Eisenkot Gets the First Shot

Herzog gives Gadi Eisenkot the first try at a government. The president announced Saturday evening that Eisenkot, backed by 67 Knesset members to Netanyahu's 46, gets the mandate Sunday and 28 days to build a coalition. Netanyahu replied by video, calling for a "national unity government" that keeps all his old partners, Otzma Yehudit included. ¹

A Christian Zionist group says Vance blew a dog whistle. Christians United for Israel's political arm said Friday that Vance, by pinning the GOP's midterm losses on the Iran war and U.S.-Israel ties, left Jews "effectively blamed twice if you can hear that pitch of dog whistle." A Vance spokesperson said he "did not blame Jews." ²

A Paris court ordered a Nazi-looted Pissarro back to the family. The Nazis took the 1902 canvas from banker Salomon Flavian in 1941; Sotheby's London sold it in 2024 for £1.2 million. The court voided every sale since the seizure and gave Sotheby's two months to name the buyer or pay €1,000 a day. ³

The man behind a Cabaret character helped get Jewish children out of Germany. Cabaret turns 60 this month, and Brian Fairbanks's book, Life Is a Cabaret, goes after the real people behind it. One is Wilfrid Israel, whose family owned Berlin's Nathan Israel department store, a gay socialist and reluctant Zionist, whom Christopher Isherwood turned into Bernhard Landauer in The Berlin Stories. After Kristallnacht, Israel wrote to the British prime minister, which fed the program that became the Kindertransport; it saved about 10,000 children. He stayed in Berlin through Gestapo arrests and spent the family fortune on emigration. The Luftwaffe shot down his plane in 1943. He was 43. He asked friends not to keep records of his politics or his good deeds. Fairbanks wrote them down anyway. ⁴

Today is 28 Cheshvan, and this week's parsha is Toldot. Monday is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, November 9 and 10, 1938, when Nazis burned more than 1,400 synagogues and sent about 26,000 Jewish men to concentration camps. The regime fined the Jews one billion Reichsmarks and called it an "atonement payment." ⁵⁶⁷