California puts "Jewish" on the form

The Texas Capitol plot is now a federal case. U.S. Attorney Justin R. Simmons charged Benny Caldera Jr. on Thursday with possessing a gun with an obliterated serial number. Texas DPS announced his arrest Wednesday after a friend reported that Caldera said he was "going to the Capitol" to "shoot it up." Per the affidavit, he was angry at AIPAC and said, "These people have to be exterminated." Without that friend's call, Simmons said, "we could have a very different and tragic story." ¹

The federal school-choice credit covers Jewish day schools. Starting January 2027, donors to state scholarship groups can take a federal tax credit of up to $1,700 under last year's Trump tax law, and the scholarships can pay private and religious school tuition in the 30-plus states that opted in. Agudath Israel's Rabbi AD Motzen called it "great news for American families." Anyone who has paid day school tuition understands the enthusiasm. ²

Balad's leader drops out. Sami Abou Shehadeh, chair of the Arab nationalist Balad party, ended his run in Israel's Oct. 27 election after the nine High Court justices hearing his case unanimously urged him to withdraw, telling him a majority would uphold his disqualification. The elections committee had barred him over an article he published the day after Oct. 7, 2023, which the attorney general argued backed armed struggle. ³

On Wednesday, the last day he could act on bills this session, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed SB 1387, making California the first state to treat "Jewish" as an ethnic and racial identity in data collection, beyond a religion. ⁴ By Jan. 1, 2029, any state agency that collects demographic data needs a separate category for Jewish ancestry. ⁵ That means forms like unemployment claims and hate-crime reports. The bill, by State Sen. Henry Stern of Sherman Oaks, adds "Jewish" to about 50 identities the state already tracks, and nobody in either chamber voted no. ⁶

David Bocarsly, CEO of Jewish California, the 46-group coalition behind the bill, said that "under the shadow of Nazi race theory, American Jewish leaders asked the government to count us only as a religion," and it "didn't work." Now, he said, "hate crime, health, poverty, and education data will reflect who Jewish Californians actually are." ⁴⁶ Jewish Voice for Peace and Bend the Arc opposed the bill, arguing that one box flattens a diverse community and creates a government record of who is Jewish. ⁶

Newsom signed with a caveat. Agencies can skip the Jewish category only by showing it would cost them federal funds, and he wrote that this sets "too high a standard" when state forms clash with federal data rules. He asked the Legislature to revisit it. ⁵ The same day, he signed AB 395, which bars scheduling public meetings and graduations on major religious holidays. ⁴

The ADL graded 40 American art museums on Jewish inclusion this week. One, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, earned "gold standard." Twelve, including the Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, came in "critically deficient." One of the 40 marked Jewish American Heritage Month; 24 marked other groups' heritage months. In the "State of the Arts" project, novelist Meg Keene says she was advised to "strip out every Jewish element that did not directly drive the plot." ⁷⁸ Scholars Josh Lambert and Dan Sinykin say the report "conflates Jews and Zionists." ⁷

Rabbi Steve Leder, who coached the "Nobody Wants This" production on Judaism, posted an Instagram video calling Adam Brody "a relatively ignorant Jew" over his genocide comments in GQ. ⁹ We think Brody is wrong about Gaza. We also think Leder reached for the worst insult available. Brody has said he "barely got bar mitzvahed and retained nothing from it." Plenty of American Jews could say the same, and a rabbi's job with them is to teach. Calling one of them ignorant in public tells every half-lapsed Jew watching that the people at the door are keeping score. Argue with Brody about Gaza all you want, and leave his Jewishness out of it.

Zara pulled a kids' Halloween costume off its website Wednesday: a gray-and-blue striped suit, $59.90, that people online said looked like a concentration camp uniform. It was meant to look like Beetlejuice. The product description promised "a distressed effect." ¹⁰ This is the third time. In 2007 Zara withdrew a handbag with a swastika embroidered on it, and in 2014 it apologized for a striped shirt with six-pointed yellow-star badges on the chest. As of Thursday, Zara had said nothing publicly and had not answered JTA. ¹⁰ Nineteen years and three strikes, and the design department still can't tell Michael Keaton from Auschwitz.

Hero: Isaac Herzog. Israel's president phoned Ahmed al-Husseini, an East Jerusalem man beaten by an ultra-Orthodox mob outside Damascus Gate earlier this week in an attack someone livestreamed. "I was truly saddened to see what happened to you," Herzog told him. "This should never happen." A head of state called a stranger to express sorrow over what a Jewish mob did to him. ¹¹

Villain: Itamar Ben Gvir. Israel's national security minister appeared in a video, flanked by armed prison guards, telling Hamas prisoner Hassan Salamah, who orchestrated the 1996 Jerusalem bus bombings that killed 45 people, "I want to kill you." Justice Noam Sohlberg, chair of the Central Elections Committee, ruled that Ben Gvir "took advantage of his position to produce an election campaign video," ordered it taken down, and fined him and his Otzma Yehudit party 10,000 shekels each. Nobody owes Salamah sympathy. Other candidates, Sohlberg noted, "don't have the same access to prisons, inmates and jailers." ¹²

No weekly parsha this Shabbat. Friday is Hoshana Rabbah, 21 Tishrei 5787, and Saturday is Shemini Atzeret, when the megillah is Ecclesiastes. ¹³¹⁴ For the table: the diaspora gets Simchat Torah on Sunday as its own day, while Israel and Reform Judaism fold Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah into one. ¹⁴

Send this to the one who'll argue about it at Shabbat dinner.

Shabbat shalom.