Category: The News And Times – thenewsandtimes.com

Millions of fruit flies will be dropped on Los Angeles https://t.co/JP0pHPw91f

— NewsNation (@NewsNation) October 27, 2023

Today, US forces conducted air strikes on two facilities in eastern Syria used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and affiliated groups.

-SECDEF Austin

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) October 27, 2023

Shadi Barud, Deputy Head of Hamas’ Intelligence Directorate has been eliminated by an IDF aerial strike.

He took part in the planning of the October 7 massacre and countless other deadly attacks carried out against Israelis.

We will continue to strike and eliminate Hamas…

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) October 26, 2023

Based on precise IDF and ISA intelligence, IDF fighter jets struck 3 senior Hamas operatives in the Daraj Tuffah Battalion.

The battalion’s operatives played a significant role in the invasion and murderous attack against Israel on October 7, and is considered to be the most… pic.twitter.com/WOnmE2Cv3O

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) October 26, 2023

The U.S. attacks Iranian facilities in Syria. President Biden is faced with mounting pressure as he manages wars in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and tensions with China. We get an update from Jerusalem and a look at native tribes in Kenya, and their reaction to the King of England’s visit.

One day after his family was killed in an Israeli airstrike, Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh was back reporting on air.

Late Tuesday, Dahdouh’s wife, son and daughter were killed in an airstrike that struck their house in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza.

They had moved there following Israel’s warning on Oct. 13 for those in the northern half of the territory to leave for the south. Dahdouh’s grandson and eight other extended family members were also killed in the attack.

The tragedy underscores the risks facing journalists covering the war between Israel and Hamas, which was sparked after the militant group invaded southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing more than 1,400 people.

Following the airstrike, Al Jazeera aired footage showing Dahdouh entering the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah on Wednesday to see his dead wife, son and daughter in the morgue.

“What happened is clear. This is a series of targeted attacks on children, women and civilians. I was just reporting from Yarmouk about such an attack, and the Israeli raids have targeted many areas, including Nuseirat,” Dahdouh told Al Jazeera on his way out of the hospital. 

Al Jazeera “strongly condemns the indiscriminate targeting and killing of innocent civilians in Gaza, which has led to the loss of Wael al-Dahdouh’s family and countless others,” the Qatari network said in a statement.

Youmna ElSayed, an Al Jazeera correspondent in Gaza, told the broadcaster, “It’s heartbreaking to be reporting about Wael’s family and to see how broken he is. He calms everyone. He speaks to us like a big brother, not just a bureau chief.”

As of Thursday, at least 27 journalists have been killed in the war, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ. Among them, 22 were Palestinian, four were Israeli, and one was Lebanese.

“I’ve got to give credit to a lot of journalists who are very brave and trying to cover this. The world needs to see what’s happening,” James Cunningham, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, told VOA.

Journalists in Gaza are facing particularly high risks, CPJ said, due to Israel’s airstrikes and the threat of a looming Israeli ground invasion. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said Thursday that more than 7,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war began. 

“The main challenge for journalists covering the military confrontation in Gaza is their own safety — being killed while covering airstrikes or clashes,” Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, told VOA.

“Journalists in Gaza have paid and continue to pay unprecedented tolls and face exponential threats,” Mansour later added.

Spotty internet connections and unreliable electricity access exacerbate the challenges facing reporters in Gaza, VOA reported shortly after the war began.

Last week, the Israeli government approved emergency regulations that may lay the groundwork for blocking Al Jazeera in Israel.

The regulations “will allow the cessation of activities of a foreign broadcasting organization that harms the security of the state, for the duration of the war,” the Communications Ministry said, according to The Jerusalem Post.

Shloma Karhi, the communications minister, called Al Jazeera “a propaganda mouthpiece” for Hamas.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, meanwhile, has asked the Qatari prime minister to bridle Al Jazeera’s rhetoric about Gaza. Al Jazeera is funded by the Qatari government but operates independently.

Al Jazeera did not immediately reply to VOA’s request for comment.

Press freedom groups have urged Israel to refrain from closing Al Jazeera. “A plurality of media voices is essential in order to hold power to account, especially in times of war,” CPJ’s Mansour said in a statement. 

