This lack of concern for black people’s struggles began to change as Eastern European Jewish immigrants and southern black migrants encountered one another in rapidly growing northern cities. These Jews, often more politically radical than the German and Spanish Jews who preceded them in America, and having experienced similar persecution in Europe, were more attuned to the economic hardship and racial violence black Americans faced. Yiddish newspapers called black lynchings “pogroms,” and their newly organized unions and political groups were more likely than others to include black people. In many cities, the majority of Communist Party members were African Americans or Eastern European Jews.

But while both communities established civil rights organizations to combat bigotry and discrimination, they rarely worked together. And Jewish organizations, peopled and controlled by white Jews, largely ignored the growing number of Jews of color. When black groups approached Jewish groups for help, most Jewish groups balked, fearful of tying their fortunes to those they perceived as even more hated.

All this changed in the 1930s. Largely in response to Nazism abroad and rising anti-Semitism at home, Jewish groups reached out for allies and black organizations responded. Black and Jewish organizations increasingly worked together to challenge employment and housing discrimination, racial and religious violence, and exclusion from social, educational and professional organizations. These cooperative efforts were driven by self-interest, but it was a far more spacious notion of self-interest than before, rooted in the recognition that if any were not safe, none could be safe.

After the war, this cooperation broadened to a fuller set of collaborations. Jewish groups filed court briefs in desegregation cases; the NAACP helped lobby U.N. delegates to support the creation of a Jewish state. Of the three well known civil rights workers killed at the start of Mississippi’s Freedom Summer of 1964: Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, two were Jewish and the third African American. Along with other allies, African Americans and Jews together compelled the desegregation of medical associations, bowling leagues, beaches, restaurants, housing developments and department stores. In 1948, black and Jewish activists convinced New York to create a public university, the State University of New York, to compensate for racial and religious discrimination at private colleges. Joint lobbying efforts promoted more robust social welfare policies and emphasized the teaching of tolerance in public schools and community organizations. And increasingly, Jews — particularly secular and Reform Jews — identified the fight for civil rights as a Jewish ethical obligation.

But during these same years, economic and racial tensions destabilized the partnership. Eastern European Jews still saw themselves as outsiders, victims of white oppression. They failed to appreciate how their white skin helped them rise economically, even in the face of persistent anti-Semitism. Many of them operated businesses in black communities — often formerly Jewish neighborhoods – and prided themselves on their relative lack of racism. But to African Americans, these were white business owners exploiting poor and marginalized outsiders. Economic tensions between shopkeepers and customers, landlords and tenants, were often interpreted – by both sides — as black-Jewish fights.

The fact that white Jews had risen economically also led to some patronizing attitudes that inflamed tensions further. Jews saw their success as proof that liberal meritocracy worked and counseled patience, moderation, and compromise. Few understood when African Americans, concluding that white liberals could not understand the depth of systemic racism, turned toward more nationalist and seemingly radical ideas, broadly known as Black Power. Even as most white Jews clung to their faith in race blindness, African Americans understood that white America and its institutions would never be – and should not be – race blind.

By the middle of the 1970s, these differences splintered the coalition that had done so much to advance civil rights in America. Black and Jewish groups continued to collaborate on issues like aid to education, expanding the social safety net and assisting groups facing ethnic and racial violence around the world. But these were smaller and less public actions than those of the civil rights era, and the bond between the communities weakened as both increasingly turned inward. While they continued to share many of the same values and commitments, and African Americans and Jews continued to be the most reliable Democratic voters, their organizations no longer acted in concert or placed those shared commitments center stage. What remained were persistent class and racial tensions, and the anger and resentment they produced were increasingly openly expressed.

By the turn of the 21st century, the situation began changing once again. As the U.S. turned more politically conservative, and as issues important to both groups came increasingly under attack, black and Jewish groups began to tentatively reach out to each other again. White Jewish political and religious organizations also began a more robust engagement with Jews of color. Both outreach efforts expanded slowly, then exploded after the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016.

Trump’s views alarmed many in both communities, who saw their hard-won political gains slip away and their deepest values challenged. Many also recognized an increasing danger to their security. Local synagogues teamed up with black churches, national organizations reengaged with each other, and younger Jewish activists in particular energetically proclaimed their commitment to racial and economic justice. In 2019, several House members even formed a congressional Black-Jewish caucus.

In this new movement, many more groups have active, even leadership, roles, including Hispanic, LGBTQ, undocumented, indigenous and impoverished communities. Feminist groups, progressive churches and others now energetically embrace the broader and deliberately intersectional struggle for justice and inclusion. This has shifted the agenda of the new civil rights struggle as well as its political understandings. While black-Jewish relations remains a central commitment of many Jews, both black and white, it is now only one piece of a larger community of progressive activists of all religions and ethnicities.

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Jewish Immigrants Seek a Safe Haven

The war had its roots in waves of Zionist immigration to the Land of Israel, beginning in the 1880s and peaking in the 1930s and ’40s, with the flight of Jews from the Holocaust. Their plight and the absence of a single country willing to give them a home made urgent the need for a Jewish state.

READ: A History of Jewish Immigration to the Land of Israel

Following World War II, hundreds of thousands of Jewish displaced persons set their sights on aliyah, but the British government — in control of Palestine since 1917 and keen to maintain friendly relations with the Arab world — refused to admit them. As violence between Jews, Arabs, and the British mounted, Britain handed over the problem to the United Nations.

READ: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

In 1947, Palestine’s population of 1.85 million was approximately one-third Jewish and two-thirds Arab. The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) proposed the end of British rule and the partition of the country into Jewish and Arab states and an internationally controlled area around Jerusalem. The Zionists, desperate to enable Jewish immigration and with an eye to future territorial expansion, accepted the plan. The Arabs rejected it as they opposed any Jewish rule in Palestine.

On November 29, on the heels of the UN General Assembly’s vote in favor of partition, Jewish settlements and neighborhoods were attacked by Palestinian guerrillas.

READ: The United Nations Partition Plan (General Assembly Resolution 181)

What ensued was, in effect, two separate conflicts: a civil war between Palestine’s Jews and Arabs (November 29 1947-May 14 1948) was followed by the establishment of the state of Israel and its invasion by five Arab armies; the ensuing war lasted until July 1949.

A Civil War

In the civil war, the Haganah — the Jews’ underground defense organization — together with two smaller paramilitary units, the Etzel (National Military Organization) and the Lehi (Israel Freedom Fighters), fought against loosely organized Palestinian fighters and volunteers from Arab countries. Between November and March, the Haganah’s main challenge was to repel Arab attacks on isolated settlements, Jewish areas of mixed cities, and on the roads.

The road to Jerusalem came under attack and the Jewish neighborhoods of the capital were cut off, unable to receive supplies, food, or water. The Jewish forces repelled most Arab attacks but suffered heavy defeats, for example the loss of 35 soldiers en route to defend the Etzion bloc of settlements.

In April 1948, in anticipation of the British departure, the Haganah launched Plan D, an offensive program for the expansion of Jewish-controlled territory. Operation Nahshon — hoped to open the road to Jerusalem. On April 9, the Etzel and Lehi invaded Deir Yassin, an Arab village near Jerusalem, killing more than 100 Arab civilians and prompting the flight of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. Tens of thousands of additional refugees fled following the Palmach’s conquest of Haifa, Jaffa, Safed, and Tiberias.

Jewish casualties followed: Seventy-seven medical personnel of Hadassah hospital on Mount Scopus were killed by Arab forces on April 13, and on May 13, following the fall of Kfar Etzion, 129 of the settlement’s defenders were killed by Arab villagers from the Hebron area.

READ: The 1948 Fall of Kfar Etzion and Its Re-establishment After the Six Day War

By mid-May, the Haganah had routed the Arab forces and was in control of the major cities and more than 100 Palestinian villages. It had 30,000 fighters under arms and had taken delivery of a major arms purchase from Czechoslovakia. On May 14, 1948, the eve of Britain’s departure, David Ben Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel at a ceremony in Tel Aviv. The next day, the new state was invaded by the armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq.

READ: The Complete Text of the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel

The War Escalates

The immediate challenge faced by the newly formed Israel Defense Forces was to rebuff the Arab attack, defending Jewish settlements until the arrival of reinforcements. The first month of the war was marked by heavy fighting against Jordan’s Arab Legion in Jerusalem; by the end of May the Jordanians had conquered the Old City and expelled its Jewish inhabitants. Syria’s advance into the Galilee was repulsed by the inhabitants of Kibbutz Degania, and the Egyptian invasion was blocked just north of Gaza at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai.

Following a month-long truce brokered by the United Nations, hostilities resumed in July 1948. In Operation Dani, the IDF broke the siege of Jerusalem by capturing Lod and Ramle, two Arab towns in the Jerusalem corridor; 50,000 Palestinian refugees fled their homes. In October, following a second UN-sponsored truce, the IDF captured the upper Galilee in Operation Hiram and, in operations Yoav and Horev, drove the Egyptian army out of the Negev by December. In March 1949, Operation Uvda saw Israeli forces complete their conquest of the southern part of the country by capturing Eilat.

READ: Who Are the Palestinians?

The War of Independence was concluded by the signing of armistice agreements between Israel and the surrounding Arab states. Israel was left in control of 78 percent of mandatory Palestine — around 50 percent more than it had been allocated in the partition plan. The remaining 22 percent was split between Jordan (West Bank and East Jerusalem) and Egypt (Gaza Strip). An independent Palestine was never established, and no Arab state recognized Israel’s existence.

Repercussions of the War

In the shadow of the Holocaust, the victory of the new Jewish state over five Arab armies has sometimes been interpreted as little short of a miracle. Yet more prosaic explanations are available. Israel’s troops numbered twice as many as those under Arab command. Moreover, partly as a result of the high number of World War II veterans in its ranks, the IDF benefited from better training and organization than its adversaries had. Ben Gurion referred to the Arab armies as Israel’s secret weapon: “They are such incompetents, it is difficult to imagine.”

Yet the Jews paid a high price for their victory. More than 6,000 Israelis — 1 percent of the population — were killed. Many of the casualties were refugees and Holocaust survivors, newly arrived in the country. The war also intensified divisions within the Jewish population. After the creation of the IDF, it had been agreed that independent paramilitary units (the Etzel and the Lehi) would be absorbed into the new national army.

But in June 1948, the Altalena — a ship carrying arms destined for the Etzel — reached Israel. Determined to head off separatism and the threat of civil war, Prime Minister Ben Gurion ordered the Etzel to hand over the weapons to the IDF. When the ultimatum was ignored, Ben Gurion ordered the ship to be shelled; 16 Etzel fighters and three IDF soldiers were killed during the confrontation.

READ: Israelis, Palestinians and the Clash of Nationalisms

Ultimately, the war’s biggest losers were the Palestinians, who were prevented from establishing a state, forced to live under Israeli, Egyptian, or Jordanian rule and, in the case of more than 700,000 refugees, unable to return to their homes. Traditional Zionist accounts of the war claimed that the refugees fled at the order of the Arab leadership, to clear the way for the invading armies. But contemporary historiography paints a more complex picture.

Drawing on government and military archives, Israeli historians such as Benny Morris have concluded that most Palestinians fled during the fighting, afraid of imagined — or occasionally real — atrocities committed by Jewish soldiers, but that some were victims of an ad hoc Israeli policy of deportation. Prevented by the Israeli authorities from returning home after the war and kept in squalid camps in every Arab country except Jordan, these refugees became an important catalyst for the escalation of the Arab-Israeli conflict into the 1950s and beyond.

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The Multiple Tragedies

The 17th day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz is a date in which many tragedies and pitfalls happened, according to the Mishnah (Taanit 4:6). It is traditionally believed to be the date that Moses broke the original Ten Commandments tablets after coming upon the Israelites as they worshiped the Golden Calf. The Roman rulers forbade sacrifices to be made in the Second Temple on this date in 69 C.E., and, in the following year, the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem were breached. This attack led to the destruction of the Temple three weeks later.

In Hebrew, the period of the Three Weeks is known as “bein hametzarim,” or, literally, “within the straits” or “within the borders.” This name comes from a verse in the Book of Lamentations, or Eicha, which is read on Tisha B’Av:

Judah has gone into exile because of affliction, and because of great servitude. She dwelt among the nations, she found no rest; all her pursuers overtook her within the borders. (Lamentations 1:3)

This idea of borders — or “restrictions” — alludes to the additional restrictions of mourning which are traditionally taken on during this period.

Traditionally, Jews take on several mourning customs during the Three Weeks. Similar to the period of the Omer, no weddings, parties, or public celebrations are held. Some people abstain from getting haircuts and shaving. Some people also refrain from going to concerts or listening to music during this period.

The Nine Days

The last nine days of the period, starting with the first of the month of Av, occupy a special status. Foods traditionally associated with joy, such as wine and meat, are forbidden, except on Shabbat. Bathing, beyond what is absolutely necessary, is prohibited, as is doing laundry, and buying or wearing new clothes.

This culminates in the fast of Tisha B’Av, the Ninth of Av, a day that is spent entirely in mourning–by fasting, praying, sitting on stools instead of chairs, and reading the book of Lamentations. The Mishnah, in Masekhet Taanit 29b, decrees that these additional restrictions are only valid in “shavua she-hal bo,” or the week that Tisha B’Av occurs. Many Sephardic Jews only observe the restrictions within this period.

“Decreasing … in Joy”

Even though the Three Weeks mark the time of the Temple’s destruction, there are signs of hope throughout. The three haftarot read during this period, are full of admonitions and prophetic passages that warn about the consequences of sin. Yet each ends in a promise of eventual redemption.

The Talmud says, “When the month of Av enters, one should decrease in joy.” The Hasidic rebbe Rabbi Chaim Elazar Spira (1861-1937), said that, though the Talmud says to “decrease in joy,” it should be read, “decrease…in joy.” In other words, though it is proper to mourn, even in that mourning, we should do so joyously, knowing that better times are ahead.

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But Jews around the world have also developed Hanukkah customs that are unique to their local community. For example, while jelly-filled donuts (sufganiyot) are a mainstay among Ashkenazi Jews, Hanukkah in southern India is celebrated by making gulab jamnun, a milk-based ball of dough that is deep fried and then drenched in sugar syrup. The sweet treat is also consumed by non-Jewish Indians during other celebrations like Diwali.

Indian Jews enjoying gulab jamnun is far from the only example of a distinct tradition that a community has developed in Diaspora. Here are eight more customs that go beyond playing dreidel or giving Hanukkah gelt. 

1. Hanging the Menorah On the Wall 

Most Ashkenazi Jews place a menorah in the window in order to publicize the miracle of Hanukkah. In Morocco, Algeria and other North African communities, it is customary to hang the menorah on a hook in the doorway, beside the mezuzah. Putting the menorah near the mezuzah was thought to enhance the protection already offered by the mezuzah. If you look at menorahs made in North Africa, you will notice that many have a ring at the top, as well as a flat metal backing, so that the menorah could be safely hung. 

Some Jews affiliated with Chabad also hang their menorahs. This group traces the tradition back to the Talmud (Shabbat 22a) which describes the menorah as being positioned on the doorpost like a mezuzah:

Rav Shmuel from Difti said: … the halakhah is to place [the menorah] on the left so that the Hanukkah lamp will be on the left and the mezuzah on the right. Then, one who enters the house will be surrounded by mitzvot. 

2. Constructing a Menorah from Potatoes   

Jews in Romania, as well as Austria and other central European communities, would scrape out potatoes, filling each potato space with oil and a wick to serve as the menorah. Rather than putting all eight out at once, each day they would add another potato. While the origin of this custom is unclear, it likely came about due to economic struggles. 

