The Haredi party eyeing Eisenkot

The Boulder firebomber pleaded guilty to federal hate crimes. Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 46, admitted in federal court in Denver on Thursday that he firebombed the June 2025 hostage-solidarity rally because of the victims' religion or national origin. Karen Diamond, 82, died of her injuries. He is already serving life on state charges; the federal deal asks for life plus 50 years. Sentencing is Jan. 7. ¹

Settlers beat two activists on camera. Police arrested the activists. Footage from the South Hebron Hills shows two settlers, at least one armed, attacking Jasper Nathaniel, an American, and Andrey Kharzhanovsky, an Israeli, overnight Wednesday. How it started is unclear. Police arrested both activists and banned them from the West Bank through year's end. No settlers were reported arrested. ²

An Agudah official says ICE detained Orthodox Jews who voted as non-citizens. New Jersey Assemblyman Avi Schnall, Agudath Israel of America's chief operating officer, said in a video that "several people" in the community are in federal detention after allegedly voting on a visa or green card. He called them "innocent mistakes" and told non-citizens not to vote. ³

The final count changed nothing at the top. Netanyahu's bloc has 53 seats, Gadi Eisenkot's 48, and the Arab-led parties a record 19. Turnout was 77.9%, which the Times of Israel calls the highest in decades. Official results go to President Isaac Herzog on Wednesday, the Knesset is sworn in Nov. 10, and coalition talks could run more than two months. ⁴

Channel 12 reported Thursday that figures in United Torah Judaism are weighing support for an Eisenkot-led minority government, abstaining instead of joining. Without UTJ's seven seats, Netanyahu's bloc drops to 46, two behind Eisenkot. The party is reportedly frustrated that Netanyahu never passed a law enshrining exemptions for yeshiva students. "Our alliance with him has run its course, especially now that he doesn't have 61 seats," a UTJ source said. The talks are at junior levels, and Yashar declined to comment. ⁵

The draft is in the way. All four Jewish-led opposition parties campaigned on ending the Haredi exemption, and Eisenkot vowed Thursday to bring universal military and national service to a vote when the Knesset opens. ⁶⁷ Also on Thursday, hundreds of Haredi men blocked Route 4 near Bnei Brak over the arrest of a draft evader. Police said three officers were wounded; an i24 reporter was hit in the head with a stone. UTJ chair Yaakov Asher said the officers "acted unlawfully and with severe violence." ⁸ The backstory →

The Nuremberg verdicts turned 80 this month, and Natalie Livingstone wants the women put back in the picture. In a JTA essay ahead of her book "The Nuremberg Women," out from St. Martin's in November, she faults the 2025 film "Nuremberg" for treating women as decoration. Her cast includes Harriet Zetterberg, a Yale-educated American prosecutor who built the case against Hans Frank but wasn't allowed to speak in court, so a man read her work aloud. Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, who survived Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, was the first woman to testify. The female reporters shared a villa with one bathroom and a single urinal, which tells you who the villa was built for. ⁹

California issued Iasmine Abdennabi a plate reading RVRTSEA in May 2024, revoked it in October 2025 after at least two drivers complained, and this week she sued the DMV over what she calls a "heckler's veto." ¹⁰ Our view: give her the plate back. We read "from the river to the sea" as a call for a map with no Jewish state on it, and her gloss about equal rights doesn't change how it reads to a Jew stuck behind her at a light. But the state approved the plate, let it ride for 17 months, and pulled it over two complaints. A DMV that cancels a slogan because two people called can cancel an Am Yisrael Chai plate the same way.

The Royal Spanish Academy's dictionary lists five meanings for "judío." The fifth is "miserly or usurious." In September 2024 a federal judge in Argentina ordered it dropped, after a complaint from the Latin American Jewish Congress and DAIA. The academy hasn't complied. Its director, Santiago Muñoz Machado, says that if the dictionary defines "Jew" as "miserly," it is "because that's how people use the word." ¹¹ In 2023 the same academy removed "talkative" and "chatty" from its entry for "lawyer," because a Spanish lawyer, Borja Luján Lago, asked. Lawyers got their entry fixed. Jews got a note, added in 2021, saying the usage is "offensive or discriminatory."

Hero: Lucas Zelnick. A woman at one of the New York comic's recent shows announced "I'm against Jews," then added, "You guys are evil." Zelnick, whose act is about being Jewish, kept asking her questions. "That's not all Jews. Like I'm here, right? And I'm pro-Palestine," he said. The crowd took his side. He asked her for more "nuances," and she walked out. ¹²

Villain: American Psychological Association. A House Education and Workforce Committee report released Thursday says APA leaders "repeatedly failed to confront antisemitism within their own organization." Among its 20 internal messages: APA's then chief diversity officer answered a June 2025 exchange with a Jewish psychologist with "Sigh!" APA also cut "terrorism" from its Oct. 7 statement on the advice of a group it consulted as an "antisemitism stakeholder." It didn't answer Jewish Insider's request for comment. ¹³

Parashat Vayera, 19 Cheshvan 5787. For the table: Abraham, sitting at his tent in the heat, sees three strangers, runs to meet them, and offers "a morsel of bread." Then he has Sarah bake cakes from three seahs of choice flour, takes a calf from the herd, and serves it with curds and milk. The original "just a little something." ¹⁴¹⁵

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

Shabbat shalom.