“Shutting that agency down and removing them would be a very chilling step for freedom of expression and the media in the region that would open the floodgates to other kinds of restrictions,” Quinn McKew, executive director of the free expression group Article 19, told VOA.

The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz lambasted the regulations in an editorial over the weekend, saying, “The state should not be authorized to decide for the public which information it can be exposed to, as is done in countries such as China and Iran.”

 

After thousands of high-profile artists and curators signed an open letter expressing solidarity with Palestinians and supporting a ceasefire in Gaza, published in the magazine Artforum on October 19, the public pushback was swift. The following day, the magazine posted a public response signed by prominent gallerists denouncing the original letter as “one-sided.” 

Behind the scenes, however, powerful art dealers and gallerists who control the cultural and monetary tides of the art world began a private campaign to force some of the biggest names on the letter to retract their support, according to a half dozen sources, including letter signatories as well as others informed about the influence campaign. 

Soon after the letter was posted, Martin Eisenberg, a high-profile collector and inheritor of the now-bankrupt Bed Bath & Beyond fortune, began contacting famous art world figures on the list whose work he had championed to express his objections to the letter. 

Eisenberg, who owns millions of dollars’ worth of work by Artforum letter signatories, contacted at least four artists whose work he owns to convey his displeasure at seeing their names on the letter. (Eisenberg did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)

On Thursday, a week after the letter was posted, Artforum editor-in-chief David Velasco was summoned to a meeting with Jay Penske, the CEO of Artforum’s parent company, according to three sources. The son of billionaire Roger Penske, Jay oversees the conglomerate Penske Media Corporation. (Penske Media did not respond to a request for comment.) Before the day was out, Velasco was fired after six years at the helm of the magazine.

“This magazine has been my life for 18 years and I’ve given everything to it.”

“This magazine has been my life for 18 years and I’ve given everything to it,” Velasco, who rose from being an editorial assistant to the coveted editor-in-chief job, told The Intercept. “I have done nothing but exceptional work at the magazine for 18 years and this is a sad day. It breaks my heart.”

In a statement to the New York Times, Velasco said, “I’m disappointed that a magazine that has always stood for freedom of speech and the voices of artists has bent to outside pressure.”

The pressure campaign against the letter echoes a wave of repercussions faced by writers, activists, and students who have spoken out for Palestinians. Right-wing groups lobbying for Israel, as well as donors to prominent institutions and various other wealthy interests, are condemning open letters and using the lists of signatories as blacklists across cultural, professional, and academic spheres. 

“Anecdotally, I know that a majority of people in the art world are devastated by the genocide by Gaza but many are scared to speak out or even join the call for a ceasefire,” said Hannah Black, an artist and writer who signed the Artforum letter but was not pressured to remove her signature. “It is absolutely McCarthyite and many of the dogmatic anti-Palestinians within the art world have, as Joseph Welch said of McCarthy, ‘no sense of decency.’ They are willing to destroy careers, destroy the value of artworks, to maintain their unofficial ban on free speech about Palestine.”

In a testament to the efficacy of the campaign against the Artforum letter, artists Peter Doig, Joan Jonas, Katharina Grosse, and Tomás Saraceno all withdrew their support. According to an Intercept analysis, the three artists were among 36 names removed from the online version of the letter between October 20 and October 26. (An additional 32 names were added during that period.)

Artforum, a premier international art publication, published the October 19 open letter calling for humanitarian aid to Gaza, accountability for war crimes, and an end to violence against civilians. The letter — which was not commissioned or drafted by Artforum, but published on the magazine’s website as well as in other publications like e-flux — went on to condemn the occupation of the Palestinian territories and reiterate its demands with a call for peace.

“We believe that the arts organizations and institutions whose mission it is to protect freedom of expression, to foster education, community, and creativity, also stand for freedom of life and the basic right of existence,” the signatories concluded. “We call on you to refuse inhumanity, which has no place in life or art, and make a public demand from our governments to call for a ceasefire.”

In a post on the Artforum website before news broke of Velasco’s firing, the publishers Danielle McConnell and Kate Koza wrote that the publication of the letter was “not consistent with Artforum’s editorial process.”

“The open letter was widely misinterpreted as a statement from the magazine about highly sensitive and complex geopolitical circumstances,” the publishers wrote. “That the letter was misinterpreted as being reflective of the magazine’s position understandably led to significant dismay among our readers and community, which we deeply regret.”