3. Lighting an Extra Shamash 

The Jewish community of Aleppo, which comprised mostly Sephardic Jews who had escaped the Inquisition, lit an extra shamash (helper candle) on each night of Hanukkah. Several explanations exist — some say that the second shamash was meant to honor God and acknowledge the divine intervention that brought them to safety. Others say the custom was a nod toward the non-Jews of Aleppo, who welcomed them as refugees. 

4. Glass Boxes On Display 

Before mass immigration and the establishment of the State of Israel in the 20th century, Jews lived in Jerusalem for centuries and followed the ruling that the menorah’s lights needed to be placed outside the home for all to see. This decree originates in the Talmud (Shabbat 21b):

The sages taught in a beraita: It is a mitzvah to place the Hanukkah lamp at the entrance to one’s house on the outside, so that all can see it.

However, Jerusalem winters are often wet and windy, so the community began crafting aquarium-like glass boxes to protect their flames. Inside, Jerusalem Jews put small cups of olive oil and lit a wick to correspond with each night. Some of Jerusalem’s oldest homes even have a shelf carved out of the home’s exterior walls to place the glass boxes in. 

Today, many Israeli Jews have adopted this practice, although some will simply place a hanukkiah with candles inside the box, rather than using oil. 

5. Chag HaBanot: A Celebration of Women 

Jewish communities in Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Morocco, Greece and Yemen celebrate another holiday during Hanukkah, known in Judeo-Arabic as Eid Al Bnat or Chag HaBanot in Hebrew, both of which translate to the Festival of the Daughters. 

Observed on Rosh Chodesh Tevet (which falls on the sixth night of Hanukkah), the girls and women of the community refrain from work and gather to recall Jewish heroines, particularly Judith, the Jewish woman who lived during the time of the Maccabees and helped prevent the impending siege of Jerusalem by decapitating the invading Assyrian general. 

Chag HaBanot festivities vary from community to community, but often include eating sweets and fried treats, dancing, visiting the synagogue to kiss the Torah scrolls and singing well into the night. Girls approaching bat mitzvah age, as well as women who were engaged, were also publicly celebrated during Chag HaBanot. 

Read more about Chag HaBanot here.

6. Neighborhood Wine Tastings 

The region of Avignon, located in southern France, is renowned for its wineries. During the Saturday night that falls during Hanukkah, after Shabbat ended, the Jews of Avignon open a new bottle of local wine in their homes and make a toast. Then, each family travels around their neighborhood to taste the wines chosen by their neighbors and to toast to the miracle of Hanukkah.

7. No Melachot Near the Menorah

It is a longstanding practice among North African and Middle Eastern Jewish communities, as well as Haredi Ashkenazi Jews, that as long as the menorah is lit, women refrain from doing melachot, the types of work that are forbidden on Shabbat and holidays. While Hanukkah is not a holiday that requires Jews to refrain from labor, this custom can be traced back to laws codified by both Ashkenazi and Sephardic leaders who ruled, pre-electricity, that the light of the menorah was not to be used for anything besides enjoying the holiday.

8. The Ninth Night of Hanukkah

In some parts of Morocco, Jewish children spend the last day of Hanukkah going from house to house to collect the leftover cotton wicks that Moroccan Jews used in place of candles. At sundown, the wicks are ignited to create a large bonfire, and each community gathers to sing, dance and even leap over the fire, which was believed to bring good luck to the jumper, especially to women seeking a partner or struggling to conceive.

These are only a sampling of the many traditions that various communities around the world have developed over time. Click here to learn more about the diversity of the Jewish people and some of its less widespread customs.

Explore Hanukkah’s history, global traditions, food and more with My Jewish Learning’s “All About Hanukkah” email series. Sign up to take a journey through Hanukkah and go deeper into the Festival of Lights.

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The exact time Jews arrived in Kaifeng is not entirely certain. Most scholars believe that Jews first arrived during the Song Dynasty (960-1127 C.E.), from India or Persia (present day Iran), stops on the Silk Road. During this period, the Chinese people called the Jews “Tiaojinjiao” (the religion that removes the tendon) because Jewish dietary law (kashrut) forbids the consumption of the sciatic nerve. A bit later, during the Ming Dynasty, the emperor assigned Jews one of eight last names because he found Hebrew names confusing. To this day Kaifeng Jews can be recognized by their last names: Ai, Shi, Gao, Gan, Jin, Li, Zhang or Zhao. 

At its peak, the Kaifeng Jewish community had around 5,000 members. While some Kaifeng Jews have discreetly recovered their lost Jewish identities, there is nothing close to a formal, organized Jewish community in the city today.

The Kaifeng Synagogue

Kaifeng’s first synagogue was built in 1163 and destroyed by a flood in 1461. In 1600 a fire burned down the synagogue which had replaced the original building. A second flood destroyed the third version of the synagogue in 1642. Yet another flood wiped out Kaifeng’s last synagogue in the 1860’s. The community’s last religious leader died around the same time.

Kaifeng Jews had prayed in their synagogue in both Hebrew and Mandarin. They wore blue head coverings while worshipping, which led misguided neighbors to call them “the Muslims with the blue caps” in order to differentiate these congregants from “the Muslims with the white caps” (actual Muslims who wore white headgear for prayer). Jews in Kaifeng faced westward when praying — the direction of Jerusalem.

Much like Jews outside of China, for centuries, Kaifeng Jews centered their Jewish practices around the synagogue: observing Shabbat and other Jewish holidays, holding circumcisions for sons and giving their children Hebrew names in addition to Chinese names.

Decline of the Kaifeng Jewish Community  

For years Kaifeng Jews were isolated from other Jewish communities around the world, and very few people knew of their existence. Europeans did not even realize there was a Jewish community in China until 1605 when a Kaifeng Jew travelled to Beijing and met an Italian Jesuit named Matteo Ricci. Ricci’s account of his encounter with a Kaifeng Jew explained that the Jewish visitor had said he “worshipped one God.”

Historically, China has been one of the few countries in the world with virtually no anti-Semitism. Non-Jewish Kaifeng residents saw similarities between the Jews and themselves, and encouraged Jews to be part of the community. Ultimately, intentional or not, this led to more assimilation.

A difficult period of war and social upheaval in China began in 1644. This, along with the increased tendency of Kaifeng Jews to intermarry with Han Chinese and assimilate, led to a decline in Jewish religious observance. Eventually Kaifeng Jews became indistinguishable in appearance and practice from their non-Jewish neighbors.

Eventually the synagogue’s land was sold and the Torah scrolls taken to libraries in other countries. Today, there are no remaining synagogues (or rabbis) in the city.

Artifacts of the Kaifeng Jewish Community

Although the Kaifeng Jewish community is tiny today, their presence has been well-recorded through the preservation of Jewish artifacts. The British Library houses a Torah scroll from the Kaifeng Synagogue, and its Hebrew letters look very similar to Chinese characters. Additionally, the Hebrew Union College’s Klau Library in Cincinnati, Ohio has a siddur (Jewish prayer book) in Hebrew and Chinese characters and an ancient Hebrew manuscript version of the Bible owned by the community. While the Bible includes vowels, it seems they were written by someone who did not understand them, as the vowels were placed randomly. Since Modern Hebrew does not require vowels, the text can best be read by ignoring the vowels altogether.  

Perhaps most notably, the Klau Library also conserves two haggadahs from the Kaifeng community. One, from the 17^th century, written in Jewish-Persian hand, and a second from the 18^th century, written in Chinese Hebrew square script. Both haggadahs come from a period before the text went through a modern day expansion, therefore the books do not include contemporary songs of European origin such as “Dayenu” and “Had Gadya.” Interestingly, the haggadahs are also missing a blessing over the matzah, which indicates that the writer of the text forgot to write the blessing or the blessing was no longer a part of their Passover traditions. The Kaifeng Jews seem to have spoken Hebrew with heavy Chinese accents which led to some errors in the transcription of the text as well.

Rediscovering Jewish Roots

The establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Israel in the late 1980s, and the arrival of Jewish tourists to Kaifeng, inspired many Kaifeng Jews to rediscover their Jewish identities. A prayer group met for the first time in years, local residents gave tours to sites of Jewish interest, and a 50 person Passover seder was held in 2015. Yet, the ability to practice Judaism publicly was short-lived.

Jewish Life in Kaifeng Today

Between 500 and 1,000 people living in Kaifeng today claim to be Jews. While most don’t speak Hebrew, celebrate Jewish holidays, or practice traditional religious beliefs, these Chinese citizens still call themselves Jewish.

Some members of the community remember celebrating Passover and Yom Kippur as children, or having Stars of David in their childhood homes. Nevertheless, today the only specifically Jewish custom observed by most Kaifeng Jews is the practice of not eating pork. There are approximately 100 Kaifeng Jews who observe Judaism to a fuller extent.

In 2016 the communist Chinese government, which opposes all religion, shut down the few existing Jewish organizations in Kaifeng and forced the small Jewish community to celebrate, learn and pray in private. Additionally, the authorities removed all public signs of Jewish history in Kaifeng and members of the local Jewish community have reportedly been monitored by the authorities.

Some Kaifeng Jews have made aliyah to Israel in recent years, but proving their Jewishness is complex. Chinese descent is patrilineal, which means that descent is calculated through male links only. Traditionally, Jews use matrilineal descent to determine if a person is Jewish. Influenced by Chinese practices, Kaifeng Jews trace Jewish lineage through the patrilineal line. This practice produces extra challenges for Kaifeng Jews who wish to be accepted as Jewish by the larger Jewish community — especially those seeking to move to Israel. Since Kaifeng Jews don’t fit the criteria of Israel’s Law of Return, they are required to go through a yearlong conversion process in order to become Israeli citizens.

While Jews living in other cities of China, such as Beijing and Shanghai, are expat Jews who arrived in recent generations, the Chinese government considers the Jews of Kaifeng to be ethnic Chinese of Jewish descent. Kaifeng Jews even think of themselves as the only proper community of Chinese Jews in the world. Although communist China has never recognized Judaism as an authorized religion, for years Judaism was unofficially tolerated all over the country.

Recently in Kaifeng this has changed and the government created a crackdown on non-government approved religions. The Chinese government feels that ethnically Chinese groups claiming minority status could lead to social and political instability. By contrast, non-Chinese Jews (Jews living in China outside of Kaifeng) are free to practice Judaism as long as they don’t promote Judaism among the Chinese population.

Learn more about Jewish communities around the world by signing up for our email journey here.

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Who Will the Messiah Be?

Classical Jewish eschatology has long held that there will eventually be a redeemer, in Hebrew moshiach (“anointed one”), who will bring salvation to the Jewish nation. In the context of the Bible, this is a title that can be conferred to more than one person. Jewish priests and kings are anointed to lead their people and even the Persian King Cyrus (not a Jew!), who freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity, is referred to as moshiach. But a more eschatological concept of the Messiah also emerges from the biblical texts — the idea that one person, a king descended from the great King David, will usher in an entirely new era of redemption for the Jewish people.

This idea has been entrenched within the Jewish belief system for at least 2,600 years.

Messianic Claims in Antiquity

By the late Second Temple period, references to the Messiah had proliferated throughout Jewish writings. As the Greco-Roman empire subjected the Jews to harsh and anti-Semitic decrees, there was a renewed sense of urgency to find a leader who would bring respite from suffering. Late biblical books such as Daniel along with other, post-biblical texts, known as the Apocrypha, offer explicit visions as to what the ultimate redemption would bring.

Understandably, this increase in messianic discussion brought an increase in messianic predictions and even the coronation of certain people as the Messiah. During the first few centuries of the Common Era, there would be scores of individuals claiming to be moshiach, the vast majority of them never able to amass any type of following. Perhaps the most famous example is that of Jesus Christ (literally, Jesus the Messiah). The majority of the Jewish community rejected this young charismatic Jew as moshiach though he amassed a large following among non-Jews and started a movement that has become one of the largest religions in the world today.

A century later, a man named Bar Kochba achieved much better traction in convincing the Jews of his anointed status. After the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, the Jews were so badly beaten by the Roman empire that they had no fighting chance to drive the foreign rulers from Jerusalem. But several decades later in the early second century, Bar Kochba was able to rally troops, planning a general Jewish uprising against Rome. A few early local victories began to convince both the Jewish masses and some in the religious leadership, most famously Rabbi Akiva, that Bar Kochba was moshiach and would deliver the Jews from oppressive Roman rule.

As Bar Kochba and his uprising gained support from Jews hailing him as both a military expert and Messiah, more people would join the fight. The revolt began in earnest in 135 CE — and it was a disaster. Rome crushed the uprising and over half a million Jews were slain and hundreds of thousands more exiled.

After the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt, false messianic claims quieted for a few centuries. But hopes were not quashed. The Talmud, penned during this time, offered several predictions for the arrival of the Messiah, including the year 440 (Sanhedrin 97b) and 471 (Avodah Zarah 9b). In the mid 5th century, a man named Moses of Crete decided he was the one the Talmud had predicted. Swearing he would, like his biblical forbear, lead his followers through the water and back to the Promised Land, Moses convinced his fellow Jews to leave behind all their belongings and march directly into the sea. While Moses himself disappeared — some accounts argue that he perished in the sea, and others that he fled the scene — many of his followers drowned. Others, the lucky ones, only lost their belongings.

Karaite Messianism

The Karaites are a sectarian movement that rejects rabbinic Judaism, holding sacred only the Hebrew Bible and not the Talmud or other rabbinic writings. Many of the early influencers of this movement led messianic charges, promising to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem so they could return to offering sacrifices (rabbinic Judaism had replaced sacrifice with Torah study and prayer). Needless to say, none of these false messiahs succeeded and many of their followers were slaughtered in battle, deserted by their leaders. Some disappointed followers even ended up forming separate religious groups, such as the Yudghanites, vowing that their killed Messiah would return.

More Messianic Movements of the Middle Ages

Dozens of other examples scattered throughout the Middle Ages further elucidate Judaism’s long and tortured history of false Messiahs. In the 12th century, another “moshiach” named David Alroy (born Menahem ben Solomon) tried rising up against the Muslim empire. His chosen name alludes to his status as Messiah descended from King David; the name Alroy might mean “the inspired one.” David Alroy’s plan was lead the Jews back to Jerusalem, overthrow Muslim rule, and establish himself as their king. Ultimately, his revolt failed and he was assassinated. His followers, undeterred by his death, formed a Jewish break-off movement known as the Menahemists.

Yet another unspecified moshiach, discussed by Maimonidies, convinced many Jews in Yemen to give away all their possessions before he was slain. Then, unsurprisingly, in the rise and subsequent spread of Kabbalah towards the late medieval period, many other Jews would claim to be miracle workers and Messiahs similarly leading Jews to death, poverty, or out of the Jewish community.

The Most Famous False Messiah

Perhaps the most famous of all the false messiahs was Shabbetai Zevi, an early modern charismatic Jew who lived in the early Ottoman empire. Building off Kabbalistic messianic traditions, Zevi started to gain a following to whom he would teach esoteric and mystical Jewish ideas. As his following grew, Shabbetai Zevi began to perform open “miracles”, publicly chant the name of God, and eventually declare himself the Messiah. At first few accepted this messianic declaration but over time a variety of well-known Kabbalistic leaders embraced this young moshiach. Towards the end of his life, Zevi was imprisoned by the Islamic hegemony and given an ultimatum: be killed or convert to Islam. As he chose the later, thousands of his own followers also converted while others looked to the creation of a different religious movement known as Sabbatianism.

Conclusion

The idea of identifying the Messiah is still alive and well in the Jewish community today. Though for some Jews the Messiah represents a futuristic ideal, for others the concept is far more concrete. For example, many followers of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of a Hasidic sect called Chabad, believe that he never died and is in fact moshiach.

