🙅‍♀️ Invite Declined: In The Atlantic, Roya Hakakian explains why she won’t be attending an upcoming event with Iranian President Ebrahaim Raisi that is being hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, of which she is a member. “If democracy is to survive the current wave of authoritarianism, Western nations must band together to uphold the rule of law…. Once, America led the establishment of modern democracy as we know it; today, it needs to show that sustaining democracy depends on a collective defense of its laws and judicial decisions. That means exercising an equal commitment to upholding dialogue with our adversaries and ending dialogue with those who are recognized as outlaws. So I do not believe that the Council on Foreign Relations, in this context, can stand to one side and claim that its invitation does not confer endorsement or approval: It does confer legitimacy, by treating this criminal as a reasonable interlocutor. As the philosopher Karl Popper warned: ‘If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.’ To invite Raisi to one of our most prestigious venues, to let him sit among us, and to listen courteously to what he has to say would be to let him think he has gotten away with murder. And he would be right.” [TheAtlantic]

✡️ Ford Focus: On the occasion of Rosh Hashanah, Ford Foundation President Darren Walker reflects on rising rates of antisemitism. “America’s history is rife with our own version of persecution and pogroms, entangling even those that our familiar stories anoint as heroes. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for instance, simultaneously defended the ‘freedom of every person to worship God in his own way’ while turning away Jewish asylum seekers through the 1930s.  The very ideology that they were fleeing manifested itself again in Charlottesville, where neo-Nazis brandished torches and chanted, ‘Jews will not replace us.’ We can and must do better. We must look to the lessons of history, which affirm — as do the Jewish high holy days this week—that there can be no reconciliation without atonement, no justice without accountability. I feel this obligation acutely as the leader of an institution that protects and promotes democratic values, which also was founded by Henry Ford — an icon of innovation, and industry, and philanthropy, and one of the twentieth century’s most virulent American antisemites.” [FordFoundation]

📓 Notes from the Road: The New York Times’ Jeffrey Gettleman travels to Uman, Ukraine, for the annual pilgrimage to the burial site of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. “Many of the Hasidim who came to Uman came to party. But Uman serves as a testament to something even deeper. Once a year, it becomes a thriving Jewish community in a place where Judaism was virtually wiped out. The fact that one of the world’s biggest Jewish New Year’s celebrations unfolds in Ukraine, the site of some of the Holocaust’s worst atrocities, and in Uman specifically, where the Nazis gunned down a thousand Jewish children and threw their bodies in a pit, illuminates a resilience quite apt for the moment. It is the High Holy Days, after all, a time for joy but also painful remembrance. ‘It adds meaning,’ said Yitzy Gradman, another one of the many New Yorkers who flocked to Uman. ‘The biggest tribute I can give to the people who suffered here is to walk these streets today and say, “We are proud of who we are, and we will never be extinguished.”’ The Uman pilgrimage goes back more than 200 years. It is cemented on Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, who died in Uman in 1810 and was a great-grandson of the man widely considered the founder of Hasidic Judaism.” [NYTimes]

👩 Generally Speaking: The Wall Street Journal’s Dov Lieber and Anat Peled spotlight Israeli Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara. “Baharav-Miara, a graduate of Tel Aviv University’s law school, began as a little-known public servant, working for 30 years in the Tel Aviv district attorney’s office. She served a short stint as a consultant for a law firm before being launched into the limelight in her current position. She became Israel’s first female attorney general when in 2021 she was appointed by a government packed with Netanyahu rivals. People who work with her describe her as professional, dedicated to her job and unmoved by outside public tension. ‘Pressure is being put on us to bias our professional judgment and violate our duty as gatekeepers,’ she said in a speech at the state prosecutors’ conference in July. ‘I will not be deterred.’…The current government sees her opposition to its landmark legislation as proof that the judicial system needs fixing, saying unelected officials hold too much power to overturn the will of the people. Coalition lawmakers have had her job in their sights. Bills have been proposed that include dividing up the powers of the attorney general and ministerial legal advisers, so that it would be a political rather than a professional appointment, while rendering their legal opinions nonbinding.” [WSJ]

🇮🇱 What’s Next: In the Liberal Patriot, Yair Zivan, a diplomatic advisor to Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, suggests a blueprint for those protesting the Israeli government’s judicial reforms. “Patriotic liberalism must always combine the universal liberal values outlined above with the local national identifying factors. Israel’s liberal camp cannot simply copy and paste an American or European model. We need to create an authentic Jewish and Middle Eastern variety. We have to find a role for Judaism in our liberal identity, we have to find the place for the Arab minority of the country — which makes up 20 percent of the population — in our liberal identity, and we have to find a way to live harmoniously alongside the growing ultra-Orthodox (and non-liberal) population without compromising on our identity or forcing them to compromise on theirs. Those are big challenges.” [LiberalPatriot]

💬 Platform Politics: In a message posted to Truth Social on Rosh Hashanah, former President Donald Trump suggested “liberal Jews” had “voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed in false narratives!”