Backlash

Critics of the letter said its failure to mention the surprise attack by Hamas on October 7 — in which some 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, were killed — was offensive and, according to some, antisemitic. Four days after the letter was published, Artforum posted an update reiterating the letter organizers’ condemnation of the loss of all civilian life, adding that they “share revulsion at the horrific massacres” of October 7. 

The response published in Artforum the day after the original letter came out was signed by three influential gallery owners: Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, and Amalia Dayan. In their critique, the gallerists wrote:

We are distressed by the open letter recently posted on Artforum, which does not acknowledge the ongoing mass hostage emergency, the historical context, and the atrocities committed in Israel on October 7, 2023—the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. 

We denounce all forms of violence in Israel and Gaza and we are deeply concerned over the humanitarian crisis. We—Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, Amalia Dayan—condemn the open letter for its one-sided view. We hope to foster discourse that can lead to a better understanding of the complexities involved. May we witness peace soon.

The authors of the response letter — the joint directors of Lévy Gorvy Dayan, which has gallery spaces and offices in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong — curate shows with some of the most prolific and highest grossing artists in the world, both living and dead. Their website lists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Joel Mesler, and Adrian Piper as representative artists and collaborators. Dayan is the granddaughter of Moshe Dayan, the Israeli politician and military commander who is alleged to have ordered the country’s military to attack the American naval ship the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War of 1967. 

Lévy Gorvy Dayan is more than a series of galleries; the venture is a powerful consortium, described by the New York Times as a “one-stop shop for artists and collectors,” representing artists, organizing exhibitions and auction sales, and advising collectors. In 2021, Lévy told the Financial Times, “I grew up feeling that art was freedom and fresh air.” She said she did not believe in gallerists and representatives “controlling them” — the artists — “completely.”

According to two artists who appeared as signatories on the first Artforum post, the Lévy Gorvy Dayan letter was a shot across the bow by powerful art dealers and influencers, warning others to stay in line. One artist who spoke to The Intercept said a collector offended by the Artforum letter returned a work by the artist to a dealer. The collector did not contact the artist prior to returning the work, according to the artist, who asked for anonymity to protect their livelihood. 

Another open letter posted under the title “A United Call from the Art World: Advocating for Humanity” called the original Artforum letter “uninformed.” It offered no criticism of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, which has killed an estimated 7,000 people in the last 19 days. This letter, issued under the banner of “peace, understanding, and human dignity” garnered over 4,000 signatures. Among them was that of Warren Kanders, who resigned from the Whitney Museum of American Art board following protests over the fact that his companies sell chemical weapons. (The Intercept reported last year that, despite claims of divestment, Kanders remains in the tear gas business.)

“It really shows that they never cared about the art.”

Penske Media Corporation, Artforum’s parent company, drew criticism in 2018 selling a $200 million stake to Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund. That same year, Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered and dismembered under orders from Saudi’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Another artist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their livelihood, said the affair with the Artforum letter showed that many of the gallerists and collectors whose money makes the art world turn did not understand artists’ subject matter.

“It really shows that they never cared about the art,” the artist said. “My art, like a lot of the people facing this, has always been political, about oppression and dispossession.”

The post Bed Bath & Beyond Scion Pressured Artists to Retract Gaza Ceasefire Call in Artforum Letter appeared first on The Intercept.

(JTA) – Like many American Jews, Matt Greenberg has been bombarded with requests to sign open letters about the state of affairs in Israel and Gaza.

One that he received this week in a WhatsApp group particularly incensed Greenberg, who helms a Jewish social services nonprofit in Stamford, Connecticut. Saying that it would be published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, the letter called for a ceasefire in Gaza as the top priority of global health workers.

The letter also included little condemnation of Hamas, the terror group that killed more than 1,400 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages. And a clause calling for the immediate release of all hostages was removed after signatories complained.

Greenberg was incensed by what he saw and decided to sign a competing pro-Israel letter also circulating in the medical community. So he clicked the link and added his name to “Call to Action: An Open Letter from Global Health Professionals.”

Only later did Greenberg realize he had signed the wrong letter. This passionate Israel supporter and head of his regional Jewish social services organization had mistakenly added his name to a petition that included a health advisor to the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, and couldn’t figure out how to remove it.

