not going to go ahead and do my bar mitzvah. This doesn’t feel right to me,” she said. “Sort of the same way that you figure out you don’t believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. It didn’t really work for me.”
Her love of Jewish food (she’s extremely excited to be living near Zabar’s on the Upper West Side these days) is straightforward. Bagels on Sundays, latkes on Hanukkah, kugel around Yom Kippur — that’s something she sees herself instilling in her kids, if she has any in the future.
“I don’t think you have to go to temple for it to be passing [Judaism] down to your kids,” she said. “But if one ever said, you know, ‘Mommy, I want to go check it out, I want to see, I will certainly take my kids to temple and show them.”
Vershbow said she sees no contradiction in her identity — and that being Jewish is at the center of it.
“My family is Polish, Russian, all of that, but … I don’t feel personal connection to any of that. I feel a connection to the American Jewish experience. And that is a huge part of my identity,” she said. “But I think that’s an amazing thing about Judaism is that, for so many people in my own life, it seems to be pretty acceptable in a lot of communities to say: ‘I don’t believe in God, but I am Jewish.’ And these can perfectly coexist within me. And they’re not conflicting.”
Dropping the deity, for decades
With decades of grassroots and congressional politics experience under her belt, 89-year-old June Fischer can rail off an endless list of accomplishments. She has been a delegate from New Jersey in every Democratic National Convention since 1972; she has worked on Joe Biden campaigns since 1974, including his successful presidential run (and became a close friend of his); she worked in the offices of former Sen. Jon Corzine and current Sen. Robert Menendez.
She’s also on the board of her local Jewish community center and in 1990 was a founding member of the National Jewish Democratic Council (now the Jewish Democratic Council of America).
But despite that portion of her resume, she’s not affiliated with a synagogue — showing that the “Jews of no religion” category is not a 21st-century invention.
Fischer grew up in Weequahic, the section of Newark that Philip Roth made famous in his many novels based there. In fact, she graduated from high school with Roth, after sitting next to him in homeroom class for four years.
When she was 15, she went to see Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s first vice president, give a speech. She caught the politics bug because of his inspiring performance — not because of any sense of Jewish morality ingrained in her. “I was smitten,” she said.
Although the National Jewish Democratic Council, which she characterized as a liberal response to the AIPAC lobby, and many of the politicians she’s worked with dealt often with Israel-related issues — Biden and Menendez both specialize in foreign policy — Fischer is not a zealous follower of the news in Israel.
And holiday dinners were — and still are for her — more about sticking to tradition than observing religious ritual.
“I do the traditional things, without the deity, as I say,” she said on the phone from her home in Clark. “I’m an atheist, I guess. But I’m fiercely, fiercely traditionally Jewish.”
BERLIN — Following a spate of anti-Israel protests across Germany tied to the ongoing Israel-Gaza violence, political leaders here have vowed to crack down on demonstrators who have used antisemitic rhetoric and have attacked Jewish institutions.
“Anyone who spreads antisemitic hatred will feel the full force of the law,” German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said in a statement.
He added in an interview with the Bild am Sonntag tabloid on Sunday: “We will not tolerate the burning of Israeli flags on German soil and attacks on Jewish facilities.”
Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble called for an increase in security for Jewish communities and institutions on the eve of the Shavuot holiday on Sunday. Due to measures aimed to stem the coronavirus pandemic, most synagogues still only allow reduced attendance or remote observances.
Though most demonstrators in recent days reportedly were peaceful, some tried to burn Israeli flags, shouted anti-Jewish epithets and cheered the bombing of Tel Aviv. The Deutsche Welle news agency reported that 180 people marched from the train station in the western city of Gelsenkirchen to a synagogue chanting antisemitic slogans. Several individuals were arrested after rocks were thrown through the windows of multiple synagogues in different cities.
Last year, Germany made it illegal to publicly destroy or damage the flag of a foreign state with which they have diplomatic relations. It is also illegal to incite hate or call for violence against a group or individuals in a manner that could disturb the peace; the law covers, for example, racism, antisemitism and homophobia.
Calling the incidents “disgusting,” Aiman Mazyek, head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, said in a statement to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper that “Anyone who attacks synagogues and Jews on the pretext of criticizing Israel has forfeited any right to solidarity.”
The Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB) appealed to Muslims to stay away from the demonstrations, Deutsche Welle reported.
It remains to be seen whether suspects arrested in recent days will be charged with inciting antisemitism.
People seen at their home that was hit yesterday by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in the southern Israeli city of Ashdod, on May 18, 2021. (Avi Roccah/Flash90 via JTA.org)
By Ron Kampeas
President Joseph Biden “expressed support for a ceasefire,” the White House said, as fighting continued and the number of Gaza Palestinians killed topped 200.
A key congressional panel meantime may call on Biden to pause for a week or so the process transferring of precision-guided missiles to Israel, which would be the first time in the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship that Congress pressured the president to restrain Israel instead of giving it freer rein.
The health ministry in the Gaza Strip said that 213 people had been killed since hostilities erupted on May 10, including 61 children. It’s not clear how many deaths are the result of Israeli missile attacks on the strip and how many are the result of rockets fired by Hamas and other militant groups falling short. So far, rocket fire from Gaza has killed at least 12 people in Israel, with most of the thousands of rockets fired intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system.
Fighting resumed midday after a lull of several hours to allow the transfer to Gaza of fuel for humanitarian reasons. A rocket hit inside Israel near Gaza’s border killed at least two Thai agricultural workers, bringing Israel’s casualties to 12.
Sirens sounded across southern Israel, including Beersheba, Ashkelon, and Ashdod, and residents were instructed to enter bomb shelters.
Biden spoke Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and broached a ceasefire while supporting Israel’s “right to defend itself against indiscriminate rocket attacks.”
Israeli officials were in their public statements showing no sign of backing down. Benny Gantz, the defense minister, said every member of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, should consider himself vulnerable.
“We have a bank of targets that is full and we want to continue to create pressure on Hamas,” Kann Israel Radio quoted the army spokesman, Hidai Zilberman, as saying.
Biden’s language signaled that he may be ready to increase pressure on Israel to bring the war to a conclusion. “He encouraged Israel to make every effort to ensure the protection of innocent civilians,” said the White House statement describing the call. “The two leaders discussed progress in Israel’s military operations against Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza. The President expressed his support for a ceasefire and discussed U.S. engagement with Egypt and other partners towards that end.”
Biden so far has used the U.S. veto to keep the U.S. Security Council from considering the fighting.
For the first time in the U.S. Israel relationship. Congress, led by Democrats, appeared ready to push harder for restraint on Israel than the executive branch. Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee is considering sending the Biden administration a letter asking it to defer for a week or so granting an expert license, a key step in the transfer of more than $700 million in precision-guided missiles, according to a congressional staffer familiar with the discussion.
Meeks replaced Eliot Engel, one of Congress’s most pro-Israel stalwarts who was ousted last year in a primary, as chairman. Progressives who are now among the most critical of Israel’s actions backed Engel’s primary challenger, Jamaal Bowman, who went on to win, but Meeks was considered a centrist and went out of his way last year during jostling to replace Engel as chairman to reassure pro-Israel groups that he would never touch assistance to Israel.
Whether or not to send the letter is still under discussion, said the staffer. The aim of the letter would be to allow Congress members to gather more information about the export license while the war is underway, and would not delay the transfer of the arms which won’t take place for a year.
The latest round of fighting however has triggered tectonic shifts in how Congressional Democrats relate to Israel, with party members last Thursday exchanging impassioned speeches over which side was more to blame in the conflict.
Ominously for the centrist pro-Israel community, which has counted on Jewish lawmakers to be its first line of access in Congress, it has been Jewish members who have led calls for a cease-fire. Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Jewish freshman Democrat from Georgia, led a call by 28 Democrats in the senate for a Ceasefire, and 12 of the 25 Jewish Democrats in the House signed a letter to urge an “immediate ceasefire.” Notable among its signatories were Jerry Nadler of New York and David Cicilline of Rhode Island, who have until now been stalwarts of the centrist pro-Israel lobby.
A number of Jewish Democrats in the House have remained outspoken in their defense of Israel, including Kathy Manning of North Carolina, Elaine Luria of Virginia and Ted Deutch of Florida. “We must say unequivocally that there is no place on earth where a terrorist group firing hundreds of rockets on innocent civilians should be defended or its actions justified,” Deutch told the World Jewish Congress last week. “Not if human rights matter to us.”
