The Limits of the Jewish Conversation
When does robust debate degenerate into gaslighting?
A Controversial Image On Canada’s Leading Jewish Publication
We have been monthly supporters of the current iteration of the Canadian Jewish News (CJN), which is now an online publication at cjnews.com. That monthly gift entitles us to receive their quarterly print publication. We’ve been reading through the Fall 2024 offering, which is a glossy magazine with a stiff cardboard cover. On the cover is a colorful drawing by illustrator Jan Feindt, which depicts a multi-generational Jewish family around a table. The apples and honey, pomegranates, and wine suggest that it is a Rosh Hashanah meal. This is not an observant family. Nobody has their head covered and some people are looking at their phones. We see a phone in a hand in the bottom corner of the picture. The phone shows an image of an explosion.
At the top of the image an older woman stands next to the table, wearing a plastic yellow ribbon pin. She is talking to a young girl sitting on her right. She has her back to a younger woman who is wearing a Keffiyeh and watermelon earrings. Nobody at the table is looking at the woman in Palestinian regalia. She is depicted looking over her shoulder and appears to be listening to a person we don’t see, beyond the right hand edge of the picture. Next to the woman with the keffiyeh is a dark haired man with a beard, who appears to be in conversation with an older white haired man across the table.
Beside the older man, a woman and a young girl are smiling at another phone, perhaps in a video call with people who couldn’t make it to the dinner. Next to them an older woman sits with her head on her hand, her eyes closed, looking tired and sad. Sitting across from the distressed older woman, another young woman looks disconcerted, staring pensively off into space, her hand holding a knife against her plate.
Image: Cover illustration of the CJN’s Fall 2024 Print Magazine by Illustrator Jan Feindt ——————Source: Canadian Jewish News
The CJN online site includes a transcript of a conversation among Hamital Dotan, the new editor of the quarterly print magazine, regular CJN contributor Avi Fine, and CJN opinion editor, Phoebe Maltz Bovy, about the feedback they have received to the cover illustration. The tone and content of this conversation addresses the question about why Dotan chose to put this particular image on the cover and also more broadly, her vision about the role the CJN magazine will play under her leadership. The transcript linked above begins with this exchange among the three participants:
Avi: This issue was conceived as a one-year anniversary response to where Jews are one year after October 7. Is that correct?
Hamutal: This Rosh Hashanah is not going to be like a typical Rosh Hashanah. There are only a few days between the holiday and the October 7 anniversary. And it didn’t seem either accurate or responsible to gloss over the complexities of this moment and just do a straightforward happy holiday issue the way that we might have in other years.
Phoebe: So the magazine, in its new direction, is going to be a more complex, wide-ranging portrait of Jewish life.
Hamutal: That is certainly our aspiration. What we’re really hoping to do, over time, is to explore in a very serious, reported way the issues and situations that the community is finding itself in. We are not here to take sides on anything. We don’t have house views on matters of politics or religion. What we’re here to do is to put the Jewish community in conversation with itself, to put Canadian Jews in conversation with other Canadian Jews, and to be a forum where we can all learn more about the diversity and complexity of the Canadian Jewish experience.
Hamutal Dotan’s first statement seems unexceptionable. Any publication tied to the anniversary of the October 7 massacre should not ignore the altered reality we are now living in. But this doesn’t address the particular way in which she has chosen to mark the anniversary. The second paragraph makes a number of claims about her idea of the mission of the quarterly magazine she is now going to run.
She claims they are not here “to take sides on anything.” They aspire to be “a forum where we can all learn more about the diversity and complexity of the Canadian Jewish Experience.” This raises two distinct questions: Firstly, “Is this a desirable goal?”, and secondly, “Does the content of the magazine in our hands actually embody any such thing?”. Setting aside the first question for now, let’s examine whether the article discussing the illustration achieves the goal of not taking sides.
The transcript of the interview is preceded by the CJN’s own description of the illustration that appeared on the cover of the Fall 2024 magazine. The authorship of the article is attributed to all three participants and it is therefore not clear which of the three wrote the introduction. Compare their description with the one we wrote above.
The image depicted a fictional family gathered for Rosh Hashanah. This family included a matronly woman in an apron wearing a yellow ribbon in support of bringing the hostages home; a young girl with a dog tag necklace in support of the Israel Defense Forces; two bearded men in a heated discussion; someone looking at footage of an explosion posted to Instagram on their smartphone; one woman clutching her forehead in apparent disappointment or frustration; and, most controversially, a young woman sporting a keffiyeh and watermelon earrings—a symbol of Palestinian solidarity.
Emphasis in the quote was added by us. This description contains statements which we see as the exact opposite of “not taking sides.”
The description of the drawing quoted just above includes a description of a young girl wearing dog tags “in support of the Israel Defense Forces”. As someone who has been wearing a dog tag for almost a year, I can reliably report that the dog tag, which says “Bring them Home Now” in English and “Halev sheli shavui b’Aza” (My heart is held captive in Gaza), has nothing to do with supporting the Israel Defense Forces. It makes me wonder if the person who wrote this description has ever held one of these objects in their hand. Have they even spoken to someone who wears the dog tag?