“I originally thought it was a pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian letter,” Greenberg told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Obviously it was the reverse.”

He added, “I unfortunately didn’t read the letter well enough and properly to understand what it meant and what it was saying.”

Greenberg’s experience is a window into the dizzying stream of petitions and open letters that have been circulating in the weeks since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the start of Israel’s retaliatory strikes in Gaza. Open letters and social media posts have become a major currency of protest, with statements from Hollywood celebrities, students at elite universities, and titans of arts and culture weighing in. So many letters are flying that even people who want to sign ones that align with their values can’t track them all.

Greenberg’s experience also points to the fact that deep division over what to say and do about the Israel-Hamas war extends into the global medical community, where there was apparently a dispute over whether to call for the release of the hundreds of hostages taken by Hamas.

The most immediate priority listed in the Lancet letter is a ceasefire in Gaza, followed by establishing humanitarian corridors and “the recognition of human rights of all people in the region.” Hamas broke a 2021 ceasefire when it attacked Israel, and Israel and its allies reject the idea of a ceasefire because it would leave Hamas in control in Gaza.

The Lancet letter also pushes for organizations to be allowed access to investigate “alleged war crimes,” singling out the bombing of a hospital in Gaza that Hamas blamed on Israel but which multiple news organizations and countries, including the United States, have attributed to a failed Palestinian rocket. The letter says it ultimately hopes to address “antisemitism and Islamophobia worldwide.”

A note attached to the open letter explains that one addendum, “The immediate and unconditional release of all hostages,” was added during the drafting process only to be removed 24 hours later “based on debate and feedback.” No further explanation was given. Hamas is currently holding an estimated 220 Israeli hostages.

“I can’t for the life of me imagine why any rational person would want to have that removed,” said Greenberg, who is CEO of the Schoke Jewish Family Service of Fairfield County. “There’s so much talk of humanitarian aid and all that kind of stuff, you’d think that would be a given.”

The open letter had not been published by Thursday afternoon, only saying that it had been submitted for publication to The Lancet, which has published an array of pieces on the conflict, including a call for humanitarian aid to Gaza and a separate letter, signed by 1,500 Israeli health care professionals, calling for “the immediate release of Israeli hostages.”

But the letter was still continuing to amass signatures, crossing the 2,700-signature threshold before pausing. Matt Greenberg was still listed at 1,743.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post More than 2,700 health workers signed a pro-ceasefire letter that excised a call to free Israeli hostages appeared first on The Forward.

(New York Jewish Week) — Last fall, when Binyumen Shaechter started putting together the 2023 repertoire for the Yiddish Philharmonic Chorus, he thought an apt theme and title would be “Chutzpah! Yiddish Songs of Defiance” to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as well as the 75th birthday of the State of Israel. 

He had no idea that, nearly a year later, when the chorus was gearing up for an encore performance of its June concert celebrating their 100th anniversary, Hamas would invade Israel and slaughter 1,400 Israelis — and that Jews might need to turn to these historical songs of defiance once again. 

“If anything, what’s happening in Israel, in that region and to the innocent Gaza civilians is more of an inspiration and an incentive for us to sing with more passion, emotion and determination and defiance,” Schaechter, the director and conductor of the chorus, told the New York Jewish Week. “These songs made the people who sang them feel good about the things that they were feeling bad about.”

The concert, this coming Sunday at the Upper West Side’s Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center, includes three songs about the Jewish people’s relationship to the land of Israel at different points in Jewish history: a setting of Psalm 137, the “Partisans’ Anthem” sung by Jewish fighters in the 1940s and, perhaps most notably of all, “Di Hofenung,” a version of “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem, that was translated into Yiddish in 1943 by Hillel Meitin. 

Schaechter believes the Yiddish version of “Hatikvah” is relatively unknown and, to his knowledge, has not been performed since his chorus picked it up. “I happened to find it in a collection of Yiddish war songs written in 1943,”he said. “I would be shocked if anybody has performed it in Yiddish. We’ve made that poem come to life after 80 years.”