The recent fighting was launched by Hamas with its rocket attacks. It was preceded by clashes in Jerusalem over planned Israeli government evictions of Palestinian families from a Jerusalem neighborhood and by restrictions of access to Palestinian worshippers.
Israeli paramedics said that at least two worshipers had been killed and at least 213 were injured in a bleacher collapse incident at a synagogue in the West Bank Israeli settlement of Givat Zeev on Sunday.
The prayer gathering was held to mark the beginning of the Shavuot holiday. “Hundreds” of haredi Orthodox Jews were congregated at the synagogue in the Israeli settlement northwest of Jerusalem, which was still under construction, a Magen David Adom spokesperson told Israeli media. The two dead were reported as a 12-year-old boy and a 40-year-old man; the incident was deemed a “mass casualty event.”
A video from the synagogue, later broadcast on Israeli TV, shows the crowded bleachers collapsing and dozens of attendees falling to the ground. The building was still under construction, with visible exposed concrete and plastic sheeting used as windows, according to accounts of TV footage.
Israeli authorities, including the mayor of Givat Zeev, the police chief of Jerusalem and head of the Israel Fire and Rescue service, all said the building was dangerous and unfinished, and traded blame for the accident. Defense Minister Benny Gantz wrote on Twitter that “my heart is with the victims” of the collapse.
For many Israelis, the disaster contained eerie echoes of the deadly Lag b’Omer stampede in Mount Meron only a few weeks prior that killed 45 haredi Orthodox Jews at another overcrowded holiday celebration.
“I’m not going to lie to you guys, a lot of stuff is going on in this world, and basketball is just not the most important thing to me right now,” Kyrie Irving said at a postgame press conference on Saturday.
“I focus on this most of the time, 24/7, but it’s just too much going on in this world not to address. It’s just sad to see this s— going on. It’s not just in Palestine, not just in Israel. It’s all over the world, and I feel it. I’m very compassionate to it — to all races, all cultures and to see it, to see a lot of people being discriminated against, based on their religion, color of their skin, what they believe in. It’s just sad.”
“I don’t care which way you stand on — either side,” Irving added. “If you’re a human being, then you support the anti-war effort. There’s a lot of people losing their lives — children, a lot of babies, and that’s just what I’m focused on.”
The Nets have their highest championship hopes in decades, thanks to a trio of Irving and fellow star scorers Kevin Durant and James Harden.
as the latest Israel-Gaza conflict reached new heights. Several events featuring antisemitic rhetoric and rioting.
In Brussels, London and Vienna dozens of men were filmed at rallies on Saturday shouting in Arabic: “Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning.”
The chant relates to an event in the seventh century when Muslims massacred and expelled Jews from the town of Khaybar, located in modern-day Saudi Arabia. It is widely understood as a battle cry when attacking Jews.
The protests came as fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza intensified. More than 150 Palestinians have died since last week, when Israel began an offensive against Hamas; 10 Israelis have died when some of the thousands of rockets launched by Hamas have broken through Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system and landed in residential neighborhoods.
At the London event, nine police officers were slightly injured when protesters hurled objects at them. The officers were preventing the protesters from reaching the city’s Israeli embassy, the end point for a march by thousands that began at Hyde Park. Organizers said 100,000 people attended that march.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is Muslim, told the Jewish News of London. “I am deeply concerned about reports of hateful, intimidating and racist language being used on marches and social media this weekend. It is unacceptable to incite anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim hatred. This must stop now.” On Twitter, he added that he had given London’s police “my full backing for their zero-tolerance approach.”
A motorcade of cars with Palestinian flags on Sunday drove through a heavily Jewish part of London with one person shouting through a loudspeaker: “F–k the Jews; rape their daughters.”
At the Hyde Park march, a giant inflatable puppet dressed like an Arab with horns and a hooked nose led to some confusion. Some interpreted it as an antisemitic reference to Jews, but others concluded it was a caricature of Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, one of several Arab nations to establish diplomatic relations with Israel last year.
