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Jewish groups condemn Trump’s comparison of indictment to Nazi persecution

Two major Jewish civil rights groups want Donald Trump to stop using Nazi analogies to decry his legal woes.

The former president’s first official comment after the unveiling of a federal indictment charging him with conspiracy to defraud the United States after he lost is the third time this year Trump has been indicted.

“The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes,” his campaign said. Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination.

“Comparing this indictment to Nazi Germany in the 1930s is factually incorrect, completely inappropriate, and flat out offensive,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the AntiDefamation League CEO, said on Twitter. “As we have said time and again, such comparisons have no place in politics and are shameful.”

The American Jewish Committee in a statement advised Trump to chat with a Holocaust survivor.

“Here’s some advice. Please sit with a Holocaust survivor and let them share their story,” AJC said. “Just listen. Then show them the respect they deserve and honor the memory of the six million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis by never making a comparison like this again.”

Since launching his campaign, Trump has come under fire for socializing with a Holocaust denier as well as invoking Nazi analogies to lambaste his critics and law enforcement officials investigating his myriad scandals.

In 2017, after BuzzFeed published an unverified dossier containing allegations about him, Trump sent a tweet asking, “Are we living in Nazi Germany?” (JTA)

Jewish fencer becomes first US man to win sabre World Championship

Jewish fencer Eli Dershwitz made history Tuesday, July 25 at the World Fencing Championships in Milan, Italy, where he became the first American man to win an individual title in sabre.

The 27-year-old two-time Olympian and grandson of Holocaust survivors, defeated No. 1-ranked Sandro Bazadze 15-6 in the sabre final.

But Dershwitz’s semifinal victory was perhaps even more notable: Facing Áron Szilágyi, a three-time Olympic gold medalist and the reigning world champion, he came back from a 10-4 deficit to advance to the final round.

“I’ve been working most of my life for this moment, this tournament, and towards Paris 2024,” Dershwitz said, according to NBC Sports. “Hoping my third Olympic Games is the one.”

Dershwitz — who celebrated his bar mitzvah at the Conservative Temple Israel in Natick, Mass., and fenced at Harvard University — won two gold medals at the 2017

Maccabiah Games in Israel.

He represented the United States in the 2016 and 2020 Olympics but failed to medal in either appearance.

Prior to the 2016 Rio Games, Dershwitz told Hillel International that he considers himself a “proud member of the Jewish community.”

“I feel proud to be a Jewish-American Olympic athlete. The Jewish community has been very supportive throughout my journey to the Olympics,” he said.

Dershwitz joins a long list of Jewish fencers who have won the sabre title. Hungarian János Garay, who died at the Mauthausen concentration camp in May 1945, won the third world championship in 1925. Other winners include Hungarian Sándor Gombos (1926 and 1927), Hungarian Endre Kabos (1934 and 1935), who also died during the Holocaust, Russian Yakov Rylsky (1958, 1961 and 1963) and Russian Mark Rakita (1967). (JTA)

York, site of a medieval pogrom, gets its first rabbi in 800 years

For the first time in 800 years, the British city of York, whose Jewish population was decimated in a medieval pogrom, will be home to a rabbi.

Rabbi Elisheva Salamo arrived in York two weeks ago from California after decades of pulpit work in the United States, Switzerland, and South Africa. She will take a parttime pulpit at the York Liberal Jewish Community, which is affiliated with a denomination akin to the American Reform movement. The congregation was founded in 2014 and now has about 100 members.

Her hiring is a milestone for York, a city in northern England whose medieval Jewish community was wiped out in a pogrom in March 1190, on the Shabbat before Passover. Seeking protection from antisemitic rioters who intended to either forcibly convert the Jews to Christianity or kill them, York’s Jews sought refuge in a tower in the king’s castle.

Realizing they would not make it out of the tower alive as troops amassed outside, they chose to kill themselves rather than convert — a choice also made by other European Jewish communities facing antisemitic armies during the Crusades. Approximately 150 people are estimated to have died in the York pogrom. A century later, the Jews were expelled from England entirely; they were permitted to return only in 1656.

“Helping to rebuild what was once one of England’s most vibrant Jewish communities is an honor and a privilege,” Salamo told The Guardian.

Salamo was ordained at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and attended Reed College and Yale University, where she studied biology and cellular and molecular biology. According to her website, she is also an experienced equestrian.

She will join a community that has been led by volunteers in the nearly 10 years since it was founded. Salamo’s first formal role will be to lead High Holiday services in September. The community hopes to fundraise to hire her full time, according to the Jewish Chronicle. (JTA)

‘Maus’ evades a ban in Iowa

Anew Iowa state law forbidding instruction on sexual and gender identity prompted one school district to briefly order staff to remove Art Spiegelman’s Maus and hundreds of other books from its shelves.

But days later following national outrage, the district reversed course, issuing a trimmed-down list of 65 books for removal that contained neither Maus, nor several other Jewish-themed books on the first list.

The quick about-face in Urbandale Schools, a suburb of Des Moines, was the latest example of the confusing and often contradictory landscape for Jewish texts amid the growing nationwide “parents’ rights” movement targeting what its proponents say are inappropriate books in schools. In Iowa and other states, that movement has fueled legislation targeting educators who distribute content that could be interpreted as sexual.

“We have determined that there is ambiguity regarding the extent to which books that contain topics related to gender identity and sexual orientation need to be removed from libraries,” the district’s superintendent, Rosalie Daca, wrote in a memo to staff.

“As such, we will pause removing books that reference gender identity and sexual orientation until we receive guidance from the Iowa Department of Education.”

The memo followed one that, as reported in the Des Moines Register, instructed staff to comb their libraries for more than 300 books in potential violation of the law, including Maus, Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, the Holocaust novel Sophie’s Choice and Jewish author Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play for adults, Angels in America. That initial list prompted a passionate response from the literary free-expression advocacy group PEN America, which implored the district not to follow through with its removals.

Administrators blamed the state’s education department for issuing vague and unclear guidance for how to comply with the new law, which Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, signed in May and is scheduled to take effect in January 2024. The law states that it is “prohibiting instruction related to gender identity and sexual orientation in school districts” and forbids “any material with descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.”

Maus contains a single panel of a nude mouse representing Spiegelman’s mother after she dies by suicide.

The same image previously provoked the ire of a Tennessee school board, which removed Maus from its district’s middle-school curriculum over the image last year and catapulted the book into the center of the nationwide book-ban debate.

Other Jewish books that have been rescued from district-wide book removals include The Fixer in South Carolina and Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation in Texas, though other districts in Florida have permanently removed the Anne Frank adaptation as well as a Holocaust novel by Jodi Picoult and a picture book about Purim featuring a same-sex couple. (JTA)