“Because everything that’s going on in Israel, we just feel our hearts so full to be singing these songs like ‘Hatikvah’ and the partisans’ song in Yiddish,” Lynne Cassouto, a soprano who has been in the chorus for nine years, told the New York Jewish Week. “It’s just so poignant and so powerful right now to be singing together right now.”

Founded in 1923 on the Lower East Side as the Freiheit Gezang Farein (“Freedom Chorus”) by conductor and composer Lazar Weiner, the chorus was an extension of the Morgen Freiheit, a daily Yiddish communist newspaper. The singers “were native Yiddish speakers and were staunch lefties,” Schaechter said. For the first 15 or so years, the chorus would begin every concert with a Yiddish translation of the French communist anthem “The Internationale.”

In the decades after its founding, the chorus continued to grow as its leaders wrote new choral and solo works. The group performed all over the city, including at Carnegie Hall. In 1948, during the anti-communist backlash of the McCarthy Era, the chorus changed its name to the Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus. 

By the 1980s, the chorus’ popularity had waned, and it became more of a community choir — anyone who wanted to join could, regardless of whether they could sing, Schaechter said. 

Schaechter, 60, became the chorus’ conductor and the director in 1995. Born in East New York, Brooklyn, he grew up in the Bronx in a prominent Yiddish-speaking family: His father, Mordkhe Schaechter, was a Yiddish linguist and professor at Columbia, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Yeshiva University and YIVO, the Yiddish research institute. His aunt, Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, was a Yiddish poet and songwriter. Binyumen and his three sisters all pursued careers in Yiddish: Rukhl is the editor of Forverts, the Yiddish Forward; Gitl is a Yiddish poet and Eydl teaches Yiddish classes for women in her haredi community in Tzfat, Israel. 

Despite his upbringing, Schaechter said he never planned a career in Yiddish music — he thought he’d become a composer for musical theater. “My dream was to win a Tony Award for Best Score and to give my thank you speech in Yiddish,” he said. He wrote a few shows that weren’t produced, and worked as a substitute conductor at another chorus that shared some members with the Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus, who asked him if he’d like to take over as the conductor full time. 

Now, said Schaechter, who also works as a Yiddish translator and lecturer, “I can’t imagine doing anything else.” 

In 2021, the chorus officially changed its name to the Yiddish Philharmonic Chorus. “Our raison d’etre for many years has been singing in Yiddish, keeping Yiddish alive and doing it in a way that enlightens the audience about the treasures that Yiddish poetry, song and even choral arrangements can have,” he said. 

In his nearly 30-year tenure, Schaechter has expanded the range and ability of the chorus. The 36 members, ranging from 30-somethings to those in their 90s, had to audition. They hold a weekly practice session on Monday nights and perform anywhere from from three to 12 times a year around the city. 

While knowing Yiddish is not a prerequisite — Schaechter guesses only about a fifth of the cohort could hold a conversation in the language — singers learn how to pronounce and perform the music with gusto while also learning the translation and meanings behind the songs. 

“One of the things I love about the way Binyumen specifically presents a piece of music to us is that he will give us historical context — he will tell us about the composer, the author if it was originally a poem, the dialect, what the part of the world it was from, the context of when it was written,” said Cassouto, who, like Schaechter, hails from a musical, Yiddish-speaking family. 

“I feel very strongly about Jewish continuity through all these art forms,” she added. “So that all, for me, is a piece of keeping that spirit alive and being true to where we come from, and not having it just become history, but really be retained as a part of my identity.”

“This was our culture. This was our language. This is our tradition going back for centuries,” Schaechter said. “There’s such wonderful literature and so many wonderful Yiddish songs that we don’t want to lose them. We want to pass them on to the next generation.”

Tickets for the Yiddish Philharmonic Chorus’ upcoming concert on Sunday, Oct. 29 at 1 p.m. can be found here, starting at $50. A recording of the concert can also be purchased.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post The Yiddish Philharmonic Chorus celebrates its 100th anniversary with a rare Yiddish rendition of ‘Hatikvah’ appeared first on The Forward.

NEW | The #IDF conducted a raid into the #GazaStrip on October 26, which Israeli media framed as preparation for the ground operation. Read today’s update from @criticalthreats and @thestudyofwar: https://t.co/V6niy5Llid pic.twitter.com/xxOXOCUKe5

— Critical Threats (@criticalthreats) October 27, 2023