In Germany, many thousands protested Israel’s actions in Gaza. At the Berlin rally Saturday, police ordered the protesters to disperse citing COVID-19 measures. They were pelted with stones, bottles and rocks, resulting in multiple injuries, Tagesschau reported.
In Paris, thousands disobeyed a ban on protests that police said would endanger public order. Police used water cannons to disperse the crowd Saturday.
And in Amsterdam, about 3,000 people protested against Israel on the Dam Square, a central square that is the country’s main monument for victims of World War II, including the Holocaust. They carried signs accusing Israel of genocide and promising that “from the river to the sea, Palestinian will be free,” a phrase that
About 50 people, mostly Jews and Christian supporters of Israel, staged a support rally for Israel about 500 yards away from the Dam Square event.
The Austrian and the Czech presidential palaces flew the Israeli flag on Friday in solidarity with Israel. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte in a tweet Friday blamed Hamas for “firing rockets indiscriminately on civilian populations” and said the Netherlands “supports Israel’s right to self defense within the border of international law and proportionality.”
Smoke rises from the Al-Jalaa tower in Gaza City, which housed apartments and several media outlets, including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera, after an Israeli airstrike, May 15, 2021. (Atia Mohammed/Flash90 via JTA.org)
By Gabe Friedman
Israeli airstrikes killed at least 42 people in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, making it the deadliest day yet in the week of fighting between Israel and Hamas.
Despite the shelling, Hamas continued to fire rockets at Israel throughout Sunday, even as overwhelmed medics pulled people out from the rubble of destroyed buildings throughout Gaza, according to reports.
International outcry — including from several leading pro-Israel American lawmakers — continues to grow over Israel’s military response to more than 2,500 rockets launched by Hamas from Gaza. But the sides do not appear to be close to reaching a ceasefire.
The recent fighting started when Hamas, long designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and the European Union, launched a wave of rocket attacks against Israeli population centers.
Here’s the latest from this weekend:
– Gaza’s health ministry claims that 12 women and eight children were among those killed in the attacks Sunday. No Israelis were reported dead or injured. One attack on Saturday killed at least 10 Palestinians from one extended family in a refugee camp. In total, 188 people in Gaza and 10 in Israel have been killed in the week-long conflict.
– Israel’s military released video of what it claims to be a bombing of the senior-most Hamas leader’s home in Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza.
– Israel on Saturday also bombed a 12-story building in Gaza City known as a center for journalists covering the region, including some working for the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera. The Israeli military says that Hamas was operating out of the tower; it also said it provided advance notice to the journalists so they could evacuate, and no deaths or injuries occurred in the attack. The AP said it was not aware of any Hamas activity in the building, according to The New York Times. President Biden’s Press Secretary Jen Psaki tweeted Saturday: “We have communicated directly to the Israelis that ensuring the safety and security of journalists and independent media is a paramount responsibility.”
– Biden spoke with both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday, urging ceasefire talks. Netanyahu said that the offensive will continue “as long as necessary.”
“The party that bears the guilt for this confrontation is not us, it’s those attacking us,” the Israeli leader said in a televised speech.
In a press conference, Netanyahu said that there is international “pressure,” but Israel is “getting serious backing, foremost from the U.S.”
– A number of leading pro-Israel Democrats — including Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a favorite of the AIPAC pro-Israel lobby — made a rare public statement criticizing Israel, urging the country to be more cautious with regards to civilians in its attacks. “I also believe there must be a full accounting of actions that have led to civilian deaths and destruction of media outlets,” Menendez said in a statement Saturday.
– A dozen Jewish House reps, including Jerry Nadler of New York, Jamie Raskin of Maryland and David Cicilline of Rhode Island, also signed a letter on Friday expressing deep concern about “Israeli police violence” and urged Israel to abandon its plan to evict Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem.
– The U.N. Security Council is scheduled to meet to discuss the conflict for the first time on Sunday. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi bashed the U.S. on Saturday in a call with his Pakistani counterpart regarding the council’s inaction so far.
“Regrettably, the council has so far failed to reach an agreement, with the United States standing on the opposite side of international justice,” he was quoted as saying.
By Andrew Lapin
as the latest Israel-Gaza conflict reached new heights. Several events featuring antisemitic rhetoric and rioting.