The other statement in the description explains that the keffiyeh and watermelon earrings are a symbol of Palestinian solidarity. The author of the paragraph is presenting a controversial opinion as a statement of fact. This statement shows why the illustration itself is in no way neutral on the heartbreaking questions that currently confront the Canadian Jewish community. In fact the statement about the keffiyeh, just like the statement about the dog tags, makes me wonder whether the person who wrote it has actually spent much time talking to Canadian Jews.
Canadian Jews have a great deal of experience with people who wear keffiyehs. We know what a keffiyeh is and have our own ideas about what it may symbolize. It’s a bit presumptuous of the author to think that the meaning of a keffiyeh is something that needs to be explained to this particular audience, and it is disingenuous to present it as a matter of fact rather than as a challenge to existing opinion.
Image: Yasser Arafat in a keffiyeh. One thing a keffiyeh may symbolize to Canadian Jews ——-Source: Indian Institute of Information Technology
In the 1970’s our recollection is that the keffiyeh was a symbol of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which had made its name by slipping into Israel and murdering Jews in schools and on buses. We have vivid memories of Arafat getting a rapturous reception at the UN General Assembly and the chilling sense that hijacking passenger planes and murdering Jews had become very cool.
If Canadian Jews are not old enough to remember Arafat they have certainly watched over the course of the past year as Jews have been harassed in Toronto neighbourhoods and children have been assaulted in Toronto schools. They have had to navigate encampments where the murderers of Jews were celebrated and Jews were denied access unless they adopted the libel that Israel is committing genocide. The keffiyeh has had a prominent place in those experiences.
We have also watched as large crowds have marched in Canadian cities and in world capitals, sporting the keffiyeh and denouncing Israel as an Apartheid settler colonial state, demanding from the first day of the war, not justice for the victims, but that an immediate ceasefire that would have left Hamas in control of Gaza.
Image: Pro Hamas protesters march in New York City on November 11, 2023. ——————Source: CNN
When Canadian Jews thought of a Keffiyeh over the past year there are other things that may come to mind. They may think of the nearly 1200 people murdered by Hamas in the name of Palestine, almost exactly a year ago. They may think of demonstrators marching through the streets of Ottawa on a weekly basis chanting to “globalize the intifada.” None of these people seemed concerned about justice for the 1200 raped, tortured and killed or the 240 taken captive. None of the angry marchers sporting the keffiyeh seemed to think Jewish lives matter at all.
Image: War Criminal and Mass Murderer Yehiah Sinwar in a Keffiyeh ———————Source: India Today
So if someone wishes to write in the Canadian Jewish News that the keffiyeh is a symbol of Palestinians solidarity, a minimal respect for the readership would require that they acknowledge that this is a controversial idea and that there is a need to at least advance an argument to support such a claim.
As for the image itself, on one level it represents an aspiration, shared by most of us to some extent, that Jews who hold views that are violently at odds with each other can still sit together at the same table as Jews. This is not such a terrible thing to wish for in the abstract, but it should be accompanied by an honest discussion of why it is very difficult for Jews who have dealt with decades of atrocities committed in the name of Palestine, to sit down and break bread with someone who is either unaware of or indifferent to that traumatic history.
If Hamutal Dotan wishes to promote a robust conversation among Jews, there is a need to show some respect for her audience. If a writer wants to advance a view that will cause rage and grief in the hearts of most of the Jewish community, then it should begin by acknowledging what is being done, rather than pretending that a provocative and hurtful claim is an innocuous statement of fact. And if that is what you are doing, don’t tell us that you are above the fray and just putting Jews into conversation with each other. Don’t gaslight us.
We are approaching another two day festival which falls on a Thursday and a Friday, which means that for the third time in this holiday season observant Jews will be off line for three days in a row. In addition, the festival which begins tomorrow evening marks the one year anniversary in the Jewish calendar of Black Shabbat, which is what Israelis are calling October 7, 2023. We thus mix obligatory celebration with the anguish of marking the anniversary. We gather as a community to mark the festival with Israel in an existential war with Iran and its proxies, and in a Canada which has changed beyond recognition in the course of the past year, a Canada which no longer seems supportive to its Jewish citizens, at a time when we are most in need of solidarity and support.
We would like to thank you, our readers and supporters for all you do to help grow this publication, to support an honest and thoughtful discussion of important issues involving Israel and the Canadian Jewish community. If you are a paid subscriber you can leave a comment.
To all those observing, Chag Sameach, and thanks to everyone for reading Canadian Zionist Forum.
Couldn't agree more with the comments by David...
I would never look at that journal again. It fails the most basic Jewish test. It does not support Klal Yisrael. It is not of Klal Yisrael. The editor seems to think she rises above and outside of what is happening the Jewish people of Israel are in the midst of an existential war against a genocidal homicidal psychopathic enemy. The Jews of the Western Disaspora are facing the worst anti-semitism, all emanating from the left and from Muslims, since the 1930s. And this journal does not stand with the Jewish people.