Philly Answered the Boycott Ride
Lines outside the targeted Jewish restaurants. Also: Israeli TV benches Eyal Berkovic.
Philadelphia answered the boycott ride with lines out the door. Philly Bike On Your Left, a self-described anti-Zionist cycling collective, rode Sunday against six Jewish-owned restaurants around Rittenhouse Square, Dizengoff and Schlesinger's among them. Police counted about 300 protesters and 200 counter-protesters and made three arrests. 1 Supporters lined up outside K'Far and Goldie. "The only way to push back at hate is to show love," said Michael Balaban, who heads the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. Organizers plan another ride next Sunday. 2
Channel 13 suspended Eyal Berkovic indefinitely on Sunday. In a Saturday segment on Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, who has an MD from Columbia, the former soccer star asked whether a Muslim or Arab could be a doctor, then said MK Ahmad Tibi, also an MD, "should show the certificate." Right call, and a late one: days earlier he told Arab Israeli anchor Lucy Aharish, "Calm down, you're not in the village here." 3
Aryeh Deri is leaving the Knesset but keeping Shas. Shas fell from 11 seats to six on October 27, and the party's Council of Torah Sages refused his resignation as chairman to keep him on the yeshiva draft-exemption fight. A court barred him from the cabinet in 2023 over his criminal record, so he's quitting the one job nobody stopped him from holding. 4 The backstory →
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of Manhattan's Stephen Wise Free Synagogue used his Friday sermon to declare the American Jewish "Golden Age" over, with October 7 as its "symbolic end." "Those heady days seem over," he said. 5
He has half of it right. Anti-Jewish sentiment has been normalized on the right and the left, and he names both. The obituary is the half we don't buy. His own prescription is to build coalitions and be "more realistic and humble about our true influence." That's a to-do list for a community with real power left to spend, and our view is that American Jews should spend it instead of mourning it. Historians name golden ages after the fact, and nobody gets to call time on one the Friday after a midterm.
Monday night is 88 years since Kristallnacht. More than 1,000 synagogues and Jewish institutions are expected to leave their lights on overnight for Spread the Light, run with Yad Vashem. Organizer Dalia Yohanan's father survived the pogrom as a boy, hiding under a table while neighbors threw stones at the windows. His parents put him on a Kindertransport to Britain; the Nazis killed them. 6
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