Refugees who fled Afghanistan after the takeover of their country by the Taliban, gather at the International Humanitarian City (IHC) in the Emirati capital Abu Dhabi, as they wait to be transferred to another destination, on August 28, 2021.

For five months, Rodoba Noori, 20, an Afghan refugee from the town of Herat, has resided inside the stark, white-walled rooms of Emirates Humanitarian City (EHC) in Abu Dhabi, alongside nearly 12,000 other Afghan refugees, following the Taliban takeover of the country last August. Most are still in limbo awaiting answers to their entry status to the United States or to other countries. Some still don’t know where they will go. Noori is one of the few whose days of waiting will soon be over. She is on route to Canada, where she will join her mother, who also escaped, before continuing her studies at Bard College, a private liberal arts college in upstate New York, where she was recently admitted on a full scholarship, Rebecca Anne Proctor reports for The Circuit.

No choice: Noori’s harrowing evacuation from Herat in August and planned move to Canada are due to the efforts of IsraAID, an international non-governmental humanitarian aid organization based in Israel, and Noori’s friend Danna Harman, a former journalist, activist and now staff member at IsraAID. Noori’s story is one shared by thousands of refugees from Afghanistan whose lives have been completely uprooted. On Aug. 21, six days after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, faced with an uncertain life at the hands of the new government — particularly regarding the status of women — Noori felt she had no choice but to flee. The decision posed the risk of being killed, and the possibility of long-term separation from her family, but for Noori, her future depended on it.

Daring to dream: Noori studied medicine at Herat University. Her dream is to become a doctor — one spurred by her late father’s cerebrovascular disease. Noori’s mother told her that if she wanted to fulfill her dream, then she needed to leave. “After the Taliban came, all women had to stay in their homes; we could not leave without one man who was either a brother, husband, father or son,” she said. Noori said that, contrary to what the Taliban has told the media about the situation improving for women and girls in the group’s second takeover of the country, women’s rights have disappeared again. “They are telling lies,” she said. “Three months before [the] Taliban returned, we were free and now we are not. [The] Taliban even sent letters to my university threatening that if they opened the doors to the university, they would attack it with suicide attacks. No one has been able to return to school.”

Bus hopping: Noori recounts the terrifying journey out of Afghanistan with pain, compassion, sadness and, at times, even laughter. On Aug. 21, she and her brother boarded buses leaving for Kabul, a grueling, 24-hour journey. “I kept jumping from bus to bus because sometimes the Taliban would change their mind and not let a certain bus into the airport,” Noori recalled. “When one bus was told not to go, someone would call me to run and get another bus.” She and her brother spent nine days, from Aug. 22-30, jumping from bus to bus. They ate and slept on the buses. “We didn’t have money to buy good food, so we ate junk food.”

Close call: The Taliban put them in another bus in Kunduz City, telling them they were going to Tajikistan, but in fact the bus was heading back to Kabul. When Noori realized this, she called Harman to tell her. “Everyone on the bus was yelling and screaming not to go back to Kabul,” she remembered. The driver and a security man on the bus were both from the Taliban. Suddenly, the bus stopped in a deserted area and a Toyota Corolla arrived. “We thought maybe they brought us here to kill us, and everyone on the bus started crying,” recalls Noori. “But instead, they just wanted to send us off the bus. The passengers stayed at different homes nearby for several days until they finally managed to cross the border to Tajikistan by car. The IsraAID team had spoken to the Taliban and gotten permission for the group to cross.

Fruits of Abraham: The harrowing evacuation of refugees from Afghanistan via Tajikistan to the UAE is the first Israeli-Emirati joint humanitarian mission between the two countries, the fruit of the signing of the Abraham Accords in September 2020, which normalized relations between the two countries. “The UAE were particularly helpful and quickly approved this group because of the Israeli connection, which was very important for them,” Yotam Polizer, the CEO of IsraAID, told The Circuit. IsraAID had called numerous countries around the world seeking a home for the Afghans trying to flee, and the UAE was one of the only ones that would take in the refugees. “This is not a job most of us do for a living, but we all felt compelled to help,” Harman told The Circuit.

Read the full story on The Circuit.

Rabbi Shira Stutman (left) and Joshua Malina

Amid a growing discussion about antisemitism in Hollywood, actor Joshua Malina and Rabbi Shira Stutman, co-hosts of the new “Chutzpod” podcast, joined the most recent episode of Jewish Insider’s “Limited Liability Podcast.” Days after controversial comments made by “The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg about race and the Holocaust, Stutman and Malina directed their attention toward antisemitism in the media.