For every example of a false Messiah written about here, there are dozens of examples not mentioned. In times of hardship and fervor, Jews have repeatedly believed the Messiah was identifiable and at hand — only to be disappointed. A detailed account of all the false Jewish Messiahs recorded in history could fill a book, and this precludes the mention of hundreds of claimants lost to the dustbin of history. While the setting and scope of each of these stories widely differ, they are united by failure and false hope — the vast majority causing death and destruction, loss of property, or conversion.

The post False Messiahs in Judaism appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

Harry and Fanny were participating in a shvartze khasene (שוואַרץ חתונה, “black wedding”). An Eastern European superstition, brought from the old country, held that marrying in a cemetery would protect the local Jewish community from tragedy. While Russian and Polish traditions differed, the main idea was that the graveside wedding would appeal to the dead, who could intercede on the living’s behalf. Additionally, it was hoped that the sad sight of poor, young strangers marrying in a desolate location would induce God to have pity on the couple, and thus halt the spread of disease. 

This obscure tradition was practiced widely during a cholera epidemic in Poland in 1892, but when Jews from Eastern Europe immigrated to the United States around the turn of the 20th century, just in time for another epidemic (the Spanish flu) they brought this custom with them. There are records of two such weddings in Philadelphia and a third in New York City during the 1918 epidemic, but more may have been conducted elsewhere. 

At the time of Harry and Fanny’s wedding in the fall of 1918, the Spanish flu epidemic was at its peak. In Philadelphia, nearly 700,000 lives had been claimed. Public gatherings were banned while social groups, including synagogue congregations, donated time and supplies. In an atmosphere of desperation, a handful of Jewish couples hoped this tradition from the “old country” might make a difference.

If this seems strange or superstitious to us, it did also to some Jewish onlookers in 1918. The following is an opinion piece that ran in The Jewish Exponent on the Friday following Harry and Fanny’s wedding:

The wedding held in a Jewish cemetery last Sunday for the purpose of staying the ravages of the epidemic was a most deplorable exhibition of benighted superstition. We are told that the custom originated in Russia. It and the participants should have been permitted to remain there. Unfortunately the publicity given to the occurrence will convey to many people that this is a custom sanctioned and encouraged by the Jewish religion. The people who do such things do not know what Judaism means.

By 1918, around one million immigrants had arrived in Philadelphia, and those who stayed in the city primarily lived in tight-knit communities with other immigrants. By the mid-1920s, over two million Eastern European Jewish immigrants had immigrated to the United States, where they encountered pushback to their previously-insular way of life. Surrounded by the patriotism of WWI, pressures to acculturate, and the constant striving towards the American dream, immigrants struggled to balance Jewish and American cultures. The pressure of an epidemic magnified this challenge.

One month later, on November 15, 1918, The Jewish Exponent announced another shvartzse khasene and was well-received by the Jewish community of New York City:

In a Mount Hebron Cemetery Miss Rose Schwartz, No. 369 East Tenth street, stood beside Abraham Lachterman, No. 638 East Eleventh street, the other afternoon, and before them stood rabbi Unger, who performed a marriage ceremony.

The tradition on which the couple acted is one which declares that the only way to stop a plague is to hold a marriage ceremony in a cemetery.

When Miss Schwartz and Lachterman consented to offer themselves to stop the influenza epidemic, the neighbors were so grateful that they provided food, taxicabs, a wedding gown and even the furnishings for a flat. Two thousand persons cheered the courageous pair as they started for the cemetery.

Interestingly, the tradition of the shvartze khasene itself is the product of a different process of acculturation; Hanna Węgrzynek traces the religious and social influences of the black wedding to include elements of Slavic culture, Christian ritual, and Kabbalah. 

At its center, this ritual relies on the Hasidic belief in frequent interaction between the earthly and supernatural realms, particularly surrounding weddings. Brides are believed to be susceptible to both favorable divine intervention and harmful demonic possession, leading to one custom requiring the bride and groom to never be left alone in the week before the wedding. Additionally, one method of attempting to cure young women of disease was to drape her in a wedding gown. 

Marriage plays a central role in Kabbalah which views the world as infused with male and female aspects. When these opposed aspects come together, it is symbolized as a heterosexual marriage. The most well-known example of this is the song Lecha Dodi, sung on Friday nights and meant to invoke Shabbat as the bride of the Jewish people. 

In Eastern Europe, where Jews had migrated after the thirteenth century, these traditions mixed with local Slavic, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian customs, many of which involve cemeteries. One Easter ritual with pagan origins involves placing eggs on gravestones, and before the All Saints’ Day feast, residents of a town would often meet at a cemetery with food to invite departed souls to the festivities. In some areas, Orthodox Christians would hold feasts with hot, steaming food in cemeteries four times a year, often with drinking and dancing. 

The connections between these Kabbalistic beliefs and Slavic, Christian traditions are not straightforward. Instead, they point to an ever-shifting relationship between each Jewish community and their neighbors. Each ritual reveals unconscious influences, deliberate choices, and blurred lines between each group — a foreshadowing of the much more involved interactions that Eastern European Jews would encounter in the United States.  

It is important to note that the shvartze khasene existed alongside other, more distinctly Jewish traditions to ward off disease. For example, many Polish Jews placed signs over their gates saying “Typhus has already reigned here” or “Nobody is inside.” This calls to mind the instruction during the ancient Israelites’ exodus from Egypt to put lamb’s blood on their doorposts so their firstborn son is not killed (Exodus 12:13). It also parallels the Jewish folk tradition of changing the name of a critically ill person in order to confuse the Angel of Death.

Harry and Fanny made a major sacrifice in trying to use their marriage towards a greater good. It may have been the ultimate sacrifice: genealogical research brought up little besides their marriage certificate, suggesting that both Harry and Fanny may have succumbed to the Spanish flu themselves. At the very least, I imagine them saying: “So many people have already died; how could this hurt?” 

All in all, the epidemic finally came to an end by summer 1919 — but how much the black weddings contributed to that is not for me to decide.

The post Black Wedding: Marrying the Spanish Flu Away appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

But neither term captures the multiple cultural influences that shaped the language for more than five centuries of life in the eastern Mediterranean, resulting in a marvelous blend of Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Italian and French. Like Yiddish, Ladino was traditionally written in Hebrew characters and known as Djudezmo and Djudyo, words that mean “Jewish.” Below are a few popular Ladino expressions, with a pronunciation guide at the top.

Ladino Pronunciation Guide

j

as in French “bonjour”
h as in English “hot”
dj as in English “joy”

1. Ijo de ken sos tu? 

?איז’ו די קין סוס טו

Pronunciation: 

EE-jo de ken sos tu
Meaning: You are the child of whom?
How to use it: You meet someone, realize you might know people in common, and begin playing Sephardic Jewish geography with the question: “Ijo de ken sos tu?”

2. Haberes buenos!

!חאביריס בואינוס

Pronunciation:

ha-BEAR-es BWE-nos
Meaning: Good news!
How to use it: This can be used either to announce good news or as a way to ward off bad news.
Sample uses: You aced your exam and tell you parents: “Haberes buenos! I got an A!”
You find out Nona (grandma) broke her hip and, to ward off the bad news, reply, “Haberes buenos!”

3. Dezmazalado de mi!

!דיזמאזאלאדו די מי

Pronunciation:

dez-ma-zal-A-do de MEE
Meaning: Pity me! I’m out of luck.
Sample use: You haven’t texted me in weeks! Dezmazalado de mi!

4. Djente de piron 

ג’ינטי די פירון

Pronunciation:

DJEN-te de pee-ROAN
Meaning: The one percent (i. e. rich folks)
Literal translation: “People of the fork”: owning a fork (and not just a spoon) was once a sign of high-class status.

5. Kome kon gana! 

!קומי קון גאנה

Pronunciation

: KO-may kon GA-na
Meaning: Bon appetit!
Literal translation: “Eat with desire.”

6. Engleneate!

!אינגליניאטי

Pronunciation:

en-glen-AY-a-te
Meaning: Have fun!
Literal translation: Entertain yourself!

7. Hadras i baranas

חאדראס אי באראנאס

Pronunciation:

HAD-ras ee bar-an-AS
Meaning: An outrageously big fuss. Being pretentious and really noisy at the same time.
How to use it: When someone is really making a scene: “Look at all that hadras i baranas!”

8. Bavajadas de benadam 

באב’אז’אדאס די בן אדם

Pronunciation

: ba-va-JAD-as de ben a-DAM
Meaning: Human foibles
Literal translation: Stupidities of mankind
Sample sentence: Water cooler chatter reveals the bavajadas de benadam.

9. Bivas, kreskas, engrandeskas, komo un peshiko en aguas freskas! Amen!

ביב’אס קריסקאס אינגראנדיסקאס קומו און פישיקו אין אגואס פ’ריסקאס אמן

Pronunciation:

BEE-vas, KRES-kas, en-gran-DES-kas, KO-mo un pesh-EE-ko en AG-uas FRES-kas! a-MEN!

Meaning: An elaborate “bless you” after a sneeze (or multiple sneezes)
Literal translation: Live; thrive; grow; like a little fish in fresh water! Amen!

10. Kaminos de leche i miel!

קאמינוס די ליג’י אי מייל

Pronunciation

: Ka-MEE-nos de LE-che ee MEE-el

Meaning: Bon voyage!

Literal meaning: May you follow paths of milk and honey

11. Sano i rezio!

סאנו אי ריזייו

Pronunciation:

SA-no ee REZ-yo
Meaning: Farewell!
Literal meaning: May you be healthy and strong

The post The 11 Best Ladino Expressions and Phrases To Know appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

With all that said, the excellent Holocaust films, the truly must-sees, transcend ratings. They have humanist aspirations, tell stories that need to be told, and do so in the affecting and often brutal ways of high art. You’ll find few clichés in the films below — only power and feeling and nuance. Unlike Life is Beautiful, The Pianist or Steven Spielberg’s inescapable Schindler’s List, these are films you might not know about. But trust us: They are dramas that shouldn’t be missed.

Ida (2013, Polish)

Winner of the 2015 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski’s masterpiece Ida ranks as one of the greatest Holocaust—or otherwise—films of all time. Ida, which takes place in 1962, is the story of Ida, an orphan raised by nuns, who learns that she is, in fact, a Jew. Together with her aunt, her only remaining relative, Ida searches for the truth about her past, leading her, in lush, gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, to realizations better left buried.

The Pawnbroker (1964)

On the strength of Rod Steiger’s earthshaking performance, this Sidney Lumet tour-de-force was the first American film to depict the horrors of the Holocaust as they manifested after the war was over—and still remains perhaps the greatest. Steiger is Sol Nazerman, a former university professor who survived the camps after losing his two children and wife. Years later, Nazerman owns and runs a pawn shop in Harlem, where he has become an abject misanthrope, emotionally numb and ruthlessly unsympathetic—until, finally, he snaps. In the annals of survivor depictions, nothing touches Steiger’s grandest achievement.

Phoenix (2014, German)

German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s modern film noir is an undertaking of breathless beauty and duplicity. Starring Nina Hoss as Nelly, a survivor rendered unrecognizable after facial reconstruction surgery, Phoenix is the story of Nelly’s search for her husband, a lout who may have been the one who betrayed her to the Nazis. Petzold indulges in some of the genre’s well-trod tropes, but his attention to Nelly’s psychology, a survivor plopped back into a world that would prefer to ignore than remember, is more than commendable. And the ending simply devastates.

Son of Saul (2015, Hungarian)

Nothing will be the same after Son of Saul. Hungarian director László Nemes’ debut, the film is a day in the life of Saul Ausländer, a member of the Sonderkommando — a unit of Jews forced to aid in the killing of other Jews — at Auschwitz. Shot mostly over-the-shoulder, or in very-blurry close-up, the film depicts the mundane horrors of Ausländer’s work — salvaging valuables, removing corpses from the gas chambers and scrubbing the floors — with an unflinching chill. Even without the exceptional work of Géza Röhrig as Saul, a first-time actor and poet, this winner of the 2015 Best Foreign Language Film film would be formidable.

1945 (2016, Hungarian)

Ferenc Török’s recent film begins on a summer day in 1945, when an Orthodox Jew and his son get off a train in a tiny Hungarian village. This doesn’t bode well for the villagers, who are worried their community’s deported Jews will come back to reclaim the property and possessions stolen from them.Quiet, subtle, and fair, 1945 is a very different kind of film.

Train of Life (1998, French)

Released a year after Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, this French film approaches the Holocaust in much the same way: as a cocktail of slapstick and tragedy. Whereas Benigni’s film controversially  suggests that optimism trumps Nazism, director Radu Mihaileanu’s Train of Life treats the fictional, hilarious tale of an entire shtetl’s escape from Europe as exactly what it has to be: a complete, utter, devastating farce.

Europa Europa (1990, German)

Based on a true story, this film follows Solomon Perel, a young German Jew who survives the Holocaust by falling in with the Nazis and posing as a non-Jewish translator. Though the film’s desire for verisimilitude renders it silly at times — there are many coincidences, tricks of fate, that test patience — the story of Perel is simply too bizarre and too extraordinary to be missed.

The post Seven Holocaust Films You Should See appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

On the eve of World War II, the European Sephardic community was concentrated in the Balkan countries of Greece, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Its leading centers were in Salonika, Sarajevo, Belgrade and Sofia. The experience of the Balkan Jewish communities during the war varied greatly and depended on the type of regime under which they fell.

The Jewish communities of Serbia and northern Greece, including the 50,000 Jews of Salonika, fell under direct German occupation in April 1941 and bore the full weight and intensity of Nazi repressive measures from dispossession, humiliation, and forced labor to hostage taking, and finally deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau and extermination in March-August 1943.

The Jewish population of southern Greece fell under the jurisdiction of the Italians, who eschewed the enactment of anti-Jewish legislation and resisted whenever possible German efforts to transfer them to Poland, until the surrender of Italy on September 8, 1943 brought the Jews under German control.

Sephardic Jews in Bosnia and Croatia were ruled by a German-created Fascist-Catholic satellite state from April 1941, which subjected them to pogrom-like actions before herding them into local camps where they were murdered side by side with Serbs and Roma (Gypsies).

The Jews of Macedonia and Thrace were controlled by Bulgarian occupation forces, which after rendering them stateless, rounded them up and turned them over to the Germans for deportation.

Finally, the Jews of Bulgaria proper were under the rule of a Nazi ally that subjected them to ruinous anti-Jewish legislation, but ultimately yielded to pressure from Bulgarian parliamentarians, clerics, and intellectuals not to deport them. More than 50,000 Bulgarian Jews were thus saved.

Reprinted with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

The post The Sephardic Experience During the Holocaust appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

When German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously said that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” he meant that there was no way aesthetics—or art—could live up to the barbarism of the Holocaust. Maybe he was right. But here are 10 lesser-known texts that can, at the very least, increase our understanding—and our empathy.

Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld

One of the great Hebrew novels, Badenheim 1939 was beloved writer Appelfeld’s first novel to be published in English in 1980. It revolves around a fictional, mostly Jewish resort town in Austria, in which the Nazis, never explicitly mentioned, are disguised in the abstract as the “Sanitation Department,” a specter that drives the Jewish vacationers to distraction. Appelfeld was a survivor himself — and every word he wrote rings true.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

Yale historian Snyder’s 2010 book explores the messy intersection between Hitler’s Final Solution and Stalin’s vicious ideology that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 14 million people throughout Europe’s “bloodlands”: Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the Baltics. Snyder’s hypothesis is profound, but simple: The Nazis weren’t just the “villains,” and the Soviets weren’t just the “heroes.” Rather, neither regime could have murdered as many as it did without the aiding and abetting of the other. An important history lesson often overlooked.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt

A towering book by a towering figure, theorist and critic, Arendt’s most famous work chronicles Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem. Famous for the coining of the phrase “the banality of evil,” which refers to the moral and emotional detachment Eichmann displayed, this book is so much more: a dense, exploratory treatise on the nature of humanity.

Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel

Lengyel was a surgical assistant in Transylvania when she was deported to Auschwitz; she was able to secure work in an infirmary, a job that ultimately saved her life. This 1946 memoir is an unflinching account of her time in that area, her interactions with Dr. Josef Mengele and her observations of the medical experiments performed on inmates. A deeply uncomfortable read, Lengyel’s memoir is a necessary living, breathing document.

King of the Jews by Leslie Epstein

Leslie Epstein’s greatest novel, this 1979 book gives a fictional account of Chaim Rumkowski, the Polish Jew appointed by the Nazis as the head of the Council of Elders (known as the Judenrat) in the Łódź Ghetto during the occupation of Poland. Rumkowski was seen as a villain, famous for his role in delivering children to the Nazis for extermination.

Ponary Diary, 1941-1943 by Kazimierz Sakowicz

In 1939, Sakowicz, a non-Jewish Polish newspaperman, moved to a cottage in the Lithuanian suburb of Ponary. From his backyard, through the trees, he could see a clearing. In that clearing, from 1941 to 1943, between 50,000 and 60,000 Jews were murdered by Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators. Published in English in 2005, Sakowicz’s diary is the most unflinching record of death you will ever read—and the fact that he isn’t entirely sympathetic makes it all the more difficult.

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn

That this gripping story of memory and tragedy won both the 1996 National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle award should clue you in to how extraordinary this book is. What begins, familiarly, as the story of a young boy learning about the tragic but mysterious fate of his relatives in the Holocaust, ends in a continent-spanning labyrinth, a sad and seductive tale of near mythic proportions.

The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. by George Steiner

Easily the strangest book on this list, literary critic and philosopher Steiner’s experimental 1981 novella chronicles a revised history in which Hitler survives and goes into hiding for 30 years in the Amazon jungle. The novel caused a stir at the time, as Steiner lets Hitler speak for himself: Hitler’s argument that the existence of Israel is due to him, and that Jews should be thankful was, to say the least, a hard pill to swallow.

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski

Introduced to the American public in the early 1960s by Philip Roth, Borowski’s spellbinding short story collection was based on the writer’s two-year incarceration at Auschwitz as a political prisoner. Borowski, who was a non-Jewish Polish journalist, provides a perspective on camp life quite different from the more common survivor narratives.

Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany by Marie Jalowicz Simon

On June 22, 1942, Simon had a choice: submit to the Berlin gestapo and face deportation, or run. She chose the latter. Underground in Berlin is, among other things, a fascinating portrait of the Berliners who helped Marie survive for the three years she spent hiding in plain sight using fake papers and a borrowed identity.

The post 10 Holocaust Books You Should Read appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

Here are some important things to know about this beautiful language that is not well known outside the Sephardic community. Find out how to learn Ladino here.

1- Ladino was once the primary language spoken by Sephardic Jews throughout the Mediterranean.

From the Spanish Inquisition until World War II, Ladino was the primary language spoken by thousands and thousands of Jews throughout the Mediterranean. Ladino no longer is spoken anywhere as a first language, and estimates put speakers with Ladino familiarity at just 200,0000 worldwide.

2-While primarily based on Spanish, Ladino has vocabulary from several other languages.

Ladino, also known as Judeo-Spanish and Judezmo, is essentially 15th-century Spanish, but it also has words mixed in from Portuguese, French, Italian, Arabic, Greek, Turkish and Hebrew.

3.  Ladino was an oral tradition for centuries.

It was first written in Rashi (or solitreo) script, then with Hebrew letters, and now primarily with Latin script.

4.  Ladino is a rich source of Jewish poetry, proverbs, folktales and more.

One collection of folktales we recommend is Folktales of Joha, Jewish Trickster collected by Matilda Koen-Sarano. The nearly 300 stories in this volume were told to Koen-Sarano in their original language of Ladino, and documented over 21 years.

5. Just because you speak Spanish, don’t expect it to be effortless to learn Ladino.

Because Ladino is based in 15th-century medieval Spanish, some vocabulary might seem antiquated and the syntax odd. Certain consonants get flipped (d’s and r’s occasionally), and pronunciations can be strange (an “h” or “j”, which would be silent in modern Spanish, are pronounced in Ladino, for one example).

6. You can watch cartoons in Ladino.

Ora de Despertar

(Time to Wake Up!)- is an animated musical cartoon collection developed by me, Sarah Aroeste, with easy-to-learn words teaching the elementals of Ladino. It is intended for young children, but is a good way for adult Ladino learners to connect easy vocabulary and concepts with dynamic visuals.

7. You can listen to Ladino music on Spotify, iTunes and other major music outlets.

Plus, there are several online radio stations where you can enjoy Ladino music and stories, including:

• 91FM Radio Lev Hamedina: Hosts a Ladino music and story program for Hebrew speakers.
• Radio Nacional de Espana (Spanish Public Radio): Has a Ladino broadcast, Emisión en sefardí.
• Israel Broadcast Authority: Has a daily Ladino newscast, Kan Ladino.

8. There are dozens of excellent documentary films about Ladino.

Here are a few we recommend:

• Las Ultimas Palavras (The Last Words) (2015): Filmmaker Rita Ender embarks on a journey in search of Judeo-Spanish in Turkey. The disappearance of the language becomes a symbol for the growing sense of uprooting among the younger generation.
• Saved by Language (2015): The story of how Moris Albahari, a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo (born 1930), who spoke Ladino/Judeo-Spanish, his mother tongue, survived the Holocaust. Moris used Ladino to communicate with an Italian Colonel who helped him escape to a partisan refuge after he ran away from the train taking Yugoslavian Jews to Nazi death camps.
• El Ultimo Sefardi (The Last Sephardic Jew) (2003): This film follows Eliezer Papo — a lawyer, novelist and itinerant rabbi — on a tour of post-Inquisition diaspora communities. Papo is called the last Sephardic Jew because he can trace his lineage back to Spain, and because he grew up speaking Ladino — which, according to the filmmakers, is the true definition of “Sephardic.”
• The Ladino Ladies’ Club (2015): Nine charming Sephardic women in Bulgaria share memories about their lives and Sephardic traditions in Ladino.

9. Tom Hanks appears in a movie featuring Ladino dialogue.

In Every Time We Say Goodbye (1986), Hanks plays a gentile American soldier who is recuperating in Jerusalem after his bomber gets shot down during World War II. There he falls in love with a Sephardic girl and must navigate the cultural (and linguistic) differences with her Ladino-speaking family.

The post 9 Things to Know About Ladino appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

Though more Israelis have died in wars, the per capita death rate from terrorism in Israel is high, and the threat is acutely felt throughout the country. Security measures are widely in evidence, from guards at the entrances to public facilities to an ingrained national reflex to call attention to unattended bags. Decades of hard-won experience have also burnished Israel’s image as a global leader in counterterrorism. Israel’s national airline, El Al, and its principal international airport are routinely cited as the most secure in the world.

When did terrorism in Israel begin?

According to the Israeli government, Arab terrorism targeting Jews traces back to the 1920s, when a series of riots gripped the land, which was then under British rule — most famously, perhaps, the 1929 Hebron massacre, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 70 Jews. Following Israel’s establishment in 1948, Palestinian guerrilla fighters known as fedayeen mounted cross-border raids that resulted in hundreds of Israeli deaths and prompted a number of reprisal attacks by the Israel Defense Forces in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Terrorism grew more sophisticated in the 1960s, with Palestinians launching a number of attacks on Israeli targets abroad and carrying out deadly bombings at home. In the 1970s, Palestinians successfully pulled off a number of high-profile attacks, including the 1972 murder of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich, Germany, the 1976 hijacking to Uganda’s Entebbe Airport of an Air France plane en route from Tel Aviv to Paris, and the infamous 1974 attack on a school in the northern Israeli town of Maalot that culminated in the deaths of more than two-dozen people, 22 of them children.

In the 1990s, the first suicide bombings were carried out by members of the militant Palestinian group Hamas. According to data from the University of Chicago, 114 such attacks, in which the assailant blows himself (or herself) up, have been carried out in Israel since 1994, resulting in the deaths of 721 people (including the perpetrators).

Who perpetrates terrorist attacks in Israel?

In nearly all cases, terrorist attacks in Israel are carried out by Palestinian extremist groups, though the particular perpetrators have changed over time. Prior to 1967, most terrorist attacks were carried out by loosely organized groups of militants. After 1967, Palestinian terrorism grew more organized, with most of the high-profile attacks carried out by affiliate groups of the Palestine Liberation Organization, founded in 1964 to wage armed struggle against Israel. The first high-profile attacks, in the late 1960s, were carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a secular group responsible for a series of attacks on El Al planes in the late 1960s. A number of splinter groups from the PFLP also executed deadly raids during that period, including the 1972 attack that killed 26 people at Lod Airport (now called Ben Gurion Airport) and the Avivim school bus massacre in 1970 that killed 12. Black September, a group of Palestinian fighters who took their name from the 1970 conflict that resulted in the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan, was behind the 1972 Munich attack. Fatah, the largest PLO faction, carried out the 1978 coastal road massacre, in which 38 Israeli civilians were killed.

As part of the Oslo peace process in 1993, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, in a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and further pledged that “the PLO renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence and will assume responsibility over all PLO elements and personnel in order to assure their compliance, prevent violations and discipline violators.” In the wake of the letter, terrorist violence against Israel was largely carried out by other Palestinian groups, although Israeli leaders have long alleged that Arafat never truly renounced violence and that he continued to incite and direct terrorist actions against Israeli civilians.

Two groups founded in the 1980s became major sources of terrorist violence in the 1990s and beyond and marked a shift from the avowedly secular Palestinian militants of the 1960s and ‘70s to an Islamic religious violence aimed at liberating Muslim lands from Jews. Hamas, which was founded in 1987 as an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, emerged as a major terrorist group after it carried out the first suicide bombings on Israeli targets in the mid-1990s. During the Second Intifada, Hamas was responsible for a number of high-casualty suicide attacks, including the Sbarro restaurant bombing in Jerusalem in 2001 (15 killed), the Dolphinarium disco bombing in Tel Aviv in 2001 (21 killed) and the 2002 bombing of a Passover seder at a Netanya hotel (30 killed).

Another Islamic terrorist group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, founded in 1981, is financially supported by Iran and is linked to Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group active in Lebanon. Islamic Jihad was responsible for the Maxim restaurant suicide bombing in Haifa in 2003 (21 killed) as well as a number of bus bombings. Numerous other smaller Islamic terrorist groups have also carried out deadly attacks on Israeli targets in the last two decades.

Beginning in 2015, Israelis began to face a new form of terrorism perpetrated by so-called “lone wolf” attackers — individuals with no established connection to a recognized terror group. Known informally as the stabbing intifada, the unrest that began in the fall of 2015 featured a number of attacks by people who wielded knives at civilians or rammed vehicles into pedestrians. Some of the attacks were carried out by Hamas cells, but others were perpetrated by individuals with no known terrorist affiliation.

What motivates Palestinian terrorism?

According to many Palestinians and their supporters, violence against Israel is driven principally by opposition to Israeli occupation of lands they believe are Palestinian. While some Palestinians specify that this means the West Bank, others believe terrorism is a legitimate form of resistance to Israel’s sovereignty anywhere in the Middle East. In a 2015 op-ed in the Guardian newspaper, Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian activist currently serving multiple life sentences for murder in an Israeli prison, wrote that the “root causes” of violence in the region is “the denial of Palestinian freedom.” Some Israelis have also endorsed a version of this view, including, in 2016, the mayor of Tel Aviv Ron Huldai.

In a 2008 report to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Special Rapporteur John Dugard wrote of Palestinian terrorism: “While such acts cannot be justified, they must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid or occupation.” In July 2017, the Trump administration’s annual terrorism report asserted that “continued drivers of violence” include, among other things, Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and lost hope in the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state — claims that drew immediate criticism from American Jewish groups.

To many Israelis and their supporters, this is nonsense. Far from being motivated by a desire to end the occupation, Palestinians are, according to this argument, truly driven by a continuing failure to come to terms with the legitimacy of a Jewish state in the Middle East. Many Israelis note, for instance, that violence against Jews predated not only the occupation of the West Bank, which began after the 1967 Six-Day War, but even prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948. They further note that Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the dismantling of all settlements there and the relocation of thousands of Israeli settlers did not bring an end to violence emerging from the coastal territory and aimed at Israeli population centers. These Israelis further argue that violence against Israeli civilians is not intended to bring about peaceful coexistence, citing as evidence Hamas’ longstanding refusal to recognize Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist.

Israeli leaders have routinely placed blame for terrorist activity on the Palestinian leadership, which it accuses of inciting violence against civilians by praising terrorists and demonizing Israelis in official media and educational materials. In 2016, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that terrorist attacks “don’t come because of [Palestinian] despair and the frustration over the inability to build. They come because of [Palestinian] despair and the frustration over inability to destroy.”

What has Israel done to protect itself?

Over the years, Israel has developed a broad range of counterterrorism strategies that are often regarded as the best in the world. Following the spate of airplane hijackings in the late 1960s, Israel implemented stringent aviation security protocols that successfully brought the practice to a halt. Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport employs multiple rings of security, beginning with perimeter inspections of entering vehicles by armed guards and including sophisticated screening technologies for people and baggage. Security personnel attempt to identify potential attackers for more extensive screening based on observed behavior or how they respond in an interview with a security officer, something to which all passengers are subjected. Though Israeli officials tend not to discuss such security measures, the process is widely understood to focus greater scrutiny on Arab and Muslim passengers, a practice that has drawn protests from civil rights groups. Similar methods are employed by El Al security personnel at airports around the world.

Israel’s counterterrorism strategy has both offensive and defensive components. Israeli intelligence and security agencies continually act to undermine terrorist groups, remove key terrorist figures through arrests and targeted killings, and foil emerging plots. Defensively, Israel has employed a number of controversial — some say counterproductive — measures, including the use of traffic checkpoints and the construction of a miles-long security barrier in the West Bank. On the home front, the Iron Dome missile defense system has proven extremely effective at taking out rockets fired at Israeli population centers. Meanwhile, Israel has successfully inculcated a culture of preparedness and caution that extends into virtually every aspect of civilian life. Nearly every public gathering place is protected by a guard or a metal detector — and often both. Bomb squads are routinely summoned when unattended items are spotted — known in Hebrew as a “hefetz hashud,” or suspicious object.

Are acts of terror ever committed by Jews?

Yes. Prior to Israel’s establishment, a number of Jewish militias carried out attacks that resulted in civilian deaths. Though much of the violence was targeted at British military personnel, many civilians died in those attacks. Palestinian Arabs were also directly targeted in reprisal attacks.

Among the most notorious acts of Jewish terrorism in pre-state Israel was the bombing in 1946 of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where British authorities then ruling the area had their headquarters. Dozens were killed and over 100 injured in the attack, which was carried out by the Irgun, a paramilitary group that split from the larger Haganah. In 1948, in the weeks leading up to Israel’s establishment and the outbreak of the War of Independence, the Irgun participated in the infamous Deir Yassin massacre, in which over 100 Palestinians were killed in an Arab village near Jerusalem. The Lehi (sometimes known as the Stern Gang), which also participated in the Deir Yassin killings, was responsible for a number of attacks in the 1940s that killed civilians as well as British soldiers.

