Briefs

The United States Postal Service released a new series of Forever stamps Friday, April 8 in honor of Shel Silverstein, the Jewish author and illustrator who died in 1999.

The stamps commemorate what is perhaps Silverstein’s most famous book, The Giving Tree, which tells the story of the relationship between a boy and a tree. The stamps feature an image of the boy from the story catching an apple with Silverstein’s name written below.

“The issuance honors the extraordinarily versatile Shel Silverstein (1930–1999), one of the 20th century’s most imaginative authors and illustrators. His picture book The Giving Tree and his quirky poetry collections are beloved by children everywhere,” the description on the postal service’s website reads.

Silverstein was born in 1930 to a middle-class Jewish family in Chicago. He started drawing and writing from a young age and drew his first cartoons for adult readers when he was a GI in Japan and Korea. In addition to his career as a children’s book author, Silverstein was a prolific songwriter and playwright. (He also inspired the name of the youngest child of a Jewish family that recently appeared on Ava Duvernay’s home-swapping TV show.)

The U.S. Postal Service’s special edition stamps commemorating notable Americans have included many Jews, including the physicist Richard Feynman in 2005, cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg in 1995 and, in 1991, comedian Fanny Brice, the inspiration for the musical Funny Girl. The series in which Brice appeared was drawn by the Jewish illustrator Al Hirschfeld. (JTA)

Canada is set to outlaw Holocaust denial, a move that has the backing of the governing Liberal Party coalition and the opposition Conservative Party.

The CTV reported on Saturday, April 9 that language adding Holocaust denial to the criminal code is in the must-pass government budget.

Coalition officials cast the change as consistent with existing Canadian laws criminalizing incitement to hatred and promotion of genocide.

“There is no place for antisemitism and Holocaust denial in Canada,” Marco Mendicino, the public safety minister, told CTV.

“That’s why we’ve pledged to prohibit the willful promotion of antisemitism through condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust. The Holocaust was one of the darkest chapters in human history. We must preserve its memory, combat contemporary antisemitism and be unequivocal when we say: never again.”

Irwin Cotler, the veteran human rights activist who is currently Canada’s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism, said: “Holocaust denial and distortion constitute a cruel assault on memory, truth, and justice—an antisemitic libel to cover up the worst crime in history— and thereby a cruel and mocking rebuke to Holocaust survivors and their legacy.”

The language echoes a separate law already advanced by a Conservative member of parliament, Kevin Waugh of Saskatchewan. He called the decision a “win for everybody.”

Canada joins a number of European nations, including Germany, that have criminalized Holocaust denial. (JTA)

For his next historical deep dive, famed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is exploring America’s relationship to the Holocaust.

Tentatively titled, The U.S. and the Holocaust, the three-part miniseries set to air Sept. 18-20 on PBS is co-directed and co-produced by Burns and his longtime collaborators Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein. Burns’ production company says the series “dispels the competing myths that Americans either were ignorant of what was happening to Jews in Europe, or that they merely looked on with callous indifference.”

In a 2019 interview with Esquire, the Emmy-winning director said the series would be “all about immigration and who’s an American and who’s not an American.”

Like all of Burns’ projects, the documentary has taken years to make. But it will now be the next release from his production house, as he announced in a promo message that aired earlier this month to accompany his latest PBS documentary, Benjamin Franklin.

“Our next film is one of the most important we’ve ever worked on,” Burns, the director of such works as The Civil War, Jazz, and The Roosevelts told viewers, by way of introducing the series.

Burns, whose wife is Jewish, has explored the Holocaust in different ways before. The 2016 documentary Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War, for which Burns came onboard as co-director and co-producer midway through its production, followed American Unitarian minister Waitstill Sharp and his wife Martha in their mission to save Jewish refugees in Europe. His 2007 series The War, about America’s entry into World War II, also discussed the Holocaust. (JTA)

The White House’s top COVID-19 response coordinator said that Americans over 60 should be getting a second vaccine booster shot, citing Israeli data.

“The data out of Israel is pretty compelling for people over 60,” Dr. Ashish Jha said on Fox News Sunday, April 17. “People who have had that second booster shot four months after their first booster, what we saw was a substantial reduction not in just in infections, but in deaths.”

The Food and Drug Administration authorized second Pfizer and Moderna boosters for people over 50 last month. But Israel, which launched the world’s first major second booster program in January as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus swept through the world, authorized it only for people over 60.

Jha also said April 17 on This Week with George Stephanopoulos that getting a second booster between the ages of 50 and 59 “is a much closer call.”

While an Israeli study found that the second booster’s “protection against confirmed infection appeared short-lived,” the shot’s “protection against severe illness did not wane during the study period.” (JTA)

Wine from a West Bank settlement was on the menu at this year’s White House Passover seder hosted by Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Dough Emhoff.

A spokesperson for Harris said the choice should not be construed as a political statement about Israeli settlement in the West Bank.

“The wine served at the Seder was in no way intended to be an expression of policy,” Herbie Ziskind, an advisor to Harris, said in a tweet.

The response from the Harris spokesman came after reporters spotted a bottle of wine from the Psagot winery in a photo of the seder that Emhoff posted to social media, eliciting a flood of criticism from anti-occupation activists.

“These photos show @VP serving wine from Psagot at Passover Seder. Psagot’s vineyards are on stolen Palestinian land. It’s not cool. It was the Trump that ‘legitimated’ the theft,” James Zogby, founder of the ArabAmerican Institute, said in a tweet.

The Psagot winery, which is located north of Jerusalem in the West Bank, has been active in efforts to resist international efforts to prevent goods produced in Israeli settlements from being labeled “Made in Israel.” The winery challenged a 2016 French ruling requiring wines produced in Israeli settlements to be labeled as such, though the European Court of Justice upheld the French law in 2019.

In February 2020, the winery introduced a special label named for Mike Pompeo, then-President Donald Trump’s Secretary of State, whom they thanked for repudiating a State Department finding that Israeli settlements were illegal.

The photo of the seder posted by Emhoff also showed traditional seder plates on the table alongside an orange, a more modern addition to the seder plate meant to symbolize inclusion of LGBTQ Jews at the seder. The tradition to host a seder at the White House was started in 2009 by then-President Barack Obama. (JTA)