📰 No R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Jann Wenner was removed from the board of directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame after a New York Times interview in which the Rolling Stone co-founder denigrated female and Black musicians.

🍏 ‘New Year, Brighter Future’: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered Rosh Hashanah greetings to a group of Ukrainian rabbis in Kyiv.

⛪ What Pius Knew: Newly published documents from the Vatican’s archive dating back to WWII indicate that top aides to Pope Pius XII in 1942 had knowledge that thousands of Jews were being killed in gas chambers a day in Poland.

📚 Bookshelf:The Wall Street JournalreviewsTwo Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin and the Miraculous Survival of My Family, by British journalist Daniel Finkelstein, a member of the U.K.’s House of Lords, which details his parents’ survival in WWII-era USSR and Nazi Europe.

🚑 Tragic Pilgrimage: An Israeli man traveling to Uman, Ukraine, for Rosh Hashanah collapsed and died at the entrance to the tomb of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. 

🇺🇳 World Heritage Sites: The U.N. World Heritage Committee voted to acknowledge a group of medieval Jewish sites in Erfurt, Germany, as World Heritage Sites; another vote by the committee to designate ruins near the ancient West Bank city of Jericho as a World Heritage Site in Palestine was condemned by Israel.

🪧 On Air: CBS’ “60 Minutes” aired a segment on Israel’s protest movement and efforts to reform the judiciary.

🐬 Spotted: The Sousa plumbea, a rare hunchback dolphin, was spotted off the coast of Eilat after not being seen for nine months.

🧕 Girl Power: In the Washington Post, Masih Alinejad spotlights Iranian women who are defying Tehran’s restrictive modesty laws, a year after protests around the Islamic republic first began.

🔄 Prisoner Swap: The five Americans held in Iran are expected to be released today as part of a broader prisoner swap between the U.S. and Iran, following the moving of $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets to Qatar.

☢️ Inspectors’ Expulsions: Iran expelled several inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, a move the U.N. nuclear watchdog condemned as being done “in a manner that affects in a direct and severe way the ability of the IAEA to conduct effectively its inspections in Iran.”

🌏 Regional Vision: U.S. Ambassador to the UAE Martina Strong reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to the region, stating that the relationship between Washington and Abu Dhabi “can very much serve as an anchor to President Biden’s vision, which is a region that is more secure, more stable, more prosperous, more integrated.”

🇦🇪 Arabian Venture: Israel’s Integrated Data Intelligence, an OurCrowd subsidiary, is aiming to triple the number of staffers in its Abu Dhabi office.

💥 Holiday Attacks: Israeli border police foiled an attempted stabbing attack at an East Jerusalem checkpoint, less than two days after an attempted shooting near the West Bank town of Shuwaika.

🕯️ Remembering: Bobby Schiffman, who for 15 years oversaw New York’s famed Apollo Theater, died at 94.

A man blows a shofar on a Tel Aviv beach as Jews gather to perform the tashlich ritual on the second day of Rosh Hashanah.

Business executive who served as co-CEO of SAP and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Léo Apotheker turns 70… 

Marina Del Rey, Calif., resident, Kathy Levinson Wolf… Retired Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon, he served as U.S. secretary of housing and urban development in the Trump administration, Dr. Ben Carson turns 72… Harvard professor of psychology, specializing in visual cognition and psycholinguistics, Steven Pinker turns 69… U.S. senator (R-AL), Tommy Tuberville turns 69… Former CEO of The Jewish Federation of Sarasota-Manatee, Howard Tevlowitz… Executive director of the Los Angeles Westside Jewish Community Center since 2004, Brian Greene… Attorney general of Israel, Gali Baharav-Miara turns 64… Professor of economics at MIT and a 2021 Nobel Prize laureate in economics, Joshua Angrist turns 63… One of the earliest Israeli tech entrepreneurs, he is best known for starting Aladdin Knowledge Systems in 1985, Yanki Margalit turns 61… Founder and executive chairman of Delek US, Ezra Uzi Yemin turns 55… Life and culture editor of The Times of Israel and children’s book author, Jessica Steinberg… Classical pianist, Simone Dinnerstein turns 51… Associate vice president, public affairs and executive director of the Advocacy Corps at the Jewish Federations of North America, Karen Paikin Barall turns 50…NBC and MSNBC legal analyst, she was a 2021 candidate for Manhattan district attorney, Tali Farhadian Weinstein turns 48… Comedian, actor, producer and screenwriter, Billy Eichner turns 45… Rome bureau chief of The New York Times, covering Italy and the Vatican, Jason Horowitz… Co-host of “Bloomberg Surveillance” every morning on Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg Radio, Lisa Abramowicz turns 44… CNN analyst and a former member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, Bakari Sellers turns 39… Professional poker player whose total career live tournament winnings exceed $15.3 million, Nick Schulman turns 39… Editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, Avi Mayer… Baseball broadcaster for the Washington Nationals, Dan Kolko… Director at the Levinson Group, Zak Sawyer…