In the decades since Israel’s establishment, a number of Jewish groups, many of them associated with Israel’s settler movement, have committed acts of violence against Palestinians. The most deadly attack came in 1994, when American-born physician Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Muslim worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, killing 29 people before being beaten to death. Goldstein was a member of Kach, a movement associated with the American-born Israeli rabbi Meir Kahane who was assassinated in New York in 1990. Both Kach and its offshoot Kahane Chai (“Kahane Lives”) are designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department. Kach was officially outlawed in Israel in 1994, but the group still has supporters. In 2005, an Israeli army deserter believed to be a Kach supporter opened fire on a bus carrying Arab Israelis, killing four.

Israeli settlers have also been behind the so-called “price tag” attacks, which began in the early 2000s and were so named because they aimed to exact a price for Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians. Many of these attacks were acts of vandalism or harassment; however they included fatal attacks as well. In 2014, Israeli settlers abducted and murdered a Palestinian teenager, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, apparently in response to the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers some weeks earlier. That same year, the State Department mentioned price tag attacks in its annual terrorism report.  In 2015, three Palestinians, including an 18-month-old boy, were killed in the village of Duma when their home was firebombed by Jewish settlers.

Does terrorism make Israel risky for tourists?

Not really. Though terrorist attacks dominate the news, and foreign governments will occasionally warn their citizens about traveling to Israel at times of unrest, statistically the likelihood of being killed or injured in a terrorist attack in Israel remains small. According to the Israeli government, only 122 foreigners have been killed in attacks in Israel, a tiny fraction of the millions of tourists who typically visit Israel each year. Even in peaceful periods, foreign travel warnings will typically specify particular areas to avoid — among them the Gaza Strip and adjacent areas, as well as certain areas of the West Bank and along Israel’s northern border with Syria and Lebanon. Travel warnings also note the possibility of random violence and urge heightened awareness and the avoidance of crowds.

A few high-profile deaths have drawn attention to the dangers for tourists. In 2016, American military veteran Taylor Force died in a stabbing attack in Tel Aviv while in Israel with a study group from Vanderbilt University. In 2002, a bombing at a Hebrew University cafeteria in Jerusalem resulted in the deaths of nine individuals, including several American students. The 1995 death of American Alisa Flatow in a bus bombing led to a lawsuit by her family that resulted in a landmark $248 million dollar judgement against the government of Iran, which an American federal judge ruled was complicit in Flatow’s death. In 2017, the parents of an American killed in 1996 sued two Chicago-based Palestinian groups in an effort to recover a $156 million judgement against a number of Palestinian organizations.

The post Terrorism in Israel: Questions and Answers appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

Why is the Temple Mount holy to Jews?

The Temple Mount, known in Hebrew as Har Habayit, is traditionally said to be the site where Abraham demonstrated his devotion to God by taking his son Isaac to be sacrificed. The mount is also the site of both ancient Jewish temples. The first, built by King Solomon, was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The second was built in the sixth century BCE and stood for nearly 600 years before it was destroyed and the Jewish people exiled in 70 CE by the Roman Empire. Jews continue to mourn the destruction on the fast day of Tisha B’Av. According to Jewish tradition, a third temple will be built on the site during the messianic age.

Why is the Temple Mount holy to Muslims?

The Temple Mount is known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) and, according to Islamic tradition, is the site of Muhammad’s ascent to heaven in the seventh century. Today, the mount is home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, and the gold-topped Dome of the Rock, one of the most recognized symbols of Jerusalem.

Are Jews permitted to visit the mount?

Yes. However, traditional Jewish law has been understood to bar entry to the site. Jewish tradition regards entry to the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctum of the temple where God’s presence dwells, as strictly forbidden, and as a result Jews traditionally did not enter the Temple Mount at all for fear of treading on sacred ground. (The exact location of the Holy of Holies is not known.) The Western Wall, the last standing retaining wall of the Temple Mount, is the closest to the mount that Jews are traditionally permitted to pray. However, Jews do visit the Temple Mount regularly.

Who controls the Temple Mount?

Since Israeli forces regained control of the Old City of Jerusalem during the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel has extended its sovereignty over the site, though most of the world regards Israeli authority in all of eastern Jerusalem to be illegitimate. Day-to-day authority over the site rests with the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf. A waqf is a charitable trust recognized by Islamic law. Jordan, which had controlled eastern Jerusalem and the Islamic holy sites prior to 1967, continued to exercise a special guardianship over the mount, an arrangement later codified in the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty, under which Israel “respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim Holy shrines in Jerusalem.” Overall security for the site, including entry to visitors and worshippers, rests with Israeli security forces.

What is Israel’s policy on access to the mount?

The Temple Mount may be accessed by anyone, but entry to the Dome of the Rock is restricted to Muslims. Though there are multiple gates to access the site, non-Muslims must enter through the Mughrabi Gate, located near the Western Wall plaza. Israeli security controls the entry points. At moments of elevated tensions, Israel has occasionally closed the site to visitors, including Muslim worshippers.

Why is the site a flashpoint for violence?

The religious sensitivities surrounding the Temple Mount have repeatedly made the site a flashpoint for violence and unrest. Palestinians have long suspected that Israel intends to alter the status quo established for the site following the 1967 war, and some Palestinian leaders have even claimed that the Jewish temple never stood there. In 2015, rumors that Israel was preparing to impose a change at the site was said to be a contributing factor to the so-called “stabbing intifada,” during which a number of knife attacks were perpetrated against Israeli civilians in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the country. In September 2015, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said on Palestinian television that Israelis would not be permitted to “defile” the Al Aqsa Mosque with their “filthy feet.” Israel has emphatically denied that it wants to change current arrangements at the site; however several Israeli leaders have made symbolic shows of asserting Israeli sovereignty there and there have been plots by Jewish fringe groups to blow up the Dome of the Rock. In September 2000, then opposition leader Ariel Sharon undertook a visit to the site under heavy guard, sparking riots that would eventually blossom into the Second Intifada. Tensions are frequently elevated during Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day) on which Jews celebrate the 1967 recapture of the Western Wall and during the Muslim holiday of Ramadan.

Why are some Israeli Jews pushing for greater access to the site?

Efforts to secure Jewish prayer rights

at the Temple Mount have gained traction in recent years,  despite the mainstream rabbinic opinion that Jews should not set foot there. A number of rabbis have issued contrary rulings, saying that visitation and prayer should be permitted, and by some estimates the number of Jewish visitors has vastly increased. Among the most prominent activists is Yehuda Glick, an American-born rabbi and current member of the Israeli Knesset. Glick is a leading figure in efforts to secure Jewish prayer rights on the mount, framing his campaign in the language of civil rights. In 2014, he survived an assassination attempt by a suspected member of Islamic Jihad.

The post What Is the Temple Mount? appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

• Those who make this case include Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, and David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard.
• A search for “Jews” and “slave trade” on YouTube pulls up more than 50,000 videos, most posted by the Nation of Islam, Duke and their supporters.
• Mainstream scholars for the most part do not accept their conclusions and see the charges as essentially anti-Semitic.

Did Jews really own slaves?

Yes. Jacob Rader Marcus, a historian and Reform rabbi, wrote in his four-volume history of Americans Jews that over 75 percent of Jewish families in Charleston, South Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; and Savannah, Georgia, owned slaves, and nearly 40 percent of Jewish households across the country did. The Jewish population in these cities was quite small, however, so the total number of slaves they owned represented just a small fraction of the total slave population; Eli Faber, a historian at New York City’s John Jay College reported that in 1790, Charleston’s Jews owned a total of 93 slaves, and that “perhaps six Jewish families” lived in Savannah in 1771.

A number of wealthy Jews were also involved in the slave trade in the Americas, some as shipowners who imported slaves and others as agents who resold them. In the United States, Isaac Da Costa of Charleston, David Franks of Philadelphia and Aaron Lopez of Newport, Rhode Island, are among the early American Jews who were prominent in the importation and sale of African slaves. In addition, some Jews were involved in the trade in various European Caribbean colonies. Alexandre Lindo, a French-born Jew who became a wealthy merchant in Jamaica in the late 18th century, was a major seller of slaves on the island.

Did Jews dominate the slave trade?

Not according to scholars that have closely examined the question. Several studies of the Jewish role in the slave trade were conducted in the 1990s. One of them, by John Jay’s Faber, compared available data on Jewish slave ownership and trading activity in British territories in the 18th century to that of the wider population. Faber concludes that the claim of Jewish domination is false and that the Jewish role in slavery was “exceedingly limited.” According to Faber, British Jews were always in the minority of investors in slaving operations  and were not known to have been among the primary owners of slave fleets. Faber found that, with few exceptions, Jews were minor figures in brokering the sale of slaves upon their arrival in the Americas, and given the urban-dwelling propensity of most American Jews, few accumulated large rural properties and plantations where slave labor was most concentrated. According to Faber, Jews were more likely than non-Jews to own slaves, but on average they owned fewer of them.

Other studies, by Harold Brackman and Saul Friedman, reached similar conclusions. In a 1994 article in the New York Review of Books, David Brion Davis, an emeritus professor of history at Yale University and author of an award-winning trilogy of books about slavery, noted that Jews were one of countless religious and ethnic groups around the world to participate in the slave trade:

The participants in the Atlantic slave system included Arabs, Berbers, scores of African ethnic groups, Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutch, Jews, Germans, Swedes, French, English, Danes, white Americans, Native Americans, and even thousands of New World blacks who had been emancipated or were descended from freed slaves but who then became slaveholding farmers or planters themselves.

Davis went on to note that in the American South in 1830 there were “120 Jews among the 45,000 slaveholders owning twenty or more slaves and only twenty Jews among the 12,000 slaveholders owning fifty or more slaves.”

What’s the origin of the Jewish domination claim?

The claim of Jewish domination first came to wide attention with the Nation of Islam’s 1991 book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One. (Two other volumes would follow, addressing different aspects of black-Jewish relations.) The heavily footnoted and seemingly scholarly book, which lists no individual author and was self-published by the Nation of Islam, purports to present “irrefutable evidence” that Jews owned slaves “disproportionately more than any other ethnic or religious group in New World history.” The book makes a point of basing its findings on Jewish sources, including Encyclopaedia Judaica and multiple works by Marcus, though it includes no data on non-Jewish slave owners and traders from which to establish whether the Jewish role was in fact disproportionate. It also routinely ignores claims from the Jewish sources it relies on that undermine its thesis. (Marcus, for example, asserts that Jews “were always on the periphery” of the slave trade and that “sales of all Jewish traders lumped together did not equal that of the one Gentile firm dominant in the business” — an observation The Secret Relationship ignores.)

Nonetheless, the notion of Jewish domination of slaving was embraced by, among others, David Duke, who has promoted it on Twitter and on his website, and by the City College of New York professor Leonard Jeffries, whose 1991 speech echoing the claim of Jewish domination provoked a public controversy that led to his ouster as chair of the college’s black studies department. (A federal judge later reinstated him.) Tony Martin, a tenured professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College drew criticism in 1993 for assigning The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews in his courses. Soon after, Martin published a book entitled The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront. Although the book was condemned by Wellesley’s president and many of Martin’s colleagues, Martin remained on the faculty until his retirement in 2007.

More recently, Jackie Walker, a British activist and major supporter of Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, drew criticism in 2016 for claiming in a Facebook post that Jews were the “chief financiers” of the African slave trade. Walker, who also made other public comments offensive to Jews, was briefly suspended from the party because of her claim, but remained unapologetic and was reinstated within a month. (She was later suspended again for publicly bemoaning Jewish centrality in Holocaust commemorations.)

Is there any merit to the book’s claim?

Mainstream scholars have on the whole rejected it. In addition to the study by Faber cited above, refutations have been published by Davis, the Yale professor mentioned above, and Ralph Austen, an emeritus professor of African history at the University of Chicago. Winthrop D. Jordan, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specialized in slavery, wrote that the book employed shoddy scholarly methods and cherry-picked information, ignoring evidence that modified or countered its pre-ordained conclusion. Henry Louis Gates, director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University  called the Nation of Islam’s book “one of the most sophisticated instances of hate literature yet compiled,” and charged that it “massively misrepresents the historical record.”

Is it anti-Semitic to make this claim?

Mainstream scholars and Jewish leaders generally see this claim as anti-Semitic. The Anti-Defamation League, the largest Jewish defense organization, on its website includes  “the false claim that Jews controlled the Atlantic slave trade” in its description of contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism.

As Yale’s Davis noted in his 1994 article, the claim is similar to numerous other historical efforts to blame Jews for a host of problems and atrocities.

Jews, partly because of their remarkable success in a variety of hostile environments, have long been feared as the power behind otherwise inexplicable evils. For many centuries they were the only non-Christian minority in nations dedicated to the Christianization and thus the salvation of the world. Signifying an antithetical Other, individual Jews were homogenized and reified as a “race”—a race responsible for crucifying the Savior, for resisting the dissemination of God’s word, for manipulating kings and world markets, for drinking the blood of Christian children, and, in modern times, for spreading the evils of both capitalism and communistic revolution.

According to Davis, much of the historical evidence that scholars have relied on to document Jewish involvement in the slave trade is itself anti-Semitic, “biased by deliberate Spanish efforts to blame Jewish refugees for fostering Dutch commercial expansion at the expense of Spain.”

“Given this long history of conspiratorial fantasy and collective scapegoating, a selective search for Jewish slave traders becomes inherently anti-Semitic unless one keeps in view the larger context and the very marginal place of Jews in the history of the overall system,” he continued.

The post Where the False Claim That Jews Controlled the Slave Trade Comes From appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

Though the precise characteristics of a pogrom vary widely depending on the specific incidents, a pogrom is generally considered to be a violent attack against a group based on their ethnic identity, and is mostly used to refer to attacks against Jews in 19th and 20th-century Europe.

Where did pogroms originate?

Most of the original pogroms took place in an area that became known as the Pale of Settlement, a territory the Russian Empire acquired  between 1791–1835. The Russian government forbade its new Jewish subjects from settling in Russian territory outside the Pale of Settlement, an area that included parts of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova and Poland. Although an 1821 attack in Odessa is sometimes considered to be the first pogrom in the Russian Empire, most historians cite 1881 incidents beginning in Elizavetgrad (in present-day Ukraine) as the beginning of the Russian pogrom phenomenon. The Elizavetgrad violence spread rapidly throughout seven provinces in southern Russia and Ukraine, where peasant attackers looted Jewish stores and homes, destroyed property, and raped women. Many individuals were beaten and/or murdered in these pogroms. In 1881 pogroms also occurred in Kiev and Odessa among a hundred other locations. The first Jewish self-defense organizations, initiated by students at Novorossiysk University in Odessa, began to form at this time.

Did the Russian government support pogroms?

Historians disagree about the degree to which the Russian government may have been involved in coordinating these attacks; some argue that it was not involved and some that it must have been. Either way, official response was often slow. In some cases only after days of violence did the police and military intervene to restore order, and they sometimes joined the violent mobs.

What factors led to the pogroms?

The main inspiration for these vicious attacks was the ideology of anti-Semitism, which blamed Jews for weakened economic conditions and political instability, in addition to the claim that Jews murdered Jesus and  the blood libel myth that Jews murdered Christian babies and baked their blood into matzah. It was also rumored that Jews were connected to the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II by members of the Narodnaya Volya socialist movement. During the 1880s, the Russian government enacted anti-Jewish legislation limiting the number of Jews who could attend secondary schools and universities and preventing Jewish law school graduates from joining the bar. In 1882 Czar Alexander III (Alexander II’s son and successor) authorized the “May Laws,” which restricted where Jews could settle, forbade non-Jews from issuing mortgages to Jews and prohibited Jews from conducting business on Sundays.

How did Jews respond to pogroms?