Seeking repentance: “Sometimes we say incorrect things and so what’s most important is what we do afterwards. And she actually was trying to do teshuva [repentance],” Stutman, who was the rabbi of the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C. for 11 years, said, disagreeing with the decision by ABC to suspend Goldberg for two weeks. “I do not know or have any reason to think she was an antisemite before this whole thing went down. But, my God, if she’s not an antisemite now, God bless that woman.”

Malice vs. ignorance: Both Malina and Stutman emphasized that Goldberg appeared to show contrition in the days following her remarks. The day after her comments aired, the show invited Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt to speak about antisemitism. “If we kept her on the air, maybe she could talk even more about what she’s learning,” Malina said, adding, “if people were suspended for ignorance all the time, I’d be on permanent suspension.”

Cancel culture: The “West Wing” star contrasted the controversy around Goldberg’s comments with that of actor and filmmaker Mel Gibson — whom Goldberg has defended in the past — who faced an informal, yearslong banishment from Hollywood following a series of antisemitic remarks. In December, Malina wrote a widely shared article in The Atlantic arguing against Gibson’s comeback into the mainstream. “Did I think that I was gonna get Mel Gibson canceled? No. Did I think that I was going to shame Warner Brothers into withdrawing its offer for ‘Lethal Weapon V’? No, not really. Although I’d like to see it happen,” the actor concluded.

Read more here and listen to the full podcast here.

Gideon Taylor

Gideon Taylor is no stranger to politics. The son of the first Jewish cabinet minister in Ireland, Taylor is now building his own political career of sorts as the recently appointed executive vice president of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash reports.

Different than Dublin: Responsible for pulling together an increasingly polarized Jewish community and reaching out to an increasingly hostile wider community, Taylor – whose father was Mervyn Taylor, minister for equity and law reform in Dublin during the 1990s, and who passed away last September – understands the vast complexities of his new position. He is also aware that the scale and scope of the Jewish community in New York are somewhat different from where he grew up. “I live on the Upper West Side and there’s more Jews on my block than there were in the whole of Ireland,” he quipped to JIin his first interview since taking over in July.

Breaking barriers: Taylor recognizes the myriad challenges of uniting an extremely diverse Jewish population, as well as building ties with a rapidly changing general population, but he believes it is all possible with a bit of patience and a lot of education and outreach. “New York is a big, complicated, diverse place, with many hundreds of thousands of people who grow up barely meeting or interacting with any Jews,” he said, adding, “In some ways, New York is a melting pot city, and, in some ways, people live in their own worlds, their own bubbles, and their own segments. I think the role of the JCRC is to break down those barriers and connect people –– that’s what community relations is all about.”

Changing demographics: Taylor noted the contrast between today’s political and societal structures compared to when he first arrived in the city. “Then, the power structures were all very well-defined and concentrated in the hands of relatively few people, but now, the demographics have shifted tremendously and so have the structures of power,” Taylor said, citing a decline in Jewish members of the City Council from 27% just two years ago to 12% today. He also identified New York’s rapidly changing demographics – with more divergent religious beliefs and increasing numbers of new immigrants – as another challenge to building bridges between the Jewish community and the rest of the city.

Jewish voice: “The JCRC needs to be the voice of the mainstream Jewish community at the tables where those critical issues of the day are being discussed in New York,” he continued, highlighting issues such as criminal justice reform and combating all forms of hate. “The second one is a big priority for us,” Taylor highlighted. “Antisemitism is one example of hate crimes, but hate crimes, in general, are like cancer that corrodes the city, and what we’ve seen is that a person who attacks a Jew on the street is often the same person who will attack a person of color, or will be promoting anti-Asian hatred, Islamophobia or homophobia. Hatred knows no boundaries.”

Tackling antisemitism: Among the many activities facilitated by the JCRC, Taylor points to its educational fellowships aimed at promising young leaders, as well as its efforts to shape state’s educational curriculum and tackle anti-Jewish content or sentiments. The programs it uses to train upcoming leaders also include addressing conversations around Israel, which has become a catalyst for antisemitism. “Israel is a core part of the Jewish community and of our identity as Jews,” stated Taylor. “On the one hand, there are clearly very many diverse opinions about Israel both within the Jewish community and outside the Jewish community, and the way to approach this from a community relations perspective is… educating people.”

Read the full interview here.