Even as the incidence of pogroms slowly lessened in the late 1880s, mostly due to outcry from the West, Jews sought refuge in Western Europe and the United States, in addition to the land of Israel, which was then under Ottoman rule. Pogroms also inspired many Jews to become politically active, joining organizations such as the General Jewish Labor Bund, Bolshevik groups and self-defense leagues. Some Russian Jews found hope in Zionism. The pogroms also spurred American Jews to organize on behalf of their Russian brethren, and was cited as a factor in the establishment of the American Jewish Committee.

What were some of the worst pogroms in history?

Pogroms continued to occur in the early 20th century. Particularly violent were the pogroms from 1903 to 1906. The horrific 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, in what is now Moldova, killed dozens of Jews and resulted in the destruction of hundreds of homes and business, prompting tens of thousands of Russian Jews to flee. The Zionist poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik wrote his famous poem, “City of Slaughter,” in response to the Kishinev pogrom. The 1905 pogrom in Odessa left about 2,500 Jews dead. In 1919 Cossacks (paramilitary fighters who had been absorbed into the Russian military) led a pogrom in Kiev in which they killed 14 people, and injured and raped others.

Did pogroms occur outside Russia?

Street violence against Jews was common in Nazi Germany, and on Nov. 9–10, 1938, the wave of violence known as Kristallnacht was instigated by the Nazi Party. Street violence against Jews continued throughout World War II. In many areas under German occupation, Nazi officials and soldiers supported and encouraged pogroms. After World War II, pogroms continued in Europe. A pogrom occurred in 1946 in Kielce, Poland, against Jewish Holocaust survivors who returned to the town, leaving 42 dead. These pogroms further motivated the already devastated Jewish population to seek refuge outside of Europe.

Is the term “pogrom” still in use today?

The term “pogrom” is still in use describing contemporary events. In 1991 the Jewish media referred to the Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn as a pogrom, and in 2008 Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert used the term to describe Jewish settlers‘ attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron. There is no consensus as to the exact defining characteristics of a pogrom, but the term still tends to refer to coordinated street violence against Jews and sometimes other ethnic groups.

The post What Were Pogroms? appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

The First Aliyah brings an estimated 25,000-35,000 immigrants to Palestine, the majority of them fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms in Eastern Europe.

1894: Dreyfus Affair

French Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus is wrongly convicted of espionage. The case has a galvanizing effect on the development of Zionism by underscoring the precariousness of Jewish life in Europe.

1896: Herzl’s “The Jewish State”

Theodor Herzl

, an Austro-Hungarian journalist who covered the Dreyfus trial as a correspondent, publishes Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”), in which he proposes the creation of a Jewish state as the solution to anti-Semitism.

Aug. 29, 1897: First Zionist Congress

Herzl convenes the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland.

April 19, 1903: Kishinev Pogrom

The Kishinev Pogrom in the Russian Empire, in what is now Moldova, kills dozens of Jews and results in the destruction of hundreds of homes and business, prompting tens of thousands of Russian Jews to flee to Palestine.

April 11, 1909: Tel Aviv Founded

Tel Aviv, the first modern Jewish city, is founded on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

1910: First Modern Hebrew Dictionary Published

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda

begins publishing the first Hebrew dictionary, hastening the revival of the ancient language.

Nov. 2, 1917: Balfour Declaration

Britain issues the Balfour Declaration, endorsing the establishment of a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people.

Oct. 30, 1918: World War I Ends

The Armistice of Mudros ends World War I in the Middle East and begins the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, which had occupied Palestine since the 16th century.

June 1920: Haganah Founded

The Haganah is founded as an independent defense force for Jews in Palestine.

July 24, 1922: British Mandate Starts

The League of Nations adopts the Mandate for Palestine, granting Britain temporary authority over the territory.

Aug. 24, 1929: Hebron Massacre

Palestinian Arabs kill dozens of Jews and wound scores more in what will come to be known as the Hebron Massacre.

JTA ARCHIVE: At Least 66 Jews Dead in Saturday’s Palestine Warfare

1929: Fifth Aliyah Begins

The Fifth Aliyah begins, bringing over 200,000 Jews mainly from central and eastern Europe to pre-state Israel over the course of the decade leading up to World War II. Driven in large part by the Nazi rise to power in Germany in the early 1930s, the large numbers of new arrivals exacerbate tensions between Jews and Arabs.

1936: Arab Revolt

Palestinian Arabs revolt against British rule, demanding Arab independence and the end of Jewish immigration.

JTA ARCHIVE: Arab Strike Partially Halts Palestine’s Activities

May 23, 1939: The White Paper

The British House of Commons approves the White Paper of 1939, which severely restricts Jewish immigration to Palestine at precisely the moment when the Nazi rise to power is prompting growing numbers of European Jews to seek refuge there.

May 15, 1941 : Palmach Created

The Haganah creates an elite fighting force called the Palmach to protect the local Jewish community.

Nov. 29, 1947: UN Partition Plan

The United Nations votes to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. Zionist leaders agree to the plan, but the leaders of several Arab countries and of the Palestinian Arab community reject it, leading to intercommunal clashes that ultimately develop into a full-blown civil war.

JTA ARCHIVE: UN Decision Prompts Celebrations in Jewish DP Camps Throughout Germany

December 1947: Arab Siege of Jerusalem Begins

Anger over the partition vote prompts rioting in Jerusalem that claims more than a dozen lives. The fighting marks the beginning of the Arab siege of Jerusalem, which seeks to cut off the 100,000 Jewish residents of the city from the rest of the country.

JTA ARCHIVE: Zionist Political Body Hopes Arabs Accept Friendship Offer

April 9, 1948: Deir Yassin

More than 100 Arabs, including women and children, are killed by Jewish fighters in the village of Deir Yassin.

May 14, 1948: State of Israel Established

David Ben-Gurion proclaims the establishment of Israel in a ceremony in Tel Aviv on the day the British officially end their rule in Palestine. The following day, Israel is invaded by the armies of five Arab states, beginning the War of Independence.

JTA Archive: Jews Throughout US Celebrate Proclamation of State

Feb. 24, 1949: Armistice with Egypt

An armistice agreement is signed between Israel and Egypt, formally ending hostilities. Israel signs similar agreements with Jordan, Lebanon and Syria in the months to come.

May 11, 1949: Israel Admitted to UN

Israel is admitted as a member state of the United Nations following a vote of the General Assembly.

June 1949: Major Immigration Waves Begin

Israel launches Operation Magic Carpet, which brings tens of thousands of Yemenite Jews to the Jewish state. Hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews will eventually resettle in the Jewish state, driven by mounting persecution and expulsion prompted by Israel’s establishment. More than two-thirds of Jewish displaced persons in Europe also arrive in the Jewish state between 1948 and 1951.

JTA ARCHIVE: First Stage of Airlift Flying Yemenite Jews to Israel Completed

Oct. 29, 1956: Suez Crisis

Israel invades Egypt as part of a secret pact with France and Britain, prompting intense international criticism that eventually leads the three nations to withdraw.

1962: Dimona Nuclear Reactor

Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona begins operations. Israel has never formally acknowledged that the reactor produces weapons materials, but the country is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons capacity.

June 1, 1962: Eichmann Execution

Adolf Eichmann is executed after having been found guilty by an Israeli court of crimes against humanity. The trial marks a turning point in Israeli discussion of the Holocaust and prompts many Holocaust survivors to speak of their wartime experiences for the first time.

JTA ARCHIVE: Eichmann Hanged; Plea for Clemency Denied

June 2, 1964: PLO Founded

The Palestine Liberation Organization is founded to “mobilize the Palestinian people to recover their usurped homeland.”

JTA ARCHIVE: “Palestine Liberation Organization” Established by Arab Refugees

June 5, 1967: Six Day War

The Six Day War begins. In the course of the war, in which the Jewish state’s survival is threatened by forces of five Arab armies, Israel vastly expands the territory under its control, seizing the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. Israel also reunifies Jerusalem after capturing the city’s eastern half and the West Bank from Jordan.

JTA ARCHIVE: Israeli Forces Destroy Arab Air Might, Rout Their Armies, Liberate Old City and Gaza Strip

Sept. 1, 1967: Khartoum Resolution

The Arab League issues the Khartoum Resolution with its famous “three no’s”: no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel and no recognition of Israel.

September, 1967: First West Bank Settlement

Construction begins in Kfar Etzion, an Israeli community in the West Bank destroyed in the 1948 war and re-established following the Six Day War. The construction sets off decades of Israeli settlement building in the territory that most of the world considers illegal.

Nov. 22, 1967: UN Resolution 242

In a unanimous vote, the U.N. Security Council adopts resolution 242, calling for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied during the Six Day War and respect for the rights of all states to live in peace and security. That formula — land for peace — will form the basis of Arab-Israeli peacemaking efforts for decades.

Sept. 5, 1972: Terror at Munich Olympics

During the Summer Olympics in Munich, Palestinian gunmen sneak into apartments housing 11 members of the Israeli team, taking them hostage and eventually killing them during a failed rescue operation.

JTA ARCHIVE: 80,000 from 120 Nations Pay Homage to 11 Slain Israeli Athletes

Oct. 6, 1973: Yom Kippur War Begins

The Yom Kippur War begins when a coalition of Arab states launches a surprise attack on Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.

JTA ARCHIVE: Eban Says Israel’s Casualties Heavy

Nov. 10, 1975: UN Resolution 3379

The United Nations General Assembly adopts resolution 3379 declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”

JTA ARCHIVE: Reform Leaders “Say Kaddish” for “Moral Collapse” of the UN

July 4, 1976: Entebbe Rescue Operation

Israeli commandos mount a successful rescue operation at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, freeing over 100 hostages taken after the hijacking of an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris.

JTA ARCHIVE: How the Rescue Took Place

May 17, 1977: Likud “Upheaval”

The right-wing Likud party, led by Menachem Begin, wins parliamentary elections in a landslide, ending decades of left-wing domination of Israeli politics in an event that comes to be known as “the upheaval.”

JTA ARCHIVE: West Bank Mayors React to Likud Victory

Nov. 19, 1977: Sadat Addresses Knesset

Egypt’s Anwar Sadat becomes the first Arab leader to visit Israel, meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and addressing lawmakers in the Knesset.

JTA ARCHIVE: Sadat Says Egypt Ready for Peace

Sept. 17, 1978: Camp David Accords

Israel and Egypt sign the Camp David Accords after days of negotiations brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The agreement leads to awarding of the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and to the 1979 signing of Israel’s first peace treaty with an Arab state.

June 6, 1982 — Lebanon War Begins

Israel invades southern Lebanon in an effort to stop attacks on civilians in northern Israel, resulting in the expulsion of the Palestinian Liberation Organization from Lebanon.

Sept. 16, 1982 — Sabra and Shatila Massacre

Christian Phalangists begin massacring hundreds of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon in what becomes known as the Sabra and Shatila massacre. An Israeli governmental commission will later find Defense Minister Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible for the killings.

JTA ARCHIVE: Cabinet Rejects Accusations that Israel Was Responsible for Massacre of Palestinians in Beirut

Nov. 21, 1984: Operation Moses

Israel launches Operation Moses, the covert evacuation of thousands of Ethiopian Jewish refugees from Sudan.

Dec. 9, 1987: Intifada Begins

Protests erupt in a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, setting off the violent uprising that comes to be known as the First Palestinian Intifada.

JTA ARCHIVE: Violence in Gaza Leads to Stormy Debate Over Territory’s Status

Jan. 18, 1991: Scud Missile Attacks

Iraq launches the first of dozens of missiles at Israeli in response to U.S. bombardment during the Persian Gulf War. Several dozen Israelis die in the attacks, the majority from heart attacks and suffocation due to difficulties managing gas masks.

JTA ARCHIVE: New Israeli Line for Reversing Tourism Slump is “Come Anyway”

May 24, 1991: Operation Solomon

Israel launches Operation Solomon to transport over 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel over the course of just 36 hours.

JTA ARCHIVE: For Veteran Israelis, Excitement; For Immigrants, Joy and Confusion

Oct. 30, 1991: Madrid Peace Conference

The Madrid conference opens in an effort to kickstart Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

Dec. 16, 1991 — UN Rescinds Resolution 3379

The United Nations rescinds its 1975 declaration equating Zionism with racism.

Dec. 26, 1991: Soviet Union Breakup

The Soviet Union is dissolved, prompting a massive wave of Jewish immigration to Israel from Russia and the former Soviet republics that will forever alter the country’s demographics.

JTA ARCHIVE: Immigrant Influx Poses Challenge for Israel’s Universities

Sept. 13, 1993: Oslo Accords

Israel and the Palestinians sign the first Oslo Accord at the White House, creating a framework for the peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The agreement provides for the creation of an interim Palestinian self-governing authority and for the withdrawal of Israeli soldiers from certain Palestinian territories.

Feb. 25, 1994: Baruch Goldstein Massacre

In a rare act of Jewish terrorism aimed at Arab civilians, Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein opens fire at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, killing 29 Muslims at prayer. Goldstein is beaten to death at the scene by survivors.

JTA ARCHIVE: Murders at Hebron Mosque Prompt Violence, Shame, Shock and Sorrow

Oct. 14, 1994: Peres-Rabin-Arafat Nobel Peace Prize

The Norwegian Nobel Committee announces it will award the 1994 Peace Prize jointly to Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Oct. 26, 1994: Jordan Peace Treaty

Israel and Jordan sign a peace treaty.

JTA ARCHIVE: Israel-Jordan Treaty Guarantees Normalization Between the Two Nations

Nov. 4, 1995: Rabin Assassination

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin

is assassinated in Tel Aviv by an Israeli ultra-nationalist following an address at a peace rally. Shimon Peres takes over as prime minister and calls for early elections.

JTA ARCHIVE: Rabin’s Death Leads US Jews to Reflect on Impact of Rhetoric

Feb. 25, 1996: Suicide Bombing Wave Begins

A Palestinian suicide bomber blows up the Number 18 bus in central Jerusalem, killing 26 people. The same bus line is attacked again on March 3, resulting in 19 deaths. Combined with a third suicide attack in central Tel Aviv, the bombings prompt a severe military crackdown by Israel and erode public faith in the peace process.

JTA ARCHIVE: Stunned by Wave of Terror, Jerusalemites Question Peace

May 29, 1996: Netanyahu Victory

Benjamin Netanyahu narrowly wins the premiership over Shimon Peres, who held a commanding lead in the polls prior to a spate of deadly terrorist attacks in February and March.

Feb. 4, 1997: IDF Helicopter Disaster

Two Israeli helicopters collide in the air over southern Lebanon, killing 73 Israeli soldiers in the worst air disaster in the country’s history.

JTA ARCHIVE: Gripped by Grief, Israelis Mourn Loss of “So Many Boys”

May 25, 2000: Lebanon Withdrawal

Israel completes the withdrawal of its troops from southern Lebanon, where it had maintained a security zone since 1985.

July 25, 2000: Barak-Arafat Peace Talks End

Two weeks of negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at Camp David end without a peace agreement.

JTA ARCHIVE: Israel Braces for Turmoil After Camp David Failure

Sept. 28, 2000: Second Intifada Begins

Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon visits the Temple Mount in Jerusalem amid heavy security, sparking riots and protests that will eventually become known as the Second Intifada.

JTA ARCHIVE: As Israeli Arabs Join Riots, Many Wonder if Nation Can Heal

Oct. 17, 2001: Tourism Minister Assassinated

Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze’evi is assassinated by Palestinian terrorists at a Jerusalem hotel.

March 28, 2002: Arab League Peace Proposal

The Arab League, meeting in Beirut, unanimously adopts a peace initiative calling for Israeli withdrawal from Arab territories, a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem and the establishment of a Palestinian state in exchange for recognition of Israel and full normalization of relations.

March 29, 2002 : Operation Defensive Shield

Israel launches Operation Defensive Shield, a large-scale military incursion into the West Bank, and places Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat under siege in his compound in Ramallah.

June 23, 2002: Security Barrier Planned

Israel approves the first phase of a West Bank security barrier. Palestinians describe it as an “apartheid wall” and a land grab, but Israel insists it’s a necessary and effective counterterrorism measure.

Aug. 15, 2005: Gaza Withdrawal

Israel commences the evacuation of all Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip and the unilateral withdrawal from the coastal enclave.

JTA ARCHIVE: Is Gaza Part of the Land of Israel? It Depends Who You Ask.

July 12, 2006: Second Lebanon War Begins

The Second Lebanon War begins after Hezbollah operatives launch a cross-border attack, killing three Israeli soldiers and abducting two others.

June 10, 2007: Hamas Controls Gaza

The long-simmering power struggle between the militant group Hamas and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction breaks out into open battle in Gaza. The five days of fighting end with Abbas dissolving the Palestinian unity government and Hamas assuming total control of Gaza.

JTA ARCHIVE: Israel Grapples With Hamas Takeover

Dec. 27, 2008: Operation Cast Lead

Israel launches Operation Cast Lead, a three-week military campaign aimed at stopping Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza.

July 2011: Cost-Of-Living Protests

Demonstrations begin against the rising cost of living in Israel. The protests spread over the course of the summer, leading hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets in opposition to rising housing costs and growing economic inequality.

JTA ARCHIVE: Just How Expensive Is It To Live in Israel?

Nov. 14, 2012: Operation Pillar of Defense

Israel launches Operation Pillar of Defense, an eight-day military campaign sparked by an intense round of rocket fire from Gaza aimed at Israeli civilians.

June 12, 2014: 3 Teens Kidnapped

Three Israeli teenagers are kidnapped in the West Bank, sparking a massive military operation to locate them. The remains of the three are located on June 30 in a field near Hebron.

July 17, 2014: Operation Protective Edge

Israel launches Operation Protective Edge, a military campaign that includes a ground invasion aimed at destroying Palestinian tunnels used to smuggle weapons into the coastal enclave and launch attacks against Israel.

July 2014: “Stabbing Intifada”

A wave of Palestinian firebombing, car-ramming and stabbing attacks breaks out, mostly in the Jerusalem area, leading some to raise concerns that a Third Intifada, sometimes referred to as a “stabbing intifada,” is underway.

July 31, 2015: Duma Firebombing

Jewish extremists firebomb a Palestinian home in the village of Duma, killing 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh and his parents. An Israeli Jew, Amiram Ben-Uliel, is later indicted for the murder, and an unnamed teenager is charged as an accomplice.

For up-to-date news about Israel, visit our partner site JTA.

The post Modern Israeli History: A Timeline appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

The Holocaust is also sometimes referred to as “the Shoah,” the Hebrew word for “catastrophe.” It affected nearly all of Europe’s Jewish population, which in 1933 numbered 9 million people. 

When they came to power in Germany, the Nazis did not immediately start to carry out mass murder. However, they quickly began using the government to target and exclude Jews from German society. The regime persecuted other groups because of politics, ideology, or behavior. The Nazis claimed that Roma, people with disabilities, some Slavic peoples (especially Poles and Russians), and Black people were biologically inferior. Other persecuted groups included Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men, and people the Nazis called “asocials” and “professional criminals.” 

MAY 7, 1919: Treaty of Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles ending World War I is presented to Germany. Among its provisions, the treaty forces Germany to accept responsibility for the war and commit to enormous reparation payments — a humiliation seen as setting the stage for the rise of Adolf Hitler and his promise to restore German greatness.

FEBRUARY 27, 1925: Hitler Reformulates Nazi Party

Hitler declares the reformulation of the Nazi Party and installs himself as leader in a declaration at the Munich beer hall where he led an aborted coup against the German government in 1923.

JANUARY 30, 1933: Hitler Becomes Chancellor of Germany

The Nazis assume control of Germany with Hitler’s appointment as chancellor.
FROM THE JTA ARCHIVE (1933): Hitler Sworn in as German Chancellor 

FEBRUARY 28, 1933: Reichstag Fire and Aftermath

A day after a fire in the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building, German President Paul Von Hindenburg approves the Reichstag Fire Decree, an emergency decree that suspends individual rights and due process of law.
THE JTA ARCHIVE (1933): Police Aided By Nazis Search Central Union Premises After Reichstag Fire

MARCH 22, 1933: First Concentration Camp Established

The SS, a Nazi paramilitary group, establishes the first concentration camp to incarcerate political prisoners near the town of Dachau.
THE JTA ARCHIVE (1933): Jewish Lawyer Tortured by Nazis in Concentration Camp 

APRIL 1, 1933: Nazis Stage Boycott of Jewish Businesses

Nazi leadership stages an economic boycott targeting Jewish-owned businesses and the offices of Jewish professionals.
JTA ARCHIVE (1933): Nazi Communique Announces Boycott of Jewish Businesses Throughout Country

SEPTEMBER 15, 1935: Nuremberg Laws

The German parliament (Reichstag) passes the Nuremberg Laws, institutionalizing many of the Nazis’ racial theories and providing the legal grounds for the persecution of Jews in Germany.
Read the full text here.

AUGUST 1, 1936: Opening of Berlin Olympics

The Summer Olympic Games open in Berlin, providing the Nazi government with a major propaganda success by enabling it to present itself as a respectable member of the international community.

MARCH 11, 1938: Germany Annexes Austria

Germany invades Austria and incorporates it into the German Reich, provoking a wave of street violence against Jews in Vienna.
JTA ARCHIVE (1938): Anschluss Proclaimed in Plebiscite

SEPTEMBER 29, 1938: The Munich Agreement

The Munich agreement is signed, ceding the Sudetenland, a region in Czechoslovakia with a large ethnic German population, to Germany and prompting British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to declare the achievement of “peace for our time.”
JTA ARCHIVE (1938): Munich Pact Abandons Minorities to Nazi Terror

NOVEMBER 9, 1938: Kristallnacht

A night of violent anti-Jewish pogroms known as Kristallnacht results in the destruction of hundreds of synagogues, the looting of thousands of Jewish-owned businesses and the deaths of nearly 100 Jews. The event, which was followed by the promulgation of dozens of anti-Jewish laws, is considered a turning point in the persecution of German Jewry.
JTA ARCHIVE: 25,000 Jews Under Arrest in Wake of Worst Pogrom in Modern German History, 4 Dead

DECEMBER 2, 1938: Kindertransports Begin

The first Kindertransport, a program for bringing child refugees out of Nazi Germany, arrives in Great Britain, bringing some 200 Jewish children from a Berlin orphanage destroyed on Kristallnacht. Thousands of refugee children would be brought to England aboard such transports between 1938 and 1940.
JTA ARCHIVE (1999): Former Kindertransport Refugees Gather for a Last Full-Scale Reunion

MAY 13, 1939: Departure of the St. Louis

The ocean liner St. Louis departs Hamburg, Germany and heads toward Cuba carrying 900 passengers, nearly all of them Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. The boat is denied entry to Cuba and later the United States, forcing it to return to Europe. Some were taken in by the United Kingdom, while the others were allowed into Western European countries that would later be occupied by the Nazis. Two hundred and fifty-four of the passengers would eventually be murdered in the Holocaust.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939: Germany Invades Poland

Germany invades Poland, setting off World War II. Britain and France responded with a declaration of war two days later.

May 1940: Germany Invades France

Germany begins its invasion of France, the Netherlands and Belgium. The Netherlands and Belgium surrender in May, and Paris is occupied on June 14.  In a June 22 armistice agreement, Germany is given control of northern France, while the collaborationist French Vichy government controls the south.
JTA ARCHIVE (1940): Jews Fleeing France as Hitler Dictates Armistice Terms

MAY 20, 1940: Auschwitz Established

Germany establishes the Auschwitz concentration camp, the largest facility of its kind built by the Nazis, about 43 miles west of Krakow, Poland.

NOVEMBER 15, 1940: Warsaw Jews Confined to Ghetto

German authorities order the Warsaw ghetto sealed. It is the largest ghetto in both area and population, confining more than 350,000 Jews (about 30 percent of the city’s population) in an area of about 1.3 square miles.

JUNE 22, 1941: Germany Invades the USSR

Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union in “Operation Barbarossa.” German mobile units of Security Police and SD (Nazi intelligence) officials, called Einsatzgruppen, identify, round up and murder Jews, carrying out mass shootings during the last week of June 1941.

JTA ARCHIVE (1941): 500,000 Jews in Path of Nazi Forces Invading Russia
JTA ARCHIVE (1941): Nazis Launch Radio Drive, Urge Russian Troops to Turn Bayonets on Jews

SEPTEMBER 1, 1941: Jews Forced to Wear Yellow Stars of David

All Jews over the age of six residing in territories under German control are required to wear a yellow Star of David with the word Jew inscribed within it on their outer clothing.

JTA ARCHIVE (1941): Jews in Reich Start New Year by Wearing Yellow Stars

DECE 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor Attacked, US Enters World War II

Japan launches a surprise attack on the United States Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to enter World War II.

JTA ARCHIVE (1941): Hebrew U President Judah L. Magnes Cables FDR Day After Pearl Harbor to Offer Service

JAN. 20, 1942: “Final Solution” Planned at Wannsee

The Wannsee Conference convenes in a villa outside Berlin. Plans to coordinate a “final solution” to the Jewish question are presented to leading German and Nazi officials.

July 23, 1942: Nazis Begin Gassing Operations at Treblinka

Some 925,000 Jews and an unknown number of Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners would be murdered there.
JTA ARCHIVE (1943): Nazis Suffocate Jews in Groups of 500 in Special Steam Chambers

APRIL 19, 1943: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Begins

For nearly a month, small groups of Jews fought the larger and better armed German forces before finally being defeated.
JTA ARCHIVE (April 30, 1943): Jews in Warsaw Ghetto Ask for Food and Arms to Continue Resistance
JTA ARCHIVE (May 16, 1943): Nazis Burn Down 200 Houses in Warsaw Ghetto, Execute Jewish Hostages

September 20, 1943: Thousands of Danish Jews Begin Escape to Sweden

With help from resistance fighters and ordinary citizens, some 7,200 Danish Jews began their escape to neutral Sweden.
JTA ARCHIVE (1943): Fishermen Establish Regular Ferry Service for Refugees Between Denmark and Sweden

MARCH 19, 1944: Germany Occupies Hungary

Germany occupies Hungary. Less than two months later, the deportation of 440,000 Hungarian Jews, mostly to Auschwitz, begins.
JTA ARCHIVE (1944): Jewish Shops in Budapest Looted, Jews Flee Homes, Seek Escape from Hungary

OCTOBER 7, 1944: Prisoners at Auschwitz Rebel

Jews arriving at Auschwitz in 1944. (German National Archive/Wikimedia Commons)Prisoners at Auschwitz rebel and the Germans crush the uprising, killing nearly 250 prisoners during the fighting.

January 27, 1945: Soviets Liberate Auschwitz

With Soviet forces advancing, Germany begins, on Jan. 17, the final evacuation of Auschwitz, marching nearly 60,000 west toward Germany in what became known as “death marches.” Anyone who fell behind or could not continue was shot. Ten days later, Soviet forces entered the camp and liberated the remaining 7,000 prisoners.

APRIL 30, 1945: Hitler Commits Suicide

With Soviet forces nearing his command bunker in central Berlin, Adolf Hitler commits suicide.
JTA ARCHIVE (1945): Moscow Jews Rejoice at News of Hitler’s Death

MAY 7, 1945: Germany Surrenders

Germany surrenders unconditionally to the Allies.  armed forces surrender unconditionally in the west. Victory in Europe, V-E Day, is proclaimed the next day.
JTA ARCHIVE (1945): German Refugee Captain Acts as Interpreter as Nazis in Italy Surrender

NOVEMBER 20, 1945: Nazi Leaders Charged with Crimes Against Humanity

An international tribunal in Nuremberg charges 21 Nazi leaders with crimes against humanity. Twelve Nazis would eventually be sentenced to death.

JTA ARCHIVE: Leaders Nervous as Allied Prosecutors at Nuremberg Trial List Crimes Against Jews

JULY 4, 1946: At Least 42 Jews Murdered in Pogrom in Poland

A mob of Polish soldiers, police officers and civilians murder at least 42 Jews and injure over 40 in the Polish town of Kielce, an event that convinces many Holocaust survivors that they have no future in Poland and must emigrate to Palestine or elsewhere.

DECEMBER 15, 1961: Israeli Court Convicts Nazi War Criminal Adolf Eichmann

An Israeli court convicts Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, following a highly publicized trial. Eichmann is executed on June 15, 1962.

JTA ARCHIVE (1961): Eichmann Found Guilty, Reading of Judgment to Conclude Tomorrow

Adapted with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The post A Timeline of the Holocaust appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

READ: How Do You Define Anti-Semitism? It’s Complicated.

In contemporary times, overt expressions of antisemitism are not widely tolerated in Western countries. However, classical antisemitic stereotypes about Jews persist and occasionally find expression in public discourse. Anti-Jewish violence and acts of vandalism and intimidation remain a global problem, with the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents in the United States and Europe spiking in recent years, according to a number of studies.

Anti-Jewish violence also tends to increase during times of unrest in the Middle East, leading some to believe the nature of antisemitism is morphing into hatred of Israel, a development that has been called the “new antisemitism.” In this view, excessive criticism of Israel or challenging its right to exist crosses the line from legitimate criticism into anti-Jewish bigotry. However, others say that opposing Israeli policies or even challenging Israel’s right to exist are legitimate viewpoints and do not necessarily imply hatred of Jews.

European Anti-Semitism Before the Holocaust

Antisemitism is sometimes called the world’s oldest hatred. The term itself is commonly attributed to Wilhelm Marr, a 19th-century German journalist who believed that Jews were racially distinct from Germans and could never be assimilated into German culture. Hatred of Jews, however, is much older, dating by some accounts to the early Christian era and the belief that Jews were collectively guilty of killing Jesus — a view that remained Catholic doctrine until 1965. For centuries, anti-Jewish ideas found their way into the writings of some of history’s most prominent and oft-quoted Christian thinkers, among them Saint Augustine, Martin Luther and Thomas Aquinas.

In Europe during the Middle Ages, edicts barred Jews from citizenship, owning land, marrying Christians, serving in government and joining various professional guilds. A number of stereotypes about Jews emerged in this period, including the myth that Jews have horns and that they are greedy and money-grubbing, a belief given expression by Shakespeare in the character of Shylock from “The Merchant of Venice.” The myth that Jews engage in ritual murder led to blood libel, the claim that Jews use the blood of Christian children for the making of Passover matzah.

Anti-Jewish stereotypes were often used a pretext for collective punishment of Jews. During the Crusader period, Christian armies en route to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim control swept through Jewish communities, raping and massacring along the way. Beginning in the 13th century European Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or were expelled from a number of countries, most famously Spain in 1492, uprooting a long established and highly accomplished Jewish community. The belief that Jews were responsible for the Black Death in the 14th century led to the violent annihilation of countless Jewish communities throughout Europe. Jews were also commonly scapegoated for problems as varied as pandemics and crop failures. Anti-Jewish pogroms, or riots, occurred periodically in Europe throughout the late Middle Ages and into the modern period.

Even after the emancipation of Europe’s Jews beginning in the late 18th century, when Jews were no longer restricted to ghettos and were allowed full citizenship rights in many countries, antisemitism persisted in Europe. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a forgery that purported to be minutes of the secret meetings of Jewish leaders bent on world domination, was first published in Russia in 1903 and later translated and disseminated widely. Eastern European pogroms factored into the decisions of millions of Jews to emigrate to the United States beginning in 1880. (The desire for better economic opportunities was also a critical factor.) The prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish army officer falsely convicted of treason in 1894, came to be seen as a symbol of the enduring perniciousness of European anti-Semitism.

The Holocaust and its Aftermath

In the 20th century, antisemitism took on a distinctly racial quality. Nazi-era propaganda portrayed Jews as biologically distinct from white Europeans and possessing telltale physical characteristics, including large hooked noses and thick curly hair. Adolf Hitler’s belief that Jews were racially inferior and posed a threat to the pure blood of Aryans inspired the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which prohibited sex and marriage between Jews and Germans and barred Jews from German citizenship. Eventually it would lead to Germany’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people.

After the Holocaust, overt expressions of anti-Semitism ceased to be widely tolerated in Western Europe, and in some countries, Holocaust denial and the display of Nazi symbols were criminalized. In 1965, the Catholic Church adopted Nostra Aetate, which declared that modern Jews could not be held collectively responsible for the killing of Jesus, removing the theological justification for centuries of European anti-Semitism. This doctrinal shift has ushered in an era of unprecedented Jewish-Catholic reconciliation, though small pockets of traditionalist resistance to the change persist within the church.

As the memory of the Holocaust has receded in the postwar period, some of the taboo against explicit antisemitism has weakened and some right-wing European parties have openly embraced Nazi-era symbols and rhetoric. However, several countries have prosecuted individuals for Holocaust denial.

Antisemitism in the United States

American Jews have never suffered the systematic denial of rights comparable to what their coreligionists endured in Europe. The U.S. Constitution, with its explicit guarantee of freedom of religion, prevented adoption of the explicitly anti-Jewish laws prevalent in Europe over the centuries. But with the arrival of large numbers of Jews in the late 19th century, and their rapid socio-economic advancement in the early 20th, Jews came to face exclusion from various clubs and organizations, tightened admissions quotas at institutions of higher learning, and restrictions from certain resorts and residential areas.

One notable antisemitic incident in American history, which some compared to France’s Dreyfus Affair, was the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, whose death sentence for murder had earlier been commuted by the governor of Georgia due to questions about his guilt. The case drew national attention and led to the establishment of the Anti-Defamation League.

Explicit public antisemitism was rare but not unheard of in modern America. In the 1930s, Charles Coughlin, a Michigan priest, began using his radio program to advocate anti-Semitic ideas and marshal support for Adolf Hitler. Henry Ford, the famed American car manufacturer, published the four-volume “The International Jew” in the 1920s, which was later translated into German and embraced by the Nazis. Aviator Charles Lindbergh, a member of the America First Committee that opposed intervention in World War II, claimed Jews wielded too much influence over American politics and were eager to drag the country toward war.

In the 1960s, antisemitism was embraced in certain quarters of the growing black nationalist movement. In 1970, black activist Stokely Carmichael famously called Hitler the greatest white man in history. And Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan has long railed against Jews and their supposed control of the American government. Similar ideas have also found support among American white nationalists, most prominent among them David Duke, a former KKK leader and former member of the Louisiana state legislature.

Antisemitism in the Muslim World

On the whole, Jews have historically fared far better under Muslim rule than in Christian Europe. Though anti-Jewish stereotypes do exist in Islamic sources, there is nothing to rival the extent of anti-Jewish sentiment that exists in Christian sources, nor is there a history of violence and persecution equal to what Jews faced in Europe. Jews living in Muslim lands were accorded a second-class citizenship that afforded certain protections while reinforcing subordination to full Muslim citizens, forcing Jews to pay higher taxes and wear distinctive badges or clothing. According to the historian Bernard Lewis, the latter requirement was enforced erratically, and was one of the few instances of Christian Europe adopting a tactic of Jewish segregation from the Muslim world.

For the most part, antisemitic ideas that took root in the Muslim world were European imports, a trend Lewis dates to the 19th century. By the 20th century, some Arab leaders were openly embracing the Nazis, most famously Haj Amin al-Husseini, a hardline Palestinian nationalist who met with Hitler in 1941. Following the establishment of Israel, antisemitism increased dramatically in the Middle East.

Today, signs of European antisemitism are rife across the Arab world. As of 1986, there were at least nine Arabic translations of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Arab media routinely use antisemitic imagery and promote conspiracy theories reminiscent of Nazi-era propaganda. Tel Aviv University researcher Esther Webman has documented how leaders of the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah routinely conflate Zionism and Judaism, and Israelis and Jews, implying that resistance to Israel is part of the long history of opposing the Jewish quest for world domination. According to the ADL, the Middle East scores highest in global surveys of antisemitic sentiment, with an estimated 200 million people there harboring antisemitic attitudes.

Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism

As explicit antisemitism faded in Europe in the years immediately after the Holocaust, and as the State of Israel, established in 1948, demonstrated its military strength and began drawing criticism for its occupation of lands with Arab populations, some Jews began to argue that opposition to Zionism was a new form of antisemitism. This concept gained wider currency in the late 20th and early 21st century, as criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians intensified, prompting international campaigns to isolate Israel politically and boycott it economically. Proponents of this view argue that while criticism of Israeli policies is valid, certain extreme forms of criticism — such as the rejection of Israel’s right to exist or singling out Israel for severe reprobation while ignoring the human rights abuses of its neighbors — can be antisemitic.

The U.S. State Department in 2007 determined that demonizing Israel, comparing its actions to the Nazis, denying its legitimacy, and singling it out for excessive criticism are all contemporary manifestations of antisemitism. Critics of this definition have accused the Jewish community of using that charge to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel.

Some Arabs have also contested the use of the term antisemitism to refer solely to Jews, arguing that as speakers of a semitic language, they are “semites” as well.

Antisemitism Today

In the 21st century, there is ample evidence that antisemitism is again on the rise. Acts of violence against Jews and Jewish institutions, the persistence of antisemitic beliefs about Jewish power and the rise of political parties that traffic in explicitly antisemitic rhetoric and ideas, particularly in Europe, are all indications of persistent antisemitism.

Mostly consigned to the political fringes since the Holocaust, far-right European political parties have made significant electoral gains in recent years. In Hungary, the Jobbik party, whose leader in 2012 said Jews were national security risks who should be registered, is currently the country’s third largest party. Greece’s Golden Dawn party, whose leader uses the Nazi salute and has called the Greek government a “pawn of International Zionism,” is currently the country’s third largest. The National Front party in France, long stigmatized as harboring Holocaust deniers and antisemites, is polling stronger than ever in the run-up to the 2017 presidential election. Even in Germany, which has been especially vigilant about right-wing politics since Nazism’s defeat, the Alternative for Germany party only narrowly missed winning seats in parliament in 2013 and has since surged in national polling.

Moreover, surveys show that classically antisemitic views remain common. According to the Anti-Defamation League, a majority of adults in Greece, and more than one-third in France, harbor antisemitic beliefs, including that Jews have too much power in business and too much influence over American politics. Over 30 percent of Americans believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their home country. In the Middle East, the numbers are dramatically higher, with more than 80 percent of the population of some countries harboring antisemitic attitudes, according to the ADL.

Jews continue to be the targets of violence, sometimes by Muslim extremists in retaliation for Israeli military actions. In 2012, A French Muslim shot and killed four people, including three children, at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France. In 2014, four people died when a French Algerian man opened fire at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels. In 2015, two days after the killing of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris, an allegiant of the Islamic State killed four people at a kosher supermarket in the French capital.

Far-right ideologies have also motivated antisemitic attacks in Europe. During Yom Kippur services in 2019, an armed neo-Nazi livestreamed himself as he attempted to enter a synagogue in Halle, Germany. After failing to enter the synagogue, he killed two people nearby.

Meanwhile, antisemitic incidents have been on the rise in the United States. In 2014, a former white nationalist leader killed three people in a pair of shootings at a Jewish community center and retirement community in Kansas. In 2016, Jonathan Greenblatt, the leader of the Anti-Defamation League, said American Jews have not seen as much antisemitism in public discourse since the 1930s.

The deadliest attack on the American Jewish community occurred on October 27, 2018, when a gunman entered the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh during Shabbat services and opened fire, killing 11 people dead and wounding seven more. In 2019, Jews were also killed at a Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, and a kosher supermarket in New Jersey.

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In addition to those in the West Bank, which Israel’s government sometimes refers to as Judea and Samaria, Israeli settlements existed previously in the Gaza Strip and the Sinai peninsula. Since 1967, Israel has also built new Jewish neighborhoods in the Golan Heights and eastern Jerusalem; while Israel does not consider these communities to be settlements, because it has annexed these regions, the international community does not recognize Israeli sovereignty there and considers Jewish communities in the Golan (home to 20,500 Jews as of 2016, according to Haaretz ) and eastern Jerusalem (home to approximately 180,000 Jews as of 2014 according to the Jewish Virtual Library) to be settlements as well.

Find maps of Israeli settlements by a group that supports their growths here.Find a map of Israeli settlements by a group that opposes their growth here.

Who lives in the West Bank?

The area is today home to roughly 2.7 million Palestinian Arabs, many of them descendants of refugees from Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, and more than 400,000 Jewish settlers. The settler population, now inhabiting some 130 West Bank communities, has more than doubled since the year 2000, when fewer than 200,000 Israelis lived in the West Bank.

Why are the settlements so controversial?

Because they are situated on land that many proponents of a two-state solution say should be part of a future Palestinian state, settlements are widely seen as a chief obstacle to the achievement of an independent and contiguous Palestinian state. Critics of settlements contend that the ongoing presence of these Jewish communities in the West Bank — and the resultant judicial system in which settlers and Palestinians are subject to different treatment and have different rights — will eventually present Israeli leaders with a difficult choice: between granting full citizenship to all Palestinians under its control and thus threatening Israel’s character as a Jewish state or maintaining the status quo, in which West Bank Palestinians are not eligible to become Israeli citizens, and thus threatening Israel’s status as a democracy.

Are settlements the source of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Not by themselves. Among the other issues Israel and the Palestinians agreed to negotiate are the fate of Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, security and final borders. Many defenders of the settlements point to the fact that Jewish-Arab tensions preceded even the establishment of the State of Israel and that two existential wars were waged against the Jewish state, in 1948 and 1967, at a time when no settlements existed. They note that the existence of settlements in Sinai did not prevent a peace agreement with Egypt, and that the complete unilateral evacuation of settlements from Gaza in 2005 did not lead to a cessation of hostilities there; instead, countless rockets have been launched at Israeli population centers from the coastal territory, which has been governed for nearly a decade by the terrorist group Hamas.

READ: The West Bank’s World-Class Wines Have Some Israelis Toasting the Settlements

What are settlement blocs?

Settlement blocs, sometimes also referred to as consensus settlements, are a handful of settlement groups that are widely expected to remain in Israeli hands under any peace agreement. Overall, these blocs — most of them located just over the Green Line, the pre-1967 boundary between Israel and the areas it took control of in the Six Day War — constitute a tiny percentage of the overall land area of the West Bank but are home to the majority of its Jewish residents. Under this arrangement, Israel would be expected to give up an equivalent amount of its territory inside the Green Line for inclusion in a Palestinian state. The settlements blocs have never been explicitly demarcated, but they are generally understood to include Ma’ale Adumim, Modiin Illit, Ariel and Gush Etzion.

What are outposts?

Outposts are settlements established by Israeli settlers without government approval. They are often rudimentary and established by parking a handful of trailers on a hilltop. As of January 2017, there were 97 such settlements according to Peace Now, an anti-settlement Israeli nonprofit that maintains data on their growth. [ ] Violence has occasionally flared at these outposts, which tend to be established by the most ideological right-wing settlers.

How do settlements affect Palestinians?

Settlements and settlers require protection from the Israeli military, forcing the country to dispatch soldiers to the areas around them. The presence of settlements has led to the establishment of a network of bypass roads reserved for Israeli citizens and military checkpoints that have limited Palestinian freedom of movement, often adding lengthy travel delays. Palestinians and their advocates also claim that the checkpoints and heavy military presence are a source of frequent humiliation and that settlements have taken land that would otherwise be available for their use, making it difficult for Palestinian villages to expand. (Critics of the Palestinians counter that the threat of Palestinian terror attacks makes the military presence and checkpoints necessary.) The vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank live in two administrative areas, determined by a 1995 agreement between Israelis and Palestinians; those areas comprise roughly 40 percent of the West Bank and are governed by elected Palestinian civil authorities. Citing security concerns, the Israeli military continues to make periodic incursions into those areas.

Why do some people refer to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria?

The territory of the West Bank is so named because it lies on the west bank of the Jordan River. Though most of the world refers to the territory by that name, some Jews make a point of using the biblical names Judea and Samaria — in Hebrew, Yehuda and Shomron. As with much else related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the usage of these terms is politically loaded. To proponents of using Judea and Samaria, the terms underscore the region’s deep Jewish roots and counter the perception that Israel’s presence there is illegitimate. Others say that using Judea and Samaria serves to obscure the longstanding Palestinian connection to the land.

Why did Israel encourage Jews to settle in the West Bank?

While Jews have lived in the West Bank for centuries, and some settlements are re-established communities that were destroyed during or in the years leading up to Israel’s War of Independence, most contemporary settlements were established after the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War. These post-1967 settlements were originally clustered predominantly in the strategically important Jordan Valley region and at sites of religious or historical significance south of Jerusalem. Early on, Israeli governments on both the left and the right supported the settlements in the belief that they gave the country strategic depth, widening the area under Israeli control and helping to defend against an attack from the east. Over time, the settlement project expanded, with some Israeli leaders asserting Jews had a right to settle in any territory of historic Jewish significance, which includes much of the West Bank. Others warned that settlements were untenable and made Israel less secure.

Why do Israelis choose to live in settlements?

For some, the West Bank offers an enhanced quality of life, enabling residents to live in less congested areas within commuting distance of major Israeli cities at a more affordable cost. The lower cost in part stems from Israeli government subsidies for housing in the settlements. Other Israelis have chosen to reside in the settlements for ideological reasons. These are typically highly nationalist or religious individuals — or both. Ideological settlers are generally the most devoted to the settlement enterprise and populate the more remote areas of West Bank further from the Green Line.

Whatever happened to the Jewish settlements in Gaza and Sinai?

In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, dismantling all of the 21 Jewish communities there and another four in the northern West Bank, and removing approximately 8,000 Jewish residents. In addition, following Israel’s 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, the settlements in Sinai, most notably the community of Yamit, were dismantled and their residents resettled in Israel.

What is Israeli public opinion on settlement activity?

Today, Israeli settlements enjoy firm support from Israel’s right-wing political parties, but polling indicates they are a divisive issue among Israelis generally. A 2014 survey found that about one-third of Israeli Jews see the settlements as illegal and as impediments to peace. A 2016 study found that a slim majority of Israelis (51.6 percent) think the settlements have helped Israel’s national interests. Another 39.3 percent of Israelis believe they have harmed its interests.

Where does the American government stand on settlement expansion?

Until the presidency of Donald J. Trump, who appointed a pro-settlement ambassador to Israel, successive U.S. administrations, while staunchly supportive of Israel’s right to exist and defend itself, have criticized Israeli settlement growth. Despite the known views of its ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, the Trump administration noted in February 2017 that settlement expansion“may not be helpful” to advancing peace in the region.

Are settlements legal under international law?

Most of the world believes settlements contravene the Fourth Geneva Convention, which bars an occupying power from transferring parts of its population into occupied territory. The illegality of Israeli settlements has been upheld by numerous international bodies, including the U.N. Security Council in a controversial resolution adopted in December 2016. Israel maintains that the territory is not legally occupied since there was no recognized sovereign power in the West Bank at the time it seized the territory. (Jordan controlled the land at that time.) Israel prefers to refer to the West Bank as “disputed” territory whose final status will be resolved through peace negotiations.

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